Notebook

Last night C. and I sat at the kitchen table and did a jigsaw puzzle that depicted a hallucinatory American scene of hardware stores, red schoolhouses, saloons, and chapels. At first our work was half-hearted as we slowly sifted out the edge pieces, wondering if we wanted to commit to this project. An hour later, we were assembling the pieces in studious silence, like we’d been hired to do a job. There’s a special kind of pleasure in putting together what’s been broken.

This afternoon I went for an ugly and lonesome run along a rural road. The music cut out of my headphones for a moment, and I heard myself panting on an empty highway like something in a nightmare.

Now I’m parked at the gas station where I can pick up a signal. Received a message that a cousin down south has the coronavirus. Russia says they’ve created a vaccine called Sputnik V. The Democratic nominee for president selected his running mate: the confusing prosecutor who slit his throat during a primary debate last year. Everyone seems to have an opinion about this, and for a moment I feel like I should have one too. It’s an exhausting puzzle, trying to figure out which parts of this world to let into your head.

There’s beautiful heat lighting tonight.

Brightblack Morning Light – All We Have Broken Shines

Brightblack Morning Light |Matador, 2006 | More

The neighbors have been firing guns all day long. Crack crack crack from noon until six o’clock. Occasionally there’s a triumphant shout. We can barely see the top of their cabin through the trees beyond the ridge but it’s close enough. I hope they’re good shots by now. How far can a bullet travel? (Approximately 1.2 miles says the internet.)

Last night I dreamt I was walking the aisles of a vast storage facility, a dim and musty place like where they archive the criminal evidence in police shows. Lumpy black trash bags lined the shelves. I pulled one down. As I began to undo the twist-tie, a woman’s voice on an intercom said this was the place where my dreams were stored, all the ones that I’ve forgotten. I woke up.

From an interview with J.G. Ballard in 1983: “The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

Three days without television or constant internet access—unless I drive twenty minutes to sit in the parking lot of a Speedway gas station. There’s still a low-level thrum in my nerves, the worry that I’m missing important news or being negligent. But I think it’s beginning to subside.

The days feel much longer than they did before. Perhaps it’s the intentional and partitioned use of the internet. Maybe it’s the gunfire next door.

Drexciya – Bang-Bang

The Return of Drexciya | Underground Resistance, 1996 | More

Arrived at the cabin yesterday. It sits on eight acres of hemlock, birch, beech, and tangled vine and fern. C’s brother-in-law showed us the property lines to make sure we don’t get shot by the neighbors. They’re enthusiastic members of the National Rifle Association, and they enjoy target practice. The cabin smells like cedar. The ceiling is three times the height of our apartment. Beavers have chewed some of the logs. There’s a fire pit.

There is no internet here. No cellphone reception either. Picking up a signal requires either a ten-minute hike up a ravine through brambles and thorns that leaves you in the sight-lines of the target-practicing neighbors, or a twenty-minute drive into the nearest town. I’ll drive. This will be good for me, this rare opportunity to short-circuit my compulsive scrolling and refreshing. Each afternoon I’ll head into town for some internet so I can do any necessary emailing and file-sending (and perhaps continue this notebook), then I’ll return to the cabin to work without the distraction of the day’s two-minute hates. We’ll see how long this lasts.

At night the sound of the insects is unholy.

C. and I drove along backroads dotted with the occasional farm or cabin, many of them flying Trump 2020 flags alongside the Stars and Stripes. We stopped to visit a park in southeastern Ohio where the Midwestern flatness unexpectedly gives way to a network of underground rivers, grottos, and caves with names like Old Man’s Cave and the Devil’s Bathtub.

The parking lot was rammed with license plates from various states, and cars and trucks lined the grass along the road. Laughter, music, and family chatter in multiple languages drifted from the caves. People walked single-file through the rock formations and gorges, pausing to take pictures of everything and each other. Almost everybody wore a mask and remained evenly spaced. The effect was like a bizarre video game, a simulation of some other civilization.

It’s hard to describe the happy shock of seeing so many Americans of all kinds gathered together to admire their country’s geological features. All is not lost.

A ten-hour drive out of New York into the woods of the Midwest. I’ve missed the heat and hum of the road. I even enjoyed the endless stretch of Pennsylvania, where the highway is choked with Amazon trucks and speed traps. While pumping gas, I closed my eyes and listened to the interstate traffic. Sounds like the sea.

Crossing Interstate 77 somewhere between West Virginia and Ohio, I thought about the night I drove through this area four years ago when I took my father’s ashes to Saginaw Bay. I listened to paranoid talk radio for hours, and I still remember the frantic voice of a late-night caller who said, “We can’t get the blood out of our eyes fast enough to see what’s coming next.” This observation felt true during those turbulent weeks before the 2016 election. This year it feels like a mantra. Best we can do is keep our vision clear. Do whatever it takes to stay healthy, rational, and present.

Those midnight shows also played a commercial for freeze-dried food with a chipper man who’d say, “Just a few easy steps and your family is eating a delicious meal instead of fighting for scraps in a food riot.” Hopefully that commercial remains insane.

SUSS – Road Trip Part 3 (The Lonely Path)

High Line | Northern Spy Records, 2019 | Bandcamp

New York City. We’re packing for a trip of indeterminate length. Our plans to log some time in the Mojave got scotched this year, but C’s sister has a cabin in the woods somewhere in Ohio near the Kentucky border. Our little flat in New York has been our entire world—bedroom, other room, kitchen, and repeat—so I’m grateful for any change of scenery. I’m already making plans to become a more positive person. Maybe someone who wakes up early and stretches and doesn’t read the news. Today the governor of Ohio tested positive for the coronavirus, so that’s an interesting omen.

This journal will probably begin to decay through August. I’ve lost the thread of this nightly exercise. Maybe it will disintegrate into fragments, stray factoids, and orphaned sentences. Like how the other night I had a dream with an unseen voice saying come here and give god a kiss.

Lately my dreams have been all garble and grime without symbolism or plot. This seems to harmonize with the current gestalt. I often have the sensation of being forced to read the news. “Breathe from your diaphragm,” the experts tell you. But this year’s happening in the chest, an electrified snarl around the sternum. I downloaded a meditation widget that told me I am not behind my face. “Breathe through your back,” it said. I deleted it.

The rational world feels as if it’s slipping away, but this has happened before. The Surrealists believed this a century ago, and I’ve been thinking about their dreamworlds of flooded bedrooms, bird-men in the streets, and melting machines. Were they fussy about their dreams? Did they consume a specific diet of fairy tales, scientific journals, and newspapers to achieve the desired phantasmagorias while they slept?

Various Artists – Erode

Decay Product | Chain Reaction, 1997 | More

A tropical storm blew across the city today. Seventy-mile winds and a couple of inches of rain. Then it turned into a beautiful evening. Walking down the street, I resisted the urge to take pictures of all the people taking pictures of tipped-over trees and scattered branches. More and more it feels like bad juju to contribute to these dynamics, although I’m not quite sure why. There’s Sontag again: “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

Meanwhile, there was a massive explosion in Beirut. Mushrooming clouds of debris. Fireballs filled the sky. These images were immediately recorded, compiled, and transmitted across the world’s screens. The cause remains unknown.

Maybe human brains aren’t equipped for this, absorbing painful images from everywhere at once without context or the ability to act.

There’s a full moon tonight. The Farmer’s Almanac calls it a Sturgeon Moon in August. I should understand the rhythm of the moon by now, but I don’t. One night it’s a distant headlight, chilly and remote, and the next night it’s a bloody orange that fills half the sky. Sometimes it hovers above the East River. Other times it rises behind the city.

The moon orbits the earth, I know this much, but why does it appear in all corners of the sky? The Babylonians figured this out thousands of years ago when people believed the earth was balanced on the back of a turtle—why can’t I? I half-remember the textbook pictures, the illustrations of elliptical orbits and axial tilts. I tried keeping a logbook once—full moon in the east, half moon in the southwest. I sketched chaotic diagrams of ovals, arrows, and lopsided planets. My calculations would have the moon crashing into Jamaica Bay tomorrow. And wouldn’t that be something?

I wonder what life must have been like in the age of the tortoise-earth, to believe the heavens would come crashing down unless the right sacrifices were made, the correct rituals performed. To believe the moon was a rabbit or that thunderstorms were demons. Lunar. Lunacy. Perhaps this had been a better way to live, to see faces in the moon and believe they granted permission for madness.

John Maus – Hey Moon

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves | Upset the Rhythm, 2011 | Bandcamp

Tonight I jogged past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stopped hard in front of its grand steps. Sometimes it hits like a fresh slap, just how much the world has changed. I thought about those in-between days in March when New York’s institutions began closing, one by one. Office buildings and schools. Libraries and museums. I remembered how I thought this would be temporary, that things would return to normal in a few weeks. That was nearly five months ago.

When does returning to normal become impossible? Maybe there’s a parallel to the psychosocial shifts following the Great Depression or World War II, the gradual realization that life will have a new cadence, that the rhythms of the past can never be recovered.

I often think about all those paintings inside the museum, hanging unseen in the gloom.

In 1993, Octavia Butler imagined a climate-ravaged America circa 2020 in The Parable of the Sower. She anticipated the spirit of today’s Democratic Party with its feeble slogans like “build back better” when she describes a presidential candidate as “a kind of human banister . . . a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American Presidents make people feel that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still here—that we’ll get through these bad times and back to normal.”

Giving up on normal seems like a critical psychic adjustment these days. Normal wasn’t great, anyway. We’re being pushed hard and unnecessarily, but maybe someday we’ll find a better rhythm.

The KLF – A Melody from a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back

Chill Out | KLF Communications, 1990 | More

Max Headroom holds up far too well thirty-five years later. Every few years, I think about the 1987 signal hijacking at a Chicago television station when an unknown man wearing a Max Headroom mask took over the airwaves to mutter nonsense. (The Wikipedia entry includes this delightful sentence: “The video ended with a pair of exposed buttocks being spanked with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.”)

Max Headroom occupies an odd space in cultural memory: a tacky 1980s face on a t-shirt that hawked New Coke and music videos, as well as a glitchy Neuromancing vision of artificial intelligence that satirized a culture increasingly devoted to sitting alone in front of a screen.

Last night I rewatched the original British pilot from 1985, and it’s remarkably durable. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Vicious advertising tactics are killing people. And wireframe graphics, joystick controls, and VHS tapes fuse with the retrofitted future aesthetics of Blade Runner and Brazil: harsh lights shining through makeshift ventilation systems, piles of televisions flickering on street corners. Strange how stacks of junked televisions became a dystopian trope even though the logistics make no sense.

But the most chilling feature in this future is that off-switches are illegal.