blurry

I think my vision is getting worse. Up to this point in my life it’s been perfect. Lately things have taken a little longer to come into focus, like when I wake up or stand up too fast. Plus I can’t shake this feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. New York feels dead and not due to any orange sky. it's probably been dead awhile. I’ve been walking so much just around. I walked to the brooklyn museum and back. I walked to manhattan and to the angelica. I walked to bushwick and greenpoint and williamsburg, all alpha beta gamma variants of the same kind of Thing. I make up an aim for these walks because I can’t bear to be so transparently aimless. Like the museum, a bookstore, a pop-up. I bought expensive Tribeca movie tickets just to have an aim that I was excited about. I saw a film there thursday about the siege of Sarajevo. It made me miss Belgrade and think about how art thrives to spite siege, how it is most powerful and cathartic when it’s desperate to get out of the bodies that contain it. Last year I went to a gallery opening when I was in Ireland of an artist's work that he created in the six months he'd been out of Ukraine. it was probably twenty enormous, pretty incredible paintings. He said that the work bled out of him. My friend made a film that she couldn't help but make about something that made her and her country bleed, and it was the best student film I'd ever seen. Inevitability is perhaps the one true hallmark of good visual art. an artist's intent to create or insistence on creation is the one thing that is crisp and clear, at least in these cases.

It seems all the discourse right now and for the past five years has been about the state of society and how it differs from past states of society. Everyone makes claims about it that are really just half-baked, asinine observations. And then people nod along and yassify the observations that come from people they like because there exists a precedent in which they yassify each other. They will surely yassify each other to death, crushed under a pile of fraudulent exclamations and affirmations. I’m feeling cynical because everything is out of focus. I keep walking and the sky is orange and the air tastes like the clothes I burned when I fell into a campfire at eight and I have no idea where I’m going. This is normal: Summer usually depresses me. The stick and sweat is heavy and tiresome. I'm lethargic and unhungry and bloated and have no interest in water despite being terribly thirsty. Plus I'm broke. Sometimes I sit so long in a place that I forget I’m occupying a seat. Then I get up and sit in another place. I’ve been sitting in cafes all over the city, disappearing into couches and benches and chairs (oh my). Perhaps I need to stop reading because I don’t like disappearing so much. Thank god I’ve been pulled aside a few times by tourists asking for directions and people needing signatures or donations that I always tend to give so they can just go home and get out of the smoke that’s blurring my vision. Each time I thank god they talked to me, because I’m glad to be a body that people can pull.