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i forgot how much fun it is to hang out in hostels. i've arrived a day early for the conference i'm supposed to be attending. met a lovely woman en route who it turns out is among the organizing committee. these sorts of encounters make me remember why any kind of travel is always better than sitting still.

i've never seen mountains before. for me it has always been oceans that have wreaked havoc on my convictions. but the cold misty peaks are giving my memory of the aegean and south china sea a run for their salt. tom stoppard is my read on this trip. arcadia, precisely. i'm always impressed by anyone who can drop fermat and claim that newton's greatest error was to omit sex from his laws of attraction. definitely a grevious oversight.

at the moment i'm eavesdropping on a deeply tanned, self-possessed (in that faye dunaway way) spaniard as she endures the tragic approach of a gawky-capped ingenue. she makes me think of bonnie and clyde, how they get done in the end. how perfect it was. or how we all should finally come to accept that hoping for answers in the afterlife is like pretending that the solutions to life's problems can be located in the back of some divine text book. Watching their little frisson, i wonder if maybe it isn't more important to recognize that ultimately in all things we must fail. Not to suggest we should forfeit our hope to schopenhauer (never him!), but because of the comfort there is that we are all limited and frail. Who is not a fool is not alive (here I paraphrase my favourite writer du jour, Mr. Milch). Meaning i think that we should not quit the struggle or fetch as an excuse for indolence the futility of existence.

Anyway, much like the unfolding of all our stories, i did not witness the result of the spied-upon courtship. It's trite (when has that stopped you before cb?) but I wonder -- as my mind shuffles through these strange non-sequitor snap-shots of others' lives -- who out there has pictures of my forgotten moments in their memories? What eavesdropper has relayed with hilarity (or scorn) my own pathetic advances? (or is this gross ego at play? assuming any should attend my presence? christ, another spiral!)

Which leads me to another unfinished thought. For a while now, i have been obsessed (or rather, terrified) by time. Handcuffed by its relentless forward grind. Desperate to obviate its omnipotent sway. However, now that Adam Sandler has bastardized Nicholson Baker's ultimate and delicious exploration of time-control (see: The Fermata) for his own sophmoric purposes, I think my next preoccupation will be to seek out all incidences wherein i have provided 'human background' to stangers' pictorial records. To wit, take a look at some of your own vacation photos. In the background lurk those unidentified extras; the accidentally captured. Playing the part of anonymous hub-bub. Unknown drinkers in bars, meanderers on sidewalks, sunbathers on beaches, or passing motorists who happened by at the moment of exposure. A single moment of their unknown lives caught in our own context.

I'm exhausted.

note, written later... this is so bad i'm ashamed to be alive. it's like a pirate shirt or those continental kits on fake soft top lincolns in florida.