character limit

A humble request.

Before you invite me to zoom, ask whether it could be a phone call.

Before you call me, ask whether it could be a text.

Before you text me, ask whether a DM would be better.

Before you slide into my DMs, ask whether email might be more considerate, in this case.

Before you send an email, do you really need the post office to survive?

Before you mail me a letter finally, ask yourself,

How treacherous are our words?

Despairing, come to where I am; take my face in your hands.

parental Realpolitik

En route to school today: According to my second grader, the worst thing about the president is that he puts his name prominently on buildings and "wants to name all the streets with his name."

"He doesn't know," she continues, "that everyone dies."
"Or at least," I offer, "he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself."
A pause, then: "I can't wait until Donald Trump dies," she says, not without animosity.

Friends, I did not try to chasten her sentiment or provide some platitude about ill will. I honored the feeling of an other – her – made space for it in the morning air. Fight me.

empire

Denver. I am reading The Man Without Qualities on an elevated glass walkway between airport concourses. Behind me: terrifyingly flat, endless plains. I am sitting with my back to them so that, when I look up from my book, I see instead the snowy scapes of the Rockies, interrupted periodically by the silhouette of a jet taking off in the direction from which I've just come.

I am really hungry but cannot decide which food to try to eat; I approach the counter and recoil. Or, between chapters, I wander from one identical bookstore to the next – in which the only books on offer are "now a major motion picture," and the magazines are differentiated by the degree of shrillness with which they celebrate capitalism (on a scale of Economist to Inc.), perhaps with some firearms and naked women on the top shelf, for our more direct patrons. The bathrooms at the end of this walkway double as tornado shelters. My friend and former roommate OF lives and practices architecture in this city, but for some reason I have never visited...always coming and going from coast to coast. Someday, maybe.

Today I read and wait for the proverbial connecting flight that will plug me back into some reality – a quality (speaking of Eigenschaften) that this walkway lacks: in the nonplace of the airport, it is even more in-between, more non-. Perfect for disappearing into a long novel about civilization devouring itself.

In a bid to loosen Leo Fischel's daughter Gerda's attachment to Hans Sepp and his German nationalist and anti-semitic circle (at the desperate request of Gerda's mother Klementine), Ulrich visits Gerda and relates a (spurious) history of the earth's moon, which, he finally reveals, has no truth to it; in fact, he says, "the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth."

Last year at this time I was finishing IQ84 in the Dallas airport, under more or less the same circumstances – a chrono-architectural link forms, not unlike the one between 1984 and IQ84; superimposition superimposes itself as mood. Perhaps, as Philip K. Dick would have it, "the empire never ended."