The disorientation of watching babies for eight hours a day has dissipated over the last four weeks as the actions involved in the job become increasingly habitual. Roughly every fifteen minutes I briefly have to pay attention to the VCR and the DVD recorder as a clip ends. Without looking up from my book, I push the stop button on the recorder and then the VCR, rewind the tape, remove it put it into its case, take the next tape out of its case, insert it into the VCR, briefly look up to preview the tape to make sure it's at the beginning, push record, push play . . . and then look down again and lose all touch with my surroundings. The disconnect between abstract analysis of human thought and the monkey work of this (admittedly fairly exotic) job could not be more complete. Right now I am reading After Virtue, given to me by Tha Unstoppable J-Nutz. I lose my physical form and stroll through mental space, pausing to take a closer look at a portrait of Kierkegaard and the deep neon of his literary genius, turning toward a portrait of Kant, who is colorless and magnificent, then briefly standing in awe at the feet of the statue of Cultural Structure, which is grimy and rusted but whose head soars in the clouds. Now, even when I do come back to my surroundings when the other workers talk to me (and one in particular is fully convinced that talking makes the time go by faster, whereas it most certainly does not), I am still caught up in abstract analysis. Every statement and gesture and inclination coming from others gets filtered into categories, associations, lines of thought. There are no particulars here. All is general.

It is rainy out there, and also cold and wet, and so cloudy that if the sky were always this way, only educated people would know of the existence of the sun. Gorgeous.

Kirillov, from Demons:

There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: 'Yes, this is true, this is good.' This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything, because there's no longer anything to forgive. You don't really love--oh, what is here is higher than love! What's most frightening is that it's so terribly clear, and there's such joy. If it were longer than five seconds--the soul couldn't endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it's worth it. To endure ten seconds one would have to change physically.

From the ice age to the dole age, there is but one concern. I have just discovered: I have to remove the tinting from my car windows before I can get it registered. Damn.