Ran by the office today to take care of a few things before the NYE celebration. I have to confess that I am glad that the year has come to a close. While not tragic, much of this year has felt to me like I had hold of the wrong end of a racing lion.

My hopes for the next year: more contemplation, more connection. some time of deep stillness. I’ve been feeding of of manic energy for too long.

I woke twice during the night. Both times I was dreaming dreaming about being behind the wheel of a car driving very slowly into a steadily worsening situation. “A slow-motion nightmare?” I asked myself as panic forced my eyes open.

When I woke for real, the morning sky was wintery for the first time in months. I’m in bed now trying to collect myself for a quick trip into town to take care of some business.

Spent the afternoon at hipster central: The Brooklyn Comic Art and Graphics show and while it wasn’t the transcendent experience it was last year, I still managed to have a good time before the agoraphobia kicked in and I had to beat a retreat to greater Williamsburg and from thence to home.

It’s funny, but many of the new alterna comics are starting to blur together or me, and while I feel like there’s been a quiet revolution in graphic and visual arts over the last ten years, right now it feels becalmed, with the same parameters being trod over again and again. Something needs to shift, and I’m not sure what it is.

Don’t quite know why I’m feeling as rushed and crushed as I am these days. This semester has tumbled by at work, and I feel like I can barely get my head around the very fact of 2011 itself, now that it is crumbling into dust around me.

All in all I feel like I’ve become someone that things happen to rather than someone who makes things (like their own life) happen. A self-spectator. There’s something comforting about this, like the sense that it’s ok to let it all slip by. That’s one of the things that’s so seductive about depression: if you can convince yourself of the ineffectiveness of your own actions, you’re absolving yourself in advance from any bad thing that happens to you.

Daido Moriyama at Aperture Foundation, NYC 2011

Had a breezy art filled Saturday: got to get a peek at one of my favorite artists: Daido Moriyama who was at Aperture recreating a project of his from 1974, attended a reading at White Columns for a book project I participated in, and saw a couple of shows in Chelsea along the way.

The crowd near Times Square in all it’s varied unreality. Not a lot to say tonight beyond I’m concerned for my serotonin levels. Watched two episodes of “Prohibition” last night, and woke in the midst of a dream of making art and taking photographs of it.

The year is shorter. And shorter. It was good day, this first of November. But it also reminds me how few of these days are left to 2011. My apartment has slipped back into mild disarray, and I’m watching more television and reading more comic books, neither of those being activities of which I definitely approve, because neither seem to bring me into contact with the richest of ideas. I’m also trying to adjust to live with my new bifocal prescription, which entails leaning a whole new set of ways to hold my head to keep things like my computer screen in focus. New glasses seem like an odd barrier between me and my experience, a baffle that things can only just barely penetrate.

I’m uncomfortable too with my current cameras, the Nikon D60 and the refurbished Panasonic Lumix. One feel cumbersome, the other a bit too compromised in image quality. Is that just an excuse to say that I haven’t been using them much? My phone is quickly becoming my main camera.

I wonder about the ways that this site can slip into another kind of performance, in the sense of monitored searching for approval. The digital existence is thin gruel sometimes.

Very little to say this month, but my time has cleared to the point where I can think about it again. It’s been a tumultuous ride both personally and professionally, with a lot of travel mixed in. Right now I’m back at a cafe on Court Street, coffee at hand and the Byrds on my headphones. Kids wander by the window, a couple clutching orange UNICEF boxes. Funny how that is still around. It was a childhood moral test that I always failed: when it was time to sign up to Trick or Treat for UNICEF I would weigh the moral gratification of collecting money to help other kids against the gluttonous gratification of amassing bags of candy for my self, and gluttony always won. Somehow the notion that I could do both never crossed my mind, and thus the whole period around Halloween joined the thrill of gorging on sweets with the lingering guilt that I had the option to do something better with my life, but had chosen not to. I always felt squeamish when the other kids would turn their boxes in at school the following days.

The house is cold, timer having not yet kicked in on the steam heat. This weekends cold plunge was a surprise, but luckily none of the trees on the block buckled to the storm, and there’s no trace of snow anywhere around Brooklyn. Less obstruction between me and the laundromat, so I can get caught up on the clothes. Apple picking last week, and I’m still chowing down to clear the table of the many Empires, Fujis and Red Delicious that I grabbed from upstate. I’ve been promised a pie by a co-worker. May blessings pour on those who find baking “relaxing”, because I am not among their number.

Andy holds the camera like a tender shield.

An artist chucks work into the pond and prays by the bank.

It’s better for your life to rebuff you in person to your face, than through a wire.

Also to kiss you.