1/25/19

i'm thankful for the weird contemporary feeling of telling the HR person that i'm "ready for her to pull the plug" on friday afternoon and then over a few minutes all of the various accounts that have ruled my life for the past three years blinking out of existence, tokens revoked, access denied

i'm thankful that i can't open slack anymore and how, because i worked remotely and the company had no office, i realize now i experienced slack as a physical structure, a kind of digital building, each channel a room with its own furniture, its regulars, its rhythm and ambience. 

i'm thankful for the weirdness of slack, which, if it's a building, is an impossible building like that thing at the end of interstellar, because it's not only a live space but also always coexisting with its entire history, you focus the search input and suddenly it's 2015 and you're seeing the messages the way people saw the messages then (except for the absence of threads, which are like rooms inside rooms, narnia closets)

i'm thankful for the idea that i wanted to do at my last company and maybe will do at my next company, which is a slack channel called #time-machine which plays back, in real time, a historical version of the same time from past slack, like if in the present it's 10AM on a monday in the last week of january 2019, in time machine it's that but 10AM on a monday in the first week of may 2017, and we would call a week imported from the past and rerun a "season" and every week there'd be a vote on what is the next season to replay and of course this is an absurd idea because nobody needs more slack but i think that's part of what makes it beautiful 

i'm thankful that we watched the first episode of the goop lab, which is about the goop staff going to a resort in jamaica to do magic mushroom therapy and to think about how to me, a destination trip like this, while i'm not against them, seem antithetical to what i love about psychedelic drugs, which is the revelation of the immanence of the quotidian around you, the tingly underlayer that your eyes glaze over during normal life

i'm thankful, though, if the show, as tacky and eyeroll-inducing as it is, normalizes taking psychedelics with your coworkers, since i cannot recommend that highly enough after a company retreat where i fulfilled a lifelong dream and went to the magic kingdom with my friends and we, hourly, took edible after edible, and walked around the small world, blurring and sharpening, until the fireworks, and then on saturday [redacted] and i did two tabs of blotter she had brought across an ocean and i was up until 4:30am, thrumming with sparkles

i'm thankful that e played leo kottke at christmas and that last night i played his album guitar music (https://open.spotify.com/album/45GOwuG1VZqnLfdvPuZ2oj?nd=1) which has some beautiful little expressive figures, kinetic sculptures of string vibration, try closing your eyes and imagining how his hands must be moving to make these sounds

i'm thankful this morning in a burst of reading to have consumed lost children archive, which is one of the best novels i've read in a long time, so filled to bursting with ideas and aphorisms and images and collage elements but all of it hanging in balance under the control of a master, elegantly gliding from line to line. i'm thankful for the little magic moment where i was thinking of nabokov, of the road trip novel, and i turned the page and on the next page, the next sentence mentioned nabokov. i'm thankful for all the passages i underlined, one of which is:

"This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate."