Tag: real life

Scratch ’n Sniff Dot Net

Trash Pickup Aftermath // Brooklyn NY // 2015
Trash Pickup Aftermath // Brooklyn NY // 2015

If the web was scratch ‘n sniff, how many posts would you bring to your nose? 

If sites and blogs emitted odors, how far would you keep your phone from your face when you check the subway status?

The internet, as with a war epic or a make-out scene in a barn or a Victorian-era period film, is easy to romanticize (and project ourselves into) because it doesn’t smell.

The Alternate Side

20230814.1040

90 minutes
1x / week
give or take
holiday suspensions

78 hours =
3¼ days
every year

give and take
time suspended
sitting
idling
avoiding citation

on the alternate side

standing still
in the driver’s seat
nothing but space
on the alternate side

to

go figure
the moon out
yourself out
the odds
the risks

in my ny city
fruit hangs low,

so low,
aamof,
that


parking enforcement officers,
none the wiser,
sweep the vehicles
even when
the street sweeper
never shows to
sweep the streets

and no one
with a fresh ticket
on their unattended car,
nestled between
wiper blade and windshield,
is any the wiser
to the unswept grit
left underfoot
or the inside grift
right out in the open

on the alternate side

An American Wall

Eastern Wall of the Richmond Police Department Headquarters
Grace and Jefferson Streets
Richmond, VA
20230624.0735

Sculpture
“Thin Blue Line,” Michael Stutz (2005)
Public Art Commission

Plaque
“Site Of The House In Which
Samuel Preston Moore
Surgeon General
Confederate States of America
Lived From 1863 To 1865

This Tablet Is Placed By The
Confederate Memorial Literary Society A.D.

[playlist] 202306.5P@<3

Spotify playlist #105 for June 2023 reflects movements in space, internal and external:

listening to jazz with my father on the lanai
stories of my parents’ meeting in 1969
my mother’s covid while recovering from a broken hand
my father’s pneumonia while recovering from covid
the WGA strike and potential SAG-AFTRA walkout suspending Cat’s latest gig, extending our trip by 3+ weeks
finding peace between the days of Luna’s now kinda-regular bi-weekly epileptic seizures
the kinetic calmness in the chaos of a tennis court
weekly quests for the perfect mango
the road from Florida back to NYC



Not bummed to be back in NYC, but I don’t return home after being away with unbridled excitement anymore, either.…

continued...

Net Speed

The internet from the start offered a grand social paradox. Everything’s apart together, but also together apart. And everyone’s alone together, but also together alone.

Fwiw, pandemic lockdowns aligned our interactions in the physical world to how we interact with each other on the internet. Everyone alone together, and together alone.…

continued...

(xtra)terrestrial vacation

The idea that alien life forms would conform to our dimensional perspectives and physics, and yet still leave themselves vulnerable to human weapons and hate, is naive.

“An Earthland vacation this light-year? Really?”

“I heard it’s pretty, and I always wanted to go.”

“Okay, but just remember to bring ‘sion-block-“

“Yes, I packed ‘sion-block!”



continued...

70-year shutter click


My IRL family, Maplewood, NJ, 1981 [me: 2nd from bottom left; paternal grandparents Ida & Morris: top row left; self-timer composition, Kodak stock, format unknown]

Down in Florida last month, I began to organize my parents’ 6 bins of photographs, the earliest of which reached back into the 1880s. Aside from being an invaluable record of my family history, the trove also provides, upstream, a fractal of the entire era of mass manual photography.…

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The Former Musician’s Blues

a former musician, surrounded by destroyed instruments, under a pink sky, photographed by William Eggleston

DALL-E 2 AI INPUT: “A former musician, surrounded by destroyed instruments, under a pink sky, photographed by William Eggleston” (2022)

Someone randomly came into one of my social feeds today with “former musician” in their bio, and the notion sent me, well, riffing…

What, exactly, constitutes a “former” musician?

Did they never “make it?”…

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Warring Thoughts

the trick is to get paid for just being you

to “turn a trick” is to be paid to be someone else’s “you”

adopting war terminology for sports (“bomb,” “shotgun,” “blitz,” “strikers,” “defense,” “offence,” “flanks,” “attack,” “sacking,” etc) turned war into sports

Now, those not fighting are said to be “on the sidelines.”…

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everywhere lies truth

There’s no such thing as “living a lie.” You live your truth and only your truth, and enjoy or suffer the fallout, whatever your truth creates.

The phrase isn’t, “you’re living your lie.” It’s, “you’re living a lie.”

At the very least, if it was your lie, you’d have some agency

If there are lives “lived in lies,” then life itself is devalued

The “problem” today lol isn’t that everywhere there’s lies.…

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Random 20220506

a week of scattered thoughts

Grass is a reflective, not euphoric drug. That’s why it was made illegal

Fwiw, nuclear power is a form of solar energy. Stars are just big AF reactors.
In a way, every nuclear plant on Earth is a man-made nano-star.
Nuclear bombs explode microscopic suns.

there’s only so many times you can say, “I’m being taken out of context,” until your actual context becomes questionable

Let’s pitch Name That Tune except you have to ID songs behind white noise at varying intensities – (vacuum cleaners, hvac, subway entering station, side of a highway, etc)

No Justice = No Peace also means No Injustice = No War.…

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Another Post About Peace

medium mirror: https://westyreflector.medium.com/…


It’s absurd that war is just “declared,” whereas peace requires “negotiation.”

Peace, for some reason, always requires a “process.”

Sometimes you have to “sue” for peace. Taking someone to court, in a way, makes you an aggressor, so, in a way, litigating the end of a war turns aggressors into defendants, and defenders into plaintiffs.…

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Rainbow Needle / Tennis Thread


Words are my thread; music is my needle

I haven’t written too much on the internet in the last few years because I am afraid of what…

  • …was
  • …wasn’t
  • …will be
  • …is

This internal poll will be open for the rest of eternity, or until eternity runs out of time, power, or storage

To run out of storage is to run out of time.…

continued...

metaphor / material

I have quite a bit of fun losing tennis matches as long as I take a ton of risks.

The zone that takes me to a place of calm courage happens when I finally displace the notion I’m playing against someone, with the notion that I’m playing with someone.

My mind and body also need to find a space of equilibration, where body forgets materiality and mind forgets gravity.…

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