Here is a partial list of the musical instruments and accessories fellowship funding from the University of Pittsburgh has exclusively enabled me to purchase. Most of these items are now sold, but the list is alarming. '*' denotes my still having possession of the item.

1. Roland KC-150 keyboard amplifier*
2. Dave Smith Instruments Mono Evolver Keyboard
3. 1978 Wurlitzer 200A electroacoustic piano*
4. Calzone ATA case for the Wurlitzer*
5. Moogerfooger FreqBox
6. Moogerfooger MuRF (x2)
7. Moogerfooger 12 step phaser
8. Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive
9. Keeley 4-knob compressor
10. Keeley Katana clean boost
11. Ernie Ball volume pedal*
12. BBE Boosta Grande *
13. Onstage keyboard stand*
14. Onstage microphone stand*
15. Sennheiser e835 microphone*
16. Onstage guitar stand*
17. Ibanez Performance acoustic guitar
18. Sequential Circuits SixTrak analogue synthesizer
19. MIM Fender Deluxe Jazz Bass
20. Lexicon Alpha USB recording interface
21. M-Audio UNO USB-Midi interface*
22. Maxtor external hard drive*
23. MFB-503 Drumcomputer
24. Peterson StroboFlip
25. Sonic Research ST-200 strobe tuner*
26. Boss Dr. Beat DB-30 metronome*
27. Fender Deluxe electric bass guitar case*
28. Genz-Benz Shuttle 3.0 bass amplifier
29. Markbass Traveler 102p bass cabinet
30. Markbass Little Mark II bass amplifier
31. Aguilar Tone Hammer preamp/DI box
32. Aguilar GS112*
33. Aguilar GS112NT*
34. Aguilar DB 750*
35. Roadrunner 4 space ATA-style rack case*
36. Fender MIA Standard Jazz Bass*
37. Proline memory foam keyboard stool*
38. Hohner Symphonic 320 analogue organ
39. Pair of Mackie MR5 studio moniors*
40. G&L USA Legacy guitar*
41. 1978 Mark I Rhodes Seventy-Three electroacoustic piano*
42. THD Bivalve 30 guitar amplifier*
43. Apogee Duet*
44. Sennheiser HD 280 headphones*
45. M-Audio Keystation 49e MIDI keyboard*
46. Ultimate Support hanging guitar stand*
47. Vox AC30 headphone guitar amplifier*

This proves, without any ounce of doubt, that my musical reinvention has been a direct consequence of the very generous financial support provided to me by my doctoral programme. In what other scenario might I have had the time and funding to pursue being a professional musician from the ground up -- on an instrument (or, as it were, a series of instruments) I had never even played before?

The process of making a jazz recording may require a high level of mastery and attention to detail, but the impact they have on the world is noteworthy in its smallness. And deservedly so.

Philosophical books have a weaker initial impact, but they linger. (Like a bad smell.)

A few months left. Then only a select few know what.

KCL now offers an MSc in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder.

Clark says the best way to learn about virtue ethics is to date an academic. No matter what you do, it is strictly a default of character which ends or sustains it.

I feel bad.
Why?
Because I am more selfish than you.

D#m
Dmaj7#11

Consider the failure of Socrates to defend the contrary position in the Cratylus.

Have I bestowed too much significance upon my drum machine? I worry. For I have always believed that technology is in no way one of the elements of music. (As distinct as phonology from semantics.)

I am undergoing a second-degree personal-administrative meltdown. At this point, there is nothing I can do, except reinvent myself anew.

Arpeggiators threaten the distinction between harmony and melody. And melody is primary. So there goes harmony.

Aleatoric art died at conception.

A good percentage of contemporary music is about to die. The time has come to emphasise an intuition common to all those with an aversion to rarefied music: art is sensuous, not theoretical.

There are obviously cases which expose a tender spot in our practical ability to distinguish ordinary objects and events from the aesthetic ones. (Consider a Warholean Brillo Box.) Yet it goes without saying that what we classify at the ends of spectrum is seldom open to debate. A meeting with your municipal tax collector is not art; a symphony is.

What is art? This question is a metaphysical question -- one concerning the composition of the fabric of the world. An answer to it would have to provide us with the criteria which distinguishes the artifacts from the artworks, the cafeteria banter from a romantic chorale and so on. I would not know where to begin in providing such an answer. (And the lack of consensus among philosophers of art is itself an indication of how difficult the question is.) But there is an answer. There must be. For there are artworks, and there are non-artworks, and that is the beginning and the end of the matter.

While we ourselves may not be able to articulate an answer to this query, and, accordingly, provide a set of criteria for what constitutes a piece of art, we unquestionably possess a reliable capacity to distinguish between the two. That we have this capacity is enough to secure that there can be fruitful debates concerning the value of a particular work. This discourse is art criticism. Exercising our practical capacity, we identify our target piece of art, and there begins the activity.

You need to keep the important people close to you. Keep them close at the exclusion of everyone else, the unwashed dross without magnetic allure.

Vote for Obama. There are so many good reasons. But here is one. Consider the alternative.

I have nearly severed my ties at school. But I remain connected to the internet. I must do better.

I aim for this to change. 'Productivity' takes on a different sense for the person whose life takes place online.

The rock trio is not a natural kind.

I am the sum total of my dispositions. This includes the latent ones, of which only I am aware.

I hear a tragedy.

After working a few years in the CIA, someone wants to write a non-fiction memoir on her experience in Vienna and elsewhere. I agreed with the reporter that this would probably be a terrible book. But why?

The answer is as follows. Certain topics -- for whatever contingent or necessary reasons -- are too particular to express a universal appeal. The details obscure the message. They alienate the ignorant.

Why are there no mathematical thrillers?

The thankless task of saying what I do not mean.

Self-sabotage: I wonder whether there can be personal progress without it. Eliminating possibilities did more for me than getting a good GPA ever did.

There is a book on the horizon. Funny that the urge to write should only happen once my ties to my academic career have been severed. Not that I have cut the cord quite yet. But the deliberation has concluded.

The idea centres on many of the aesthetic thoughts I have enthymemetically expressed herein.

I wish you would direct your literary ambition elsewhere. Forget 9-11.

It took me a long time to realise that I am exactly qualified to do one thing: nothing in particular.

That DFW wrote about death is no clue that he would hang himself. His books are not, as David Gates naïvely suggests, suicide notes.

I am going to take a little bit of a break from this.

The thickness and intimacy of electronic communication is underestimated. It is why people fall in love the way they do. (Over MSN.)

When you lie, you confine yourself to the depths of dishonesty -- a space from which no apology will permit you to escape. The weighter fibs delineate the darkest circles from the fainter. But both rings are in the series.

Consider my hypocrisy. Subtle and venomous.

On the very idea of knowing yourself.

I could not imagine being a historian. Imagine the constraints!

I am always a little surprised to see how the public reacts to sexually suggestive advertising like this. Even on that gossip website, where I would imagine many people to be comfortable with the saucy, over 80% of its readers think that a clever advertisement is in poor taste. It leads me to question how such conservative attitudes might arise from their own intimate exploits.

Someone sent me an email asking me to donate money. She told me she needed to raise $4500 for a marathon hosted by a charity they were running in Anchorage, AK this summer. The idea of helping to pay someone's airfare from Houston to Alaska so that they can run a marathon to combat cancer is ludicrous to me. It is a backwards approach to goodwill.

It reminds me of a friend of mine that biked across the continent to raise money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. He did the trip with his girlfriend (who accompanied him in the largest van I had ever seen). His 45 day trip raised a total of $1000 for the charity, but he raised thousands more than that. A lot of it went toward gas and sustenance. Despicably, when he arrived home, he had a $4000 carbon fiber bike to show for it.

Funding someone else's recreation under the guise that you are supporting a charity is deplorable. That is not goodwill.

I can send things here from my cellular telephone.

Everything is broken right now: my camera, the zipper on my new jeans, the nose piece on my glasses, my iPod, my front derailleur. It is painful.

I edit all of the photos you send me. I adjust the tint. I fix the levels. I want them to look more like you do. I match your digitised face to the one stored inside of me.

I am teaching ethics next fall.

We do not see coloured things.
We see things in colour.

Musicianship matters. I did not see that hint of greatness in St. Vincent that I saw in My Brightest Diamond. We tolerate play-along tracks in live concerts, but I wonder why?

I am glad we walked to the Warhol and back. Otherwise, we might not have had a chance to listen to the creaky ice together.

I see glimpses of myself in Chad Vangaalen.

I would call it 'an irrational attraction to arms'.

I spoke too soon. My personal stereo is destroyed.

I put my iPod through the washer and dryer. And it still works and looks the same. Impressive.

Things are beginning to bloom here. I see it. I see it in the way they say.

My peers are questioning my narrative strategy. They say that my point of view is displaced in certain instances. But who is to say that there is a point of view at all? And why would I trust others whose writing I had no desire to emulate?

The difficulty is that I expected nearly every comment I received. That is a good sign for me. It shows that I was precisely aware of what it is that I was trying to accomplish. It is a bad sign insofar as it is unclear how I am to revise my fiction with their remarks.

Follow the key signature. Do not play wrong notes.

Remember what happened 31 December 2005 - 1 January 2006.

Can I write a story without fantastic events? Not until episodes of that sort cease to occur in the ordinary.

My fiction reads like a mongrel of news articles and poems.

Do not mistake opacity for profundity.

Exercises of the Imagination.

I have been having these heretical thoughts that the function of a story is not to present a closed system occupied by fictional individuals with determinate traits that assign them motivations which explain their behaviour. What a story does is present a host of sentences which place restrictions on the generation of a make-believe world. But anything might happen. Even direct specifications of events and attitudes might be doubted. And there is nothing incoherent about that. As always, is a distance between what is reported and what occurs.

We use heuristics to read. We synthesise each sentence and incorporate it into our representation of the fictional world, and using theoretical vocabulary like 'character' and 'plot' help us do this. But heuristics, as Newell and Simon have shown, do not invariably yield the right results. An algorithm, of course, would, but, if what I am saying is correct, there are no interpretative algorithms by which we can specify an underspecified system, nor could there ever be any.

This has the consequence of casting doubt on any notion of there being a 'logical ending' to a story -- something taught to me in my fiction workshop yesterday. In a world without empirical constraints, anything conceptually possible is possible, and this is true even if it upsets our hermeneutics.

The story did not have to end with the young woman finding her place in the world, which, in this specific instance, was in a gourmet kitchen.

Let me syntactically prime you with my idiosyncratic prose. I want to see you employ odd conventions.

Surrounded by thinkers.

I wish I had a little cat roaming around my apartment.

Did I do something out of character? I hardly recognised myself on the phone.

I have the luxury of idle time.

It is of no interest to me whether characters like this have ever been generated. That the possibility of their generation exists is all that matters. It is a philosophical point with aesthetic consequences.

Fictional worlds are underspecified worlds.

Narrative.
Character.
Exposition.
Backstory.
Symbolism.
Metonymy.

These are theoretical words. If you wish to use one, you had better understand what it is that you wish to succeed in doing by using it. Say you want to analyse a fiction, and your goal is to succeed in understanding of why it is that someone in the text did such-and-so. The answer might plausibly be that he or she had a certain character. But what if we abandon this value -- the idea that we might explain such-and-so with respect to some static property that person has? It would seem that the utility of the theoretical expression would vanish altogether. We may as well abandon the tool.

I get the sense that nearly every writer takes these words to pick out static literary kinds. I suggest we abandon them in conceptualising literary work, and see how far we can go.

This line between fiction and reality is impossible to keep straight. There is no clean division between the two.

There are sometimes disclaimers at the beginning of novels explaining that any similarities between fictional and real characters and events are entirely coincidental.

As if fictions are developed in a vacuum! As if dreams come from nowhere!

It is an intellectually fertile place: the Cathedral of Learning.

I read Hemingway next to Sellars. Because that is how I do things in Pittsburgh.

I refereed a paper in the philosophy of mind for a conference. 23 pages of well-written nonsense. It was defending a realism and internalism about rules. I tore it to shreds, and recommended it -- with revisions -- for a poster presentation.

One of the memorable dummy arguments against internalism was that what I feel as painful in the actual world might be felt as pleasurable in a world whose material constitution was different.

My adviser refuted two months of hard work in two sentences. His criticism is so devastating that I cannot help but smile a little. I am already thinking of my next paper for him.

These job talks are tiresome to watch. One of my professors put it succinctly.

'It makes me worried about Gresham's Law in philosophy.'

None of these candidates seem particularly special. This is to make no claim about their academic achievements. They are all sharp and accomplished. It is only to say that there is a serious dearth of people on the market with any intellectual character.

It makes me depressed and happy to be here.

Anyone who has ever done a technical search on cycling-related matters has found Sheldon Brown on the internet. He died yesterday. It is impossible to test, but I think it would go without saying that he knew more about bikes than anyone ever has. And we have the closest thing we could get to proof: his website.

I emailed him once four years ago when I was first getting interested in fixed-gear bicycles. Believe it or not, they were only a fraction of us back then, though I still felt like minor poseur when I started. Anyway, the one gap I found on his page is that there seemed to be no thoughts on the bolt-on cog design for LeVeL hubs. He replied saying that it was pointless to reinvent the wheel. Lockrings work just fine. And now we know.

She told me she was a country mouse.

The cure to wanting to be a philosopher is an Analysis subscription.

I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

- L. W.

Goodbye, friend. The co-op will never be the same without you.

Our standards for electronic communication are so low.

This story is making me explode. I am getting sentimental.

Helicopters and head trauma.

You have me thinking about community.

I do not recognise these legs.

That an organism responds to electrical stimulation, lacks a central nervous system or cries is no demonstration that it ought to be edible or inedible. We need better principles guiding our dietary restrictions than that.

I get overly enthusiastic when blood pumps through my body like that. Accordingly, I spent too long questioning your description of quinoa. You said it was crunchy. I could not let that go.

I liked the way we were in that cave.

I doubt there is a department quite like this for me. The course offerings for next semester look perfect.

My system breaks down when someone asserts something flagrantly false. If he or she continues to endorse it despite being committed to other incompatible propositions, it becomes evident that our disagreement is more than a matter of taste. We inhabit different logical spaces althogether.

The night she might: it was a possibility he could not ignore.

I am annexed in my apartment, writing fiction. It is even more solitary than writing philosophy. In philosophy, you are forever engaged in a dialogue with towering historical figures. But you construct your world from the bottom-up in fiction. You generate your own history.

A wonderful card came in the mail today, housed in a little textured envelope. The words were inscribed with colourful metal point pens.

I had a dream yesterday that you were cradling me in your arms. We were sitting in front of a pair of computer speakers, listening to sleepy music. I touched your arm with my head accidentally, and then you brought me into you.

I enjoy food the way I do because of you.

A former coworker of mine had a climbing accident last week. He was evacuated from Mount Harvey with severe head trauma. He is alive, but his condition is unknown. He played a key role in generating my interest in the activity.

They brought me rice cakes.

The concept of a pink houndstooth dress.

How many thoughts do I think each day? Is there no determinate number, or is it that the barrier to enumerate is strictly pragmatic?

Even I was impressed with the execution of my Sunday lunch party.

I am on a radical sleep schedule.

I am constantly using new methods to get where I want. Not because I find my old modes of engagement to be ineffective, but because my destination keeps changing.

It is the most ambitious fiction I have ever attempted to write. There are recurring images of alphanumeric characters, gourmet foods and snow. It ends in great sorrow, but not without palpable beauty. I will invite you to read it soon.

Oh! How you say it!

It is hard to read what you write
because it barely matters what you say.

My
breath
sends shivers
down
my spine.

I know why I do it. Is is because I am elsewhere, somewhere incommensurable with the world of public objects. My private world is cast in oratio obscura.

That rogue tremor trembled through me without warning.

It worries me to think of all the pronouns I have used.

I refuse to let things move in slow motion. Let us do it now, or let us do it tomorrow. I cannot wait longer than that. Mine is an attitude of urgency.

Like every man you speak of.

Pittsburgh has been a series of minor disappointments for me. But that is what gives me hope. It is what makes each day seem so much better than the next. With expectations so low, I cannot help but marvel at the small miracles around me.

I am taking a fiction writing workshop. This is a secret.

We extract significance from coincidence.

I am almost ready to begin presenting myself as an expert on a foreign instrument. But three elements are still missing.

I am very methodical. I always think things through.

Aloe Evra.
Aloe Evra.

I think about my hair more than most men. It was relatively early on that I learned much of my perceived identity was dependent on my haircut. And so I futzed around with it. It began with experiments in gelatinous hair products, and, eventually, I adopted a matte philosophy. I am flexible on where it goes from here. But I will keep the ideology alive when I visit Regina at Luxx today.

My endorsed fellowship cheque is on my lap, and it becomes clear that it is absurd for me to complain. I am in a city of bridges, in an apartment full of books, instruments and bikes. While my heating bill is a little high, and my heart is a little broken, there is nowhere like the present.

An index for a work of a fiction that will never be written.

A number of my appetites came back.

I like the way we curled up on the bus. You were the prettiest girl there.

Everything is closed.

Not many of the people in my current rotation of friends knew me in the first two years of adulthood, so, to them, my connection with the fine arts seems more like a hobby than a undying obsession. It made sense, then, that I should leave the fine arts altogether in pursuit of a straightforward humanities degree. Not every hobby needs to be a hobby cum profession.

But some remained unconvinced. I can remember my first university girlfriend, at a far simpler time, encouraging me to forget school altogether, and focus exclusively on building my career in the fine arts. I can remember another telling me, with an uncharacteristic poetic flare, that my church had been erected, that it was a church of fine arts and that it was the most ornate in sight.

These optimistic remarks did not go unnoticed, but they exerted little force in my decision to turn. I switched paths, and it all worked out fine. My successes continued there, and, to an outside observer, I suspect it seemed as if I had replaced one juvenile interest with a sensible one.

Yet I should have expected. You cannot contain a volcano.

This psychosomatically-generated nausea is so violent that I can barely contemplate drinking water.

I wish I could say (with Sufjan Stevens) that I cried myself to sleep last night. But I hardly slept a wink.

The only reason I do not think I have completely decayed is that I feel the depths of the seas of anguish.

I thought I had some power over the situation.

There is something unstable here.

I am a depositor of viewpoints.

Do you have any idea how much there is inside of me?

It is like knowing the exact instant at which I will lose my vision forever.

I do not want to go climbing tomorrow.

Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions; lower-middle-class Toulouse, that's you. No man ever grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay that formed you has dried and hardened, and no man could now awaken in you the dormant musician, the poet or the astronomer who perhaps once dwelt within you.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The quietly turbulent mode.

My heart flutters for you.

I think in paragraphs when I write, not sentences. But the chunks are underspecified. Some sentences have gaps, which need to be filled at a later stage of editing. The composition, then, is the simple part. It is the editing that takes the iron.

Remember me as I was. (As I know you always will.)

I do my creative work in the afternoon.
I do my intellectual work at night.

I used to think there was a way I could put my creative work on hold for an extended period of time. But that led to difficulties. It led to me to conclude that I was pretending to understand a foreign language all the way along.

I have no difficulty putting my intellectual work on hold. But that is what I am trained to do. So I do it. I am a skilled practitioner. I diagnose philosophical problems.

We disappeared on Thursday.

You and me could make the most beautiful music together.

I am never getting rid of this site.

There is a tired debate on the extent to which a fictional work is biographical.

Are the dark chapters in such-and-such generated by the acute psychological malady of so-and-so? One best articulated by a paragraph in the DSM-IV?

That we consider these questions indicates our ignorance of the distinction between syntactic well-formedness and the Wittgensteinian maxim that it is impossible to judge a piece of nonsense.

It looks like my uncle's mine in Madagascar is going to turn him into a multimillionaire.

I signed up to Facebook. Seconds later, I deactivated my membership. There are simply too many people to whom I wish not to be linked, regardless of how informal or secretive others expect me to think that link is.

I took an impromptu trip to Toronto. There are so many photos I want to show you: some subset of the 496 stored on my camera right now. But we have to wait.

No ominous fog can prevent me from constructing my pipeline between Toronto and Pittsburgh.

Someone took my umbrella from the umbrella bin at a restaurant. It was my 2007 Valentine's Day gift.

I know what people say about hindsight. But I still find it difficult to think that I was so intent to continue on with music lessons after I had already learned the basics. What else was I expecting to hear from David Liebman?

'Be sensible. Experiment.'
'I know.'

It is all he could really say.

It hits me like a brick wall, the way I return to that singular thought again and again. So I suppress it. My working mantra is produce or perish.

I feel the weight of a theoretical commitment.

It is 8 AM on a grey Thanksgiving Day. It is nothing intrinsic about these early hours of the day that pains me. I like the dawn. I like the stillness of the great lakes and city streets in the morning. It is only that impending hurry -- the incontinent flurry of messages and phone calls and obligations I would rather wait to confront -- which keeps committed to this odd schedule.

There is something romantic about the way we turn. (You and me.)

Pittsburgh is beautiful in the fall.

Because some of us are afraid of the dark.

An undergraduate asked me whether this was supposed to be a Trojan giraffe. I told him that it was not. I explained that the little people on the inside were simply controlling the beast, perhaps providing an analogical representation of what actually occurs inside a giraffe when it moves. He then asked me what the little people were going to do when the animal made it through the front gates.

I get into these modes. I have been fawning over this extremely rare recording of myself playing at the Rex five years ago. We are playing 'Inner Urge' in 7/4. It is one of our first shows together -- back before we made the switch to exclusively popular music -- and there is this youthful vibrancy in the playing that I doubt has ever been captured before. I was 20 when it was recorded, months after I made the switch to the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. I still had my technical facility, and, more importantly, the live desire to make something of myself as a musician.

The quality is poor, and the audience is far too noisy, but it is the perfect snapshot of the past. I forget who recorded it, but thank goodness that they did, or else there might be no evidence that there was a period like this in my life.

I was asked to play again with the band on 30 December 2007, but the request came two days too late. I had already booked my ticket elsewhere.

I know I need to keep my chin high.

It is a sign that I need to adjust when I find myself in bed at 4 AM.

Not that it bothers me.
I like it.

But it puts me out of step with you.

It seems to be that the difference between dreams and waking life is that a certain rational acuity is absent in the former. In those vivid, horrible dreams, I never thought once about thinking.

I think in loops about you.

I died a little when I declined that ride to Toronto this weekend.

Tomorrow: My Brightest Diamond.

A man lives next door with a woman. I worry for them. The man has antisocial traits that trouble me: he looks downward at the cobblestone when I pass him on the street, and greets me quietly and all-too-colloquially. He erupts behind closed doors.

Some of the things I hear him say to his girlfriend are so blatantly inappropriate that I cringe. He calls her names, insults her intelligence, threatens to walk out. And then he does. He disengages the security system on his Oldsmobile -- bleep, bleep, bleep! -- and squeals away.

He is a mess of incontinent fury. And I feel sorry for the both of them. They are utterly trapped -- she in his apartment, him in his ways.

Tonight: Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

I like to think that I might have a system. But I know myself better than that. My method is piecemeal. I am woven from the threads of many disciplines, too many to cohesively quilt.

The one and only day I decide to wear hiking boots to school, I remember on the way there that I have a departmental dinner to attend.

I am struck by the overwhelming cheapness of the featured videos on YouTube. With the number of users they have, you would suspect that one or two might display a manifest genius about them. Perhaps the quality is latent. But I doubt it. Not a single one of those videos warrants viewing to completion.

I was once committed to the view that knowledge precedes interest. That I am interested in philosophy, say, is a function of my knowing something about it. But this trivially true thesis has zero predictive power. My total lack of interest in experimental psycholinguistics is, likewise, a function of my knowing something about it.

This just goes to show that knowledge of X is not sufficient to have developed an interest in X. But is it even necessary? Trivially, it is a geographical region, stereotyped by its inclement weather. But this is only to say that if I am to have an interest in something, I must know what that thing is. And this is nothing more than Russell's Principle: that to make a judgment about something, I must know which object my judgment is about.

I doubt whether knowledge in a sense more robust than this is either necessary or sufficient to establish interest in a given topic.

I have an interest in physics. But I know virtually nothing about it -- nothing beyond the facile identifying description, 'it is the study of physical properties, like energy and matter'. But how could this be so if knowledge precedes interest? Is my interest illusory? Or is the criterion faulty?

I try my best to fight our electronically automated mania. I send cheques by mail, and write letters to the Department of Homeland Security on canary yellow paper.

Piano is going to be my new instrument. I plan to forget the others for a while.

I went to a noise concert yesterday on the Northside. No one expressed interest in the going, so, when I entered, I received the $10 change that he would have kept had there been another.

The music itself was tertiary to the experience. What was essential is that I was surrounded by myself. I could see me everywhere I looked.

I was the banjo player on stage. I was the death metal noise rocker. I was on my Rhodes, facing forward.

Those people on air mattresses were me. That bearded gentleman standing by the merchandise table was me. That skinny courier with the thick thighs. That lifeless girl with the lifeless hair. (They were me, too.)

My relationship to my body is like that between a sailor and his ship. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I cannot direct it where I want to go. I need wind, and the wind takes me wherever it does.

There is nothing systematic about the way I get a grasp over a particular philosophical topic of study. In my introductory sociology classes, there was a method. I sat down and reread the text until I knew all of the details. But the sense in which I can do that in, say, understanding the literature on intentional action is extremely limited.

Light dawns gradually over the whole. - L. W.

I call my friend for recent literature on motor learning. I consult my MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. I fall asleep with Anscombe, and, somehow, awake with the landscape of the area charted out topographically, on my chest.

Give me the beans.

I have not had this much silence in quite a while. It has been a loud seven years.

I remember convincing myself that I had the stamina to walk to the Alps from the city square. It was the first time I had ever really seen mountains like that. In which direction would I travel? I figured it did not really matter. The city was surrounded my mountains.

After six hours of walking, I was in the (dirty, rural) French slums, with nothing but a blister to show for myself. Except the decisive conclusion that it was time to drop out of music school forever. You see, this was, as they sometimes say, my year of discovery. And of the things I discovered, it was this that mattered most.

The only other discoveries worth mentioning were that Europe itself was boring, not so different from North America, except with more littering, more overt racism and more antiquarian preservationists that I could tolerate. Only in Morocco and Barcelona did I genuinely enjoy the traveling itself -- and for quite separate reasons in both cases. The silence was what really kept me there -- not the sights -- not the culture -- not the hostels.

And so here I sit. Type. Read. Alone in this massive apartment. Thank goodness I have control of the volume on my headphones, or else this would be a long journey to the foot of that mountain.

I find the new Radiohead album painfully boring. I would recommend it to suffering insomniacs.

I am finding my own way of doing things in this environment. Most of my waking life is entirely unstructured. And with that freedom comes a great responsibility.

I often question whether I should act thus or so. And it would seem that the more I tremble, the less I accomplish. But the beauty of the intellectual life is that no flirtation with an idea is a waste. Iconic memory has been a recurring topic this week.

I also made a craft today. It is a fish with the last name of a philosopher glued onto it.

The good news is that everything is going well. I have hundreds of pages to read before Anna comes on Thursday, but those fleeting anxieties will dissipate the instant she lands. I cannot wait for those five days.

The programme here is excellent. They invest a considerable amount in their students. But they demand just as much. It is a quid pro quo exchange.

I feel like I could do great things here. But I also feel small in this community. A caterpillar in its earliest stages.

Many at school seem to think that I would be lonely living out here. Clearly, they know nothing of the symphonies of thought and sound that take place in my cloistered environment.

It has been a long time since I have thought about something for any duration of time. All of this reading really distracts me.

Perhaps I am going to start going to bed at 11 PM, right after drinking coffee. That way, I can hide in the dark and think. (Descartes did some of his philosophy in the comfort of his own bed.)

When does it befit me to be kind? (A plausible essay title for a normative ethicist.)

I have been reading Anscombe on intention. So far, it looks like intention actions are classified as such only if the agent performing them knows without observation that they have been performed under some description of the action in question which is familiar to them. This sounds right. But what of cases of emulation? Cases where I, say, unknowingly act in the fashion of someone else?

It just goes to show how little assessments of intention count in assessing the behaviour of others. Unintentional isomorphism is blameworthy, and we scorn individuals who have the audacity to attest that they did know what they were doing.

Producing enlivens me. But it should be noted that there is delineated class of things that does so. Making a meal or roasting coffee might do it to a degree, but, as a general rule, the productions in question are limited to those in which the inserted intentionality is unquestioned.

I am thinking of cases like doodling an image of myself. Or emailing. Or choosing one mode of expression over another synonymous with it. In performing the way I do, I thereby extend outward.

This, I think, is what Hofstadter has in mind in his I Am a Strange Loop. Yet I can only guess. (I have only read reviews.)

There is a Tractatus reading group here, led by a student, featuring an expert. I hope to get a photograph of all of us, huddled around our books, with the puzzling propositions numbered on the blackboard behind us.

In one hour, I completed a paper whose unfinished manuscript had previously haunted me for eight months. All it took was five or six sentences.

Sometimes I wonder how I can get caught up in these intellectual stalemates. And then I think that the embarrassing psychological explanation nouns, like 'insight', might not be so embarrassing after all.

I am done here for a while. You might have inferred that by the seriously diminishing frequency at which I choose to post. But I have other things on the go, not limited to a new life in the United States. Electronically speaking, I have two sites that I plan to develop over the months.

The first is a Flickr site. I like the interface, and I like posting images. I have never really done that before. And it is liberating. I want to document my life in a more concrete way, and, naturally, this pushes me away from the cryptic writing here, and toward keeping catalogued visual records of my doings. Flickr is my impetus to do this.

The other is YouTube. I plan to post a number of little movies here.

So visit if you like. I am going to keep this site up, but I am unsure whether there will be anything of any substance posted here in the next little while.

I am happy that July is taking a different turn. It has sometimes been painfully difficult with my mobility constrained, but everything is now on the mend. I am ready to go exploring again.

And that is just what we did today. I met you at that place on that street on which I used to live, and we then chose to spend our evening over there. It was a delight.

I generally cannot stop thinking about the future. I only wish I could focus a little bit more on the present every now and then, just as I did today.

I recently developed an acute interest in Lin Yo-Hwan. Watch him. He writes the perfect story.

I was wheeled to the park last night.

It occurred while reading a new book. My moment. The one in which I came to value the distinction between logical investigations and investigations of any other sort.

I worked in a toy factory for a very short period of time. I had two tasks there: one was to sort alphabetic beads, and the other was to sticker plastic dinosaurs. Both were repetitive to the degree that they allowed me to be elsewhere while I worked -- still in the factory, and still at my table, but elsewhere.

Made in my own image.

We shared a calamari appatiser last week. It amounted to one squid per person. That ratio is too high. (In my opinion.)

Even more testing was a preparation error. The soft, translucent bone in the animal had neglected to be removed. New textures are difficult. (For me.)

I roasted a roast last evening. A roast so bold -- a roast so challenging -- that I am not quite sure how to assess it. My standards of evaluation break down here.

It is an assault on the senses. Taste it if you dare.

There have been so many technological advances in the development of audio equipment over the recent years. I have little interest in hi-fidelity stereo. So what is it that interests me about this evolution? The decrease in price. Combine this with sophisticated and accessible peer-to-peer networking, and anyone with a modest Western income can now listen to what they want, loudly and clearly.

I like software engineering. (Not that I do it. I do not.) And what appeals to me most is that it is, for the most part, an a priori art. Code is code whether you compile it or not. And the ideas represented by that code are also artifacts of the theoretical realm. To be sure, the design process is influenced by successive compilations of the code, but no more than the evolution of a poem is influenced by a typeface or the voice of its composer. Both get generated elsewhere, nowhere visible to me.

If there is one good thing that can be said for crutches -- beyond the obvious fact that they allow me to move simpliciter -- it is that they reduce my pace to a lento.

There is a very valuable piece of paper in my hand, endorsing my relocation to the United States. August 8 2012 is the official expiry date, but I have a sense that the stint is quite possibly indefinite.

I have been thinking a little bit about Twitter. (Here I sway by some members of my online quietest faction.) No need getting into the details of the software, but my first impressions are positive.

The technology constraints each message broadcast to 140 characters. That is the part that I like. You can broadcast from your phone, instant messaging client or browser. I like that, too. What I dislike is its regulative suggestion that each message should be an answer to the question, 'What are you doing?'. How contrived! The quantitative constraint is enough! Why impose a qualitative constraint, too?

They say that people sometimes change after long illnesses. And I can see why. Entering my fourth week of being bedridden, I only barely feel like myself. My energy is at an all time low, and, for that, I am irritable. I have lost my ability to partake in basic home duties, let alone live up to my spontaneously mobile standard of living.

I am thankful for the care, and I am thankful for the visits. But I am sorry that everything is on pause now. I am sorry that I am not playing the show you so generously organised for me this weekend. I am sorry that I missed you when you came to Toronto. I am sorry we never went on that bike ride. I am sorry that I cannot care for myself. I am sorry that I have not processed my reimbursement forms. And I am sorry that I am snappy. But I am thankful that this will all be over soon -- the six weeks I never want back.

I have another three weeks in this cast. The time in isolation has not been altogether too miserable. I have been doing what I sometimes wish I could do: proceed without the interruptions of everyday life. I have been discovering new websites, new technologies and new musics. I have been wondering whether I actually prefer the modes of investigation and expression that I endorse over all else. And I doubt that I do. But ex nihilo nihil fit. I have not arrived here without arriving from somewhere.

Above all, I am preparing myself for Pittsburgh. What sort of philosopher will I become? Will I really, as I say I will, focus on the semantics of context sensitive expressions? And will I continue to listen to Ladytron? And is my decision to attend a shallow and disguised attempt to relive my unrepeatable month of bliss there last summer?

A fancy dismount led to the spectacular breaking of my ankle.

No, really. There is something private to me, unavailable to any other.

My relationship with coffee is sensitive. I do not want to overdo it. But I have reached the mature decision that I am -- and should be -- a consumer for life. I typically wake up happy. But I am so much happier when I supplement my morning routine with a trip to I Deal, Merchants, Cherry Bomb or Jet Fuel. That happiness is not ephemeral. It lasts. It lasts until the very next morning, when I remind myself once again that I am committed for life.

I like Toronto. After a lengthy day at work, I went for a characteristically solo ride in the core of the city, stopping once to hug a friend, a second time to phone my bike mechanic and a third time to purchase some coffee. I like me.

If I had to decide on a practical vocation, there is little doubt that I would choose to be a stylist. For style is essential to me, to you. And it only takes a twist, a cut.

It is good that I do not have to make such a decision. Because I am quite happy reading David Lewis, and leaving the twists and cuts to others.

I am sitting in underpants and my University of Pittsburgh tee shirt, happily deliberating on my bright prospects for becoming a professional philosopher. Again. Again? Again.

Thank goodness you are bringing your bicycle. It might otherwise be difficult to achieve the lofty plans I have laid out for your first visit.

We begin at dusk. I will gather you from my apartment, and lead you to an excellent cup of coffee. This marks the ideal segue to dinner. We will eat cheap, excellent food surrounded by people looking like us, and then make way to the first neighbourhood of the night: the Annex. (It is not one of my favourites, but it warrants a visit.) Then onwards to College, Kensington and Parkdale. That should do for the evening.

The next day, we wake up early, grab pastries and coffee from another one of my favourite neighbourhoods -- Cabbagetown -- and cycle to the island. It affords the best view of the city. The view is worth the travel. We spend a couple of hours there, and make it back for lunch at a very nice deli. More coffee afterwards. I then take you through some of the less interesting neighbourhoods, but for very good reason: they lead to Dutch Dreams, an ice creamery on the north edge of downtown. We visit the castle after our banana split, and then deliberate at which vegetarian restaurant we prefer to eat. (I, of course, plan to explain the subtleties to you.) We eat, sprint down University and then stop in a selection of the neighbourhoods we visited the day before for discussion and delicious drinks. Perfect. I suspect the night will conclude at either a late night Chinese food restaurant on Spadina or a country-themed after hours establishment called the 'Matador'.

The next day we cycle down to Lake Ontario. It really is a fantastic lake -- ! -- and it is located just minutes from my residence. We can return home via High Park, and I can introduce you to some very odd creatures: Toronto squirrels. I may as well take you to campus that day. Thankfully, the visit will not obstruct our path to the Beaches, which I take to be another essential destination -- not because I like its socioeconomic or cultural demographic, but because no characterisation of the city is complete without a glance. Our trip back to the central area of town will take us through some very poor areas of town, and that, too, is essential. Moss Park should certainly be an element of our itinerary. Perhaps we can park our bikes at home before eating dinner that night. That enables us to take the TTC to our venue of choice that night -- quite possibly the PWYC Wavelength series at Sneaky Dee's.

So there. I cannot wait for you to visit. And I suspect that this is reflected in the depth and detail of my plans.

I went through a period of avoiding pirated music. But this period is over. I can no longer accept that intolerable gap between the time in which I want an album and the moment I get to listen to it.

I know how difficult it is for musicians to make money. But this suggests that the economic model is wrong. (No profundity here. I just added my name to a tally of votes.)

Hello Pittsburgh.
So long Yale.

Perhaps it would be best to rank institutions not by the quality of the work done by their faculty, but by the work of their graduates. That, I think, would be a more valuable indicator for prospectives in my own position.

The choice I ought to make is not as obvious as I had hoped it would be.

The question is not so much whether I would like to go here or not. It is this. Do I want to be a philosopher? If I do, then I have solved the dilemma. But is this dilemma really a dilemma? Or do I recognise that, in my effort to break out of discourse to an arché beyond discourse, I have provided the most curious dimension of all?

I have a new pair of dress shoes: Paul May.
I have a new gastronomic hobby: roasting coffee.

Lionel sent me an email today, informing me that he will, indeed, be coming to North America within the year. I had originally contacted him with the distant hope that he might someday do some work on me. Interestingly, it now looks like this can happen.

It is nearly time for me to leave Vancouver. And I am split on the forthcoming event.

In one sense, the change is welcome. I am drawn to Toronto like a magnet. It will be a thrill to be back for the summer, at a time when the patio culture flourishes. Our sublet is located in the Roncesvalles neighbourhood, too, which just happens to be one of my favourite places in the city. Moreover, the apartment itself is a dream, and I foresee many enthusiastic kisses for securing it.

On the other hand, I am sorry to be leaving this place. Moving out to this coast was a significant act. (And, as hesitant I am to associate particular acts with particular significances, I am compelled to concede this is so.) The skiing was wonderful, and, above everything, I learned that there are ways to keep yourself quite content in foreign lands.

What I look forward to most is having a permanent residence again. I do not mind traveling, but I hate to be a traveler. Envisioning my belongings in a city for more than three hundred nights fills me with a palpable happiness.

And so it goes.

Is it his phonemic inflection that puts me here? That is what I think. But it is hard to convince a language user that a vehicle interpretable as carrying semantic content moves you for strictly acoustic reasons.

Thank you for your advice. But my acumen allows me to recognise its limitations. A decision that is good for me is not always a decision that is good for you -- not because I deny that the space of reasons is fabricated with objective thread. I simply think that the time it takes to formulate sage advice on a situation exceeds the window in which that advice is relevant to that very situation. And why take advice if it is anything less than sage?

Two of my best friends lay eggs five times every seven days.

I like it very much here. I saw five fixed-gear bicycles this afternoon, including one Kiyo from Japan. It had pink handlebar tape.

Name:

This is the template for each email I send. The first paragraph almost always consists of exactly two sentences, the first of which typically greets the addressee, or thanks them for their continued correspondence.

Then I get into the heart of the matter. I try to keep this section brief, but, for obvious reasons, it is usually the longest, sometimes extending three paragraphs or more. What can I say? I have information to disclose. I try to keep a light air in the composition. But I nonetheless stick to my formal habits: no contractions, and no use of the possessive apostrophe. (The latter is one of my inexplicably odd rules.)

I sometimes include a final paragraph before the end. Such is so when it is the inaugeral member of a thread, or when a landing point is required after a lengthy meditation. I do not always need one, especially if I care little about the health and happiness of the addressed party.

Closing greeting,
Me

I do not get nervous very often. But I like being nervous.

Be alert!
Pay attention!
See yourself anew!

For those fragile seconds, I believe in a great number of things that I do not ordinarily believe.

I have little to report, with the exception that I will soon be in Toronto. The trip begins this Friday, and ends before the next.

If a record is good, then it is always good. Whether Loveless was released on 4 November 1991, or on 5 September 1982, its date of publication should not affect our assessment of its excellence. Likewise with any other contextual change. If something is always good, then it is good whether the Radiohead formation subsists before, during or after its release.

As reasonable as this line of thinking seems, reviewers are fickle. They want to commit to the autonomy of art, but, at the same time, are inexorably swayed by circumstances in which they live. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with being influenced by these circumstances, but you cannot then commit to the timelessness of art.

He asks me the most difficult questions: the simple ones. I like him for that. I say in passing that I am interested in parades, and he asks what it is that interests me about them.

If you sing softly for me.

I imagine myself on a plinth, performing. My friends are watching me, relieved.

What I seek is total justification that my decision to be a performer is a good one. The only way I can think of doing this is by succeeding as much as possible at every interest I have, and then arriving at the emotive conclusion that nothing brings me more delight than music.

I spent the early part of this decade escaping the arts. I see the early part of next decade returning.

As independent as I am, I could never live in total exile. The people around me are my affective and perceptual pillars. They constrain my engagement with the world by policing my use of language.

You make me feel like I am sewn with golden thread. A sickly, self-righteous feeling.

This site sucks the creativity out of me, and disseminates it in no particular direction.

Who am I?

What about me is private? Not my mood. Not my usage. Not my pain. Perhaps the only private thing about me is my plan for the future. Here I stray poetic.

I want to wage intellectual war against an influential music critic. But what good would it do? Unwashed readers would continue to leech onto his negative views of well-funded music. I cannot possibly fight for the disinterested.

I cannot help thinking that the smooth path I anticipate in the near future is really just the eye of a hurricane.

While I am beginning to like Vancouver more and more, I am more than happy to see myself back home in Toronto. This should be from May until August.

The life of leisure is fun. What I like most about engaging in strenuous and dangerous physical activity is that it removes me from thinking about anything serious. But I can only escape thinking for so long. As soon as the activity ceases, and there no longer exists a build up of lactic acid in my biceps, I feel empty -- an emptiness only filled by activity, love and my engagement with what is beautiful.

Why do I continue to expose myself to avalanche conditions?

Choose between attending two schools. One has a better reputation for the discipline you study, but the other exceeds at everything else. Were you aware of your own volatility, I foresee little difficulty in the choice. The only real challenge is determining whether you are, in fact, as capricious as you think you are.

I stepped in shit. That makes twice in two weeks, both times in my cycling cleats.

I request that you do not send me congratulatory remarks. I was accepted into a doctoral programme in philosophy this evening.

No one makes rational choices except me.

It was winter torture.

We ascended 1200 feet on alpine touring skis with 40 pound packs. Difficult, but augmented by a heavy snowfall, a fresh 30 centimeters in 24 hours. With the thick gusts of wind, and the drastic change in temperature, we exposed ourselves to considerable avalanche terrain. On the second day, after collapsing our snow shelters and boiling enough water for the descent, this was confirmed. We failed three out of four of our avalanche safety tests.

My hat was an ice helmet. My face was a windburned scarlet. I have never been so vulnerable.

Gone backcountry ski touring.

Someone from my distant past called me this morning. He invited me to perform in loving memory of the wife of a man I once knew. I was unsure how to respond. Do you ask a dentist to take a quick look at your molars shortly after he has retired?

I have said nothing about lyrics because they escape me altogether.

For someone with a tutored perspective on the theory and icons of the history of music, I have extraordinarily parochial tastes. Music capturing my interest requires both consonance and dissonance, and the resolution resulting from the temporal transition of the latter to the former.

Jazz music bores me because the resolutions are so slight. Within two seconds of recording time, we might very well see an improvised melody traverse the Bm - E7#9 - Amb6 sequence, stepping down a semitone and adding exceedingly complex extensions to that already familiar harmonic pattern for the next two seconds.

Very basic popular music bores me, too. A song with recycled G - C - D - G sequences will not sustain my interest for anything beyond a week, unless accompanied by stellar subtleties. No storm. No stress.

I only have so much time. How am I going to spend it?

Let me be honest. I want the esteem and the discussion which accompanies the profession. But there is very little else luring me there.

Remarkable that I can leave what is most important untended.

I held on until the arms in my muscles failed. And then I did it again.

I like the first album by Camera Obscura.
I like the newest album by The Shins.
I like recording myself playing instruments at low volumes.
I like manipulating those volumes with basic Apple software.

Climbing is climbing. It is no more spiritual or selfless than a trip to the store.

Sitting to our left, about two feet from a 10 000 foot drop, was a man. Not dead, not sleeping, but sitting cross legged, in the process of changing his shirt. He had his down suit unzipped to the waist, his arms out of the sleeves, was wearing no hat, no gloves, no sunglasses, had no oxygen mask, regulator, ice axe, oxygen, no sleeping bag, no mattress, no food nor water bottle. 'I imagine you're surprised to see me here,' he said. Now, this was a moment of total disbelief to us all. Here was a gentleman, apparently lucid, who had spent the night without oxygen at 8600 meters, without proper equipment and barely clothed. And Alive.

(On Lincoln Hall.)

What is a problem? A route from A to B. With no beginning and no end, philosophical puzzles look moot.

I never have and never will understand how it is that some philosophers think they can defend their practice with the same tools they use to defend philosophical positions. (Harty Field is an exception.)

If I were to maintain a regular posting schedule, this site would collapse into a climbing log.

My level of physical exertion this week is remarkable. I climbed for three hours on four of the last five days, immediately following a lengthy workday.

I look different. I feel different. I imagine myself summiting a spire, not so far away from here.

All I want to do is climb and traverse. This is all I have been doing. Not to be interpreted in a metaphorical manner.

Representative stereotype for the West.

I could never fall prey to the lure of Eastern spiritual writings. Metaphor and paradox lead me to philosophy -- or to forget philosophy -- but not to any level of divine enlightenment.

A little band played my high school cafeteria last week. Look here.

I sometimes think that this site is not a representative sample of the work of which I am capable. But what else do I have to show to you?

I need to stop treating my electronic face as if it subsists without consequence. It does not. My life extends behind and beyond me like the links of a chain. My keystrokes, footsteps and utterances.

I never put much effort into being on time. But I should. I was one and-a-half hours late today.

Snowshoes are very loud.

I dislike how we, the society, mythologise the arts. Because most people do not have the patience to sit in front of a mirror for hours each day, watching their sore muscles continue to contract until some subtlety is corrected, it does not follow that there is something ineffable about the achievement of musical excellence.

No need to use a word for which you have no way of identifying its reference. Neither impressive nor necessary. Our other words work synonymous wonders.

Because it is my duty to defend the fine arts.

It is my first day practicing in a very long time, and I already have two noise complaints. I can already tell that this is the first of many incidents I will experience over the forthcoming months.

This is the first quiet apartment building I have inhabited. For the most part, the others have been loud: footsteps, parties, babies. Sure, it was a welcome change moving here, but now I see the price I pay for living in a complex with picky, private people.

In many ways, that first apartment building I lived in was a blessing. It was next door to a strip club, and, every Thursday, the people in the back hosted experimental jazz and dance concerts. I could practice whenever I wanted, and play music at unruly volumes at all hours of the night. Its only real problem was the steep learning curve in determining how to fall asleep with deep, repetitive bass drones in the background.

I posted an online advertisement in hopes to find someone willing to sell their sporting equipment. One woman responded. The equipment is a perfect match. It turns out that the skis were once the property of her recently deceased husband.

I feel as if I have not made a decision in a very long time.

I woke up at 6:18 AM. I worked eight hours. I took the bus to North Vancouver. I hiked to a switchback for 45 minutes with a bag of skis and two friends. I hitchhiked up Cypress. I went skate skiing for five hours. I took the bus downtown. I walked home for an hour. I took a shower.

There has never been a day quite like today.

Some treats today. Some treats tomorrow.

I like the unrehearsed, too. But it needs to be in context for me. This is why I like the experimental artists that I do: Jim Black, Ellery Eskelin, Cuong Vu. Against a lush, consonant backdrop, all madness becomes beautiful.

Because what would I be
without my memory?

I accidentally scrolled down to some of my earliest email correspondence. It was embarrassingly messy. A fresh reminder of what I left behind, and what I can so clearly do without.

I had hoped that our first kiss would be with headphones on.

I am trying my best to figure out how all of me fits together.

People sometimes remark that I am especially articulate in enumerating my goals, faults, priorities and perversions. Perhaps they are right. I do have a lot to say about myself.

Yet consider this. If I were to hand you a complete log of my thoughts, actions and dispositions, there would still be an existential puzzle to solve -- one whose solution is unbeknown to you, and also to me.

One of my favourite musicians has made a noteworthy move. He is offering bootlegs of his concerts for a very reasonable price. You can get two sets of music for $6, and the recording quality is very reasonable.

What I like about this idea is that it brings something exciting to the world bank of ideas. Instead of using electronic commerce to boost sales of products designed for the audience at large, David Binney is providing a product which would seem not to have an audience anywhere else but online.

I spoke a while ago about my thought that we should endorse what we produce, and defend the fruits of our intellectual labour. If the efficacy of the discussed move is as powerful as I think it is, then it illustrates that endorsement is not a binary relation between a person and their project. We can endorse some things more than others.

Consider Mach bands.

A few of my closest friends are members of an exclusive club. Admittance is contingent on accepting a truth about the vices in which the prospective member partakes. I could never commit.

Tiny like a vitamin.

Print media is losing its authority. I came to realise this today while reading a Vancouver newspaper, whose editors have senselessly insisted that the publication refer to itself as 'the Georgia Straight'.

The articles were lengthy and lackluster. And this surprised me. I thought that space was a premium in print. Perhaps their high word count balances the mass of adult advertisements that fund their lofty payroll.

I look forward to a day where their empty authority begins to vanish. We are well on our way there. And you all give me hope.

I split my face open on a sheet of powdered ice. My first worry was that a tooth or two would be missing. They were all there. When the blood stained pool under my face stopped growing at logarithmic degrees, I gathered my shattered glasses, and skied the rest of the run. It was a spectacular fall.

One long, very strange noun phrase.

Marshmallows outside. And I am going skiing today. The first time in eight seasons.

One reason I am not interested in aesthetics is that there seems to be no good resolution to the antimony of taste.

Some art makes me feel uncomfortable. And much of it is designed to do so. I could name a number of excellent, challenging works whose affective product is in no way delightful. Contrast this with the works presented to me in my high school auditorium. Those left me with an analogous emotive response. (A puzzle.)

My mood has taken a noticeable turn for the better these past few days. I imagine the improvement is the consequence of becoming active again. Not just physically active -- though I am going skiing and climbing, all in the next couple of weeks -- but intellectually active. I have plans.

I have plans to go to the coffee shop this evening, and begin to make a little pamphlet about myself. The first draft will be composed with my favourite black metal point pen and recycled paper. I start off by making a little myself in the middle -- legs, glasses and all. Then the lines and arrows, of varying thicknesses, extending from every major organ. At the end of each point, a word or two, emphasising something important on which I wish to direct my attention over the next two to three months, not limited to developing a taste for chicken and learning how to use an avalanche beacon.

If you ask someone what their name means, I doubt that they will point to themselves. Depending on what their sources are, and whether they foster an interest in etymology, I suspect you will get an adjective.

It is OK to be critical of your heroes.

I am beginning to feel the effects of stress. My eyes are foggy; my motor control is poor. It is a direct result of my having put hours of intellectual energy into a cause to which I have not been enthusiastically committed.

I understand that some professionals regularly expend energy like this. What makes them different from me is that they have secondary and tertiary goals they achieve in doing so.

I have committed to paying a world class instrument mechanic $1000 in exchange for his expertise. That gives you a very good sense about who I am and where I am going.

I speak in persuasive tongues.

I have always been able to ignore Joe Lovano. Another ordinary voice. He brings nothing new to the table, save a few stylistic tricks. That I can ignore such a discussed figure in contemporary jazz makes reminds me that I left that world for a very good reason. It fosters an antiquarian historicism that I find disgusting. Perhaps the best way to put this is that I ignore Joe Lovano for the same reason I hate Florence.

It was like a deathbed conversion, the way I turned my back on the fruit of five months' labour just sixty minutes before the applications were due. What have I done? I am not sure. But I am certain that it will forever be strewn with mystery.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned from my lofty education was not how to think smart, but how to sound smart. This separates me from almost everyone else.

I know not to succumb to idioms. I know when to avoid contractions. I know where and how to stand.

I have been writing and erasing all night. I thought it might be the time to publish what I have been meaning to publish again and again.

(I was wrong. It was not the right time.)

I have been writing long notes. These notes are no substitute for our distance. They are more like a promissory reminders that we have -- and will forever have -- unfinished business together.

I organised a cohort of outdoor enthusiasts to swim in the ocean today. I can think of no better way to begin a new year than by treading uncharted waters.

Some of my happiest moments are by myself. What I do alone is a secret.

I turn off the lights, close the blinds and conceal the unsolicited luminescence with cloths and towels.

I am perhaps best characterised by my dynamic priorities. Above all else, the pursuit and subsistence of love.

Let me look inside. Let me see.

I looked for you everywhere tonight.
I broke into Port Vancouver.
I explored an abandoned warehouse.
Where were you?

I live here overshadowed by an oppressive skyline hegemony. Those mountains, those unfriendly rocks, continually reminding me that I am away from home.

My second apartment in Toronto was not so different. I was perpetually cast in the shadow of a brutal concrete peacock, friendlily reminding me to study.

I do not in any sense like the movies of Wes Anderson.

I am coincidentally catching up on lost sleep and lost calories.

Is there an equivalent to the footnote in spoken discourse? What about parentheses? I can only think that a subtle whisper would do.

Spatial metaphors are all around me.

I try to step outside of myself with language. But I am the sum-total of my linguistic dispositions, my propensities to say. That makes my task senselessly Sisyphean.

Sometimes I see what I want to see.

She says she only wears synthetic fabrics. She insists on playing her own music. She only listens to butt rock. Her voice is loud and offending. Her body is too long. Her humour is exhausted at sarcasm. She is aggressive. She interrupts. She is certain that her boyfriend -- a PhD candidate at UBC -- is going to get a professorship at one of Harvard, Oxford or Stanford. She talks to herself. She whines. She hums. She has a monstrous jaw.

Like living in a cloud.

I understand why there is social stratification. I see how those at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid tacitly protect the positions they occupy. Why settle for less when you can have more? While it is open for me to distribute my resources with others, I do not. They are mine.

What I cannot understand is why there is so much interpersonal cruelty. Is it a consequence of the stratification which subsists now and forever between us? Perhaps.

I am reminded here of a group of Nietzschean aphorisms. But none of them seem to illuminate the question from a new direction.

I have a sensitive touch on the guitar. I prefer to play without a pick. The penalty I pay in speed is more than matched by the quality of the tone yielded by my warm flesh touching the strings. It is all very intimate. So very soft.

In one month, I have come a long way. I can thank my years of musical education for this quick progression, and also a helpful online guitar tutorial.

I see that it is much easier to learn songs on a guitar than it is on a monophonic instrument. The contrast is akin to learning a written language character by character.

My good friend asked me to give him the update. He is expecting bright lights. I hate to alert him that the fireworks he anticipates are really just the remnants of an explosion.

Girl:

Be
my
analogue
swirl.

A big thank you to all of my musician friends who have shown me that a beautiful life can be built on a foundation of beautiful sounds.

Whatever it is that I do for the next few years, I need to be certain that it requires me to keep creating. I shine best that way.

I am on the twentieth draft of my writing sample. I am now arguing for the negation of what I had initially planned to argue. Such alterations are typical of intellectual pursuits directed at truth.

I want to keep my chin up, but I need to look down to read.

No power, no power.

I misunderstood my camping stove. No one was hurt, but a fire engine came to the front of my apartment building, flashing lights and all.

We had a violent storm yesterday night. I found it difficult to sleep. I thought the winds were keeping me up, but, really, it was the thought of hiding in a tent somewhere in the mountains.

I have two pairs of exceptionally nice shoes. If I had to choose between them, I would choose the aurally ostentatious of the two -- the shoes that announce with clicks that I am in the room.

I am beginning to feel the effects of non-musical isolation.

When one of my favourite writers stops writing, I get a little upset. But understandably so. That person contributed something important to the fabric of my linguistic experience.

One of my favourite aspects of Seattle is its skyline. I am thinking in particular of a series of illuminated letters, suspended like sprites in the air.

There is an incident that really ought to be reported. It occurred today, at the second-closest grocery store to my home.

The man in front of me wanted to return some breast feeding product he had purchased for his girlfriend, no less than a week before. He was short a receipt, but, apparently, spoke with the manager of the store who said it would be OK for him to return the product. When this story was relayed to the cashier, she phoned her supervisor. He came over, listened to the story, and told him that he could not make the exchange.

'But it is $13. That is a lot of money.'
'I know it is a lot of money. That is exactly why I cannot make the return without the receipt.'

What irks me most about the exchange is that the predicate, 'is a lot of money', is vague. Which quantities satisfy it depend on context. The supervisor responded as if the predicate were context insensitive. His not allowing the return was voiced as a consequence of the fact that the predicate had those properties. But it does not. So the reason did not license the conclusion.

I woke up in a cold sweat last night, twice. A horribly unpleasant feeling. It is especially times like this that I do not miss being a bachelor. Someone to help you when you are weak. Someone to help you when you are strong.

I have been asked whether I would like to work unconventional hours at work: 7 PM to 3 AM. I initially thought this would be a bad idea. But I am now coming to sense the sweet tartness in it all.

My sleeping hours are already unconventional. I cannot stand to sleep through the night until it is well past midnight, but, at the same time, my current job requires me to wake up at 6 AM. Check the math. That is but a few hours of sleep each night. I compensate by taking two hour naps around dinner time.

This has to stop. Nothing it more disturbing than having two beginnings each day: both in complete darkness. (It is Vancouver, remember.) I figure that taking the unconventional shift might solve this problem.

I see myself waking at dusk, and sleeping after dawn. Right now, work requires me to miss both fringe encounters with the sun. Perhaps I will wake up at 4 PM and go to sleep at 10 AM. That way, I can make the most important meals with the cute one that I love.

As it stands, I am missing both.

I am throwing it all away. I have been resisting this academic nonsense for long enough. It is time to move on.

I am sensing an upcoming change in my sea of priorities.

Nothing to say. Sorry.

I cannot imagine not having an interest in something. It is true that knowledge and experience precedes interest in a topic. But the power of counterfactual thinking affords us a way of seeing into somewhere we cannot go.

I am in the planning stages of an urban typography project. The most conceptual elements have been sorted out. I now need a reliable printer and some volunteers.

Each step forward is a step away from my past.

Spare me your rhetoric. Do not classify something as a paradox when it is simply puzzle to which you have no answer. Nothing about the words we use to communicate upsets De Morgan and his logical laws.

An example. That love is good and love is bad is not a paradox. It is an underspecification of the relations to which the evaluative expressions are intended to apply.

I live in a linguistic idealism. But I am no solipsist. I live in a community of other speakers whose soft adherence to patterns of usage ensure that my world is dynamic.

Certain literary devices are deplorable. I am thinking in particular of the simile. This is like that.

I made a spelling error in a laudatory email to a Los Angeles columnist.

I want to typeset myself onto bare industrial walls.

All I needed was a little bit of time to myself.

Reminders in text. Reminders everywhere.

I find it hard to believe that the locus of happiness is always within reach. Sometimes extraneous factors play an indispensable and sufficient role in determining the average number of days per month you experience a general malaise.

We need sun. We need food. We need activities which further our own creative ends, and not those of our employers. The problem is that I have only one of these. Gaining the others is a matter beyond me.

I am having some intense difficulties communicating with others. The problem is not some error between the time that words leave my lips and invade the ear of another. It is that we appear to be speaking different languages.

I want to walk into an art store, and ask to see the most diverse selection of coloured construction paper they sell. If it has the colours blue, green, yellow and red -- which it inevitably will -- I will purchase it. I will walk home with the array of paper, and cut one alphanumeric character out of each sheet. I will rearrange those letters with the eye of a cinematic photographer, and drown our bland walls in colourful, non-representational art.

One of the only pieces of positive evidence for our freedom is our ability to overlook a hint -- the possibility of our ignoring a sentence.

We all need something mystical in our lives. Something unspeakable. Something which resists reduction into some logical language. Something known only to us.

The problem is that our delight in the mystical is only typically temporary. We all want an analysis. And as soon as it comes, the mystical thereby ceases to exist.

My age is the least of my worries. I am 24. An age appropriate for everything. Nothing I do is surprising, wise or too immature.

My haircuts reflect my moods.

I took the GRE today. The testing facility -- a lifeless, carpeted unit in an office building attached to a suburban mall -- was located in Burnaby, BC.

The testing environment was awful. Inimical, suffocating and unlivable. It was nothing like taking a test in my home college at the University of Toronto.

My score was fine. I am happy to report -- and not without irony -- that one of my two essays was on the enduring value of art.

The moment I escaped the grip of the mall, I rolled onto an urban highway, and rode home with the violent attraction of a neodymium magnet. It was all downhill.

I discovered a secret on my journey home. The phenomenology of cycling down a mountain on a bicycle without brakes can be heightened by projecting explicitives at no one in particular.

Tomorrow is a very big day for me. It marks the end of an division between two lives: art and academia. Perhaps it is best understood as a marriage of the two. It is my academic background, after all, that prepares me best for my return to the arts.

I imagine that I will have my doubts. And I imagine that the battle will never really stop. But I am as certain about this unsettled engine inside of me as I am of the existence of my own two hands.

Thank you to my family and friends for helping me see that I need to change directions.

A tutorial on fluttering violins can be found here.

Listen to me sing some online karaoke.

My sister has an extraordinary way of seeing. I am only now learning how to echo it.

It is times like this that I reach out to the deepest members of my network and probe them for assistance. I need a perspective on myself which I cannot otherwise get from peeking in.

I was reviewing some vocabulary in a coffee shop yesterday, and happenstance placed me next to an attractive couple. They fit in every visible way. The girl was thin and blond; the boy was muscular and clean. But something was wrong. So wrong.

I predict that in one month, I will have some very important news to share.

I have been singing pretty songs all day long.

I like it when violins flutter!

Come with me.
The best is yet to be.

I cannot help if this site is a palimpsest. Editing is my egress.

It has recently come to my attention that my voice is sometimes mimicked in correspondence with others. Those who write in poetic verse sometimes reply in cryptic aphorisms. Sentence fragments. Rarefied language. Dainty sentences.

I have influences: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But there is a fine line between influence and appropriation. Cloaking original thoughts in the style of another else is a step above impersonating a celebrity. And impersonators only have a home in Las Vegas.

It is not the megalomaniacal possessiveness of my style which motivates these remarks. It is the lack of importance which others ascribe to their own.

I say how much I like words, as if everything were cloaked in language. But is it? A linguistic novelty cannot possibly compete with the thrill of losing my attention.

Students in undergraduate seminars make an effort to note that societal conventions are just that: conventions. They are arbitrary, and vary from society to society. If we treat them as such, then we might be all the more willing to let these plastic conventions reign.

Perhaps they also lack a foundational status because they are essentially properties of groups of persons. It is people of all ranks that police a convention. But people vacillate, and so can they. I cannot make a pact with the enduring moon.

These thoughts, however, lead us astray. They underestimate the depth of these conventions. Conventions can be flouted, but only at a price. If I choose to disrespect the syntactic rules of English, the you will disappointment face of having not understand others you then.

Conventions are instantiated by human beings, and humans have strength in numbers. It takes a Heracles to fight back. Like me.

What differentiates a hunter from a dabbler?

Second-person pronouns are some of my favourite linguistic tools.

I am continually evaluating sentences in a new light. It might be that ordinary assertions dissemble code for something else.

I am very sensitive to words.

I have lived a life immune from criticism.

I think I would make an excellent ballroom dancer. The way I sway.

I do not remember much from my trip to the Sahara. But what I do remember is preserved in amber. I keep a record of the important things.

Making a literary decision is no different than making an ordinary decision. I erase for the same reason that stall: because I am too volatile to commit.

There are so many layers of conversation going on here.

This is nothing more than a series of reminders to myself.

I rarely work with digital photos of myself. When I do, I am always surprised to see how striking I am. This is not a testament to my genetic good fortune. It is a concrete reflection of the uniqueness involuntarily thrust upon each of us.

I really should be asleep -- now, and when I was reading you -- but something has been keeping me awake.

You are nothing more than a string of symbols to me. As I am to you. That is fine. This is the way we keep our linguistic lives in order.

I see these videos you make, and wonder what is stopping me from producing something with such outstanding beauty. It cannot be indolence: I am impossibly busy. So it must be fear: my hesitance to abrogate my commitment to this lifestyle.

Shields up.
Shields up.

I am happiest at my most dynamic.

I study reference: the relationship between words and the world. But what is there to study? 'Princess' refers to the class of all princesses. 'This' refers to whatever I am demonstrating. Where does the philosophy of language take us that the dictionary does not? Who says that the problem of negative existential statements is a problem at all?

I am precisely the person that admissions committees ought to strike off their lists. I am irreverent, easily distracted and intellectually insatiable. A polymath like me has a future as an outlier on any placement record. And no department wants that.

I have no time for Belle & Sebastian metanarrative.

Someone wants me to revise a paper that I wrote one-and-a-half years ago so that he can include it in a collection of papers for some publishing company in the United Kingdom. I am practically compelled to use this as my writing sample for graduate schools, but I am too obstinate to consider sending that piece away.

The reason for this shortcoming is that I have a plan. The plan is to stay committed to my thought that I should always endorse everything that I do and create. (It is here that I reveal the severity of my seduction toward a philosophical chimera.)

Although I was once proud of that essay, I no longer endorse it. But it is out of my hands now. It has been released into the eddies of the external world, and I can never get it back.

I was never comfortable with saying that I was a musician. In circles of musicians, I was fine. And I thrived. But when it came to speaking with the academically inclined, I felt inadequate. That inadequacy turned into my thinking that musicians were inadequate, and, in the matter of one week, I decided to drop out of my music programme and join the other team.

Luckily for me, I kept my contacts. I stayed in touch with a large number of excellent performers, many of whom are now traveling the world, making their way in rock bands or on Canada Council grants. My undergraduate education is now complete, and I cannot help thinking that I made a grave mistake. Not in my leaving music school, but in my adopting a contemptuous attitude toward musicians.

I apologise. But I could not help myself. The only way I could deal with my own insecurities with pursuing a career in the arts is to drop out altogether, and pontificate on the laziness of artists.

This is still no excuse. I made a mistake. I made a mistake. Please take me in again.

I like songs that make me want to march.

I have a heart that will never melt.

I like my handwriting. My characters are very small. They blend into one another.

'a' looks like 'c'
'e' looks like 'c'
's' looks like 'c'
'w' looks like 'h'
'a' looks like 'n'
'n' looks like 'r'
'o' looks like 'u'
'v' looks like 'u'

It is a wonder that anyone can read my love letters.

I see philosophy as therapy, not as a method for generating positive theses about the world. It prevents me from overstepping my epistemic bounds, and tempers my affective dispositions.

I didn't feel like wearing any underwear at work today, so I took them off in the washroom, and hid them under an empty box.

When I was in grade nine or ten, I used to watch my saxophone teacher play biweekly jazz duets at a small, smoky bar in Ottawa. I was always out of place. But no one seemed to mind a little me on their social horizon.

I remember eating a caesar salad one of those evenings, sitting as close as I could sit without seeming like I had some sort of personal connection to the musicians. A middle-aged lady, whose date had gone to the washroom, approached me and asked whether I was a Virgo.

'Yes. I am.'
'I knew it.'
'What are you?'
'Leo. We have a lot in common. Did you know that?'
'No. I do not know that much about astrology.'
'There so much to know -- about numbers, about stars, about people. I could go on forever. Are you a musician?'
'Yes. That is my teacher up there.'
'I do not want to stop you from listening. I just wanted to say that I love watching you. There is something so beautiful about seeing someone doing what they love.'

Every conversation is a little out of place. (So long as we fight our perfunctory urges.)

If I say something about you, should you know? Whether the report is positive or negative, it seems that there are no conditions under which you are entitled to hear it. A causal link between some use of your name and a sentence featuring that name is certainly insufficient to warrant your knowledge of what has been expressed by means of that sentence.

I like having space between my real life and my virtual life. Combining with the other is like having your past continually creep up on you.

I think of myself less like a troop and more like a legion.

Don't panic. None of us really know what to do, anyway.

It was grey yesterday. And it will be today. And when I wake up it is dark. And when I come home it is dark.

I used to think that I like the rain. And I used to like being awake when it is dark. And I used to think it could be possible to live in a world illuminated only by electricity. And now I am learning that I like the sun.

I value the ability to sequester myself on an island.

My dog has vanished. I will never forget the way she used to smile after our trips to Conroy Pit.

Suppose you build an intellectual enterprise on a mistake. You take one style of data accumulation to achieve verisimilar results, but it it does not. What then? If your practicing that enterprise has not been otiose, then something of worth might have been achieved through the process. If it has, then the activity has been pernicious. Not simply to you, but to those dealt the blows of your pragmatic indolence.

You could have been erecting buildings on the streets of Barcelona.

His imagination is unfettered by the laws of logic. This is what my computer dictionary used as an example of correct word usage for 'unfettered'. But it is so plainly false. No one can envision the logically impossible. Try to imagine a round square.

This is not creative writing. This is nonsense which results from the misunderstanding of language. I should hope that no one is duped into thinking that sentences like this express profound thoughts.

My writing is so unlike my colloquial voice. I never speak with this many pauses. I seldom use deplorable words. You would be surprised at my range of prosodic inflection and the straightness of my teeth.

Something for which I am thankful is my background in the musical arts. It bestomed upon me an entirely different mode of perceptual enagement with the world.

People completely unlike me can be catalysts for change in my own life. I am unsure how this is possible. I do not aim to lead lives like theirs, but, nonetheless, I itch to be so much like them. (I am thinking of a particular co-worker here.)

Two possible explanations:

I have an unfettered dependence on idols. I have always had the need to look up to others. I need someone in authority to tell me that I am on the right track. Or the wrong track. I feel lost without them. I lose my trust in the network to which I belong.

I want to dissemble myself by cloaking as another. Sometimes we all need a trip away from who we are, or, at least, who we appear to be. Do not get me wrong: I am not unhappy. I simply need a break from that predictable manner in which pursue the same ends over and over again. And I do this by emulating another.

I'm sleeping in a submarine.

I consistently think about staging a spectacle.

The sites I am drawn to most are those which I cannot quite understand. In exceptional cases, I feel like I am reading another language altogether.

(There is another one in my roster. )

Sometimes, I think that all I have is the past.