today’s journal entry~~~
*
Cardboard boxes. Mattress pads of the street, but upright at my door. Before slicing the tape. Everyday. Sometimes even Saturday. And Sunday. I forgot that nothing stops here on Sundays. Okay, some businesses, but most, operating. Always. I’ve been shopping too much on Amazon in quarantine. I know it’s not good. The workers are treated like shit, barely offered benefits, barely paid, let alone time off. Endless delivery. I know those boxes are a total waste. Sure, recyclable, but all that energy. All that mass. Must be accumulating in landfills too. Soaked or spoilt. Bent too many ways. They’re everywhere. Especially here. We take too much. This is where our imbalance stems. Too much in, not enough out, the curl is collapsing in on itself. It’s too heavy. Too much to hold. Too poisonous. It gets inside, and infects like a virus, and at some point you’re believing the truths of the told and the told might not always tell the truth. They only serve a narrow specificity, always incomplete. We’re all blind in infinite ways and so much more than we portray. So much more than we can speak, than we can write, than we can read. Miranda July said on April 20th, 2020, online from her home in Los Angeles, for her City Arts and Lectures interview, that she would fail in attempt to use words to describe this moment, while we’re in the depth of it. COVID-19. Quarantine. Everything has changed, some things likely permanently (maybe later: thankfully). She said to try to describe this current reality would be like trying to describe falling mid-air. Afterward, grounded with more perspective and information to gather. Our little mind machines. But she said, words are her job, and alas, she would try. She’s shocked by our ability to adapt. Experiencing a bit of Stockholm Syndrome herself (a reaction unlikely in Stockholm right now). How could the end of this be near and how will she go back into the world and how will she start seeing other people? There’s really never and always a good time to use words to explore lines and connections across hypercubes. Which point is the best? Hard to say, from any given event, it will always change. We can never see with the clearest accuracy ahead or behind in a hallway that perpetually turns. I don’t know how many used books or records I’ve bought since lockdown. Other things too. Some clothes. Things I hope to wear once I can get out of here. I mean, I do get out, for walks and sometimes for coffee, but I haven’t been to a grocery store in weeks. Just small shops. The Fort Mason farmers’ market on Sundays. For the first time I ordered toothpaste online, something I said I’d never do. Bath salts, bedding, a laminator, a label maker. What else? Too much. Too much in, not enough out. Yet another addiction born of privileged position to get a handle on. It’s stress buying, I guess. But it gives me hope sticking little notes around the city. It gives me hope to see mounds of stories to read, the possibilities. One book leads me to another, and so on, Fibonacci. Still self-serving. Is it a hopeless condition? Manic over-consumption? Even the herbs and weed. To-go cups of coffee. Suppose this state of increased uncertainty, and widespread panic, is making things worse than actuality. So it’s easy to spin into neurosis from time to time during this time, if not its entirety. So people are stockpiling. A transactional means of avoiding feeling something. The anxiety. Well, that’s what seems is happening. (The American dream?) I don’t know. I have to say, my perspective is purely observational and experiential. With a skewed social lens. Been inside most days for over a year, most of my time living in Melbourne. Reading. Puzzling. Avoiding. Hiding. It’s just that now people also avoid me as much as I avoid them walking down the street to get a bite to eat. Really, quite pathetic—the stewing, the sadness, the long showers, the uneasiness, the madness, the heartbreak, and the neediness to mask it—but also, strangely beautiful and metamorphic to spend so much time circling a cube. Unwrapping a box. I haven’t emerged out the other side of this nearly year-long inward trip. (Do we ever?) Hard to say from inside it, but aren’t we always filtering through limits of body? Its relation, its settings. I could say nothing. Yes, silence is an option. But it seems, without thinking about it too much, soothing settles into its favorite pattern. Tea water boils, letters join, and ends stack.
