Things and not-things

I've been thinking about a kind of pathway that I’m going to describe as outside —> inside. The focus here being on what may be a shape or flow or directionality. Somehow, what I want to pinpoint with this framing is the exact feeling I get when I read “2 > 1.” The movement that takes place from the 2 to the 1. (The greater than sign functions as a kind of arrow?) Whatever this is, it feels like a particular category for me right now, a mode that I've taken up--bringing something from the outside in. But it also occurred to me that this is how I understand stacks , which is a term Rachel Yanku put into my mind when we had this little exchange about her work. This is where we started: (One of us had never thought about stacks before. The other: living a life immersed in stack thoughts.) Rachel then defined stack for me: I liked that stacking was a way to see, while also being a way to act on something you were seeing. This is where I relate it to this outside/inside thi...

I’ve been a little bogged down by all of the everything that is right now. Bogged down in the sense of somehow having to figure anew how it is that I take place (the present moment seems to require a lot of reevaluation), and how I can continue to take place in the midst of, alongside of, and in opposition to the ruptures and sludges of it. I could describe “it,” though I truly think the pronoun speaks for itself, and in a way stands for and describes this moment's own confines by remaining only as “it.” Anyway, I’ve been kind of inundated (or something) in feeling the impossibility of articulating all that I take in (in a day, for instance)--facts, thoughts, ideas, sights (some mine, but mostly others’)--and find myself walking around with all this undigested stuff (I’d like to put a heavy emphasis on the static sound of the word “stuff”) in me. I can feel the unusable excess in myself. I have often felt that there is an act of weaving that needs to be done to bring my personal ma...

Two small white pieces of paper and a physical embodiment of my "favorite color combination." It’s possible that it was because I had been thinking of each of these subject matters (subject matters sounds absurd, but it does convey how I’m thinking of these terms) separately that I came to the thought that posting an Instagram story is kind of like wearing an outfit. I’ve been thinking about posting stories in that I’ve of late been participating in such an act, though have been engaging somewhat blindly--not knowing exactly why I do it. And I think I’m always having low-grade thoughts about what I wear, though this too has been peaked by a recent experience (by “experience” I mean “revelatory thought”) I had while wearing red socks--because of wearing red socks--which I hope to write about here next. It always feels like there's all this backstory for me when it comes to talking about clothing, but I’ll just say that currently, I conceive of everything I wear as a failed...

Unrelated photo about how not to hold a burrito according to Super Burrito in Brooklyn. (?) I’m frequently thinking about the prospect of writing. How likely something is--in terms of what it is, what happens, the way that it happens or doesn’t happen–to be transformed into writing. “Likely” is a funny word to use since it seems to imply that what the writing is exists outside the bounds of my choices. Likeliness should really be attributed to my own odds to participate in such an act as writing, but I think I mean it here more in the sense of how close something may seem already, as it is, to be or become writing. (What gives something the sense of being like writing, like something written, of appearing to have a smooth path of transition into it? Do certain things ask to be written about in a way that others don’t?) How fitting would an object, a person, a scenario be to the structures that writing can provide? Or, how much would I want one of these things to be writing? How diffi...

Two pretty full recycling bins. Photo taken from across the street and then extremely cropped to ensure it would be poor quality. This isn’t something I’ve been thinking about, but it is something that occurred to me. I can also say something like “I have been looking for something to occur to me.” I’ve been scouting out occurrences, as the things I do think about are not currently fitting the mold of written sentences. [Fade to black on this comment.] The “this” of the first sentence is the idea that what I want to make may have a lot in common with people’s recycling bins--not just the bins themselves, but specifically filled up bins placed on the curb--and more specifically the bins in Philly that look like the ones in the above photo. Either that, or it’s the idea that recycling bins have something to them that I’d like my made, 3-D things to have. (Does it make a difference from which direction a question gets asked? From which of the two contributing sides it approaches [my makin...