This morning beginning around six the cast and crew for the television show Trauma began to appear in the park next to my apartment. By nine everybody was in their places: the camera crew, the table full of donuts, the police officer waving cars around and people through, the director and his assistant in a little black tent decked out with monitors, the rails for the camera dollies to run accross, the lights, the key grip, the sound boom, the mic director, the actors playing the heroin junkies, the actors playing the soccer players, the actors playing the homeless people, the actors playing the doctors, and the actors playing the none of the above people. Ironically, they have to kick the real heroin junkies, soccer players, and homeless people out of the park to film. One the one hand yes, the film guild people get paid, which is always good. On the other hand, somebody is getting paid to dress up a shopping cart to look like its been pushed around by a homeless can collector while there is a shopping cart of a homeless can collector just around the corner. That slight sheen of fakery we recognize while watching the television and the people in the background? Now I think I understand a little better.

For example the soccer players in the background were kicking a ball back and forth from about nine until I left for work today around one. They looked tired and a little bored. As did the actors playing chess, although they weren't actually playing chess, just sitting across from each other with a chess board in between them. Again, for four hours. Probably more. Eventually the director yelled action and the important characters (the doctors) blew through the scene, something about warning all the addicts that there's some bad heroin on the streets. My roommate and his girlfriend spent the better part of the morning throwing paper airplanes out of the window at the cast and crew. Easy targets from our apartment window. We were all a little troubled by the scene.

My roommate described it as a kind of scorched earth policy, why one needs a hundred or so highly trained professionals to shoot a totally forgettable scene for a totally forgettable medical drama. That with all those people, money and resources, we no longer have any option to fail, and in place of uncertainty we get mediocrity, pushing the creative rock half way up the hill for the imagined expectations of the imagined public and their imagined living rooms which are probably being foreclosed on as we speak. Anyway. Medical drama. Sheesh. Sorry to be ornery. I'm a bit sick, some kind of flu. Since Sunday. Halloween cometh. Today a student told me that she thought once people get married then they don't celebrate halloween. I told her it was the devil's holiday.

This morning in the news computer there was this article about the dreaded Hadron Collider that will inevitably destroy the world in late December of 2012. This is an article about a theory about why it keeps breaking down and how a couple of physicists have speculated that somehow the higgs particle is going back in time to kill the possibility of it's own existance. Here is a link to Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" as performed on Conan O'Brien. Here is a link to Cole's "disorientation, excerpt" and thus you've now experienced the three most interesting pieces of media that I've experienced in the later half of this morning.

Earlier this morning I woke up to two doors blowing open from the wind and rain, which I've been told is a storm leftover from the Typhoon that hit Japan a couple weeks ago? It's come all the way over to California! Wow! so, it's raining and blowing outside which is nice if you're inside. It's also doing something else out there, like little gooey chunks of white ribbon but those might just be big raindrops, the kind that accumulate under eves. Anyway. Tuesday morning. Just writing to say hello.

Been reading a lot lately which has been nice. Three J.M. Coetzee books, "Elizabeth Costello", "Disgrace" and "Waiting for the Barbarians", a book of essay's by Eula Biss called "Notes from No Man's Land" which are pretty interesting essay's about race, reread "No Country For Old Men" over the weekend which I still have to say is not my favorite Cormac McCarthy book, but it was interesting to read after seeing the movie. The sherrif's monologues I couldn't help but hear Tommy Lee Jones' (why do I know all these movie stars?) voice. And finally I started the 8th part of the Language Poet's Grand Piano books but I'm pretty sure I'm only reading it because I've read the previous seven. Okay. I've got to go. Hope you're well.

This morning I noticed a large black shard in the middle of my chest. On Monday it was a deep indigo and there have been times in the past when its been an off-white. I think its made by thoughts repeating, muscles tensing in the same way in the same place, the same feeling over and over how one carries their body tension built into the shoulders or how the same part of your shoe wears out no matter what kind of shoe you wear. (In my case its the back right heel that wears from the left outside corner to the inside.)

Yesterday was the last time I will meet with editing concepts study group. Which made me a little sad and gave me the feeling that I was abandoning them, a good group a graduate students. The feeling of leaving in the middle that felt wrong, the feeling of giving up on something before it was done. The feeling that I could in fact have kept supporting the students in the class if I was a harder worker. But this is an idea I want to get away from. I dropped the support class because it met from 7 to 10 at night and was leading to a highly irregular and busy schedule. One where I had to cut out my own work in order to keep up with teaching and other duties. All that is to say when I don't get to my own work shards of various colors begin to calcify in my chest.

Sometimes I have to rely on outside sources to confidently come to conclusions and commit to a course of action. Say, when I begin to feel like I "deserve" things like a bubble bath or a punch in the nose is a sure sign that something is out of wack. If one has to go to extremes of pleasure to balance out stress, like renting a jet ski, this is one way, but I'd rather arrange the day so that it doesn't come to this point. Easier said then done but going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting to my own work is one way to do it. Another name for this kind of thinking about behavior is: MANAGEMENT