July 2006 Archives

it took a good while to get out of the house yesterday. but then we walked and walked and walked. around 1am i was still walking in my sleep, looking at the clouds in the sky, some resembling faces coming straight from fantastic drawings. kids on the train were taking money away from each other and almost breaking things. a kid was reading watchmen for the first time. as we crossed the overpass, the lantern above us finished its work, letting us see the surroundings in even more spectacular illumination. an animation of a bunny and the promise of friendship from one of the largest corporations out there, somehow did not feel trustworthy in the slightest. mona was playful and smart. she just is.

in a few hours I am going to be somewhere in the belly of a silver plane, heading west again, to los angeles again, for pretty much a week of work. this morning i had decided to just walk to the train despite of the baggage on me, dodging strollers and dog walkers was a bit tougher. and the humidity just really turned the dial up to nasty levels. had breakfast at the grand canyon. the man next to me spilled the milk all over himself and the teenager behind me were planning some shady sleep over ("we will just leave the music on. dad won't hear a thing." ghmm...) she ordered a serving of toast, home fries and bacon. he had vanilla ice cream and bacon. both had cokes. i really like vox. my brain age is 250.

it is not very nice of me to leave posts here as if i were just constantly falling around corners of some tiny room. there is so much beauty around me, I have no words or time to describe any of it. (i guess?) the other night i had a moment when i thought there might be a cavity in my brain, maybe one of those little bubbles we love so much when we discover them in cheese. i was trying to wrestle to the ground the 200gb or so of photographs i have on various hard drives, using aperture, that software for which apple gave me a coupon i lost. and it was then that i realized that i had not a single photograph that was taken in the last few months. i mean that's really a good reason to panic. then i checked the blog and all i found there were just very obscure descriptions of events that never really took place, and especially not with me around. so what had happened? where have all these days gone. wait, weeks... no months?... i then remembered that i had just had a wonderful time with really amazing people around me. and so maybe that's why some of the things just did not need to be translated into pixels or words... and that was somehow good... and i feel much better now. if only somebody could please now close that span sewage pipe that has been pumping trackback spam into my site for the last few days, i would be a pretty happy person. damn them spammers. yeah, that's why all the comments are off on this entry and many many many others.

at this point he picked up what looked like the oddest bottle among the oddest bottles and he carried it home and straight from the freezer he drank a bit of its content, mixed with his favorite pieces of animal sliced so thinly that he could almost see the landscape from which the poor thing was taken to be turned into delicious pieces of m..eat. and all this on a friday. fridays were days for fish, he said. this was no fish by any means. though he had eaten fish for lunch, right next to those odd people who buy factories because they look good on a napkin. the shoemaker was of the very respectful kind this evening. he even asked, in russian, how much the shoes were, which were given to him, never worn, chosen to be protected by some metal pieces positioned just in the right places. (he just wanted to finally end that shoe story thing.) - potchemu, eto charoshye tooflyee? - da, nu da, otchen, otchen haroshye. "what is this game you are playing," somebody asked today. "it is a game about nothing," he replied. "so what is the point?," the other person asked. there was no point to any of this, of course. neither to the game nor to the person playing, nor to the reality the game was so cutely representing. the drink tasted like fresh landfill juice. delicious. he never knew that gin had more poison in it than vodka. a whole 4% more. could this be? and how about those peanuts? and how about that dutch cheese that was almost old enough to know how to read. it is still bright outside. and yet there is a cloud of indifference now very tightly spun around his head. thank god it is. oh, thank God it is indeed.

My brain was the excuse this time. And I also wanted to do something about the 90 minutes spent on subways every day. I needed something to keep me on my toes, be not too large, somehow discrete. And then i got the dog. Soon after that I moved into a little forest with animals. I have not emerged from there yet. It will take some time. Maybe a year or so? Listen, I have some great friends now who want me to gift them some pink furniture and would like me to send them shirts. My dog needs to be walked more than once a day, but we are already winning some good frisbee competitions, so i can't complain. I bought that new nintendo ds lite for that purposely grown up game, called brain age. and it was a really good purchase, i think. it took a few minutes to figure out that my brain had completely forgotten how to add and subtract the simplest of numbers. 1-1= yeah, i suddenly saw myself as a bit of a zero. a computer generated head kept reminding me to come back for more of primitive head beating. my "brain age" went from 56 to 45 to somewhere abound 30... then back to 40 something. and all because i did not pay attention when they were teaching us the value of 7x8 or 6x7... we used to have calculators to do the bean counting for us. now a toy is making fun of me because i used it's grandpa. nintendogs feels rather perfect for someone like me. i do not want to have a dog, no matter how close to the park i live. i sometimes go on shoots and am then gone for weeks. i sometimes work for 14 hours, and then there are the 45 minutes on the subway. having an animal in my apartment would be just completely inhumane. a golden retriever in my pocket is a different story. goldie, my golden retriever is a pretty smart "forever-puppy." she knows how to sit, roll over, fetch a frisbee, be it blue or green. i do have to feed her regularly and i need to click on that pixelated fecal matter she leaves behind, but she recognizes my voice, and is happy even when i come to visit her for a few minutes a day. the real knockout of a game happens to be that bizarre animal crossing wild world. i do not even want to know how many hours i have now spent talking to cats and ducks and a semi intelligent squirrel. a fox just sold me a fake painting a few hours ago and i am mad at him. what is wrong with me? was i bitten too many times by those buzzing pixels called bees? or was one of the fish i pulled out of the virtual river too poisonous after all? amy and i have been visiting each other's villages several times now (nintendo offers a free wi-fi game option. free means no monthly subscription fee or anything like that. not kidding.). she brought some pears from her world, i gave home some peaches from mine. (each world has its unique natural vegetation.) i planted her pears, so i can sell what will grow on the trees for a better profit at the store run by a racoon. i have a mortgage on my little virtual house. i need to pay it off rather soon. (My brain-age just went down to 9.) this is all completely insane. how can a little video game that fits nicely in a pocket, and the actual game, not much bigger than a postal stamp, create such a rich experience that managed to shorten my subway rides to almost nothing? after a few hours in animal crossing (my city is called happysan) my reaction was to buy nintendo (NTDOY) stock. i have not played video games properly for maybe... 9 years or so? and here i am again, in a happy interactive place... and really enjoying it. A lot. Wow. i now can't wait for the release of nintendo wii. i will have to buy a tv set to play it. insanity. amazing. great. i am impressed. unexpectedly. big time. excuse me. i need to write some letters to my animal friends.