emancipate yourself from particulate matter.

I've been thinking a bit about economies of scale. First, in regards to time: taking a moment and saying, "this is just one moment," and letting the one outlast the other. Second, in regards to sheer geographic scale and how difficult it makes the concept of co-temporaneousness: me here typing, some hours or days or weeks later you reading what gets typed, with me - presumably - off somewhere that is not ether but for all intents and purposes may as well be. I think I was in college when I realized that "for all intensive purposes" was not right.

I visited, as a visitor, crestfallen-like, an emergency room two days ago. The Coke machine was a locus of activity and the automatic doors made a sweeping sound that was neither natural nor un-. Styrofoam cups of coffee were all the rage, as was shoe-gazing. someone told me upwards of five inches of snow is at this moment converging on the part of the Northern Plains I occupy. I am not surprised. Not one bit.

Jeff Spicoli-Style Vans Slip On Shoe, Deposited in Sunless Clime

1) Current onslaught of cuisine/cooking related materials continues. No Reservations, by that Anthony Bourdain guy with the TV show and the constant cigarette dangling (completed) - does not make me want to become a heroin addict or a line cook. To one degree or another, did inspire militancy and desire for unilateral uptick of my life's intensity (for instance, four hours of sleep, aided and abetted - once again - by neighbor's nascent relationship). Plus makes for vivid version of imagination's constructed notion of New York City blunt, a kind of eccentric honesty and You-couldn't-pay-me-more-to-care-less-ness. Of course I have spent about 17 hours, total, in that metropolis so all notions get filtered through countless viewings of NYPD Blue and the early poems of the Confessional type guys and gals with drinking problems and hangups that stick out like goiters on sleepy southeast asian women on a pilgrimage to some holy goiter-shrinking shrine.

New York theme cont'd - a re-re-reading of Kissing in Manhattan, first discovered in 2003 and devoured in a sitting. Found in library today, to be the accompaniment to warmed up chicken and potato with 2% milk dinner. Also found at library today: 12 old New Yorkers, circa 1982-1985, and subsequently absconded with.

Other book:

Maximum City. About Bombay. Or Mumbai. Good epigrams. Author interview over at the Believer may be worth your time, if you have excess amounts of it.



2) dark muck on slowly evaporating snow drifts, plus every morning starts with ice, metls a bit, then freezes again by the time I'm out ambulatory and socializing. Makes for large yellowing bruises and waking up unsure of where exactly that came from.




UPDATE: having read Kissing in Manhattan in a sitting, once again, it seems like it's worthwhile to at least ask the question: do you, dear reader, have a book or a CD or a movie, even, to which your attentiveness to your own list of TO DO and your day-to-day goings on constantly crumbles in importance? What kind of thing is an obsession when it's completely temporary and sated in a sitting? Is it even one? Discuss.

Subsist on purple passages at your own peril

1)

Yesterday I read a book called “The Making of A Chef,” which was about – ahem – the making of a chef at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), parent institution to the Food and Beverage Institute (FBI). Aside from having a lapidary effect on my ability to scramble eggs, the book made me think about the notion that work reflects character and character determines success. Now I want you to think about it.

2)

quote of the week, courtesy of SE: I just missed the days when the Republicans' main priority was fucking over the poor.