I woke up just before 3. It was dark, I knew I still had hours of darkness ahead of me. I watched The Departed and I thought about how stars fade.

Every time I start a new body of writing in a new place the same quotation pops into my head — "Whoever anywhere will read these written words?" The Departed struck me as probably the densest text to have as much success at the box office as it did, at least in terms of texts containing literary quotations rather than cinematic quotations. But it also isn't a matter of volume with these citations so much as placement in the film, how they echo throughout, transforming the mob/cop conceit into a text about the father, the son, and the family in America.

Costello's"Non serviam" at the beginning of the film, along with a young Colin's attribution of it to Joyce, locate it —

"Non Serviam" / Joyce / Ireland / Boston / Stephen & Bloom - surrogate fatherhood / Costello & Colin & Costigan (Surrogate fatherhood) / Costello (Jack Nicholson) and Colin (Matt Damon) and Costigan (Leonardo Dicaprio) as faces rather than characters (Doinel / Truffaut, Lee Kang-Sheng / Tsai Ming-Liang) / Freud — The Father / The Son / The Mother (Therapist Shawty - Oedipal Shit) / "Families are always rising and falling in America" - Hawthorne / Absence of Shakespeare / Entry of Ghosts / When Matt Damon brings Therapist Shawty back home for the first time and in the morning she's telling him it's okay he couldn't get it up / When Costello makes a joke about getting up to Damon unaware of this / The three men in the porn theater / Leo fucking Matt Damon's bitch / Before Matt Damon shoots Costello there's the 'you were like a son to me' bit but really it's the revelation that Costello is infertile & can't have kids / The failure to have a family - A film of familyless men - The family dying in America (Martin Sheen getting thrown off the roof) / The likelihood that Therapist Shawty's unborn child is Leo's and not Matt Damon's

Justin Bieber / My World / Oprah Winfrey / Falling Off

As I tried to write this, the question of why write this overwhelmed me — questions related to linear writing, writing and reading, the purpose of the text, writing as a technology — the same sorts of questions that have lead back to the dedication that undergirded the previous iteration of this: that is, writing as a means to manipulate reality. Which is, in some senses, a form of coding. In other senses, it is a matter of translation. In any case, the question arises — what is the use of arranging these signifiers above into a cascade of text? Does the montage as such not already get the point across? And as I ask these questions I'm reminded of one purpose, one result of this technology, which is that it allows me to think in a certain way, as the characters and words fall onto the page, thoughts spread out, ideas graft themselves onto what is here, and the mind meanders. What is now a series of signifiers about how The Departed uses a mob-cop film conceit to tell a story about the death of the family in America can become something else, something that reflects about myself and my relation to the family, to writing, to departing.

What C wrote and has now deleted still lingers with me — how does a day becomes a lifetime. There is so much I need to do: math, reading, writing, painting, filming, editing, coding, learning (French), translating — they all loop back into one another but the question of time returns — how is there enough time, is there enough time? Normal pressures to feel, and of course the only way is to continue. I've been reading Lahiri's Translating Myself and Others — this isn't the place for an in-depth reading, but as I progress, new forks emerge, more PDFs are downloaded, and it's a reminder of the impossibility of reading everything, though it remains quite easy to maintain a large taxonomy of these things. A world-map of sorts. I had a dream about a map. Or about map-making. There was some sort of challenge, to create a map out of something, to a map a thing out, I didn't want this map to be visual so much as a system of signifiers, interlocking, that explained the world in some way. A mix is a map, as are so many other things, Stanley Brouwn unfolds, as do memories of previous writings about maps and realities, and this dream remains a glimmer just out of reach, just as Duelle did until a couple weeks ago.

After I realized the memory of the film I had, with a woman following another woman, with a death under the moonlight by the outdoor aquarium, was Duelle, I rewatched it, and then followed it with Noroit and Paris Belongs To Us and Out 1 and Celine and Julie Go Boating and now Le Pont du Nord and all of these other later films lie ahead of me. It felt very strong, this passion for cinema being reignited, but also this passion for games, puzzles, and secrets. That there can be so much just outside of reach, but the idea of chasing this thing, like JPL in Out 1, can be so intoxicating, and if you route that energy into the "right thing" how rewarding it can be — but also how rewarding it must be to be Rivette, to be the author of these games and puzzles and systems, interweaving, interlacing, architecting, constructing, playing — like homo ludens, within the space of cinema, which now needs to be reconsidered given how far the space of cinema (perhaps the space of the technical image) stretches now. The cliche seems to ring true — the most important thing is having fun.

[Text about Groys & Nettspend painting & Nettspend Interview & Justin Bieber & My World & My World 2.0 & Worlds & Falling Off & that episode of Oprah Winfrey & about Nettspend & Charnel Vision]

[Text about catching up with C and catching up with A and being alone vs. being with people and re-entering the fray of people in the days to come before returning back to a being-alone for a short period of time before P comes back]

[The bracket as a concept to be completed, but one that remains in a space without contract, lingering in the empty temporality of this webspace]

For old times' sake:

It's really quite a thing to spend a series of months writing writings, writings that eventually turned into writings about writing, the different types of writing, different types of inscription, of writing with text, writing with image, writing upon surfaces, writing upon the body — and the inevitability of this last part: that everything is inscribed upon the body, only some inscriptions remain more visible than others. And after writing about this mostly invisible never-ending body-writing to take a pause from inscribing text to what had become an extremely familiar container, one that almost summoned it from the self, and after this pause, to fall, and to encounter a break.

I was texting J about this and he compared the night to a public secrets entry. A funny thing to be compared to — Asher Roth's "I Love College" comes to mind: "That party last night was awfully crazy I wish we'd taped it". And it's funny to think of the act of taping a party in the 2000s when you still had to bring a camera out vs. now when the phone cameras can be everywhere, but when I was walking to the train w/ J on NYE I was talking about how I rarely use my phone camera, it's not an effective appendage, at least it isn't as demanding as when you bring out a camera, which turns the event into an Event, you take the pictures and they go to a different Place than that of the overflow scroll of the iphone camera roll. That party last night was awfully crazy I wish we'd written it, or something like that, except the thing about writing is that once it ends, everything was written, it just remains to be inscribed. "For old times' sake", for the sake of time that is old, time that has gotten old, time that has aged, time processed by time — that's the reason to write it, or rather to inscribe it. There's a dance around these words, because of their imprecision, the dance necessarily becomes precise. We arrive at the arriving — we dance towards a destination.

The break — the break becomes The Event, the text attempts to lead up to The Event. That's how it's supposed to work — an ending, a beginning, but of course you start to unfold it and it becomes much more difficult to put the sequence of events into place, to delineate the start and the ending. That tooth break last night was awfully crazy I wish we'd taped it — except it probably did get taped on security cameras — I need to ask J to ask the liquor store for the footage. I need to call a personal injury lawyer and set up a consultation. These are things after the ending — is The Event the ending? Is The Event ending? In the last paragraph of the coda was a break, and I realized that it had then settled into place. There are still footnotes to come, in time, slowly. The footnotes to come, after the book to come, after the time to come and the time that remains, and the slipslide of memory and linkages. We didn't tape the break, but we photographed the moments after. With the break came an adrenaline rush, I couldn't feel pain, everything sped up, everything blurred, I lost my teeth, I was unperturbed, at least I was in my memory and in the photograph, though it became a thing to take care of.

Naturally I wondered about the events that lead to the break, what could have happened differently, such that the break didn't happen. On the train platform I saw D, whose government name is A, we'd never met but I've seen him through the screens and we exchanged a nod that said I know who u are but we don't need to have this interaction, and he read his Angela Davis book and we got into different cars and in my car I noticed C but I was too tired to say anything to her, I last saw her on the 4th of July, she talked about her senior anthropology thesis, about a mall that was being built in Jersey and was supposed to open in 2020, an event disrupted by an Event, but I didn't know what to say to her, I was tired from not sleeping on my flight or on the floor of the Denver airport, I figured I'd just leave it until next time, and avoided a couple ripples that perhaps would have diverted the break, but this wasn't even the day before the break, but the day before that. On the day of the break M was also supposed to hang out after he finished a recording session, but he didn't text me — which also might have diverted the break. There were all of these turns that could have been taken, but the break happened. Perhaps this paragraph about the potential of the break not occurring serves a purpose — the purpose of which is to explain a natural inclination following an Event — but as it unfolds itself, I wonder if it is really necessary — I debate deleting, but allow the thread to hang. The constellation hasn't been made yet, this is still just a cascade, but forms can change, along with them memories. The previous iteration was on a different website, the previous iteration had numbers, it had yet to form itself and then it formed itself.

The night of the break S arrived. We split a Zyweic and then another Zyweic and then we went to Gottscheers, he had a bratwurst sandwich and two beers, I had some of his pretzel and a beer. Before he'd arrived I'd had a cappucino and a vegeteriana sandwich from Sofia Gourmet. It was all I had eaten all day. The night before I took a couple roxies and they had me constipated. The coffee didn't help. After Gottscheers we met J on Forest Ave and then we went to an opening of J's friend where they were not very welcoming and we drank two of their peronis between the 3 of us, and the following day J would dm his friend about how hostile it was but that it was lovely to see her and her art and she would leave him on read. That night she was talking about Argentina, I just remembered her name, M2, and M2 said that it was the worst christmas in a long time, that the toy stores didn't have toys, and S found this sort of statement unbelievable. We left there like WTF and it would be more accurate to say we were "shown out" than left. In any case, we went to Cozy Corner, we linked with C2 and K, we drank beers, we played pool, I got a shot of Jameson for me and J while we were playing pool against two girls but later one of the girls corrected me and told me the other girl was actually a they/them, and the girl and the they/them couldn't stand us, and as I got the shot I felt bad that I didn't get another shot for S but it was too late at that point in terms of the flow of things, and we kept drinking and we kept drinking and then C2 and K called it a night and then the three of us took the train to Alligator Lounge. I pissed twice on the train platform, once as the train was approaching and then onto the train. That last part was taped. Taped is such a funny word. As it wasn't taped, and it wasn't filmed, it was captured as information by the sensors on an iphone which masquerade as cameras, which software then assembles into a technical image. In any case, we looked back on it laughing afterwards.

There was karaoke at Alligator Lounge. We sang different songs. We drank white claws that we'd bought at a convenience store beforehand and snuck into our jacket pockets. And then I think J was buying more white claws, I didn't go to the bar or buy a drink at the Alligator Lounge, I assigned myself hypeman for everyone doing karaoke and was acting incredibly out of pocket, I was too drunk to really give a fuck, and it didn't seem like a place where there were rules, social rules, that needed to be followed. Some of the songs: Born To Die (J), Fluorescent Adolescent (S), Flashing Lights (some guy), High By The Beach (me) — when I was singing, I'd half sing the words, half repeat "molly percocet", half freestyle. J took some great pictures of me. The fit was great — Junya pants, custom dress shirt I got made in India after buying the fabric, camo HP hat that they would've gave my dad when he worked there. Though in the picture after the break I wish I would've had the presence to put the shirt back on and take off the Dries jacket, which dominated the image. That's how it goes though. I was automatic writing, I wasn't concerned with the writing of events, rather I was responding to what had become The Event.

The Event happened, we acted accordingly in response to it, I had to leave earlier than I would've liked, it will shape the events to come in the upcoming year, and serve as a reminder of that unit of time which is so binding for so many, like decades, like centuries, which I would like to escape as best as I can, which I attempt to escape through the construction of forms in particular ways, all of which serves as a reminder that this form is not complete, that it will find itself in the time to come. The Event happened, but now I'm forced to contend with the impossibility of endings and the impossibility of endings, rendering a sense of doubt as to whether The Event happened, or rather an event happened, like many others, that this designation is forced from the hypervisibility of this body writing — did The Event happen? What was it? Yes a break happened yes, was the break an event or an Event? As I inscribed the events, I felt trapped by the banality of parts, not the banality of the events, but the banality of inscribing them in this way. Of chasing a thing, a moment that had past, of trying to paint a picture that had been painting. Trapped — I don't think trapped is the right words actually, there's still this dance, this imprecise dance, towards meaning, attempting to assemble and construct it — maybe "caught up", or "tired", not an "I've been in This Club Too Long" feeling, but the feeling of trying to capture a thing that had past, became what I'm not trying to capture is not the writing, but the inscription, and that sort of inscription is a repetition of a past inscription, the slew of events that fold into each other, a simple narrative that attempts to say this is what happened while wrestling with the impossibility of saying what happened and the impossibility of knowing what happened and perhaps the impossibility of happening itself.

And it remains: the impossibility of beginnings and endings. There is the graft. I can graft an ending, I can graft a beginning. It's what I will do, what I'm forced to do, at least in terms of grafting this inscription, forcing delineations in my process, but the the impossibility of endings and beginnings still remains in regards to reading. The eyes flitting around the text, not proceeding in an orderly fashion, left-to-right, down one line to the next, but rather bouncing around the page, drawn into certain words, losing attention at other parts, the natural way in which we read language, at least this type of language, the impossibility of perfect attention, and of course the impossibilities that such a thing as perfect attention would be accompanied by. I like loops. I begin to type "I realize" but I know this, you can see this in my past writings, I backspace it, but then I inscribe this deletion, it becomes an imperfect palimpsest. Perfect is a tense, I wonder why, the research into etymology beckons. I abandon this repetition. This inscription has opened doors — language as a technology, writing as a means to transform reality, loops form from that last part. I leave, I return. I leave, I return.