(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

i wish that somebody would steal a fully stocked office supply cabinet out of some nondescript office in midtown and give it to me. bureocratic/organizational props fascinate me (in an abject way) and even motivate me, in the way that it's compelling to try and play-act a behavior that is the opposite of how you are by nature (in my case--entropic, at least when it comes to my room). I have too much stuff and ADD when it comes to cleaning. I start cleaning, and then I come across books that I meant to re-read and I start organizing a separate shelf for them, to create space for the shelf, I have to move my diaries, and I come across the journal I kept while I was in Israel, and all the long entries I wrote, trying on a metaphor after metaphor to describe walking through Jerusalem as unbearable heat subsided marginally into twilight, and how confused I was about something that five years later seems so cliche. I try to sort through a box of tapes, I am very invested in tapes, and that's why I have an ugly boombox with a double tape deck, because CD mixes are just not the same, and all of my bootlegs of Vysotsky are on these old transparent Russian tapes, and then I find a tape with a song I've been looking for forever and think that I should make a label before the tape vanishes into the anonymity of the pile of unlabeled tapes one more time, but I can't find a label, or even a black sharpie to mark the tape; I find a tape my cousin made for me and I write on my hand that I should call her because I have not talked to her in months; mixed in in the tape drawer, I find a photograph that is not in my photo album, because it's a lying photo, a synchronic moment that implies a diachronic history that is very different from the one that actually transpired, and so it goes on. If I could just fix it, in files marked "past," "irrelevant," "unresolved" or whatever. I could even cross-reference, and be done with it, instead of getting caught in labyrinthine word associations. No, I don't listen to that CD anymore; the reason for that resides in Paris these days, why does it ambush me from the drawer where I am looking for a diskette? Colored stickers, the smell of white out, hole punchers, they motivate me because I hope their prescriptive logic will rub off on me, that by wielding them, some imperative of me "getting my shit together" will commence. Other objects, Nabokovian in their transparency, play tricks on me, redirect me down rabbitholes of memory, where, sliding between years, I don't notice hours passing.