Journal

Couple days before Halloween, 2019. Did I already share this one? Doesn’t look like it…

I was heading towards the edge of town for no particular reason—rainy, messy day—and I caught sight of this. They must have just put it up. It was pretty obvious what the people who did it had in mind, what they were referring to, and I thought shooting it through the chain-link fence surrounding the building was an appropriate touch.

That banner could mean a couple of things today—and now that I’m thinking about it, there will probably never be a moment in human history when it isn’t a dead-on reminder that we are probably failing at something that we swore we’d never screw up again.

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I’ve been wondering how COVID will affect the street art around here. Might result in more of it, for one thing; the streets are deserted after 2AM, and it’s no longer conspicuous to be wearing a mask. You could go full Banksy and maybe get away with it—if you’re keeping an eye out for the occasional cop car on Main every twenty minutes or so.

Did a post office run today, and they don’t want more than five people in the lobby; they’d marked out places to stand with postal tape on the floor. I was wearing a homemade mask—paper towel + rubber bands—and I was standing between a nurse and a bank robber, going by their facial gear. Only one of us was N95-secure, but I think masks are more than just protection at this point; a sign that you give a damn about other people.

Can’t sleep—goddamnit. What is it this time? Well, everything, of course…

Per usual. I don’t like sleeping, anyway—it’s a waste of time and I don’t like losing control of my mind for hours at a stretch. Also, I’ve never been good at it. ⠀
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Some of that was my own doing. I discovered caffeine sophomore year of college—Trinity was irresponsible enough to install a Mountain Dew machine fifty feet from the lab I usually worked in…and it took credit cards, no less, so I didn’t even need cash. I thought I’d cured sleep.⠀
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And I had. It just came with side effects. I passed out at least once that year, flat on the floor of the computer science lab after 72 hours awake. I’d hallucinate on countless other occasions, usually during all-nighters in the cavernous basement lab where my dad worked during the day…vaguely aware of people arguing behind me, before realizing I was the only one in the room. I’d panic, suddenly remembering that I was supposed to be meeting someone, before realizing it was 4:35 AM and the person was Switek from “Miami Vice”. It was crazy, stupid, and counterproductive. I still preferred it to being asleep.
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And I don’t do that sort of thing any more, of course…but there are nights—like now—when the prospect of several more dead-eyed hours in the dark seems no less stupid and counterproductive, and the idea of flooding my veins with some sort of stimulant and pounding a laptop until the sun comes up sounds like the most sensible course of action.

This is a stove clock, viewed through a glass cup. I took about forty photos of it a couple of hours ago, and this was the best one. Honestly I probably should have just gotten up at that point.

Different times. It wasn’t even that long ago.

I remember this moment. I was walking out to my car before work—a weekday ritual I never thought I’d be nostalgic for—and I noticed this guy, poking around a cat tree that someone had tossed.

It’s so weird. Everyone says this, a thousand different ways: you never think about how much your mundane daily existence means until it’s gone.

And I’m saying this as one of the lucky ones.