Thankfully San Francisco weather reflects the sentiment.

It was ugly.  I was supposed to hit 22.5.

I’ll get it next week.

Today I hated running alone.

I try running around in public.  Around folks I know who are more likely to cheer me on.

Today, no one cheered me on.

No one thought about me.

I know I thought about runners today.

I’ll get over it.

For now, fuck people.

It’s just me and San Francisco.

We dance.

We spar.

I spit on her.

She skins my knees.

I stare at her closely.

There’s no favor returned.

It’s an existential act.

It’s not a pretentious way of thinking.

Try it.

I’m rendered invisible with footsteps light.

She cradles me sometimes.

Either in fog,

sometimes sun.

A breeze, like a kiss on the cheek from someone you’d think you can spend the rest of your life with…

It’s fleeting though, because your body reminds you of where you’re at…

…and it’s not in bed.

It’s not in an embrace.

You think when you run your body to the ground, your endorphins kick in…but mine don’t anymore.

I did laugh today though.

The laugh came around mile 8.

I thought about 2046, the film.

I drew a schema of Wong Kar-Wai’s philosophy of love.

Rendered it to a 3 dimensional system filled with so much empty space.

Trajectories and groupings not quite random, but close.

Propulsion of bodies at different rates,

different sizes,

different expressions of brilliance.

I put myself on there.

I put her on there.

I saw us move within this system.

I saw the connection.

It’s tenuous right now.

It’s imbalanced.

Or the language obfuscated by physical distance.

I try.

I laughed, moments after seeing this in that system…

I love easily.

I can’t speak for her.

It doesn’t help that she’s so quiet either.

No bitterness.

Within this system, these things have a ways of working themselves out, that’s what I’m told.

I’m trying.

He didn’t turn back.

It was as if he’d boarded a very long train heading for a drowsy future through the unfathomable night.

Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia.

This is why it just can’t be.

I’m leaving.

I’m going to Oklahoma.

I’m going to New York.

I’m going to Chicago.

I will ride the train back to Oakland.

I live my day-to-day full of thought, of intent.

So this trip will be beyond me, thankfully.

“Circumlocution,” is what Leah whispered to herself.

She thought that maybe the 15 yards from the fake palm dispersing water to the bay was like moving 15 years through a relationship of misconstrued everything.

A smile drew itself only on the corners of her lips as she proceeded to let herself burn in the sun. Her closing eyes closing on the cloud on the horizon.

They stopped on page 372 of Swann’s Way, specifically the following sentence:

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it; but at least we have the things we discover, if not in our hands, at least in thought, and there they are at our disposal, which inspires us to the illusory hope of enjoying a kind of dominion over them.

It is possible but would perhaps be abusive to relate this excerpt to the story of Julio and Emilia.  It would be abusive, as Proust’s novel is riddled with excerpts like this one.  and also because there are pages left, because this story continues.

Or does not continue.

The story of Julio and Emilia continues but does not go on.

It will end some years later, with Emilia’s death; Julio, who does not die, who will not die, who has not died, continues but decides not to go on.  The same for Emilia: for now she decides not to go on, but she continues.  In a few years she will no longer continue nor go on.

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it, but there are illusory hopes, and this story, which is becoming a story of illusory hopes, goes on like this:

They both knew that, as they say, the end was already written, the end of them, of the sad young people who read novels together, who wake up with books lost between blankets, who smoke a lot of marijuana and listen to songs that are not the same ones they separately prefer (of Ella Fitzgerald’s, for example: the are aware that at that age it is still acceptable to have recently discovered Ella Fitzgerald).  They both harbor the fantasy of at least finishing Proust, of stretching the cord through seven volumes and for the last word (the word “time”) to also be the last word foreseen between them.  Their reading lasts, lamentably, little more than a month, at a pace of ten pages a day.  They stopped on page 373, and, from then on, the book stayed open.

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

The Clash

The Strokes

Thrice

Jimmy Eat World

Elvis Costello

TV on the Radio

The Black Keys

Nina Simone

The reading breaks have overtaken the cigarette breaks, which is a blessing.

I’ve been perusing a couple of online journals, but this one seems to resonate most.

http://www.thecollagist.com/

And another vice that hasn’t been too fruitful, women.  I’ll let Hank take the reins on this one…

If you, reader, have had this conversation about said “intensity” with me, thank you.  Your physical reactions – from tilted head leaking smirks, to outright pity – are loads more expressive than whatever attached comment you thought would protect me.  If anything, I’m earnestly thankful that you would spend the time with me, knowing full well revelations would only lead me back to one, me.

I can’t explain it, and it’s not necessarily in this lifetime that it’s worth explaining – but that goes without saying.  Saying nothing.

I just feel it. Live it.

A major project is in the queue.

It’s core is waiting.

Whether that wait is in transit, in the liminal, the subaltern, on the toilet.

I’ve been memorizing a lecture by Pedro Costa, entitled, “A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing”

The Rabbit Hunters (2007)

Some gems from that lecture:

The pleasure of making a film is in making a film, it’s not in showing a problem.  The first reason to make a film is for the pleasure of making it, the pleasure of the work.  If there’s no pleasure in the work, there’s nothing.

The article, or transcription is so rich, I’m just dropping my finger anywhere on the page:

At bottom, being a student of cinema is a very solitary labour, because it involves working on your own feelings.  To be good, you must work on your own feelings.  It is perhaps impossible to really know yourself, but when you direct an actor, when you have an actor in front of you, you can only work with feelings.

Ok, so it’s fundamental material, but it’s packaged in a way that you just can’t knock… really.

The Rabbit Hunters (2007)

You directors who want to make films, you must work to make each shot, each image, each speech from an actor, each sound, you must work to make them like the first shot ever made, the first sound ever heard.  That doesn’t mean originality or something like that.  Not at all, in fact it’s exactly the opposite.  It’s a matter of working with the oldest feelings, as Chaplin did.  He worked and worked and worked, to show feelings as if it were the first time.

The Rabbit Hunters (2007)

.Fin.