Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, 1998:

That month I had read a science fiction story, Childhood’s End. In it, the children of Earth conglomerate to form a master race that dreams together, that collectively moves planets. This made me wonder, what if the children of Earth instead fragmented, checked out, had their dreams erased and became vacant? What if instead of unity there was atomization and amnesia and comas? This was the picture posited by Karen … She saw a picture, however fragmentary, that told her that tomorrow was not a place she wanted to visit — that the future is not a place in which to be.

Very pleasant weather here this week, sunny and cool, gesturing toward autumn, ceaselessly breezy, very healthful weather, you walk out in it and there are electrolytes and antioxidants and multivitamins in the air, refreshing currents of pure oxygen rippling your clothing attractively and tousling your hairdo just so. In the evenings we box things up. We own a lot of books but I do not feel proud of this fact right now. I am made of tape and cardboard. I box and box and box and box but the shelves never seem to fully empty. I do not need all these books. I do not want them. (At least we will not have to carry them; we have hired a posse of moving goons to handle that part.) After next week, when we are unboxing them over Labor Day Weekend, I must make a belated purge pile, the books of mine that are dead weight, that I will not read or reread, whose authors I am not attached to, ones that I bought for doubtful reasons, ones that if I really must someday read I will settle for a library copy. My fondness for physical books is growing shaky. The bulk and weight of them in aggregate is pissing me off. Someone please invent an e-book without the book. An e-book that is just a heads-up display, the pages projected onto my glasses lenses, perhaps employing some depth-perception trick to make the pages seem suspended in midair a customizably short distance away. If such technology ever exists it’ll be 99% used for movies and videogames and the net and it will wipe out most of the Western world in car accidents, pedestrian collisions, and death by cross-eyed ugliness.

The Tick:

INTERVIEWER   Can you destroy the Earth?

THE TICK   Egad! I hope not! That’s where I keep all my stuff!

We close on the condo in a week, and the moving-van goons are scheduled to appear in a week and a half. We will be spending the next ten days stepping over, diving into, and being trapped under cardboard boxes. Ah yes, all this again. Boxes of stuff.

Anne Carson, “Short Talks: Introduction”:

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Ogden Nash, “Put Back Those Whiskers, I Know You”:

There is one fault I must find with the twentieth century,
And I’ll put it in a couple of words: Too adventury.
What’d I like would be some nice dull monotony
If anyone’s gotony.

Above: Reconstructed screencaps of erasing.org’s original front page and first journal entry
(with hackneyed entry title and dreadfully out-of-context quotation), circa 13 August 1999.

Happy belated TENTH birthday to erasing.org. Gracious me and mine. The actual date hits last Thursday, 13 August 2009, while I am on vacation. I do not think that on Friday, 13 August 1999, that unhealthy, unhappy twenty-two-year-old mope could’ve conceived that his starting up that web journal thing with the bleakish domain name would, through various chains of events both improbable and quotidian, bring him exactly a decade later to a dock beside a Canadian lake, in the wilderness of Ontarian vacation country, basking (basking!) in lake breezes and brilliant sun, reading classic (classic!) literature and splitting a bottle of ice-bucket-chilled wine with a spouse named Laura, and contemplating erasing.org’s decennial, thinking with great (great!) amusement that if it weren’t for that wretched website, he would not have met Laura and thus would not be here on this dock beside this lake and blah blah blah half-hearted sentimental mickey-mouse bullshit can we get off this now? — Yes, if this website had never existed, last Thursday I would have been … somewhere else. (Just kidding. I would’ve ended up there somehow.)

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits, — but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West, — star territory, — to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them. I have interest but for six feet of star, and that interest is transient.

Annie Dillard, The Living:

Waves splashed glowing on the beach and rolled stones. Overhead the hard stars uttered their gibberish from horizon to horizon. How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

Erased de Kooning Drawing and the White Paintings sort of make Rauschenberg the patron saint of my poor erasing.tumblr.com collection. Am up to 174 pieces since January. (Very unprolific for an art Tumblr, I know.) Wish I could buy all of them.

Lawrence Weschler’s “An Impromptu on the Theme of Erasure”, on Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser sculptures and Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing:

For here came an artist of the immediately subsequent generation (b. 1929), and surely part of what was going on was that in observing the de Kooning-Rauschenberg battle — the Old Man seized by the anguished Oedipal implications of the erasing gesture, and the Younger Man by the splendor of its look — he, in effect, the grandson, had taken to proclaiming: Forget the erasure, look at the Eraser! Look how beautiful it is!

Above: Scenes from our seven days hunkered down in cottage country with family last week: 1) Big Lake Rideau, small fisherperson, a zillion suicidal fish below the surface hungering for hooks — 2) One-third of Bambi inspects the lodge’s vaulted ceiling — 3) Canoeing before breakfast, I squint into 7am sun at Laura shooting over-the-shoulder photos instead of helping paddle — 4) The lodge’s midmorning-light-flooded great room is radiant with rustic lodgey salubriousness — 5) Lodge exterior at twilight, seen from down on the dock, photographed through clouds of sadistic insects — 6) Laura takes a break from sunburning herself to read some surfer noir.

Failure, “Blank”:

I like the blank way
I fill up the sky

Jim Coudal, interviewed at Design Glut:

People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer — We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!

James Richardson, Vectors:

If we remembered even a fraction of our million tiny plans, our whole lives would be regret at their failure.

Sweet Mother of Baluchitherium. The Mad Crumpler has moved out. Our last month here at Chez Tunis, and our ambulatory tormentor has packed it in and split. No more lumbering, blundering, thundering foot-thumps hammering heavily through our creaking ceilings at one in the morning, and throughout the day; no more cascades of runaway stompings and crashings up and down the staircase outside our door, making walls shake and furniture tremble and drinking glasses sing in the cupboards.

The Mad Crumpler has lived above us for the past couple of years or so. The nickname is not worth explaining. We have not met him, but we know he’s a medical resident (hence the late hours, I guess), we know his name, we’ve seen his face — roughly mid-thirties, chiseled good looks, resembles an impressive mixture of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Marc Anthony, and Brideshead Revisited–era Anthony Andrews. He is not a fat man. He is very tall and somewhat buff, looks like he might weigh two-ten, two-twenty, maybe more, but slender, not burly. For all we know he is a nice guy, an intelligent, caring, stand-up individual, witty and charming, a man of the mind. But we doubt it. We loathe him. The way he pounds around his wood-floored apartment, and careens up and down steps, it is such a bizarrely violent locomotion, so thuggish and gigantic and arrogantly indelicate; we have never gotten used to it. Yes, we are certainly oversensitive brats, but this is really something. The man must have metatarsals of pig-iron. His stomping has caused plaster to fall from our ceiling (admittedly just a few times, and not recently). His stomping has occurred while we have had guests over, and the guests have looked up at the ceiling and said Wow.

Of course, everyone who has lived the apartment life has had loud-upstairs-neighbor experiences, months or years of living underneath oblivious weirdos who groaningly rearrange furniture all night, who race and pace and play spazzed-out floor sports and practice nocturnal kickboxing, etc. The Mad Crumpler, we grant, is no weirdo. He just walks. But no other neighbor we’ve known has ever given such jarringly literal expression to the phrase throws his weight around. And but now he is suddenly gone. Godspeed, doctor. Thanks for the newfound quiet. May your new dwellings be lower-level and have floors of solid bedrock baffled with many feet of foam.

Surprised to see the news this morning about Russian nuclear submarines discovered patrolling off the U.S. east coast. I am particularly surprised because only last night I’d been watching The Hunt for Red October. I watch maybe the first forty minutes, listening to John McTiernan’s director commentary. I am very surprised when McTiernan says at one point that Sean Connery’s wig for the movie was, at Connery’s own request, modeled after the hair of Samuel Beckett. WHAT?! I suppose it is appropriate for the captain of a sub that runs on silent propulsion. One Ping only?

Today is Civic Holiday, the holiday Canada compassionately invented out of thin air pretty much just to give people a paid day off in this otherwise holidayless month. One of the precious few months with warm weather, so a long weekend simply had to be dropped into it. Many Canadians traditionally observe the holiday by disappearing into the woods for the duration. It is impossible for me (at work today, no day off, thank you for shedding a tear) to ignore the fact that the city streets outside are conspicuously devoid of the usual steady traffic racket. Like an all-day Sunday morning out there, serene, spooky, the occasional vacant bus or keening ambulance, but that’s it. Everybody’s gone! Vanished! Fled! It is the Canuck Rapture. Obviously most people just sequester themselves in their homes and/or wander the malls (which would not dare close today), but the ones who do go up (it is always up) to cottage country, lake country, moose country, Sasquatch country, these happy vacationers hunker down in beautifully rustic cottages/cabins/lodges/RVs/tents and sit and relax and hike and fish and kayak and sit some more and commune with nature and drink beers of all nations and swat vainly at roaring fogs of bloodthirsty rat-sized blackflies and admire wildlife in its natural habitat and then throw it on the grill and eat it. Laura and I have a week of cottage country coming up soon. I cannot overstate my dread. Seven days of deadly wilderness while sharing a lake house with a platoon of extended-family folk. I give myself thirty-six hours before I start praying for bears.