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I surprised C. with a trip to the sea for her birthday. This morning I woke before dawn to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic, which goes against my night owl nature. I hadn’t seen the sunrise in years, and I was surprised by how fast it moved. Standing in the wind while the world lightened, I felt wholesome. Maybe there’s something right about these early hours that justifies the pluck of morning people, the moral dimension they achieve when they advertise waking up at 5 am. I wrote for a while and caught up on some work. Then I took a nap.

A few hours later, I woke to the sound of C. making coffee and waves crashing on the rocks. Whenever I hear the ocean, I think about how it sounds like highway traffic or radio static, not the other way around.

The final presidential debate was tonight, and some self-hating part of myself felt obligated to tune in. Thankfully, C. is wiser than me: “It’s my birthday,” she said, “and I don’t want to see Donald Trump’s face today.” So we listened to the sea, and it gave us much better information.

Echospace – Ocean of Emptiness

The Coldest Season | Modern Love, 2007 | More

We took a night drive through heavy fog, aiming toward the ocean. Reverberated guitars washed across the dashboard while we admired the smudged headlights of oncoming traffic, the fleeting sense of driving on some other, better planet.

She dozed for a while, and I contemplated my constant need for motion and my craving for faith in something otherworldly because, really, what would that solve?

Yellow Swans – Sovereign

Going Places | Type, 2010 | Bandcamp

I’ve been thinking about the connective tissue between the fragments of writing I’ve generated over the years. How to stitch everything together in some sensible way when the world feels increasingly insensible? This anxiety might explain why I’m dragging my feet on finishing the book I’ve been endlessly rewriting, forever shuffling scenes and squinting at the possibilities.

This afternoon I came across an old interview with Michael Ondaatje:

“In that last editing stage, I am outside myself. I’m looking at it much more clinically and saying, okay, get out of this scene quicker. There’s that element of technique and dramatics and timing and ‘lighting’ in those last stages. Punctuation and paragraph. But I don’t at any point say, ‘What is this book really about?’ It’s unsaid. I worry instead that it’s cloudy over here, or the brambles need clearing.”

A good reminder that, at a certain point, writing requires you to stay outside of your head. Easier said than done. But I like this idea of thinking about writing in terms of lighting and landscape. Snap the shot and keep moving.

The Sight Below – Through the Gaps in the Land

It All Falls Apart | Ghostly International, 2010 | Bandcamp

I had a dream about frightening beasts called Fahrenhogs. They were spiky piggish creatures that loped across the edges of my dream on two legs like men.

It started with a peaceful scene. A flock of ducks bobbed on a pond, the ones with that green-black velveteen shine. Mallards, I think. I tossed them bits of bread, but they weren’t eating. Why weren’t they eating? The people I’ve lost were somewhere behind me, and I could hear my grandfather clearing his throat to say, “Well, you see, Jimmy…” The way he always did before explaining something. Suddenly the ducks darted toward the shore in a determined way that didn’t seem natural, and they rose from the water, attached to bodies of pinky muscle and hair. They weren’t ducks at all, but the topknots of terrible creatures with drooling fangs and stinking breath. I ran through the trees. Well, Jimmy, what do the Fahrenhogs mean?

Why would my brain invent these monsters to terrify itself? And why on earth did it give them a name? I could only think of bad reasons, so I described this dream to C. because she’s good at seeing dreams as instructive, the grey spaces where transformation lives. She suggested that feeding the ducks meant nurturing my projects and plans—but right now, they feel overwhelming. There’s too much on the table. I always feel like I’m starting something, as if my work will begin once I figure things out or get smart enough. But there’s no figuring anything out. There’s just the work.

HTRK – Dream Symbol

Venus In Leo | Ghostly International, 2019 | Bandcamp

Infections are increasing across America and Europe. They’re talking about “pandemic fatigue.” The signs at the park that instruct us to keep six feet apart are faded and worn. I don’t think anyone expected they would be on display for so long.

What is the line between fatigue and acceptance? Maybe fatigue would make sense if this season of masks and dots on the floor lasted only a month or two (and for a time, this was possible). The muscle memory of normal might be exhausted, but it would eventually find its way back to its original condition. After seven months with no end in sight, however, acceptance seems like the only workable strategy. Again I find myself returning to the logic of grief, how it’s like losing an arm and there’s no growing it back. But sometimes loss can uncover new ways of understanding what’s important.

Nine Inch Nails – Your New Normal

Ghosts VI: Locusts | 2020 | Download

No matter how many times I see them, I am captivated by Nevelson’s monuments built from furniture scrap painted black. They remind me of childhood, conjuring dim memories of playing among the legs of tables and dressers, of my first intimations of death. It’s a specific feeling I cannot quite connect to words, and this is why her work moves and reassures me. More and more, I admire this quote from her: “I have made my world, and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.”

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As I walked past a shuttered café this afternoon, I realized how much I miss writing in public. There’s an interesting shift between writing in silence versus writing against noise, such as the din of a coffee shop or a busy train station. A wall of babble can become a springboard that drives me deeper into my thoughts. That’s something reassuring about this, like a favorite blanket. Maybe it’s the social contract of working among strangers; I can’t pace, moan, or gaze into the refrigerator like I do at home. On the other hand, one person’s coughing or skreaking pencil in a library can shatter my thoughts and become a vector of hate. So there’s a distinct bandwidth for me: either lots of noise or none at all.

The perpetually miserable philosopher Schopenhauer agonized over the noise of the early 19th century: “I have long held the opinion,” he wrote, “that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity. Noise is a torture to all intellectual people.” Perhaps my industrial soundtrack of doom metal and blurred techno reveals my intellectual worth.

In this year without coffee shops or libraries, I’m surprised how much I miss being around sounds I can’t control. I’m even becoming nostalgic for someone coughing while I try to concentrate.

Mønic – Cut Through The Noise

In a Certain Light | Osiris Music, 2020 | Bandcamp

Last night I had a dream that I found my father in a parking garage. I hid behind a car and watched him from a distance, afraid he might shoo me away if I approached. He was in charge of picking things off the floor and he was taking it very seriously. Parking garages are the most common architecture in my dreams, and I wonder if there’s any meaning in this, some insight to be gleaned. Woke up and tried to meditate, but garbled instructions rattled around my head. Stay alert. Click to accept. Stay six feet apart. See something, say something. Breathe through the backside of your body. Are you still watching?

Tonight the president held a town hall on a major network and refused to distance himself from conspiracy theorists who believe the Democrats belong to a satanic pedophilia cult. When the interviewer pressed him on this, he replied, “They are strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that.” Can a nation recover from this?

Maybe the question shouldn’t be Are you still watching? but Why?

The Normal – TV O.D.

Warm Leatherette | Mute, 1978 | More

Day three of the confirmation hearings of another retrograde Supreme Court justice, and it’s a simulation of government. Nobody will deliberate. Nobody will listen. Everyone’s locked in and committed. I flipped on the television and saw footage of one of the president’s frightening rallies. He stood in front of his airplane, flapping his hands and crowing before a sea of red hats. All those red hats like angry sores.

Scientists say there’s a 50/50 chance we live in a simulation. The idea that some lunatic is behind the controls would explain a lot, although I can’t imagine what kind of intelligence would find this entertaining. At least give us magic or Martians or something wild streaking across the sky.

Satomi Taniyama – Simulations Of A Garbage Truck

Portopia | Strange Life Records, 2010 | Bandcamp

I’m fantasizing about the desert again. The Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan. A place where only the occasional shredded tire or dilapidated cabin would interrupt my fantasy that I’m driving on another planet. I’m daydreaming about the desert as a tabula rasa, a blank-slated land of spiritualized visions, even though I know there’s by now no such thing as a fresh start. The past must be reckoned with, and it can be done painfully or gracefully. But one day, I’m going to live in a double-wide and get weird.

October weather at last. A blustery evening, damp and grey. Maybe it’s the remnants of a tropical storm. While running through the rainy dark, someone stepped in front of me and took my picture for no apparent reason. Maybe they needed a snapshot of a man lumbering into middle age.

Took my picture. Such an odd phrase, as if we carry a single image of ourselves with us like a rare object, something that can be snatched away. This line of thinking brought to mind a quote from Milan Kundera’s Immortality: “Even when I was a child, adults would ask me: little girl, may we take your picture? And then one day they stopped asking. The right of the camera was elevated above all other rights, and that changed everything.”

Franz Falckenhaus – Secret Photographs

Stories from My Cold War | Strange Life, 2006 | Bandcamp