michael-dean-k/

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

The other night, a cohort of drunk teenagers were screaming the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova" on a quiet train, trying to get a sober passengry to sing along at 10:45pm. At first, this looks belligerent. It was belligerent, but I tried not to judge, and instead imagined them as supremely wise beings, uniting in song and joy, with an inner knowing that this moment won't matter to anyone else (and might not even register to the majority, scrolling with headphones). Outside of this log, everyone will forget their judgment in a few weeks, and we'll flatten them into a caricature of youth. But to them? Maybe they'll remember this on their deathbed. Two of them could get married. I wondered how my life might change, for the better, if I were as careless and inconsiderate as them. I started singing along the lyrics in my head, because I liked Oasis once twenty years ago, and even imagined myself standing up and singing, being the bold #2 that gives the rest of the train permission to join. If that somehow erupted, no one would forget it. But they quickly changed to another song, and then another, and I didn't recognize any of them. Realistically, I would never do it. I'm too conscientious, mired in etiquette. Even though this just might be a band of idiots—possibly the same kids I caught running on the tracks a few weeks ago,¹ filming it, probably trying to go viral—I sort of envy their disinhibition. It's not that I yearn to be a menace, more like, I can't quite conceive how much I limit my life by deferring to the feeble opinions of others. Across the aisle, I saw a woman in distress, kind of over-dramatic, saying to the stranger next to her, "I'm going to complain to the conductor! This is horrible!"

I have been brewing on this Call for New Aesthetics. I’m stuck on the question of why we need a new aesthetic for the 21st century. To go one layer deeper, what role does an aesthetic actually achieve? Like let’s say you can trace the lineage from the iPhone’s design back to Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus never existed, and smartphones took on a different aesthetic, say one that is more ornate, would we not still have TikTok? I guess this all ties back to my conclusion at the end of architecture school, that probably played some role in leaving the industry: it is capital that controls everything, and as revolutionary as architecture aspires to be, it is something like frivolous dressing atop capital aspirations (picked this up from Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist critic of architecture; IANA Marxist, but the critique is hard to forget). No matter how you design a bank, a bank is a bank. Bauhaus was not a revolutionary aesthetic movement, but a response to the economic reality of mass production (could be an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate to see it as a response, as most architecture is). There is a long history of architects trying to proactively change culture, but failing because they don't actually have leverage. And so what you really need is not just an aesthetic or formal style, but a reimagining of the programs, institutions, and rituals of society, and then a way to use form/ornament to realize those ambitious visions. Put another way, architecture can’t matter without the vision and power of a client, and I don’t think there’s a future for architecture within the OS of capitalism—but if capitalism is about to implode, maybe there’s a new opportunity.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

Waiting for my wife, I am sitting in the lobby of a firm I quit 4 years ago—though I haven’t entered the building in 5, since COVID—and I see Westler slip out the elevator bay; out walks Westler into the barrel-vaulted lobby, out through those gold revolving doors that started and ended many days of my years. Westler. He’s still here! Alive! I remember him like I do an old dream. His placid demeanor and dry humor, a goatee, his subtle mischief and possible creepiness. I don’t know if I ever really knew him behind that caricature. He designed multi-story basements for megapolic airports… I think (a kind of endless machine work, the coordination of billions of lines, cognitive sterilization, a tectonic death in service of a suitcase city, a labirynth of conveyor belts). Is he doing that same thing? Did they find some new VR guy to render his city of luggage? Of course I know absolutely nothing of Westler’s life—for all I know, he has a pearl of a daughter that makes sacrificing his peak hours worth it, forever—but in my assumption, that the company we both worked for is something of a life-sucker, a hunter and skinner of the young and ambitious, a building broker that drools steel angled towers across the East, across Dubai and Korea and Singapore, an entity in Bryant Park that overworks and underpays but leaks enormous partner bonuses that enables the CEO to buy luxury pets and park penthouses while speaking at Venetian conferences on the virtues of design, I imagine Westler as a sleepwalker. I imagine every day of the last five years, as he wisps out those gold-trimmed revolving doors, he finds relief in his break, but doesn’t stop to question the sacrifice, and knows not the basic mystery, “time flies.”

Now that I’ve retrieved my wife from the grips of her Tower, we are back in Penn Station—because no more trains run out of Grand Central this late—and we see a familiar figure, a man on fentanyl hunched over at 90 degrees. “Is that the same guy from this morning?” My wife said sadly; but I said, given he spent his entire day in the same spot, same position and same trance, he looks to me a whole lot like Westler.

This is an extreme comparison—to compare the default path to a lethal addiction—but it tracks to how I feel, an anger over a design firm kidnapping my very pregnant wife.

This morning I finally visualized the whole chain of command, the reason she works until 4am, and why 1 AM is considered a “good night”: somewhere in Dubai is a very rich man, and he’s decided to cure the anxiety over his massive pile of money but funding a Tower that, most likely, no one will live in. So he hires a team of henchman, the “client reps,” and it’s their job to dangle glamorous limitless design work to very hungry architects that fear the market could evaporate at any moment. So naturally, the firm accepts the work at half the rate, and I assume half of that is just cut off the top to reward and keep the partners fat (the 80%, the staff—they don’t matter, they are burnt and churnt over, with eager beardless faces eternally sending resumes, because where else in America can you build DUBAI). And so the client, being entitled and aware of our desperation, will throw a screaming fit if my wife and her 2 juniors can’t pull off the labor of 10 people, every single night. Staffing can’t be honest because it’s trying to survive, and business development can’t be selective because it knows it’s runway, and so what emerges is a kind of caste system where office workers are expected to work 80 hour weeks without overtime or questions.

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.

A gloomy day, where smoke rising from tar blends in with clouds, and through fog I see men in orange vests, smoking cigarettes and adding to the blur. Traffic is backed up, there are honks, and a baby wails through an open window of an SUV. I am walking south on Bell, where pidgeons flock, and realize the enormous weight of everything, all before I enter this French coffee shop. Upon entering I twist out my own head, assaulted by audiovisual XMAS slop; dear god … can I have a sricacha caesar wrap and a London fog? I contemplate emails and henchman and billionaires and babies and such, and so when I sit, I try turning off my mind. The XMAS slop is back, along with the chatter of screaming kids, and the woman to the left of me yapping on a mobile zoom call in a foreign language, and the couple to my right speaking Greek. This is too much, so I look for peace at the marble tables outside, but when I look at the fake wicker chair, I notice it’s covered in worms and birdshit. I realize this is a pessimistic log, a chain of unfortunate events, but sometimes this is the way reality presents itself. And even if it feels fresh to occasionally write with cynicism, it’s not a place to live; the literati too easily withdraw from polite society and cocoon themselves in with their own cannon, drooling acerbic puss into the gutters of Substack.

I’m at the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library. It’s old, almost like a church, and when someone slides their wood chair on the tile floor to get up, it lets out a horrendous screech that echoes through the whole hall. Surely, NYPL knows about this? I wonder, why do they not have felt tips on the bottom of the chairs? Have they tried this? Are they opposed? Would they stop me if, one by one, I personally installed felt tips on the bottom of each chair?

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

I’ve lived in New York my whole life, but I have nothing to say about it. Meaning, in Manhattan at least, I have no recommended pizza spots, no bagel stores, no upscale restauraunts. Almost every out of towner I meet seems to know the city better than me. I am willfully and unwillingly, an idiot in my own home. I stumbled in and just gawk at the mystery, still, every time. I mean of course I know some trivial facts (like how the skyline mirrors the bedrock), and I show them off when I can so my national and international friends don't get suspicious. 

Really, New York is a metropolis, a city of cities of cities. Austin is equivalent to Astoria, just one of several downtowns in Queens, one of five Burroughs. And so you’ll find whatever you need here, meaning, aside from the obvious places, you can surrender to the city and get swept into some odd and novel experience each time (alternatively, you can get caught in identical loops, only going to the same places). When I was in the psychedelic society I found myself in Gowanus, Brooklyn in the apartment of a 70-year philosopher with cancer as he took LSD and hallucinated St. Teresa Avila. When I was trying to start a virtual reality company, I was in Zillow’s headquarters putting headsets on executives, telling them we’d “put Manhattan in a briefcase.” When I needed money, I walked the same path every morning through Bryant Park, to the same corporate job. Now, as I start a family, I’m in a suburb at the edge, moving a little farther east every 3 years, and now I take the LIRR in to meet traveling writers. After many years, you realize New York isn’t one thing. Your take on New York is a reflection of yourself at that phase in life, and the city changes a lot less than you do.

When someone tells me New York is this particular thing or that, they're telling me who they are.

I’m watching a squirrel on a tree; specifically, it’s instinct to structurally brace itself against a wind gust. It is frozen alert, flat, legs wide, arms narrow, neck up at 30 degrees. It looks stuffed. Fake. Is it in fear or wonder or maybe just loving the breeze? Is it scared of the pongs from the pickleball courts, or curious about the strange spherical nuts curving through air, a sport played by millennials and elders on a Friday? I see it swallow, it’s tail fuzz blowing, attached to a white belly with orange at the ears and the edges of the eyes. I step closer and closer, until I can see the glass in its eyes. I look away for one second, look back, and it’s gone. A brown sock hops away through the leaves again, rummaging across the concrete to find another tree.

There has to be a better answer to the “why is nothing beautiful anymore?” discourse. This usually takes the form of plucking two objects, two hundred years apart, to make a point. If you take the best thing from the past and the worst thing from the present, you can make any conclusion you want, in any field. Are there not beautiful phone booths made in the 2000s? Might there actually be more of them than in the past?

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in aesthetic studies if they don’t tie back to character. What good is beautiful architecture is everyone is ugly in spirit? I mean that. If we built beautiful, luxurious, maximalist cities, might that not reflect a kind of materialism in the soul of its people? Not saying that’s a given, but the real dilemma of architecture—the one that troubled me in my later years in school—is if the design of our world actually has any role in shaping its inhabitants. Maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask of bricks and steel. But maybe that’s why I shifted to other fields of design that are more influential in shaping virtue.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

Surprised to learn that John Olerud has one of the highest all-time OPS (on-base plus slugging percentages) in New York Mets history. He wasn't necessarily a power hitter, but for over a decade (1992-2003), he had more walks than strikeouts each season. He also set the NYM record for walks in a season: 125 walks in 1999. His skill was discernment, knowing when not to swing.

The morning after the wedding in San Clemente, I walk into a coffee shop to find a book club of seven identical surfer bros, each with bleached blonde hair and branded gear, taking turns reading the Bible out loud.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

On the gallery we saw some guy selling black and white doodles for $180, and they looked a lot like my (post-it) doodles, except less mature. My wife was critiquing it, just as the guy (Tykneenen) came up and introduced himself. Nice guy. Later, we guessed that he wasn’t part of the First Walk officially, just a local (a musician actually), trying to make some money and capitalize off the foot traffic. Not a bad idea. I showed him my gallery of doodles, and he was impressed by the perspectial nature (and even said that, from our brief interaction, that I inspired a new direction for him), and I realized, huh, I forgot how much I enjoyed drawing.

Looking at “The Where” exhibit by Karey Kessler gets me wondering how I might able to weave prose/poetry into art/geometry/composition. There’s another one I saw that had pages from a book as part of a collage, and I wonder how typewritten pages and cutouts might play a role.

I’m most inspired by Ryan Hamburger’s Monomyth exhibit, which feels architectural and similar to some of my own experiments from the past. It got me nostalgic for my drafting board. There’s something to using straight edges and lead pencils to construct things, and then using watercolor to fill them in. I have a fuzzy mental image of what I’d create if, suddenly, I had all the supplies I need. Something like a geometric fractal where shapes occur at all sizes, but at different angles.

If you printed every signed contract through Docusign and then stacked them, would it be taller than Seattle’s Docusign Tower? Yes, definitely, but could you match the foot print too? Like could you make the entire Docusign Tower just out of stacks of signed contracts?

On the bus she had short red hair, a mask, seashell AirPods, tubes with bubble blowers and bubble mix as earrings, and a free Palestine wristband. All signals. Should we attempt to describe ourselves through symbols? Or should we find content in knowing that within us is an uncategorizable mystery that no one else can ever possibly know?

Tempted to get a vinyl player because it would be a form of analog media my daughter could engage with. The core feature is not sound quality (the typical justification), but the fact that each album is an object, and a young mind can associate media with physical things. You can also, display your favorites on a wall, as a constant reminder of the ones you like.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

1. Small bedrooms: not much bigger than the space required to get into bed. No TVs, computer, or furniture. A bedroom isn’t a place to spend time in. Instead, reallocate that space for well-designed walk-in closets and storage.
2. The core space of the house should be “the studio,” a series of spaces for making things and working together. There should be a hierarchy, many nooks for specific functions (organized with sound/sight in mind), that all revolve around a central rotunda (for discussion, relaxation, review, presentation, wall display, showing guests). Again, no TV, that could be in a separate theatre room.
3. Design art & ornament around spaces of biological rhythms. You’ll use your dining room 3x a day, and your bathroom even more. This is where you display family crests and things that will consistently remind you of your values.
4. Minimal friction to outdoor walk: ideally, most functions are on the first floor so you get get outside without thinking. A staircase will provide the slightest friction, making you go outside less than you could.
5. Be mindful of where you place clocks. If any. I would recommend not having them in bedrooms, dining rooms, or studio spaces. Maybe put one in the foyer. If you need to know the time, you go to the clock space. The time is not something you should be ambiently aware of.
6. Time capsule cube storage: as often as you can, document and throw out things that won’t have much sentimental or practical value. For things you do want to save, don’t just store them away, because you won’t be able to find them for decades. Create a system where each year gets a cube of storage, and at any point you’ll be able to find things from your past.
7. Family tree idea: I just like the idea of dedicating a wall to visualize family lineage.
8. Sunken floors: Slight level changes (1-2 foot) force an awareness that you’re changing planes.
9. No shoes in the house.
10. A silent chapel space (not necessarily religious), ideally separate from the house, accessible from the backyard, where you can go to reflect.

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.

I should make a case in r/GratefulDead that “St. Stephen” might be heavily inspired by the death of Neal Cassady.

Robert Hunter, their lyricist, confessed not knowing of the Christian “St. Stephen” until after the lyrics were shared with the band. So it’s not literal. Also, Neal died earlier in the same year (February 1968) that the song was first played (June 1968). The middle of the song is abstractly about death, but all the surrounding verses paint a portrait of Neal that, after reading 5 years of his letters, is now unseeable. Hunter knew Cassady well. Cassady was Weir’s roommate. Cassady was a “sacrificial muse” for much of that generation, so it’s conceivable. True inspiration or not, it will forever change the way I hear these lyrics.

• verse-1: He steals a roses (Neal stole many things, like 500 cars), and “wherever he goes the people all complain.” The verse doesn't explictly say St. Stephen was a thief, but he “had a rose,” he “goes in and out of the garden,” (as a theft might), and everyone is annoyed.
• v2: “Stephen would answer if he only knew how” relates to how, in Neal’s letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg, both masterful writers, he would excessively express how he couldn’t put words to his feelings.
• v3: About death.
• Bridge: “Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow” taps into Neal’s speed. On the road has the line, “the road ran straight as an arrow.” Also, “what a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned” ties to his range of chaos. “Several seasons with their treasons” refers to his shifting moods, and how he would predictably betray people (Carolyn, Kerouac) in search of something new.
• v4: “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills,” Neal spilled everything, and Kerouac/Ginsberg saw immense value in what Neal thought was worthless confession.
• v5: “Saint Stephen will remain, All he’s lost he shall regain,” maybe talks to the enduring influence of his spirit. And then “been here so long he’s got to calling it home,” speaks to his nomadism. (This is prob the weakest link).
• v6: “Can you answer? Yes I can, But what would be the answer to the answer man?” speaks to their desperation, follow-up letters when their friend hadn’t answered them.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

My core value is contradiction, for there’s no other trait that leads to freer-thinking. If you are so stable in your beliefs, you run on auto-pilot. But if you are a Christian atheist, a Luddite technologist, a scrappy perfectionist, or any other kind of walking-paradox, a legless man, then you really have some explaining to do. In resolving the conditions between the two true but opposite things you harbor in one body, you think to make sense, and write to speak truth. This is where you find the work that matters. 

Why am I so inspired by the reckless and irresponsible Neal Cassady? It will take me years to find that out, if ever, but in that pursuit I invent some value system that is uniquely my own. This sort of embrace is, by the way, brand suicide. Your consumers are slow to update their mental model of you, and in the high-speed pizza counters of the Internet there is only small talk and one identity per person. To write for a niche, to stay on brand, to hit the same message, to do the things required for you to dominate the soul-gutting mediasphere is to mistake banal desperation for your alien soul. Do not trade oneiromancy for efficiency. Do not have one mind across all essays, let alone in one essay.

San Francisco, where billboards of slop promote slop promotions,

impossible benefits from machine intelligences;

San Francisco, where the Dead reborn in golden Park,

to dance with perpetual stank

face to nitrous balloons and tie dye,

until Mickey Hart plays cosmic harp,

with shamanic visuals to drunk men,

pointing and chanting his name;

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts,

and sometimes catch fire at night;

San Francisco, where the powerful have,

their souls caught in their throats,

from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is,

a backdrop for cinema-quality technology trailers,

signaling their city is the city of new religion.

After reading the first 3 years of Cassidy's letters (the letters from the real-life Dean Moriarty), I find myself questioning who I am, the impossibility of anyone else being able to reveal that to me, and how I have to really be honest with myself to know it; I think this all while staring at the ceiling—as one does when trying to figure out impossible things—and I’m struck by the unfamiliarity of the stucco, plaster, or whatever you call it (I am outing myself as an architect who is illiterate in some absolute basics of building construction). It reminds me of my uncle’s old condo in Utah—the one I went to every President’s Week for a ski trip, the one we stopped by on that disastrous road trip. I wonder if western ceilings have thicker textures, more noticeable by the gradient hues of an uplight. Any time you travel, unless you are camping, a ceiling is the first surface to greet you, the white sky you never notice, with as many grains as stars if you’d care to count (this sentence tries too hard, but there’s something in it). I think all this thinking about ceilings is probably a distraction from the alienation I feel towards myself. Alone in SF. I mean, I could reach out to everyone (and maybe I will on Wed/Thu). This is likely over-dramatic, and likely due to being alone in a new city, but I do sense that all my recent focus on building software this year, as utterly exciting as it is, has distanced me from finding the soul in my own writing.

Should I be able to walk into Vesuvio and just make instant friends with strangers? What does that say about me if I can’t? Feels like the last 15 years have been a shift away from social fluency and sports and, instead, a shift towards obsession with creative expression and technical mastery. It’s a trade I’m glad I made. Once I have an intro or context, I feel fine, but there’s an inhibition I have in bursting through and creating contexts from nothing.

Among this cafe where I hear lunch talk about data centers, a homeless woman walks into a cafe with her suitcase. She walks right past me towards the counter, until I hear a loud electric tazor. “We don’t fuck around,” says the cashier. Terrified of that zap, of that cartoon sound, she runs out, leaving her bags. A minute later, the guy rolls her bags to the curb, and angrily kicks them over. How dare she?

I got into friendly conversation on a public bus in San Francisco, almost entirely due to the friendliness of the deadheads, and that, once you can tell, it’s an instant invitation to chat. I got tips for the show (ie: avoid the JFK promenade), and tips for the bus. Thanks to them I took a different route that went through Haight Ashbury, ground zero, which included a counter cultural museum, dozens of pop-up vendors, a rock band, and a nudist with a red sock on his cock. 

To what degree did this movement 60 years ago affect culture? I look to my left and see a white-haired woman in tie-dye furiously swiping through a feed on her phone. 60 years ago, it was edgy to wear tie dye to a concert. Now, the truly counter-cultural thing would be to wear a full suit and tie to a Dead and Company show. That might be the only way to actually feel the discomfort and community judgment that original hippies felt from straight society.

Walking through the architectural slop of suburban Queens, hot and windy, sandals digging into feet on a 20-minute walk from a bad haircut to the cute part of town to meet my wife, and now there are church bells. Typical ding dong pattern. And then three low, ominous hits. The new hour is here. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. Power lines, planes, and Amazon trucks. Sun on a clean-shaven neck.

These details are arbitrary. It’s not enough to just render my in-moment perceptions into prose. There is endless detail and no time to turn each pebble. Which ones have significance? Which details create a third thing when you put two together?

The difference between an architect and an engineer is that an architect needs conceptual agility in an unknown problem space while an engineer needs sharp heuristics in a known problem space. They both operate in the unknown, but engineering unknowns are within equations, and architectural unknowns are the problem space itself.

Smooth haircuts and fat loss shot advertisements, a train full of sleepy heads not yet caffeinated but fixated on their little computers. The AC cranks.

It’s a July that feels like a September from kindergarten, and I just read a Substack post from “Worst Boyfriend Ever,” which felt like a second-rate beat impersonation, but I wonder how much is literary inspiration and how much is real. There is a brand of prose-poetry that feels anchored in real-life degeneracy, and while I was once inspired by that early on for its edginess, I realized it’s inauthentic to copy it, and even more inauthentic to aspire to live it. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by him, and realize there are whole secret corners on Substack of this kind of writing that I’ve yet to find. (Note from future self: when writing this, I had only read a post of his where he befriended a homeless man. I didn’t yet know his Substack name was literal—that he started by writing about cheating on his girlfriend, and is now traveling the country in a van looking to fuck everyone in his audience.)

Of the 22 people in this train car, we are all zombies except the buttoned-down silver-watched slick-haired coke-eyed man who seems engaged in the best conversation of his life; his face is more animated than all the passengers combined, his forehead so scrunched that his eyebrows levitate above his head.

NYC is so interesting because it’s an open, secret, peaceful war of virtue clashes. You can’t really know what a passing stranger is like, but in the attempt to infer someone’s virtues, you sense that there are radically different worldviews all co-existing in a very dense space.

I am undecided to the degree that I want to write about cockroaches.

First, obviously, they are skeevy. Roach prose is definitely less gross than a Google images search, but still, it’s far from a feel-good topic. I don’t want to put my readers through thinking about them too much, let alone myself. But I feel intrigued to write about them; there’s the Burroughs-like writerly obsession with roaches in Naked Lunch—which feels like an honestly twisted curiosity that is nothing to aspire to—but it would feel insincere to mimic him. Still, experiences with roaches are uncomfortable and memory piercing and physiology altering and I guess I want to freeze them in text.

I am the exterminator because my landlords are very nonchalant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just crushed them with their hands (I have seen them do this once, at our lease signing). I have a new habit of applying Indoxicarb near the radiator with a syringe; the theory is that, since they are scavengers, they will grab the bait, bring it back to the nest, and poison their families. I’m skeptical of this. In any case, this my 2nd time finding “roach droppings” under the radiator. Does it immediately expunge everything in their intestines? This time though, I looked at the underside of my Clorox wipe and saw what seemed like a microscopic baby roach, dead or alive I’m not sure, and I couldn’t tell if it’s legs were wiggling so I pinched hard just in case, but now I am in this ethical haze of seeing my self as a roach abortionist.

When falling asleep I felt a tickle on my leg, turned on the light, saw it was a roochie (disgusting). Flicked it off, and had something like a 2-minute battle with it before I trapped it in a corner and gave in my 5” thick “Interpreting the Renaissance” book (so far the only practical I've found for a Marxist textbook). Showered, walk back into the bedroom and immediately see another one, same size, in almost the exact same spot. My first thought was not “we have a problem” but more like deja vu or irreality or dream logic.

Reminder to future self: this only really happens once a year, and it’s usually on the day/week when it first gets abnormally hot/humid—need to apply bait in the radiators before then.

Beyond 11pm, all the food places near Bryant Park were closed, and so I found myself in a McDonald’s which led me to buy dinner for a possibly homeless man. He told me he lives in Connecticut, but his cousin (his ride back) didn’t show, and so he needs to wait overnight, needs money for food, has a spine injury, and I wasn’t sure if the whole backstory was real or an excuse. In any case, we talked for 10 minutes as we waited. As I left he reached out for a handshake and I saw what might have been infected blisters, and so I awkwardly offered him my pincers (thumb and finger). The gesture might have negated the kindness of me getting him food in the first place, and I feel bad about it.

Walk through Times Square with an empty, non-judgmental mind, and you'll see the variance in the source code of the species—in looks, language, class, culture, and mental illness. It's a place that belongs to no one and draws in everyone.

In addition to the full variety of human faces, I saw at least 5 rotating ring light cameras that would create 360 photo/video. ChakTok? Some had red fuzzy carpets. They ranged from low-quality rigs to fancy booths. In the last one I saw a 5-year old kid doing an awkward finger-pumping dance to the sound of Jay-Z’s “New York,” and I imagined him watching the output with an earnest technological awe.

There is also a man in a massive gorilla suit as if waiting for 100 humans to fight him, and among it all is a girl sitting in the center of the world, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating.