Theft by Imitation
I’ve always been bad at journals.
But David Sedaris is good enough to convince you that anything is worth remembering. In his seminal book, “Theft by Finding,” his journal entries of nearly 30 years mark strange small-town encounters, quirky employers, and off-the-rails drug experiences.
It seems as if extraordinary is the rule more than the exception, and Sedaris’ wit all the more builds a roughly hewn and intricately detailed world.
But there isn’t anything exceptional about Sedaris’ universe. His trajectory is unique, but in “Theft by Finding,” the book’s title gives away the subtle beauty of his baptism by fire. A stolen outside world, inventions of other people that inevitably reflect the self.
He chose to write when others might have shrugged. Where I likely wouldn’t have.
After finishing the book in 2019 at the recommendation of a friend, I started writing down my own offhand conversations, details from bus rides and walks in town, essentially looking to form my life through straight description.
I ran upon small moments that, within their context, felt quotidian. At first, they were mundane. But after four years, the writing began to pile up. I was able to revisit moments I’d had the time to completely forget. Some of these moments were rambling and uncut. But when I read them aloud in the most memorable fragments, characters were revealed to me.
Some of these will be poems, some writings, and some streams of consciousness. Some days will have multiple entries, and those will be separated by a dash rather than a dotted break.
It turns out journaling was better for me as a literary exercise, not a personal one. So here is everything fit to print.
1.20.2019 — Poem
The envy of diamonds to be caught in our toes,
Gracious enough to hold a footprint.
This is our glimmering graveyard,
Joyous in its pebbles
A joyous discarded.
I feel the tide over my ankles
And dive below
To see the world thrown into chaos,
Free in settlement,
The shells and sand given new life,
Made floating and spontaneous and given new opportunity to fly where they might want.
Such audacious freedom it is,
To cross oneself while cursing freedom,
But it is worth it to see the ocean once again,
And hold a breath till the next wave comes to tempt fate.
Sand must hold special histories
Of wars and loves and afternoon snacks.
But I reach out to let it sift through my fingers,
A kind of hand holding with past,
And I can only hope it feels as honored as I do
To take up a spacious corner in each other’s memory.
12.15.2019 — Dirty Words
Listening to an off-hand conversation.
Oh! Now we’re up to double digits.
14%.
Yeah, it’s an iPhone 6. I’m trying to wait a couple more months before I really need to upgrade.
You know, it’s a funny story. When I went to get this one, I checked both the Apple store and the Verizon store. And I went in, asked if they had one, and they said sorry — we don’t have anymore. But just then, another employee said they had a cancellation. And they gave me this little guy here.
He’s talking about a minstrel show: “you know, it was kind of that ‘company show’ feeling, where you’re there with your boss and they say dirty words — I like that because it feels like you’re getting away with something.”
We’re talking about the metro and he says, “and you know, pardon me if I’m being too critical, but the bus quite frankly stinks”
He moves his hand to the dial. This is perfect, he says, and punches the keys. “This is the original country music,” he says, beaming. What plays is an ensemble of grainy voices ripped from vinyl, faint banjos and washboards in the back, yodels shrieking through the talk-sing verses. We ride down the road in silence, windows fogging.
The fog rises from the forest in clouds of steam, great cold exhales of pine and fir.
The islands rise and recede, pined dorsals.
1.23.2020 — Poem
It is early January, an afternoon made gray.
The ducks are like ink,
A velvety black under the water.
We follow them and the trail of bubbles they leave,
A sign that even ducks leave their breath,
And I wonder if they speak to each other,
Test the boundaries of their words
Like I did as a kid.
I wanted to watch them float and imagine them speaking at their pop,
Knowing I could reach out and grasp it like an instrument.
When he breaks the surface he gives a shake,
Remembers the warmth of January sun,
And looks to where his messages have risen.
I want to be such a creature,
Free to dive and hold my breath,
Feel my voice press against the walls of my lungs.
I want to feel the weight,
The shake and release,
And know I can do it all again
1.25.2020 — Poem
Where were we!
A land of incongruous shapes
Quick lights
But I see you in the blurs
The passage of time and place
I hope there is less
Than quick glances
O hope you love me
In my eyes and not through them.
— — — — —
Red Square
The gulls trace outlines with the airplanes
Splashing and sharing themselves
Reading laughter for the embrace of cool cloud water.
The birches smile at the pine, still full and green in winter,
And the birch gives a jealous nod to the birches and the miraculous choice to change the brick and, in turn, be changed themselves.
It’s dark and cold and people shuttle through, phones up,
Their hands made into peace signs.
Always a curve of smile in a square made of brick,
Rectangles and triangles and intersections.
They turn their heads and admire the smallness.
Skateboards crack,
Voices run through the spaces.
This is a place who wants to be made by you,
Reinterpreted,
To take all it can just so it can give it back.
An afternoon laid open like a yawn.
Each photo could make a brick,
Pieces of collective smiles and jumps and peace signs and laughs.
I want to again see the gulls fly through the puddles,
Their silhouettes the same as planes,
See the hands and phones drawn watery,
Before it’s gone tomorrow
And all that’s left is the red brick
And the naked grey trees.
An afternoon made of lazy epiphanies.
Ask us to stop,
Take a breath,
And see ourselves in a larger frame.
Enjoy the smallness,
And see where you are
And know it is special because it asks you to notice how little there is,
And all that’s left
Is you.
See an afternoon made of looks
The gift of noticing yourself
As all there is left to see.
Look up, see the sky,
Take a picture
Just for the chance to see your own smile.
1.30.2020 — flying
The wing bends like the tooth of a comb through stubborn hair.
It’s a reminder of the great fragility of things,
That at 30 thousand feet we are at the mercy of a great nothingness who makes.
But we can’t be in the sky, because I can see above and look to our other blinking friends, static as they trace clouds spread smooth.
I want to pull higher until we meet our orbit and witness the great brokenness of gravity, silent and invisible, more a feeling of how we only know the truth of things once we challenge its weakness.
From here we see the curve of the earth, and another shaking on the wings reminds me how fragile it all is, even the gracious horizon who bends without breaking.
I never thought I’d be made for such miracles.
3.7.2020 — Rennies
I watched a man take a photo of himself flipping off a Stanford log on a stairstep. He was really proud.
A girl behind me was talking to a friend about her other friend’s high school reunion. The man at the table was really excited to see everyone again for his reunion. It feels like these things are built to make a select few feel better about themselves. Her friend was apparently very successful now and excited to tell everyone about it.
Her friend asked if he could borrow a Tesla.
“Does that make you feel like a big man? To show off to people who are just… Trying their best?” She said.
3.8.2020 — EBT
It was a long bus ride but I wanted the time to read, and heck it’s a Sunday evening so why not. When I got to the store the security officer was in a heated discussion on the phone, something about a group of people hanging outside and heckling people. “These people…. These guys are harassing customers,” he corrected himself. “You don’t understand, these are gang people, these are street people.” I got 10% off for the first time there.
The guard said these…. Guys were at the Shell corner, so I went to the Chevron.
“Do you guys do EBT?” There was a woman who walked in after me asking this. I knew it was fine unless you’re buying alcohol, because I was on EBT once. They gave me $300 a month for groceries, and I remember feeling terrible because I’d never get close to spending that much. I had to ask for a bag twice when I left because the cashier was watching the monitor. I never did get a bag.
I learned today that Oberto beef jerky is made and packaged in Seattle.
3.14.2020 — Van Gogh coffee house
I went and got coffee at a new place called the Van Gogh cafe. I got a delicious blueberry muffin with cream cheese and a Mayan mocha. I don’t know what makes it Mayan, but it was good. After a while, three policemen came in. The atmosphere of a place changes so quickly. Suddenly everyone’s a little more friendly, a little more still, and nobody wants to be the first to make eye contact. They’re so big it’s just megalithic.
“A lot of these national guards are Iraqi veterans.” He said that outside of certain hours, they can shoot you for anything during a national emergency.
“You guys live in a fantasy world.” He said. “This thing gets completely stupid, you don’t understand how stupid this is going to get.”
The woman: “If this thing gets a fifty percent death rate…”
The captain: “This quiche is really, really good.”
“Red lights, it depends on the red.”
He sipped coffee out of a small blue espresso cup with whip cream.
4.25.2020 — The House on 29th Street
The house on 29th Street gives away free flowers.
Bushy daffodils,
Weighty roses.
Each day I wanted to pick them but left it for someone else,
Not wanting to throw greed on freedom like so many things these days.
So I stop and look, savor, soak the color of a white morning slowly turning pink.
I think, today, I will take one for me.
I will put it in a glass for my desk,
To feel the color again,
Sweet like morning dew,
Enjoying my end of the bridge that is giving.
Today there are no more flowers.
I think of my friend, wilting splendidly on my desk.
I could gather the petals like conversations
And gift them again to my new friends.
How different things would be if we were all short lived and beautiful,
If we all cut from our bushels for the gift of blue afternoons.
Who knows, maybe we are
and we’re looking for the other side of the bridge
12.4.2020 — Hawaii
The feeling of being lifted, of out of contentedness, of rising and falling like held to strings. This is the view of God. He must float above his clouds, caught dangling by air streams. Everything here is floated by. I look at my hand and it is a blinding white, wrinkled and foreign, and wholesome. I see my feet plant in the valleys and lick up whole plumes, tiny things of wood and shell and hinted centuries. Who are you, pale giant? Who are you to traverse me? The valleys dip and rise like rest one before the other like a rib cage, all movement and rivulets and sequined. This world is pushing and pulling, all before and after, all restlessness. I pull a shell from the bed. It is made of waves of brown in a spectrum on its top. On the underside, it is boring in the light. When you pull it under it glitters, and emanates through the water. This is me meeting reality. I think of the shells my mom used to have, circular and smooth and porcelain. This is me meeting the idea and its fruition. Seeing myself in a picture. Meeting a place and remembering the first time you saw it in a magazine or book. Maybe that’s why I see myself outside of itself, these alabaster limbs and such. I am meeting myself, an idea. Meeting the potential with a self. With a moment. It makes me feel like a child. A few spare moments of forgetting. A few spare moments of meeting.
Another force is coming. A great uprooting wind. The ridges soar across their spines with great plumes, suspended, held random in the space, held with me. When it falls I stay. But I can always reach out and take it by the hand.
People walk out and hesitate, their hands just above like inspectors waiting to find the right moment to touch something beautiful. It is part want, part respect, knowing that a thing is one half of the conversation. It only matters as much as you think it does, and for you, that feels powerful. But it knows what it gives you.
—
On the beach, a man in green stands at an easel. He has one completed project nearby — sea-foam waves rolling onto a glass beach shimmering from the oil paints. Purple clouds hang in twilight. He’s painting a new work. A house, single floor, blue with white trim, a flattened bird with congruent wings splayed out. A healthy green lawn, towering oaks splintering their branches into the summer sun. Freshly suburban. He is in paradise. So where, and what, is this?
The way the ocean sucks the sand into great momentary cliffs, a tectonic inhale. This was a reminder of how the world is constantly rebuilt by forgettable moments.
2021 — TJs and San Jose moments
Trader joes employees saram wrapped a shopping cart to a mystery man's Honda Civic.
A woman pulled a U-turn and waved out the window mid-intersection to the 4th level of the prison. The crime scene cleaners were in front.
In the plains of Marin, saw a single black and white cow standing on a rock, with a full herd below looking right at him.
40-50 motorcyclists darted between us right before the golden gate bridge, like locusts.
2.14.2021 — Random writing — Napa
Today we went bike riding in Napa. On the way back we stopped for some Italian by the beach, which turned into one of those suburban capers, where we found a restaurant smelling of savory garlic and received two overpriced middle-school-lunch-quality meals — which of course came with no silverware. She is eating her spaghetti with the disused crusts of my embarrassing margarita pizza, the two of us parked illegally in a small lot sort of overlooking the water, nervous but at the same time calm because the world’s longest train just cut us off from society. On the way back we saw a woman walking her pony — something you’d expect to see on the range, or in one of those white fence communities, but not on the hilly main drag of Rodeo, or Hercules, or Pinole, or wherever it was.
Is it Pinole like canolli?
6.15.2021 — I5 and wasting time
We sped through the central valley, a long line of cars 10 feet apart, not quite stopped in traffic but trapped in our monotone caravan. My mind always wanders in those moments, thinks of our pacer car catching an errant piece of piecemeal tread eager to relieve its lost days of rotation under the weight of a wheel. It spins out and the bumper drivers — of which I am one, with full compunction — lose their ten feet of security and crash one into another, two lanes too few to avoid the debris. I grip the wheel together and focus on whatever I hear — two men arguing about whether or not to use dressing rooms (conservative talk/sports radio), the latest pop song, even the quiet tones of the last classical station standing. It’s an immaculate focus that I can only find here, one both drifting yet intent, gullible yet noticing. But today we drove past fields and fields of sunflowers ripe in the summer sun, climbing over and between themselves, thankful for their careful plotting in lanes across the California valley. Thankful for the soft collision of morning rain.
In southern Oregon, I lose track over the mountains as we trade tilts, the slow grades balancing vertigo.
Here time is measured in acres and exit signs, and I feel at once trapped in the unchanging room of our car and blessed by the quickness of this time, this mobile clock rotating its gears in hundreds of humming revolutions. We dip into the valley and I remember it like home; Shasta, the daunting, reminds me of Oregon’s hood or its triplet sisters. The mountains here are all scattered, defiant teeth still biting at the sky through the valleys have long worn down, gaps that rest to taste the canines and incisors. We pass the time with music and podcasts but I want to roll down the windows as our competitors pass, to ask them how they pass the time, and to see if they feel just as guilty for doing so.
8.19.2021 — Boston Bits
Some waves can be carried across entire oceans, making these small tumbles into tiny fulfilled dreams, the end of their manifest destiny.
The log and fire, hunger turned inside out. The edges of the logs fall by their own dissolving weight, supine, upward toward prayer.
— — — — —
The beauty of home is the inexplicable reminders of the slope of the hills, that memories aren’t stored in you but in places, both the good and bad ones, and that the burst to tell someone about those places and memories isn’t just for them but a little for you, too, to make one more attempt toward refusing forgetfulness when you remember it’s at your door.
— — — — —
A woman came up and asked if we needed directions. Felt like we were real tourists. Must have been obvious.
Went and asked about luggage storage at south station. A man named Harry gave us directions — such a Bostonian. Got Panera while waiting for the water taxi to open. A nice guy named Tanner. No accent, but he did have a piercing in his eyebrow. Had to wait on the call because he was literally calling from a boat.
I catch fragments of conversation.
“What makes a good pee tree — one you can grab and squat at.”
“Remember when we saw Simon and Garfunkel and you tried to harmonize with them? It was a Madison Square Garden.”
American society exists in superposition, everything works but it has also broken, everything is true and also false, prosperous and destitute.
How many get to see the fall of an empire? By definition, more than want to.
10.5.2021 — buying for the thrill
The most outrageous thing just happened. I lost my kindle during the transfer between two planes on a recent trip. Devastating. Melodramatic. Ultimately inconsequential.
I was so angry. Or frustrated, which is indeed a separate shade of anger. Indignant, in the truest sense of the word. I’d just lost my e-reader, the relationship severed. How useless we now both were. I know I just said inconsequential, but it wasn’t even that. Sure it’s replaceable, but that makes one more device of cosmic refuse, another battery on the fire.
Maybe it’s the guy listening to a downhill BMX video with full volume across the aisle, but this is particularly stressful. I’d just lost a device, something my thrifty self hates himself for. On the nose waste.
Do commercial flights pack parachutes? I mean there’s no way they have enough for everyone. But there has to be at least two, right? Maybe three? Or would that just encourage hijackings, because then there’s a built-in escape route. Better for everyone to go down with the ship.
When COVID hit they changed the system. Now you can’t just order a ginger ale on the assumption that the hostess or host might have some loaded on the cart. Now you have a 1–4 option, because that way you don’t have to scream. Limits your choices, but yes, it makes sense. Capitalism silently pushes on.
If I was smarter I’d be able to apply some Marxism to this whole Kindle fiasco. Something something commodity fetishism. I just bought a $60 sweater at the airport — which is ironic, because I’ve always felt it ridiculous that people buy anything but food at an airport. The prices! The predetermined bag space! Where are you going to put those two bottles of wine and commemorative bag of tree-nuts? But here I was, new sweater sitting comfy and out a Kindle. Was this some kind of karmic comeuppance? A comment on flippancy? Somewhere in the background of my mind I can see drawn: “Copernican revolution”, “Alienation”, and “New-Hegelians.” Another philosophy of guilt, in its simplest terms. I kept floating my hands across the fuzzy front of my new ‘Sub-Pop’ sweater. Fetishism, indeed.
Okay, so maybe there’s a silver lining. Whoever stumbles upon it will get to read “All the Light They Cannot See” for at least two more weeks, before the library reclaims the megabytes. They can catch up on my highlights about the Bushido Code, or the latest gaffe with M. Swann in my slow reading of Proust. Maybe there was a kid who always wanted a portable book device, one which doesn’t connect to any social media or connects to any games. Or maybe someone will use it to completely unravel my financials. Two comforting possibilities. I think this while typing out on my new iPad, which I’ve yet to connect to my new Xbox. Money’s moved fast in the last month or so. Out as quick as it comes in.
I wish my frugality would express itself more. If it’s even there. I’ve suckered myself into believing I grew up ‘poor.’ My mom disputes this, of course. Lower middle class was the furthest rung we descended — but heaven’s no, we were never poor. And of course I bring up that we were ‘homeless’ briefly too. In reality, both these facts are partial truths. Growing up money was tight. I remember early on that we couldn’t pay rent (“we” being a particularly funny word), and that we were eventually “kicked out” in light of that fact. My mom sobbed as she cleaned every square inch of that home, one which she was promised she would own someday. I slept in the closet that night, because I wanted to be out of the way as much as possible. But this is about money, not emotional alienation. The homeless note is about the time after the aforementioned exodus. Everything was packed in the Uhaul, and we had to bum couches for a bit. I’ve convinced myself that we spent at least one night sleeping in it, but that may have been the time we parked and loitered outside the employment office, menacing in its boredom and its empty 200-car parking lot. We were technically homeless, insofar as we did not have a designated home. We hung around Taco Bell and Wendy’s to order off the dollar menu, on repeated days, because my mother told me there wasn’t another option. That felt like money trouble. Or it at least sticks around as such.
That’s why money is so weird now. The only real lifelines for us were when somebody died, which (un)fortunately for us happened often. That money was then squandered on protracted dying events. We needed enough space to house my grandfather, so we paid more rent. That time was firmly middle class. Stucco inside and out. A shared cul-de-sac with suburban neighbors and an HOA. I made a high dent in the outside wall with a lacrosse ball and never told anyone. Mom worked two jobs still, which helped stanchion things. But now I make 2–3 times what we pulled in then (again, “we” pulling the least weight in that sentence). It’s more than I know what to do with. You’d expect frugality to be a reflex, but it’s a luxury. Because when you come into money you want to pay for lost time, buy up all the things you could never have as a kid. I understand now where entitlement comes from: kids who live in a lack of want, and adults who want too much.
Okay, but why does this kindle thing bother me so much? There’s something existential at the heart of it. Like how I lost this thing and it only…. Sort of matters? I could get a new one easily (in fact this model is on sale for cheaper than I bought the original right now). Maybe it’s because there isn’t really any consequence. I’ve become the thing I swore I hated: a financially stable, and flippant, person. A wasteful person. I wouldn’t go so far as to say entitled, but at this rate it can’t be far off. Spending for the thrill of it and buying exhilaration delivered straight to your door. I’m just one more uninteresting person in the schema, a nickel in the drawer.
Money makes us all. When I was younger it made me resourceful at the cost of being jealous. Never satisfied. Growing up is just becoming who you’re conditioned to be.
Anyway, the new Kindle comes on Thursday.
Poem — Bees
I sat down to read and fought the shadows and humming afternoon.
I recoil because I feel the stings from before,
Made by those who felt the fear of my lumbering body,
And those too who sacrificed their tiny, spirited life just to leave a piece of themselves with me.
How selfish I was to pull out these pieces
And not pray for the pain that’s been shared,
This atom worth a life.
I thank the honeybees for their bravery
To bury themselves in the skin of their fear,
To at once become part of it if only for a distracting moment.
I too hope to die in the arms of some great stranger
And leave some of my sweetness along with some pain.
2021 — Random writing — Riding bikes in San Jose
Kids holding golf clubs like sidearms, aiming at planes on descent.
Cardboard shanties built beside the river, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. Whole societies springing up like a leaf through concrete, or a mole from a face, depending on who you asked.
Dogs bark at each other in yowls. A gang of cats sit pleasant by the side, tucked in. Roosters call and respond. The entire stretch is a pallet of cardboard, sycamore, and encasing sound, a menagerie of the unseen.
Slick, athletic, soft.
We pass two golf courses. Drivers laugh to the hollow cling of club meeting ball. They scatter the field like circular bodies, their use exhausted. This is a graveyard of benchmarks, total cumulative feet, another set of numbers used to define arbitrary measures of success, lobbed revenue streams and bank accounts and frequent flyer miles, one number only as good as its ability to be replaced by one bigger and farther.
The courses are surrounded on all sides by towering curled fences. It reads like a fortress, or a prison, and is there really so much difference between the two? The only deciding factor is context, or time, or the chance to be born on one side of the fence versus the other. If the world went to shit today, where would the golfers go? Back to the fencing of the course, or the metal pod of their vehicles, or the walled perimiters of their home? Comfort is really about controlling fear. The golfers move from oasis to oasis, avoiding the desert between, comfortable within their boundaries until they need more to roam.
2.21.2022 — Seattle, WA — Hockey
A family eyeing food coming out too quickly, two old men with crowning hair and small glasses exchanging YouTube videos, two college girls gossiping about international travel, avocado toast with diced grape tomatoes, two family friends complaint about work. Bottomless coffee. Is this all there is? Tropes of ourselves? Nothing more than charicateurs of ourselves and the attempts to live or run with them?
The tallest man in the room plays basketball.
“I like your nails, what polish is that?”
Most of the world is nothing more than people saying what they think needs to be said.
Someone likes my LinkedIn update — small pittances of interaction. How we’ve been reduced. I open twitter and it’s a fumbling chorus, voices tripping over themselves.
I guess I’m afraid that I’ll end up like the two men sitting next to me at a hockey game, taking photos of a two day old expired bag of peanuts, thinking that this is the apogee of the human experience. Maybe I just wish things could be that simple. Is it worse to take small things seriously, or ignore them altogether? Where’s the middle?
What’s the point of a sports game? Congregation? To gossip? Or to enjoy the spectacle? Or some greyed combination of the two?
What will come of 40 years? How terrifying a decade must be for the older.
05.22.2022 — First sunny day, Seattle WA
The first sunny day after a fresh rain. The pathway crunches extra because sediments, maybe old and maybe new, grip your shoes as you fill in the cracks.
Worms and slugs are out basking before they are eaten or shrivel into small dehydrated toothpicks. A crow hops along in the grass looking very fat. The path is littered with hundreds of tiny bulbs, little crunched flowery things, like what I’d imagine an old timey boulevard would look like after photographers captured an event and left their spent glass as a calling card. What did these little swooping flowers see that was so worth giving up their regalia?
Two birds swoop at each other on the crown of a bristled fir tree. A pair of eagles, and maybe the same ones I saw over the weekend, dozens of moles across town, at a different part of our water’s long body. The water keeps pace with the clouds. Birdsong melts with the roar of jet engines. Two kayakers slip across views just as quietly as the eagles. The pair has a second duo and they’re far out on the horizon, afterthoughts, dropped eyelashes on faraway clouds. Their call is high a pitched yodel that punches the sky like needle through soft cloth.
Other people come armed with books like me. Find the perfect knoll or rock and practice amateur acrobatics to land their spot, the place where inspiration lives, moments sequestered in the cores of durable and unassuming things.
10.2.2022 — outside Aachen, Germany
Raindrops like shorting stars across the window, flashing by old brickyards and classic European row houses.
Blocky parking lots are replaced by verdant fields walled by old brick, and it’s hard not to imagine the mortar laid was by some ancient people.
11.23.2022 — Amtrak
We pass through small towns where the train runs right through backyards.
As I drink a coffee at a single dining car table, another passenger talks with a conductor about the line between Washington DC and New York. He jokes about drawing the shades as the train rolls through “some choice neighborhoods” in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and the conductor says there’s a reason behind the expression “the wrong side of the tracks.”
But these towns are different, small roadside blips with a single Main Street surrounded by outdated brick buildings. Their backyards are filled with assorted junk, old mason jars and moldy tables, that one patio chair that everyone owns but never sits in because it soaks up the weather. Old mechanical parts, all scattered on overgrown lawn. Their yards are flat, without any trees or bushes. The driveways are expansive. After, there are empty fields with ivy entombing rusted vehicles and tractors. I see a VW auto shop with twelve discarded bugs in the back. Some fields are groomed like golf courses with small corduroy lanes.
I remember someone from my childhood and the pre-fab home he lived in outside of town. It was one square acre of wasteland with pallets of bricks and cinderblocks. Out of boredom I would smash them against one another, throwing some into bushes to see if I could scare out coyotes. Empty land filled with detritus.
I know someone who grew up on a junkyard. I don’t remember the house much, other than it was filled inside and out. The basement had assorted toys, model plane kits and magazines, dusty junk. Outside, rows of rotted out cars spilled for acres. You could still sit in the leather seats of 1970s Oldsmobiles, laugh at the novelty of rotary windows that only moved halfway. In the far back there was a racecourse, the memory of which I can never trust. He says he and his brother used to drive the pacer car around the rink, and I think back to the tall stadium lights and petite box office. I never saw it with the junkyard absent and the track itself felt like a significant hike from the house, a mirage over the crest of Buicks.
Here, log piles line the riverbank, ready for further extraction.
The guy behind me is talking about taking Verizon to court. He’s reading out his home address, his personal email, and now his debit card. The announcer said to take calls in the landing between cars, and I’m not even annoyed — it just seems foolhardy. Maybe read the numbers from the bathroom if the landing is too loud? I don’t know whether this means he has too little to lose or if any winnings would be too little for anyone to care.
I go to the backroom and notice my crows-feet. My face is getting fatter and it makes my tired eyes look absent and old. I can’t look at pictures of myself anymore.
I watch Star Wars and finish my mediocre book. The subject is a sysiphean fever dream as an entomologist winds up in a slave pit on the beach — or something like that. I debate on video games or Coursera or LInkedIn Learning, or one the four books I brought with me. Fog lays thick over the river. We pass a container train and I try to match the beat of my music to the cadence of cars.
It may not be a lot, but it’s all that we have.
12.29.2022 — streetlights
I watch the rain fall in the winter night, fast and cinematic, and breathe to the steam from the streetlights.
1.3.2023 — old self
Today I rode the bus to work. Listened to soft piano and guitar while reading philosophy.
It is a moment when I feel kindred with myself, meeting my true self again, passing him on the street. I give him a wave but he is not the one moving, I am, for I have so much to do and he, so much to enjoy.
Airplanes in soft light —
Seagulls dance with the black crows
While one sits and calls
1.7.2023 — idiots in cars
I read a lot of comments. I’ve always wanted to jump in and argue in the debate, but I’ve always been afraid to. There’s something about it that feels so dangerous, that saying you prefer pasta over rice could devolve into a chain of accusations, reactions, and on and on.
So I created a shield. A dummy Reddit account. Something to anonymize and distance myself. I spend so much time reading comments, isn’t it part of my responsibility to add some comments myself?
I commented on a post in r/idiotsincars. A driver was hit by someone running a red light at five miles an hour. It was snowy conditions. And It seemed to me that even though the driver had a green light, they very impatiently tried to shoot a gap in a slow line of left turners.
After reading through other comments, many of which agreed, I figured I would add my analysis of the situation.
I turned my phone off and hung out with friends. But in the back of my mind I was waiting for something. Comments, upvotes, downvotes, anything. Something was gnawing at the back of my mind. Like I was craving junk food, something filling but unhealthy.
When I checked back my comment received nothing. It was ignored and just one idea in a sea of thousands.
I deleted the comment, and shortly after, my account. I left the stage after one single performance, and returned to my place in the seats.
01.11.2023
dojasprout: Okay but what the hell IS corecore ?? Someone plz
origamisnow: editing style that seems to link the viewer into a feeling of sadness or despair, that grows in intensity with each clip (from what I noticed)
nevvyhuh: no, corecore was actually originally political and was meant to be videos to make people get into action and become more aware of the world
lilacmilktea_: that’s correct, it wasn’t meant to cause despair but motivate to stand up but somehow its just collage of “this is what it is, alone and failure.
Which is also not a bad thing, its accepting reality and having a moment of catharsis but still we must find strength_
tidy_up_ur_tiddies: corecore is an investment in misery and meaninglessness. it’s like picking a scab._
Corecore is a kind of pastiche. Like a digital collage.
