February 6, 2011 - Lunch

Things are currently so complicated, and genuinely baffling, that I must return here, to the moron switch. This is a system that works. I'm not ready for the scale, though, as it will tell me something serious and disappointing about the last few months; that is not something I'm ready to hear.

The level of steady, stressful, ever-increasing chaos, confusing, and fear in my life, coupled with my ability to process it and and the fact that the world at this very moment seems to have some strange desire for what I am selling has, in combination, immobilized me. As if I'm in some kind of gravity ride at a park where lifting your arm is a great effort and the floor falls away so fast is it spinning.

I thought I had moved on, but of course that's not the lesson of adult life; repetition, the daily or weekly or monthly repetition of thoughts, is more common than progress.

Progress is in many ways just a story we tell ourselves while working through various forms. For example, at my last full-time job there was a sense of progress as the magazine went out every month; the place was a mechanism for transforming neurosis and repetitive tasks, the generic fiddling-with-things, into a kind of time-marker.

And so you have the form, the space that must be filled, and the demand for novelty among the readers, and out of that, somehow, there is something at least a little new. It can't help but be new; it requires newness.

So this is why, I think, the web is interesting, because the very nature of forms, the fact that communication happens in boxes and grids, requires one to innovate, at least slightly, to consider the nature of what came before and to innovate a little. And that innovation, an artifact of anxiety more than anything else, is what constitutes progress, which leads to more and more subtle forms being invented.

At least that is what I am thinking here, with this tiny box and the sans-serif typeface within at 10pts., almost too small to read safely, the lines of text emerging. The goal is to find a form, to find forms that get me through the lockjaw and out of the gravity ride.