The time changed yesterday and nefarious forces are afoot, delivering personal setbacks, professional disappointments, and hard forks in the road. Also, a favorite character on a TV show died (if you're watching Tokyo Vice, then you know) and my speakers refuse to connect to my device. In times like these, I’m grateful for my little altar, where I practice my meditations each morning and night (except Saturdays). “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Pascal back in 1654. And it remains a struggle. I fidget and sigh and glance greedily at the clock. But they say there’s no such thing as good meditation or bad meditation; there's only meditation. The same might apply to running, but I’m not sure if it can be said for writing and design.

Inventory of my altar:

1) a patch of fake IKEAN grass because synthetic nature tickles some pleasure center I can’t quite describe (although I’ve tried). I find it very reassuring.

2) a small brass Buddha that came from god only knows. I found it rattling around a cardboard box seven years ago when moving from New Orleans.

3) a Charity Island “round stone” that delighted my grandfather, who enjoyed telling long geological stories while we stood in the cold by Saginaw Bay.

4) a chess piece my father carved after one went missing in Wisconsin because chess was serious business for us while we waited for a lung.

5) a Garry Winogrand photo that captures the joyful lunatic energy I’d like to bring to the new thing I’m writing.

6) a Glade lemon + bergamot mist diffuser that smells like a fancy hotel lobby. Available for $12 at Target.

7) a handy visual timer purchased after reading Jack Cheng’s newsletter. (I spent ages dithering between Fern Green and Pale Shale before choosing the green because it matches my fake grass.)

I share this because I'm fascinated by the totems and rituals of others. At my Thursday night philosophy book club, there’s a gentle old Catholic who likes to say, “God can’t give us happiness, so he gives us habit.”

Woke at 8:30 and showered and filled a mug with coffee and drove straight to the library. Only when I sat at a desk did I take a sip, look at my phone, open a can of Helwit Salmiak, and satisfy the little beast inside me that craves caffeine, internet, and nicotine. This is progress.

(I’ve been importing my nicotine from Sweden and the shipping costs are killing me but I enjoy having an international vice.)

Flipped through a massive book of Gary Winogrand photos and selected characters for a new story: a gnarled old man who looks like he was muscle for a union in some midwestern town, another with a spooked expression like he’s spent too much time thinking about God.

Went for an ugly run in the rain, and it was gloriously dramatic in the mud and the grey. I’m picking up my mileage now that the weather is no longer fuck-you degrees.

Came home to the news that one of my favorite music producers was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room, along with two other artists whose work I’ve admired. For fifteen years, Silent Servant has been a steady part of my life’s soundtrack, a name always in my playlists via landmark imprints like Sandwell District and Hospital Productions and Jealous God, and an early producer of one of my all-time favorite projects, Camella Lobo’s Tropic of Cancer. Now there will be no more. Goddamned fentanyl. It has claimed so many, and the chemicals are only getting weirder and more relentless.

Early in my sobriety, a loud old man in a church basement said this would be a life of stepping over dead bodies. I thought he was being melodramatic, but his words come to mind more often with each passing year. I loathe the moments when the suffering of others reminds me to be grateful. This should not be necessary. But tonight, I’m reminded yet again that my sobriety is like grace and cannot be taken for granted.

Silent Servant – Loss Response

Shadows of Death and Desire, 2018 | Boomkat

A warm and rainy Christmas in Ohio. Highs in the mid-60s and the sun will set at 5:11pm.

It felt like somebody else’s dream, going to Midnight Mass last night. We dove down empty rain-slicked streets before entering a cathedral filled with incense, chanting, and a menacing organ that shuddered the stone walls. I’d never been to Midnight Mass before, although I have smudgy memories of spending the holidays with my Polish grandparents when I was very small. Of mysterious late-night comings and goings, their voices downstairs mixing with the smell of cabbage and kielbasa. I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a world shaped by ritual.

The pews were crowded with an exceptional cross-section of humanity, all awake at this late hour, hoping to connect with something beyond themselves. Taking a seat in the back, I thought about Leonard Cohen’s comment that religion is the greatest form of art. Maybe I don’t need to feel like an interloper. Perhaps it’s okay if I admire Catholicism solely for its aesthetics, how it dramatizes grief and bends towards science fiction: the surgical ministrations of the priest and the fixation on eternal life and sexless creation; the swinging censer that fills the vault with smoke. The theatrical outfits and elaborate hats; the orchestrated calisthenics of kneeling, standing, and sitting while a man on a platform holds up a golden book. There’s a fascinating feedback loop in how speculative fiction borrows from the ancient rites of a faith that yearns for a future without death.

Most of all, I admired the humility of the Penitential Act: I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do. There was power in the sound of so many strangers chanting these words together, admitting we were screw-ups and wanted to be better. There was reassurance in knowing these words have been repeated for over two thousand years. I bowed my head and remembered my parents.

When the service ended, we wished each other Merry Christmas. “Peace be unto you,” we said. Then we scattered into the dark, where the streets were empty except for drunks and insomniacs, the penitent and devout. 

Rhos Male Voice Choir – Holy Night

Music from the Welsh Mines & Songs of Goodwill | 1957 | Bandcamp

Sunset: 6:16pm. Moon: Waxing gibbous. A high of 77 degrees because there’s no such thing as seasons anymore. During my morning meditation, my widget instructed me to select an object of focus, and I could not decide between a pattern on the carpet or the sensation of my hands in my lap. I spent the session dithering between the two, struggling to pick the best one. This seems like a metaphor for my life, evidence of a deeper issue. Perhaps it’s better to simply sit in silence and not listen to instructions.

What will be the rituals of tomorrow as the world speeds up and the fires, floods, and droughts increase? Maybe there will be more magical thinking, more people retreating into superstition. The first rituals began to make sure the sun would rise each morning, and I often wonder what the last ritual will be.

We gathered around the mayor’s mansion and sat in the street for thirty minutes of quiet. The silence was stunning. It had presence and weight that nearly muted the birds and the steady beat of three choppers in the sky. A different world felt very possible with hundreds of strangers sitting on the asphalt in silence, all of these bodies driven by a shared impulse, both disciplined and limbic.

I closed my eyes and contemplated the convulsions and pain of the past week. For a moment, I thought I understood the compassionate silence described by spiritualized leaders.

Then a small thing occurred, a minor incursion in the scheme of bloodshed and berserk police, but I think it’s worth noting as a sign of our times. The silent vigil was interrupted by the dial-tone drone of an emergency alert that radiated from our telephones. We opened our eyes and riffled through our pockets, fumbling for the mute button and shaking our heads at the message on our screens: Emergency Alert. Citywide curfew in effect at 8pm. No traffic allowed in Manhattan south of 96th Street.

The timing felt like a taunt: freedom colliding with authority, the spiritual scraping against the technological.

Drexciya – Take Your Mind

The Unknown Aquazone | Submerge, 1994 | Bandcamp

Revisiting Drexciya this week, and I’ve come across some academic papers about their elaborate mythology—there’s one about Drexciya’s “sonic third space”, and another called Inside ‘Neptune’s Lair’: Drexciya, Dystopia and Afrofuturism.