"he represents the highest motives of man; to create and not destroy."

mercury has gone retrograde (jan 11 - feb 1, this time round), and that has brought:

good: running into long lost friends on the street. retrograde seems to always offer a few of these re-emergences. i ran into eve on valencia street tonight, as the sun was setting. she was carrying a baby blue sort-of bird cage and we caught each other up briefly on tragedies and miracles. always, with her, no matter how long it is has been, or the circumstance, i feel seen, and come away marveling at our strange alike-ness. as i walked away i thought about how much i've changed since she and i lived together, and felt glad at the prospect of sharing this new self with her. in many ways i feel much more suited to friendship with amazingly driven independent artistic women than i ever was before. (an aside: it's weird how, when i was younger, being driven and self confident seemed almost like a barrier to entry in friendships with women, and now, i feel like those qualities are what make my friendships with women totally necessary and amazing.)

good: noticing what has been lingering, undealt with, and dealing with it. this manifested in the form of talking over a lot of maybe not expressed or not resolved stuff with jarett, tonight, but it usually comes up in much less interesting ways, like, finally dealing with the IRS. which i totally don't rule out as a possibility, before feb 1.

less good: the weird nonverbal haze that seems to come over me during mercury retrograde. it feels like i have to work very hard to express myself verbally, and conversation can become incredibly tiring and can feel ineffectual, fraught with misunderstandings, or sometimes even damaging. sometimes it can spread to even THINKING, just trying to sort out thoughts and having it all seem like a terrible soup. i think of this as a haze-state, and it's not limited to retrograde, it happens during pms sometimes too. something about the haze-state gets me feeling quite anxious. it is best to surrender to silence at these times, and simply wait until i feel clear.

went to the taco truck. two tacos instead of the usual three. two tacos is a snack, three tacos is a meal. i'm not sure why this is. ate them while i walked across the mission to bi-rite. at some point on valencia jarett called or i called him and we were talking about how people align themselves with television shows and movies as a cultural identity indicator, or, well, he was talking about that, i think i was just complaining about how everyone would be watching battlestar galactica instead of hanging out with me.

i was craving champagne, so i bought cans of sofia at bi-rite. thought i might go to the park. park seemed not right, so i headed the other way on dolores, ended up at needles and pens. got this great little book by raleigh briggs with instructions and drawings about how to do things like naturally get rid of fruit flies and make your own cleaning supplies.

had decided sofia was kind of gross, so gave second can of sofia to employees of needles and pens. they were busy setting up an art installation behind some curtains. photography.

took bart downtown, called my mom from the cable car turnaround. walked up
went to north beach.
found poet's corner
looked at orion sharing the sky with coit tower.
never did put on my sweater in this warmest january.
looked at the new art installation on the corner of columbus.

thought about jarett, missed jarett, felt confused about jarett.

laid down upside down on a hill to take a picture of a tree.

i hoard and save every email and chat log and, for a time until my phone got lost, i was saving text messages too. i also keep this journal, and have kept private handwritten journals as well, most of my life, and since late 2007 i have been keeping the most prolific private journal i've ever kept, in a file for once instead of handwritten. i also have endless scraps laying about, months of text files with notes about certain situations and ideas. and bits of paper with notes, too. this saves me, this totally saves me. keeping the private journal feels like it saved my life in 2007 and 2008 especially.

as i was walking down florida street yesterday it occured to me that the journal is just data, and tonight as i got sucked into a mercury retrograde quicksand of reading a ton of old emails, they seemed like data, too, almost entirely devoid of emotional resonance, just like, markers to help me fill in the memories in between and try to construct a reality that feels right and true.

as i was reading, the insane idea occurred to me that maybe i could run some kind of truth-extracting script on the journals and the emails and the chat logs and the text messages. like, maybe i could feed this data into a system or machine that, once it had taken all the data and had rearranged and parsed and calculated it using the right algorithms, would offer some kind of aggregate report of ultimate truth or ultimate reality. for about 30 seconds the idea seemed quite reasonable.

so then i considered the idea that my documentarian nature is, i think, sometimes, maybe, an obsessive reaction to anxiety or stress, like a digital hoarder's syndrome. it's a lot of energy expended trying to use repetitive and detailed actions to soothe myself or try to find some kind of truth or answer. i find this idea rather romantic, honestly, i like the idea of having a little mild mental illness that manifests as a something that can at least sometimes be art.

but, you know, i'm sure i could delete everything and never save another thing and i would know the same amount about what the fuck happened before as i do now: almost nothing. it's all a total mystery with a bunch of words swirling around trying to explain it and ultimately never really making it to the core.