My life seems uninteresting to me. A repetitive series of mercurial flourishes, forgotten with each step and vanquished from all times in the following seconds through which they trail. I sometimes imagine a swirl of mental dust that vanishes with the expulsion of body heat, a tight cloud of what would wrongly be called anticipation. This seems wrong for a hunger to linger after a deed is done, but the vanity and the theater of daily life commands it.

I should make an outline. An outline of my day, with indented items, sub-items, and sub-sub-items forming a scaffold-like frame. I remember how impressed I was as a youth when introduced to the technique of outline form. Inchoate experiences, even textless mental yawps became articulate details as the task of crafting uninteresting book reports and essays seemed to complete itself. The first items, the pillars of the “I.” and the “II.” and the “III.” and the “IV.” demanded follow-up, the consequences of after-thought showering down in seemingly infinite variations of list bulletry.

Outline form, I imagine, could make even this life seem interesting, though like any mediocre solipsist I would inject some fantastical flourishes and outright lies before feeling I had reached that dubious threshold.

I wake up some days having conquered sleep, other days my sleep lingers too long, reaching unwanted durations and angering my silent mind for its inability to leave. This, I think, is some people’s experience of death: a grim fade-to-nothing in the lingering state of consciousness housed by a freshly dead body no longer under the command of its brain. Some morning I wake up with a jolt, screaming at a non-existent intruder who seemed real. That sound of my half-alive voice used to howl in my mind for the balance of any day with which it started. Straining to emerge from a body stiffened by sleep those ghastly scratches of terror rise like the hooting of a train that is transporting illicit goods, and which should therefore travel in silence.

I brush my teeth. I rarely look at myself in the mirror but when I do I am not surprised at what I see. I see my mother, and I see my father in the contours of my face.

Some days I precede the teeth-brushing ritual by turning the computer on, giving it several minutes to churn through its mysterious startup machinations. The underworld of software used to interest me, and I anticipated new releases of operating systems and office suites with enthusiasm. Today I simply hope that these things work but I expect combat. Rarely a day passes without periods of mystified aggravation and even anger directed at some unexpected behaviour or technical error I encounter in the network of software and machines I use each day. One of the most frequent questions I ask is “Where is it?” followed by “What happened to…” or “I used to be able to…” or “What did I do?” While typing these very words I was reminded of the bottomless potential for intrusion of software into my thoughts. An unintentional combination of keys mashed all at once caused a previous sentence to appear underlined, red, and contained within a resizable box. All I wanted was to type a sentence from one side of the screen to the other, but instead I found myself wandering through useless help files and reverse-engineering my path from that simple intent of writing a sentence to instead producing a ludicrous balloon of word art.

Software is written and crafted by people far smarter than me — it is the element of my life that most consistently makes me feel like an imbecile.

I try to start each day with reading a small amount of poetry. My interest in poetry is shared by virtually no one in my life. I look to it for economy of expression. I write poetry myself, and like most poetry mine is bad. These days my visits are with Elizabeth Jennings, André Breton, and Pablo Neruda; and my old standby is John Ashbery.

I spend some time each day at the piano. My fascinations these days are with Leopold Godowsky, the spaghetti-like counterpoint of his Bach and other arrangements is a good source of entertainment. I feel like I am handling a Rubik’s Cube when unraveling Godowsky’s denser pages. Today I lumbered slowly through his arrangement of “The Swan,” a sweet piece of near-kitsch whose plaintiveness (I today notice) seems to come from landing hard on tritones and minor 9ths. I also love Godowsky’s Elegy in B Minor, dedicated to Gottfried Galston. Like many Godowsky works the Elegy exists in two versions: one for both hands and one for left hand alone. Many of Godowsky’s arrangements of Chopin Études are for left hand alone, and I have been chagrined to play through several pages of said pieces with both my hands before realizing it was written for one hand. No wonder it was so easy, I say to myself.

From there my days wander off incoherently. No two days are the same but none are very different. I go outside. I look around. Sometimes I walk on unplanned journeys, though these wanderings have become as routine as everything else in my day. Long walks to Manhattan and back are a privilege of city life and of my physical well-being. Some days I look for a pinball machine, an object of increasing rarity as more space-efficient electronic amusements take over arcades and pubs. All things, I think, will become digital, even human consciousness. The physical synapticism of human thought will be reproducible with cheap plastic and synthetic fibers. Thought itself will travel along compatible networks, transforming that last frontier of anonymity and dropped packets into any other searchable index.