Notebook

A heatwave is settling over New York City, and the streets are filled with the silence that heavy heat brings. Voices seem to carry further. At sunset I went for a sludgy run. These days my running soundtrack is an odd mixture of glitch, gloom, and ‘70s rock: Autechre, Fleetwood Mac, The Knife, and Funkadelic. The early maximal albums of M83 are also fantastic widescreen scores for running.

I love watching other people run. Everyone has their own style, like a moving fingerprint. Some are knock-kneed and avian with prancing steps, while others take leaping strides like something from a savanna. My style sits somewhere between scraping and dragging. Sometimes there’s crying. They say you never see a cheetah stretch, but maybe I should. My legs always hurt. I hate running but I admire how it forces me to narrow my focus to a single step and all the life lessons this implies. And each night there’s the sensation of either running from or towards something.

Fleetwood Mac – The Chain

Rumors | Warner, 1977 | More

Spent the afternoon in Chinatown, and it was so reassuring to see the woman on Mosco still serving cheap pork dumplings like nothing’s changed. Then I stopped at my favorite deli on Grand Street for a nostalgic sandwich: hot coppa, mozzarella, vinegar and oil, and a few peppers. It’s just a sandwich, but I got a bit misty-eyed as they handed it to me while I waited on the sidewalk because of the virus. These spots on Mosco and Grand have been in my life for nearly twenty years, and their presence is more reassuring than ever now that the rest of the world feels like it’s being rearranged each night while I sleep. I need all the anchors I can find.

Rode the subway home in an empty car except for me and an old woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “Love is so gangster.”

John Lewis died today. It feels like an omen, the loss of this compassionate and brave lion amidst the news that federal paramilitary units in Portland are tossing protestors into unmarked vans.

Of all the philosophers, the Scholastics speak to me the clearest. Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas. These medieval Catholics were haunted men who desperately wrestled with the question of a soul, not like the playful Greeks who made up the world as they went along—a soul, sure why not?—or the modern philosophers who buried god beneath the clutter of elaborate word games, leaving us with a world stripped of the divine. For the Scholastics, philosophy was urgent, driven by the desire to reconcile logic with otherworldly devotion, to marry the church with the words of Plato and Aristotle, words which might otherwise threaten their faith. Their souls were truly on the line.

I need to find faith in something soon. Difficult days are ahead. Today the White House said “science should not stand in the way” during this pandemic, and everyone shrugged because this is the world now. But dig the soul of the old man laughing on the corner tonight, drinking a bottle of gin and doing a word jumble.

Lately there’s been a great deal of handwringing about “cancel culture” as evidence of increasing intolerance, even a rejection of liberalism. Instead of addressing these ideas, however, every essay on the topic seems to be about things that happened on Twitter. Maybe I’m being dense, but doesn’t this suggest the fault is the design of our spaces for conversation with their binary logic of like and mute, or follow and block? Stare at these buttons long enough and of course their language will infect how we think.

Meanwhile, I scroll past headlines that say things like “you won’t believe the fifty most incoherent things from the president’s rambling speech.”

I had big plans for today, but they went unfulfilled. I make demanding schedules then punish myself for breaking them. Thumbing through an old notebook tonight, I came across this quote from Ingmar Bergman: “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”

And what is my intuition telling me? To turn down the volume on the world so I can hear.

Autechre – Glitch

Amber | Warp, 1994 | More

There’s a strange dynamic to this nightly journal, this sensation of writing against time. Or more precisely: writing for myself in the future. Each night I try to record my thoughts and, where sanity permits, some of the day’s events and headlines. This makes for remarkably dull reading in the current moment. But I’d like to have a record of these days to look back upon in five or ten years. I regret not having something like this during my optimistic years circa 2010.

I’ve been re-reading Stephen King’s The Stand to understand how a sprawling apocalyptic story works, and I’d forgotten that it’s so compulsively readable, the way he inhabits his characters’ thoughts and steers them into the secret world of familial wounds and childhood taunts. Some sections didn’t age well, and sometimes the writing gets clunky, but it’s forgivable because you get the sense King doesn’t give a shit, either. He’s too wrapped up in carrying you across his plague-stricken America to bother with lyrical gloss. But there are some terrific lines: “They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups.” Or when a man walking down a quiet street wonders if “the normal world had skewed into a place where bodies were sacrificed behind closed doors and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.”

But what strikes me the most about The Stand is the diary a pregnant character keeps as she crosses the country. Each entry ends with “things to remember,” a list of things she wants to tell her child about life before a plague wiped out civilization. The catchphrases and television commercials. The amusement parks, laugh tracks, and frozen cheesecakes. This captures how I’d like some entries in my journal to work: something written for the future rather than the moment. (Hopefully it will be far less dramatic than the diary in The Stand, but god only knows what the rest of 2020 has up its sleeve.)

So, some things to remember: We’re buying fewer breath mints because we’re less social these days. The stock market continues to climb despite all evidence that we’re heading off a cliff: infections are soaring, yet unemployment assistance and suspended evictions will expire in two weeks. The president’s only solution is to distract us with racist remarks. Every few days I double-check to make sure I didn’t imagine that Taiwan has only had seven deaths from coronavirus. That’s something to remember, too: it didn’t have to be this way.

E.R.P. – Remembrance

Afterimage | Forgotten Future, 2018 | More

Nobody died from the pandemic in New York City the other day. The Northeast has returned to the infection levels of early March, those faraway days before exponential curves and social distancing. Hopefully we can continue this trend now that we’ve become accustomed to masks, testing, and tracing. Meanwhile, record-breaking outbreaks and hot spots burn through the rest of the nation.

Could the pandemic hasten the breakup of America? This country’s been tearing itself to pieces for years while the wealthy pick the bones—yet no ideological disagreement or political argument would likely trigger the balkanization of America into different regions. But a colossal and sudden disruption might do the trick. As America grows more estranged from the rest of the world, perhaps the Northeast will want to travel abroad and do business with other nations. And one day, checkpoints appear along the Pennsylvania border…

Houses of Heaven – Time Apart

Silent Places | Felte, 2020 | Bandcamp

Last night I dreamt that I discovered a substance called ‘onesium’, which is the substance used to clean the soul and wipe away difficult memories. I also dreamed that each finger has its own consciousness.

There were more important things I wanted to write about tonight, but I’ve forgotten them. I wanted to write about the texture of living through this long summer of 2020, but the phrases and connections have evaporated. Whenever I have an idea, I must write it down immediately. I’ll never remember it later, no matter how hard I try.

But ten years later, I still remember the sight of a young couple marching along an empty desert road in Nevada. He walked on one side, she was on the other, and they both wore the saddest expressions I’d ever seen. I hope they’ve made up by now.

M83 – Highway of Endless Dreams

Saturdays = Youth | Mute, 2008 | More

Lately I’ve been torn between the possibilities of fiction—and the mental reprieve it affords—versus my compulsion to record each day’s events and thoughts in this nightly journal. I’d like to find a way to synthesize these energies. Seems like this should be possible, given that each day’s headlines read more and more like an unbelievable novel.

Returned from New Hampshire’s mountains to the city heat, and it took a moment to readjust to the sight of so many masked mouths after hiding in the woods. The remnants of a tropical storm blew through Manhattan’s canyons as I dropped the rental car in a parking garage over the Battery Tunnel. Walking home, I saw a tree splayed across First Avenue like a drunk. It felt like an ominous greeting.

Fired up the news for the first time in a few days. America’s coronavirus virus records continue to soar. The president commuted the sentence of another convicted friend, the one who wears a top hat and looks like a terrible cartoon.

There’s something oddly soothing about the sound of traffic peeling down wet streets on a rainy night, the way it sounds like little bursts of static in the dark.

Spiritualized – Lord Let It Rain On Me

Amazing Grace | Dedicated, 2003 | More

Why is fire so hypnotic? Hours evaporate whenever I sit before a burning log. I stare and stare like it’s my favorite television show. Perhaps it’s something hardwired and limbic that’s magnetized by the uneasy combination of sustenance and danger. Maybe it’s an ancestral memory of bearing witness through the night while tending to the flames. A friend suggested we’re attracted to fire because it moves upwards, a rare phenomenon that defies gravity.

The desire to bear witness is a noble urge that’s been hijacked and warped by our screens. But sitting here tonight and watching the embers burn, I have no desire to look at the news or refresh my feeds. Monitoring headlines and scrolling through the opinions of strangers seems like a ludicrous way to spend my limited time on the planet. Yet I already know this clarity will fade.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – We Drift Like Worried Fire

Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! | Constellation Records, 2012 | Bandcamp

You can almost taste it, that bright metallic sensation that floods the brain when it decides there will be no sleep tonight. Last night I tossed and twisted in the sheets while wondering if I’ve become a dinosaur. While the rest of the house slept, I lay wide-eyed in bed and listened to the insects buzz in the New Hampshire woods like bad reception. The world feels as if it’s spiraling beyond my comprehension, but perhaps I’m just getting old. Maybe it’s time to make some kind of cognitive leap or be left forever pining for the past.

In the afternoon, I watched a storm roll across the White Mountains, a line of thunderheads with an animal logic that dragged veils of rain across the trees. I watched the raindrops approach until they reached my toes and began falling on my head.

Andy Stott – Sleepless

Luxury Probems | Modern Love, 2012 | Boomkat