June 2004 Archives

M recently got himself a bluetooth mouse. I recently was given a pda that can bluetooth. Waiting for the elevator the other day, I checked if there were any other Bluetooth users in the neighborhood, I discovered M's mac and sent him a photograph. (Just casually.) He liked the idea of photographs arriving on his desktop out of thin air. (M is a guy who likes to work on projects that are somehow innovative in nature, I would say.) He came up with the idea that there could be a folder on his harddrive that would refresh his desktop every few minutes or so and that the images in the folder would be photographs, or whatever it might be, that I feel would be nice to have as a desktop. He just leaves the folder open for me now, and whenever I walk by his office, if he is there or not, I just drop in a picture or two, through the air, invisibly, just like that. Finally some good use for that bluetooth stuff. (I already began to feel like the man with the first fax machine at times. Whom could I possibly fax? Should I maybe just create a loop of black paper and let the machine copy until it goes up in flames?) I started spreading some of my pictures onto cellphones in phone stores, just for "fun"... I use bluetooth to sync my palm... (sorta lame, no?) I do not have a cellphone. This might be part of the whole issue here. Please do not feel sorry for me. I do not really need a cellphone... ... How sad have some of the entries become... not so long ago, there would be joyful compact posts here, praising the sunrise... now there are little stories of office adventures... i feel dilbertified. Not so long ago there used to be daily drawings here... now some of the entries almost make me cry, onto the same page, offline, online... efficiently. ... The plants are doing okay, at least. I will probably have to setup an alarm on my handheld device, preferably a vibrating one, reminding me to water the smart, though brainless green friends... at least every friday... what should be the time? Should it be a "whole day event?". ... Do you bluetooth? .

There is this one gentleman in the office, who seems to never wash his hands. He wears a suit, his hair looks great. He is a handsome guy, but whenever I see him, I remember this one time he came out of the stall, and then out of the door, and then today again... I use the towel to touch the doorknob for a while now... for obvious reasons. So when I went to get a coffee today, around four pm or so. The man in the nice suit, who does not seem to want to wash his hands happened to also go out of the building to get a smoke. I do not feel so bad now, at least. The smoke probably kills a good percentage of the bacteria he leaves on his hands. (The cigarette will be a really good one to blame, once he happens to somehow injure himself via his bad hygiene...) One of the ashtrays outside of the building was smoking too. One of the cigarettes must have set some thrown out receipt on fire, and so there was a general smell of burning paper in the air. And yes, some smoke. I went to get the coffee. There is a little place across 8th avenue, and their coffee is not so bad, even though they do not have Moby Dick symbols on their paper cups. (They also give me two cups every time, and then these cups make very nice building blocks for paper sculptures.) As I was returning to the office, back on the same path, there is was, obviously, the ashtray, now much more smokey. People standing around, staring, smoking their cigarettes. The smoke somehow heavy actually. A security guard, in his day-glow vest and his walkietalkie was calling the fire department. For help. I could hear the syrens, the firehouse is not very far... He kept them very well informed: "Yes, we have heavy smoke here, heavy smoke." This was not heavy smoke, it was a bunch of paper really happy to be finally on fire. I walked up to the ashtray, took off the lid of my coffee cup and slowly poured some of my java onto the little flames, extinguishing them instantly. "...yes, we had a representative sent here and he put coffee on top of the fire, extinguishi...." I heard the security guy speak into his device, as I walked into the building through the new york airlock called revolving door... I actually thought that I had spilled most of my coffee on the fire, but as it turned out, it was not all that bad. Oh, and I do not think that the security guy is a bad person. He was probably not allowed to touch an extinguisher, or do anything by himself. So I don't blame him. And neither do I blame the man who does not wash his hands. It is a bit lame that I would write about such a silly incident here, I know... Good thing nobody got hurt.

...

It is summer again and then also friday, and so I find myself back in Sapporo, that slightly sticky and yet always packed place on 49th street. The only seat for the only me is at the counter. The man next to me is clearly not Japanese, he ordered a salad, which looks very limp and almost transparent. It is not the specialty here. I will have yet another Hiyashi, that cold bowl in mustard soup, which will have me filled and slow until tomorrow, I guess. Right now, I can just sit here and listen to the noises and smell the burned pieces of something, the things that did not quite make it in to the broth. In front of me, in the refrigerated display, I think it might be rice with pink flakes, all wrapped in shrinkwrap, and then some more in tupperware. There is a bowl of lemons. They must have been prepared a few days ago. The foil on the bowl is slowly changing shape. I like the animals most. To my right there is a little family of small animals. A grassing horse, almost completely stripped of its original paint, lays on its side and guards a pile of paper napkins... He is the chosen one, observed by three other animals, similar in size, yet not quite as ideal for this particular job. The glass elephant is probably least suited. The little blue guy would probably just break if a hand reached out for him to allow two of its fingers to grab one of the napkins. The horse is a perfect one for this job. Hiyashi chukka arrives, it looks like a mess, like leftovers, artfully prepared to please the various senses. I fold the keyboard and put the palm into my chest pocket. This is where it starts to vibrate, almost immediately. I do not let it make any sounds. At least no alarm sounds. It vibrates three times. I have 15 minutes to finish and to get back to the agency. I forgot to enter the location of the meeting. I like entering data by hand. It slows me down, but it allows me to have the feeling that I am dealing with some sort of an analogue device. I feel as if I were the one painting time... colors...I do not think the hiyashi will hold me over until tomorrow.. I will probably try to find something to add to myself before the sun sets. I will probably have to eat a little more. The man next to me gets up at exactly the same time as I. I do not even have a receipt. The lady at the door knows me well enough to just request the right amount of money. Did I tell you that I would like to just lock myself into a room and just draw for at least two years?.. Where did this idea come from?... I moved on,... it is the evening now... it is wet outside, raining. I took a different train to get here. I took it to avoid the heavy rain. There is thunder outside. I like typing on a little device that lets me do just that. No distractions... just typing. Tiny letters appearing on a small screen, one by one. I do not trust my fingers. I watch my fingers as I am typing... and yet, looking at the screen works quite as well... it seems... home is where the greygoose is... and the juice and the water and the key works... and I wish I were somewhere else. The glass is empty now. There are no doubts about this.... Across the street, on the fifth floor, the mother decided to walk around naked. The plants are falling asleep, as the sun is setting. I miss slow conversations in a dark room with a green ceiling. We would find out that my taste was unfashionably mainstream. I would learn that ultra vivid scene music is beautiful, even if there was wax on the record. The waves of truth are now slowly taking over and my hands would love to perform larger gestures than just typing... my forehead is sweaty.. .and it feels like the best idea now would be to get more of that colorless french bird... just to completely break all the edges of the evening. This right here, might be the perfect moment... could it be? Not sure really...

Each one of the entries should perhaps be accompanied by the technical specs of how it was created. How much energy is being burned right now, just so I can see the letters appear here in front of me, somehow slowly still, one by one, blurry, greyish, behind a layer of disturbing floaters. I turned off all lights. I put on the headphones. I should be able to focus now. No. I am not really able to focus. I watch probably about 15 minutes of television per day. Maybe less. Still, some of what I see when I try to think reminds me very much of flipping channels. Just had o think of the cold blade of the knife my neighbor would press against my forehead after I managed to hit something again. I somehow thought that she would cut off the red bump growing on my head. She would always only press onto it, very strongly with the broad side, the cold metal, it would hurt as much as the original impact, except that now there was this giant face of a very thin woman with transparent skin, curly hair and a breath like a ashtray looking at me through the rims of her 1978 glasses. click... When I finally bought my first mac, it was put onto an oven. It was a very old oven I had found in the street and dragged the two flights to the apartment. There was the kitchen, the place where the cats ate their gradually more disgusting food, and then just a few feet from there, the computer, all fresh and beige. It was far enough from the bookcase when it collapsed. The entire wall collapsed. A giant wall of paper and other objects just toppled over into the room, crushing a table, chairs, almost hitting a little cat. click... The cleaning lady just picked up my styrofoam cup with the remnants of some sugar, as well as a very oddly curled piece of paper. click... I should have written on Wednesday. I could have sworn that I saw at least two homeless men on cellphones. Good... all homeless people should have cellphones in New York City. And it should be a public service. If they do not have homes, at least give them a help-line... and maybe right into their hand... Oh, such a bad idea, isn't it?... Too much control? Too naive of me? no bread thus cake? click... She said that she lived two hours away from the city. She would thus spend four hours every day, staring at the landscape moving past the window... I hope she gets a seat every time. I asked her what she did when on that train. And she admitted that her thoughts would just drift away. And I imagine he reflection travelling with her, the eyes closed sometimes. Sometimes open, but not seeing... sometimes seeing a lot and yet choosing not to understand. Her thoughts traveling from her, to the reflection and then just ton off and left behind on the train tracks... until things became completely quiet again and even the vibrations of the tracks would stop... click... Allergies would easily kill me... click... my hands would be completely cold... click... i almost drowned... click... before going to sleep, my legs would walk up the wall, until they could not walk any further. I would remain in this position until the world around me would start to pulsate in the rhythm played by my heart. I still like the moving shapes on the ceiling of the bedroom. I should be on my way home now and get some sleep. Hmm... maybe it is just time to wrote on and sit in front of a very different device... let's see where and how this is going to happen...

And computers will disappear. The screens will disappear. The keyboards will disappear as well. Some of them will. Or at least they will pretend that they will. And they will be everywhere. Once it becomes as cheap to make a surface intelligent as it is goign to be to add a coat of paint, then... well, actually much earlier than that... they will just blend in, will be worn, will be inhaled, injected, looked through and with and at unintentionally. We take information for granted. We take music for granted. We take light for granted. We take heat and cool air for granted. We take transportation for granted. We take color for granted. And we will take computers for granted. They will become the surface and the subsurface of whatever will be around us and on us and in us... and it is not going to matter too much... Stating the obvious here... next...

Very silly entry this is. I had to start this one in yodaEnglish, bacause I really feel as if I were celebrating my newly discovered ability to touch my left ear with the little toe of my right foot. I look ridiculous right now. I at a tiny foldable keyboard, to which I connected that Tungsten T3 I have been obsessing with for the last few weeks now. I am writing this entry into a really tiny entryfield that does not even have such luxury like a scroll bar. The screen I am typing this here on has a resolution of 320x480 (I wish 480 were the width, but I would need a different keyboard for that.) The ridiculous part is that it took me several days to get this little devil connected to the web. I still am not quite sure how I managed... Well, my connection to the internet is established via Bluetooth, a little Personal Network, through which I am communicating with my PowerBook, which is connected to the internet via a hub, which gets its network IP addresses from an Airport Station, not really utilized otherwise in this particular excercise. So imagine me, the little Palm setup on a wacom tablet, in front of a 20inch flat LCD, with lights blinking, staring at the tiniest screen available in the house. I must be insane. I crawled into a tiny hole and am using a wire remote to make donuts on the parking lot... oh boy... But hey, the cute part is that I managed to connect the toys and that I think that the site does not look half bad when seen through the eye of a Palm Handheld device... Somebody please pinch me... I should be drawing... not surfing in a puddle... ; ) (If you can read this, then I managed to actually post the entry as well, which is pretty amazing...) ...

Timetimetimetime... barely any here, rushingrushing rushing through the mini clicks on the keyboard, and more and more and more wedges in the calendar... the days feel like jumping over a herd of sheep again and again and again... but we are winners again. Just received a call that we won an award in Cannes... and it is a very happy moment... (though mildly so, as we do not want to be overly ecstatic, do we?...) What ever happened to Wednesday? Nice Shoes? Modigliani beyond the myth and right next to the pita bread... If I only had more than 90 seconds to tell the story, I probably would... scary moments of overworked winners? I guess...

My dinner right now consists of food that was left over in some conference room. Pre packaged salad, the ain dish in the aluminum tray in the toaster oven just gave me that little ring. My subway ride home was packed with some amplified characters. First there was this guy with a dead hand. Okay, it was a dead looking hand. He was reading the financial times. His left hand was just so perfect and clean as if it were made out of wax. He never used it, it seemed, except when he had to reach out with it to give it to the Korean girl who did his nails. And boy, did she do a great job. These nails were very nicely pushed back and showed their white moons. The glossy lacquered look probably was exactly what he though he needed. It was even more amazing as a contrast to his buttery, softened whitish skin. The woman next to him was in her late forties, I guess. Her manicure looked as if it had been applied to freshly melted toe nails. Thick and strangely shaped, used and abused. She was reading, and I wrote this one down:"The Great Goddess of Egypt." In the paperback edition. She was not very deep into it, and she seemed more interested in the way what she looked like reading it than actually finding out what it was about. Or at least this was what I thought, at first. It appears that she was just looking around, just to check out the situation. Her index finger went up to her left nostril on a serious mission. We are not talking about a brushing moving of the nose-wing. She went to town. She went really deep. She twisted and turned. She really dug deep. The train was in the fifties, and she was really deep inside... when the 66th street stop came she had her hand out of her nose, but now she casually, just very much in a way as if she really did not care. Well, she fed herself with what she just had found in her nose. The Egyptian Goddess reader really ate that stuff she found in her nose. What more was I supposed to see tonight? I left the train on 79th street. I mentioned before that I have recently been really obsessed with that little palm device. (I am actually writing this entry on it.) and so like an old man who feels drawn to a Harley Davidson dealership, so he can buy some stupid chromed extension of his exhaust pipe, I found myself in an electronic store holding little card readers and synchronizing cradles. Around me were people who said things like "no maam, this monitor will not work with a mac," or that really short thin man shouting out the words: "does anybody work here?, does anybody work here?" I realized that this whole experience was not really worth it, and so I bought the cheapest thing in the store, which was nothing and just left... (Oh, this past sentence really hurt, I know... more about it just below.) I walked home. from 79th street. No big deal really... Though there was an accident on 80th. It looked not to good for some of the people involved. The Audi had the airbags out and was on the right side of Broadway. That plastic van on the planted middle strip had a broken axis and some other serious damage. I guess this was also the reason why police had blocked off the entire area. The ambulance was just one of a few to arrive there... it looked like a bad day for the cars. People on the sidewalk were holding court over who dared to be responsible for this mess that was probably the pinnacle of their Tuesday experience... I was glad to be home. The Restoration Hardware catalogue in the mailbox contained some objects I would never be able to fit into any New York City apartment, which just reminded me that there was California and all the states in between. The lady who was a video producer and I thought lived in the penthouse, got out on the second floor, the same floor where the Super got out. They played this game of looking invisible... but it was so clear that they went to... .... hack? I just took off my shoes and did not even turn on the AC. Just wanted to eat something and finish all the work I never managed to finish during business hours. I spiked my red grape juice with so much grey goose that the drink is not even really solid red. Not even as red as that tomato sauce on the food that was born to be eaten in a conference room. Is this what my mother's blood looked like when she almost died because she managed to thin her blood out of even being blood? I am not even sure I can think about it clearly right now... And this might explain some of the incoherent sentences above... Or if you think there were any brilliant ones, or maybe daring ones, then God bless the spirits, because they make us more daring writers. Except that most of us do not dare to write... irresponsibly... This has been a bloody Tuesday thus far. The aluminum tray is now semi empty in front of me. The second glass of "grape juice" is begging to be "refilled"... I think I will need to take a little nap before I manage to actually upload this little stream of multily distilled simple thought onto the ... where?... Please drink responsibly...

Around this time, the dogs still roam free in the streets of the Upper West Side. And the birds can still be heard. It is still possible to get a bigger booth at the diner, even when just walking in as one person. It is almost quiet. Well, not here and now, just in general. The guy next to me ordered whatever I am having except with an additional bowl of strawberries. Oh, and he also has no potatoes with his omelette... or bread. I am sensing a low carb diet here. Comfort food has been replaced by comfort therapy. A sense of control over the belly in times when the world appears to be spun out of control completely... Away of preserving sanity in an environment where food is going to be plenty tomorrow and the day after that. Crazy. When I visited an artist camp in Poland in 1995, one of the Polish friends reminded me that no thinking and no development was really possible if there was food on the minds of the. What he meant then and there was of course, that there was plenty of people in Poland who had no time to think about great ideas, as they had to think about ways to get the next meal. “Mit leerem Magen denkt sich schlecht.” (Thinking is bad with an empty stomach… is a German saying.) I wonder if declaring war on Carbohydrates might have a bit of a similar effect, what a brilliant coincidence. The stomachs may not be empty and that feeling in the belly might be fear, not hunger, but boy, does it take off the mind of whatever else there is. How much of the thought real estate in the head of a large part of the population here is set aside for nutritional matters these days? How much is taken by matters related to looks? (and this includes those whiter and whiter teeth, I think.) How much is taped off for that danger zone called career? How much of the emotional and thought real estate remains available for actual independent thinking and for this really stupid thing called dreaming? How much remains open for that thinking that is just seemingly useless and not really translatable into anything that could be sold or bought or… outlived. Whom am I fooling here... a lion share of the world’s thinking has to be brought down to a ritualistic celebration of the mundane... not all parts of a car can be the engine, as my father would put it... Should I probably drop the sugar and investigate the advantages and disadvantages of sweet'n low? Though I have the feeling the Equal, with its blue packaging is speaking more clearly to my light blue set of my mind... Oh, and could the guy behind me please stop reading his bills to himself out loud, with all the rubbish commentary? I understand it when couples argue about money, but if a couple is trapped in a single middle aged body, then matters are more serious, I guess... It is still relatively quiet right here and right now… and this is why I will now get out and take a walk for another 40 blocks or so. The rest of the day will be spent in an office. No dogs allowed. Forget the birds.

and I do not mean "the others"... after going to bed at around 2am and waking up this morning around five or so, I am in a state that must be similar in what rabbits are in when they are on a highway at night, many lanes, giant glowing moons passing by in varying constellations noise, noise, noise... .... . Coffee will make me believe that I am okay. I am not... tried to take off my skin and put it into the coat closet last night. Attempt failed. I am still completely myself, tired to the point where my skin is a very sensitive giant tip of a tongue. The headaches behind my eye balls are maybe mild, but they are not a good sign either... and for those who read the last entry... imagine the girl with no hands walking into a garden, accompanied by an angel, her arms tied tightly to her back, eating a single pear, straight from the tree. I think this might be a very nice picture to start a day with. And I think I will now go take a walk, towards midtown... (where men with many greedy hands tend to tear out orchards to replace them with giant shopping experiences, without ever leaving their desks... sorry for this one... some high fructose corn syrup with that, anyone?)

The freezer makes a squeaky sound when opened this late at night. And the cork in the bottle with flying french birds on it is not very quiet either. The glass should be far too cold to touch with lips, but it is not. And the liquid inside feels almost as if it were snow, at first, and then it just glows nicely and in a very clean way. Forget the weekend. Now. It was a good one, actually. I slept more in the two days or so than all of last week I guess. And it was a quiet sleep, packed with adventures and dreams involving owners of delicatessen playing the roles of art experts. My old Russian and English teacher even came forward as a life long artist painter, his back room of his tiny Florentine apartment packed with orange paintings much more vibrant than what Richter showed us at the Biennale in 2000. Oh, and there were the coffe cups, some really stunning designs. Who knew such things could be printed on paper. And a mail on friday (or was it Thursday?) reminded me that I really wanted to dive deeper into the two little leather bound books containing the Grimm's fairy tales (sans filtre, mind you,) the very stories that might be the origin of the word grim. Yes, grim they are indeed, and in no way as cute as uncle Walt wanted us to believe. Death is a brutal and inventive force in them, and sometimes it even does not arrive in person at the end of the story, it just sends a long shadow, just long enough to remind us of our own finite calendars. "Each day is a day less to live." My father has much better quotes in his collection, but this one was a fitting one for the day when I did not call. Oh, it was father's day, but only here in the US... the capital version of you and I.. the US... there could probably be just two countries now, the US and the they. At least according to some, who never had to be the "they" in their lives. Oh, the Grimm brothers. Yes. I would take the number three bus on Freiheitsplatz every weekday (Freiheitsplatz is "Freedom's square" in Hanau.) The bus stop of the number 3 line had a little plaque where I waited. It was a reminder that this there was the place where the house used to be in which the Grimm Brothers were born. Right there. Yes. The house, as 98% of Hanau was destroyed, when somebody was dumb enough to declare that Hanau was a "fortress." Well, two airplanes were stationed there, not actually even there. The US planes left the 2% or so standing, which happened to be the Casernes... (is this the spelling for military quarters?) So the Americans had a place to stay, aster they eventually liberated the city. The house in which the Police and the Gestapo used to be was turned into the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, the Grimm House was turned into a bus stop... and the Synagogue was turned into a Car Body Shop for russian automobiles of the brand "Lada"... I would walk over the fields in the west of the city in the 80's and my dog would dig out the strangest things. Parts of dolls, little colorful bottles, pieces of ceramics. My parents have a recreational garden on that field these days. The food grows really well there... Hmm... enough of all this now... I will read some more of the Grimm Brother tales... hmm... I wonder why there was never a Disney version of "Das Mädchen ohne Hände." ("The Girl without hands.")... (Oh, she has them in the beginning of the story, it is the father who cuts, them off, as he promised to the devil, you know...) Maybe this is the perfect time to open that squeaky door again. What did it taste like?... like melting snow? Oh, the beauty of things that happen without words...

I had had some of that fermented red grape juice. The picnic in the Empire State Building was really great. Seeing old friends again is always a comforting experience... A tourist couple in front of the ESB was taking turns in taking pictures of each other. I offered to help. Decided that the picture needed a flash, made a cute photograph of them posing in a very happy way in front of the giant building. They were ecstatic. They did not speak any English, it seamed, but they were so incredibly happy as if it had been their very first picture together in New York. Oh, and I love This little entry on Sarah's Blog. Can we please just start doing more good things to people? I mean tiny little good things? More of them? Every day? Could we please do whatever we can to make the life of others in some tiny way easier? Not just friends. Everyone. And could we not even talk about it too much, just do? Just help out? Just for the helping's sake? Preferably anonymously? Maybe there could be an anonymous blog somewhere with things that have been done, just to allow others to have ideas as to what to do? I don't know...

The man arrived late. He brought a large Coach bag with him. He looked shy and somehow old compared to her, he was a balding 50 year old. She was maybe 25. He brought little presents for the kids. They struggled a bit with their little Coach branded packages but had soon layers and layers of tissue paper torn to little pieces. The girl's present was a watermelon keychain. The boy received a flat chrome whistle. He was allowed to blow it once. Softly. Not sure if anybody in the restaurant even noticed. It was more of a whistle for someone taking evening walks in a park. The girl’s keychain appeared to be more of an accessory for someone's imaginary beach house... The mother soon had a rather large brown bag in front of her on the table. Inside was a good sized saddle bag, pink, suede, a branded tag attached. It looked very much like the tan saddle bag she already had on her lap. It was the winner. She checked the tissue paper inside of the bag, just to find a receipt. The item was returnable? There were many “wows” and “ahs” and encouragements to say thanks and general happiness. The boy had to go to the bathroom and the man walked to the bathroom with the boy. . they returned after just a few minutes and the man whispered something to the mother. She nodded. Fitting dishes arrived for all. The man spent the rest of the meal either silent, or shy, or on the phone... outside of the restaurant. And I do not know more... as I have to leave them behind now, to go back to the office... So how might the story continue? Or is there a piece of story at all?... Or where was the beginning of the story? How did these unequal partners meet? Where? Was this one of their beautiful moments? Or were these ahead or behind them?... I think ahead... but it is all a very wild speculation... Next to the restaurant is a launderette. An older woman is sitting in front of one of he washing machines, her head sunk deep between her shoulders, both of her middle fingest pressed firmly against the glass on the machine door. She looks as if she were playing slots at a casino. My feeling is she will win. Outside of the OTB are lines of old men, some in wheelchairs, one with his visiting nurse, I guess. They seem to be waiting for some sort of results. One of the men is clenching to a little book filled with tables of numbers.

Clearly the photograph of the dunes in Death Valley below is far away from the actual conditions which were there while I shot the picture or maybe not? It is a photograph after all. There is an interesting feeling to this image... and this is why I want to keep it here... for a little while, maybe?...

Tried to turn of the Air Conditioning for a while, just to listen to the silence of the valley and maybe sleep without any noise at all for a while. It felt nice for a few minutes, until my hearing became sharper and the other air conditioners from the other cabins became seemingly as loud as the one I had just turned off. Oh, and the heat crept into the room, slowly, and it began to choke me. So now my own AC is going through its various sequences again, the sounds of compression and decompression are another reminder that this here is a very mild version of experiencing reality. Adjusted reality makes it possible for me to be here, more than 2000 miles away from home, which in itself is thousands of miles away from where I was born. I will need to remind myself of some of these things next time I complain about technology being too important perhaps?... I tried to imagine the tank with the gasoline I burned with the car this past week. It was a rather big tank. I should probably be sleeping now. I will be taking the redeye flight tomorrow... and there is a reason why it has this name... .

Hmm, will need to rescan this image to show more of the detail hidden in the expression of this really dangerous guy. He was ready to just jump and conquer and to fight... and to eat some good piece of the mel somebody had left on the outside table in the restaurant... Well, I think he was looking and some piece of food that had been pulled to the floor by other birds... (Note to self: need to learn that great scannin' machine... or at least better...)

Em!ly had her thumb bitten by Sasha her currently injured dog. Sasha is still injured after a biting accident, was in pain, mistook Em!ly's hand for an attacker... and thus the injury. Em!ly will probably lose and re-grow the nail. In the meantime, she will not really be able to use her right hand for some very normal activities... So just to solidarize with Em!ly, I drew a little dog with my right hand. (I am about as completely left handed as they get...) The dog is certainly less than perfect, but hey, it is drawn with that other hand. So let's all hope Em!ly will get better. Thing appear to be very dangerous where she lives, out there in the wild, wild Coloradian west... : )

There are days when I feel incredibly behind everything and everybody around me. Then there are days where it does not really matter. The days when things just develop the way they have to. And then there are days, or maybe just evenings, when I can not quite manage to dive into the reality of things. I can not see the sentences, I can not even see the words that spell out reality, I see the shapes and colors and they dance in some often strange ways... sometimes rather sad. Maybe tonight is such an evening? Maybe some part of me somewhere is just injured in some way and so my perception of the world is shifted to the point where even spoken words are as incomprehendable as if they were sung by exotic birds. It is very humid, or just about as humid as one could expect from an early New York summer day. I am walking towards home and just from time to time cool off in places where I can slowly recharge and maybe adjust my temperature and humidity. But inbetween, inbetween these stops, there is an entire odd rhythm of faces and well dressed bodies, floating in their reality of things. And I might be one of the people they see walking by me, but I do not thing most of them know they do. And it is okay, it is a great thing about New York. It is possible to be in a fully packed train and to just dive into some faked medical condition and achieve privacy. Even mild medical conditions work. And because there is therapy even for the condition of no clear condition... it is very much possible to achieve privacy with gretest ease. And it is also easy to observe. One has to observe and be aware to at last not bump into others. On days, or evenings when a detachment from the common reality is achieved though, the observations become a bit more detached as well. Why did the woman walking her dog just a block away from here look like an upside down pink muffin, or a lamp shade with legs? Why was the perfect businessman on the phone, ordering water, looking at his female companion who looked so incredibly perfectly manufactured. She was the latest model of what she should have been. She was one of about 10 who must have been the same model, seen tonight. A woman in a small black dress, carrying bags with the Morgan Stanley logo on them, looked also incredibly perfectly bread to somehow be able to carry these heavy branded cloth receptacles. Her legs were like perfect machine parts, carrying her over the dirty sidewalks towards a place she was probably also contacting with the wired cellphone attachment connected to her somehow magically held phone. I was so happy to see a little scratch mark on her calf. It appeared as if she had been bitten by a mosquito perhaps and she scratched the spot. So she had her Achilles heel?... Why do many women here have to have so perfectly matched clothing and accessories? Why do the men who are with them appear to be just one of the matching accessories? What happened to the idea that some women could be incredible sorceresses, able to connect and connect with people? How did men become mere devices? Apparatuses? Many do not appear to live. They appear to function. They appear to perform certain simple preprogrammed activities. Portions of human interactions have been converted into an interaction sport, all including the proper team outfits. This is a battle I am looking at here? Can there be winners? What is their prize? Will they break down in tears once they pass their virtual finish lines? Will they run around the field? Will they be congratulated by their peers? Will there be special coverage? Will they be interviewed by a special reporter who will ask them about the different rounds in their so demanding life? Will they then remove themselves from the ring as champions? Will they then retire with their golden belts and pictures of their championships in the basements of their giant homes, so giant that the outside walls will touch the walls of another champion home, touch, almost?... will they have to live in the basement, so they can make money with the upstairs, rent it out to those who have not yet achieved the suxess? Where will they all go? What is the heaven that many of these people are trying to crawl into before their star sets?... Maybe the next few blocks will hold another part of the non-verbal answer to this one... let's see... (8:45PM Columbus and 76th Street...)

Just a little bird. In the heat. Thus the open beak... or maybe it is a song after all? Not sung for us anyway... It is the same photograph, the online space is a bit of a rough place to display actual photographs... thus the extra cropping... oh well...

So I started writing these little entries on the Palm Pilot recently. I got this palm for free just a few weeks ago and I really tried to embrace it. I really tried to "make it mine". It is barely working. My sense of organization works on a very odd meta level and time is really a bit of a squishy and soft kind of thing around me. I do not have a cell phone. And so I do not have a cell phone with bluetooth... which would have been really great in combination with the new Palm Pilot. (it is a Tungsten T3... it expands when things get really exciting, yes, it is this kind of strange mini computer...) I got myself a keyboard though. And a tiny version of word was on the little computer, and so I can write my little entries with a hightened level of intimacy, basically anywhere. (That last park entry was written on the Palm.) Stuff got tiny. The letters I am looking at now are maybe two millimeters high... I have no idea what this could be in inches. 12 perhaps? Oh, and I also got myself this GPS navigation system, which works with the little palmpilot, and so I never get lost. Actually went to Cape Cod this weekend (a five hour drive in each direction... I will be riding a bicycle uphill in hell for that.) because I knew that I would not get lost. The GPS thing brought the (borrowed) car all the way to the front door of the hotel, and then it broke down. Hope the manufacturer will be able to fix it, or I will have to give out some names... ; ) Somebody is probably trying to tell me that it is time for me to prmanently move away from the big city, to move into a place where dogs roam free and people have the courage to live in their mobile homes. Some of my more interesting projects recently were handled via email anyway, and it really does not matter if the checks would be sent to manahatta or to my hutta. Hmm... The first animal seen in Cape Cod was a little fox. It behaved like a giant mix between a cat and a squirrel. Is this how foxes happened? Maybe a dog watched. Foxes are very odd animals. This one just stretched out on the dunes, wiped his behind on the path to the beach and took a foxy dump in the sea grass. The other animals seen soon after were little rabbits. Crazy little guys. They were such clear fox fodder, it was somehow not even funny. No wonder the fox looked so well fed and happy. Oh, and the rabbits fought. They fought little territorial battles. As if the grass really were greener on the other side (of the rose-bushes)... The view from the room was directly onto Pleasant Bay. Such simply still water. I wanted to be a boat and just hang out. Throw my anchor. It was a bit disturbing to find these floating dead fish here and there. They seemed to be all of the same kind. They looked like some sort of shark. Could it be? Is there research on the Cape Cod sharks? They had the eyes, they did not really have the teeth. Maybe this also was some sort of sign. (The Rabbits were.) I will not be moving to Cape Cod anytime soon. It must be the water of the ocean that can make strange people even more strange. Most of those whom I had the chance to meet... I am not sure if I would love to live with any one of them. Oh, and the delicious food I had this morning, nearly killed me throughout the day. It was not a good feeling, as I was driving, somehow blindly, for more than five hours, towards home. Where a pink bottle waited for me... It was great to be able to listen to about ten hours of radio. Yes, radio is the interestingly uncontrollable device with a built in windstorm, and hidden, magical voices. I like the voices that whisper, not shout. Some of the singing voices are okay as well, but the spoken word is the really good stuff. At times. No, this note does not seem to be more personal than anything I would have written on the now seemingly huge PowerBook. I like writing on the tiny screen, on a keyboard that I can easily fit into my pant pocket. I like how simple this software here appears to be. This is word, but it does not involve some hyperactive paper clip, or those nasty underlines, red for wurdz written da rong way... or grammar, when wrong or somehting. then green. Typing on this little device feels so intimate and hidden. It feels as if I could write anything into here and nobody would ever even find out.

I think they are both the same kind of bird. I think they are both Streptopelia decaocto, or the Eurasian Collared-Dove. Yet another bird that was introduced from Europe... The top picture is from Miami, where many of the doves nest free. The photograph below was taken just a few days later, in the basement of the pet shop here on 98th street and Broadway. The dove shared the cage with a very smart and hyper orange Parrot... The dove in the bottom picture clearly has the advantage of having the latest news at her feet, there are no dangerous predators that could kill her, there is an always controlled temperature, a steady supply of just the right kind of food. Paradise? Not quite. There is no internet connection in the basement, so the dove can't blog and the bird is not allowed to vote. Now that would be paradise... now wouldn't it? I wonder who would run for president in that great pet shop with a really beautiful aquarium in its Broadway facing window...

Just walked through the park a little bit. It is a perfect evening for that.I just wandered in, on Columbus Circle and just kept slowing down since. The pain enveloped runners slowly turned into blurs, the bicyclists as well. I wandered by the Sheep’s meadow, and on to the lake. I was slow enough by then to actually see school of fish in the murky water, then the sparrow pretending to be a water bird. And the turtles. They were the colorful alien heads, sticking their nostrils out of the wet green. Taking pictures did not really make sense the batteries are dying anyway, it seems. Then there was the family of raccoons. A mother, perhaps and two little ones, high in the tree above me. Right there in the middle of the park. They slowly crawled down the trunk of the tree, as if it were covered with special raccoon glue, and then the mother dove in first into one of the large ast holes, very high about the street level. Her legs stuck out of the hole for a while and they were folded in a way as if she were a calf about to be born by the tree. Some of the onlookers on the path below wanted to count the animals. Some of them saw three, some saw up to five. It was somehow about the numbers. I just kept walking, until I found this bench here, right outside of the ramble, a very different kind of wild place. I would not really want to be here after dark, but I know that many like to. It is a famous meeting place, and no buildings can be seen from here, and so no windows have a view of what happens here after dark, I will keep moving, I am not very far from home now. Just always wanted to be able to write directly in the park. And it is quite pleasant actually. Once a peaceful place is found, it is possible to write little notes outside. I somehow thought that it could be a bit too distracting, but it works... maybe... maybe I am just in a bubble of an illusion. Maybe the things written here will turn into worthless dust as soon as they enter the context of a website... but maybe that's okay as well. The words here are mere hints, little pointing arrows towards experiences I can not really translate into language anyway... And that is not a bad thing either, I guess... A little woman is playing with her giant dog, right here behind me on he meadow that seems to have a bald spot, right in the middle of it. A couple, holding hands, just walked by, talking about "Karen's dog", and how different he was... and maybe he was not... The lanterns just went on. I should really keep walking now. Just keep walking... The woman and the giant dog are walking into the ramble.

Listen, it took just a few days of working to get me back to a semi stressed mode. Bad. And it has been the deep kind of work, a bit like the moments when there is a leak in the hull of the ship and we can all see the island and the giant shark just crushed the last piece of wood that we gave to him... and maybe it was all but a dream. So I would dive into the little slides I brought with me from the desert and it felt as if a tiny piece of Death Valley were really in them, right there and then it felt a little better... for a brief moment. Good... Other than that... portions of the last few days have not been as glorious as they possibly could be... and I really failed in some areas in which I should never fail. And that's bad. (Nothing work related this time... worse.) And I really wish that tonight I could just take that elevator and just go... but... it is not going to be this easy, you know... oh, how did I get this confused this quickly?...

It is so tempting to perceive many of the trees on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as dead. Their trunks are bare, bleached, stripped of bark, twisted, pushed to the ground. Upon closer inspection, the trees reveal a more complex picture. Between the deep ridges of their bare wood are often drops of fresh golden sap. Their oddly alive branches carry not only needles but what looks like little green fruit. These are very old plants and they are far from the end of their life cycle. Often the longest life is not the one lived most glamorously and in a rushed manner. Sometimes the long life is the one that is filled with slow growth, many seemingly painful adventures, which are however survived... and well, a lot of slowly flowing time. Do we humans appear to these trees a bit as if we were one day flies?... If we would appear at all, we maybe would. Really pesky and loud ones I bet.

"So when did you come to New York?" It was strange to see a man with longer white hair walk on the jogging track around 66th street in Central Park. He was wearing a black suit, he had his glasses on, he was smiling. He looked incredibly familiar. He was somebody I should have recognized immediately, but I did not. It appeared that the joggers who slowed down their pace, so he could talk with them knew exactly who he was. Their body language was subtle but respectful. The man was smiling, asking simple questions... It took me a few minutes. Oh, it was Frank Gehry. I think it was him. And if it was not... then it was a man who reminded me that Central Park is a simple background for people sometimes. Saw Jose Carreras on a bench in the lower part of the park once, and he looked afraid of being recognized. I might have looked wild on this particular day? Kofi Annan was engaged in a very clear conversation with who I think was his wife... Oh, and then there were all the other visitors, who happened to have rather interesting lives. But I do not know their names and I never will... and I do not quite understand why some of the runners in the park push themselves to the point where their body looks very, very tortured... I tend to mix up things...

Oh, just for the record, I managed to travel to some places far beyond death Valley... here are some pictures... hmm... and I guess I will need to explain something about these pictures, but maybe later... ; )

When I stepped out of the car around sunrise on the first morning in Death Valley, there was no sound. It was completely, perfectly quiet. There were no birds, no insects, no people, no cars, no police sirens, even the wind stopped for a few moments... It was so incredibly peacefully quiet. Maybe more so because I was inside of a huge landscape, and so I barely even heard myself breathe... Yes, I am one of the very few people who actually chose to go to Death Valley during the off season. It was magical...