we didn't get any cards at the office for several months, then a little bundle arrived in quick succession.

the author ran out of room to type each section on the small cards, and the final sentences, pencil-written, crawl back up along the sides to the tops.

The Joe Lose case 11-03=09 report by O.L. Gumshoe Jr. update

After shaking Joey down a few times, I finally got the break in the case I've been waiting for.Compiled a trail of evidence on the murderers son showing where he was and when.Soundtrack: I'll Be There by Micheal Jackson. As I reflected upon this, I began to examine the case from different angles.This was useful in determining his perspective.Like father, like son. Same emotional makeup.It afforded me a window inside the murderers mind so I could anticipate his next move and be one step ahead of him. To make this work, I had to pace myself. Not pushing too hard too soon.While I was gathering evidence,I had to make it appear as if nothing in his life had changed significantly.He couldn't handle too much truth too soon. Soundtrack: I am sailing. I am sailing through the dark night across the sea I am sailing to a distant shore, home to you. The realizations had to come over him slowly, little by little.Memories of past history between people builds trust in relationships and forms a bond.I was an outsider, unknown to him.I had reached a part of his subconscious mind. Establishing common groumd was no small accomplishment. It was a milestone.I realized it when his demeanor towards me changed. He seemed protective of me. Sights, sounds and even smells can trigger memories and cause an emotional reaction.It was the same voice that sang when he was a child.The most serious repercussion I had to consider was that Joey would lose respect for me and deny me the chance to continue the investigation.Lives are destroyed because people get tired of each other. Somebody wanted to be rid of the victim, because he knew the truth. Now, I know too.

anxiety that i'm not made to be a good bicycle racer is tightening my throat. i'm hunched over the keyboard feeling the tension running down in lines from my jaw through my neck as i respond to my coach's weekly e-mail in which he tells me i'm doing great.
it's eleven forty-five and i should be asleep not thinking about tomorrow's intervals.
the snake was deprived of water for a few days because he was coiled up right where his dish belonged and i was too distracted to fish him out, hissing in complaint, while i replaced it. he's dipping his head in now to drink through the rustle of his shed skin. another obligation that waits while i wallow in self-absorption. i think i had another dream of being bitten by snakes recently. no wonder--it's a lengthening, coiling fear, then a sudden shock. sometimes i dream of being struck again and again, unable to get away. but i never dream of being constricted to death.
my dad and i have been discussing the possibility of my buying an apartment. last night i called my mom, half in tears, complaining about my work and not knowing what to do, raging about the situation i've stepped into. today my dad sent an essay of an e-mail laying out the steps to undertake while i look for a home, and ending with his calm advice for dealing with work. he reminded me that he raised me to know that life is not fair, (which i recall as an invariable refrain in the background of my childhood setbacks and frustrations) and that knowing that, we do the best we can without taking each failure or difficulty as a sign of personal weakness or failure. his tone calmed me, and oddly, so did the reminder that he will always hold me up to standards i fear i won't reach. when i was growing up i felt that he didn't praise me enough. now i'm more inclined to feel that his patient indication of the next step to take, with the assumption that one never stops striving to improve, is far higher praise than some encouraging compliment on something i've already done.

seems like even the most unsentimental of my friends (i'm looking at you, tresler) are indulging in year's end state-of-the-union reflections. so it's a little silly and unnecessary, perhaps, to pretend i haven't been doing the same.
where to begin? 2009 began with me buying my first road bike and ended with me joining a racing team. so far, of course, i've been the weakest and most pathetic member of the team, but i'm going to bust my ass trying to get better until they kick me off.
work is a wellspring of an entirely different sort of challenges. i'm suspicious that i'm the sort of person who needs to feel under the gun and stressed out and at a disadvantage to succeed, in which case i'm going to do great at my job and bicycle racing, but my tmj and the coffee addiction will proceed at a corresponding rate.
i'm also idly entertaining the notion that i'm utterly cursed in love. all the little sparks have fizzled out with varying degrees of heat and light. perhaps more disappointing is how little i care. sure, i've felt flashes of rage and passion and affection, but nothing seemed to stick, and i'm left with this vague disappointment. and of course, like the writer hoffman in the opera tales of hoffman, which was an enormous pleasure to see the day after my birthday, it's not a curse but some inconsistency that exists in my head, or perhaps my heart. i don't want what i want. i don't commit. i want the ones that don't want me. i want the one i can't have. it'll go on that way until dumb luck strikes me on the head or until i resolve the internal conflict.
probably neither will happen in a year, but i'm sure the path will be interesting either way.

dreamed last night i had gotten tattoos everywhere. text, pictures. they were around my trunk, my thigh. all black, delicate lines. it didn't hurt.
probably memories of the acupuncture treatment from yesterday evening. the needles didn't hurt, but you felt them going in. pressure, a prick, and then an awareness that they were there. my back feeling like a map with an invisible message, the whole surface activated and sensitive. like fred sandback's yarn pieces that create invisible walls and planes by delineating their edges. you feel a strange resistance when you walk through the empty space between them.
the night before i had another bee dream. in the building where we were staying (memories of the mansion in rhode island where i spent last weekend) there was an enormous hive growing on the roof. the storm knocked it over. i went out to look at the empty husk, but the homeless angry bees were still guarding it. they swarmed me. i ran back inside, all stung up.

on the train coming home from philadelphia last weekend there was a somewhat interesting looking character in the seat next to me. we barely spoke until it was nearly time for him to get off, when he asked me if i was going all the way to new york, because he has a show going up there in a couple of weeks.
turns out he used to be a professor at sva, but now he's a medical student studying radiology. in his spare time he goes into the lab to put random things under the ct scanner and the resulting prints and videos are his art.
i finally went and checked out his website today. i guess i was expecting something more obscure and art-worldy from a former art school professor, but the sentence above pretty well illustrations the length and breadth of what he does. the videos are more interesting than the prints, just the object rotating 360 degrees on a loop. you can watch them twirl and twirl, glowing fluorescent green and magenta, filled with negative space. they're all ordinary objects. on the train he told me he has kids, and it looks like he's raided their toys for material. the little teddy bears and dogs and dolls are more compelling to me than anything else. their skins, the part that we identify with and cuddle and drool all over, are all shorn away. instead you see the seams where pieces overlap, and deep inside where they have little rudimentary skeletons or weighted fillings that allow them to sit upright, the little motor inside a dog that walks. it seems very sinister, like learning something about a friend you never wanted to know.

it was a good week. i’ve been working too much, and in a manic/frantic state at that. as much as i like to ride a jangly caffeine edge through the day from one problem to the next, it wears me down pretty quickly. a couple weeks of long, stressful days ending with book events ending with me blank-eyed drinking beer on the couch till two with my roommate jason, coinciding with an illness that kept me off the bike for a solid week, and i felt like i was losing my mind. worse, i was calling up close friends and telling them i was losing my mind, avoiding my family and snapping at my roommates. bleagh. oh, and insomnia.
when i felt well enough to get back on the bike it was like someone had turned the lights back on. it’s a dependency, for sure, but i’ll take it over smoking or getting wasted every night. unfortunately, cycling’s a habit that is not so compatible with attending all-night disco parties, now my second favorite thing, for which discovery i have to thank the gentle people across the pond at djhistory.com. we through a party jointly with them and white columns at santos party house for a book we’re distributing, a collection of weekly columns written during the heydey of disco. our book parties often involve wine and polite networking; rarely is boot-shaking involved, so this one had unusually good attendance from around the office. i’m proud to say that everyone got down. the personal life/work life barrier in our office is fairly weak, and that used to give me some little anxiety, but i‘ve since given up and embraced it. the music was joyful and fast and loud, and everyone danced like no one else was watching. it was such a release from the usual new york cynicism. i really enjoyed dancing with my new boss. we were sizing each other up a bit, i think he was surprised. my record nerd coworker and i stayed until the lights came on. another nice consequence of the cycling is that my dancing endurance is better than it’s ever been, way up from the smoking days. the next day at work was a total blur of zombie tiredness and pleasure memories.

tonight i went to a talk that my company helped organize. it was a talk between the french artist christian boltanski and the head of publications at the boston museum of fine arts. boltanski is one of those artists about whom i only know a little, but whose work i usually enjoy. he does massive installations, inventories, they're called. piles of folded clothes on shelves, blown up black-and-white photos of children's faces. there was a piece i saw at the little modern art museum in paris, a row of rooms you walked through, with all these multiplied objects stacked and lined up. the clothes piled against the walls of the first room effectively shut out all sound from the rest of the museum, so you felt like you were really inside the piece, rather that surrounded by lots of objects. anyway, my boss and i approached the event with some anxiety, afraid that no one would come or that the talk would be awkward. well, it wasn't crowded, but the talk was wonderful. the gentleman from the mfa had come prepared with plenty of leading questions, and boltanski was quite pleased to tell stories from his life sprinkled with little jokes, and to make pithy romantic statements about his philosophy towards artmaking. i belittle it to describe it that way because i enjoyed it enormously. in college our art history methods teacher one day brought in a prominent conceptual artist for us to interview who was so determined to be true to the conceptual nature of her art and the theories behind it that she wouldn't answer any of our questions and it was very uncomfortable for everyone.
i enjoyed most what boltanski said about the employment of the element of time in his work. if i understand him correctly, he likes to always have something in a piece that is time-based, some performative element or some action that takes place, something that passes and then is gone and cannot be recalled like we would turn back the pages of a book. talking about his inventories, he said they were inspired by ethnographic museums, in which all the objects that pertain to a person or people are displayed, everything but the actual person, and in the end they only underline that absence. and he picked up his glasses and said, if i put these glasses in a vitrine, they will be preserved, they will not be destroyed, but they will not be glasses any more, because glasses are an object that you use to see. once you put them away and prevent them from being used, they become a different kind of object. and he spoke of how this act, which he equated with the production of art, is fighting against death and decay, which is a very futile act.
i''m reading catcher in the rye for the first time, and on the subway ride home after the talk i read a passage in which the main character goes to the natural history museum. most of the new york he describes is unrecognizable to me, but i remember walking through the museum. he's talking about looking at all the vitrines, and he says:
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, those birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

quite a lot has gone down over the last month, big events and small perfect moments. when i'm in transit, on a plane, out walking, the subway, the bike, i compose little essays. the moment i sit down at my computer all that remains are meaningless platitudes.
this happened so frequently when i was living upstate that i bought a microcassette recorder so i could save my driving musings. i didn't end up recording my thoughts, but i did use it to record harmonies to practice for the band i was in at the time. one night when i was driving home from a bar i hit the record button by accident and the whole cassette was taped over with me singing along to bjork's album post in the car.
on sunday i had two accidents on the bike which left me uninjured but still feeling kinda bruised and beat up, so i took a few days off of riding in to work. it should have been much worse, but all i got were bruises on my arms and a perfect row of delicate pinpricks on my thigh from my big chainring. so i've been taking the subway, crossing my legs carefully. in the sterile endless frankfort airport last week i bought orhan pamuk's black book, and it's been unsettling my travels ever since. the main character wanders the streets of istanbul, ostensibly in search of his wife who left him, the only woman he's ever loved, but he's losing his mind in this idea of disguise and becoming someone else. he wants to become another man, so he starts inhabiting his life. i have a bit of a horror of stories in which people lose track of their identities, where who you are starts to slip... but i read them anyway--paul auster's new york trilogy, philip k. dick's flow my tears. it makes even creepier travel reading because when you travel you are already in an altered state, underslept, disoriented, in between. religions have figures to protect travelers like the orisha eshu and st. christopher. i've been doing a lot of traveling lately and a lot of thinking about identity and transformation.

i've been getting ready for my bicycle trip. as i think of something i'll need, i put it in a cardboard box in my room. it's up to the top now with bicycle shirts and jerseys, ziplock baggies, a first aid kit, raincoat sweatpants bathing suit beach towel, sandals, little plastic vials of sunblock and peppermint soap and bug spray, and so on. this evening i went up to the roof to test out the alcohol stove my parents lent me. i tended the blue flame, lighting it, adjusting it, putting it out, and heated up a pan of water. in the kitchen i've been making energy bars. two successful recipes out of three isn't so bad. i've been laying off on the bike riding, and so of course we're now into our second week of perfect weather. it's making me anxious, and i sleep in and stumble off to work with no breakfast. now i'm writing to try and settle down enough to go to bed early, do some laps in the morning.
on the subway in the morning and evening i'm reading short stories from bard's literary magazine. this issue is full of stories of the slightly fantastic. like magical realism, but reined in a bit. so many of these stories are about longing and loneliness. it's all very self-indulgent and lovely. they suit my mood.

someone has been sending postcards to my office. they appear to be installations of a noir murder mystery, but with a surrealism that smacks of auster's new york trilogy.

they are typewritten on cards with corrections and addenda written in in pencil.

the address on the cards is the correct one for our office, a small distributor and publisher of artbooks, but the company name is given as "PUBLISHER: NATIONAL LAMPOON." the return address is a po box in newport news, virginia. our front-of-office manager finds them creepy and was discarding them unread until i expressed fascination, so now she sends them directly to my mailbox. eventually the cards will be lost among my other ephemera, so i'm going to begin posting them here, to find a new life.

i'll try to reproduce them as accurately as possible, but i'm not able to represent the notes written in sideways in the margins and i'm not going to bother coming up with a notation for the many instances of typewritten words obliterated by pencil. you'll have to use your imagination. the cardstock is soft, nubbly, and cream-colored--pleasant to the touch.

with no further delay, here is my installment #1, the first card that was passed to me.

5-6-09 Followup report by Det O.L. Gumshoe Jr Joe Lose Case
In observing the situation, I saw that Joey and his aunt were from two different worlds. She was old fashioned. He was into modern cell phones, wIFI. This stuff was foreign to her. They barely spoke at all. There must be some reason. She knew about the murder. (statement on file) . Joey was keeping a low profile. He had more to lose than she did.He was a rich kid. His Aunt was poor however. The truth would save her life.But Joey had clammed up. Saw him going for morning coffee.He had another visitor. I know from experience that broken families must take on Extra responsibility in order to survive. It was a damn shame what was getting ready to happen here. Joeys Aunt was going to lose her brother and he being an ASS! I've seen snobbery before. It is an intolerable injustice that destroys lives.I needed a devine intervention to perform a miracle! All Joey had to do was stop and listen. Soundtrack: Why must people fight and dies Why can't they live in peace. Hate is everywhere you go leaving no room for love to grow. Once there was a man walking through this land he was always kind and loving jesus is the name and he's still the very same and if you wanta meet him all you have to do is pray. Red like the Robin's chest is love's bright fire Small in the black of the worlds great bane but when the light overpowers the darkness, love boundless love takes wings again. Sew the seeds of love wherever you my go shining forth a Heavenly light and where there is hate joy instigate for they reward is waiting above. Will the circle be unbroken in the sky Lord in the sky.