Notebook

Michigan. My home state. Sunny skies, a high near seventy, and there were no kidnappings or explosions in the wake of last night’s election. We’re doing great.

Tonight C. and I are driving to a museum to discuss a possible thing. We spent a fair chunk of the ride debating whether laws were necessary to prevent us from killing each other and bouncing checks or if they merely reflected the fundamentally good inclination of human nature. I was the optimist in this debate, which surprised us both. But I enjoy imagining we need a complex system of federal and state statutes to prevent C. from causing trouble.

I love driving at night. It feels like a video game.

Ohio. The moon is full, and the weather remains strangely warm in the Middle West. Meanwhile at a climate conference in Egypt, the head of the United Nations said, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” Here in America, we’re bracing for another degrading election between the toothless and vicious. We lost Mimi Parker from Low yesterday.

This afternoon, I idled behind a white Honda with a crumpled fender and a bloody palm print on the trunk. A decal said HELP in a horror movie font. What is the psychological profile of someone who decorates their car this way? Perhaps they’re a beloved prankster and a big hit at parties. Maybe they’ll wind up on the evening news someday.

I’ve started reading William Gibson’s The Peripheral between bouts of Graeber + Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which is helping me think about fiction—sort of like how Bertrand Russell‘s analysis of Catholic Scholasticism reads like the best sci-fi.

Another summer day in November, but I’m delighted because the sun went down an hour earlier tonight. It’s such a beautiful thing, this seasonal reminder that we can tinker with the rules. The end of Daylight Savings Time is my favorite holiday because it brings the night closer. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. And here I return to what has become my annual appeal, perhaps even an invocation:

Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we please. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Rewind the internet to 2005. Erase the borders on maps and replace money with hugs.

Tonight I flipped through an old notebook and came across this quote from Germain Bazin on the Baroque:

After two centuries of light, Caravaggio created darkness—a darkness whose nature was metaphysical. Henceforward, darkness was like a mantle of nothingness, a habit of mourning, enveloping the monk in his cell, the philosopher in his den, and the hermit in his retreat, and bending the back of Crespi’s St. Charles Borromeo, who eats his meager repast of bread and water without lifting his eyes from his book, for life is short: the days of man are numbered.

I’ll be crushed if this is the last year we fuck around with time.

Ohio. Another seventy-five-degree day in November. This afternoon I sat in a park and watched the ducks, which was out of character for me. A bright daytime moon hung in the sky, surrounded by the vapor trails of airplanes.

In antiquity, we told stories to explain this uncanny sight. That god’s plan for our world has gone awry, and the daylight moon is an apology for these errors. Or that the moon refused to live in the same sky as the sun, asking, “Of what use is a candle in broad daylight?” I’d like to live in a world of apologetic gods and talking satellites.

I turned on the radio, and a woman was reading a letter from a man in prison who wondered about the opening scene of the Bible: “God said, let there be light. So one would then have to reason that God himself was dwelling in the darkness.”

Tonight a cheerful old blackjack dealer told me about “the ministry of presence,” a term from smoke-filled church basements about the value of simply showing up.

Ulla Anona – Moon

bblisss | 2018 | Bandcamp

This morning’s fog matched my mood after another night of patchy sleep. By noon the temperature edged into the seventies beneath a cloudless sky. These summery November days echo my sense of losing the rhythm, of being out of time. But I’ve decided to embrace the upside of insomnia. No more tossing and turning. If my consciousness refuses to rest, so be it—I’ll shift into vampire mode and use the small hours to write.

Last night I finished Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a remarkable book, especially for 1954. We spend 180 pages in the head of one lonely man, the last survivor in a world of vampires. When he visits the crypt where his wife’s body rests, it becomes a meditation on grief and depression:

"He had no idea how long he’d been there. After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge. The flagellant’s curse, he thought, to grow inured even to the whip. He straightened up and stood. Still alive, he thought, heart beating senselessly, veins running without point, bones and muscles and tissue all alive and functioning with no purpose at all."

He gently closes the crypt so as not to disturb her sleep and returns to his suburban home for another bout of rumination while the monsters beat at his shutters. The story is so durable—and haunting—because Matheson’s prose lives between psychological interiority and clinical detachment. (The precision of his writing in Legend is a million miles from Hell House, another horror landmark he wrote seventeen years later, and reads like something blurted out on a bender during a botched attempt to plagiarize Shirley Jackson. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.)

My insomnia puzzles me because I cannot point to a cause. I’m facing no catastrophes or major vexations beyond the search for meaning and a way to survive this century with some dignity. Perhaps my brain has run out of sleeping juice. Or maybe I’m just anxious to get on the road in a few weeks.

Ohio. A warm and hazy November day, and my insomnia continues. Tonight I ran around a lake until I tired myself out. Why does the brain go to war with itself? My body is hungry for sleep, yet my soul races around like a crazed puppy, fetching unpleasant memories and scraps of regret for inspection. And my mind turns gullible in the small hours, ready to believe anything. 

I believe you believe that. C. and I often discuss what would happen if one of us saw a ghost. It might be the most fundamental test of any relationship. One person sees a spectral figure at the foot of their bed, maybe a flying saucer over the highway or Jesus Christ floating in their soup. Now they stand before their lover, telling them magic is real and it’s all they can think about anymore. And the other person must decide whether to humor them or rearrange their own understanding of the world.

Last night I gave up the search for sleep and watched All the President’s Men at four o’clock in the morning. When played at low volume, it functions as a nostalgic fireplace: typewriters and shuffled paperwork, cigarette lighters and shoes clacking in hallways. The soft ding of an elevator is followed by a mumbled conspiracy that feels wholesome these days.

Black Polygons – Ghost

Accalmie | 2013 | Bandcamp

It was a muggy and unusually warm first day of November here in the Middle West. The leaves have fallen, and we crunched over them while dressed for spring. Meanwhile, Iran is shipping a fresh batch of Loitering Kamikaze Drones to Russia, pundits are wondering if words are dead, and American elections are becoming extremely American. In Arizona, a group of paranoiacs known as Clean Elections USA agreed not to carry guns or wear body armor within 250 feet of a ballot box, and they’ll stop screaming at voters within 75 feet—which creates an interesting 175-foot zone of getting yelled at without worrying about getting shot.

Three weeks until C. and I point the car west and search for a new home in the desert. I’m determined to finish the novel I’m writing before the year ends. I’m midway through another line-by-line edit, and every sentence looks so ugly, riddled with commas and gerunds. I’m becoming aware of my tics in sentence composition as well as my thoughts, and perhaps this is good and necessary, even if it’s irritating. But there’s a thin line between vigilance and neuroticism.

Insomnia has hit me hard lately. You can almost taste it, that bright metallic sensation that floods the brain when it decides there will be no sleep tonight. I tried sniffing lavender and eating melatonin. I even tried watching The Phantom Thread. But no luck. I toss. I pace. The upshot is I’ve learned to appreciate thirty-minute-long vaporwave tracks, thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent reviews.

2814 – Drifting

Birth of a New Day | Dream Catalog, 2015 | Bandcamp

C. and I celebrated her birthday at the Largest Korean Sauna in North America. I’ve always loved the mythic sound of “Chicagoland,” how it conjures a shadow empire within the nation, and this effect was enhanced by King Spa, a retrofitted big-box store nestled between Home Depot and H Mart in the northern sprawl of Chicago.

As we entered the changing room, an attendant handed us our uniforms: a drab t-shirt and gigantic shorts. After dipping into icy and boiling pools, we logged time in saunas made of charcoal, salt, amethyst, gold, ocher, and infrared light—each advertising various healing properties: increased blood flow, keener vision, tighter pores, fewer toxins, and a sharper mind. Signs warned against heavy petting.

Some people brought their laptops. They composed emails and entered data into spreadsheets between bouts of mind-blowing heat and bites of kimchi fried rice. Some played cards, and others played chess. Most of us just stared into the middle distance, trying to take it all in.

The decor leapfrogged postmodernism and landed in a 21st-century dumping ground of pleather, plastic, and faux marble. Cottonball clouds hung from the rafters. Stalks of fake bamboo sprouted among black lacquer credenzas, fake pineapples, and massive geodes on sale for $16,500. Propellors spun on the ceiling. A selfie station faced a meditation area with fifty recliners. On the mute flatscreens, Formula 1 cars quietly zipped around a racetrack. The mounted head of a deer gazed down at a golden Buddha and a silkscreen of Audrey Hepburn. 

The clientele was just as eclectic. Hushed voices spoke in Korean, Russian, Spanish, and every variant of American slang. The movie theater was playing Full Metal Jacket for reasons unknown, and we stuck around long enough to watch Gomer Pyle blow his brains out before heading back to the Pyramid Room.

We stayed for eleven hours, reluctant to leave this beautiful polyglot future where everyone wore the same terrible outfit, all of us refugees from the 21st century, searching for some peace and quiet in a hot room.

Wasted Cathedral – Heatstroke Cowboys Ride On

Wasted Cathedral | Dub Ditch Picnic, 2015 | Bandcamp

Here in the Middle West, it’s seventy-seven degrees in late October. I took an afternoon drive through Indiana the other day, and it was clear that America is not doing well. The interstate was a patchwork of craters and ragged concrete, and I still feel the judder of the car in my nerves. Above a shuttered rest area, a billboard announced Jesus Christ is the Answer! Call Dan’s Windows & Flooring. I spent several miles wondering about the net return on this marketing strategy: those who want a Christian window installer versus those who prefer a secular approach to home improvement.

Real-world rot feels related to Drew Austin’s meditation on being choked by digital content. “It fills our cloud storage to the brim and piles up at the margins of our digital interfaces like garbage scattered across a freeway median,” he writes. “It is the lorem ipsum that wallpapers and carpets the internet’s liminal spaces.” 

Last night I received an error message from The New York Times: You are browsing and clicking much faster than is typical of a human being.

The sun went down at 6:46pm, the moon is waning, and a cold front has arrived. I need to support my writing and teaching habits, so I logged into LinkedIn last week to hunt for some design work. Depression hit me in seconds, followed by an urge to tear apart the sky. Instructions to “Measure the Weight of Your Social Media Voice” and “Forge Emotional Bonds with Your User Base” commingled with homilies about resilience, creativity, and being authentic. Hundreds of grinning avatars were psyched, chuffed, delighted, elated, blessed, and thrilled about social media strategy and UX design. Somehow we’ve moved from doing a job to advertising it as a state of ecstasy. I ran from my screen like someone in a zombie movie.

Over in Velcro City, Paul Raven shared his experience with opening LinkedIn for the first time in ages, and I found it tremendously reassuring. He nails the weirdly homogenous atmosphere of “performativity and personal-brand backslapping, a river of abstract aspiration laced with brow-furrowed bits about mental health and the risks of over-obsessing about what one does, all written in a style whose careful optimisation to the platform’s affordances suggests people doing the exact opposite of what they’re saying, quite possibly without even realising it.”

Our networks are transforming us into such peculiar creatures. Meanwhile, people are scaling buildings in France and turning off the lights, hoping to stave off an energy crisis. It’s happening more frequently now, the gut-punch realization that I’m living in the future that so many books and movies warned me about.

Public Image Ltd – Careering

Metal Box | Virgin, 1979 | Reviewed by Simon Reynolds

She hummed with the nervy energy of a talented yet unrecognized mind. Maybe it was the way she talked about omens or her deep cigarette drags, but I sensed she belonged to a world of jukebox bars and motels with bulletproof glass at the check-in counter, moving through the Saturday night terrain of nicknamed men and last-call specials. And I wanted to join her there.

Ectomorph – Crawl of the Cthulu

Stalker | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | Bandcamp

The deeper nights of autumn always draw me back to Ectomorph, purveyors of Detroit electro sleaze. Stalker is their masterpiece: debauched drums and queasy synthesizers, a rumbling from the depths. It’s the sound of something impossibly cool and possibly wicked loping through the backstreets. This brings to mind David Leo Rice’s meditation on the virtue of seediness: “The seedy trace that’s left behind when a drifter leaves a motel is reduced to an essence of past human presence, and thus the seedy both erases the human and offers the possibility of its renewal. Rather than starting a new life, the seedy offers the chance to be reborn in one’s own life, or perhaps to be born in earnest for the first time, well into middle age.”