highindustrial.

I have this habit of fixating on gestures and words. Primitives, basic vectors—every act of communication can be reduced like a suspension bridge or geodesic dome: line, angle, line, angle; struts and bolts. And sometimes I have to be a total chimp to negotiate those perilous architectures. I don't think chimps care about geometry.

This has nothing to do with what I just said, but: at the grocery store this evening, in the checkout queue, we were situated behind a rather corpulent (and I don't use that word ... lightly) young boy whose sole cartload was a mountain of assorted packaged red meats and about twenty generic Hostess-like pies, also individually wrapped. And some beer. The boy's contagiously distended father joined him shortly, bearing more pastries and beef. I fancied I heard their hearts ticking. I admired their excess.

Nearby, there was a promotional freezer case of Pepsi Blue. It was empty. There were depressions in the shaved ice where the bottles had been, little craters of impulse purchase impact. I felt obscurely cheated, robbed of my right to sample and spit-take what I'm sure is a ~~berry~~ very noxious concoction. + 9

Autumn tested the waters today. Color temperatures were down across the board, and everyone I ran into seemed likewise just a shade subdued. Personalities registered as composites of other personalities. Averages.

When the sky is gray and people are plain, conversations feel a bit like toll booths. Faces are viewed as if through Plexiglas, overlaid with the reflection of one's own countenance. Words are pennies and nickels, passed through a slot. Time Is Money. Talk Is Cheap. EXACT CHANGE ONLY.

Silence is undervalued. + 7

A tectonic headache had been grinding its way through my cranium for the past eighteen or so hours. Sometimes it seemed to have better pates to torment, so it came and went. The reprieves were welcome, but the repetition was unpleasant. I bummed some prescription ibuprofen off a friend and chased it with some bitter wine, which only left a bad taste in my mouth and did nothing to suppress the sensation, like halite on ice, of my parietal bones slowly and deliberately de-fusing and re-knitting.

Later, and later still, after some Coke and Skittles, the headache dissipated. Finally, perversely. + 1

In my dream she had the tastiest Cocoa Puffs ever. And I don't even like Cocoa Puffs. And yes, I mean the cereal. I ate her cereal.

For my money, and having never been diabetic or predisposed toward autoerotic asphyxiation, the best pass-outs are the naps you steal on sunny Sunday afternoons when everyone else is in wine country or at the beach, when you can just starch yourself pussycat-flat in your amnio-chromatic bedroom and let your subconscious rise up past the tip of your nose like warm mineral oil.

Some time later your superlubricated eyes loll slowly back to their upright position, your vision gyroscoping from too-amber to too-blue, a cycle reminiscent of the bad art-film lighting in some big-budget movies. Snap crackle pop.

The entries have been weirder lately. I don't know why. + 8

A wicked heat wave is grifting the city. I've watched it shimmer under the naked-filament sun, iridesce off streetcars, coronate hairlines with saline baubles. The heat is syphilitic; it moves men to madness. Stricken citizens of all stripes depart abruptly from their senses and their foundation garments, manifold in their morphology, quantum-singular in their unshapeliness—cruel-ambulating about in truncated, semi-opaque raiments which, in violation of the basic laws of Helmut Newtonian physiognomics, rupture the space-time prophylactic and allow all manner of Bruegelian excesses, lapses and indignities to burst hideous-kinkily forth. +

This site is parts of me from time to time, then days and even weeks go by where nothing intersects and the more recent entries start to ossify like edicts.

The weekend was ascendingly good. Sunday, whetted, overflowed: moistening me for no particular reason and just because. I was happily felled by, and crushed underneath, failed words; nebulous, as though I'd overshot my bedtime and ended up in the half-light, where day descends from night and drapes itself across the dwindling lampposts of the city, a dolphin-skin big-top over the urban three-ring.

But Tuesday. Tuesday was Tuesday. Wednesday is nothing so far. August has that way about it. August is yellow wallpaper and perhaps too much ice cream. Summer smolders. + 6