Memory (34.533265, -117.289216)

Tires always end up in the desert, and I’ll forget everything, but how strong the feeling is now, and how the chance to write it down is so worth it, worth the risk of forgetting it all like ash. That’s enough, and perfect.

Driving out of the coyote dry lake bed, doubled back over the tracks I rode in here. Tried to drive over them exactly, not realizing the lines in the dust ahead were made by the same car.

“Who’s this?

Who left, if no one was here when I arrived?”

Was a me-ghost all along. This also left a powerful impression.

The sun stepped below its hottest angle, finally relenting. The blue sky got more and more solid, from gaseous haze to paint. & the mountains began to turn blue again, too. & the car thermometer ticked down from 116 to 114, to 109, to 105 and eventually 91.

Once, we had an unforgettable time in Victorville. We sat high up on a mound and looked out onto the road bending into Apple Valley. Tire shops and closed Route 66 museums. I always wanted to go up the 15 a little further. This time, I blew straight past, only making it at night, on the way back.

It was completely unfamiliar, but I found the scramble of rock and joshua tree again, and ended up at the place where we ate dolma out of a little cooler, and looked out on the factory processing zeolite, bentonite, brown clay, and the long freight trains that make a run in the land like stockings.

Just out of frame is the Funeraria del Angel, Victor Valley, where there is a curious amount of trimmed lawn grass for the middle of the desert.

The world’s edge is never that far away, you try to push it but it’s right there where you’re pushing. The factory churns, rumbles, and squeals, with no lights on. And the funeral home sign is brighter than every house window I can see from here, which is not many.

Empty-headed summer, feeling distracted. But I’m finding distraction to be another form of attention.

My digital twin

The recorder state has its eager eyes wide open, never blinking, on everybody all the time. So, I don’t wanna say distraction is resistance lol bc that sounds crazy, but “being distracted,” or letting yourself be guided by the idea of distraction, being open to the idea of it as a form of errantry can help build #Random mode into something more formalized, a map for the world that changes every day, an unpredictability that the trackers hate and the recorders actively try to repress.

These days, when an algo gives me a bad rec, I feel like I’m running into an incomplete me-ghost, a byproduct of all the data collected on me, a shape in the server that was enough to recognize as me, but off-kilter. I can’t tell what’s off, too, since the whole body is blurred, but something’s wrong—this definitely isn’t me.

Alice put together a screening of “We Live in Public” last month at 47 Thames, which I’d recommend people watch, but am not going to synopsize here. What I’ve been thinking about is the essential bet Josh Harris made at the heart of it all: that people would share every aspect of their lives in the future.

It was an interesting premonition, and one he said with so much conviction (and arrogance) back then, that even watching it in the present makes you want to raise your eyebrows and say, “yeah, wow, he got it, spot-on.”

He was right about the omnipresence of broadcasting, but he was wrong that everyone would “want” this 24/7, because of how it spiraled and spun out of the hands of individual agents. When 24/7 surveillance became a thing enacted upon us, it became undesirable—curated/clipped presentations of life became a way of saying, “this is my life, not yours” (even though we’re still feeding the machine).

When does presentation become performance? When does performance become performative? Moving unpredictably, dodging the gaze of the Apparatus keeps us true to ourselves, and reifies the world, by asserting and holding onto some sense of opacity, which proves understanding.

Friendly ghosts

I posted up in the dark, watching the factory work in stillness, and thinking about how different a place can be between day and night. The car was up in the sand, by the mound, blinkers on.

Someone who was way too nice stopped and asked if I was ok. For a sec, I thought I was in trouble. Maybe I’d stayed here, sitting and smoking a little too long.

Truck was big and rusty, he was likely ten years older with long hair. He dapped me up when I explained what I was doing and said, “Aw man, we all been there.”

He mentioned the view at the top of the mound, suggested that I go up to where I had just come down from. The exact feeling in my chest was something between 😮‍💨 and phew,

right in between those two exact signs. Honestly, what I’m describing, it’s tears welling up—not in a good or a bad way. I suppose “bittersweet” is accurate, if there was a way to fit right in the middle of those two signs as well.

He peeled off & I wished I got his name, & told him that he read like a friendly spirit, a good omen, a pull out of distraction that drew me to a whole new, rich line of thought.

A slow hour twenty-six back home. The temperature in LA is 71 F.