We have internalized the experience of a clock — speed ungoverned by the steady, standardized tick of a grandfather's second hand — and this without the tedium of Einstein's proofs: a clock that is always moving faster and faster. But we remain in hearing distance of other, older clocks and grow accustomed to their proliferation and multiplicity. We live in these times, in their plurality.

Because all efforts miss their mark, fall short, fail—and still there must be something to do, which is to say, there is nothing better to do than this, than to try, than to try anyway. Not in spite of, but because of. I know I will never get it, do it, make it, finish it, be it. And fortuitously, not being it, is exactly the place of productivity. Filling the empty placeholder of the "it" provisionally with something—with anything, and then clearing it out, on finding it lacking, a bad fit, wrong, and preserving the motile vacuum of the empty square.

Here is always nowhere in particular, except that someone pointed and said here. Here is just the coincidental meeting of a finger and an utterance. Here is a sequence of events, of accidents, of circumstances. Here is only there waiting for the sun. Here is only a there waiting for someone.

Mostly me—that lump that moves when they call Brad Borevitz. There is, or so I have heard, a Buddhist exercise wherein the question, “who am I?” is asked and answered until exhaustion. The enlightened result, I'm afraid, is still a mystery to me, having been unable to sustain the query beyond the repetitive strain of its boring recurrence and into that metaphysical realm where all notions of self are somehow gotten beyond.

Her short skirts made me curious just like tight pants did. There is nothing but tension between a pretty face and a crotch. I remember that feeling better than the details of our first meeting. I liked her right away. It wasn't long before I couldn't stand being away from her. Before I was desperate for her. There was no resistance, no hesitation, none of that queasy sense of the other's fear that boys generate when I get too close. She was willing. We talked like neurotics in therapy and fucked like machines.

“Do I ever deny you anything?” That's what I should have told him. He should know what the answer is. I do whatever he wants me to. That's just how it's been. Always. But that's not all I do, I do what I want too. That's what I'm doing now. If I am going to enter his story, I am also going to enter mine.

Why do i do what he says? He has his reasons for wanting things written down. I don't really care what they are. They are his reasons, not mine. Maybe he wants to be sure i'm paying attention. It's not so he can read this later, ‘cause he can’t. I guess that's it. Something is missing since he can't see any more. Something is missing and he's trying to replace it with something else. And I guess I do care after all, since the first thing I‘ve written, is all about his motivations. So in writing this, I’ve managed to figure something out about him. But what could he figure out about himself this way. And there is still the question of why I agreed to do this.

A trajectory towards a generic view of containment, possibly un-gendered, and described in a language of instrumentality seemingly well suited to a discussion of technology, appears from a certain perspective to be promising. But, is the lure of the generic, as a solution to the problem of difference, a symptom of masculine blindness to that difference, one more gesture of erasure that fails to account for the way that breasts or a womb change the experience of embodiment? Is accusing Irigaray of missing something in her cleaving to woman, equivalent to the phallic gaze which refuses to see her? Or, is there a radical potential in the embracing of a notion of containment by the masculine body — not a containment on the model of the womb, but a containment that cannot hold; not a containment that gives birth to the new, but a containment that grasps and releases, that receives and sends?