The Bell Sounds, Move to Your Next Scheduled Period

What to make of my most recent actions? There's such varied pace to my life. Sometimes it feels as though everything is quick and coordinated. Step to step to step. Google transit embodies this feeling. It's time to go somewhere, take the bus, then stop and sync your body with the cross streets, then wait, then board another bus. GPS World. Arrive at your destination, trust the maps that have been made for you. It was another time altogether when people had to worry about understanding where they were in order to relay it to other people. Now there are just maps, maps outside of ourselves and you follow them to get what you want. That's what yesterdays commute to Thanksgiving felt like. Breakneck pace of following steps, laying out my plan in my mind and carrying it out with my fingers following my own efficiency meter. But while I was blazing and bustling through my flow chart, my instructions manual, there was a comforting feeling that the pace would waver. That I would find a haven of sorts, a place where my orderliness disappeared. Where I was meant to be at ease, to do things that made it clear I was taking it easy so that everyone else could enjoy the easiness they too had settled into. To let it be known that I had arrived and that my arrival meant freewheeling fun. The pace had changed again.

Usefulness. What a loaded word. Most of the people I know (know, yet another mindfuck of a word, makes you love the implied lengths of most things? ie to what extent do I know you until we couple for at least a few hours; pillowtalk is such a weird form of knowing, I wish I could say more on assumed rawness, moments of vulnerability-LATER). Phew, lost my track, anyhow I bet some people around me find the ideas of usefulness troubling. How quickly can you make a sandwich? If you are very quick then you might be of use to my sandwich shop. I will trade you coins for your uses, deal? Ha if only you knew how useful you really were to me than you wouldn't feel so useful after all, ha ha! That sort of thing. Be wary or someone will exploit your skills, your handiness, or better yet your good intentions. That's the Marxist somewhere in me saying I am not just more parts for you to amass. Stay the fuck away, let me think.

Usefulness. There's more to it than that. RP and I were talking today about what to do with ourselves, what to do with excitement, with a challenging outlook, with dissatisfaction. How do you spread your own feelings of newness to people who feel like nothing new will surprise them? People who don't so much anticipate the waves of technological innovation as much as they effortlessly use their iphones. How can you convince someone that you've got a new piece of mind for them to try on? No promises, just a different outlook. What I'm hoping for is something that's gonna shock you right out of your skin. If only we could build new mirrors that destroyed you and rebuilt you over and over again, right in front of you, each new building of you different, maybe a variant of yourself you've seen before, call it a memory, but something new and astonishing to behold. People can be very vain. If they could see distinctly different versions of themselves whenever they wanted to would it excite them? Honestly I suspect not, but my reasons are static, like facebook profile pictures, people have choices to represent themselves anew all the time but the choice to do so just doesn't have a fierceness. What's potential, what's this abstract usefulness when you can do such stimulating and different things all the time. We're all arrested by too many choices, and too many of those choices that could restart us would mean too much energy and attention. Dedication. TOO MUCH.

I am going to ponder how to feel out new ways of being useful. People surprise me all the time, I feel them being startlingly relevant to me alot. How invigorating, how surprising. Of course people are still doing it, I'm always sorry whenever I've doubted you all. You surprise me with your choices, with your well timed thoughtfulness, your understated but deeply social actions, your cautious eye, your need to be here in the new now. Accessibility that preserves intention. What a nasty mouthful, astringent. Like nasty mouthwash that you have some faith in, all about the mouth sometimes. RP is here I am going to cut this off, it's a chunk, a morsel if I'm lucky. I need to think about where style and accessibility meet. Fragments, seizings, ugh, look for more time to make meaning come across, like a megaphone in peoples heads, loudspeakers.