This girl neglected to shake the water from her umbrella before coming into the café.  It’s dripping all over the floor. 

The other side of American bullshit, as Cat called it, is being freed from the dumb need to have opinions and judgments about things.  Sorry: when we were in Mexico City, Cat remarked that a really nice thing about being in a different country is that you don’t see all the cultural bullshit.  Of course abstractly you know it’s there, but you don’t have to encounter it.

The flip side of that is being freed from feeling like you have to make judgments about things, to call certain things bullshit.  Every time I pass Haakon’s Hall on Amsterdam I think, “That’s a dumb bar, only dumb people go there, people who suck.  I know better, they’d never get me to come in there.” And I wish it weren’t there, so that for that eighth of a block my head wouldn’t be filled with that negativity, that strenuous “resistance” designed to reinforce some bullshit identity, to put me on the side of other imaginary people who wouldn’t go there, against the imaginary people who would go there.

 (Just look at this: if I happened to be in a conversation, maybe at a party and with someone else who lives in the neighborhood, and Haakon’s Hall were mentioned, I would say “Yeah, I’ve never been in that place, but it always looks awful,” and if they said “Yeah, that place sucks,” for five seconds I would feel SO VINDICATED, it would be more satisfaction than I’d had in days.  Christ.  Every time I walk past I dream a little bit of such an interaction.)

But it was nice to get in the habit of not hating things for no reason.  I am trying to keep that up.

(Es muy mal español, ¡yo sé!)

Es casi imposible a distinguir: cuando yo realmente quiero mantenerse un conexión con alguien despues de que había un partiendo; de cuando  simplemente no quiero me sentir culposo, o, pejor, quiero considerar que soy una persona buena.
Esta no debe nos sorprender: el sensación de superioridad, de orgullo, es la recompensa la que hemos aprendido a sentir.  Es el motivo.  Un adaptación social.  In el caso más “sincero,” “autentico,” esta es el mismo razón de acción. 
Estoy dirigido a creer que es en esta misma tentativa a separar los dos, que causa confusión.  ¿Y me acerca nada al solución de mi problema real de la ética?  Parece que no, tengo un intuición fuerte que no va.  Esta sí es buen indicación.
Pero aúnque pienso que hay un diferencia entre los dos casos.  ¿Qué es?
Tuve más a decir, pero una otra tiempo.

Reprelude

Sitting here (on my bed, at night) missing Brooklyn while I listen to Spotify indie pop.  The depth of shallow emotions, the depth of drunkenness on depth of self-reflective self-reflective youth with lines like “I’m just 22 I don’t mind dyin” (EMA, “California”).  And that Starfucker song for the several-hundredth time.

There is a roommate here who is an artist but whose art / artisthood I have little a priori confidence in.

It does not matter by the way if, say por hazar, my roommate sees my superficial assessment of him on this blog.  Because either he is not someone whose reactions to my judgments would matter, in which case there’s a near-nil chance he’d ever look at my blog; or he / we will be cool and good enough to see superficial judgments for what they are (among other things, certainly not something to take “offense” at).

That was one of the worries that would prevent me from publishing experiences and thoughts from my life “in real time” on a blog.  Another is the worry that, how to say it…, that people would see what a self-absorbed and narcissistic aesthete I am.  But if I don’t mind the fact (and I have long decided that it is ridiculous to mind or not mind that fact), then what use is it to mind people seeing it?

Everyone should meditate on that Dr. Seuss line: “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”  One of my parents — somehow I always assumed it was my father, but really I have no idea, funny — put that up on the fridge. Sometime in the past year. 

I am also not embarrassed about enjoying any music.  Some people, who are not actually embarrassed (not actually ashamed anyway—it may be a curiosity about me that I don’t know and can’t tell the difference between shame and embarrassment) about the music they like, make a big show of saying they are embarrassed by it.  That’s fine.  I’ve never really gotten it / been able to relate, but so far as I can tell it’s a way of deflecting embarrassment.  A sort of inoculation. And I am vehemently in support of people not being embarrassed (one of the dearest tenets of my shallow little ethics), so fine.

Oh: another preventing worry is that people who I think are smarter or righter than I will see thoughts of mine that claim to be careful and truth-seeking, and think/see that they are stupid/careless/misguided.  I need not explain what a pointless worry that is.

Another: that in fact no one will read this.  Because what is more pathetic than talking — pouring out your soul even, or at least things you feel at least for a moment to be valuable and worth hearing — to an empty room?  Well.  I could say that it is not about any particular people or number of people reading (though putting it that way is a little misleading.)  That it is more about the very act of completing a group of words, making a unit of them, a work, and making them public.  Which act has many implications which I won’t try to expound at the moment.  And I could also mention that there are many excellent people with excellent blogs that I don’t or barely read, but I am glad of them.

Which brings up another worry: that blogging things is bad for me, bad for the things, bad for their development.  I don’t think so.  Right now I think there are a lot of things that it will be useful to “have said” and be able to respond to, correct, add to, etc.  I think that will be better for their development than mentally drafting and erasing and re-deriving them. 

piso rojo

(de nuestro departamento.)  I boggle sometimes over decisions such as to make a floor a color.

I feel like it requires either a lack of appreciation for color (“You are supposed to paint floors colors, so pick one and splash it on.”) or a much deeper, because so casual, appreciation than I have. 
Of course that is what they — Frida Kahlo [1] and all the rest (I wonder what other people think of these poets who tell them what is essential to their lives [2]) — that is what they say about Mexico, Mexican life, Mexican culture.  Color and flavor and all that.  A sudden thrill for this gringo: things from the Mexican Art Museum in Pilsen, exhibits about Day of the Dead, I will get to see the reality and substance and referent of them.  But don’t get me wrong: I’m not someone who thinks he can characterize a culture, not poetically anyway.  It’s not my place, anyway.

“You are supposed to paint floors colors”: I meant to example a cultural rule that for the subject is an empty rule, an external form to comply with.  I meant to point at the superficiality and insubstantiality of such.  But apart from the influence of a constant light and quick touch of something (e.g. bright colors) on the subjective mind (Benjamin, architecture, shock, habit), it is a question whether substance must dwell in the subject and not in the culture (understanding culture as external forms; objective culture, so to speak).  (Thinkng now of Anti-Oedipus, or rather anthropology via Anti-Oedipus, or perhaps structuralism specifically — about both of which (anth. and stru.) I know next to nothing but am currently acutely curious.)  And what “substance” is, needless to say, depends on our purpose i.e. viewpoint, what we’re after investigatively or otherwise.

—
[1] Lovers and admirers of Frida Kahlo, por favor desculpame: I have been to the Casa Azul, and know her no better than that.
[2] Despite my tone I don’t mean to disdain or discredit such tellings across the board.

anarchism

: writing poems immediately after experiencing them #2[1]

1.

drunk

leaving the anarchist party

asking

“yes, but I still don’t know how anarchism works”[2]

“me neither but it’s better than what we’ve got now right”

2. about parties: that they are the same as they always were and were at first, when you didn’t know anyone (: you still have to stand around watching and ask dumb questions and not care if people might not want to talk to you)

3. the only and essential political stance any (any) of us (us anyway) have ever taken is to refuse/resist using each other

can nobly sweetly: inside other people’s #1

A man and a woman in the station.
Hunched toward each other, each wearing a coat and cap.
Perhaps the man only has a beard, not
a hat actually.
They look kindly.
Not dopes, mind you.

“No, it doesn’t work with complaining. If
you share, you share, that’s it,” says
the one to the other, in compassionate
reprimand,  as if reminding of something
they had both been taught.

These people, who’ve “taken what they’ve found,” and humbly work with

that,
work to be happy.  Note well: not “what they’ve been given”.  It’s their
luck if it’s luck, they know that, they take the credit and the
responsibility, and what use is the ‘if’, for more or less the new
metaphysics has made its way to each and all of us, it’s what’s there.  In
these days of relationships, where you
don’t have to, but if you want to you
can, nobly sweetly.