the air is clear and clean today, the sky is cloudy. i walk through dewy weeds in the back yard and collect four fat cucumbers. i slice one up to take with me. there are some drops of rain on my windshield as i leave for work. how wonderful, how deliciously cool. 

on the way in i am stopped, as usual, at the road construction by a man with a red sign. it’s the same guy i see almost every day, leaning on his sign, staring blankfaced at the cars. is there a bored distance in his eyes? i don’t know, because he wears sunglasses. i wonder if he recognizes the same cars and drivers as they recognize him. or is he focused only on the music or audiobook or podcast that is surely playing in his ears. to stand in place and think all day… a blessing or a curse? he turns his sign around from stop to slow, and i think no more of him

hello desk, hello pc and pile of papers, hello pen and yellow sticky notes. outside and below me the lone red car is still lone and red on the flat gray expanse of pavement. a deeper red today under the clouds, like older, deoxygenated blood. where is everybody? where is everything? in such moments i feel that if everyone on earth had vanished minutes ago, i’d not know the difference. i try to convince myself that it has happened, that everyone is gone, i try to truly believe it, to feel that spark of shock, the twisting of unease in the gut, just to know what it would be like. if one can believe something for even the smallest sliver of time, that feeling can be captured and sealed away, and used for any number of things. 

1.

what is that 1 doing there? in yet another instance of me writing exactly whatever i happen to be reading, i have been influenced by plath’s tendency to number her journal entries. that is, not only are they dated (though not always) but each entry gets a number, even if there are multiple in the same day. why am i starting at 1? well, where else would i start. it will be, i imagine, satisfying to watch the number go up. what is that strange human impulse, exploited by videogame makers across the world, to make a number go up? it is my number, it must get higher and higher! at any cost! sadly, embarrassingly, this little change will likely encourage me to write more often, and more consistently… 

2.

the trap of social media. how many hours and days are spent clicking and scrolling, chasing the dopamine hit of something truly interesting or titillating, something i’ll surely see if i scroll just a bit further. i hate it, and yet i find myself doing it constantly, unconsciously sometimes. because facebook (i note my own hesitance to type that name, because in my mind facebook still resides in the same room as those ephemeral trends de jour, forgotten by all in a fortnight, and due to my chronic delusions of relevance telling me that ten or twenty years from now someone may be reading these posts, i cringe to type the name of such an impermanent thing. but this idea that facebook is some passing trend itself is dating me, aging me, because facebook is a global and shatteringly influential entity that has and will shape the course of human history, and will be in history books for centuries [if there is anyone to write those history books in centuries, that is] to come, whether we want it there or not) is the only place where i can easily chat to certain friends and family members, i am often there typing a message, and it is also often that i am sucked into scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, sometimes for five or ten minutes before i even realize that i am doing it. then i hard click out of the tab like i’m slamming a door. but then i’m back there some minutes or hours later, scrolling again, before i even know what i’m doing, as if hypnotized, as if this giant automated entity is drinking my attention like blood, an ever voracious creature that feeds on my mind, and i live every day with it sitting right there next to me pressed warmly up against my thigh. why do we do this to ourselves? because everyone else does? what is gained from it? what do we get in return? this creature only takes takes takes, and we eagerly give give give. the only escape, it seems, is to burn the data centers.

3.

the point, the point, the ever elusive point. when i write, what am i trying to say? what am i trying to convey or explain? if nothing, then what the hell am i writing for? fun? self-pleasure? if i could answer these questions then maybe the point would not poke me so often with its pointy self. then too i could stop comparing myself to various literary legends and just focus on my goal or my purpose whatever those may be.

i fear, however, that there can be no purpose in this post-reality soulstripped world. everything has been drained and shrunk down, all meaning has been scraped away leaving the hoarding of wealth as the only possible purpose. all people and all their creations, including all ideas, all art and literature, all of nature, and even all of history, all of it has been reduced to a red or black bar indicating profit or loss. any purpose one might try to invent other than ‘to make money’ will be hunted mercilessly and murdered, then strung up to rot in plain view as a lesson to anyone else who might get a crazy not-for-profit idea. if your purpose is not to make money, then you either already have it, or you simply cannot live here.

4.

enough dramatics. the point is to write. who will read it? what will it accomplish? i don’t know. but i’ll leave behind as many words as i can, regardless.