It begins — how much Babylon can there be? It emerges, runs around, repeats itself, dies, and is reborn. It is a place, of course, but it's also an Event. America is an Event too, as was the Ottoman Empire, as was the Songhai Empire, although there emerges an abberration — a Babylon written but uninscribed, until it was too late. Not only was it too late, but they inscribed it with a different tongue, one that wasn't structured in the same way as the Empire. There was a transposition of Babylon, a translation of Babylon, this alteration driving home that I can never know Babylon.

I found myself saying things without particularly meaning them. Though perhaps I did mean them. I'm at this makeshift desk typing, wondering if this conversation would be better suited to the analyst's couch. I've been drifting into a sort of latent suicidality lately, letting my body go to waste, and then following that pattern of behavior by bemoaning that I have a body capable of ailing and pain. Clearly I don't seek death but an absence — I seek another opiate, another way to make the time pass while experiencing the bliss of pure emptiness. Is the game a means to this end? Is there a bliss that accompanies playing, one in which my mind gets lost in the action of feeling contra thinking and I manuever around the board, writing, re-writing, erasing, leaving behind a scroll of scattered graffiti?

Somebody tells me a secret and I feel as though this whisper ushers in total collapse. But everything has already fallen. We are speaking amongst the rubble and the ruins. The sun rises, we go homeless.