technically memoranda

Worried about my mother's illness, but less worried than yesterday. Feeling the crushing terror of soon-to-be deep loneliness. I haven't had a good couple of days, but I keep hoping I can be strong enough to endure it, to find worth in the foundation that I'm still building. It's hard to be at peace when you feel lost.

Temperatures have gone down enough that I'm once again vaguely lethargic from the chill, my feet and hands aching. I don't resent it, but much like extreme heat, it gives me the feeling that I'm not in control of my body.

I want the weather to match the wanting-to-slow-down of my thoughts, I want rain and I want a heating pad, I want to burrow until I know what I need to make things again.

Do you like references to history of science in your music? Are niche transformative projects up your alley?

Check out this bearblog site for The Superconducting Supercolliders! It has a player for each track alongside the lyrics, a download link to their entire discography in MP3 and, soon, annotations for the lyrics.

Fell in love with containerized desktop layouts and I spent yesterday afternoon constructing one for this site. It'll force me to be consistent with my tagging as well.

Now, to settle on a way to organize pages and tags...

the fact that walls get dusty is ridiculous. you’re vertical. act like it.

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it's wall cleaning day in my apartment; this has been on my mind. at least we have an appropriate mop and we're not wiping by hand.

Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other.

"Are you trying to save my soul?" Do you know what you're part of? Do you know that to God you can't save the soul of a suicidal man? Do you know that there is no other way out? Do you know that this is how it must end?

"What?" Do you know that your death is not noble? Do you know that your life is not an island? Do you know that in all the time I've known you, disabled and furious, you have been my hero? Do you know that I see you in all the miracles of film and life? Do you know that wanting to die doesn't mean you have to?

Because we live we are granted names, streams, shocks of heat, murmuring summers. All the days you have ever breathed are swallows shooting between trees. When the wind pushes branches in and out of shade it is an opening, as every small gesture toward another person is incomprehensibly alive. Will you be part of the stoneless passage? When life starts to take things away will you grow very still beneath the larch or feel the slow flight of birds across your body. The bright key of morning. The bay fanned with foam.

source: The Infinities by Joanna Klink

For whom does the bell toll? For whom do I don this clown’s garb and dance in the town square? I am grateful to have found friends, but I feel increasingly drawn away—not by some misbegotten notion that there’s too much negativity, or by the dubious claim that the internet is no longer fun. No. The darkness is within me. All these worries, the pull toward spaghettification in how I interact with others. What I hope to achieve, what drives me toward a kind of broken mirror of expectation upon which I’ve been cutting myself since I very first felt shame. The call is coming from inside the house.

There is no if. There is only this: a dance to be forgotten, a lifetime of wanting to be seen, felt, and missed. For absence to sear. And yet I know that if I give in to these tantrums, to tear it all down, what would even be accomplished? Who would notice? Who would care?

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In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as examined by Annabelle Pelster in an essay for Girls on Tops’ Read Me magazine, subtitles were used sparingly and translated minimally to intentionally exclude both the characters in the room and those of us in the audience who do not understand the Osage language, thus driving home the exploitative power of William Hale’s language knowledge.

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The desire for comfort for those who Capitalism has pushed to its margins automatically creates discomfort for those that profit from it; it's an act of violence, even when it’s performed in a non-violent manner.

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Many people think taste is all about choosing what is good. That is part of it. The other part is suffering what is bad in your own work until you can make it good. If your taste is ahead of your ability, you will spend months producing work that looks wrong to you. The only way through that valley is to keep going long enough to close the gap.

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Math is the most accurate language we have for describing the world, but sometimes we don’t need accuracy, we need relation and approximation. That’s poetry. Poetry is a mutation of the language that allows for evolution. We can expand a body of knowledge with logic. We can expand a body of knowledge with experimentation. We can expand a body of knowledge with lateral thinking and comparison.

People have limited attention, limited bandwidth, so you have to cut every dead word and every false gesture. It has to be relentless and inevitable.

Picking a fight for the sake of fighting doesn’t do anything interesting. Disagreeing with a premise or an approach is incredibly generative.

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Characters can become the meat chewed up to keep the system running—as in the case of the burnt machinist or the dead teenage girl—or they can become, themselves, producers of even more death, embarking on psychotic road-trip killing sprees or vigilante missions to rid the streets of human filth. Cosseted by imperial wealth, they have no connection to the real labour embodied in their surroundings, and no economic need to engage in or even understand such labour themselves. Consumption can only turn back on itself: hollowed-out like Amy’s stomach, or else apathetically comfortable like the disaffected wealthy loners vulnerable to the recruitment tactics of the new-agers.

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