A world of beautiful women

I fall in love with women daily.  It doesn't always last the same amount of time, it doesn't mean I'll love them, or some aspect of them forever (perhaps unconsciously), but then again, I may, and sometimes think I will, even though I haven't gotten to that point yet, that vague blur of possibility.  I'm a great admirer of beauty.  I'm wrapped up in aesthetics.  I have a wealth of vanity.  Balancing girls like spinning plates while I'm walking to nowhere.  Feeling like a spectator.  Talking talking talking.  To the casual observer I'll be moving and speaking and entertaining, natural as a river running, but a river whose bed is frozen, where only the top is moving, but even this is an illusion.  Being alone with someone.  Looking at them, letting the images crystalize, face, hands, a rug, oblique light, music, smell, a vague crystal of memory.  Desire.  Ambiguity.  Pictures.  Walls of pictures...cities...civilizations of images of women.  And at night, I dream of people who I have never seen, and may never, and I wonder if they're alive, or were alive, or will be, and if I'll know them, or whether I've met people and I just can't remember.  I walk around the world of beautiful women, and they affect me, they all affect me, every one, the kind and the cruel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9So-TLZwXmA

Books Needed

The Painter of Modern Life & Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire
Petersburg by Andrei Biely
The Foundation Pit by Robert Chandler
Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schultz
The Microscripts by Robert Walser
Dance With Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Run River by Joan Didion
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
Tintin in the New World: a Romance by Frederic Tuten
The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens
Away by Jane Urqhart
The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

Chartomancy

Divining motives is a curious business.  There are obvious, broad strokes of intent, like Van Gogh, and there are conversations that seem oblique in the moment, as if you were looking at le Grande Jatte from three or four inches away, but like a work of pointilism, the picture becomes clear from a distance, with time.  And then you have the unclear expanse of uncertainty....a dark place where you have to feel your way out, like some endless hallway in the night, skimming fingers along the wall for doors, looking for scraps of light, or familiar sounds to guide you where you want to be.  And these indefinite markers could be so subtle as not to be noticed, the way a book was held, something flickering behind the eyes, a text message that came from nowhere and the specific words in it, or all the myriad things you saw but didn't remember, passing into the oblivion of your unconscious mind.  And the things noticed, you dissect them to try and understand.  Was there anything to understand?  Reading into nothing and imposing reasons.  Lighting a fire of meaning in the darkness of mere being.  Writing yourself a story.  Though maybe intuition trumps logic and takes us through alleys and hidden doors otherwise unavailable or jammed, to take us where we need to be, or, more like wayward detectives, maybe we're drunk on curiosity or  hubris or whiskey (most likely all three), and find ourselves suddenly in one of those alleys, poorly lit, about to get beaten bloody and knocked out.  Still, you keep going on, in whatever instance, ready to deconstruct, to pick apart, to find the bones, how they fit together, the elusive reason.

Archimboldo

Random

I think it may be possible (though I am not entirely sure) to gage someone's loneliness by the amount of frozen pizza they eat.

Whiteout

I watched the snow build up all day, deeper and deeper, smoothing out the landscape impeccably.  I wondered if people were working, and if so, where?  Where were people going?  Sometimes one could hear them moving at speeds that seemed too fast, and looking to the road saw nothing, but equally often a random glance would produce a car, (or the ghost of a car, because it made no sound) which would vanish into the distance.  Imagining the wind as a physical presence beating on the walls and windows and doors and kicking up now outside in a frenzy is only entertaining for so long, so I decided to read.  Some time passed and it was dark when I lifted my eyes from the words and frame I'd couched in.  The inky black window.  And my room was full of quiet things, unobtrusive things that seemed possibly grateful to have warm alcoves and security.  And the lights were dim, and against the pale walls of green, the light cast back from them seemed to illuminate and shade at the same time, some brine pale light.  Something about the light, and the thickness of the air made me think of the sea, and how I love the sea.  But not what most humans consider the sea, thinking of the surface, of endless generating waves that are symbols of madness and defeat, rather, the seabed.  That other earth, with it's plains that weren't plains, and valleys that weren't valleys, and cliffs that weren't cliffs.

Graphing

I'm not sure how to describe it, this mood.  Stagnant.  Like being surrounded by the sick and the dying, or the people who won't die but aren't really alive.  Ideas shriveling and turning to dust, hearing things that make you not want to think, or reading too much, or drinking too much.  When you don't miss being touched.  Feeling like you're on the losing end of some vast, imperceptible struggle.  Watching television.  Not sad, but not happy, when the venom dries up and consuming flame dies down to embers.  Weighed down by obligation and guilt, not sure where one ends and the other begins.  Knowing that even vocalizing the shape of it is over-indulgent, luxurious, work of boredom.