It's June. Your letter arrived in March. The way that we correspond is closer to the spatio-temporal dislocation of scrawling ink on pressed wood pulp, folded up into little vulnerable compartments with symbolic currencies glued on for a sense of safety and security, sent through the air over oceans and impossible distances, to be carried by hand and shoved in a dark little slot with your name on it. Whenever I'm on an airplane, sitting there in the seat, hearing the mechanical sounds groaning underneath the floor and creaking through the plastic walls, I think to myself "what the fuck how did humans build a flying bus we're fucking hurling through the air and this shithead is looking at pictures of food on a glowing screen what has become of life" and perhaps it's a similar kind of amazement I have with mail, and now even with email, that such a thing could exist at all and more so that we use it so often and so casually without having to attend to all the minutiae that make it work fluidly, seamlessly, quietly in the background.

I'm sitting in a yellow room with yellow table cloths and yellow curtains. I'm drinking mechanically protruded coffee and crunching on sunflower seeds and raisins and bananas swirled in a bowl because that's what I've been eating everyday for breakfast since I arrived at this hotel in the Swiss alps at the beginning of the month, and now the month is almost over, so I've been doing this for a month, and this month seems more real than real, more real than airplanes. Yes I've been living in this small town called Saas Fee in a German speaking part of Switzerland up in the mountains because I'm in school again - more real than real - my first term of a very unique school working towards a phD in "Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory" emphasizing in "Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought." Seems perfect for me eh? When I was living in Norway, with ___, in the cold dark frozen forest, having empty sex and drinking empty coffee and feeling empty, I decided that the purpose of my life was being stolen from me by all the silent machines of the world gnawing and suckling from my lymphatic nodes, drawing the aether out of my eyeballs on all these goddamn screens and calculators, and so I had to make a stand of some kind, set up a fortress - especially if I am to retain any solitude - and reclaim some territory for myself.... so I applied to this program and got in. I felt pretty fucking prestigious for a minute there, thinking I was getting wrapped up in an exclusive world of advanced minds crafting visionary models of existence out of abstract postulates, but now that I'm here I realize that even philosophers can be shit heads. Just kidding - not really - everything's fine now that I've created some distance around myself and let my peers know that I don't want to engage with the typical bullshit, which is to say the laughing about absurdity and giggling about saying stupid things and joking about how much they love to drink themselves to death and all the whining and complaining about all the things which we must engage while knowing that we never really ever have to at all.

I always make this distance, and of course I feel conflicted by it, but it's a matter of self-preservation, dig? It's necessary to maintain the state of mind that I've decided I need in order to get up every morning, to stay playing this game of life - I wonder if I am a finite or infinite player, someone that plays by the rules or someone that plays with the rules - but I console myself that everyone is entitled to be a freak if they want to, that bars and cigarettes aren't mandatory, and at the end of the day fuck em all because I'm doing what I want to be doing. With love of course. Hmm, yes so I was telling you (6 months ago) about how I felt weird while living in Seydisfjördur, working on the house with you guys, and I think it has something to do with this tendency I have, which is more than a mere unconscious propulsion, to remove myself from the group - any group - in order to pursue my own grandiose idealism. I had a hard time sometimes, just moments, speckled here and there, certainly not always but absolutely recognizably frequently, when I wanted to be so profoundly alone that it felt like yearning for death, oblivion, what Heidegger calls "the abyss." Henne and David gave me some anxiety - just between you and me - because of their youthful buoyancy, cultural integration... maybe because of their joy, flippant joyfulness, eagerness to laugh.... I don't know. It wasn't really about them, of course they were sweet and made the experience wonderful, but it was about me and the profound situation I just emerged from, being so deeply engaged with some of my very close friends in such an exhausting and emotional manner right before you fellas showed up, and then before that living in Seydis for 4 months carefully instigating an existential crisis (crises?) in the students of the LungA school, which kinda backfired and sent empathetic shivers through my own being that perhaps I had not yet recovered from. I don't know if I ever told you about that experience, during LungA. I don't know if I could have talked about it yet. There was a woman who was attending the program under a false name, what she thought was a performance of identity but I perceived as a deception of my invitation to be transparent and radically honest, and of course there were many other interesting humans assembled as well, all in very close quarters, and resonating with the tunings of the other as one giant jiggling vulnerable Other-ing. My presence in this group was in leading a workshop called Existential Units of Concentration, which was based on the proposition of simulating an existential crisis caused by philosophical reflexivity: basically I would inundate the students with a carefully crafted trajectory of rigorous stimulation, bombarded with questions opening up considerations to the outer stratospheres of consciousness, and then bring it down into a quiet comfy dark corner to be profoundly bored - boredom is useful in opening up a space to ruminate upon life - and it fucking worked, in a way I couldn't have anticipated. The student with the false identity had a nervous breakdown - I don't think I should take credit for it, not completely, but it happened nonetheless - and other students began projecting their inner fears and terrors upon me as the target. The trust was splintered and my motivations were questioned and I became extremely unsure of myself and what I was doing and what it was for, and it was from this place of bleak midnight being-in-the-void that we began building it back up again, when I started articulating the possibilities of an "opera of/for known & unknowable un-i-verses." Shit got crazy. I didn't anticipate losing my head along with the students, I thought I was gonna keep it cool, but I embraced it and followed it through and ended up experiencing a profound transformation myself, and now that I look back on the whole experience I don't think it could have (or should have) happened any other way.

When I met you I was immediately attracted and repulsed, by your depth and words and darkness and seclusion, recognizing in it something of myself, and always a silent nod of knowing exchanged between us, a recognition of the necessity of some distance out of mutual respect, never of competition or spite or bitter flavors. A recognition and understanding of the profundity of personhood, and a laughter that resonates through the absurdity of being alive.

So that's how I was when we met. Shivering in the shadows on my own quivering being, a pure trembling, profoundly vulnerable, a delicate situation, strapping on boots and ready to wrestle with a screaming motor writhing in a cloud of ancient wood dust, to peel away walls and make weather patterns out of destruction, to get lost again in new thought forms and lay a new foundation I could stand upon. While building the house I was trying to lay down this fundament, and because of that I felt unstable, like I didn't have firm ground to stand upon and just wanted to be alone, so that's why I didn't really feel like myself and wonder what impressions you formed from our time together. Now things are different. I went to the deserts of New Mexico and chewed on the rocks, melted and boiled under the relentless sun, and died numerous times over. Then I went to Oslo and had a very weird and strangely cathartic winter negotiating the blurry territories of affect flowing under and around ___ as she processed her own mechanisms and confronted her own specters. Then I moved back to Oakland, to the fucking hood, to the cuts, to a war zone of poverty and garbage and perversity which made me quiver anew as I no longer had a skin and my eyes could hardly take the sights which confronted me everyday, so I again retreated into books, reading a book a week, prolific in words, weaver of worlds, sucking the amniotic fluids out of the poetic meat, gorging myself on botanical and bio-mechanic psyches. Then I met an amazing Greek woman with a boxer puppy and immediately decided to move in with her and build a studio and eat her pies and listen to her fears and help her clean the house, all the while continuing to read a book a week and working a job building fake rooms for photoshoots and saving money and feeling more and more like a real human again, until one day I woke up in Switzerland with the summer sun scorching a hole through the curtains and thought "I should tell Jeppe about this to make him laugh."

What else? I've been reading a ton of philosophical texts, still, of course, as usual. I'm slowly uncovering the porthole I've been anticipating - a schism that lies buried deep at the seat of western articulations of consciousness, the origin of our suffering, the wellspring of poetry, the mythological beginnings of our subjectivity and the obsession with death which drives us towards our lonely oblivions. I need to understand it so I can subvert, you see, because I'm sick of building compartments of tension and anxiety around me and yearn to live out in the open, with profound poetry and radical feeling, without it being stolen by concepts of capital or phenomenological pragmatism. I think you understand this: the search for freedom is the voyage to one's own inner depths, but it also oscillates back out into the universe, because we're never really so alone as we convince ourselves to be. So this bullshit has become my project, my obsession, and I'm following it where it will take me. Even though I still hate everybody I meet I'm pretty happy because I'm swimming in an ocean of concepts that are coagulating into new definitions of life, so I feel pretty fucking light and optimistic these days. The sun helps, for sure.

I wonder how you're getting along in Copenhagen. I would like to live there. You Danes have fashioned a beautiful balance of Scandinavian pretentiousness and good ol' fashioned Germanic ingenuity that I find oh-so-charming whenever I encounter it. Maybe I'll start conjuring a way to get myself there, or to southern Sweden, or into a little cabin built out of sticks next to the river behind ___ and ___'s house on the fjörd at the edge of the world. For now I'm in Oakland, with the beautiful silly Greek and the beautiful silly boxer puppy in a big open gray room where she dances and I read and we bake pies and make videos of each other reading Heidegger on the toilet. We can pitch a tent in the living room for you if you ever decide you want to come experience the horrors of the California wasteland first hand.

Ok my friend, you have endured my rantings long enough. There's much more that I would care to share with you, but I supposed you will have to respond to this garbage first and then wait another 6 months before I can be bothered to reply, as is the way of the world we have made for ourselves. Or perhaps we will meet each other in person first, out on the frozen island or in your own neighborhood, or mine, or somewhere in between. Let me know how and where you are, what it's like to be doing those things in those places, and if you want to get married to I can get the fuck out of America. Hope all is well and heavy and warm without burns.