1. “The perch of the air conditioner”[1]
Odd communion with it has to be achieved in a sequence of agreements. The air conditioner suspends any authority of stationary radiators (particularly for renters) and tears apart thermostatic command, accord. If you walk into a hardware store and are instructed: there is one sheet of Styrofoam and it will hold, it can frame or couch or even support a device that is much heavier than its funny density, much not even being enough. They suggest two people put the object in the window. No one is clear about how much foam you will need to fill the frame, how cutting it doesn’t quite clear the edges, or cut it. Or if you are from the cool edge of BC, you might not even understand what the symbols for cooling mean: a snowflake, a droplet with two wiggled arrows, a winged fan. A remote control by the door doesn’t do enough to establish a rhythm for use and coolness over several weeks.
So much time tells now in the space between two text messages. If I leave my phone in my purse I’m scolded by the sender; and so, like so much, it is gendered. For most guys, the lag is immediately determined by the leg: a sound, even a droplet one, or a buzz from the bottom of a pocket reverberates into a response conditioned otherwise, by anyone across pants and purses, by the placement of the phone on a table, versus that of a bed, versus that of the small moon symbol, or the like, to distinguish “Do Not Disturb.” In these communicative relations it seems impossible to achieve enough space at either end, at any point, amongst bubbles. Imposing that moon might be the best chance: “silence” allegedly provides the phone’s operator with some distance from the choice to respond, opportunity to ignore, or space to read over several more seconds unbeknownst to sender. Privacy is not delirium but the currency of texts proves the extent to which suspension in time, as a formal precedent for delirium, is conditioned by new logics and technologies of communicative interruption and control.
2. then text becomes a pun
Water drop trackpad. Grant admission: the best reality show, which puns on, or not, no, merely adopts, a 1919 caption-cum-idiom, replacing the white, upper-middle class Joneses with the Armenian surname of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, among so many others. The cost of narrative is not. We are guilty iPod listeners. Dad says he wouldn’t use one in transit, missing. While an Ivy’s student insists it is not radical at all to state I don’t like novels, if I’m here, I’m fallen on debt’s ears. It is sad that non-linear is for some still subversion, vignettes are more and more put upon like salads. Not shy, like buffets and bars, like those lines if not free form maybe free from. We can close the windows of cooking blogs and if we can’t follow we can keep up.
Kim used to be a closet organizer. But the limits of the working day have even come to be marked by the bubbles of texts. For the student, the shift worker, or the self-employed for example, near constant availability via text is expected. At the same time, sabotaging what Marx had in “The Working Day” called the capitalist’s “small thefts of time” is an act felt online across Facebook, but really so many status updates and news feed scrolls on shift suggest a much larger theft at desks around the world, a personal availability that is always logging times into one book over and over. If for Marx, borrowing words from the workers, a small theft of time was the “nibbling and cribbling at mealtimes” etc. that extended the working day infinitely in the capitalist’s favour, for Facebook, each log in acknowledgement of a self in no real space, small thefts at a snail’s pace outside of time. Next is never able to be not ready for your text. What was waiting for your call is index to end. Bubbles to breathe.
3. Blue and green
Not that we deserve delirium in any conversation, but the opportunity would seem mostly to be in it, not at its ends, but in everything it means. To me dérives don’t exist anymore; busses have to stop at stops and a click chirps the amount of time they are ahead. Swallow turn over take back entry or use alley against all muscle memory making wanded a garage door opener, daydreamers like me, we fumble with keys. When asked what she would do if she had a dick for a day, Kim replied, “Have sex with myself so I could see what it feels like to hit it from the back.” There are maybe enough accumulative acts for getting in your house now always within capital’s purview; noisy neighbour. One by one each frame drops out and to load earlier messages. A private mind might hold tight to texts for otherwise dropped phones are cracked screens—a small squeegee preps the protector, a film falls on, arches arcades of The Crystal, made in a king’s swaying stride.
Application for gainful respondent, eager externalization of imagination of narrative forms. Begins with a sequence of frames that fall away, weather character or site—would argue every yolo is privileged, we know Eno’s phone apps and the Miami waterfront against inland art practice, against odd, do shots. All shut up situationist mall attempt Bourgeois has a sculpture there, it’s a series of eyes that are seats. Egos form the lashes and Bea, three, gets off the floor and points to a scratch. If I explain the protector I am a topcoat on the same anti-imaginary, a ‘cure on two broken acrylics and a ten count truth against nature. There is a scratch. It waits on top of plot.