| So far, my highest ranking forms of pain are ear infections and spinal cord malbendings. I figure most bloody types of pain are the same, just in degrees. Are bulletwounds sort of like really heinous splinters? | It's still fun to drag someone around in a trash bag, even when it's not me in the bag or doing the dragging. | I feel bad because all of my roommates cakes came out awkwardly shaped or broken | In the Big Apple Hostel: Restless sleep. My bunkmate hates me, but she rhythmically hums in her sleep so I feel no shame. I'm surrounded by Australians. They're middle aged english muffin eaters. |
| Damn, it smells good next door. Last night the hallway smelled like cat pee, but now it's like cheese and bread, garlic bread. It always seems to smell like toast when I get home from work. | Whenever I finish a new painting does the preceding one pale? Does that happen with children? | The most bizarre dream I've had in years: I was at a RISD dinner pary, and there were two short-ish, plump-ish people with black hair that looked like penguins or humpty dumpty. They were very white and aloof. The man cried out that he was totally in love with the woman because she made some snide comment. So he starts making out with her and she becomes a man. | The man in front of me on the bus has unusually high ears, a pointed bald head. He scratches the wart just below his hairline with his golf ball sized fingertips. His hair hasnt been cut in years apart from patches above his ears and just above his collar. |
| Somewhat disturbing: I order rabbit and moments later they carry a rabbit past my table by its ears...egad. There it goes. Dead. I eat. I'm a dinosaur. A shark. Alligator. Chomp. Just 6 hours it lasts. How can we consume so much? How can the world still exist? Dang it must be panicking--grow grow as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man. | A pair of people. Like Socks. | I have bats living under my windowsill. I'm very happy about it because as we all know, bats eat bugs and there are bugs-a-plenty here in the jungle and a screen is not an easy thing to acquire because there are no "hardware stores" or "yellow pages" in China. If I want anything, I play the memory game. I take the bus around town and stare out the window, trying to memorize what can be gotten where. The other day I found the store where I can buy boat propellors and old electric fan blades. | China totally lacks patterns.I think it all started with the language. It's funadmentally no fun. The language is too damn easy to rhyme that its just not satisfying. Hell, rhyming is just short of puns in the scale of flabbergasting things to do with words in your spare time. |
| I had a dream that I drove my old Ford Bronco II out into a lake to scoop up little jellyfish. I found one so I opened my door while idling, but the car filled with water and sank. It was difficult to steer because if I turned right the car would sometimes invert or roll over its nose depending on the gas and break pressure. Now I'm sure I know what it's like to drive in space. | In China I can afford luxuries. Today I bought temporary tatoos (ultra realistic!) featuring earwigs. Maybe not--they're those three-inch thirty-legged bugs that you find behind your curtains and travel the speed of german cars. | There are bubbles flying upward outside my window. I thought they were weed floaties but that makes no sense because there is no plant life on this block. No, it's laundromat soap bubbles. On the roof of the boob-windowed convenience store is a hammock. The soap from the adjacent laundromat is spit out in the same place. I long for that hammock. | When I think of lungs, I think of jellyfish, though in fact they have the consistency of meat. Weird. I don't think people eat lungs in China, though Belly is often on the menu. Would lungs crunch? Crab lungs crunch, or at least snap when you crush them with your fingertips. I like to think big mammal lungs would be like pop rocks. |
| People have no qualms about eating in public here. When I think back to my past life, I realize I never saw anyone slurping noodles out of a bowl while sitting on a folding chair in the gutter. Here, no matter where you are or what your're doing, at noon, you eat. You could be crossing the road or standing in line at the bank, and you'd have a meal in one hand and chopsticks in the other. The same goes for 5:00 pm. If I'm doing something other than eating at 5:00, people look at me like I'm, well, a foreigner. | Here in China, two very common phrases synonymous with "on sale" are "our prices are so low you might as well take our blood" and "it's so cheap we may as well jump off a building." | I've been living in Hangzhou for the past 4 months or more, and I've been shooting video sporadically with no purpose in mind. However, I like the footage, and have been putting it together into a sort of picture book about street life. Only it isn't a book. It's a video. I love to take the bus to some distant street and make my way home a la Hansel and Gretel. I forget the way that story ended, something with a gingerbread house? No, the witch lived in the gingerbread house, right? And their mother wanted to kill them? Everyone hated them, they must have been ugly little brutes. I don't have any trouble finding my way home, but Hangzhou isn't as confusing as a dark forest. It is decidedly un-forestlike, though the trees often emerge from unexpected places like a gutter, doorstep, or store window. I'm guessing they've been trying to preserve the existing trees when they rip up all the neighborhoods to build a modern city which should emerge from the dirt in a week or two. Today I learned how to say "film canister" | I feel really damp here. Damp like cheesecake. I just sit and accumulate moisture in my mind. Need to dry my brain out like a fish on a powerline. My thoughts gurgle through my synapses, and damn it is messy. All the colors bleed and turn the picture into mud. Now I know how housewives feel...after vacuuming the breakfast off the carpet, having nothing to face but a television...daytime television...in which they live vicariously through other people without jobs. |
| For some damn reason I couldn't sleep last night so I had to resort to Sudafed Nighttime. Now my neck feels like it was beaten with a lead pipe. I'm horribly groggy but my eyes are wide open, and hello, that's what I'm looking for, rush of pseudoephadrine mixing with coffee. Cheap bliss, pharmaceutical giants unite the world. I might be invisible but that doesn't mean I have to be conscious! | Silkworms look like baboons. They have snouts. | Yesterday I walked around late at night and found myself on a brand new street. It had just opened, complete with unbelievably fancy clothes stores, already teeming with shoppers. It was a different planet, lit like a damned fashion runway. It had perfectly white sidewalks of stone, curved buildings, and rainbow colored storefronts. Briefly it even made me want to shop. It occurred to me that very soon everything I shoot will be vaporized. It's somewhat exciting. Like hunting. I know something's going to die, and I'm going to eat it. | They're ripping up my road to put in a sewer line and the ground in Hangzhou is like clay and of course its raining so the piles of clay get all runny and spread accross the sidewalks like butter on linoleum. The poor 70 year olds with right-angled backs who walk every day from their home to the store using their home made footstool as a walker now have to hike through peanut butter. |
| I think people with the crankiest cars in the city live accross the street, and none of them leave at the same time. They each take ten minutes to warm up, their owner pumping gas through their unmuffled engine at regular intervals, 35 to 40 times. Between the twelve of them the sound is constant, like a baby on a plane. | Man o man o man o ray. O war. O boy. Dang I love this vehicle I'm commanding. | I once had a pet weed named Sparky. It wasn't a weed really, it was sort of a ball of sticks, resembling a sea urchin or rolled up hedgehog. My sister and I found it in a gully after she stepped on a cactus and since our neighbors were always stealing our cats we were in need of a pet. We loved that weed and kept it by the milkbox--the one with the stinkbug nest underneath. Sparky lasted two days. We were very upset that one of our parents threw our pet in the trash. They never knew how much we loved that weed. Since we had no cat and no weed I would eat cat food and sand. After all, it was a shame to let it go to waste. I lost my taste for sand almost immediately, though. Anyone will tell you it is very difficult to eat. | On the way to work, passing by the remaining purple bar: Two ratty looking guys talking: Yeah, Ive got to just throw em out. Especially the blonde ones. Remember...remember that time I got really drunk at a bar and you took me home and threw out the blonde wig and put a red one on me? Other guy: yeah. |