101318 ## Things you could play around with during these sessions 1. experimenting with concentration and memory; like for instance always trying to carry forward at least one thread, any one thread from a/the previous session. OK, now I’m going back up to the other thing I said I was going to go back to. I’ll get back to this list of things... later? 2. expanding pigeons -- did that like once, and as I recall it was pretty good. pretty good in an ashley man cow sense? or pretty good in like a wonderful fred sense? I don’t know; maybe neither. Maybe pretty good in a Fucking um Fucking um Mister Grenache sense? Could be. But he’s not really that bad a guy when you get to know him. I mean yes, he’s *sensitive* and he *stares longingly at girls walking across bridges* and he *can’t type worth a shit because he always insists on buying Apple-tastic Brand Computers only* but he’s honestly not that bad to, you know, quote get a beer with unquote or whatever. This one time, him and me went down by the beach behind the game lodge and just picked at snails and tiny pebbles and bits of colored glass all afternoon. I mean it was really kind of nice. I was surprised. I wouldn’t have thought it wouldn’t have been awkward. But I guess because we were both out of our fucking minds on some rancid truffles, maybe that’s what made the differents. I DON’T KNOW. 3. hardcore porn 4. elaborate descriptions of recipes 5. different sentence structures 6. duh 7. dumbness 8. just getting back to the basics, yo 9. i forget Stop. Stop. You’re basically just shitting all over the walls in a public restroom. Stop smearing shit all over the walls. That’s not why we came here. As a quivering doggo in relatively sustainable health, despite the toxins and socio-cultural mismatch of my environment in captivity or highly coerced servitude, I cannot help noticing the antics or wavelengths of the other doggos around me. That’s why I like to come to cafes like this one, still, even after all these years of nothing really changing in cafes like this one. Well, some things have changed: - more laptops, more of them Apple products - more people “working” and does that then mean fewer people just “hanging out”? What might be the significance of that, or the cause of that? If true. Vague question. Wander off. - less smoking, obvs. Now it’s rare, and it’s just a few grizzled folks lurking about the front steps. Nobody inside smoking, can you even imagine? I can’t hardly believe that’s what we used to do in these places. God, it must have been noxious! - On the whole, if the cafe represents a nodal locus of representation of the zeitgeist or whatever, and I would argue (if I had the passion or organization skills) that it does, then I would have to say our little society, that is, the one that surrounds me, so, whatever overlapping Venn patterns of social and cultural and individual behaviors, mores, institutions, and shared perceptions and antipathies and cooperative impulses form an ever-expanding out from *me* at the center (but of course there is no center; just look at *yours* if you don’t believe me), has become simultaneously more and less civilized since the mid-to-late 1990’s. The people in the cafes seem simultaneously more tame and agitated. More deferential and more seething. There’s less eye contact, and what eye contact there is seems more suspicious. OR maybe that’s just me making up a narrative to fit my “theory” that I think I thought of or perceived, but in fact I really just absorbed due to prolonged conscious, unconscious, and subconscious exposure to and immersion in the stew of text and images and relentless insinuations that we, for lack of a more precise term, continue to refer to as “media.” - Or do we refer to it as that anymore? Am I snapping back to the nineties here? What do we call it now? “Social media.” “That stuff that kids are doing.” “Devices.” “Consumption.” “Connectivity.” “Always-on Internet.” (Just think about even just that one alone: you would have been intrigued and horrified back in the nineties. But now you’re just like *shrugs.* Ha. And you think of yourself as some kind of sensitive writer type who can see outside the pre-recorded groove. Ha.) “Today’s interconnected world.” “Our media-saturated teens.” “A frantic slave clown bashing their afro against the inside of the bathroom door, trying to get out, get away from the cameras, get back down onto street level, shit, I’m losing it again, the chemicals are pouring in, my dick rises, my toes tingle, my loins swirl, I hafta take a shit, my hackles rise, my lips curl back, my smile dries up, and I lurch on up the street, past the cathedral where a man fell off the roof and died twenty years ago, and ever since then they’ve heard bats in the rafters every time they have mass.” - See what I mean? You walk through a room of tables in the cafe these days, and people look at you but don’t look at you. They’re all *doing* something. They’re all *with* someone. But still there’s this cheesy, creepy feeling that they’re all, ultimately, utterly naked and alone, shivering and scared. - I know I am. - Times are hard; times aren’t hard (yet) but they sure are weird.