Recently in just thinking Category

I love images. I love them more than numbers and words and often more than sounds. Sometimes more than smells. Though that's not really fair. Smells hit the deepest. They hit places that only a few can translate anyway.

Images. The visible ones. The ones in color and the ones with only shades of grey. The ones that gently move and the ones that move violently. Or not at all.
The ones that are visible and recorded and created, organized, shared, seen by more than one person. And the ones that were never properly recorded, were not fully created, never shared, completely unorganized, visible only with eyes closed, yet pretty spectacular. Or barely tangible and so subtle, so subtle.

The image of a hand touching the waves of the ocean. The tips of trees on an island, with little animals jumping in them. My father falling of a box.
A large bubble floating away from me, violent storms on its surface making fun of my reflection.
Plop.

And so many images I do not even dare to translate into words. One of the reasons why I have been barely writing anything here, despite of having experienced so much in the last few years, is the inadequacy of my language. Any language though.
How do I describe some very indescribable things?
When? Why?

Or maybe all I can do is write down single doorways into thoughts. And they will then lead into places that will unfold into secret gardens?
But why would I? Why here?

Language is so incredibly important. If it were not, it would not be used by most of us. But it is also a linear, historic, thing, drenched in opinion and experiences of an entire group of people. Writing in English even is already such a...
I don't think there is a word for that.

Images. I love images. They are as fragile and imperfect, and incredible and so...
there is no word for that.

I do not like when what I write is so playful without being concrete enough.
What I have just written feels like an indoor cloud, with just tiny specs of man made dust in it. The shape of a hand is there, an island, a little box, the numbers 13 and 14?
Tea. Water.
To write better I need to write more.
Maybe that's the secret.
Many words.
Again.

Perhaps that's the way to go.
The path to take.
The slope.

Or better some completely off road everything.
Language that invents itself as it goes.

Might be better.
There is no way to know.

Szerokiej drogi, jezyku.

the little leaves on one of the plants turned a green so pale that i am not even sure the poor thing is still alive.
what is it like to die as a plant? do the dreams of growth just evaporate? does the skin stop to itch? what kind of senses do plants have anyway?
the little ones. the gigantic trees.
they do have intelligence. don't they?

the fog was beautiful this morning. trillions of little water droplets between here and the horizon. some suspended. all moving.
the same water that has been around for billions of years.
so good to see it in ever new constellations.

i stepped outside and looked at the roof of the next building. the raccoons living in the garbage shaft had assembled a stone garden on the silver surface.
near the emergency ladder a small bottle made it look as if at least one of the animals were a drinker. perhaps it was. i would not be surprised.
the little guys behaved rather humanly when out and about early in the morning and late in the evening.
they probably still did that. except that the days were much shorter now. so the actions were less obvious.
tracks in the snow were actually proof that the raccoons still lived in the building not so long ago.

i am slowly moving books and notes and layers of information from one room to some other room. wish i were able to let go of things easier.
maybe if i knew that they could help someone?
not sure how this is best done.

here is it. the end of the year. it is in sight. just a few more days. snow. rain. sunshine.
not sure the little plant will make it.
eventually i will probably end up with many jade plants. each slightly different, even though they are actually just taken from the same donor.
and that plant was likely taken from some other.
i hope tomorrow will be incredibly foggy.
there is a certain pleasure in being able to stand outside in the cold and to know that the inside is warm and calm and allows to have a thought.
as simple as that thought might be.

when i stepped into the snow, it was warmer than i had expected. it melted under my bare feet, but it was not cold. it was the warm snow. and i was in the middle of the park, in the middle of a gigantic meadow inside of a park. it was surprising at first, but then i looked behind me and there we no tracks.
no tracks of me arriving here?
no sign of me entering this wild meadow covered with the fresh white powder?
i was clearly dreaming.
we arrive in our dreams as if there were no before and no after.
and so i walked towards the trees i saw on the other side of the meadow.
it did not matter why i was here.
i was here.
this was the perfect day.
a very short perfect day.
winter.
warm snow.
a meadow.
a soft snow rabbit walked up to me.
it was completely white. and it was not scared.
the rabbit spoke. and that was not surprising either.
and yet it said things that i did not really understand.
but i understood the rabbit. i guess it is possible to understand a rabbit. a speaking one and a non speaking one. it just happens in slightly different ways.
we walked towards the trees.
now i had a guide. a little soft furred guide had chosen me somehow.
a soft and friendly guide.
i guess i was incredibly lucky?
the rabbit was leaving no tracks at all.
at least the snow seemed to be melting under my feet.
the shapes i was leaving behind were slightly unusual actually.
wait a second. now i was leaving melted tracks?
some of the tracks of my feet looked as if they had been created by objects.
others appeared to have been left behind by a variety of animals.
there was a melted shape of a chair. then a rooster foot. here a large house?
so odd. so inexplicable.
yet perfectly logical. i was in a dream, wasn't I.

the rabbit had been speaking with me the entire walk so far. and i understood the ideas, but i did not understand the words.
suddenly the words became very clear.
"by the time we will reach the forest, you will know exactly why i say the things i say. but you will have lost the ability to understand the person you were when you left those oddly shaped tracks.
what are they anyway?"

the shapes of the tracks were truly odd. and some of them had now turned into little patches of vegetation. it was a bit as if the seasons had moved on in those seemingly random shapes of melted snow. some flowers grew in the chair. some branches of succulent plants extended into the sky from a perfectly round shape.
some of the tracks had turned in to little puddles of water?
two, in the far distance, appeared to be star shaped tar pits. sad.
"i do not understand you", said the rabbit. and then continued in a language i really was not able to decipher.

we continued for a little while.

the forest that seemed so close appeared to be moving away from us, just gently.
i knew that if we just continued for a little longer, we could reach the trees and then that miracle of some magical comprehension could actually happen.
but the rabbit was very restless.
i could see it from the way it was hopping around in the snow.

i turned around and just stood there.
it must have looked as if i were admiring the tracks i had somehow left behind.
some were now turning into little fires. others were sounding with birds. others yet appeared to be just blurry and undefined.

and this is when i woke up for a very brief moment.
just brief enough to lose my understanding of the logic of the meadow and the rabbit and the tracks.

the sun in the seemingly real world had not yet decided to rise.

i tried to return to the meadow.
but it would probably take another few days and nights for me to be able to actually get there.
i hoped very much to find myself in the same place, of course.
and would the rabbit even still be there?
who knows, i could suddenly have to deal with some wild boar trying to kill me.

but dreams never work in any predictable way.
the only way i can somehow make sure that the next visit to the meadow will not be a complete disaster, is to imagine the best things that happened there, on that brief walk that appeared out of nowhere, and just disappeared in a completely unexpected way.
oh yes. the warm snow. the odd tracks.
the rabbit. the soft and wise rabbit.
the slowly moving forest.
let's see. this should be a place that could probably welcome me again.
and i hope it will be snowing?
i do not know. i do not know.

we are here. and in the larger context of things we are invisible.
yes, we might have language and pictures and lives. but in the larger context of things we are invisible. the brother is invisible. and so are the parents. the children will be invisible too.
the only thing that will maybe survive is the idea of our existence. the idea that something like us existed at some point. one in 7 billion. more than ever.
i think 80 percent of the people who have ever lived on earth are alive today.
and we are some of them. tiny creatures that eat and sleep and drink and think.
now we are better connected then ever before.
but it does not rally matter.
in the larger context of thing all we can do is try to be good to each other.
because soon we will be simply gone.
in the larger context of things, of course.
in the tiny context of things, it is very important to pay attention to every little detail.
i like your new nails. but did you make your hair wavy? not sure this is the best. i like the larger curls much more.
oh, the universe. the universe is a tiny sphere.
we are here. we are here in some sort of context of things.

the shadows on the wall just appeared and then disappeared again. the wall is now more about the cracks and the uneven spots. it is not a screen for thin stripes of shadow and light.

i would like to write something about the architecture of the chinese house. but all that comes to mind are my limitations in understanding. it might also take a bit more time for me to really understand things. it is dangerous to write without understanding?
but perhaps language itself is so imprecise that even the most understanding writer can easily be misunderstood. or misinterpreted.
language is alive. and language is ever evolving. words that sound harmless today, could be potentially deadly tomorrow. words that look friendly today, could potentially be dirty little animals tomorrow... and words that seem harmless to me, could appear without intelligence to those looking for my weaknesses.
and we should probably not fool ourselves that solid objects do not change with us and our intentions and understanding. even objects and houses and cities and countries are in some way connected to the way we want to see them. and the way we see things changes. it should change, i hope, it should probably change all the time?
some of the changes are very subtle. and sometimes the changes are massive.

it will take a really long time for me to understand the chinese house. it will take a long time to understand not the theory of it, but the reality, the true emotional meaning of it. and by the time i will understand it, it will probably be late in my life. i will finally know what it means, but that meaning will probably be a story i will watch disappear?
i do not know, i do not know.

the first time i arrived in china was for just two or three days. and i only saw and smelled the things i knew. everything was drenched in preconceptions. i had expected things i did not really like. and all i found were things i did not really like very much.
and most of the things felt somehow familiar. it was as if i had stepped through a magical door and had arrived at a place that was supposed to be foreign. but it was assembled out of things that i had felt before. and the more i opened myself to them, the more the familiar and the known, replaced the prejudice and the rational barriers.

slowly, visit after visit i was able to unfold my personal understanding of the place. and the wonderful thing was that i knew that it was incredibly important for me to do so. and the more i was able to unfold a china in myself, the more interesting things became.
i now might be at a point where i do not understand anything again. but i know that i need to give it all some time. i need to wait and patiently, wait for the next gate to open. and it will open. and i will probably forget what it was like before it opened itself.

almost like a child that can not stop recognizing words, once it has managed to learn the symbols that are letters. it is almost impossible to remember the world that was filled with unrecognizable objects. suddenly everything speaks. and it speaks not with an external voice. it speaks form the inside.
i guess as a child one does not understand that this is a path of no return (unless some tragedy strikes, of course.) but as an adult, i understand that the more i learn, the more i will forget how little i knew just a few days before. i will discover new layers of ignorance. i will discover new layers of non-knowledge. there will be new gaps. new missing pieces.
and the journey progresses.

i now barely remember what it was like to see the chinese house for the first time. i now barely remember what it was like to see the idea of the hutong. but i obviously know that i have not seen anything yet. i think the only time i have been to a proper court house was on my most recent visit to beijing.
we drank tea. and it was in a house of a perfect size.
it felt perfect to me.
but there are so many reasons why something can feel perfect.

the shadows on the wall are not coming back until tomorrow. near the corner of the room two little dots of light are the indication that the sun is out and moving across the sky.
i know so little. and i know that i know so little. and that's one of the biggest joys of life, i guess? i know that i am just barely beginning to see a surface.
it is a surface that has been scratched and it has been bruised by others.
so much to learn. so much to learn.
what is the name of shadows that are actually bright projections of light?

Dear timezone,
you have to please let go of me now. I have moved on. I have moved on to a different season even.

I know we used to be like one, knowing each other without words, I used to wake up in you, no alarm needed, no warning.

You would watch me brush my teeth and eat my meals. I would shower for just the right amount of time, so I could stay in synch with you.
And we would go through the day together: The slowness of the morning, the focus of the pre-noon, the rush, the journey, the calmness of the finished day.
The glass of wine that helped us fall asleep.

This was great,
but now it is over,
please,
let go of me, let go of my internal clock.

It was even funny at first, how I would go to sleep in the winter of São Paulo, but then somehow magically emerge seemingly in the monsoon season of Mumbai.
But obviously not. Ha, ha.

Funny.

But funny
no more.

I can hear the wintry city outside slowly find its cosy blanket,
and here I am ready to jump into the steamy chaos of the day.

I am trying to make things work, and make things meet, but after only three hours of sleep, I am officially confused and barely able to describe a simple thought.

What was that?

It's time we move on. Really.
You have billions of internal clocks to worry about.
Let go of this little one inside of me.

I will try to sleep. Again.
Perhaps it is going to work out this time.

The ringing phone across the street is hopefully not you.
And stop making that skateboarder slide down the hill on the wrong side of the deck.
The cars. Let go. Let go.

Let.

Go.

It is obvious, so clear that our relationship is bound to find an ending.
We will be fine. All will be normal. We will go our separate, usual ways.

And I will be begging for you to take me back in September.

"hope you are writing this down. even if just for yourself."

i recently walked down a street in london and the shutter speed of the camera was set to 1/500 of a second. i thought that i could somehow sneak by a few minutes by letting the little machine have a very brief look at the world, all together not even adding up to a single second, and yet sliced in space in a way that could recreate a book blown away by a gust of wind if printed out and thrown back. into thin or thick air. air.

when i sit in a taxi and it speeds under a bridge that carries a train filled with standing people, in that very moment, going from one side of a country to the other. when we meet for that one tiny fraction of a blink. was it worth it? was it worth preparing for this one moment for our entire lives. and what if all these moments were familiar. like the face of a friend in a street somewhere in a place seemingly visited for the first time?

what if there were the anticipation towards that moment of passing. people in objects, moving in very different directions, at different speeds. lucky enough to meet. to overlap almost, if only seen from a distance great enough.

"see you next time" i have abandoned the idea of leaving any memory completely. a shadow of it will eventually find me and turn a gap between words into a trap, or a garden i did not anticipate.

or maybe both. maybe gardens are traps. and traps are made to be teachers or kind friends who allow to pull the world into a bitter, or sweet taste at the top of one's mouth.

the most lovely part of getting lost in the back streets of guangzhou was that my palate was remembering the stones of the houses. breathing in was more enjoyable than i could have anticipated just moments earlier.

like objects enclosed in objects, moving at various speeds into directions that are set by the gravity pulling on other objects. a never ending restless dance of little particles on a ball of spinning dust. there it goes.

i will try to sleep for an hour. the recording of a brass bell will remind me to wake up and walk into my evening that will look like bright day to a place i like to call home.

sleepy. perhaps that's the way to describe the split second that will follow.
my eyes are shaking.
because that's the only way they can see.

after three weeks away from home, i am spread around the globe like fly on a windshield, except i am alive and will now reassemble myself slowly, before i jump off again.
first there was a week in beijing. and i have learned so much there about myself and life that i will need to think about it for a while, and maybe a while long enough to outlast me.
that is very possible.
the thinking i was pulled into on this trip to china was so fundamental and so deeply set in human existence that it is not something i can just simply put in words or write about as if it were just another occurrence.
not that i would write about any other occurrence here.
then the two following weeks were spent in germany, in some places familiar and in some places much less familiar. and the airline lost my baggage for about 10 days, so there was a very vulnerable quality to most of the time spent in bavaria and swabia.
i felt lost at times, even though i should not have.
and felt cornered, and angry. for no reason visible to the outside world.
so in a way this was also a very transformational experience, but maybe this time one i do not really understand enough to even interpret properly.

it is almost midnight on the first day of the first month of 2011. and i am awake as if it were around noon of the second of january. and my suitcases are still packed. i have not even looked at the pictures again that i took in the last three weeks. there is a hum in my head and my dreams seem to be straight out of inception's abandoned scripts.

it is incredible how i manage to throw myself into this similar state almost every year. it is not that i am placing any resolutions in front of myself. it is that giant shifts somehow happen around now. and it could just me that this might be the only time left for me to actually stop for more than a day or two and to look at my feet and the ground and the ground beneath the ground and to look at the sky beyond that.
maybe. perhaps this is the only time left when i can become a set of ripples in a pond.

and all of this will probably sound ridiculous to anyone outside. and it will probably all sound ridiculous to me in a few days from now.
but it will probably not make it less valid at this current moment in time.

The boxer looked at me suspiciously as I was on my way back to the seat behind his.
I felt a bit as if he were just about attack me. But I guess that's jst the way he looks at people sometimes. It was a bit as if his eyes were capable to generate a rede dot of light. The last warning before a bullet follows.

The three men who are with him, pudgy, loud and happy drinkers certainly do not have that sniperish spark. Or at least not today.

I met several flaneurs in Garmisch-Partenkirchen yesterday. Maybe they were far enough out of their element to be called something else. I met them for seconds at a time.

A woman walking down the path towards Partenkirchen gave me directions to a place she never had the opportunity to visit. A place called Schöne Aussicht simply had to have a good view. Or at least at some point in the conscious past.
I am now not completely sure if I actually ever managed to arrived at the Schöne Aussicht, or if i managed to walk beyond it without actually recognizing it.
The views were beautiful. All along. I might have passed the one recommended, of course.

Then there was the elderly couple who liked that I was using my umbrella to protect myself from the afternoon sun. Their dog Baloo could not know that it had the same name as the most recent friend of my parents. The one whom they had to bury in their neighbor's garden, after the poor thing was not strong enough to lift his leg. Or any leg. A smart little buddy of a border collie reduced to a shitting carpet. Blind. And yet happy.
The dog running around the Alm somewhere above Partenkirchen was still oblivious of his destination. It was a golden retriever. A dog not completely aware of the jobs available in this mountain environment. It even ran away for a little while.
That's how I knew his name.

Soon after I met two horses under the shadow of the tree. With them, hundreds of flies eating on them. The Horses' eyes were almost completely closed. They looked very tired with their bodies standing close to each other and in a way that would allow them to kick anybody with the audacity to get too close to the tree, the flies, them.

Ten cows, and their ten sucking calves walked up the hill not far away from any shadow. They had come to drink in a place prepared just for that occasion. The mothers were able to have the water. The little ones were hungry, and allowed to have the milk.
All played their part in the symphony of bells. Small and large.
The mountainside. Suddenly beyond romantic. The sounds. The sounds.

Down the road, beyond the gate made for cows and people, I encountered the snake. A snake I almost stepped on. It looked too big and its colors were too interesting for it to be harmless. And its neck had turned itself into an S. It was ready to bite me, or at least launch its head after me. Clearly.
We both stared at each other in a calm or perhaps even focussed way. Or at least that was my interpretation of it.
We just stood there for a while. Well, I stood there for a while. The snake obviously did not.
I wondered if it was my now stupid black umbrella that worried the animal so much. I imagined that I must have looked like a large bird? I could imagine how the snake did not want to die exactly here an now. I moved away slowly. And so did the snake.

Then there was the girl on the meadow. This one was dressed. She was unlike the one who lay there naked next to the train tracks a few miles out of Garmisch.
Staring at the passing by trains.
The dressed one on the meadow here had her head turned away. Privacy can somehow achieved by just not looking. It is true for the New York subway. And apparently also for the meadow just outside of Garmisch-Partenkirchen

Further down the street, a little girl on the monocycle pedaled by me. "this looks incredibly difficult" I said. "it is incredibly easy. You just need to practice." she answered,
as she sped down the hill and between the painted houses.

The saddest encounters were not even with the living. At the St. Anton church, nailed to its walls, a cemetery of memories. Men and women who left the place for a war, never to return.
Their photos looked like those of friends.
Some of them looked the way I used to look when I was their age, 18, 20, 21, 30, 35. One was exactly my current age when he died.
Some were not even allowed to have died. They were just "lost". They were not even given the privilege to become actual bodies in an actual grave. No closure permitted for those left behind.

One board had been carved for two twin brothers and their older, third.
It was tragic enough that all three brothers did not return to their home here. But what seemed to make matters worse, was that one of the twins apparently managed to survive the war. He died in 1948 when finally allowed to go back home from siberia. Or at least I hope he was allowed to go home. I am not sure why in exactly this moment I remembered the two fly covered horses under the tree.
Did he die knowing of what had happened to his brothers?
Was he hopeful and looking forward to returning here? To the very spot I was standing on?
Most of the men seemed to have died in February; in Russia.
I felt privileged to be able to encounter a summer in the beautiful town they were forced to leave to die. And I was aware that there were many other photographs somewhere out there, tragically connected to these. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers in other villages somewhere far away. Connected to the same horrible events. Their family killed or "lost".

A man barely able to utter a sentence had sent me on the walk, actually.
He was a man in his twenties maybe? His eyes hidden somewhere in the depths of their sockets and stumbling words seemingly barely able to find their way out of his mouth.
He seemed to be a head taller than me, his arms somehow uncontrolled and randomly helpful and almost dangerous.
He approached me in the little chapel where I happened to be taking a picture of the "holy water to go" in a corner. It was a relatively large jar.
I refilled my bottle with holy water from the plastic barrel nearby. When I was taking the picture, the need to frame it correctly must have made me look pious. I was a person kneeling in the corner of a tiny church. Not even in any center of it.

The man was very helpful.

He sent me in the direction of the pictures, the snake, the girl on the monocycle, the cows, the horses and even the beautiful view of Zugspitze.

The train rides from and back to Munich were pleasant. Out of habit I had purchased first class tickets. And so I ended up being the only person in a car attached to an otherwise crowded train.
I paid for the solitude.
And the lack of conversation.
But perhaps also for the luxury of reflection.

I hope the boxer from flight LH410 will win his fight. The three pudgy men will undoubtedly be very happy when it happens. They will probably take the plane back to Munich with more joy then. And they will drink more and they will take more pictures of their boxer.
And he looked quite good with a yet unbroken nose.

it took hours to chew through just one thought today. and it was not even a very big one.
in the end the question won and i somehow stood at the beginning of the circle again.
circles do not have beginnings, of course. and so i was nowhere.
just like that.

i was a drawing today. for hours at a time. and that was a nice thing to be. just a drawing. or at least elements of a drawing. a cropped collection of lines. gathered over hours. now available worldwide, instantly, in bad resolution.
no real winners here.
i should make some new drawings.
stop holding up the same old ones.
as if i had passed away a few years ago.
that's just not right.

i will need to prepare the studio for drawing. right now it has an altar for the religion of the web. and mass is whenever there might be some update somewhere. how very sad is that.
instead of transforming the world into something very personal, i often look at the world as it falls apart into tiny little squares of light. a very temporary skin.
the inside covers of a gigantic book shop. or book show.
and it knows where and when and who and yet it really does not.

drawing will be better.
even if i do have to start at 0.5
somewhere, at the desk behind me now.
as i am again at the altar of the web.

why is that? it really does not need me.

This last visit to Germany really took away some years from the end of my life. And it was not the food, because that was rather good. And it was not the places where I stayed, as I seemed to get upgraded in every hotel now. And not even the travel. All modes of transportation were about as good as I could have hoped for.
No, it was the psychological underpinnings of it. And maybe the weather too.
I have been ground down to a little core of a grain at this point. And the nerves are blank now. And I overreact to the world inside and outside of me.
My biggest piece of good luck is probably to be surrounded by brilliant people. Or what might be the bigger piece of good luck even is that the brilliant people are on my side of the equation.

But that last trip managed to bargain out quite a price for what will some day be seen as "experience". Or maybe the memory is just freshest at this point. That's probably what it really is.

And now, before 4 am on a Monday. I should probably not be typing on the glass surface of a little device that really wants to grab more and more of my attention.
The moon is rising as a thin orange sliver over the outline of the King's county hospital. And I should be sleeping. Too much is too much. Sometimes it really is.

my office at home currently smells like the end of a catholic mass (i was cleaning the place and came across some old german incense. no priests were harmed.)
the books on my shelves are no better organized than when the "vacation" began a few weeks ago, last decade. and the snowflakes outside look a little bit like razor wire. so maybe leaving the house would be a very bad idea now.
especially since the sun is setting and the music streaming from the living room is quite pleasant, actually.
my 2010 horoscope on one of the polish newspaper websites i tend to visit predicted a year of confusion and something probably best described as doom.
glad it was not a chinese fortune teller telling me that i should not fly this year. that has already happened. and there is a nice book about a similar experience, about 17 years ago.

i should probably have another bowl of tea. is it good to drink tea until the mouth goes numb and my insides turn that freshly plucked, ground, bright green?

there are many more questions now than there were just a few days ago. and they are hard and challenging and actually pretty good. and they are the kind i could never dream of answering myself. the best kind.

hmm... another bowl of tea?

this is not a book with empty pages.

managed to not say a word to the guy sitting next to me on the plane. even though we appeared to be the same age, we seemed to read the same magazines, and even ordered the same food.
well, i watched "wickie der wikinger" right after "kojak" while he held his iphone close enough to his face to leave smear marks on the screen. with his eyelashes. it was some art movie. mostly blue pictures of people doing something.
it was not my seat anyway. i was supposed to sit two rows back, in a seat i had booked months in advance. but there was this father who wanted to sit next to his sons.
"i speak three languages" said one of the boys, maybe 8, instead of a hello, when i was exchanging my opened blanket for the one that had not been used yet.
"oh that's nice, what are the languages?" " i speak english, german, and french."
"das ist ja sehr schön, dann haben wir zwei sprachen gemeinsam" "ja"
i was a bit upset that we did not have three languages in common. today.
perhaps the boy will end up learning polish at some point in his life, or perhaps i will finally be forced to learn french.
that charles V quote i recently read somewhere made me smile... I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
he should have probably mixed it up now and then. and would he have used other languages had he not suffered from the habsburg jaw?

we are back in new york. the snow flurries are turning the palette of the brooklyn i can see out of the window now into something that one would probably use a pencil to describe, perhaps some dirtied sienna? a true lead pencil?
it appears to be cold enough for the flakes to actually bounce of each other as they land. they do not feel they should be come one cover of snow yet. right now they want to be new year flakes.

we travelled a bit too quickly in the last few weeks. it is so tempting to just jump on a train to go to a place that is so close and yet so different than the current location. köln is now about an hour away from frankfurt? really? that's pretty much the length of my daily commute today.

what is it like to express anything in more than 140 characters? how many facebook friends does it take to make one who will actually save one's life when it is threatened? not just like or comment on one's fall. or just retweet it.

jetlag can be a beautiful thing. and now i am even 5 minutes early.

last week was punctured with moments that had a certain density to them, when i had to rush against time, against the stream, against the sun. and circles of rocks fell apart into piles that did not look like anything assembled by human hand. and things had to be brought together again, one word at a time, even the spaces carrying a certain weight. heaviness. meaning.

writing is a pleasant stream when it is free and when it can just develop at its own pace. but when it needs to be very precise and when the message is fragile and already expected to be flawed, then writing is painful and imperfect.
there is no way to say two things at once, there is no way to say precisely the exact thing meant and to hope that at the other end the recipient is going to understand things exactly the way they were... they were what... intended? there? true?
language is just a rough tool to work with at times. it makes possible to summon the entire world as we know it with just a simple set of letters arranged on a string, but on the other hand it can only play with the rules it is given, and it is a linear medium, one that has to rely on the attention and the memory of the writer and the reader too.
sorry for pointing out all the obvious stuff.

spoken language is richer at least. the tone of voice, the smell of the air, the light, a conversation in a shared space has a much richer meaning than a castrated, declawed email. or even a phone call. when language in spoken in a context that expects it to be a certain way, then it is a herculean task to pull back the planks bent into certain shapes, to open the blinds to somehow harmonize the angle of light coming into the conversation.
tough. tough. and also without a net. no preparation. just there. immediately there.

the cat smelled my elbow for a moment, then looked at me an a very concerned way. she fell asleep on my chest for about two hours. she forced me to allow her to heal me at least a little bit.
hope it all works out.

trying to calmly look at myself as if i were a spirit watching my body age at a pace that is very clear. today is a good day.
and there is a big difference between alone and lonely.

The little tree that I had decided to bring over from the Park Slope apartment a few years ago is now beginning to turn gently yellow again. I had removed all leaves from it somewhere in the middle of the season, so it was allowed to age an extra year in 2009. The colors might turn out more vibrant now that it realizes that it is indeed truly going to be fall.
A different tree right next to it, took maybe 9 months to recover from being transplanted into the new and actually smaller pot. I had almost given up on the little guy, and just as a test scratched on the thin bark a few weeks ago. Underneath the color was green. Life. And soon after the leaves came out after all. Spring in July. The fall is recognized here too. The colors are shifting. The tree is getting ready for colder months.

I seem to have more journeys in the next two months than I could have ever expected. There is going to be some traveling to places in the US. Perhaps Kansas, though I am not sure if I will be able to go. Then probably some places on the west coast. Maybe some places on the east coast. Maybe a few more places somewhere closer to the middle of the country.
And then, shortly after columbus day, we will take off and finally go to Japan. It is a bit as if I had been preparing for the trip for decades. And now I feel incredibly not ready. There are such huge gaps in what I would like to know before I go, I am not sure I will be able to bridge them. But I guess the most important thing is to be open and to discover, not to be completely prepared and disappoint one's never truly complete expectations.

One of the challenges is going to be to actually go to Japan and to be there. I have taught myself to work on my trips. And often there is the sense of the presence in one place being the important preparation for some other place.
Very much like what I just mentioned actually.

And then there is the urge to report, and to record. What kind of camera should I bring? What kind of camera should I maybe buy? And what will I write?
Am I going to post our status here, or on Facebook, or Twitter?
"Currently relaxing, far away from it all."... What a lie. Pathetic really.
I wonder how many moments will be truly actually experienced as those that will actually really happen then and there.
And perhaps such a thing does not exist?
Perhaps this very moment was lost to this very reflection here.
What could I have been doing right now?
And what are you doing here?

I guess a new season is coming and it will be followed by the next, then by the next. Other rhythms will define the angle at which we look into the light of the sun.
Pretty much like the little trees I happen to keep as pets out on the balcony.

I need to leave the house today, I guess. Maybe not.

Not completely sure what time zone I am in right now, or even what precisely a time zone could mean to me being here. There are several motors running in the apartment. The refrigerator is compressing something, the air conditioner is pushing cool air into the room and the little spinners in tivo and friends are busy remembering television broadcasts I will probably not remember once I see them.

Some of my sentences have turned from linear strings to circles, rings, some even bubbles. The visual world is gathering like the road at the end of a blur tunnel when in the left lane at high speeds.

I will need to slow down for at least a few hours this morning. The apartment is littered by objects a busier me has left behind for the me who has a bit more time.
This has happened so often that the busier me actually assumed that time can be just stolen from the less busy me.

And now I am not even sure where to start here.
It is odd how I have to somehow defenestrate myself into calmness.
At least for a few hours I have to.
Let's see if it works.

Walked around the castle this morning. There is a field in the back, waiting for its yellow color. the trees are currently covered with multiple layers of moss. birds are moving in slowly into the many homes prepared for them. what sounds like a joyful song could potentially be an angry territorial argument.
it is still cold here, but the water around the castle is molten now and school of huge carp wait for their feeding, or maybe for the mosquito larvae which could also make a delicious snack.
my room is like a snail house made out of oak planks and granite. so wonderfully quiet, calm, a very fine filter for concerns. perhaps the very tiny ones make it through. no big ones allowed.
calmness. or slowness, as suggested by the Hamish Fulton piece in the lobby.
there is a small one in my room as well. each room has a special one. there are 65 of them.
also sat down in the old chapel of the castle. a Lawrence Weiner piece reminds about stone plus stone & stone and stone.
stone and wood.
we are just like water around them.
calm now.

going back for a short visit to munich now.

No purchase necessary. Free trial with a $10 purchase. Easy to use. Play now, get cash back, no payments until march 2009. Just 0.666 APR...

Where did I read that toy stores were not places where parents should look for toys for their children? Toy stores were for those busy uncles and aunts visiting from abroad. Those who did not really know the child, or culture, who needed to make a quick, age appropriate homerun. ("Say thank you to uncle Shlomo for the golden bongo."... ..."thank you uncle BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM")

Toys given by parents should be the beginnings of stories, not the final word of such.
Do you remember the packaging of your very favorite toy? (I don't.)
Do you remember the packaging of your most useless toy?... The one that was the biggest disappointment when pulled out of its promising box?

What happens in a time and place where biological parents technically become the aunts and uncles, the rare visitors who only come home for the highlights? How many tv commercials show parents observing their children from a safe distance, while the superbly focused kids interact with some sort of device that perfectly replaces true human interaction?
Sometimes a pet is present: a drugged kitten, a loving puppy or a fascinated, cheerful, freshly changed sibling.
Children themselves are often seen as something that comes pre-packaged with pre recorded messages that just need to be activated and many well accessorized fun activities, and a whole bunch of matching clothes to buy for.
And God forbid that perfect kid turns out too active, too tired, too heavy, too fast, too slow, too different... too something that was not covered on the back of the box or in the manual...
oh, wait... things can indeed be adjusted these days... most conditions are the result of a chemical imbalance of the ingrediens anyway...
try me... press my heart, gimme that, feed me that. Or as a one 5 year old hyperactive boy recently put it while pretending to hit me with the hand that did not hold a starbucks hot chocolate: "I did not take my pills today!, I did not take my pills today!, I did not take my pills today!!!" (What appeared to be his grandmother was a neighbor who only borrowed him for a day, to overcome her own depression after the death of her husband 13 months ago, as she told me... and so the story continues.)

The weather was perfect. The conditions never changed. There was never any wind or rain or anything like that. The days were the same length. Always. The nights were quiet and peaceful. No danger, no danger at all. no predators, not even a food chain. Perfection, long life. State of the art conditions. Steady, predictable, just right.
Nothing one could ever complain about.
What else?... Not sure. What else was there?
Maybe something behind that shimmering wall?... nah, that was a dark and dangerous place.

The window of attention became smaller and smaller in the last few days. It was a few minutes at first, this turned into a minute, 40 seconds, 10, 9, 3 what was I writing about?
So odd, I could not keep up my curiosity levels either. and then the ability to...
what happened next was the appetite.
Were we ever able to draw?
How come the desk is so messy?
A rhythm keeps hammering into my skull and it is not a good one. It might be one that is produced my my own body, but was it requested? Shall we ask again in a few minutes?
Will this entry go to draft? Will I ever publish it? Maybe not... should not. Wait a second...
It was after a longer walk that I came across the sumatran rhinos. The taxidermist arranged the young rhino to look at the yellow note describing the species. This should teach the stuffed baby a lesson, shouldn't it? Maybe if the stuffed skin with the plastic eyes were made to stare at the yellow note long enough, for let's say 200 years or so, it would learn how finite a species can be... as long as it is not human...
now that was not quite the idea, I guess...
The window of attention became smaller and smaller. For some reason it became very difficult for me to hold a single and clear thought.
It must be the lack of sleep.
I think my body is about to crash... let's see what happens next...
Not much will happen to the baby rhino... enough has happened to the baby rhino... not much should happen anymore. How many animal artifacts are in that building anyway?
And who shaved the Sumartan Rhino? (See also here...)

we sat down for lunch in a place where the picture on the wall was a photograph of a city with many bicycles. somewhere in the sky area, right over that motorola-wings advertising on one of the shops, was a dead fly. it must have been trapped between the glass and the picture for a while until somebody just smashed it. now it was there forever, looking pretty much like a fighter jet with an exploding cockpit. a horrible thought either way.
all the bicycle riders seemed to stare at the explosion in the sky.
though they never met, in any way, well they did, now, somehow...
the question over lunch was if it is a better idea to turn oneself into a bright and fragrant flower, one that could be known among bees for the right reasons and among dung bugs for all the wrong reasons, or if one should just take things down the more winding path and just work towards becoming a tree.
I was definitely for tree... I was not very discouraged by the bright and attractive flowers around me. May they have petals the size of dinner plates and be as fragrant as chanel #5... I was not worried...
And so the lunch was not a bad lunch at all.
On the way back to the office, I picked up three seeds from the street. A truck must have crushed their protective hull and they would certainly not turn into anything major on that concrete corner of 50th and 8th.
They are still in my pocket. I will push them into the soil later this week. It will take them months to turn into those brilliant little guys... I think they will be fun. Their mother tree looked like one that still remembered when the neighborhood was packed with gangs. west side story...
i wonder if that fly, in that picture, planned to become something. and i know we all agree that it did not. but who says we ever actually do? Staring out into our three second attention windows... (They were three seconds weren't they?)

We all know this is going to be a great one...
don't we?

the walls should be orange, maybe just one of them, maybe the floor, parts of it, the ceiling, a light? How about orange sheets, could the curtains be orange, stained glass? The scent could definitely be the one of orange peel. I would like to hear orange sounds and to look out of the window and to see the sky incredibly saturated, magical. It would be a very nice thing. Really. Very much so.
I would love to wake up to orange and to close my eyes... well, you know...
From time to time it might be a good idea to visit a place with orange soil, or maybe to just put on an orange robe and to beg for rice with a little bowl made out of orange wood...

and there was rest. nothing really happened, so it seemed. the mind was left to travel happily to locations displayed in kind words and tiny saturated pictures. I liked the view from a speeding street car, droplets on a window, behind the slow looking glass more water, a river, I forgot the name. Another picture, a glimpse of an academy. The academy, we shall say, the one where Beuys and Richter and the Bechers and who else... Lupertz (is he still there, acutally?), Penck, Immendorf, Oehlen, Trockel, Ruff, and who else... oh does it really matter now?... seriously...
we traveled further... a kitchen, all tools arranged according to some very successful formula... apples, oranges, other exotic fruit and all of it noted with the help of Ludwig Sütterlin... the one who's beautiful looking writing was prohibited in 1941...
And we bite off time in little sweet chunks, they are delicious. And we are not quite sure why nothing really never happens, even when there is rest... and nothing really pretends to happen all the time.
--
update... Hmm...

one just needs to wake up and look out side at the right second to forget that there is anything other than beauty. The light, just a few minutes ago, was so indescribable, it wiped out all memories of last nights dreams and replaced them with some pantheistic lump in my throat, glowing, growing, ...
the magical light has moved on now, we are back to a greyish looking new york, with a combustion engine soundtrack, but what else have we learned from making pictures than to experience the world as a series of unique, decisive moments... oh, look, here comes another one...

We sat down on the roof of a brownstone and looked into the back yard. that bag that had been hanging in the now leafless tree was still there, waving, the dogs still ran around in the back yard in little circles, there was still this subtle smell of creeping mold, fading, as if the air were marbleized with it.
The decoration in the windows across the back yard was turning away from trash bin recycling, towards the architectural digest faux heritage style.
Some of the ones we did not see now were very close together. Some even closer. The couple on the sofa on the third floor of 273 west 74th, was closer than that. For at least a little while.
For them we appeared as very small, thread shaped clouds, rising through the cracks of a brownstone roof... across the back yard... to which they certainly did not pay attention anyway.

because he introduced himself as an inventor and a discoverer, they would often ask him about his (hopefully maginificent) accomplishments. what was it that he had invented, or what was it that he had discovered? would he share, would he let them have some of the adventure, without the risk of being eaten, burned or pulverized?
they would usually think that he was an impostor, or a liar when he told them that he was in the process of inventing them and himself and that this in itself was one of the larger discoveries. (not unique perhaps, but that did not seem to matter.)
they were expecting him to be the discoverer of things that had managed to hide from the robbers of past centuries. they secretly wanted him to be a similar grave robber, a thief of secrets so incredible, nobody even knew of their existence.
and inventions? inventions were mostly as good as their potential profit. They wished he were the inventor of a device that would allow them to move their motionless bodies from location to location, maybe levitating? Or he could be the inventor of the matching, miraculous, effortless, simple diet. He could be the inventor of something that would allow them to broadcast their brilliant ideas of the world to every single person on the globe, or the man who finally found a way to prevent others from spreading their poisonous propaganda...
it was a large disappointment to hear him say that his inventions and discoveries we shy and tiny ones, some even in a parallel universe, one without injuries, and gain, and death.
many considered it more exciting to listen to those who spoke louder, more shockingly and offered great solutions on how to really kill... at least somebody or something, and let it be this thing called time.

They touched a radiator. She told him she did. Touching the hot metal was less painful than not being able to touch his face. He was in a completely different location, remembering his head, the back of it, hitting a radiator after being thrown through the room by an urge to escape from his father. He had fallen into a tunnel of memories, filled with moments when his scull or the scull of others, was hit by much heavier objects than it should be.
He remembered the stone he threw, the single one, and how it tore open the skin of a running boy, he remembered the cut, the consequences.
Then there was the other boy, holding on to on his back, laughing loudly, until his skull accidentally hit the bedroom wall.
In another image, it was him again, falling down, holding on to a friend, his friend falling on top of him, his head against concrete, the pre-manufactured walls of a future building.
He remembered the dark spots against the sky. He remembered the large knifes pressed by women, against his head.
He had traveled far, he had managed to cross much more than a river, or an ocean, or whatever that water was that could easiest be crossed by voices...
It was to be their last conversation. If he managed to fall through that tunnel in the midst of a simple chat, how far would he fall if they continued to talk. She clearly had the power to trigger very powerful images. It was like magic. He would never tell her about it. He would never tell her about anything else either... not the other, much stronger sequences of memories and forward flashes that followed...
Even if their conversation must have appeared very light to anybody who accidentally happened to observe it... the reality of it was that of two very different trips, taken from very different starting points... and ending up in quite dramatically different locations...
He looked at his hand. Under his fingernails and on them was his own blood.
Maybe they were both trying to do the same thing.
He hoped she was okay. And yet he would never ask her about it.

Next to me are little pieces of stationery, small pouches for incense, paper fish for sending money, a paper flower that also serves as a pouch.
The pieces not only traveled for thousands of miles to get here, they also had to be manufactured, they had to be invented, their idea must have traveled for centuries. The fibers of the paper alone have been through so many processes, the idea of the paper however has spent a lot of time on other pieces of paper and in heads and...
We appear to have arrived at the crossroads of many parallel journeys. There is the journey of the idea of things, as well as the journey of the actual pieces... as carriers of ideas. (and there is more... isn't there?)
And then the pieces of paper are actually just a temporary representation, a harmonious collection of molecules. The molecular building blocks used to make these little pouches and pieces of paper, ready to be made more obviously unique with ink... they have traveled for millions of years. They can quite possibly have passed through landscapes, through bodies even... these being as well, temporary travelers.
One of the letter sheets has a drawing of flowers on it... and the idea of flowers alone is a really complex one.
I might be able to begin to grasp the complexity trapped in a sheet of prepared stationery, I do not seem to turn this understanding into this here, the linear string of words...
And to make things even more odd, I took one little pouch, shaped like a leaf, filled with fragrance, out of its pouch...
I placed it onto a round metal tray. It took three matches so far to burn the little leaf. It is now a strange looking black mini sculpture that sits in brown sweat, on a metal tray, next to three used matches.
And even though it would be easiest to describe this little leaf as gone, it is everything but gone... Not only did it light up in bright flames when I set it on fire, it also released some of the fragrance the incense... in a beautiful, slowly unfolding flower of smoke. It was a very quiet, very amazing spectacle...
And the fragrance... yes the fragrance is quite beautiful too... It turned the room into a quiet place, independent of time and space...
And I am aware that in order to smell anything, there have to be molecules that enter my body, touch the right receptors... so not only did the little leaf burn, parts of it are now part of me... and the idea of them being part of me is now part of anybody who chose to read so far through this attempt to translate something that just can not be translated... because not everything can... and not everything should be translated into anything that appears to communicate it faster...
a piece of paper can be quite possibly best experienced as a piece of paper...
and an incense can be probably best experienced as an incense... and a flower, best be left a flower... though leaving things alone would certainly make us less human... as we seem to be programmed to have the urge to transform...
as we are somehow just particles of an unstoppable transformation...

Did anybody out there see some time for sale? I am not sure I could afford to buy a lot of it now, but I would please like some, maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks... an hour perhaps?... minutes? just to be able to catch up on sleep... perhaps. A friend reminded me yesterday that I have not really slept properly for the almost two years that we know each other...
It is almost 2am again and I would really love to read about Urushi, as there is a truly beautiful article in the most current issue of Kateigaho | International edition.... but I will now be taken away by a slightly spinning cocoon of powerful sleep... one eye is already closed... see?...
(If this entry is too short and tired, please scroll down and read something more enthusiastic and glowy...)

oh and... "One gram of sumi (charcoal) possesses a surface area of 300 square meters."... how about a sumi brain?... oh... sleep...

did he really ever even move his wings?, or was he just floating in?, suspended on an invisible air-stream? Embracing air.

don't you dare to look back, buddy, there are tons of pigs and donkeys, right behind you, on that trailer. you are moving on into the one and the only direction known to man, you are on the right track, in the front seat, in the cockpit, up there, on top, most powerful machine under your behind, crowds cheering, here, there, everywhere, right? lights beaming, copilot giving good direction advice. others have been here before you, others have tried to achieve some sort of greatness, but hey, they only messed up the seat, they only somehow pretended to be driving higher. you are different, you are pressing on that gas pedal, are burning that diesel like it should be burned, you are very well equipped to look at the road ahead and to drive the whole load right into a slow motion supercrash, with a big and joyful smile. go buddy go...
just remember to sometimes go home, park the truck, have a snack.
relax, at least for 28 days or so...

writing this with slightly stiff hands. went out to the ocean before sunrise. a storm seems to be coming up, a cold something was brewing over the water. it will hit the coast soon. I am indoors now, ran out of batteries on the camera... there is a coffee on my little table... let's see what happens next...

(just some time later, the sun beaming, I am closing the windows, will go home now, slowly... get some more sleep?... or maybe go through all the tiny notes and names and thing?s... try to remember in a better way... will touch snow tomorrow...)

Her new office was gigantic. It was so huge that some of the walls had to be covered with thick, textured foam, to somehow crush the sound-waves, to somehow prevent the echo from reaching cathedralesque proportions. The room looked a bit like a place of worship indeed, but did it really have to have the acoustics like one as well? Preferably not.
She liked it when her voice could be heard clearly by anybody who entered through the giant iron doors, hundreds of them daily, sometimes many more. Some were warned. Some were required to take a specific route over the tiles on the floor resembling an emotional map of the world, not one of those simplistic ones put together by primitives who would just apply rulers to coasts. Or to their thrones.
Her freshly arranged desk was uncluttered, stylish. There was a large display, some input devices, some paper... ink.
She had about 21 little ink bottles, some red, some blue, lined up in front of her, ready to be fired, thrown with deadly precision, at anyone, anyone who's sum of character flaws was too dangerous for the fragile world...
the not so dangerous ones, she could simply ignore... their petitions piling, collecting reddish dust in front of her office doors.
Though her office was miles above the vast and old city, a dove would sometimes find her window and just simply sit and stare amazed (I know, a staring dive is a truly rare sight). Pigeons would get the ink.
Once the bottle would hit the bird, they would both travel like a blueish pile of bricks, hitting the ground minutes later, turning the entire city into a shaking, swaying ship at sea.
Such earthquakes would occur every two weeks perhaps...
But one really does not know too much about any further detail... we might need to travel there, to find out ourselves... April?

The activity log showed that somebody used the Google translator to read the entries on this page. For some odd reason, the "wow" title of this entry came out as "Wimmern" which means... "whimper, moan, whine" which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I am actually saying here. Is this how wars get started? How do generation long conflicts start anyway? Could it be through blunders in translation?... and I do not only mean words...

this entry is just here to bookmark the day. what started with missed trains and spilled coffee, bloomed into a pandemonium of international thought and some really great ideas. It is raining in New York... but what about all the other places that happened to somehow subtly touch this screen today?...)... wow........ (thank you sooo much.)
When I wrote here first, it was a bit too late to use my brain, tinkered with with two screwdrivers and some quite interesting little snacks at a place that selected an anvil as their logo.
Now it is the morning after, the time when I should be able to somehow put together the puzzle of the positive little pieces that fell on me yesterday, I am barely able to do that... and so I will just rush forward and just write the next entry, about the terrific, stunning new day...
(For Google translators: Happy, happy, smiling face.)

there are layers upon layers upon layers of brilliant surfaces around me, left right and on this silver table. photographs and drawings and books (some prints). little three dimensional objects, created by many very different people are also here with me in this room. (hello.)
i will move them around a bit today and maybe move myself out of here as well. the sun is out there, offering some good old free radiation.
all good today, all good today, all good...

oh, and I woke up in Berlin, and it was a truly good experience. now it is time for coffee and a sandwich and some orange juice...
feels a tiny bit like the future. and i like that...

it must have been a whole pack of police cars and a bunch of fire trucks, all rushing down broadway at 4:30 am...
I have been staring out the windows since...
and now the sun will slowly turn this perforated dark mandscape into a spectacle of golden light... any minute now... the sky is already this brilliant navy blue, some of the buildings are turning from ebony to mahogany to bronze to gold... slowly... very slowly... or at least it appears this way seen my human senses... my scratched and greasy lens of perception.
I guess being alive means being chained to a cell called point of view?

Dear reader, it is quite possible that I wrote about this before, but it is always nice to point it out again. Anything that you type into the search field on the right hand side, ends up in a log file. I check the log file now and then, just to see if anybody might be looking for something. Some users arrive here from search engines and look straight for little kittens, or roosters or combination of both. Some try to speak to the search field in plain English, and look for pictures of little kittens, roosters, or various combinations of both. Some take the call to action quite seriously and look for themselves. ("me" appeared several times in the last few days... I do not really know who you are, my dear. Please look for your full name, address, phone number. You might want to check if I posted your Credit Card number by typing... no that's a bad joke, don't.)
I also do not know:
2003.11.10 22:51:30
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'

2003.11.10 22:52:19
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'

I will however try to answer the following question(s).

2003.11.13 17:45:57
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:46:33
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:49:17
Search: query for 'what is the sound to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:53:32
Search: query for 'to travel the speed of sound , how long will it take to go around the world'
(It took our seeker seven minutes and thirty five seconds to ask this interesting set of questions...)
Well, what is the sound to go around the world?... And how long will it take for it to get around the world?... I thought I could find a really simple answer to that... just divide 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) by the speed of sound (which is 340.29 m / s)... but then I realized that there is so much more that needs to be considered... Take a look at all the factors I almost forgot.... So even though the simplistic answer would be that the time needed at sea level around the equator would be ... almost 33 hours... (no way, really, this long?) and that the time it would take for the same sound to travel just a little deeper, in water, would be about 8 hours, (The speed of sound in water is about 1500 m/s!)... these answers must be wrong...
If the same sound had to travel around the world outside of the atmosphere... then it would take it exactly 24 hours... because sound does not travel in a vacuum... (imagine how loud the sun would be...) so the sound would just wait in one place for the earth to turn... the sound would travel by not moving... hmm...
But wait, does this mean that we should calculate earth rotation with the other equations as well?... I am clearly confused, can not solve a simple mathematical problem... and I guess I will just need to go to somebody's blog and type into the search field:
"How long would it take an object, moving at the speed of sound, to travel around the world, and what would happen if the object were actually a sound, an informed shockwave, and it traveled through environments of different media with different density, maybe even with different temperature?...
Hmm... we all have these really powerful calculating machines in front of us... I wonder how long it might take to get some real answers... (Or are we asking a really silly question?)

it is easy to be thrown off when things are subtle and tiny and gentle and soft. the bold, the loud, the agressive, the destructive appear to just grab attention, arrest it, keep it... for a while... maybe again, again, again...
the fastest way to become famous is to kill somebody famous. but is it the best way? is it at all important to claim any kind of fame?...
the slow and the subtle and the gentle may not be the best way to grab anybody by their throat and to show them what the way could be through here, out of here, or wherever...
but it might be the best way to get to hear the little sounds, the slight changes in color, the ghosts that make up the magic that is transformed into what the screamers then might claim to own...
and yet they never really do...
i think i like the slow and magnificent growth process more than a jerky explosion of anything...
it can be all quite calm, as long as we assume that the others could carry a big stick, no?...
oh, and never stop to listen, never stop to learn...
i think we will be fine... ; )

Looking at work of Students at the FIT it was good to see how there are certain heritage specific vocabularies in their visual language brought here by students, how these vocabularies survive in their thinking in their view of things. This energy of ideas from all around the world is what makes cities like New York so rich and interesting (among other things, of course)... and it is always a good experience to see this energy shine through all tiny cracks here and there... (even though it also screams sometimes, of course.). Some of the visual languages spoken were easier to understand, to listen to, than others. Just for me?... for others?...
It was also interesting to see how computers are now integrated into the design process, how it is easier to swing around several thousand dollars of a cursor in a software environment than it would probably be to move around the tip of a 50¢ pencil over the surface of found paper...
Hmm... ideas should probably still be born inside of heads or on pieces of paper, not on screens and inside of "creative suites"... hmm...
Also, how do these two points of view mix?... On one hand there is a very local and location specific view at things and on the other hand there is this technological filter which uses a bit of an "international technology style" interface... hmm...

it is 6:30 and i have yet to eat. this will happen now, after a day of pushing up a round boulder up a hill, just to find out at the end, that there were already several on the summit. who would have thought.
i am entering the phase of the day in which the dried out lips begin to hurt, the stomach becomes more demanding and the head just floats on top of the very weak body.
It is not as cold as before, there, outside, where I will go now... to hunt down something that will taste wonderful, no matter what it will be.
I still dislike speakerphones... too bad a certain portion of my work has to take place in a dialogue with them...
typing into this tiny text entry field feels so comforting now... (you can't see it, I can now...) hmm...

Really wanted to mention it earlier, yet there was never really a right moment, and now maybe is the wrong moment too, but it appears to me that for some reasons the Right socks are the better survivors, or maybe they are the ones who just want more stability, the ones who return to the drawer, who want to flock. Left by their Left socks, they are the Right socks, but yet they are left behind. (that does not sound right.) What I mean, I have half a drawer of paired up right socks can you believe that?
How do I know the difference between my Left and the Right socks? I like to wear so called Runner Socken, manufactured by a very excellent company from Germany, Falke. The thing about runner socks is that they are fitted for their particular foot and that they have not only the shape but also a little red letter on their noses. The right socks carry an R, the left ones an L.
I do not wash my socks myself, the friendly laundry place across broadway does an excellent job in my absence. It is quite fascinating to find new combinations of socks after each and every wash. It appears that the right socks are more now (the ratio is maybe 2:1 or something like that). They like to hang out together, they come back paired couples... how odd. Left socks like to go missing, they just disappear, they seem to wander off, they leave.
One special pair, that was a so called "walking" Socken pair, a slightly thicker kind of socks, actually never even made it into the wash. The Left sock left the Right sock before they even got to go down and around the block and into the laundry place. It is a truly odd little event and observation. They are obviously made for each other, there is no doubt about it. They are very different than all the other Left/Right socks, they never even get to go to the laundry place, where they could possibly get lost while having really close encounters with other socks or pants or who knows what... and still. The L sock leaves. The R sock possibly feels completely useless... sad and tired and really out of place.

Let's talk about what Germans call "Handschuhe", hand-shoes... the English word for that is... gloves...
When I was a boy, I used to lose my gloves at a higher rate than the Polish economy could possibly manufacture them. It was quite odd as well. How could one lose a glove or mitten. It was not like I had to take one off to sign some treaty or document of capitulation. One mitten would always get lost. I imagined it alone, somewhere, in the snow...
My parents eventually connected my mittens with a special, semi elastic string. The string was long enough to go right through one sleeve of my jacket, behind my back and through the other sleeve. Even if I took off one of the mittens, the other mitten would still hold on to it via a very primitive model of the internet. (Smart mitten, dumb network, remember? A telephone network would be a mitten with two strings.)
Maybe such a string could possibly be an idea for my socks, now that I am older, and can dress myself? I could attach my socks to a string that would go up one pant leg and down the other, connecting the Right one with the Left, making them a unity forever without them having to be attached by the hip.
Just a thought... and i wonder how comfortable or how silly this would feel. (Should I possibly patent it, would I like the friction?)

My problem with the Right walking-sock the one left behind is far from being solved, of course. I still somehow hope to find the left sock, lonely, somewhere in the wash. (Probably busy chatting with the other socks?)

Socks seem to really enjoy it being united by their necks, don't they? It is as if their union created a model for our multidimensional universe. And maybe it does? Could we be onto something here? The universe could be like two matching socks, connected with the perfect string.
(I bet this whole trackback thing does not work for me, so yes, I was reminded of the issue by a much better post by Shauny.)

it was a bit of a disappointment this morning when I arrived at the last page of a book I had been reading for the last few days on the train. My thoughts were something like... she is touching the handle of that portfolio with such delicate attention, if the train were not so loud, we could certainly hear it purr. Clearly I was not paying attention to what I was reading. Not a good thing, as what I was reading was again one of the books in which every sentence is like a layer on top of the previous one and so on... so I have been looking at letters, playing with that highlighter in my pocket, but only the punctuation marks would resonate with the sounds of the train and find their little homes in the back of my head. Not very useful.
This is why I like looking at pictures, when on the train I guess. Here we have a thousand words, all completely disorganized, forming what appears to be a familiar impression. I tend to look for the flaws and hints left behind by those who made the images. Look at photographs and try to discover the human factor... It is interesting that writers do not get excited about their typewriters or word processors. Photographers on the other hand are not only divided into particular brands, they sometimes even sign their photographs with not their names but the name of the camera. Machine operators...
Looking at images on the subway and looking at the little flaws that make me hear the voice of the designer saying nobody will notice if I just clone the background here or what if I blur that hair here... but these people are not photographers, they are photoshoppers, editors...
No wonder I can not read on the train, or barely read anywhere else for that matter. I tend to fall into the little spaces opening up between the words, little loopholes in the Os and As... and the Ps as well...
Soon I will be listening to the songs hidden in the sentences of the people speaking to others (i already do that) then probably to the songs hiding in voices speaking to me...
and if all this progresses... I will probably somehow need to find a therapist, on who's sofa I will just take a nap, listening to the sounds hiding in the walls, my own breath, the breath of my sleeping therapist, on the chair near by...
It is sometimes the best thing in the world to pay attention to those things that do not really matter... but at times... now I forgot what I wanted to say...
; )

One of the grand achievements of consumer culture is the dissatisfied shopper, the one who gets really upset, the one who demands the money back, the one that gets her or his way, the one that walks away with a fixed new item, a brand new something. Or money back. Money back is also very popular among some. One complains long enough and back comes the money, the same money that was in the wallet before... it just returns. (In most cases it comes back sans the shipping and handling and the interest accumulated on the credit card and we do not even want to start about the hours or days or weeks spent on the actual process of complaining....)
I can't complain. I am not really good at it. I was not taught how to complain properly, I love to suffer, I guess, just wait and see and look for the solution... passively... actively, certainly (or I could pray, or wish, or hope.)

So when my new PowerBook arrived with one little pixel screaming at me with all its brightness, I went to some site where I found the manual for Apple technicians, found the story about dead pixels, found out that I would need to have at least three of those bright ones, or four of those dark ones in order to get an exchange... and so I did not say anything... I sometimes place the pointer of my mouse under the dead pixel, then it looks as if it had a green, glowing eye... we talk... it is sort of fun.
I read an article today about a new petition regarding an apparent flaw in the display of my PowerBook. I checked, I have it, indeed... I am not one of the 650 people who signed that thing so far, I see some white blotches, yes, but I am going to wait right now, not go crazy about something that really would not make me smarter or more handsome, or live longer if it were fixed. (Actually, worrying about this stuff, could quite possibly shave off a few days of my probably pretty short life.)
Complaining is a really nice new way of self expression. Some cranky "experts" just lustfully jumped on some of the new features of the new mac operating system, some write as if they were really, physically aroused when they can complain about some practices by companies like google. Others are truly, deeply upset that some fonts do not ship with some free software...
I am just really glad that I am alive tonight...
There must be a bit of a misunderstanding here, some of us believe that pointing out of issues is a great way to stimulate progress.
Large discussion groups emerge, hundreds of users enjoy the brilliant observation skills of the complainer.
Complaining feels a little anti productive to me... it does not appear to be a really creative process... and it is really not to be confused with constructive criticism which is actually something really good...
It is a bit like lamenting about a blown out candle, pointing out that it smells and does not illuminate the room, or that the room now disappeared, or that the moths have nowhere to fly...
Or one could just light the candle again... or just a match or something...
Silly, simplistic thought, perhaps?...
Is complaining the great power of the consumer?... Is the role of the complainer the same one that used to be one of the court jester, perhaps?...
I have this slight beginning of a feeling that complaining about things and their flaws is the direct response to what expectations are packed into the now more expensive toys we call products...
We tend to buy fantasies that surround a product, the actual item is then just a material representation of the expectation... anything that does not comply with the promise... is obviously a large disappointment... to the one who really believes the promises in the first place.
I guess I am still too much of the boy who was very amazed about the possibilities of a piece of paper, or a plastic cup, or plasticine. I did not grow up in a world that promised me that I would be able to draw like Leonardo if only on the right sheet of paper, or that the water would be the most delicious if drunk from this or that particular glass, or that the clay would turn into art in my hands, if only purchased in that bright and pretty special pack.
Most of my toys could probably be considered rubbish, or dangerous, or maybe both. I played with knifes, with caps of bottles, with dirt, with dirty snow... None of these items came with some predetermined world, stories, instructions, a sales pitch, which could annoy me, or just bore me... I had to turn the bottle cap into a racer on a track I drew into the dirt with my left shoe. That knife was not really dangerous because I knew that pointing it at myself could injure me badly, of course...
My job as a child was to "inform", to "transform" things, anything really, and to thus turn it into something that was as complex as my imagination.

I remember coming to the west and discovering that the packaging of toys was the best thing about them. The promises printed on the outside of the colorful boxes were really rarely kept... and they also were a but like panic flaps put onto a horse. Even lego was pretty disgusting in the west, the packaging contained pictures and predetermined outcomes of maybe three stories per package... this was all really disappointing...
So I can understand quite well, why anybody who was born into a world that tends to bombard us with legally backed up promisses would focus as much as possible at the disappointing flaws of things... It really is a bit of a creative process, a breaking beyond what the manufacturer wants us to see...

Though wouldn't it be really beautiful if we all somehow had that power to invent new things and ideas and just charge forward and explode into the world as a burst of completely new ways of looking at the silliest little things?...
(rather than believing dome marketing pitches, and then whining that the promises were not completely kept?)
How great would it be if we managed to just take the energy of the blessings we encounter by the million every day and just ride it into the next unscripted day?...
This is not very fashionable... sarcasm and irony are the king and queen of the contemporary thinker...
Hmm... how odd that this little entry could almost be read as a complaint...
; )

Btw. I am still amazed that this piece of software here checks my spelling on the fly no matter if I write in English, oder ob ich mal schnell was auf Deutsch schreibe, albo nawet po Polsku, (obwohl ich mir da nicht so sicher bin...)
Amazing... I find it all amazing...
I am stunned by the tiniest of things...
I can't complain... we are so darn lucky to have what we have. So darn lucky... and I sometimes have to pinch myself, because I must be dreaming...
this all goes far beyond my boyish imagination...

On certain days, there would be such fog outside of our window that it almost appeared as if somebody had painted the glass white. There was nothing out there, not a thing, just this shapeless whiteness. I would stare at it for what appeared to be hours, trying to make anything out, anything. We lived on the 8th floor, far above the tree line, of the young trees planted in the freshly made dirt around our buildings. It would sometimes take more than an hour indeed for the fog to settle, branches would eventually emerge from the whiteness, then the faint shapes of flat looking crowns of trees, some transformer box here, a street lamt there, then headlights, then cars.

There were other days on which I would lock myself in a seemingly perfectly dark room, ... and then wait for the first shapes to emerge. It would sometimes take more than 10 minutes for me to be able to see the bathtub, or the photographic equipment of my father's darkroom. The darker the room, the longer the period of pure anticipation. Did I really see something, was I just imagining it? I knew that I could exit this voluntary blindness at any time, by just opening the door, just stepping back out into the light.
I think it was only once, in the mountains, at our weekend house, in Koszarawa Cicha, in Poland, where the light never became enough for me to see anything... I stared at where I knew there was a ceiling, I looked over towards the walls... and there was nothing. It was a complete darkness, one that did not seem to be out there, but inside of me, not in front of my eyes, more behind my eyes. I tried to reach into it, but it felt like nothing... I think I was pretty scared.
I remember waking up before everybody else in the house on the following morning, into a complete darkness again, I waited patiently, it took a really long time...
In the place where the window shutters had been closed, red ovals eventually appeared, they then turned somehow less bloody, and they slowly became the branch circles in the wood of the window shutters... My brain used this tiny amount of light to somehow reassemble the room for me, I began to see the inside of the house again... I was able to find the door.

I am not sure if I looked straight at the sun on this particular day, but I know I used to, sometimes. A blue and green disk would appear in front of the glowing star, A shaking blueish disk, obviously my eye trying to not go completely blind.
The blue disk would then stay with me for quite some time, the after image of the sun, one that only I could see and that I could then follow, as it was jumping, seemingly randomly wherever I was about to look.
If I managed to relax enough, the burned in blue circle would just slowly sink to the ground, like a deflated ghost friend who became tired of jumping around the apartment... as soon as I became aware of this observation however, he was ready to jump around again, of course...

I am not sure why a rainy morning like the one today would make me think of some of my childhood's eye-games...
The rain has been pushed forcefully against the window for some time now, if I step close enough to the glass, I can see the world exploded by thousands of little water lenses. A bit like the slow glass photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama...
Time to leave the house again. Just a few more minutes left here...

At the end of my money I smelled the dust on the brown linoleum in my living room next to the two red chairs which I had found in the street just a few months after moving in. I somehow wished that the metal shelves, filled with books and toys and probably just trash, could cave in on me, just burry me, just make sure i was killed. quickly... by Astro Boy, or Goethe.
I played with the tears on the floor, little salty drops that turned into trails of dirt under my fingers. I made crosses, triangles, no circles...
I ate Matzo bread and onions, since they were the cheapest thing I could find, I froze juices diluted with water, to make a taste last longer. I so wished I maybe had a dog, or some pet that could maybe just eat the bills from my mailbox, and then maybe me, once the shelves caved in, buried me, smashed my stupid skull in, at last.
A friend came to visit, we had been paired up to work on a big project together, a few months prior, it was supposed to be a big one, I had spent the thousands in anticipation of the great success. We failed so miserably like never before and never since. The company paid me a symbolic dollar to just make sure I do not say they did not pay me for the weeks and weeks my partner and I failed at visualizing our really lame ideas.
So here we were again, in my living room, my tears wiped, the matzoh on a plate, the empty kitchen closed, we on the chairs, far away from the window, staring at each other silently.
I took her in my arms and carried her light body into the other room, the one that was just bare with two found tatami mats on the floor, no futon, really cold. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of small photographs, near the ceiling, but that's a completely different story.... She looked so incredibly fragile, barely there...
We stared at each other with a most desperate completely silent intensity. I think we might have kissed, though we probably have not. Or did we maybe touch each other's bellies? No we did not.

Then she just left. I do not even remember how quickly or really when and how. Oh, I remember her probing her thin limbs into the sleeves of a flimsy worn out t-shirt... Her translucent skin less and less visible under layers and layers and layers of fabric.

She later, much later, told me that she had been pregnant on that day when we met, in my pathetic apartment of unpaid bills and rent.
She had lost the baby shortly after.

It was as if somebody had been listening to my pleas to bring death quickly into my apartment, and the reaper came to visit, rushed through the rooms, found us staring at each other, on the mats, on the cold linoleum floor... and then he killed, and he killed the weakest one he could possibly find...

Dear God, why are you making me think of this right now?

As the sunbeams illuminate a strip in the façade of the building across Broadway, I can see glimpses of families in the morning. A father trying hard to read his paper, his little son fighting for his attention, and yet distracted by the little girl, jumping around like mad, closer to the television set on which they tend to play video games for hours at a time.
Just one flight above them, a mother, dressed in only a thin white nightgown, is holding on to a large white cup. The woman is barely visible behind the little plastic pumpkins and books and stickers in various colors and shapes that adorn her living room and kitchen windows. Are her two boys still asleep? Maybe they are not even in town, she appears very relaxed...
I wonder if these families ever meet. I certainly do not know my neighbors from downstairs or upstairs. It is quite possible that to the families on the other side of Broadway I am as grouped in a theme as they are for me. It is quite possible that there is somebody above me or below me, who now also hides their hands behind the screen of a laptop. Somebody who peeks out of the morning shadow cast by this building, somebody who is rarely there to enjoy the evening sun when it nourishes the plants in our windows.
It would be fascinating to be able to observe events and people and thoughts without a set point of view. It would be so most incredible to be everywhere at the same time, without the choice of the floor or direction or even time of day...
As long as one is trapped in the physical world and as long as one is contained in a certain point of space and time, one can only imagine such a state...
and it is not easy, because our thinking is based on being somewhere, at some point in time... (perhaps?, I do not know enough.)
Or maybe the imagination of such a state is reward enough... hmm...

What happened to the extra hour? Where did it go? It is late again, my body seems to trust my watch more than itself. How odd, how odd. Did you go to work and hour early today? Did you notice the extra hour in any way?...
So strange, so strange...

Well, I really do not know much about the Hajj, just little bits and pieces... what I know is very humbling and very important, feels like an extremely important experience for anyone involved. I had no idea that the event takes place only once a year, I did not know about most of the symbolism. It is all really amazing, amazing...
Have you participated in the Hajj? Are you going to go? Do you know anybody who has?

My parents went to Mallorca for two weeks, or was it three weeks? It is a bit difficult to keep up wit their European style vacations. Both of my parents get 6 weeks of free time each year. My mother even gets a little more. She works so incredibly much.
My parents sent me two postcards from Mallorca. My mother has the handwriting of an elementary school teacher, she used to be one, first to 8th grade... well ,that is beyond elementary, of course. My father writes like a little printshop. He used to design things, now he builds things, he always had this iso italic handwriting....
The first postcard was written my my mother only...

Dear Son,
We visited the house of Frederic Chopin, here in Mallorca. It is all incredibly impressive. Most impressive about this place are the letters he wrote to his parents. His handwriting reminds me of yours. It felt almost as if I were looking at letters from you to us.

"Dear Parents", this is how Frederic Chopin would begin his letters to his parents. There were many, many letters here that started with these words "Dear Parents"...

Dear Parents,
the weather here is really horrible. I do not think you should come visit me this next month. Yes mother, I know that the diet here is not quite as good as your incredible recipes. Yes, my piano play is improving, dad, though I will probably never be as good as your old friend Jasio... please send my regards to my good old piano room, I hear you converted it into storage...

There are layers upon layers of paper on the shelves next to me. vast landscapes of thought, photographed, turned into linear, slowly developing lines of written and printed language, drawings, charts, page numbers. All pressed so tightly against each other, waiting for the moment of liberation. They are worthless unless looked at, they are worthless unless decoded, the layers of black and cyan and magenta and yellow ink, covering various areas on both sides of pages. Advertisements calling out to buy products no longer available, offers no longer valid, points of view burned into pages, published, now preserved, frozen.
There are very peculiar combinations of information on that bookshelf next to me. Wayne Thiebaud's Paintings press tightly against some observations made by Laura Hoptman, pressing against Gursky's photographs, against William Eggleston, against Helen Levitt. Thiebaud painted uptown, downtown, really, Levitt went Crosstown. Gerhard Richter painted for forty years, the back of the book quite abstract, next to him, Tufte, Envisioning information, then Andy Warhol's brilliant drawings from the 50's, next to the twilight of Crewdson's photography pushing against Georgia O'Keeffe's portraits taken by Alfred Stieglitz, resting on Struth 1977 2002, next to Ansel Adams at 100... next to the wall... below all this some Bulgakov, some Bachman, Rilke, E.T.A. Hoffman, J.Pawlik... Goethe on Gingko, Murakami, more Rilke, more Goethe, Heinz Edelmann, Sagmeister, Paul Johnson, Thoreau... gosh... this is quite a wild bunch, right here, right now... I should probably not even spend my time looking at this screen here, but grab these pages again, when there is daylight, and just read a little more again, not using any electricity anymore... just mine the words and little dots that make pictures, and just dive and swim... not surf...
But I will probably close this universal book here again in a few minutes, turn off the light, stare at the stripes projected onto the ceiling by the cars driving by on broadway. They will move like pages of a book, they will wander like the links on some schematic view of a site... they will remind me of the nights when I was in my room and when I had not the slightest clue that any one of the books next to me or in front of me ever existed or would ever exist...
And I will probably try to just slow down to this particular private pace, and then watch the hours and hours of stories concocted by my own brain from what I fed it all of today...
Hmm... so many stories waiting, everywhere, everywhere... always.

the world slowly melted into something that became just one single thought. A large thought, one that can not be simply expressed by language or drawing, or song or any communication tool available to us...
The world simply turned into one single thought. It was that easy. And it was only possible because there was no need for an explanation, no need for reason or outcome or anything like that.
or were there two thoughts?... were there maybe three? Three that somehow felt like one?... Hmm... just the idea of being able to grasp these thoughts and counting them seems absurd... even calling them thoughts, or ideas, seems absurd... I will thus not even say anything about those non translatable and uncountable ideas, thoughts, whatnot... hmm... but if they can not be counted and can not be summarized, captured, grasped anyway... hmm...
could it be that this hypothesis is completely true then?... except that maybe melting is not the right expression here... and describing any process as slow or fast certainly also involves some sort of comparison not really needed here...
hmm.... yes. I think the answer is ... yes...
(I guess.)

The lamps cast interesting shadows on walls and ceiling. The sounds of Broadway could almost be mistaken for the beating of waves against a high, rough ocean coast. The air has cooled down substantially. I am sitting in a chair far away from the slightly open window and I can feel how the cool air is spilling into the apartment. My head is too warm, my lap is hot from the powerbook... even my right foot is warmer than the left one, the one actually resting on the carpet.
I am holding on to this Sunday. I know what will have to get done tomorrow, it will be a manageable amount of work... I know where I will have lunch tomorrow, I will finally return the camera with which I shot that Selfportrait with Sockdog...
My mind feels like a pendulum right now, swinging from the past, quickly bypassing the present, into the future, just to return in the same rush, pass the present and to return to the past... I should have gone to sleep more than an hour ago, calm down this silly movement, try to let thoughts rest in the present, real time. But maybe this is what some part of me is afraid of?...
Could this be what makes living easier sometimes, for some of us?... Do we like to somehow imagine worlds ahead of us, and dwell on those behind us in order to just somehow sneak by the things we should be really doing now?...
Sleep, sleep is what I need right this minute... and no more writing for me today. Not even some short little posts. Good night. : )

Last week knocked me out quite well. So little sleep, so much work... so many worries... Today I just closed my eyes on the sofa, next to my powerbook reading a book to me and next thing I knew it is four hours later, the book seemed to have closed itself...
Not many emails have been coming onto my mailbox lately, maybe because I have not replied to so many... why would anybody write me if I do not reply?
The mail application filters out junk and spam, so I checked up on that folder just to find an old email from a bank, reminding me in a typically edgeless tone that my statement was now available online... (a week or so ago...)
I managed to log myself into the secure area where they were hiding the statement from me, just as I had requested, originally with the intention to maybe save another tree...
I was expecting a positive balance on the card... yet what I found looked more like a bloody crime scene. I had obviously assumed that the account was in good standing for a while, had not paid and now there was a huge number there, and many little red numbers. The tone of voice here was not quite as edgeless, more of a sharp one, like broken glass... finance charges, increases of rates, all the things seem to have happened at the same time... so weird.
I felt a bit like the man in this British commercial I saw just this past friday.
The first scene is the face of a calm man in greenish light, asleep, the voiceover is calm: "This man, will die in his sleep tonight. He is warm, comfortable, surrounded by his loved ones." (Does not sound too bad, does it?)... then the camera zooms away and we see that the man is indeed surrounded by his family and warm and comfortable, but only because he is in a speeding car on a highway. The greenish light was coming from the car's instruments...
Okay, it was not quite as bad... but it was still very odd to "wake up" to something of a slightly negative surprise...
Oh and one more odd observation. The chapter of the book was almost finished when I woke up. Not completely finished though... so I must have woken up and turned off the reading. I returned to the point in the book which I remembered from the moment before I fell asleep... Now what was read to me appeared completely new, as if I were hearing it for the first time... only now and then, every 15 minutes or so, was a sentence that was completely familiar, absolutely clear and just somehow seemed to make sense in the context now created by the minutes and minutes I must have missed because I was asleep.
I know I am jumping around here, but I recently read about a study in which overly tired men in Germany were tested in a driving simulator. They were observed as they fell asleep for just a second or two. The dangerous "second sleep"... The men would then be asked how long they perceived to be asleep. Some were not sure if they had been asleep at all. One of the men thought that he had fallen asleep for about two seconds, had been asleep at the simulator wheel for a full 45 minutes... Now imagine he had been the pilot of, let's say, the Staten Island Ferry...
Today's experiences somehow reminded me that I sometimes ask myself how awake I am when I am convinced that I am awake. There are some days, some weeks, some years even that appear to have taken place as a chain of small, aware events, connected by whole passages of sleepwalked life...
How much of what I have written here is actually based on anything that I can truly say that I fully experienced?... Hmm... the warmth of the powerbook on my lap is telling me that I am awake... the smooth keys under my fingertips are suggesting the same... but... hmm... now I lost the thought... ; )

If the jacket had been a little larger, if the time were a bit more abundant, if the skill were a bit more there, he would have certainly just sailed away, for miles and miles. effortless. right through that open window...
his eyes focused on that legendary horizon, the place where the sky meets the earth, not the water-towers, the roofs, the man made mountains with cut out holes for light. Oh, there would be a sun, up there, high above the milky soupy clouds...
being outside is a luxury onto itself. he had spent the last days and days in rooms, staring at windows he could move around, and open and close, but never really reach into. there was a mouse under his hand, but birds? birds were just visitors frozen in photographs, memories.
if the jacket had been a little larger and if the time were a little more abundant and not already completely spent and rented out and sold... then he would probably just take off...
next time...
please let there be a next time...

Frank B. was a true artist friend of mine when I was 15 or so. He lived in the basement of his mother's house, he had two rooms, the bedroom had a pile of clothes in it from which he would just pull out random pieces of clothing, in the dark, every morning, he always looked the way I thought a real artist should look like. Including wrinkled everything.
His idea of painting an E and a Y between the B and the U and the U and the S of all BUS lanes in the city, (making them Beuys lanes), sounded like just the perfect project. (I still think it is a pretty brilliant little idea.)
One other little thing I remember him telling me was the thing about glass. He claimed that glass did not quite have a cristaline structure like, let's say, a sheet of metal. The molecules in glass were frozen in an organization that resembled something closer to a liquid. He claimed that if measured with the appropriate devices, one could see that large sheets of glass, like those in department store windows, for example, were thinner on top and a tiny bit thicker on the bottom. Glass was like a really, really slow liquid. Really slow, dripping its way down in every single window frame, giving in to its own weight.
Hmm...

a clear plastic bag just floated by the window, as if New York were an under water city, the cabs its yellow lobsters. I almost swam out to play with it... well, I did not really, I knew that I am not the best air diver... not these days at least..
This past week passed in such a blur, such a quick succession of kicks and puffs and other punches... at times the feeling was as if I were running against the current of a large herd of buffalo. I would return to my desk after just a few minutes and there would be many, many messages, friendly voices pulling at my skirt in all the possible directions. (No, I do not wear skirts, it is just somehow a more fitting picture than somebody pulling at my pants, don't you think?)
And so Saturday is here, it arrived with the heavy thwomp of the weekend edition of the New York Times at the door, it arrived with five phonecalls from my father, telling me about his new fascination with this thing called os X... and that the neighbor died... after saying good bye to his wife, hugging her... he knew... oh and that my mother keeps telling him that I left the house much to early... (My father likes to create potpourris of messages, to make the sad not too sad and the happy not too goofy... he is a libra...)
A good morning... though I brought work home, I will look at it after breakfast. Now is the time to just go through the piles of things that need to be sorted and given to others who need them more now. (The gigantic DaVinci book now actually has its own place, for example.)
I received another first day cover from Britain. It is the one to celebrate the birthday of the British Museum... on the back is a very nice quote by Russel Lynes a Cultural Critic who lived through most of the 20th century (1910-1991).
He said:“There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating, accumulators act at random”
Hmm... i sometimes feel like a collector of everything... I am very discriminating, just have broad interests...
Hmm, shall we raise some funds and get just the best items from this upcoming event?
My head is abviously still spinning...

A few transparent shadows hushed by my office yesterday. They were not even shadows really, more like areas of changed focus, as if the air had the density of water, spontaneously, in the shape of some creature, maybe for a split second, here, there. It happened more than once... then again.
My heavy head feels as if it were attached to the body with just a few quick stitches.
Upon arrival at home last night, I fell onto the bed, face first, and woke up an hour or so later, just to fire up the PowerBook again and to play catchup with my overdue projects. (And they are good ones, and I love working on them.)
I closed the machine at around 2am... slightly numb...
This is a very temporary condition, I know... the seasons are changing, Septembers tend to be difficult? It is the jetlag?
All will be good.

Why do some of us sometimes become upset that they have to wait for the flavor of the tea leaves to become part of the water that surrounds them?
Why is there this need for immediate results?
Such a behaviour must have something to do with the contemporary distance of origin and destination of things.
The tea and the water and even the clay of the cup did not start to exist a few seconds prior. Ordering a cup of tea did not create either one of them. (Though some economists would certainly argue that the need for them did.)
The tea leaves traveled far from a field from a seed from a tree from a seed for billions of years, touching, dancing, kissing the soil, the rain, the wind...
The water around the leaves traveled just as long... and so did the clay of the cup...
The heat that was used to bring the water to the right temperature was a sacrifice of resources to allow all the parts to meet in what we perceive as a perverse harmony.
When waiting for the tea to develop the right flavor, it is helpful to imagine that we are much more temporary than the water in and the clay of the cup.
And the flavor of the tea?... Where does it really come from?...

Home. The Dalai Lama is speaking in the Park now. I am sure his disarming laughter will make the massess of people I just saw, crossing Central Park in a cab from the airport incredibly happy.
It is okay that I have a headache, it is okay that my stomach is really upset with me and with itself and ultimately with the world which I presented to it by odd combinations of airplane food... it is all okay... I am finally home, it is noon, my body thinks it is 6PM... all good, all good... what will now have to follow, will be pages and pages of coded descriptions of micro events on this other old continent, spent without online access... and actually... no phone... can you imagine that?...

Under my fingertips are the soft and familiar keys of the PowerBook keyboard. They are as smooth and soft as they can get after three years of extensive use. In front of me is the slightly messy surface of my PowerBook screen. Because of certain design issues, there are some soft keyboard imprints on the surface. It all makes the screen feel a bit more like a slightly less than perfect piece of paper. Not a sheet of paper, more a piece, really...
Underneath these familiar surfaces, around this familiar and so friendly user interface of Movable Type is a freshly furnished virtual space, furnished nicely by Apple... It is a fresh installation of os X... Jaguar, 10.2.6... nothing personal really... I have tried moving some of the sensitive data to a backup disk, folder by folder... just hoping the dead drive would not hit that corrupted sector again, flip out, drag the entire setup into a crash...
I was able to salvage some work files, some personal files... only to discover yesterday that some of them were randomly corrupted... this will be a longer walk home...
Data loss is fascinating, because it is so clean. The outer shell of things looks really the same. The data deprived environment is a pristine space, happy, ready to be used and furnished.
It is amusing how a few days ago I imagined what it would be like if digital interfaces had some of the qualities of real life objects... riiiight.... here... and then a bit later, I lamented about this unquenched urge to paint...
I will need a little time to readjust, please be patient... can we be?...

the drive just made the clacking sound again, the computer crashed, the drive does not want to show up anymore (again). We are back to square 1.5... except I am exhausted... this was a horrible day... and it is bound to continue...
I was too happy, too soon?...

I am currently at the apple store getting disk recovery software and a backup drive. My PowerBook broke down last night (drive made loud CLACKING sounds... and then everything froze.) I really hope that at least some of the vital data can be recovered. Sorry for sharing such sad news... at least for me...

Even though I barely remember any of the little details that were so new to me and so strong when we escaped from Poland in 1981, I will never forget that one map. It was the map of Austria. We had crossed the border from Czechoslovakia and were on our way to Rome. We stopped at the very first highway gas station, just to look at what the West actually looked like. I mean there were all these legends about the incredible mountains of actually colorful products. The eleven year old me wanted to definitely find out if there were indeed as many Matchbox cars as hinted by the numbers on their little boxes. We looked at the map of Austria. It was all in German, all pretty colorful and all roads seemed to lead to this very interesting white blob. It was a hole in the map actually, rubbed through the paper by thousands of fingers that somehow wanted to touch their immediate future. The blob was called WIEN, Vienna and we were also heading towards it, though it was not our final destination, just a centre of gravity that was about to propel us onto our actual orbit... (which was not Rome.)
Whenever I see a map with a rubbed out place, and there is a lot of them around New York, especially on the subways, I have to think of Vienna.
Vienna, the place that looked to me like the largest pile of broken washing machines and burned out cars. It was a narrow road between two landcapes of 1981 style recycling... I guess we never actually drove into the city.
The outskirts of Vienna actually looked a little bit like that hole in the Autobahn map...
And why am I thinking of this little fragment right now? Is it because of the shiny greasy spot on the spacebar of my PowerBook?... maybe it is because of those three "Get Mail" envelopes, which might be the most often clicked little icon in any application on my mac. It is a bit like going to Vienna, except that it is the other way around, it is as if random voices were summoned onto my screen from so many various corners of the world...
The odd thing is that whenever I hit that little button with the pointer of the mouse... it does not rub off a bit, no pixels go missing, there is no hole in it... nothing.
I once got really upset at Jeffrey Shaw when he was giving a lecture about his then quite ground breaking virtual reality art installations.
I was maybe 20 or so and I got up in one of his lectures and burst out that his work was not really worth anything, because it did not allow the user to leave any marks, to leave anything behind, to comment to scratch in anything. He looked at me (and not only he looked at me) and did not understand how I could be so pumped with adrenaline about such a silly, unimportant thing...
Nobody leaves his marks on the Mona Lisa... those scratched marks on historic landmarks are a rather disturbing side effect of human interaction with art...
And yet, if there were no fingers pointing at Vienna, ever... if there were no eyes wanting to stare at the Mona Lisa (or, 1911, that space), if there were no massive amounts of humans streaming towards the places others make or build...
Would it make sense to make any of these at all?...

One of the second generation Jade plants received an "architectural" look today, as I removed about 30... counts... fifty!, fifty leaves of it. Does anybody know a recipe for Jade plant salad?, I am holding about a pound of bio matter here. Lush, large, juicy Jade leaves, some with a red rim.
I think I will give them water and see how many will make it into grown up plants. The one from which they were harvested used to be a little branch just about a year or so ago. It now stands 14 inches tall, has 7 large branches and more than 100 leaves.
I am looking for ways to make the stem of these plants a bit more tree like, more covered with bark, I hope that removing the "trunk leaves" will have the desired effect.
We shall see what will really happen.
The mother plant is now completely out of control. She must have some 500 leaves, perhaps, she is almost two feet high, and maybe three feet wide.
I will need to find a way to somehow groom her better or she will topple over kill herself with her eager growth. I was able to turn her branches into about 14 new plants... this is all getting out of hand. And then there were these saplings she herself started to plant. I just found a leaf with roots and even a stem put onto the branch of a close by leafy plant. The nutrients in the now limp leaf were almost exhausted, but it was clearly a baby we have here. (Now in water, soon in soil.)
I am actually glad I do not breed kittens... can you imagine?...

as I moved my feet in a slow continuos sequence, turning my head left and right, the little city walked right through me, the houses passed through me, the trees, the decks, the flowers on the frontyards did. Waves of air turned into sounds as they rushed through my head. I did not really change my location much, it was the surroundings that moved, I think... I stayed inside, quiet, afraid to make too much of my own noise and also afraid to be too visible.

And it feels as if the universe has began to collapse into itself just recently, a slow implosion that will devour me just seconds after I realize that there is no outside, just the though...

There are shiny spots on the printed imitation wood of my desk. Right under my elbows. Polished edges. Reflective now. The space bar on my Powerbook has an incredibly shiny spot on it (left hand side). This is where the right side of my left thumb likes to rest and just move the cursor forward, whenever I want to take a written breather... (like... now). Most of the keys are shiny. Their imprints on the LCD screen will never go away.
The sides of my little mouse are also smooth. The headphones are falling apart.
The PowerBook sometimes falls into a sleep so deep that only a restart is able to bring it back... when we are all relaxed and lucky.
My ten year old leather mouse pad has seen many mice, many rooms, many table tops, many computers. The graphic tablet stayed in my bag today.
Managed to start a little drawing on one of the deeper pages of one of the many Moleskines.
Tired. We are all too tired to make any real progress today... but maybe it is not all about progress anyway.
Hoped so much to be rested and spring loaded. Instead, I feel as if heavy stones had been placed on all my limbs, my head, and even inside of me, piles of little stones on the heavy heart and lungs and soul...
I will try to smile a lot this evening. If I just try hard enough, there will be a series of joyful drawings here, when we all wake up to a new day tomorrow.
Tuesdays tend to be the busiest days anyway.

Lorem Ipsum velit iusto facilisis iriuredolor, augue ea at exerci ipsum dolore magna ut dolore te aliquip. Laoreet amet autem blandit elit euismod vel vero et aliquip, in dolore sit, eros aliquam in? Eu luptatum dolor, eros enim augue delenit nisl illum ex ut velit qui ut ad lobortis at feugait magna. Facilisi hendrerit nulla iriure at luptatum euismod odio et exerci, sed hendrerit dignissim minim, ipsum wisi vulputate dolore at in illum. Accumsan ipsum lobortis vel wisi ullamcorper enim iusto nostrud facilisis. Lorem esse enim, blandit exerci, eu wisi?
Facilisis, lobortis duis dolore lobortis ullamcorper et praesent. Nisl aliquip duis minim eros vero commodo et accumsan dignissim consequat delenit te duis lobortis ut vulputate. Commodo sit ad crisare, molestie aliquam enim vero erat iusto minim diam ipsum ut. In quis iusto duis in qui erat facilisis ea nulla eu in, et dignissim esse et. Commodo ea vel.
Dolore eum consequat facilisis ad delenit eros exerci at ea commodo feugiat minim in. Ex autem quis tation erat in, te suscipit feugiat ex odio eros. Sit, ad at illum et eros diam, sit exerci wisi, hendrerit eros augue, duis vero augue exerci commodo erat esse autem consequatvel. Suscipit luptatum exerci at nostrud odio volutpat, dignissim facilisi duis consequat qui consequat blandit commodo qui iriure. Praesent minim nostrud consequatvel eum, delenit laoreet vulputate iriure, delenit vel, feugiat dolor, diam eros feugait? Quis dolore nisl autem suscipit dolore iusto, facilisis aliquam nisl ut, enim iusto ut ex.
(Sorry, could not resist.)

It was not very far from here, inside of a Wal*Mart, right next to the HotWheels cars, right next to the Barbies and the dancing giggle Elmos, about 3 yards from there...
Racoon urine spray (Link provided for illustration only). "Guaranteed to cover up human scent." Right next to it camouflage clothing. Gun Bullets, 12-pack. They were in the same plastic bubbles as the little dolls just around the corner. I was expecting a button in the back "try me" or "watch me kill". Across the isle: Bows. "Don't open the bow boxes." this is not looking good. Right next to the bows were the arrows, of course. Right next to the arrows, were the various weights of arrow heads. Scary, spooky, disgusting little pieces of engineering. Spring loaded razor blades on a sharp piece of metal. Loading device included. Razor blades with little teeth, designed to spring open when needed. Above it all, a 3D-deer, made out of "self healing material" a "replaceable vital area core extends the life of target significantly." Easy assembly, three pieces. A near-perfect replica of a 130-pound Whitetail Deer, made for bow hunters who are "serious" about their shooting..
At least the guns were in a locked glass box, like watches. The most expensive gun was $350... (Maybe they were air guns? "fun")
Attention Wal*Mart shoppers... now you can killer savings in isle 13!...
Oh, I am not kidding...

Can you imagine living here in New York and not leaving the city all Summer long? I mean look at me, I recently started writing confusing little posts commenting on other confusing little post, posted at confusing times, drifting. I pretty much snapped yesterday, sent some really adrenalized (I know this word does not exist) emails, I am turning weird.
I do not think that I am going to end up like the gentleman downstairs who spread himself all over the sidewalk with his coffee and who smeared the butter off the bagel onto his face (he really managed to get it all over himself, even into his hair), but I obviously need to leave the city for at least a short moment.
And this is exactly what is going to happen. I am going to leave this place and take a ride in an actual car, (not a subway car,) one with a combustion engine, take that ride across the river and upupup... for a day or two. I seriously need that. This means that I will fall behind even more on my 360 drawings and the stories and all... but when I come back... expect great things... miracles. (Okay, maybe not.)
While I am gone, can you please find out some things? Some are really silly...
1) Is This Gentleman possibly related to Paul. (Sorry for deep linking, Eliot, your photographs are a true inspiration.)
2) Does anybody out there speak whale, and can you please find out what really happened here... I just do not believe this ridiculously human-centric (not a word, right?) point of view in this sad Story. Especially after reading this article. (I mean: A scuba diver even landed on the whale and shot video as the leviathan dove. Comoooon!)
3) Can you tell me if you managed to go This event... or maybe one of these events. (This question was actually for Alaina, who's little typepad site I like very much.)
4) Can you explain how a package (and it's content is going to be explained on more than one site, I promise) can travel from New York to Anchorage to Shanghai in a matter of hours, be delayed in China and still make it back to New York for a late dinner?
5) Would you be interested in hunting down a lost edition of some of the 360x360 drawings?
6) am I completely insane for liking This? (why did they make the price of it so ugly?)
7) Can you please forgive me?

So why is this post called "Prince of Whales?"... obviously because of poor Migaloo... the "white fella" (this is what his name means), that should be just left alone... (though things seem to be pointing into a rather different outcome.)
Sorry again for this very confused and confusing post. Have a glorious weekend.

it appears that drawing is a bit painful but still somehow possible in the evenings. Stories are best brewed up freshly in the morning, before coffee, before water, before even the alarm rings.
And things will probably appear more steady in the long run than they actually are. This means that I managed to add three images last night, and then wrote their little accompanying remarks this morning... Not the greatest way to interact with the readers here, but it just makes more sense for me... oh well...

Took a new look at the improved William Wegman World this morning, and I had to smile. Not because of the admittedly sweet dogographs but because of the way Wegman writes about his work (like an actual nice human being). It is just so nice and straight forward that I could not help but smile... Read Art - School and Drawing and Writings... and Painting...
Yeah, this is more like the guy who took those really funny and inspiring Photographs... back in the day...
He does sound like a really nice guy, doesn't he? (And there were no pictures of puppies, see?) : )

Could this possibly be electric-radiation-deprivation? Could I be suffering from something like that? Could a night spent in a Manhattan apartment without electricity, only filled with microwaves from cellphone transmissions and the unavoidable radio signals (allright, there were quarks involved as well,) have such a long lasting effect? I feel as if I had traveled through several time zones and ended up in a parallel New York that appears to have all the elements of the city I love, but which really is a completely different place.
It must be me. The tiniest disruption in my silly routines makes it barely possible for me to draw, to write, to do anything... seriously...
This is really quite odd. (Maybe it is the peanut butter and Jelly?, the avoidance of perishable foods?)
Who would have thought that my ability to do things could be so dependent on outer factors... wait no... who would have thought that my perception of my ability to do things could be so dependent on my perception of what influence outside factors have on me... who would have thought that my perception of the perception of... (aagh, stop that.)
(Am I just looking for something, or someone, to blame?)
I should probably close this entry now...
Please disregard, please disregard, draft mode, draft mode, delete, delete, delete...

The attempt to avoid perishable foods (or at least those needing refrigeration) for the next few days is making me walk down culinary emergency paths I never thought to have to explore. Today was a historic day for me personally because I actually enjoyed several slices of toasted rye bread with ...( achtung, achtung), peanut-butter and grape jelly.
Haha, this entry should be posted somewhere in the depths of 1974, shouldn't it? The four year old me should have been the one to discover that the taste of pulverized formica is "the good stuff" when put on top of a toasted slice of bread and under the layer or otherwise pretty cheap blueish jelly...
And it should have been the same four year old me who should have been fascinated by something that sticks to my teeth and palate...
But I grew up in the southern Poland, not in the south of the United States, so when American children were having their cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I had my bread with butter and Cabanossy, or maybe Krupniok, or Leberwurst. There were days that started with Kasza, and some that had to be the most horrible ones, as they were kicked off by a bowl of milk soup. (Yuck.)
Eating meat products for breakfast was a serious luxury, of course... but don't we all like to remember the best of times?
So today was the very first time that I enjoyed Peanut-butter and Jelly on toasted Ray bread... what will happen to me next? Will I order a BLT? or even try to enjoy marshmallows? It really appears that my life is quite a serious scenic path on all levels... cheers.

A massive package of paper just hit the bottom of my door... outside there is the regular honking and the screeching sounds of the subway. I think we are back in Business, dear New York, I think we are back to a fairly regular Saturday...
Will I have a cheese omelette for breakfast today?, or should I wait for a few more days?...
How quickly can one be turned into one's own grandparents, who used to keep their money under their mattress and unbelievable amounts of canned food inside of the musty smelling closet?
I am considering adding a torchlight to my daily bag of wonder in which I carry my Powerbook, the mouse, the power supply, the mouse pad, the pens and pencils, erasers, a pocket sharpener, several sketchbooks, 4 Japanese brush pens (one with only water), a black Leica Minilux, several rolls of film (I am so analogue), the serious black swiss army knife (the ultimate size), printouts, forms, stuff... Yes it is a heavy bag and yes I carry it with me every day.
I am hoping to be able to cut out the laptop soon, as it is a heavy piece to lug around...
Hmm, let me walk over to the door and see what the New York Times has sent my way...
__
It is actually two papers. Yesterday's paper had not made it up the stairs, and so now I will need to catch up on looking at pictures and reading the captions. Not sure I will get to do much more. The amount of information appears massive.... ; )

Jade plants do not appear to rest at night. They look pretty much the same in the morning as they do at night. They are growing quite seriously. The ten new ones I separated from the mother plant are looking quite healthy still. They are developing roots and will be soon ready for some soil.
This little red plant which had been dead for several months and then shot out of the pot with three new activity centers also appears to not care if there is a sun or not.
What I thought was a Tiny Mystery Plant are actually five (!) Acacia trees. The oldest one is now about two feet tall. I had to administer the first pruning yesterday, just to slow the little guy down a bit.
Acacias seem to rest at night. All leaves are neatly folded and the plant will not open until the sun returns.
The first Ahuacatl (Avocado) Plant actually died. It was a very sad sight. The plant turned into a straight leafless black stick. I put another avocado pit into the pot, did not even cover it. The pit eventually (after 3-4 months maybe) split into two and I now have a new, much healthier little avocado plant. Avocados also seem to be resting at night. The leaves are all folded up, the plant closes up...
My rather large (about 4 feet now?) Potato plant, (Patti Potato... more about her some other time) also appears to be resting... (Leaves folded into a night position.)
I will now also take a short nap... and then continue with my tasks...

"So you will be only posting these little stories to your drawings?", Todd is back from Vancouver and we can again talk in person sometimes, not via ichatAV with me pacing around the room, shouting at my powerbook and him somewhere relaxed looking at the ocean.
Things have been a bit much in the last few weeks. All I end up at the end of the day is a square of virtual paper in a very moody Adobe Illustrator, a wacom tablet of the old sort and a thus slightly shaky virtual pen.
Last night the software and I stared at each other for a pretty long time, until I decided to walk over to my bookshelves again and to make another one of those crosswordpuzzled drawings. There was just nothing I could think of, no story of my own. Many of my friends must think I am avoiding them, or that I am going crazy. I ask for lunch plans and then have to cancel, ask for some time to relax and then am too stressed to keep my promise. Not a good thing... At least I know that it is temporary.
When I looked through some of the old emails and paper diary entries, there seems to be a pattern. I tend to go through phases of incredibly dense work, followed by phases of good and calm observation and learning. I guess it is a bit like swimming upstream, perhaps? And I will just need to keep swimming... Just try not to die somewhere upstream, or be eaten by bears...
So will I be posting anything beyond drawings and stories? Oh, absolutely. For my own sanity I will... or is there anybody actually reading this here?

It must be the combination of humidity and airconditioned air. All of the parkett tiles on the floor make every step like walking on egg shells. Crackly, crackly, crack. The flowers on the table are still alive, despite of their water being a bit foggy. The wild garden by my window has new light green tips, telling me that somebody grew again, or that everybody grew.
I do not feel as if I grew or kept myself alive very well.
Yes, the water in my vase of the day appears to be foggy. again...

the train, the night train, the chain of bright lights, the rushing through landscapes, the speed, the speed, the urgency, the rush, the heavy heavy rain, the mountain side, the tunnel, the distance, the distance, the distance, the headlights reflected in the silver stripes of the tracks, the rush, the rush, the rush, the speed, the speed, the speed...

A conversation. A bottle of bordeaux St Julien. An invigorating little snack. A whisper. A hand protecting the words from their reflection in the blur filled black window. A soothing rocking motion. An accidental brush of fingers. A very red red wine. A private space. Attention. Affection. Amorous tension. And then...

the rain, the rain, the rushing, the wind, the night, the steel on steel, the tunnel, the bridge, the valley, the light, the blur, the hundreds of wheels, the sparks from the wires, the high voltage electricity, the rush, the rush, the...

All of the above...

Made a dusty pile out of pillow shaped coal pills today. Cracked open a nascar branded white plastic bottle and added some of that odorless lighter fluid to my crude creation... Opened one of those little paper pockets with cardboard matches. Did not quite follow instructions, flipped over the cover, grabbed the head of one of the matches and pulled it out as if it were already hot and burning between my fingers. There, a soft whispered sound, a little flame, ready to go, ready to spread. Just a little magic touch of the flame and the coal sculpture and *wooopieee* larger flames jumped up for their wicked dance.
How could I ever forget how I loved to play with fire. I am a fire sign, after all. I would spend evenings playing with a single candle. I was a fire child. A single, fire loving boy, in an apartment with a sleeping father, a mother who was not there to watch me, as she had to teach a class of other probably also fire loving kids.
Imagine little me, all alone in an apartment with a gas powered stove, four open burners and a plastic melting oven. I had the matches, I had the "zimne ognie" (what is the name of these magnesium powder covered sticks that are called "cold fires" in Polish, but are anything but cold, are actaully able to burn holes into things, are actually able to melt into bizarre shapes when just brought together, those things that burn like little hand held suns on their far too short wire rods that get so hot one would want to just throw them at the carpet?)
I used to burn and melt and toast things almost daily. Once I discovered that it was possible to make nearly invisible yet quite destructive flames by burning mail polish remover drenched magazine cutouts, I spent entire afternoons watching landscapes and objects and sometimes just random photos with some strange looking politicians turn into incredibly light, incredibly black, incredibly brittle leaf like objects.
I was concerned about safety, of course. I would burn things only in the bathtub. The shower head was always ready to fight an out of control inferno.
Some more dangerous experiments involving combustive mixtures of chemicals took place in the safety of the always flushable toilet.
I was also the child that enjoyed a casual black snowfall in the kitchen, when a plastic cup turned into probably quite cancer causing airborn fallout.
I guess it was good to get all this out of my system before I was five or so. This way I did not try to blow things up once some more potent flamable objects became the rave with my friends in school. (I only heard some scary stories of some kids blowing off their limbs if they were lucky...)
I also remained quite cool when years later my otherwise peacefully organ playing friend Stefan would set up elaborate chain explosions, destroying entire armies of plastic soldiers in his little playhouse in his parents' backyard in Groß Auheim.
It was pretty much as if I had forgotten that I am a real fire sign until today.
I saw myself waving a paperplate at a pile of red glowing choals as if I were a desparate bird trying to take off with one far too short little wing.
I made the flames come back several times. Sparks drew little messages into the air. I watched the black coals go from black to red to almost white.
Oh, such simple pleasure, such deep satisfaction.
I will need to buy some really good candles. Maybe it could be the right time to take up a welding class?
I smell like a smoked ham right now. Happy, satisfied...
Do you like flames?

when drinking my green tea at lunch time, just a few blocks away from here, I closed my eyes and very actively listened to each one of the remaining senses. Holding the little cup in both my hands I felt the rough underside with the slightly cooler holding rim being in stark contrast to the hot ceramic on my left hand fingers. My right thumb found a little imperfection in the rim of the handy cup. I could not stop my skin from seeing this imperfection as a large interesting characteristic, as a unique fingerprint of this cup which would have allowed me to recognize it among a hundred others without this mark. The rim in general was glazed and smooth. My upper lip touched a glossy surface, while the lower lip met with the roughness of stoneware. This is also when the heat of the tea welcomed my face. The temperature felt just perfect. Maybe 60C maybe a little more. Not a temperature I would like to spend a lot of time in, but just the perfect temperature for green tea to enter my body.
The smell of the tea was very distinct as well. It was not really the smell of a beverage. It smelled like the back of a clean hand of a loved one perhaps? Such a good and familiar and yet distinct smell, or the feeling of a smell.
I slowly sipped a little of the liquid. A tiny bit, really, not a lot. It felt as if my body had been preparing for this moment. It was such nourishment, such good vibration that went through not-described areas under my skin all over my body. I let the tea travel through my mouth. A small, measured amount of warm, delicious, nourishing liquid. I hesitated a bit, then swallowed the elixir. I heard how my body accepted the tea with a whole sequence of unique sounds. I felt how the liquid traveled through me, radiating little shock-waves of good.
I leveled the cup, moved it away from my mouth. Still felt the temperature of the vessel, still felt the little imperfection under my thumb, still smelled the seductive body, still tasted the delicious nourishing liquid...
It was then that I opened my eyes.
The cup in my hands, the lightly greenish tea with little floating particles of leaves, the dark brown outside of the cup, the crackled green glaze on the bottom of it, the light spot with missing glaze on the rim, the steam coming from the cup... the sight of them all took over my perception. Everything was there in front of me, beautiful, subtle, and yet somehow louder than what I had just experienced...
What I now saw was still the same object with the same liquid, but it felt as if the other senses did not want to compete with my sense of sight. Seeing is such an overwhelming, such a strong experience. It is sometimes quite beautiful to have the luxury and time to play blind and to listen to what the other senses have to say...

Phone conversations with my father are like two streams of consciousness flowing together to make a powerful stream. My father likes to be a serious and very wild river of thought. I like to listen and laugh. He reminded me today of how he used to teach me how to draw by recommending to draw circles until I see something that makes sense. Or maybe some straight lines, just to get the feeling for the drawing tool. He would more often make me draw circles though. (I really wanted to learn to draw as well as he did. So I would always bug him about drawing in general.)
I remembered our little exercises and began with drawing circles on circles on circles while on the phone with him.
I ended up with the drawing below... I emailed it to him right away and he had a really good laugh. And so did I...
Gosh, blogging under the influence again... ; )

It really all started with circles... Here the Outline view of this particular image. (Yes, drew it in Adobe Illustrator.)
Wow, why am I even posting this?... ; )

some aphorisms:

Der Pater: Ihr seid Manschenfresser, ihr Neuseeländer.
Neuseeländer: Und ihr seit Gottfresser, ihr Pfaffen.

The : You New Zealanders are cannibals.
New Zealander: And you clerics are Godeaters.

(the above was written some time between 1789 and 1793)

"Gottfresser" is such a strong word... Godeater does not quite give it justice... or does it? (fressen is not to eat... it is to devour...)

life sometimes turns into a single point of , so tiny and dim, so barely there... just a single... it.
then it can unfold and turn into the thinnest silky strands, like hair, long hair quite deep below a glistening surface of an ocean.
then clouds of strings, as if paint first met a glass of cold clear water. A body almost, an illusion of one perhaps?
At times there're solid ribbons of life, rich and ornate and strong.
Then there are sheets of interwoven fabric, silk perhaps, sometimes, then again a carpet, and...
Thick curtains, lush heavy softness, the colors somehow...

Then solid metal, a wire, a string, a rope...

quicksilver,

platinum,

led...

and again layers and layers of translucent skin,
a wind?,
an upward movement?
edible air?
a sweet pure thought?

which one of the many shall we ever wish for?
where are the words that say: life?
could they possibly be hidden between these layers and layers
and layers of layers?

Something in the air is making me feel like a bit of a winner this morning. What could it possibly be? Maybe the dream I had, which included a meeting with some of my old friends? Or was ist just the time I spent sleeping. Two hours more than the usual 5 hours of rest?
Today does not quite feel like Monday. But I can imagine that this bubble is bound to burst in just a few air conditioned hours.
Good morning... what time is it?...

Another Tuesday, ladies and gentlemen, the day when visitors come to this page, maybe because they were able to survive a monday? It could also be that Tuesdays are just days when search engines send out their bots to read all the things we write and look at all the things we managed to collect. I do not know. It would make sense. The German word for Tuesday is "Dienstag" which very much feels like a marriage of Dienst (service, ministration) and Tag (day.)
What a perfect day to do check up on things... and not only if the Sunday (Sonntag) was sunny, which it was. (Yes, something is telling me that the right side of my brain is not in today and the left side is obviously also running late.)

It really does feel like it. My brain feels like a giant cotton ball that somebody stuck into my scull, for the time while my actual brain, the friend whom I know longest, is out for a thorough cleaning or something. Wash, rinse, spin? My thoughts are not very organized as it is, but the cotton ball just does not do as good of a job as my original, sly less bleached matter did.
I did not recognize myself in the mirror last night. There are large mirrors where I looked. There was a man staring back at me, who looked as if he were somehow related to me, but he was definitely not me. I tried to calculate the years. Did another seven pass? 7,14,21,28... 35... no, not yet... so what the heck is going on?
A cotton ball is soft and certainly well wired, but please, if you come across the ticket from the cleaners, please let me know where I left my brain.
I might need to read some Oliver Sacks again, just come to terms with what is going on up here on my top floor.
Good morning.

Just saw the sky and it is so incredibly spectacular and saturated and beautiful. There is a mark on one of the windows on the other side of the building. It was me, pressing my face against the glass, wanting to turn into a cloud of tiny particles that could forever just follow the sunset... It is comforting to know that one day at least a part of me will be just that. and maybe it will be two of me... one following the sunset while the other will rush around the planet just minutes ahead of sunrise.
Silly me, I think we all make the sunrises and sunsets the way they are already by just being part of this eco system, by breathing, by evaporating little by little, every day... an even more comforting thought.

Where the heck was I while this band made all the albums with all the songs? How could I have missed a band that named themselves after one of my very favorite writers?... And it is not even the Rilke poems I love, but some of the short stories of which I do not even know if they exist in English... Oh dear, they do not even appear to be available in German... Hmm... Or do you know an English translation of "Die letzten"? Should I perhaps translate the story for here?... Once I get home, which might be tomorrow?...
Obviously "Rainer Maria" is not Rilke, but it is still a really good thing to not only stumble into a whole world of music I really like, but also to make it remind me of the literature on my shelf at home which I forgot that I actually really missed a lot.
Hmm... found via Leah, who has one of the best about her pages out there. (Though my favorite "about" page might actually be the one of rebecky. Who is neither forty, nor a , of course.)
Where is my about me page, you ask?... Wandered completely off topic now, haven't I? Hmm... let's be honest, this is a personal site, I can not just keep posting little stories with drawings... (though I am not going to stop that, promise.)

the batteries claim they will last for another 15 minutes or so. There is so much I would like to write now, but I will never be able to pack it in 15 minutes.
Well, not really... it is just an excuse, an easy way out by looking sideways. There will be a lot of catching up to do... so many emails to reply to, so many drawings to be posted... hello weekend...
Now I feel like an American TV station (okay, some). Not offering any real programming, just procrastination and announcements. "Stay tuned, find out more, hear the full story, the shocking, breaking, exclusive news... when we return... to announce more... right after these important messages..."
hmm... later today, okay?... for now, "enjoy the encore presentation of our favorite on demand programming. Anything you want When you want it." (Just scroll down the page...)
; ) (Sorry, had to write this some day...)

Two birds were having a strange dialogue before sunrise. They were telling each other the same two stories, again and again and again and again. The stories had nothing to do with each other, perhaps. But maybe they were looking for their continuations? Maybe they were the beginnings of stories that waited for the next, missing part. Andno bird was there to tell it. Two storytellers who spent an entire morning looking for what is next in their stories.
And there was nobody to continue, nobody to reply, nobody to comment...
I know, an overly romantic view at things. What sounds like a birds song to me is probably more of a "My left foot hurts and I am hungry", or "Get off my tree or I will pick you so hard, you won't be able to fly," or maybe "Hey ladies, look at me, I can build the finest nest and have the loudest voice and largest wingspan."
Hmm... pretty much like blogging, isn't it?...

I remember that evening of November 9th 1989. I was alone in my good old horizon blue Mercedes, returning from Offenbach, to Hanau. I had just turned onto a straight piece of the road, the railroad tracks to the right, some dark, sleepy houses to the left. The old blaupunkt radio was on, so was the heat, the engine made this purring relaxed sound, we were cruising. The announcer on the radio interrupted the broadcast. I do not quite remember what he said exactly. It was something about the Berlin Wall coming down, or the border between Eastern and Western Germany being opened. I do not quite remember what the announcer said. I just remember that I immediately had tears on my cheeks, my immediate reaction was to cry. I was alone in that same car, driving on that same road, except things were blurry now, I was crying as if somebody had removed an incredible weight off my chest and told me to go home.
We had escaped from Poland less than 10 years prior to that evening, the world was now a different one, suddenly, without a proper warning. So many of the fears and limitations had been turned into a page of a history book within seconds. For me, personally, in that purring car between Offenbach and Hanau. The world changed indeed. I do not know how I could explain how deep the emotions were that swept upon us back then in Germany in the days following the announcement. On both sides of the previously impenetrable border there was joy and an indescribable outpour of human emotion in general. I can not think of any comparison or description of what we were feeling. It was such a raw and just unscripted real emotion. It was incredible.
The reason I am remembering this moment and trying to remember what it felt like to be in a suddenly soon to be reunited Germany, is what happened today. (Well, yesterday.)
58.5% of the Polish population voted in a referendum today (and yesterday). 77% of those who went to the ballots voted for a united Europe, voted for Poland joining the European union. 22 years after we escaped from a Poland that was about to declare Marshal Law on itself, that same country is about to become a state in a union that will include what we called the "Zachod". I should be really touched again. Poland will be part of Europe, a peaceful decision, a choice of the people, an idea impossible in 1981, an idea somehow natural in 2003.
There is barely any mention about this incredible event in the American media, of course. It is understandable, there is an entire ocean between here and there. There is actually a quite good article in Times this morning. (Also take a look at the BBC-News article.)
Only a very private perspective allows me to compare the fall of the Berlin Wall with the decision of the majority of the Polish population to join the European Union. The climate of both decisions is a completely different one, of course, the decision is made in a very different world.
Hmm, a very personal, very private comparison of both events...
I guess they are both gigantic steps towards a more open world... does this make me compare them?...
Btw. If you do not know what happened on December 13th 1981, check the entry in this blog. Yes, there is one.

When on a walk on November 9th, last year I collected some strange looking seeds on the path to the bay. There were maybe two berries among the seeds maybe, one seed looked like a funny hat, some looked very much like little stones.
I put them all into a semi-clear 35mm film container, to maybe later put them into soil. I have no idea how this little container landed in the drawer of my night-stand, but this is where I found it, a week or so ago. Inside was a sour smell, sly fruity maybe, more like wine gone bad, there were some serious mold spores, the white camembert kind to go with it. There has been obviously some fermentation going on here, the little oxygen left in the container had been probably eaten up by the little mold plants. (Dear biologist, I am not one, please feel free to correct my caveman-assumptions.)
I emptied the container into one of my "experiments and found things" flower pots. It is a pot with good soil into which I drop some of the remains of plants which for some miraculous reason might have survived the pre-supermarket radiation treatment and which I could as well just throw out...
I covered the seeds with barely any soil, I moved the one with white fur into a deeper indentation in the ground. And I forgot about these fellows again.
It was yesterday that I noticed a little three inch tall plant, in a very joyful spring green lurk its two wings from the blackish soil. The wings were leaves of course, but they appeared as if they were something else. It appeared as if they were protecting something between them. The plant grew over an inch since yesterday and I can now see that the two leaves were indeed somehow just there to protect a more fragile content from being bruised as the tree-to-be poked through the surface of the soil. The two fleshy leaves are now open, the seemingly main portion of the plant appears for now to be four leaves, each one of them consisting of about 18sub-leaves. It feels like an incredible miracle. I do not have a camera that would allow me to post an image here right away. I tried to draw the little buddy, but it is not easy due to its size. I put the largest magnifier onto my camera lucida (12x) and attached the 19th century tool to the wacom tablet connected to Adobe Illustrator. Without being able to really monitor what I am doing, I at least tried to trace the proportions of this new guest. (12x was too strong actually, I ended up using 10x).
As I was drawing the outlines of the new tree, I was so close to the flower pot that I could smell the moist black soil. And it reminded me of the smell of the forest in which I had found the seeds seven months ago. If plants could smell...
But they can certainly take in nutrients. Maybe what I smell is what makes the little buddy go.
I will need to take pictures... just won't be able to post them right away...

instead of going deeper into interesting matters, there appears to be a series of little jumps over the last few days, again and again we go, skipping four days almost of drawings to be posted. And there are more activities right outside the window, there is more going on under the waves. It might be time to get back to that. ; ) (just saying...)

"Film mi sie urwal..." My would use this expression, which is Polish and means "My film just tore...", whenever he would fall asleep in front of the television set, or just on the chair, or on the sofa, or just anywhere. He would just fall asleep out of nowhere, it bordered on narcolepsy.
My used to work in a coal mine, underground, often in nightshifts. We also had a nicer apartment, because sometimes this special truck would pick up my and some of the neighbors and they would speed away, syrens howling, to work in a fire, somewhere in a coal mine. He explained to me how fires are extinguished underground when I was four or so... and even though I had some nightmares about it for a little while, I think I eventually accepted that coal is more important than lives. (Extinguishing a fire in a coal mine in most cases meant to build air tight walls around the burning area. The bodies would be retrieved later...)
So my dad was really overworked most of the time, he would just fall asleep on me, in the middle of a conversation sometimes. One more reason why I would draw so much as a child... it is a very quiet activity after all.
I am writing this because I just woke up, sitting on the sofa, just as I sat down on that same sofa last night. The tv was not on. My film still ripped, the world I saw as I opened my eyes was a blurry foreign place.
I am now about as old as my dad was when he used to pass out. I certainly do not have to rescue miners out of burning coal mines. I do not have to work the nightshift. Maybe age has something to do with it as well...
Good morning. I am writing this also, because we are here alone again. The masses from the first day of the publication of "The Scar" seem to have moved on. I think it will be a little easier for me to write again. (What a silly entry...)

There was a car accident on 49th and 9th. A car cut off a cabby. There were big yellow streaks on the side of the black car. The driver did not want to deal with it, it seemed, neither did the cabby. The men just shook hands and continued their journeys.
At the amish market, the sandwich man made a very bad joke:
"We have a special tonight: the Honeymoon Salad. It is Lettuce alone and no dressing." hmm...
A puddle of dried blood with a very fresh glowing red center was being ignored by pedestrians on 46th between 6th and 7th. The Ambulance was there already. Somebody was being kept alive.
The Harvard Club has a new addition to it. The man in the elevator (the one in brown socks in sandals) was very excited about the new extension of the building.
Eliot Spitzer gave an excellent (intelligent and entertaining) speech..
I was the only man in the entire building who did not wear a tie and a jacket.
Hmm, it barely mattered... after a while and some wine.
Forgot my power supply at the office. One battery is empty now. The other has barely 30 minutes left. Going to get some real sleep instead.
Please take care of yourself tonight. Okay?
Code Orange again. Will it ever turn to green?

As I was looking through my drafts folder, looking for a little piece I started a few months ago, I came across this little fragment:

It looks as if the wind had had great fun whisking the pink layer of clouds across the bright blue sky. The sun is setting now and the colors are turning more dramatic by the minute. Soon the now colorful clouds will be just dark shadows, empty areas in the carpet of stars. The last boats are crossing the bay. Their s are on. Their engines seem louder than usual. Large passenger ships seem to be pasted on the edge of the horizon. I can see three now. All of them are facing south. One by one there are little s visible in the windows of the buildings around the bay. Each one of the s turned on by someone who thought that it was time. The s here are off still, but it is time. It is time. I will turn on the in a few seconds. And then for others around the bay this place will turn into a tiny man made star on the façade of a building. Good Evening Sunny Isles.

I am not really good at relaxing. Relaxing makes me nervous. And I can not relax unless I stop relaxing and do something, even if the ?something? is some sort of relaxation. (11/30/02/6pm)

Many readers of this blog really seem to like Victor Stripey Hugo (He is the one with "witold" in the picture. He is a sock dog, he is a one of a kind guy, hand made by the incredibly talented Anna of Absolutely-vile.com. So while I can not quite share the actual toy with you. (VSH is busy protecting the house.) I can still share images or maybe some tiny little pictures for your desktop. So here we go, I made two little icons of Stripey for you, dear reader. You can download them and use them for your private icon needs. They are a gift for you. They are not for sale. They are not to be used commercially.
I can not guarantee they will look good on your desktop. If they do, please send links to screenshots. If they do not, please let me know. I am not sure I will be able to fix anything, but I could try.
The icons work probably best in Mac OS X. The largest picture below is the actual size of the actual icons. If you do not have the newest Macintosh operating system, you can still use the icons. You will only get to see the tiny size though. (Until you upgrade or Switch.)
I also made versions for Windows™XP®. I do not have this operating system here, so I have no idea what the little sock dog will look like on your PC™®. (Let me know...)
Again. I am not responsible if you decide to delete all files on your hard drive to make room for the dog. I also can not take any responsibility if the dog bites or pees or does other funny things (no, wait, he will not, he is a sock dog turned into two little icons). He is a virus free animal (as long as you get him here). He was originally hand made by Anna of absolutely-vile.com and then drawn for you on my little PowerBook by me.

Macintosh users: Sitting Stripey or Standing Stripey.
Windows users: Sitting Stripey or Standing Stripey.
If you would like to know how to use the icons on windows and or would like to get more icons, visit dotico.com, I think it is a division of The Iconfactory, one of the greatest sites for mac users. So if you are a mac user, make sure to visit The Iconfactory. (They are also the makers of iconbuilder pro, the filter used to turn Stripey into a desktop icon. I could just go on and on about The Iconfactory, but you probably are not even reading anymore, but playing with your sock dog. I am happy for you.
Enjoy your own desk top sock dog. Have a great week.

My sight sight Ht night Ht night RIGHT WRIST hurts quite a bit so I decided to me this Appu inkped tedmgy to write tm's post with ng uA howl HAND on a wacom tablet lt 1h N my sbw ml it does not M< 100% IT IS ALL VERY SLOW AND DOES NOT WORK 100% AAAAARGH! H took me 10 Mimuts to write Mis! WRITE THIS! DO I HAVE To CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING 1% ORDER FOR IT TO WORK? GRRR...

Layers upon layers upon layers are between me and the cold. And yet we still shake hands. She sneaks into my gloves, both pairs of them and touches the fingertips just sly at first and then she grabs them one by one. Then the kisses on my face, the tip of my nose, the cheeks, she sucks on my lips. Enough already. She finds a place where I did not tuck in my sweaters under my jackets and her hand goes right there, straight onto my skin, straight for my back, right there. Oh please. I pull my hat over my face. Nobody can recognize me now but her. She still goes for my neck, she still embraces my legs, she even... well, you know.
So I just go from door to door to door, trying to avoid her advances. But once inside, for too long, I miss her.
Winters are really tough in New York.

Waking up in the middle of the night is not always a beautiful thing. Yes, amazon.com is open and the mac is listening to various radio stations, yes, the city does not ever sleep. Broadway just called through the open window. “Come, play with us, we are up all night.” Police cars and the trucks with fresh deliveries from upstate and north Jersey rush by the windows. The sky just turned dark purple again. And because there will be plenty of work on my plate today, I will need to force myself back into the land that can only be entered with the eyes closed. Now, please, I would like to go back. Show me what my mind is digesting. Thank you. Let’s go back, shall we? Good morning, good night. Just two more hours, please.

Having my very first (this year), very special, not so happy allergy “attack”. Nothing too wild, except that I can not see with one (left) eye and it looks as if the skin around my iris would like to burst any second now, oh, and I can not close my eyelid. Nothing serious really. Not both eyes. It does not hurt anymore, at least not the way it did just a few minutes ago. So things are turning for the better. I completely forgot about my allergies. They got so much better here in New York. Did I mention that this is one more reason why I love this city? It does not give me 10% as many allergies as I used to get in Hanau, in Germany. There in mid May, cars get a neat coat of yellow pollen. I remember not being able to breathe, bad asthma attacks. It is not a good thing when it is so difficult to breathe that the things begin to dim and that there is this certain mild sense of panic.
My allergies were gone completely once I moved to New York. They were really gone. I did not realize that I spent the first two years in an office, working like a madman, 16 hours a day. Every day. Nature was the picture on my desktop. So once I started to understand that this “life” will cost me my life, and once I started to get out of the office again, the allergies came back. Not as harsh as in Germany or in Poland, not quite so bad.
The swelling on my eye got better already. I am able to close the lid now. Tiny happy pleasures. Closing the eyelid is certainly one of them. There is this famous Adam Mickiewicz quote, the first few lines from Pan Tadeusz - Ksiega I

Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jestes jak zdrowie;
Ile cie trzeba cenic, ten tylko sie dowie,
Kto cie stracil. Dzis pieknosc twa w calej ozdobie
Widze i opisuje, bo tesknie po tobie.

Or in (almost plain) English:

O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

Not that I have lost Lithuania (guess why my name is Witold?), or lost health, it is just in moments when the body overreacts, or plays some tricks on me that I remember that whatever we perceive as the background, the status quo, the day to day body experience is quite a miracle we should always be thankful for. Really. Being able to walk and talk, me being able to write this, you being able to read this. It all is quite a great, fantastic, unbelievable miracle. This is why it is incredibly important to see the beauty in the tiniest, most normal things.
Swelling almost completely gone.
Now I can think much more clearly. Or so I think.

Skipping a day is usually not a good sign. When I wrote my “diaries” as a child, or tried to keep my regimen of a certain amount of drawings in any 24 hour period, skipping a day usually meant the beginning of the end. Looking back into the books, there was always a day skipped, then an apology for having skipped the day and then nothing. Nothing for pages and pages, up to the next book, the next diary, which would be triggered by some On Kawara event. Most of the skipped days happened to be in January.

I actually wanted to write a lot yesterday, but then the things I wanted to write just seemed so banal, so unnecessary. (Not that what I am writing now is terribly necessary.) It felt good to just draw again and scan and read, without posting and writing and telling.
The watch place from Frankfurt left a message on the machine that my watch is ready and that they will send it via mail (they did not trust FedEx, and no convincing worked. It will be German Mail, Einschreiben versichert) I had given my good old black ORIS alarm to Juvelier Pletsch in Frankfurt in December of last year. There was nothing wrong with the watch, it is just a mechanical piece that needs lubrication every two years or so. My Oris alarm had not been opened since 1996. The winder was almost stripped of chrome, and there seemed to be some resistance whenever the alarm needed to be set. (It is a wrist alarm, a minimal mechanical PDA.) My ORIS wrist alarm will be 10 years old soon, but only on the outside. The reason why I had bought the watch in the first place was its strange age discrepancy. The mechanism that runs the watch was built in 1969 by A.Schild, the same year when I was born, and ORIS bought the last contingent of these mechanisms and repackaged them in 1988. Giving the watch in to Pletsch, I knew that there would be some sort of complication, because the watch was such a limited item with a very limited amount of spare parts. (It was this moment when the entire store came by to take a look at the thing). And even though there was nothing really wrong with the watch, the Watchmakers concluded that the ORIS needs to be sent home to Biel in Switzerland to get a new glass and a new electroplating on the entire housing. At this moment it was pretty clear that this was a serious adventure for the watch. ORIS obviously did not have new housings anymore and so the entire watch needed to be taken apart, stripped to the brass and re-chromed. Everything. The winders the lugs, all of it. Then the new glass... No wonder the whole procedure took four months, during which some Swiss specialist must have done the job by hand. (His left hand probably behind his back.) I hope everything will be fine, because it is impossible to find a black ORIS wrist alarm anywhere. Not even google or eBay could provide a picture, so I will need to scan it in when it arrives. Does it really matter though? How obsessed can one get with a watch? I need to stop, right now. Sorry for that.
What really happened is perfectly described by Claire in her Loobylu blog. There is a serious amount of fear in me. I have this strange feeling that I am not doing enough. That I am not working enough, that the things I make are so far from the standard that I want to achieve that it will just take too long to get there for me to actually ever get there. Tom and I had this whole long email discussion in which I must have concluded several times that I will need to go back into advertising and just continue my drawing as a side entertainment. But I do not want to be some old Creative Director who will sit in front of a blank canvas with freshly bought oils, completely out of ideas and scared like a rabbit. The whole reason why I went into design was out of fear. I did not want to fail right away. I needed to convince my parents quickly that it was possible to survive on this stuff I was doing. This whole drawing thing.
I remember this little interview a friend of my ’s friend had arranged for me with the head of graphics of ZDF, the largest TV station in Germany. I had my little portfolio and I was full of fear. He looked through my work, which had nothing to do with design, nothing; and just started telling me how they just bought these new Computers, Paintboxes, which make a designer up to six times faster. Up to six times. Not the computer was six times faster than anything. The Designer was six times faster. He concluded that I should take the path of commercial design. The art thing could be some sort of hobby I could pick up when I retire. Six times faster.
I did not quite understand that the “faster” was a trap, set for me by life, and I walked right into it. From now on things had some timer attached to them. The faster the better. It took me a while to understand that it might matter in some environments, but it is the opposite of good in others. Making a thing faster does hardly make it better. It should not really matter sometimes how long it takes to make a thing and certain things neeed to take a whole lifetime or even longer to find a state even close to complete. It often feels as if it took a lifetime to be born. Some of us never manage to really give birth to themselves. Some just get by, almost born, drugged out by their surroundings. They run really quickly to nowhere.
I clearly need to start a new day now. This writing makes me a bit depressed.

There is a great strategy employed by Camper, the great little Shoe brand from Mallorca in Spain. Whenever they open one of their new stores, and they usually try to open them in high quality areas, they do not wait for the grand opening, they do not wait for everything to be clean in the store, to be prepared for the first customer. Once Camper gets the lease for a store, once they get the keys, once the phone works, they pull out the shoes and start selling. And they just close little portions of the store, or work at night to build that place. And so they sell shoes as they build the store. This is a bit how I feel now. The move is basically done. I have migrated all of my almost 300 ramblings into movable type. Movable type has a completely different way of thinking than blogger. It is going to take quite a while until I understand what I am doing here. Please have some patience. I really want to make this blog a good one. My old blog was missing interaction. Users could not really leave any real feedback. Some of the readers would write me comments which I would post as new revelations. How much nicer would it be if each one of you could just reply to what I write here?
Well, now you can. Each entry is a separate item and so below this entry there is a little comment form. Go ahead, say something. Another thing were the permalinks. I could just not figure them out. There were some archives somewhere, which were basically a strangely broken page. This is much better now. Because each entry is its own page, it becomes possible to link to each one of the entries. Then there is XML. I do not even know what XML really is.
And this is just one of the things which I do not yet understand. Blogger worked with an HTML template. When I started writing my blog, I knew what was possible in HTML, knew all this, but I had always worked with Content Engineers and programmers and information architects. Tom told me how to make a link. Josh told me how to set a target for a page. I was using Tom’s cascading stylesheets. Movable type runs on CSS... when I imported this page into GoLive, it looked nothing like what I expected it to look like. So all I managed today was to add a little accent on top of the page, to add the familiar links on the side. CLicking on the top bar links to the homepage as well. I know this blog does look nothing like the rest of the page. This will change over time. I need some time, some help for sure... But eventually all will be ok again, only this time more user friendly, much better organized. And there are so many more entries which still need to be added... so much more to happen.

So here we are. A new place. Everything is movable, especially the type. Everything can be set in motion here. A beautiful little place. Suddenly it is possible to post comments and to link to files and do all the crazy things not possible before. They probably were possible, it is just that I had not the sest clue how to make them happen. And now...

Leaving the house... No blogs until later tonight... but then plenty. (I hope)