There’s something stuck into my head almost immediately this morning upon waking. I don’t know where the bad attitude started but maybe it was when drinking- which was fun- liberating if nothing else. I hope maybe I can flush out my dreams from this morning. I recall waking and realizing (initiating dialogue with myself) that it takes a self to pull out of sleep. I wondered if there was something in me that could be removed, like a part of my brain perhaps, like my ego or something, so that I could love wholly, more.. without end. But here I am on the verge of working. I’m slotted to work today. My first deadline (for a collaborative project with friends) is today- this evening, some bird sculptures for a film. I am powerful- someone told me that a few months back, but then also again yesterday over the internet. How I recall the power that you had- something along those lines. I apologized for blackmailing that teacher in a meeting. She said she didn’t remember it, and that I was young. Yikes. I cast my former self in a negative light sometimes, but I wasn’t that bad, and I’m not too terrible right now either. I got sick, and it probably had to do with drinking and smoking, and having a sense of lack of purpose. Socially, it was fun, and I got a ton of numbers and business cards, but as it goes in Florida, mostly from do-nothings and mouth-breathers. I read this book, which is close to the best I’ve read, by T.J. Clark called The Sight of Death. In it, TJ goes up to these two paintings from Poussin nearly every day. He’s on this residency at the Getty museum in LA. Part of the reason I want to get out of here is the people, truly. People are the same everywhere mostly, it’s true, but these young worrying, self-centered yet not self-aware ‘Ringlinger’ types are the worst. They are uncreative, and walking echoes of mass consumptive culture. They sport bed-wear including elastic eye-shades in the day time while they work, to demonstrate how long they’ve been awake and at it. I am sitting next to one right now, he’s not made a move on his digital image in about twenty minutes- he’s fried. He takes sips from a water bottle with much pomp and sound. He’s self-righteous. I guess it takes one to know one. So in this book: TJ is on a residency at the Getty, where he walks into a room where two paintings are hanging- Gallery 20. One of the Paintings is Landscape with a Calm, and the other is Landscape with a Snake. The authors ideas about the paintings are fleshed out over the course of his residency, including poems, tight crops (studies), and supplemental plates and texts to enlighten throughout. The area I had was not too much. Last night I was being pseudo-racist with my friend outside of the dorms. It’s funny that when you try to explain your purity, that you show your ugliness and flaws. Or rather, if you try to grasp at the notion that you are separate from racism, then does it claim you. I guess racism is systematic, such that there is no escaping it. It is in the air we breathe. That’s the newest information from the new-left I’ve heard. Anyway, waking up I thought about this pool, where there was a big thing going on (in the James Bond sense). I was a part of some team or something, and a black friend came up and I changed my vocabulary- talking about some bitches around the pool. This goes into some of my distrusts. When a (let’s say) white person alters their speech to sound more black, it’s one of my biggest peeves. Though language is flexible and important, I do not think that it should be dumbed down for the sake of others- that’s retarded. Here’s where getting out of the south would be good. There’s a bunch of idiots down here, and to have a little something special is nearly toxic. So I said this bitches by the pool line to my black friend, and I woke up, thinking god, I’m fucked up. It’s not the worst, I was trying to relate. I won’t get too wordy here, because words are so damn slow, they could not express the complexity of my thoughts, or I would be stuck here writing on a moot topic, wrestling with myself as to whether or not I’m racist. .Hey.
