Notes from the End of a WorldEach night in 2020 I wrote a short post because I wanted to etch these strange days into my memory before I forget them. Before the world changed completely.
Each night in 2020 I wrote a short post because I wanted to etch these strange days into my memory before I forget them. Before the world changed completely.
Cathedral
Now begins the season of Arvo Pärt and private hymns for a better year.
Ash
“The bottom line is we’re all prisoners of the universe.” This becomes the coda for Jia Zhangke’s Ash is Purest White, where a dangerous romance downshifts into existential longing.
Bookends
I try to imagine what I would have thought if someone had described the decade to come while we watched Obama wave from his motorcade.
Silence
Today I came across the phrase “algo-seance scene” and realized I’m losing track of not only the future but the present.
Information
I try to see the world through my father’s eyes, his sense that everything looked like science fiction.
Consolation
I wonder what the effect will be in the long run, bearing witness to so much handwritten pain. “First let this be consolation,” she says. “Then let it be courage.”
Nostalgia
Korpo, Finland. I remember believing the world would make sense when I grew older. But it never did, and it probably won’t.
Intoxicated
For years I’ve nursed elaborate fantasies of living in a remote cabin or better yet a double-wide in the Mojave desert. But would isolation make me more sensible?
Screens
I want to commune with nature but I do not know how. Some lizard-brained part of me wants to pull out my telephone and look for new headlines, new information.
Crying
The tears of things. If I squint at this phrase a certain way, I catch a glimpse of how I might better relate to grief.
January 11, 2020
The priest apologized for the warm weather. “This new climate is beyond me,” he said.
January 12, 2020
I went to a 700-year-old church on Sunday morning and the service was purely tonal because I don’t understand Finnish. It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard.
Cabin
I stared at the empty cabins along the shore, half-wondering if I was still dreaming about my father.
Scale
I came across moments in the forest that felt ceremonial, the ancient rites of geology operating at scales beyond my comprehension.
Retreat
This season is defined by muted Bergman films projected on the wall in the hour of the wolf.
Solitude
It seems perverse that a deeper sense of community would come from living someplace remote rather than among the crowds of the city.
January 17, 2020
The idea cohered on the train somewhere between Turku and Helsinki: take a photograph and write at least three sentences every day.
January 18, 2020
Alone in Helsinki. The sky is pure gloom with rain that hangs in the air, refusing to fall.
January 19, 2020
Looking at the sky tonight, I think about the philosophers who believed the stars were rational creatures and the sun could sing.
Past
Whenever I come across Goethe’s maxim that architecture is frozen music, Helsinki is what I see.
January 21, 2020
I was shaken by Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Finnish National Gallery.
January 22, 2020
I remember smoking a cigarette in the subzero wind while watching the lights of freighters on the horizon. I thought we were at the edge of the earth.
Maybe religion and weather are intertwined.
Meanwhile, China has quarantined a city of eleven million people with more cities to follow.
January 24, 2020
People sweep through the galleries, looking at the paintings only through the screens of their phones. Taking pictures is how we see the present moment.
Turbulence
The turbulence began the moment we entered American airspace. It was hard not to read this as an omen.
Rotation
We talked about not staying in New York. We talked about finding a way back to Helsinki and we discussed moving to Taipei.
Hidden
I closed the book and watched everyone on the subway swiping and scrolling, hunting for something. Or escaping.
Glitch
The mathematical precision of these birds looked improbable. Maybe it was a sign of some cosmic change, a hidden pattern made visible.
Light
Finding lightness becomes the job. And if it cannot be found, it must be invented.
Static
These are destabilizing days when there always seems to be a screen playing something upsetting in the room.
January 31, 2020
Long-simmering anxiety has a new focal point, a new excuse for indulging in much darker fears. Borders are being closed.
February 1, 2020
No wonder so many religions began in the desert. The raptures and visions of the ancients were the most rational response to so much sky.
February 2, 2020
I wonder if deep down each of carries a fantasy of one day becoming an ascetic or a mystic, some hardwired notion of stripping our lives bare and praying in the gloom.
Seeing
Walking down street tonight, I find myself paying closer attention to shadow and light, reminding myself that yes, this is plenty.
Change
New York City. The skyline stopped me in my tracks this afternoon, reminding me that I live in an increasingly alien city.
Boot
My eighty-year-old German neighbor and I picked at our omelettes while a television in the corner of the diner delivered the vote count.
Twilight
‘Civil twilight’ is an elegant term for the moment just before the sun sinks beneath the horizon. It might be a fitting name for these strange years.
Decision
I scroll down the aisles of the office supply store, soothed by the racks of folders, binders, and containers that promise an organized and efficient life.
Badlands
Strange how I’m embarrassed to write our president’s name, a name that looks like an obscenity on the page. Maybe it’s because I thought we deserved a worthy villain.
Clutter
I catch a glimpse of a beloved actor from the 1980s smiling across three flatscreens in an empty lobby, encouraging everyone to triple reverse-mortgage their homes.
Powerball
The only noise tonight is the highway and it sounds like the sea.
Dreams
Waking up this morning, the world doesn’t feel much different from the illogic of sleep.
Stranger
Nearly every advertisement on the subway trumpets the virtue of having your favorite meals, outfits, entertainments, mattresses, and toothbrushes delivered straight to your door.
Ghost
The first gods must have been born while we slept.
Future
A vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire, determined to walk.
Blue
Why are so many visions of the future cast in cool tones? Blues and greys, whites and silvers.
February 16, 2020
The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.
Eye
Sharks have a transparent membrane that allows them to see despite the blood and carnage that fills the water when it attacks.
Love
I remember sitting in a cathedral on a snowy February morning and watching an elderly couple hold hands.
Event
Debate night in America. We tune in because we need to know: Who can withstand the punishment of live television?
Perfect
A man studies yesterday’s horoscopes on the train. He carefully highlights a line that says today is the day to take action.
Bow
Billboards along Interstate 90 tell me that God owes us nothing, love is an action verb, and the key to forgiveness was hung on the cross.
Pattern
The machine says tens of millions of people will flood into Las Vegas as well as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston.
Virus
She scrolls through websites that sell protective face masks while I half-watch a conspiratorial documentary about our hyper-mediated world.
Salmiakki
Meanwhile the television says things like “jawbone damage may occur” and “America’s most trusted home surveillance system.”
Jabs
Instructional videos at the train station teach me how to behave in 2020. If there’s gunfire, take cover. Silence your cellphone.
Cross
Ash Wednesday and people walk the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted.
Scribble
A consultant from Brussels asked everyone to draw the shape of their lives on a Post-It note. I made a scribble and people began approaching me as if I’d scrawled a cry for help.
Crash
A woman was visibly upset in aisle six because they’re out of antibacterial hand-wipes. “But when will there be more?” I’m still thinking about the look in her eyes.
February 29, 2020
“The beginnings of Dada were not art but disgust,” said Tristan Tzara in 1918.
Hills
These are days of hand sanitizing lotion and being told to sing “Happy Birthday” twice in your head while washing your hands.
March 2, 2020
Tonight I crave the cadence of the desert. Groom Lake. Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range. Devil’s Hole. Epic names that speak of salvation and redemption.
Tuesday
Another chapter in this endless season of passive-aggressive battles in hotel lobbies and gyms, their flatscreens cycling between Fox News and CNN.
One of the finest things I own is a lamp.
One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a long sword.
Sanitizer
We wash our hands constantly like we’ve done something wrong. We try not to touch our faces.
March 6, 2020
Once again, the question that haunts me when I approach any kind of altar: Am I allowed to pray before you if I don’t understand you?
March 7, 2020
The brittle energy of coronavirus anxiety commingled with ritualized decadence. Face masks and champagne stations.
March 8, 2020
Went to an exhibition about the countryside that felt like walking into a Wikipedia entry written under the influence of heavy-duty stimulants.
Pantheon
The house of all the gods.
Denial
A note on Barnett Newman’s portrait of “the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without end.”
Spike
Meanwhile in New York City, we’re told the subway is safe but we should avoid taking it.
Storm
The streets hum with a hunter-gather energy that brings to mind the days before a hurricane. Except there is no storm, only the prospect of staying indoors.
Closed
I’m beginning to understand the street preachers and late night radio voices who root through arcane numerology and biblical verses that implicate Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United Nations.
March 14, 2020
I needed to work with my hands today. To be reminded that I can make something that takes up space and serves a need.
Distance
I run through Central Park, passing joggers with balaclavas and kerchiefs wrapped around their faces like they’ve been throwing Molotov cocktails.
Vigilance
Riffling through an old box of keepsakes, I came across a note that I wrote to her five years ago.
An echo of those first days and weeks after losing my mother.
These are long days of suspension. For a moment I convince myself that everything is just fine. That I must have imagined the whole thing.
Quiet
There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three.
Hothouse
Tonight I sympathize with Will Durant’s wistful sketch of Rousseau: “He escaped from the stings of reality into a hothouse world of dreams.”
Artificial
There’s a blush of dopamine, an uncoiling of the nerves: the smudged memory of doing arts and crafts in a classroom while a storm beats against the windows.
Always do your best to wipe everything down.
Once this is over and we’re allowed to gather outside again, I hope we take to the streets for all kinds of reasons.
Blank
I spent the morning scrolling through images of empty highways and blank parking lots that look like a new form of land art or maybe a message to the gods.
Night
This is dedicated to the nighthawks and graveyard shifters, you beautiful enemies of sleep.
Six
A deeper hush fills the city, a sense of bracing for an unseen blow. We know things will get worse.
Kneel
I hear the undoing of a lock and her voice calling behind me. “Thank you, darling. Pray for me.”
Point
The optics feel wrong, more like a simulation than reality; it’s eerie to see New Yorkers so evenly spaced apart.
The Electrifying Mojo had the most reassuring voice I ever heard.
Every night the Electrifying Mojo would sign off with the same message, and I want us to hear it in our heads tonight.
March 28, 2020
Each headline is more disorienting than the last, and these pandemic days are breeding baroque conspiracies.
Grid
Meanwhile, I’m reverting to the diet of a five-year-old. All I want to eat are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
A burst of animal noise from a wounded city.
There’s the guy I’ve always wondered about, the one across the street who leaves big chunks of bread on the fire escape for the pigeons.
Shake
Don’t shake out your dirty laundry, the television says. You might release a viral cloud.
Passing
Passing each other on the sidewalk, we hold our breaths like children in a graveyard.
Doubt
Now they’re saying the virus spreads by talking and breathing. We can kill each other just by being a person.
Prediction
I thought I’d devote my energies to becoming pure and benedictine, brand new and all-seeing. Instead I scroll and refresh.
April 4, 2020
Sirens and cheers, these are the sounds that shape our days.
Park
We wear bandanas and scarves across our mouths like a haphazard gang or makeshift religion.
Lung
Dig the old lady who cut a tiny hole into her surgical mask so she can keep smoking her Benson & Hedges.
Space
And so much space there’s nothing to think about except something resembling god.
Like I’m about to commit a poorly-planned crime.
These days I walk to the market like I’m about to commit a poorly-planned crime.
The noise of humanity prevented God from sleeping.
Last night I dreamt about a god who was angry because the noise of humanity prevented him from sleeping.
The names of the lights overhead.
It seems like a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names of the lights overhead.
Saturday night during a pandemic.
Consider the word “ecstasy” in its strict sense, a Greek word that describes standing outside of one’s body.
Patient zero might have wiped it from the earth completely.
This season of suspension will forever tint the thoughts of all who survive it. Bright-line moments from recent memory cannot compare.
A time to rethink everything.
I stood at the window and watched raindrops slide down the glass like I was six years old again.
The grammar of dead casinos.
I remember walking through corridors of jumbled neon and thinking this was the poetry of the nation: the grammar of dead casinos.
Wednesday
Time blurs. Every day feels like it’s either Monday or Saturday.
Slow
Maybe I could become a Zen lesson in the art of presence, but it feels more like I have the attention span of a goldfish: understanding the world only nine seconds at a time.
Mouth
I can’t stop staring at this photograph. I study the woman’s mouth, teeth bared and jaw dropped, probably wrapped around a word like tyranny or freedom.
Reverb
I thought I’d dreamt about standing before my bookcase and picking up a copy of The Plague by Camus.
Interference
I find myself frequently returning to a century-old line from The Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along. Events will not tolerate your interference.”
Fugue
New York City. My attention span has been chewed up by the news.
Glacier
I remember the sound of white thunder, that bone-shuddering crack as another piece of a glacier fell into the sea.
Flowers
There should be a clinical term for the sensation of wanting to look at my phone while looking at my phone.
Ruins
Flipping through an old notebook last night, I came across a page dedicated to the first time I saw a painting by Hubert Robert.
Drain
Sometimes there’s poetry in anger, and I saw it scrawled across the street this afternoon.
April 25, 2020
Strange how something you’ve heard a thousand times can suddenly knock you over.
Glum
Maybe I should work on my resume. Instead, I press on with reading The Plague, dropping the book every few pages to marvel at its resonance.
Diner
Tonight I miss sitting in diners and listening to people murmur and jive, scraping their forks and stirring their coffee.
Smile
The smile is the expression that can be seen from farthest away.
Compound
Night walk to the corner bodega and I nearly forgot to wear my bandana.
Outline
I’m beginning to understand why so many novels and television shows are set in the past.
May 1, 2020
Time and again, I must learn that I can get ready for dinner and I can get ready for bed and not much else.
Saturday
I wonder if I’ll ever get accustomed to the uneasy combination of sunshine and masks, as if we’re afraid of a perfect spring day.
Scold
There are advertisements on street corners and bus stops for events that will never occur.
Coherence
My grandmother was tradition personified, a west side Polish Catholic who served Saturday night dinners of kielbasa and fried smelt.
Options
People keep talking about a return to “normal,” as if there’s such a thing.
March 6, 2020
It’s becoming a nightly habit: scrolling through desert scenery while fantasizing about horizons, speed, and possibilities.
Diners with fritzing neon that you can hear.
“Everything’s a mystery and I’m just another small part of it,” said a woman at a gas station in Barstow.
A ghostly figure spiraling up out of nowhere.
“I will create a world from the past,” she said, and she painted an audience on the walls and danced for them every Saturday night.
Season
Time feels like an increasingly fictional concept as these weeks and months bleed into one very long day.
May 10, 2020
I find solace in these instructions from Epictetus: do not say something is lost, only that it is returned.
Next
The triggers for fear are largely universal: loud noises, fast-moving objects, and the sudden loss of orientation. The loss of orientation has been sudden this year.
Scramble
Someone down the hall has been practicing “New York, New York” on their piano for the past hour.
Remember
I’m writing these things down tonight because I want to look back in a few months and see if any of these dire predictions came true.
May 14, 2020
An otherworldly landscape of alkaline and soda towers surrounded flat waters without a single ripple.
Grass
We spent a few hours in the park because it’s almost possible to forget this pandemic while hiding in the grass beneath a tree.
Symbols
We might remember crouching on the sidewalk, frantically trying to gather the teeth falling from our mouths—not the circumstances that led us there.
Genre
The Chinese takeout spots along First Avenue have pulled up their metal shutters. The florist is open.
Weird
Maybe we’ll have a vaccine soon. Maybe the president will poison himself. Things can go either way these days.
Dark
I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by grey-pink flecks while I waited for sleep.
Cracks
I write and work. I step outside and look at the sky. Sometimes I go for an ugly run. I make phone calls. I tend this journal. Repeat.
May 21, 2020
Each morning I wake to the imaginary babble of fully-formed news reports and television clips while skating across sleep.
May 22, 2020
Time is a concept. Time is a flat circle. Clocks only measure other clocks.
May 23, 2020
Thinking about the blurry line between media consumption and my soul.
Bell
Riffling through my small box of family memories, I came across a note written in an unfamiliar hand.
Memorial
After sixteen hours of talk radio, interstate winds, and screaming into metal boxes for food, my grip on the world grew slippery.
May 26, 2020
I’m fantasizing about a sprawling network of night markets and bazaars that reclaim the streets and devour the cars.
May 27, 2020
The amount of incense smoke that darkens a temple’s ceiling demonstrates the popularity of that particular god.
Haze
When I flipped on the news around midnight, my concerns about running, writing, teaching, and everything else felt stupid and indulgent.
Pain
A man stood before the crowd of reporters, his eyes filled with pain and conviction.
Dissonance
The presence of the police introduces the prospect of violence like a promise, and that promise came true by nightfall.
Vacant
The White House went dark tonight in response to the protests across the street and spreading throughout the nation.
Desecration
A news anchor said, “We are descending into something that is not the United States of America tonight.” I’m not sure if this is true.
Curfew
I say hello to an old man with a power drill and a bucket of screws. Everything’s coming so fast and ugly this year.
Alert
The silence was stunning. It had presence and weight that nearly muted the birds and the steady beat of three choppers in the sky.
June 4, 2020
My interest in triangulating art, faith, and the day’s events feels increasingly toothless, maybe even oblivious.
Presence
Tonight I came across Tolstoy’s three questions, and they feel especially pressing in these overloaded and disorienting days.
Paranoia
Men with amplifiers delivered gnostic interpretations of the facial expressions of various health officials.
Hope
We’re still living through a season that requires the suspension of disbelief, but perhaps it’s possible to believe we’re heading somewhere better.
June 8, 2020
Sometimes you come across a phrase that haunts you all day. A few words scraped from last night’s dream, maybe an odd line in the news.
Otherwhere
This morning I was pacing our flat, searching for something I could not find. She told me it was probably “otherwhere.”
June 10, 2020
And I’m trying to conjure the faith of those fiery manifestos when they believed a particular font, grid system, or color scheme might solve everything.
Unless people are exploding in the streets.
Tonight I’m going to play Funkadelic on repeat, dim the lights, make bad coffee, and write some purple prose.
Liability
It’s a strange kind of whiplash, living in a society that’s somehow becoming more sensitive and cruel at the same time.
Texture
This morning I came across a stray photograph from my mother’s things, and something about it looks like a scene from a dream.
June 14, 2020
Sometimes my mind lands on a jittery thought: screens have become our reality and the physical world simply exists to serve their needs.
Wolf
They call it the hour of the wolf, and I think it’s reassuring there’s a name for this time, that others feel it too.
Reconciliation
I want to square my life with these instructions from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Vow to work for reconciliation by the most silent and unpretentious mean possible.”
Tactile
And I’m reminded that I think better without the screen tugging at my thoughts like a magnet.
Convulsion
More than ever, surrealism might be the best strategy for surviving these days.
Midnight
I scrolled through streets named after Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton while the radio worried about leftists and alien abductions.
Solstice
People are edgy, their dreams infected with anxiety if they can sleep at all.
Radioland
During commercial breaks, I sang along to radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep.
Phase
She made a comment about her life that seems like a solid piece of wisdom for dealing with any kind of history: “I need to look back, but I don’t need to stare.”
June 23, 2020
For years I would reach for my telephone the moment I woke up, groping for it with a junkie sense of need.
You can see the Gorilla Dust Cloud from outer space.
They’re calling it the Gorilla Dust Cloud, and you can see it from outer space.
June 25, 2020
As I listened to a woman talk to the pigeons, I began humming that Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.
Invasion
Aliens could land in America and we would politicize them until they became just another round of ammo in our endless red versus blue battle.
Rhythm
And there’s the sound of someone in the street laughing and saying, “How did we get like this?”
Humid
We had a pleasant June for a while, but the long mean heat of summer is finally here. Beyond this, I’m losing the plot.
To believe in something otherworldly in 2020.
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020.
June 30, 2020
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.
Abandon
Maybe I should go live in a tree. Learn the phases of the moon and teach myself to cook with the sun.
July 2, 2020
I sat in front of a fan while premature firecrackers echoed through the streets.
Toll
Sometimes I dream about tollbooth operators, the half-glimpsed faces with cigarettes on their lips, their left hands forever clutching a quarter and a dime in change.
Independence
A degraded and muffled Fourth of July. The prospect of celebrating America these days feels like a dark joke.
Forgetting
It was remarkable, this sudden act of forgetting as if we’d left the past four months behind.
Vivid
A world without the color green. A man who repainted all the seashells on the beach.
Nature
We contemplated where waterfalls came from and wondered how saltwater becomes freshwater and vice versa.
Sleepless
You can almost taste it, that bright metallic sensation which floods the brain when it decides there will be no sleep tonight.
Embers
Maybe it’s an ancestral memory of bearing witness through the night while tending to the flames.
Rain
There’s something oddly soothing about the sound of traffic peeling down wet streets on a rainy night.
July 11, 2020
Lately I’ve been torn between the possibilities of fiction versus my compulsion to record each day’s events in this nightly journal.
Each finger has its own consciousness.
Ten years later, I still remember the sight of a young couple marching along an empty desert road in Nevada.
Breakup
Nobody died from the pandemic in New York City the other day.
July 14, 2020
There’s a strange dynamic to this nightly journal, this sensation of writing against time. Or more precisely: writing for myself in the future.
Spear
And what is my intuition telling me? My first thought is to turn down the volume on the world so I can hear.
Soul
These medieval Catholics were haunted men who desperately wrestled with the question of a soul, not like the playful Greeks who made up the world as they went along.
Anchors
Rode the subway home in an empty car except for me and an old woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “Love is so gangster.”
Run
They say you never see a cheetah stretch, but maybe I should. My legs always hurt.
Echo
Tonight I’m craving the kerchunk of a rewind button and the ritual of scotch-taping the edge of a cassette
Cover
Finishing a project means closing doors, killing darlings, and foreclosing possibilities.
Detach
I remember speeding across a blank Oklahoma plain dotted with pump jacks and cattle pens.
Downpour
And for a lunatic moment I wonder if it will keep raining until everything is washed clean.
July 23, 2020
It doesn’t matter if the nail is in the exact right place, so long as it’s holding together two pieces of wood.
Clay
The Stand brought me back to teenage nights of staying awake into the small hours with a flashlight, promising myself just one more chapter.
Feedback
It’s two-thirty in the morning, and a caravan of motorcycles and dune buggies are growling up First Avenue, their engines rattling the windows.
July 26, 2020
The seven o’clock cheers faded long ago.
A list of things that inspired the book I’m writing.
A list of things that inspired the book I’m writing.
Demon
Today’s headlines featured phrases about “demon sperm” and “the umbrella man” because we’ve slipped into a psychedelic hell.
Pray
When I consider the man I want to become, I often picture myself as someone who prays.
Ready
“You can put on a jacket,” she says, “but you can’t take off your skin.”
July 31, 2020
There was a half-moon in the sky and a large man in a red pick-up truck was talking to somebody on the phone about Jesus.
Max
“You’re looking at the future: people translated as data.” This line from Max Headroom holds up thirty-five years later.
Normal
Giving up on normal seems like a critical psychic adjustment these days.
Moon
I should understand the rhythm of the moon by now.
Debris
Maybe human brains aren’t equipped for this, absorbing painful images from everywhere at once without the ability to be present and act.
August 5, 2020
Lately my dreams have been all garble and grime without symbolism or plot.
Pack
We’re packing for a trip of indeterminate length.
Road
I still remember the frantic voice of a late-night caller who said, “We can’t get the blood out of our eyes fast enough to see what’s coming next.”
Cave
Americans of all kinds gathered together to admire their country’s geological features. All is not lost.
Logs
The cabin smells like cedar. There is no internet here. No cellphone reception either.
August 10, 2020
Three days without television or constant internet access—unless I drive twenty minutes to sit in the parking lot of a gas station.
Puzzle
It’s an exhausting puzzle, trying to figure out which parts of this world to let into your head.
Desk
By now I should know the only way to outrun my bullshit is to keep writing.
Lot
An old man pushes a shopping car filled with metal scrap and hollers about demons.
Buzz
We’ve entered the last stretch of summer when everything is overripe and so green it feels obscene.
Tornado
Maybe it was the barometer dropping, the rearrangement of air pressure.
August 16, 2020
The body remembers slowly and forgets very quickly.
August 17, 2020
Somewhere north of Columbus, we tuned in to the first night of the Democratic National Convention.
Jeremiad
A woman at the supermarket kept making a noise I could not decipher.
Signs
Somewhere in southeastern Ohio, I drove past two ranch houses sitting side by side with tidy sidewalks and neatly mowed lawns.
Machine
An empathy machine sounds like a pretty good leader right now.
Sunset
Heading west on Interstate 70, there’s a beautiful sunset and it’ll have to do for tonight.
Scan
For a glimpse into the brainpan of America, you can’t beat late-night AM radio.
Pegasus
First memories are such peculiar creatures, these fuzzy impressions and garbled snapshots that teach us how to see the world.
Observance
Tonight I sat outside in the unfamiliar terrain of southeastern Ohio, lit a candle, and watched the stars.
Untethered
The First Lady stood in the Rose Garden and lectured us about civility while her husband smirked.
Weather
I switch the channel and a meteorologist says, “Just behind this vortex is a wall of water getting ready to surge.”
Stimuli
He said, “The president recognizes the best way to restore normalcy to people’s lives is to bring back entertainment options.”
Monochrome
I wonder if there’s anything to learn from my recent drift towards color and my desire to return to monochrome.
August 29, 2020
To erase the “I” and stand outside of time, writing like a ghost.
August 30, 2020
I’m chilled by how quickly phrases like “the other side” have become so natural. Because that’s the grammar of war.
August 31, 2020
It’s always good for me to be reminded that writing is a physical act.
September 1, 2020
Demons and hexes would nicely explain why some people behave the way they do.
September 2, 2020
Perhaps the best work scrambles genre and rides strange lines that might swerve at any moment.
September 3, 2020
As I scrolled through the radio dial in search of company, I began to understand the appeal of its doomsday preachers.
Howl
This election will test how much cruelty Americans will tolerate, and how many of us crave it.
Beauty
“Beauty is remembering the sad times without crying,” said one girl, who at fifteen years old was already so wise it broke my heart.
Kindling
There’s that principle that we burn up all available time to complete a task—and this gets scary when measured in years.
September 7, 2020
Why is the sound of thunder so soothing?
September 8, 2020
They walked around caked in mud with lice in their hair, which they called the “pearls of god.”
September 9, 2020
I’d always thought the future was just around the corner, but it’s already here.
Deer
I’m not sure if I believe in symbols or signs, but today gave me plenty to decipher.
Nineteen
Nineteen years ago but it still feels like it was just the other day.
Superstore
My breath catches in the existential and super-saturated detergent aisle: All. Era. Gain. Cheer. Bold.
September 13, 2020
This has been a year of references to plague novels and the dystopian skies of science fiction.
September 14, 2020
Sometimes I fall asleep thinking about the ancient atomists.
September 15, 2020
Like painting legs on a snake. My in-laws taught me this Chinese idiom, a scold against unnecessary embellishment.
Encounter
The deer didn’t seem alarmed by my presence. It just watched me while munching some foliage.
Behalf
Five thousand years ago we began outsourcing prayer and devotion to statues that would worship on our behalf.
Process
Looking at the state of the world today, perhaps we need more architectural details designed to scare away demons.
Spectrum
There’s a problem with modern grief, a rupture that cannot be filled with squishy words like mindfulness and acceptance.
Closer
Last bonfire before we return to the city.
Plaza
A modern marvel where you can eat fast food on top of eight lanes of freeway traffic.
September 22, 2020
We’re standing on the verge of an uneasy fall, unsure of just how high the curve will go.
Shatter
Three moments in America today that reach beyond my ability with words, striking only the rudimentary language of grief.
September 24, 2020
In a superstore parking lot this evening, I watched some geese fly south, and remembered my parents’ relationship with birds.
Homeward
We’re leaving the Ohioan wilderness behind, night-driving back to New York.
Lull
But tonight there’s light rain, our windows are open to the city’s hum, and there’s something dark and slow on the radio.
Converge
It’s my mind that kills me, the constant looking at my watch until I remember how to forget about time.
Dots
If I’ve gleaned anything from keeping this glum journal throughout this year, it’s that I keep returning to the language of grief.
Shame
Tonight’s first presidential debate was a fitting spectacle for a degraded nation.
Training
“You’ll be working at least seventeen hours on Election Day,” he said. “So bring a sandwich.”
Ritual
A mixture of marble and steel that looks like a collision of the past and future.
Positive
Today the president went to the hospital after testing positive for the coronavirus.
Oldies
I find myself craving the days when a 303 sounded like it contained all the mysteries and possibilities of the world.
Extreme
This year has made conspiracy theorists of so many of us to some degree.
Dust
As if I’m doing something wrong just by living in such an embarrassing time.
Kite
I once saw an old woman in a red sundress flying a big yellow kite down a busy street.
Creature
The fly felt like a portentous symbol in a year that has reached the caliber of myth.
Landfall
Lately I’ve been having a dream about a weatherman grinning in front of a map while talking about a hurricane of bullets.
Silentium
And I realized this was because of that rarest quality of all these days: silence.
Spare
When you cut something down to the bone, every decision becomes much more dramatic.
Drome
More and more, it feels like trying to critique the sky.
Pictures
While running through the rainy dark, someone stepped in front of me and took my picture for no apparent reason.
October 13, 2020
A place where only the occasional shredded tire or dilapidated cabin would interrupt my fantasy that I’m driving on another planet.
Simulation
He stood in front of an airplane flapping his hands and crowing before a sea of red hats. All those red hats like angry sores.
Watching
Maybe the question shouldn’t be “Are you still watching?” but “Why?”
October 16, 2020
I miss being around sounds I can’t control.
October 17, 2020
I’m always captivated by Louise Nevelson’s monuments built from pieces of furniture painted black.
Fatigue
What is the line between fatigue and acceptance?
Monsters
Why would my brain invent monsters to terrify itself?
Landscape
I’m endlessly rewriting, forever shuffling scenes and squinting at the possibilities.
October 21, 2020
We admired the smudged headlights of oncoming traffic, the fleeting sense of driving on some other, better planet.
Ocean
We listened to the sea, and it gave us much better information.
October 23, 2020
Returning to the city, I felt a familiar drain on my attention as I drove down the FDR to ditch the rental car.
Up
Eighty-five thousand new cases reported yesterday, another record smashed in a year with too many records broken.
Safe
A friend sent me an article about a helmet you can buy that creates its own microclimate of filtered, customized air.
Court
I will channel my anger into becoming a morning person this week.
History
It’s an uneasy sensation, knowing something massively historical is one week away.
Mirror
It looks like half the country is burning and the other half is freezing.
Wind
“Sometimes I think they are graceful like ballerinas,” he said as we drove. “Other times, I think they are wicked.”
Devil
My first understanding of how media hysteria works, the way it creates a dark scoreboard with a record begging to be broken.
October 31, 2020
America hit nearly 100,000 new infections yesterday. Britain declared another lockdown tonight, joining Germany and France.
November 1, 2020
The end of Daylight Savings Time is my favorite holiday because it creates more night.
November 2, 2020
I was mortified by just how childish I’d become, that I would allow any man to crank my lizard-brain into full swing.
Election
After so many months of isolation, working the polls for seventeen hours reminded me of something important: New Yorkers are beautiful and insane.
Razor
A slow-motion drift in Pennsylvania. Refresh. A lot of places are sold out of nicotine gum.
Goo
Patchy sleep and fever dreams of narrow margins and outstanding ballots. But it’s not much different from waking life right now.
Endless
Meanwhile, we wait for a signal, a 72-point headline or a glossy cable news graphic that cements and formalizes.
Catharsis
The networks called the race for president at 11:26 this morning, and the city erupted in cheers.
Shift
Yes, I wept as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden gave their acceptance speeches in a Delaware parking lot.
Test
Shops are removing the plywood boards from their windows after barricading for riots that never came.
Spirit
In the beginning, God was only “a permanently existing ghost.”
Suffuse
Words that haunt the unconscious: Trilobites, moonfish, and gorgons.
Profane
How many times have I glimpsed a better, more spiritualized way to live—and retreated?
Lament
We knew it was coming. They’ve been telling us for months, and now it’s here.
November 14, 2020
A profane old man would often tell me, “Fuck your feelings.” Then he’d remind me of the facts. That advice probably saved my life.
Astro
Or take the word ‘disaster’, the inversion of ‘astro’, a term which means a negative star, a kink in the heavens that leads to catastrophe.
November 16, 2020
I wanted to visit my favorite statues and paintings before things begin closing again.
Hijack
Meanwhile, I keep forgetting the screen is a tool, not an environment.
Forward
I don’t want to become a prematurely old man, pining for a romanticized past.
Post
I found a rare picture of my mom young and smiling, caught beneath the overheated gloss of a 1970s photo.
Walk
I often hear people say they feel as if reality is slipping away. But perhaps reality is becoming more evident.
Image
I read about a temple where an image is treated as the living incarnation of an infant god.
Stretch
We stopped at a rest area where a man stood on the grass, grinning at the moon.
Patterns
There was a time when people believed the stomach’s gurgles and rumbles belonged to the voices of the dead.
We scrolled down the aisles in hunter-gatherer mode.
I tuned into the voice looping over the P.A. system, struck by how it sounded simultaneously rational and insane.
November 25, 2020
I miss the dopamine loop, the carrot and the stick, and the rhythm of stepping outside for five minutes after each page or paragraph.
November 26, 2020
Tonight I am grateful because I have a safe place to sleep, food to eat, and the freedom to make my own decisions.
Access
Sometimes I blame modern-day aesthetics for my difficulties. The optics seem wrong for devotion.
November 28, 2020
Domestic rituals of all kinds will be critical during this long winter.
November 29, 2020
The holidays remind me that I don’t have the type of family that appears in commercials and television specials.
When a pounding headache fades.
Light snow here in Ohio, and the weather report was mixed with grim coronavirus forecasts.
Writing through a uniquely terrible year.
The first day of the last month of this nightly exercise, and I’m thinking about the value of this exercise.
Language
How tragic to enter a museum hoping to feel dignified and ennobled, only to walk away feeling like a fool.
Eat
I stopped at the window and gaped like a hermit suddenly confronted by society.
December 4, 2020
The image of the Pietà occupies such a distinct place in memory that I often forget it translates to “the pity”.
Metal
If aliens landed, I’d probably mistake them for a guerrilla marketing campaign.
My father quietly nodded his head to Funkadelic on Highway 61.
I’m learning to carry my dead with me, to ask them questions while pacing the kitchen or driving to the supermarket.
Absence
I catch myself patting down my pockets while feeling phantom vibrations, seeking synthetic communion.
Alright
I passed a church sign that said, “Jesus paid the price, you keep the change.”
December 9, 2020
His gaze leaves me questioning my life choices and entire personality.
Worship
Three years ago on a Saturday night in rural Pennsylvania, I saw a vision of the future that I cannot shake.
Numbers
Three thousand Americans are dying each day from the coronavirus, and two hundred thousand more are infected.
Narrows
I feel more present in the world at midnight, most like myself.
Vaccine
They gathered in Washington DC to wave flags with the president dressed up like Rambo, slicked with sweat and carrying a belt-fed weapon.
Mundane
I’m reappreciating the joy of mundane events this year, the delight in everything happening as expected.
Reflection
There were days when our images were honored, even feared.
Flurries
Maybe it has to do with the silence it brings, how it tranquilizes the world for a while.
Death
An elderly man collapsed against the base of a Bernini.
Fracture
“But I’m working on a special microchip that will block the signals of all demons and devils,” he said.
Programming
I absorbed so many forms of 1980s sitcom trauma.
Postmortem
How would knowing that consciousness lingers while the body goes cold change the way we reckon with death—or bear witness?
Hibernal
Heavy rain beats against the windows and it’s the longest night of the year, one of my favorite moments.
Stimulus
A billionaire was on television this morning, and he’s worried about our social fabric.
Banquet
My memories tend to pile up around the holidays, fogging my thoughts with the textures of Christmas seasons from the past.
Eve
My first concept of god came from It’s a Wonderful Life.
Moment
Remember this, I thought, because it won’t always be this way.
Shambles
A pair of ears clutches a knife. A pig dressed as a nun encourages a man to sign a legal document. And so on.
December 27, 2020
But for three or four minutes, something otherworldly seemed possible.
Version
There will be no flash of light or burning bush.
Unthinkable
I try to imagine my reaction if someone showed me some scenes from the year to come.
Clocks only measure other clocks.
It’s almost like a new form of weather, this atmosphere of everyone waiting for this wretched year to end.
Clearing the decks before trying something new.
The end of the year leaves me feeling as if I’m supposed to be reflective; I find myself hunting for revelations that never arrive.