Oscar the Blind Kitten and His First Toys

avacado love boats

It is an unspoken hunger we deflect with knives--one avocado between us, cut neatly in half, twisted then separated from the large wooden pit. With the green fleshy boats in hand, we slice vertical strips from one end to the other. Vegetable planks. We smother the avocado with salsa, hot chiles at noon in the desert. We look at each other and smile, eating avocados with sharp silver blades, risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly.
-Terry Tempest Williams, from An Unspoken Hunger

everything is on fire, slow fire

I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday...

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what -- a hundred years? two hundred? -- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windbown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, to only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1863, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

-David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King

no man

island

* * * * *
figured out a pattern in my practice today - it seems pretty accurate:

a silent radio, tuned to an EAS station

working titles:
silent shortwave
silent radio
EAS (silent)
a silent solid-state analog shortwave receiver
candles lit by no hand, then melted into nothing
still shortwave

other recent notes:
the morning light annexed our apartment
"He is out. Needs 2 get used 2 new blood." (text from my mom, 11/16/11 11:54AM)

[i'm noticing more and more that i am drawn to dismal/beautiful ideas]

on when i might eat someone

had a collaborative-cook dinner with allie. over spaghetti and asparagus we talked about how we would, or could, live in a distopian future. some subjects were: avoiding suicide and murder, how we would get supplies from Home Depot, and when we would resort to cannibalism.
this is not an uncommon subject of thought for me, but i had never talked about it with allie. it was kinda revealing to hear that she has similar fears.

still sick - it still sucks.
made this drawing (or sketch, or something) at USF today:

it's a rubbing of a man-hole cover outside of the Rialto in downtown Joliet.

my insides

feeling like i'm somewhere between squishy, un-confident, and __________.
from teaching, from lack of clarity (?) at a PD, and from getting sick :(

(Active ingreedient (in each drop)                        Purpose
Menthol, 4.8mg.......Cough suppressant, Oral pain reliever)

-i like how the back of packages sometimes read like T.S. Eliot poems.
my mom called to tell me that my grandfather has something that she couldn't remember - turned out it is diverticulitis. then i said some things about how i will probably be sickier tomorrow and she was all like, "that's good."
at least the (brief) critique in Intro to Drawing went nicely. a student brought this in:

 Inside Looking Out (tattoo transfer papers) 2011

(detail)

swirling my coffee

gyre; noun

1. a circular or spiral motion or form; especially : a giant circular oceanic surface current

11/11/11 11:11:11

(i wasn't awake for the AM [or real] version - oh well)

bluets

 leaves in the Harris Bank parking lot, downtown Joliet, IL

For Mallimaré, the perfect book was one whose pages had never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird's folding wing, or a fan never opened.
-from Bluets by Maggie Nelson, pg 70

Untitled, Chicago (to Cy Twombly)

i found this object outside of the hidden gallery of Cy Twombly sculptures at the end of a row of galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago - it really mirrors his work in the gallery. while i was photographing it a few people stopped to look at it, as if it were a sculpture.

 found object/sculpture/wall outside Gallery 267 at AIC

 Cy Twombly - Untitled, New York (wood, cloth, nails, and house paint) 1955

 Cy Twombly - (To F.P.) The Keeper of the Sheep, Jupiter Island (wood, cloth, plaster, and nails) 1992

Cy Twombly - (To F.P.) The Keeper of the Sheep, Jupiter Island (wood, cloth, plaster, and nails) 1992 (detail)

silence, in 9 parts

Silent Band (from My iTunes)

Aphex Twin - Penty Harmonium

Beck - Black Tambourine

Blackalicious - Ego Sonic War Drums

Boards of Canada - Dawn Chorus

Fela Kuti - Funky Horn

Sparklehorse - Piano Fire

Squarepusher - The Modern Bass Guitar

Talking Heads - Sax and Violins

Thom Yorke - Cymbal Rush

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

disposable

some highlights from the disposable camera that i just had developed.