Notebook

They’re caucusing in Nevada today. Voters organize themselves in the corners of gymnasiums and hotel conference rooms. The networks were not happy with the result. How can a socialist win 49% of a six-candidate field? Editorialists wring their hands. Meanwhile, an artificial intelligence program predicted the migration patterns after the seas begin to rise. The machine says tens of millions of people will flood into Las Vegas as well as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston.

The subway seems more erratic lately. Short bursts of speed followed by sudden stops and lurches. We look up from our phones to see if anyone else is afraid. Maybe this is emblematic of something.

They did an MRI and said I have acute patellar tendinitis in my left knee. A physical therapist gave me a big green rubberband to wrap around my shins and taught me to do exercises with names like clamshell and butterfly. These are gestures no grown man should perform. I did not go back. I’ll live with the pain. I read an article about a woman who abandoned her children because she believed she’d been chosen to be raptured by god. I wonder if somebody like that experiences knee pain.

Andy Stott – Bad Wires

From We Stay Together | Modern Love, 2011 | More

Everything’s on the fritz but it’s got a hell of a beat. See also: Sea level rise could reshape the United States, trigger migration inland.

The motel manager was unnervingly chipper when I checked in, a shine in his eye that could have been religion or drugs. Now he’s walking the perimeter of the parking lot at midnight, staring straight ahead and making perfect ninety-degree turns. I close the blinds. I think about praying, but I don’t know how. Instead I fall asleep thinking about the origin of the word hotel until I become convinced it is a portmanteau of home and tele. A distant home.

In the morning, billboards along Interstate 90 tell me that God owes us nothing, love is an action verb, and the key to forgiveness was hung on the cross. I drive with the windows down, thinking about forgiveness and my fifth-grade teacher. I wanted to play the saxophone, but she said my hands were too small. She made me play the violin, and I was terrible. At our Christmas recital, she told me just to pretend my bow was touching the strings. Her name was Mrs. Fiddler.

The towns in South Dakota have solid names like Reliance, Interior, and Alliance. A sign near a rest area says hundreds of victims of smallpox are buried nearby. Inside the travel plaza, giant flatscreens teach us the history of random celebrities. (Julianne Moore’s maiden name was Smith.) I wander the parking lot looking for my car, exchanging looks with a woman wearing a sweater that says, “I’m not bossy; I just get everything I want.” I stare at the electrified gates of golf courses named after slain tribes. I speed past a dozen military planes propped on concrete blocks like offerings to the machine gods.

A man studies yesterday’s horoscopes on the train. He carefully highlights a line that says today is the day to take action. Somewhere in Texas, a blinking church sign says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

When I was growing up, my mom often told me that perfectionism was my worst trait. Being obnoxious and young, I told her this sounded like a compliment. Who wouldn’t want to be a perfectionist? Three decades and so many missed opportunities later, I can’t tell you how many times I look up at the ceiling (or wherever her ghost might be) and tell her she was so damned right.

Debate night in America. We tune in because we need to know: Who can withstand the punishment of live television? Put anything on a screen and it absorbs the logic of entertainment: heroes, villains, conflict, and resolution. All other plots become secondary to our craving for zingers and tears. Our debates are, as Daniel Boorstin said sixty years ago, little more than a “political quiz show.” And the production quality was spectacular tonight. A stage so glossy it looked like a mirror. Ornamental neon and aerodynamic podiums. Red, white, and blue bunting everywhere.

Boorstin also said that a “pseudo­-event tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own.” But protocol was torched in the first three minutes when one candidate said, “We’re running against a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians”—a statement that applied to the former New York mayor who’s attempting to purchase the Democratic nomination as well as our current president. The protocol did not improve. Two solid hours of trembling, sniping, garbled insults, red-faced hollering, and woozy moments of tension. It was fantastic television. And when it was over, I felt dirty because tonight’s event gave me what I craved.

M83 – America

From Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts | Gooom, 2003 | More

The sound of our political conversation. An appropriate soundtrack for reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.

I remember sitting in a cathedral on a snowy February morning and watching an elderly couple hold hands. They looked at each other until tears filled their eyes. The man gave a small smile and the woman nodded. It was a beautiful sight. Three years later, I still try to imagine what passed between them, these wrinkled lovers with hair like clouds. Perhaps it was the start of something, maybe the end. I find it comforting that it’s difficult to tell the difference.

The Cranes – Beautiful Friend

From Loved | Dedicated Records, 1994 | Spotify

This is the flat-out best bighearted open road love song that I know: 1960s drums, surf guitar, and that purr on “our love was special, our love was strange.” And I will always remember the night she gave me this song on a Maxell cassette just before I fell for her.

Today I learned about the metaphor of the shark’s eyelid. Sharks have a transparent membrane that allows them to see despite the blood and carnage that fills the water when it attacks. This is a handy symbol for our ability to function while remaining blind to the pain in our lives—particularly the damage we cause.

Before switching to the simplicity of an hourglass, I would listen to meditation recordings that said utterly deranged things to me. Sometimes it was a panic-inducing question: Do you feel like you’re behind your face? Or batshit commands: Breathe through your backside. Even the more benign instructions sent my mind reeling: Release your thoughts, memories, and images. This phrase left me imagining a man ringing a bell in the night while calling, “Bring out your dead.” So much chit-chat and babble, the endless comings and goings of the mind. In prison, solitude is a punishment; in a monastery, it is a reward. “Treat every moment as your last,” said Shunryu Suzuki. “It is not preparation for something else.”

Seefeel – Starethrough

From Starethrough | Warp, 1994 | More

Seefeel’s back in heavy rotation this winter, a woozy blend of fuzzed-out guitars, cosmic vocals, and dub tactics that holds up incredibly well after twenty-five years. See also: Shunryū Suzuki and nictitating membranes.

Crossing the 45th parallel always gives me a thrill. Whenever I see the green federal sign that marks the occasion, I instinctively hit the brakes and snap a photo that comes out blurry and gets deleted. The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water. I’ve often crossed this line while speeding towards Michigan’s upper peninsula on an empty road in the dark.

Lake Superior frightened me when I was small. My parents enjoyed camping along its shore on long weekends, and I’d doze on the sticky pleather backseat of our Pontiac while we drove from Detroit to Marquette. I remember squirming in my pup tent, unable to sleep with that mysterious lake sitting out there in the night like it was waiting for something. In second grade, we studied the Great Lakes and read a pamphlet that described Lake Superior as the deepest and coldest of the five lakes: Scientists have not yet reached the bottom of Lake Superior, and they do not know what lives there. I studied that sentence until it became a hymn, and I’d lie awake chanting it in my head while thinking about what might live in all that uncharted space.

There’s enough water in Lake Superior to submerge all of the Americas. Its southern edge is known as “the Graveyard of the Great Lakes” due to a cascade of shipwrecks. On July 30, 1985, Jeffrey Val Klump became the first person to reach the bottom of Lake Superior at 1333 feet. This must have occurred after I read that pamphlet. Over the years, I’ve made my peace with Lake Superior. Antarctica scares me today. My head goes swimmy if I look at it for too long on a map. All that blank land feels like leaping off a rooftop. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to signs that clearly position me on the planet: the 45th parallel, the Continental Divide, and my telephone’s pulsing blue dot that accompanies me wherever I go.

Why are so many visions of the future cast in cool tones? We watch science fiction movies and look at renderings tinted in blues and greys, whites and silvers. We do not imagine tomorrow in shades of yellow or red, olive or tan. Perhaps this reflects a desire for cleanliness and order, but it also points to something darker: a fusion with the machine.

Walking through the city, I try to remember how the world looked when we held books, newspapers, and maps rather than gazing into glowing screens. How quickly we’ve traded aesthetics for convenience. But nostalgia is a fool’s game. What will nostalgia look like thirty or forty years from now? I try to imagine myself as an old man, telling the kids about the good old days when every inch of public space was branded with a logo, when every street corner had a Chase bank and a Walgreens.

Matrix – Blue Film #2

From Various Films | Chain Reaction, 2000 | More

Woke with a yelp from a tense dream of standing on a Russian coastline while pieces of my life washed onto the shore. Will I ever believe in god? If so, it will probably begin in my dreams. The first gods must have been born while we slept. How else could our ancestors explain the fantastic scenes that unfolded in their heads each night? God was little more than a ghost in the machinery of the subconscious before gradually being refined into a spirit, a concept, and finally, an animating force with ethical qualities. I often think about this phrase from Herbert Spencer: “God was, at first, only a permanently existing ghost.”

A haunted-looking priest stops in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at an advertisement for a career in nursing. “Maybe only 75% of my life was a disaster,” says a woman on the corner. “I don’t know, I never weighed it on a scale.”

Burial – Ghost Hardware

From Untrue | Hyperdub, 2007 | More

An appropriate song from a perfect album that still haunts today. See also: Herbert Spencer.

February, a month that sounds like a bruise. The weather in New York City feels like one, too. Purple skies and an endless string of days in the mid-forties. And still no snow. Meanwhile, two billionaires are vying to become the Democratic candidate for president by purchasing wall-to-wall advertising and buying everyone who’s for sale. Today the richest man in the world purchased the most expensive house in the world for 165 million dollars. It was only 0.8% of his wealth.

Seems like we spend a lot of time at home these days. Nearly every advertisement on the subway trumpets the virtue of having your favorite meals, outfits, entertainments, mattresses, and toothbrushes delivered to your door. Walking down First Avenue this afternoon, I caught a glimpse of all of us cocooned in our little overpriced flats, turning ever more inward. A dead city. This is a crotchety observation, I know, and it’s not particularly new. Here’s Richard Sennett in 1977, bemoaning the loss of ambient relationships between strangers that once defined parks, cafes, and sidewalks:

Each person’s self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world. And precisely because we are so self-absorbed, it is extremely difficult for us to arrive at a private principle, to give any clear account to ourselves or to others of what our personalities are . . . Masses of people are concerned with their single life-histories and particular emotions as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation.

Sennett goes on to say that every individual is “in some measure a cabinet of horrors,” but The Fall of Public Man is fundamentally an optimistic book that celebrates living among strangers as essential to defining our personalities and purpose. So I approached the lady behind the counter at Walgreens with a smile. “Use the self-checkout machine over there,” she said without looking up from her phone.

Three recurring dreams: 1) a murderer who creates traffic jams in front of ambulances; 2) The “dishwasher episode” of a critically acclaimed drama; and 3) being told I’ve contracted a rare disease and no matter where I walk from now on, it will take one hour and eleventy-two minutes.

Waking up this morning, the world doesn’t feel much different from the illogic of sleep. Frantic spinning and slinging as exit polls dribble out of New Hampshire. The president is firing his critics and reducing the prison sentences of his friends. And with only one or two exceptions, our politicians continue delivering platitudes about “getting back to normal” and “remaining moderate” while the planet burns after so many decades of us being normal and moderate. It’s 65 degrees in Antarctica.

There might be a connection between the state of the world and our dreams. Schopenhauer comes to mind: “After all, what is to be expected of heads even the wisest of which is every night the scene of the strangest and the most senseless dreams, and which is expected to take up its meditations again on awakening from them?”