She asks me who I'm looking for, and I say no one, and that is a lie.

* * *

Tonight, right now, I am listening to Airhead's Pyramid Lake and looking at images of a vacation home, photographs I didn't take of a man I don't know naked in the driver's seat of a truck with gray interior and five cloudy rectangles (once ice cubes) at the bottom of a perfect whiskey tumbler from which I instead sipped gin. 

And I'm eating animal crackers. (Did you know I love animal crackers?)

I'm purposefully not looking at email. I'm purposefully not thinking about my camera sitting on the pink Formica table in the kitchen and how I promised myself that I would shoot at least five photos before midnight. I'm purposefully not reading the Ames essay Herzog, Landscape and Documentary, even if La Soufrière made me exquisitely happy and I'm genuinely curious if anyone else feels the same.

Since I've typed this, the music's changed. It changed to something embarrassing that I don't want to admit here (though you may have already been privy to my stumbling upon it a few days ago), and then I skipped ahead a few songs to James Blake. Who helps me to feel that unsteady sensations are the only rocks. I keep returning to the Paul Schrader heard earlier this evening: Existentialism asks if it matters that we exist; Post-Modernism asks the same question but puts quotation marks around the word exist.

Once, someone asked me if, like a tourist or a diarist, I take photos as proof that I'd been there, experienced that.

I don't know how to write this without sounding self-deprecating, which I do not mean, but...

I think the photos I take like a tourist or diarist inside my own body and living my own life are proof of how little it matters --

that there is Affect in abundance but no Effect --

and that it's this Effect-less-ness that makes me endorphin-crazy, over-the-moon, filled-with-pleasantries happy --

no matter where I am or what I experience or how the flowers smell like shoelaces and waterfall mist. No matter that a charming woman in a house-dress always lives behind a neighborhood cemetery and offers you sun-tea from over her fence in the middle of the day. No matter how many photos you take of trees in drugstore parking lots. Whether or not my eye appears in every glass fold of every mirror, or that I have to make the block once more, twice more to get a good view of curtains in a window.

I've moved onto jazz. The desire to tell you more has subsided, and now I want to dance.
And to close my eyes. And to fuck those five photos I have not and will not take.

And to lay the side of my face on this cold wooden table upon which, right now, my knee presses with all its might.

* * *