you are a booklouse
you are a psocid, a member of the order psocodea, from the greek ψῶχος, which loosely translates to ‘insects that gnaw’
you are often regarded as the most primitive of the hemipteroids
you are not a true louse
fossilised psocids have been found which date to the permian period, over 250 million years ago. you’ve hardly changed
you may grow up to 2 mm long
you hatched from an egg, moulting six times on your way to adulthood. you may live for up to six months
assuming three months per generation, four generations per year, you are the culmination of approximately one billion successful generations of booklice – an unbroken line extending back to before the days of the dinosaurs
in nature, you feed on fungi, algae, lichen, and organic detritus. recently, you also partake of dry, starchy household items such as wallpaper paste and bookbindings
hence your name
your favourite book is a la recherche du temps perdu by marcel proust
because of its length
but also its major themes of love, art, memory
and of course, time
to burn
so you’ve got six months. so what?
what’s a year? what’s a lifetime?
what’s the entirety of evolutionary time?
what’s forever
and a day?
what’s a day, and what are you going to do with it?
machine
what is it?
where is it?
when is it?
the scope of this project is the fabric and structure of existence itself.
the scope of this post is the fabric and structure of this post itself.
time limit
do you ever feel like you’re running out of time? i do.
i feel it every time i walk into a bookshop, or a library, and see all the books i’ll never read.
i feel it every time i find myself in some new and interesting place, that i’ll never come back to.
i’m running out of time.
time to read all the great books
time to watch all the great films
time to learn to play the bagpipes
and ride a unicycle
time to become actually good at anything
without that anything having to become my one and only thing
time to become the artist i want to be
time to become the person I want to be
time to make something of myself, my life
i want to wake up each day and feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to get down all of my ideas. instead i feel like there are too many hours, and not enough days. not enough years either.
here’s david foster wallace, saying it better
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
trial
why then am i wasting time being afraid?
of the unknown
of boredom
of my own insignificance
nothing lasts
why worry about making a lasting impression?
and what am i waiting for?
my next life maybe…
here’s alan watts:
But if you really believed in Christianity, you would be screaming in the streets. But nobody does. You would be taking full-page ads in the paper every day. You would have the most terrifying television programs. The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believed what they teach. But they don’t. They think they ought to believe what they teach. They believe they should believe, but they don’t believe it.
Alan Watts
for ‘Christianity’, read death. for ‘the churches’, read western society.
read me.
ergo, i have to conclude that i don’t actually believe i’m going to die
or, alternatively (maybe more interestingly)
that this life isn’t all there is
travel
the point isn’t to have read all the books
or watched all the films
be fluent in all the languages
be proficient on all the instruments
the point isn’t to be there
but to be on my way
the point is to never stop reading
never stop watching
never stop learning
the point is not to know everything
but to know one more thing
for me, the point is to feel like i’m on track
so, where am i?
being
kigali, rwanda.
that’s where i am.
where i’m writing this.
where i’m typing these words at my improvised kitchen-table writing desk.
where i’m overthinking and overheating in thin black trackies, and topless, looking and feeling hot as hell.
where this thought thinks its way into my wrinkled pinkish-grey thought-organ.
i miss shit weather.
here’s this week’s forecast.
it reminds me of lorna simpson’s five day forecast [here], which i saw in the tate modern gallery, liverpool. from the summary: ‘the similarity of the pose in the photographs … suggests the drudgery of repetition with little variation on the horizon.’
misremember
i miss shit weather.
i miss proper october weather.
i miss miserable morning mizzle. i miss afternoons, evenings, nights the same. i miss cold, wet, sunless days. i miss gale-force wind and sideways rain.
i miss reluctantly stepping out of bed onto freezing floor and hurriedly pulling on boxers, socks, thermal sweatpants, long-sleeved thermal tshirt, another tshirt, fleece, buff, woolly hat, slippers. i miss sitting there and shivering and seeing my dragonbreath condense like a bongcloud.
i miss writing on pages so cold that it actually hurt my hands. i miss damp. i miss running the heater to stop the water freezing. i miss hail, sleet, snow. i miss putting on waterproofs to walk two metres from the van and take a piss. i miss days and sometimes weeks of near-constant pissing it down.
no wait. that’s not it.
it’s not the weather. not exactly.
what i miss is the way the weather changes. the way everything changes.
the temperature, the length of the days, the colours, the animals, the vegetation.
and people. their clothes, their habits, their body language and facial expressions.
i miss the markers of cyclical time.
i miss the seasons.
springtime on acid, pupils dilated to dinnerplates, bugging out on beetles and borage, rubber soul and revolver summer with the van side-door slung wide open, touring the sweaty city in a tshirt, everywhere, bodies on display and the ducks and canalside stoners smoking away sleepily, smile sessions, abbey road, dark side of the moon autumn wearing my favourite coat again, finally, and a wooly hat and yomping the moors like sherlock holmes on the hunt for magic mushrooms, blasting distorted doom metal, dunkelheit and dopethrone winter on the schoolbus home, in a white shirt and a black blazer, tie in my pocket staring out into the premature darkness, madly, madly in love, nu metal on my mp3, mutter, subliminal verses, toxicity
to go
here, everything stays the same…
i guess it’s up to me to change.