sometimes

when i've been staring at the computer screen for a while doing nearly fruitless research, or i have to stay up till eleven-thirty doing prep for various things, or i'm so sleep-deprived that i'm deranged and a bit hallucinatory, i wonder why? i'm not totally sure what the point of the work is, other than specific short-term goals that seem to be pointless and only for the purpose of conforming. sometimes i get so tired that i stop caring about run-on sentences correct uses of clauses and "that"s and "and"s and i just want to crawl onto a mountain and sleep like a god.
but oh, well.

a picture that i found somewhere.

is it better to say "a picture i found somewhere" or "a picture that i found somewhere"? i've been wondering about this for quite a while.

in case you were wondering, this is all you really need to know about my philosophy:

live.

AD BUSTER-jordan seiler, 29, is on a mission to replace outdoor advertisements with art. late last month, he coordinated a stealth campaign to...

...whitewash and redecorate swaths of lower manhattan.

















i tried to publish it big enough so that you could read it, but that failed, so:
i don't really have a problem with advertising. i kind of enjoy it. and i'm a freelance photographer, so there are definitely times when i've shot advertisements. there is a difference, though, between advertising that's presented in situations where you have a choice as to whether or not to take in the message and places where you do not.
on october 25th, as part of an ongoing project with my group public ad campaign, about 80 volunteers and i targeted street posters that we believe are put up illegally, first whitewashing them, then making art on top. the advertising company npa found out and started postering on top of what we had done. the cops came. seven volunteers were arrested, and five ended up spending about 30 hours in jail.
i honestly believe that i'm right-that people should be allowed to make commentary like this and that i need to not be hiding. but at this point i don't think i can do my work in the same way anymore. with the nypd vandal squad after me, they're probably just looking for reasons to throw me in jail.

fyi

not everyone who sits on the subway with greasy, unwashed hair and a billion bags, reading a pocket dictionary while humming old songs to herself is homeless! okay? please remember that.

vacharey kichlot hakol and when all shall end v'lo ira i shall not fear.

the world is so incredibly complex-there are billions upon billions of stories and lives and deaths and and crises and epiphanies happening all at once, that to see it all only for a moment would kill you. did you know that 86,300 books are published each year JUST IN SPAIN?! and each of those 86,300 books is the story of an author who has been influenced my millions of other stories-to think about it is like trying to untangle a knot of every color in the universe.
did you know that the universe is actually pale yellow? by average, i mean. we all picture it as being black with little white bits, but in actuality, its a sickly butter-white color.
anyway, what if all of this confusion transfusion retribution illusion delusion were to end? just stop, like a candle? we're pushing the door so hard a million different ways-when will we go too far?

think think think whisper NO NO NO not that just breathe in out in out not so fast shhhhh don't think of that obey me obey obey turn lift life stop stop stop it!!! sigh heartbeat heartbeat beatbeatbeatbeat beat...beat...beat... panic blood racing whew slide move operate pulse throb work work work!!!
boom.
silence.

my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light that split the night

as i type this, i am staring through a murky window across the murky hudson river at the murky state of new jersey. there are a pair of white lights that shine more brightly than any other lights in the state, from what i can see. they look like headlights, but they're immobile and huge. they are like a pair of unblinking white eyes. they reflect on the sewage with a cold, eerie stare. i gaze at them, they gaze at me. we have one of those blinking show-downs that people get into without realizing it. but they win. they have to. they're just lights.
just lights... what makes people people? aren't we just machines? as emerson pugh (not that i know who he is) said, "If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." so are we as magically human and irrational as we like to think that we are? or are we just incredibly complex machines that can program ourselves and perform commands that "we are too simple to understand?" after all, no machine can understand itself. this computer that i'm typing on doesn't know that it's recording a young human's existential ponderings. those eyes across the river don't care that they caught my attention.
or do they?

who am?

interesting how that's grammatically incorrect, isn't it? everyone knows who they are, the question is who are you? but, when you think about it, what is the correct answer? people ordinarily just say their names, but that doesn't at all answer the question. it answers a completely different question; how do i refer to you? i suppose that we say that because a true response would be impossible. we don't know who we are. and we don't even really know what the question means. who are you. who am i? do you say where you come from? no, that doesn't answer the question. your parents? your personality? your dating status? your interests? your relationship to the inquirer?
none of these actually answer the question. in actuality, the question is unanswerable. we don't understand ourselves. we only understand the things that attach themselves to us. it's like... imagine a silhouette that is only visible because of the clutter around it.


nothing exists.
it's all in the mind, y'know.