At some point today I wished I had never heard of Angry Birds. That little monster will clearly be my new time sink.

In my office now I am working on a freshly delivered one of these and its screen is so much larger than my previous one that I’m still a bit freaked out. It’s like my email is in gol-durn iMax.

See, the way it works around here is that annually the school buys new computer equipment for the class rooms and media labs, which means that computers that have reached the end of their life cycle get distributed to the offices for staff use. So this behemoth used to live in a classroom and now I’m staring at it.

Mom dropped by the office today, just prior to our big welcoming ceremony. Even she admitted that some of those Poptart concoctions sound pretty vile. We will probably come up with some other excursion.

You might think that this is a long overdue and benign public service, although considering what happens, maybe it isn’t.

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I was up and around early enough to catch some of the West Indian Day Parade as it passed by my apartment. It was barely 9:30 and people were already partying with abandon. Admittedly, events have been going on in all the surrounding neighborhoods for the past few days. It’s the last pulse of summer, and mercifully the weather has cooled enough to bear convince me that it’s well and truly September. I feel like I’m shaking something off that’s clouded my mind for the past couple of months. I keep saying that in one way or another, but this summer has been a confused and blank one. This weekend I had a few conversations with friends that served to highlight for me how much fear has been crowding around the edges of my consciousness recently. Seeing people out and joyous is the true corrective to that.

Labor day: time to think about work about working, about ending this odd dark vacation of a summer. today I listened to this podcast from the Poetry Foundation that put some of this Labor Day stuff in context: that pie in the sky by and by? That’s a lie.

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Yeah, we’re back in school, and I’m happy to see my students settling in. New York is lurching its way into the new art season, while the streets are still swampy and packed. I’m shamelessly running my air conditioner, making the earth cry.

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As you can see below this post is tagged with the phrase “daily photo”. Which means that it’s part of my practice of taking pictures every day. What is not readily apparent is that while there is at least one pictuer a day, because of the format restrictions I’ve come up with for this blog there is also usually one post per day, with only one picture in that post. So at the most, one picture gets published per day. But for each that gets used, there is at least one other that gets taken and processed and uploaded to my photobucket account. There’s quite a few of them over there that haven’t been posted yet, and I don’t quite know what to do with them.

For example, this was taken the same day as the above image. Why did I think that the first one would make more sense as the lead off? I couldn’t tell you. For the most part the relationships between what I’m writing about and the images I’m posting are oblique, but I know that when the time comes to figure out a post there’s always one picture that seems to make the most sense. And sometimes that picture choice eliminates the topics for the post altogether.

For example, today I’m tempted to write about the odd habit that I’ve noticed in certain women to continually pat and smooth their hair. I see them do it on the subway often, women who’s hair has been coiffed into swooping bangs and straight sides: they form their hand into a kind of mitt, thumbs opposed to all of their other fingers which are held rigidly parallel; then they grasp the hair and slide it between the the thumb and fingers. I suppose the grip is to keep the nails from snagging the hair, and the hair has been straightened in some way, so the smoothing is to keep it all straight and aligned. There is something that reads as so considered and technical and yet unconscious in the gesture that it marks for me the extent to which these women feel observed and displayed, how the regime of appearance has become so utterly internalized. The other night I watched the “Housewives of NJ” and a couple of the women there did it frequently, more so when they were agitated. Many times a preen can be a mark of power, a subtle amping up of allure: think of Mae West adjusting her furs or rolling her shoulders. But this gesture just seems trapped to me. Trapped in a constant state of disrepair.

Now have I taken any pictures lately that I could place alongside that? I think not.

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How bad do you have to be as a business owner when you offer both bikinis AND wifi and you can’t keep the place open?

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Today is my blogiversary. Seven years ago I began complaining here about digital culture, and I’m still a crabby guy. Today it’s a bit harder to know what to write about, and to make the time to do it. I’m happy for the community it’s brought me and the many ways it’s helped me stretch what I do. I never thought that I would be a person who insisted on having a camera with them all the time, or that I would know half of the people I know here now.

In some ways this activity has drifted far from the “sitting in the cafe with my notebook” origins of all my journal keeping and we don’t yet know what the cumulative effect of all of these millions of self revealing documents will be. Here’s a time where more people than ever are leaving a record of their thoughts and impressions, but doing so in a medium that is shockingly fragile from a historical viewpoint: barely more lasting than speech.

Perhaps it’s fitting that thought, which begins as patterns of energy, should travel the world the same way. The printed page provides us with an illusion of continuing past the end of our bodies. Very few artifacts will ever survive the demise of this planet and most of us have had no hand in them. I make art objects in the hope of providing pleasure and possibilities for other people, but do they really need to stick around physically? Framed that way, I should probably lighten up. None of the things I fret about here matters all that much. Think I’ll crab on for another year.

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Look what has appeared down the street from my office: one of those it-doesn’t-matter-how-much-rent-we’re-paying-for-this-space-because-the-whole-damn-space-is-really-an-advertisement-designed-to-rebuild-a-flagging-brand “product experience” restaurant/gift shop things. I took a quick look inside and had to flee, because it was packed, and utterly chaotic as a visual environment. I also took a look at the menu and decided that the various “treats” on offer weren’t worth either the half hour it would take to get them or the five bucks they cost.

Pop-Tarts fall squarely into that category of foods that I actually like less than I think I do. After that tickle of nostalgia around the thought that “hey I buy my own food, I could have Pop-Tarts if I want”, I realize that all things being equal, I actually don’t want. But I really did grow up in a simpler time, because it’s shocking to me that my mom used to send me off to school with two chocolate Pop-Tarts in my gut as breakfast (sorry Mom!). I didn’t complain then and I’m not complaining now, but damn, that was some dodgy nutritional thinking we were all engaged in then.

The other thing that is really odd to me about this “retail environment” is that the dark lighting and pseudo-industrial air of furtive indulgence immediately reminded me of the fact that the storefront currently occupied by the Pop-Tart World used to be occupied in the 70′s and 80′s by a concern called Peep Land where adult products of all sorts were sold and where men drifted through the back booths in search of something a bit racier than a toaster pastry. I couldn’t help superimposing those two time frames in my mind and the floors started to feel distinctly sticky. Thus, my hasty retreat.

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Off to Jersey for the weekend. Here’s hoping for fun and relaxation. I think I’ve packed everything I need.

Lot of walking around yesterday which led to some good photos. I’m feeling more at peace.

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