Right now this is the midpoint. I arrived on the 14th and I'll leave on the 26th. I've been thinking about writing, whether or not to inscribe this, how to inscribe it, so on, so forth. It's cold and rainy. The sound of the rain was so beautiful this morning. I thought of that Latina girl who tweeted "car sex in the rain would smackkkk" and how different the rain sounded here. I think it's the flat roofs, the way the water pools up on them.

I start to write I've started to write, wondering what there is to write. The same song and dance. There was a party, there was a bar, there was an opening, there was a party. Bitches were over, it wasn't my party, ergo I was bitches. But not necessarily, I could've been with bitches. That's the mathematical proof. Bitches came over to the party but not everyone who came over to the party. That sort of equation. I was at Taix, I was there with N and T and R and I ran into C and two of her friends and the next night I ran into one of her friends and didn't recognize her immediately. That they don't have letters says enough. At Taix I ran into C2 and rode with him to the party. I texted him Flusser and Yuk Hui - Art and Cosmotechnics because he said he was looking for book recs. I met his brother at the party. His brother went to college with Z who wasn't there that night and then I saw N2 at the party who I only knew from online and we talked and through him I get G, who was visiting from the bay area, but was from Silver Lake, and he had lost his bag.

I tried to help N2 and G look for his bag. In the process I met G2, whose writing I had read before, whose writing Z and N and I had talked about the previous night, and I was surprised with how she looked — the next day I was in the kitchen talking with N and T about how I expected an LA baddie and instead she had a librarian type look, a description which N considered generous even though I only said librarian and not sexy librarian. This is a place where people are judged for their looks. Like every place. N2 and G abandoned their search for the bag and left the party. G2 started emotionally talking to me about how G ghosted their friendship¹. I told her that he was going through a divorce which she didn't know. N had told me that an hour or so before. Maybe it was less than that. G2 talked about Bard, I talked about the Bard people that I knew, like N3 and G3. In the kitchen, Z brought up S as an example of a hot female writer and the judgement that accompanies that. Or maybe it was T who brought her up.

I can't recall which one of them wasn't a fan of her writing. I thought about the Q&A I read that was between her and G2. N or T mentioned the Fiona Duncan related piece of gossip which is that he appears in her novel, in the early pages, though his name starts with an M in it. She writes about sitting on his lap in a car, wondering if she'll have a threesome with him later. It's funny what dictates the abbreviation vs. full name usage — how much distance is necessary for that to happen. I wonder what has happened. Disaster, catastrophe. Most of these things are happening in my head, in the ether, in other realities that are this reality, but not the present one. Though there was a sense of disaster and catastrophe at Eightfold Coffee, in the sort of LA paradise everyone inside seemed to be living in. The name wasn't a Heidegger joke, it was probably an Eightfold path reference, but the former would've been funnier. I walked down Sunset Boulevard feeling like a GTA NPC, unable to press the buttons to swing punches or jump up and down. All I could do was move up the street. To stand in the road until a car stopped, and then to grab a person and throw them out of it, and then hop in... I don't think I possessed that ability.

Banality. A string of signifiers. A list of things to compose a text. Two sets of wheels spinning — Chad Masters, a text on sports and games and computation, and a holocaust text, a text on disaster, holocausts, ghettoes, etymology, culture, speaking, meaning, Philly, Gaza, images of death, their distribution. N has a lot of paper here. I've made some watercolor drawings. Most are unserious but there's a sort of seriousness to that. My I Ching reading he did for me was about the family and about how I speak and carry myself, how that matters.

This morning I mentioned a Blanchot passage to N. While working through all the nothing that happened last night. All the nothing that became something. The passage had something to do with how the act of writing about doing nothing negates having done nothing. I realize it ties into our conversation on meditation last night — this gap in inscription. I think about what I inscribed last night — inscribed into the ether. My I Ching was about family and how I speak and carry myself, how that matters. I should do another, to figure out how best to proceed. I have questions now: like how should I proceed? The "now what?" that accompanies the completion of a work while moving onto the next work. And I have so many things to work on but it comes back to this feeling of Killing — Killing by affixing a sort of finality into a form and a work and not being able to Edit it — and what accompanies Killing is Dying. The other night I mentioned wanting to write a text that accompanies the show after with N — I think this comes from the urge to want to Edit the show in a way. I conflated different ideas of what the text could be, as I didn't know which text would become The Text. There's always this idea of The Text but afterwards it becomes a text — but this capitalization and The The is helpful for me. It's nicely resolved now in that we'll make a text together to close the show, the aforementioned text above can become its own text, if it becomes a Text beyond the sketches above.

"What now?" vs. "Now what?" — I'm forced to move forward, by the nature of being unable to remain the same place. What is this place — metaphysical? The question, rhetorical, rhetoric, a field of study, but also containing the etymology "Middle English: from Old French rethorique, via Latin from Greek rhētorikē (tekhnē) ‘(art) of rhetoric’, from rhētōr ‘rhetor’", but now my mind is in the field. A West Germanic word, there's the Dutch Veld and the German Feld: “...the learned delirium of etymology bears a relation to an historical vertigo. The entire history of a language opens up under the pressure of certain words and is by this genealogy either mystified or demystified. We think and speak dependent upon a past of which we demand an account, or which supports us, not without honor, in its forgottenness. The writer who plays with, or invents etymologies, or, more surreptitiously, appeals to etymology as a guarantee of his thought, is less dubious than exaggeratedly confident about the creative force of the language he speaks. He has in mind the vitality of language, popular inventiveness or the intimacy of a dialect: always he thinks of langauge as a dwelling; always it is a habitable language — language, our shelter. And right away we feel rooted, and so we pull at this root with an uprooting force which the demand of writing wields, just as it tends to tear us from everything natural — for the etymological series reconstitutes the becoming of langauge as a kind of historical nature.”

I suppose the unease I feel is the idea of being trapped in this gamespace, the idea of playing games, the recognition of those who are good at playing games, but also the reduction of Life to a Game. Is it a reduction? A string of text from my Twitter bookmarks: What are good texts on the literary & art worlds as games? (Or similar creative fields) Either in fiction or nonfiction Burying my mans hope he don’t go to hell! More and more I see that it is possible to treat life as a game. The more I see this the more I understand that it is nearly necessary for survival The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs “To write is … to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.” (tr. Smock) “Sometimes I look at the design, the geography of the text, as if it were a map, embodying the world… I like to work like an ant, crawling the entire length of a text and examining all its details, as well as like a bird that flies over it.” "Am I in Jerusalem? This is a question which one will never respond to in the present tense, only in the future or in the past." (Derrida) Postscript This book contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by: A horrifying massacre unfolded in the city of Rafah last night, following a relentless aerial assault directed at residential houses and mosques in the area. At least 14 houses were bombed 3 mosques 60+ confirmed killed Via @alijadallah66 “not about the body, but the body itself” “not about the body, but the body itself”

One has to find a stopping point. Often times it is forced by the world, but the computer opens up a space where it's much harder to find a stopping point. One can keep going and going and going. One is often incentivized to do so, the rewards system hijacks you in such a way that you keep going, keep generating text, keep generating image, keep generating metadata, inscription, inscription, inscription. It's funny that I'm stuck on this McKenzie Wark piece from a 2006 volume of Grey Room about The Sims, it generates the same sense of unease that I think N felt when I was talking to him about [NYC It Girl Publicist] and how Things are Made in Worlds and the same unease he felt when I was playing the Anna Weyant interview where she talks about her Tight Pussy, the unease of the inevitability of the Gamification of things, that there are some people who are better suited to The Game, some people who love to Play. Strategist is a job title now, although it mostly operates in the spaces of banality, while "Cultural Strategist" is supposed to have this glimmer of allure like a gold-coated stool. And of course there's this whole Thing about "Culture" it's relation to "Art" the Venn Diagrams and where they intersect, what's in the in-between space, what defines the in-between space, diagrams to make, flows to map, maps to render, renders to engineer. Hommez Co.: A Boutique Cultural Strategy Consultancy. "Sarcasm font" but it's Serious. I suppose sometimes I like to Play and sometimes I don't. And I worry about this issue of Reduction: early 15c., reduccioun, "a restoring to a former state" (a sense now obsolete), also "a conquest or subjugation" (of a people, etc.), from Old French reducion (13c., Modern French réduction) and directly from Latin reductionem (nominative reductio) "a leading back, restoration," noun of action from past-participle stem of reducere (see reduce). The meaning "diminution, a lessening" is from 1670s; chemical sense of "reversion to a simpler form" is from 1660s.

Wark talks about EA's slogan ("Challenge everything") but what's engrained into my memory is the EA Sports slogan: "It's in the game". It would play every time I started Madden 07. I built a world of created players and custom rosters in Madden 07 that I maintained for years. A sort of alternative realm, somewhat based on the evolving reality of the Chiefs rosters as they progressed year over year but I kept the same game, but the other rosters remained static. It's the sort of thing that's easy to probe as an impulse and an operation that was undertaken, and why it is that I did that². And in the same way, there's the urge to probe that EA Sports slogan: It's in the game. One of these Nothing phrases that is Something, of course, all I am coming to is this idea of ouroboros, the game eating itself, the game consuming the game, how loaded a word Consumption is, and all of the meanings of Loaded. This endless game of etymology. Or perhaps there is an end: to write a map towards the genesis of Language. I said I felt as though I was walking in Language's Graveyard. As much as I wanted it to, Lazer Dim couldn't shake that feeling from me, too much repetition of a mechanism I'd seen before. A Content vs. Form problem perhaps. A Problem — a mathematical implication begins, I think of another tweet, I find a reply to it, and I find that the original tweet has been deleted. The reply: mathematicians love to describe results or proofs as beautiful because theyre relishing in the independence of their aesthetic canon from the sensible. Nabokov's Poems and Problems comes to mind, as does Grothendieck stopping because of what these mathematical definitions were leading to. C3 was talking about that earlier. I think about what I was saying earlier, about how getting drunk introduces a sort of randomness into life, it increases Chance, but there's also a sort of split in personage, where the self of the after has to make due with what the prior self, the self of chance has done. I question whether this is the best course of operation once again. It's been about a year since the last time that question emerged. I mentioned having self-control earlier. I suppose this is a question of the desire to Lose Control, a sort of escape from The Game, that later affects The Game. I remember Drunk Mode in GTA. You play it for the novelty. That was where last night ended. Drunken novelty. EA Sports: It's in the game.

Bonus stage: Silverlake. There was no reason to go. If there was a boss to beat it was the atmosphere. The first party had a poker table with a 1k buy-in³. Another game, money to be made, money to be lost, money to blow. There were scented poker chips as a piece — I made a joke about sniffing. I did the dance as best as I could but it all felt so dark. Another party more of the same. I talked to K there and things opened up in an interesting way after I unmasked myself⁴. N tells me I could make a lot of money being a "fuckboy painter". I think about Phreshboyswag and Laker outside of Plaza⁵. A bunch of possible threads open up, but they remain unrealized. I like one of K's tweets about circles of Hell — more games, more stages, more levels, more reduction. That is the truly the utopian part of Flusser's thinking — that The Game presents some sort of liberation. I suppose The Game isn't liberation but beating the game, such that The Situation changes, is supposedly the point. I think of that Buum tweet: I feel so blessed to be able to Describe The Situation, or something along those lines. De-scribe/In-scribe: another etymological fork. Fork - a utensil, or a tool, but also a point of splitting. Splitting, there's a sort of atomic invocation, the apotheosis of technology, or at least a former point in that trajectory, another place, another time. I did another I Ching about how to proceed: it was something about revolution, but also saying to transform like a panther, to shed my molting skin. Pinned Tweet Moment: Every Time You Are Tempted To React In The Same Old Way Ask Yourself If You Want To Be A Prisoner Of Your Past Or A Pioneer Of Your Future. I saw a screenshot of it re-circulate yesterday, but it isn't 2021 anymore. I watch the self-immolation video of the day. L.A. Hills Burn at the Peak of Winter was playing in my head as we walked to the second party and I stared at the opposing set of hills, the stagger of houses, the landscape that becomes banal once the novelty fades. The first house had a pool, there was a party photographer shooting from the high ground, stealing Dead Souls. I thought about Wang Bing but didn't say anything. I turned around and let myself fall face first into the pool. I wanted to swim, I wanted to feel something. Later I would joke about listening to Channel Orange on the bus with N off our phone speakers. The dried blood from my Junyas leaked out into the water as I sunk to the bottom, a stream of rose-tint rising to the surface, to do the dance, to wear the mask, to become a face. I remembered what I'd quoted earlier to N:

Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?
Do you really think most of all these niggas real?

1) After that night I continued to run into G2. She came to our opening, and then I saw her at the carwash show, and another show later that night, and then at one of those house parties in Silverlake. In all of those interactions she barely spoke to me. The switch had flipped to that of coldness — I think that I moved from a random person in the mess of a party to a person who was a Player in the overlapping game. I joked that she would review our show to N, who made a remark that was only partially a joke that she would write something nice about Z and I's pieces while saying something snide and backhanded about N's work. In any case, the impact that the press has on these things is funny. My scheme to write about the show for Spike as "CM" has gone awry and it's doubtful that Artillery or Carla will accept the pitches. At that point, there are no longer sufficient "papers of record" worth archiving the show in. I suppose there's the off-chance of a Contemporary Art Website doing something with the images, but that wasn't the purpose I came into the show with, rather focusing on the personal archive, a log of exhibited work, the Work in Spaces of a Certain Significance, the toppling of a dominoe to see where the other pieces fall into place afterwards. || Return

2) Video games, virtuality, decision-making, World-building, Sims, etc. — Madden specfics: franchise mode, create a player, eugenics, IQ, position. The games I played and the games I didn't. Vitalek and Ethereum. || Return

3) We're not in Kansas anymore — Anna Weyant interview. New Yeat. 1k isn't even that much money. Being good at poker / blackjack, counting cards, jeopardy champions, mathematics, I Ching and change. Games: winners and losers. || Return

4) Masks, dances, shared points of past references: mutual friends, jonty, dj kirsten angel dust / a desire to maintain a sense of mystery / mystique. Him and A never meeting until LA. || Return

5) Phreshboy and Laker story. The Dare. Damon Rush. Gossip and veracity in respect to the Fuckboy. The total commitment of the self to Work. Rap Game Issy Wood. When N asked me if I wanted to be famous in a very real way. Yeat type fame. Fame with masks.^Postscript || Return

Postscript: On the flight home I made notes towards footnotes, intending to turn them from fragments into sentences later, while also knowing that rendering them as such would make it incredibly difficult to do so. Like many others, the image of the soldier self-immolating is burned in my mind. It was the first direct image of death I've shared, in part because he filmed it with the intent for the image to travel. It felt like honoring a last wish of sorts, unlike that of sharing an image of death from Gaza. I watched Philly music videos, starting with YBC Dul and then Hopoutblick and then Skrilla and felt hopelessly depressed by the images and sound-images of death. I think about this world being recycled, of the impending flood, of all evil being washed away for a new world to begin. I watched a Mati Diop IG story where she drunkenly talked into the camera with so much pride about winning her Golden Bear for Dahomey. I thought of the difference between her actions and what Sembene said: Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts of Africa. Why be a sunflower and turn towards the sun? I myself am the sun. . Of course, I've been getting drunk and revelling in that too. In a sort of extension of the art world appartus which is relatively innocuous, but is still an extension of a poisoned apparatus. I can think of what Moten said in that video about the curse of making visual art, of feeling the compulsion to make visual art, and the systems which you're confined to in our existing structures, which he says knowing he's trapped in the ivory tower that confines him, but I wonder what else there is to think about. I'm stuck on how I started this ending — "on the flight home" — immediately feeling trapped by the phrase. I attempt to locate myself in this groundlessness timelessness placelessness of universal homelessness.