It's mornings like this one that really make me miss you. I'm always actively processing my desire for you, and I realize again and again that I am sick for not having you near me, but a morning like this locates the sensation of loss - of your loss - in very specific areas of my awareness. The temperature has cooled a lot since you were here and I imagine you would need a proper sweater to join me on the back porch for coffee. Mine is still iced of course - my coffee that it - and I'm still wearing the shorts and tshirt which has become my uniform for this scene. The light is crisp, spilling over with blues and purples. I'm still so amazed by the clarity and distance of vision of this place.

I feel uninspired today, inarticulate. There is a mood to this place that I am struggling to capture as it feels hardly there, flickering, some desert mirage that my eye cannot focus upon. It feels like a hallucination, less than real, which make me struggle to believe in it. Perhaps it's choice to: I choose to not believe in this reality. In this place everything is manufactured, including this view, and every moment passing in this sterilized container makes my own life feel all the more manufactured, mechanize, metallic. The place I'm describing is my parents house specifically, but its also this neighborhood that they have placed themselves in, and the sprawling manila stucco city scape, and the divided territories extending out to fill my view. It all seems so toxic, poisonous, harmful to my health, to my mental meat and physical corpus alike.

Yesterday I spent some time organizing my possessions being stored in my parents garage. My humble pile of goods consists mostly of memories, small mementos that I have removed from the world to be hermetically sealed, secret prizes for my psyche, trinkets that only make sense to my own sensibilities. There's lots of old artwork, countless prints and drawings that betray so many moments of past reverie, photographs of old sculptures and installations, and just photographs. I used to take a lot of pictures, not that they are any good. In fact they are horrible, completely uninspired. I learned how to use a camera before I understood how to see, but I never really understood photography anyways... seems like a marketing ploy to sell cameras, produce documentaries, concretize a civilization of nostalgia, or just to sell things. I know that sounds harsh, but I can't help but think that photography flattens experience and compresses the world while its proponents ramble on about the poetics of light, the subjectivity of faces, and the politics of the image. Photography feels like betrayal, like theft. Yet photography is coming back into my life in a new profound way, right now, all of a sudden. I'm trying to turn it back upon itself, to invert the situation, the instance of the moment being captured and the vision of the observer. I'm trying to photograph nothing, or nothingness, or the process of being immersed in this suspended state of awareness. That's what it feels like to be here: suspension, off the ground but not into the atmosphere, not completely of this place. All these screens feel similarly, not altogether something different but decidedly not the same. All I know is that I cannot make here, cannot be creative, and that's about the most interesting realization I've had so I should try to document it. I need to document all of this nothingness.

I've been thinking that this opera is going to start with my own narrative, completely me as subject, but with the explicit purpose of unraveling/deconstructing that self through a study of the materials that compose the life and working on from there. Right now it feels really satisfying to document this strange fractured space with myself in it, thinking about where this place ends and where I begin, as a beginning, a beginning to the opera. Even just documenting long periods of nothingness, seeming sedentariness becomes activity, and it feels stupidly profound.