Health Gossip

Full Moon (Day 1):

The sunrise was nice. There were a lot of clouds, so the light cast into my room was diffused hazy white. The night before I stayed up late doing ketamine and bouncing around different regions of my computer. A rewatch of Motorway (2012), which I'd only seen the day before — I was trying to tease out exactly how Soi Cheang was able to construct such a dense, lean text about the relation between humans and machines, all while using the vehicle of the genre film. Clicks around my archive, looking at things I'd made in the past, specifically gifs from 2020, constructed from miniDV footage from the backseat of a car on the way to a party in Seattle, trying to forge the way forward. A series of minor events from the past weekend lead to an acute depression that I knew would pass but I had to find a way out of what was momentarily overwhelming despair. The clicks lead me to a video about Stanley Brouwn, notably violating the artist's instructions not to document his work in image. There's a section that focuses on how he maintains records of steps and presents them. This was my favorite part while seeing the shows in Chicago and Los Angeles, earlier this year and last year. The footage in the video is from the Stedelijk, at a show open until the September 1st. It's a traveling map, though the map shapeshifts. The AI voiceover keys in on something crucial: "There is an unsettling absurdity in reducing a life to measurements. The lack of curatorial explanation creates a productive ahistoricity that brings Brouwn's work close to contemporary anxieties. Who hasn't tracked steps by choice or by health app default? We are now adrift in a sea of often forcibly gathered biometric data and Brouwn's bespoke tracking feels both quaint and prescient."

Despite waking up early, I was running late. I sat on the couch and read some of Sergio Pitol's The Art of Flight until I lost track of time and had to rush to work. I bought a Lenny and Larry Birthday Cake protein cookie and a VitaCoco Pressed at the deli. For lunch I bought grocery store spicy tuna avacado sushi rolls and a Pink Lady Apple Kombucha. For dinner I made myself a burger (not organic) and black beans (organic). I wanted to go to the gym but I was running low on sleep from the previous night so I did 5 sets of 10 push-ups and called it a night. My phone told me that I'd walked 4,978 steps or 1.9 miles. I'm generally quite averse to cataloging the self like this, not only as far as health but the creation of logs of books read, films watched, places passed, life lived and affixing these logs to dates. Too much rigidity, too static of a memory of the memory, too limiting for future imaginations.

There's an underlying awareness that everything is being recorded in some way — metadata, of course, but also the floating oral record, and then the Akashik record. But as far as reading and writing the personal, I prefer things to remain unfixed, open. Writing as a means to transform reality — the phrase has been a sort of bedrock for me. Initially I applied it outwards, thinking about writing seeding itself as a virus, transforming and hijacking the language of traveling texts and images. But in the last two years, the phrase has reconfigured itself inwards. The idea of writing as a means to transform one's internal reality, informing the way of seeing, approaching, and moving through the world. And these interactions with worlds as Writing — this log presents itself as an opportunity for this.

11 April 1987 Paris
Indifference of knowledge rather than indifference of ignorance

In other words, I did everything and the world remained the same.

Day 2:

In the morning I did 30 pushups (3 sets of 10) and then walked to a cafe and brought back a cappucino and a apricot croissant. I read more of the Pitol, did the dishes from the previous night, and started to clean my room, which entailed migrating a few stacks of books around before going back to the Pitol and a PDF of the letters between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson. By the afternoon I started to get hungry so I ate the rest of yesterday's black beans with cheese and salsa and then took the train to S's apartment south of Prospect Park.

We had plans to drive around Staten Island but were waiting for his girlfriend to get back. He suggested getting caffeinated and then we drank these energy drinks he'd acquired at Erewhon — he'd attended FWB Fest as part of performing a series of ethnographies. Among his observations was that every food item catered for the festival has ashwagandha in it, monkfruit was very common, and upon making the return from Idyllwild to Los Angeles and hitting an Erewhon for the first time, that essentially all of the food from the festival came from that store. The beverage was from the Emotional Utily Beverage company, which sells beverages that "contain Amino Acids, Adaptogens, Nootropics, and B-Vitamins that support the firing, blocking, and regulating of key excitatory, inhibitory, and modulatory Neurotransmitters such as GABA, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, glutamate, acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and adrenaline" and its ingredients were:

Filtered Water, Organic Cane Sugar, Natural Flavors, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Magnesium Glycinate, Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA), L-Theanine, Organic Lion's Mane Mushroom Extract, Organic Green Tea Extract, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Stevia Reb M, Pantothenic Acid (Vitamin B5), Pyridoxine HCL (Vitamin B6), Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

Naturally, I brought up this log to S, about the experiment it posed, the behaviors it could change, what I hoped it might accomplish, and he suggested going to his kitchen, where we popped Omega-3 softgels that are vegan — the Omega-3 comes from Algae. We talked about sea moss and health trends and wellness and the conversation migrated to the idea of poisons and pharmakons. I talked about a life of consuming plastics and how stopping now wouldn't necessarily change the past, but also how difficult it is to avoid poisons. I'm generally able to accept these sorts of things existing on the threshhold of control and belonging to historical periods and geographic constraints. The one day where New York was orange and smokey last summer, where everyone wanted to declare apocalypse would've been an ordinary day in Delhi or any number of third world cities with significant pollution from manufacturing. There's a certain privilege that accompanies being able to be neurotic about certain things, even if those neuroses are well-guided. In a different way, health is wealth.

We set off on our drive, with no real destination in mind, rather focusing on the idea of exploring a place without many signifiers attached to it. We walked around a park and abandoned sea plane hanger in New Dorp and then drove past a carnival that was taking place in the parking lot of the Staten Island Mall. We tried to go into the mall first but they were closing so we hit the Lidl. I bought a pain au chocolat and ate it while walking to the carnival. We went in and I brought up how this sort of a thing is supposedly better than TikTok for kids, at least in terms of screen time, and then we began to compare the form of the circus to TikTok. The short form bits, the "swipe up" that exists between acts, the various ways dopamine is generated and attention is channeled, the bits of sexuality that trickle into the performance for the dads in the audience. The intermission hit and they encouraged us to hit the concessions, which signaled our moment to depart. We would miss the metal spherical cage that they'd drive motorcycles inside.

We stopped at a Mexican restaurant and I got two tacos (el pastor and carnitas) and a water and talked about how the log was changing my behaviors, stopping me from getting a beer, a margarita, a horchata, a Jarritos. I spent a decent amount of the day moving via train and automobile. My final step count was 6,343 — 2.6 miles. I got home around 11 and did another 50 push-ups before bed, to try to compensate for the lack of gym time today. A quote from Pitol, a photograph of which I sent to B:

"It is well known that there is no tide without a counter-tide, action without reaction. And the undertows tend to be brutal. Perhaps in a bar, on a walk, in a party, I will suddenly regret not being in my garret, where I could take notes... and write letters that I owe, and, above all, write stories, make up stories, write, write, write instead of drink like a Pole and go about life from binge to binge, instead of ruining my health, altering my nervious system, wasting my faculties, time, and energy only later to fully become the loser that at this moment I feel predestined to be."

Day 3:

I had the same breakfast as yesterday. For lunch I had a half of a vegan panini (grilled asparagus, sautéed spinach, black pepper and vegan mayonnaise, roasted fennel, on pizza bianca bread), a roasted veggie wrap (sautéed spinach, roasted eggplant, roasted tomatoes, goat cheese, baby arugula, provolone cheese, sriracha sauce, on tuscan flatbread), half a gluten-free cookie and half a gluten-free brownie. In the afternoon I was pretty tired and walked to the grocery store and bought a Gorgie Energy Drink. There was a self-conscious decision in continuing from yesterday in getting an over-the-top health beverage. 150mg of caffeine, but also 100% of my daily value of Niacin, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, and Biotin. The ingredients: Filtered carbonated water, citric acid, natural watermelon flavor with other natural flavors, potassium citrate, caffeine from green tea, fruit and vegetable juice for color, Steviol Glycosides (Reb M), L-Theanine, Niacinamide (Vitamin B3), Ginger Root Extract, Pyridixoine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Biotin, Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12). I looked it up the brand's Instagram and saw that they had a collab smoothie at Erewhon and that it was currently the 2nd best-selling energy drink at Erewhon. It had me geeking for an hour or so, total mind-race that eventually calmed down once I went for a walk. For dinner I had a few pieces of proscuitto, ham, and salami, two pieces of foccacia bread, a couple handfuls of dates, a few blackberries, and a couple pieces of gouda and mozzarella.

I came back to the apartment and made myself some yohimbe tea. Yohimbe's a West African tree bark that they sell in a ground-up powdered form at the Indian store in the East Village (which has a lot of herbs). It's typically marketed as an aphrodisiac but I've been using it mainly for its mild stimulant properties, which don't seem to hit the mind as much as they do the heart — my working assumption is that it's hitting different receptors than caffeine does, which makes it an ideal mild pre-workout while coming down off caffeine and not wanting to re-up. I smoked a spliff with J while walking around the neighborhood and then went to the gym. Stationary-biked 5 miles (which burned 203 calories) and lifted weights for a tiny bit (10 sets of 15 15 pound curls, 10 pull ups and a few minutes hanging from the bar, 10 sets of 25 pound kettlebell lifts). Drank some kefir when I got back.

I'm still actively trying to navigate how I'm shaping this piece – it's unclear at the moment and there's a natural worry that it's only a slightly different repetition from my Residency piece. In turn, it becomes a question of value. I'm also still working through the problem of the map / the visual / what I'm trying to condense the visual accompaniments to this are. And of course, what the final published piece will be, which I think will be a different piece than this. Already I prefer "healthgossip2.html" as far as form, but I need to work through the coding problems that its facing. As far as this problem with repetition, there was a part of the Pitol that I underlined today, starting with a quotation from Gide, which Pitol calls a basic rule: "Never take advantage of momentum already gained."

Pitol asks "Does each book, then, have to start from zero?" before going on to answer his question: "In the end, it is really a matter, I imagine, of preventing language from passing, by sheer inertia, from one book to another and becoming a parody of itself, lulled by the energy of the momentum gained." It reminded me of something C's talked about, how people's online personas become parodies of themselves, specifically with Twitter, but when texting a picture of this page to C2 I extended it to rap, the idea of Lil Baby in 2024 vs. Lil Baby in 2020, with Baby and Central Cee's "We can go band for band / Fuck that we can go M for M" functioning as a parody of Baby and 42 Dugg's "Yeah yeah yeah yeah we paid / Yeah yeah yeah yeah we paid"

I smoked a bit more. The yohimbe had me geeking and I needed to fall asleep.