I need to post something today to fill the gap between trips and to keep me from wondering years from now, “Just what happened between Death Valley and the Grand Canyon?”

Well, here it is. Like after so many other trips I’m typically saddled with a lot of photos. On that recent weekend trip to Death Valley, I shot 949 images. The Monday following, just like after any get-away, I had to work on prepping the photos that hadn’t been done while we were out. Once that’s finished (in this case, it turned out I’d chosen 68 images to accompany 3 blog posts), I started writing. This kept me busy until Thursday; at that point, I needed a down day and I might have spent Friday between talking at my local favorite coffee shop, doing chores at home, shopping, reading, or any combination of those things.

Getting “back on track” I wasn’t interested in writing as much as I wanted to return to some deeper reading. Over the past couple of months, I’d finished In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy by Eugene Thacker, The Third Unconscious by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and was making progress in The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism by Bernard Stiegler, but I was stumbling with this last one so I’ve turned to A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Whoa there, from super complex to mega-complex, are you sure that’s the path you want to take? I’m not certain but I’m thinking that it might help pave the way to that end. I do write notes to myself trying to explain what I think I’m figuring out from some of these obtuse writings that typically wouldn’t find their way to a blog but this is different as I’m filling a space to let future self know what I was doing here in early 2022. So for example, here’s a paragraph I wrote a couple of days ago where I’m trying to understand Deleuze’s writing on strata:

As we fix on certainty (arrogance and ego) we limit ourselves to living in the corner of the tiniest universe while searching for stability and the absence of chaos because the turmoil of uncertainty frightens those not prepared for exploration. Disrupting our ideas could lead to us challenging what we believe are foundations of maturity as that’s what we are graded and promoted on. In these situations, only those who hire, fire, arrest, grant credit, and allow our existence have authority. We are helpless and can’t think for ourselves, that was buried in some long-lost strata, which by definition is rigid and inescapable until the underlying foundation (earth/reality) convulsed, thus upsetting the order of things in crushing profoundly destructive ways.

After a morning and afternoon trying to decipher concepts such as Body without Organs, Deterritorializations, Planes of Consistency, Rhizomes (not in the sense you might think), and assemblages my focus is finished. At best I can tolerate listening to another 20 minutes of Caroline reading more from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust on the way home, the first 20 minutes is read on the way to her office. After that, I struggle to convince myself to make dinner and then we head out for the last one-mile walk around our neighborhood. The final two hours of these evenings are open to mindlessness but certainly never television.

Between chatting here at the coffee shop where I’m also trying to write this morning I’ve already spent 3 hours of my time and haven’t cracked open my book yet; as a matter of fact, that’s certainly not going to happen before lunch. Also, I need to consider if anything special needs tending to with regards to our visit to the Grand Canyon starting tomorrow. That’s about it for now.