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10,000 photographs to be taken:

by 1000 people,
over the course of 1 month,
anywhere,
of 1 square meter of sidewalk,
from the perspective of 1 meter above it,
looking down.

What I saw was all dead white. When I opened my eyes, the grey light hit what was there and I saw in shades I roughly numbered—guessing, too lazy to count: 256, 1024, a million. It was an effort to stop the scan of the closed scene, to check the flitting of vision over the contours of shadow, that compulsive tracking of the boundaries of tone and color, to arrest its sweep, to capture a circuit of vision and contain it in a scape defined by the paralysis of my head. A lock of the eyes is not possible, they buzz like flies in a box.

At the bottom of the toaster, there is a diminutive desert where the tiny bits of bread have gathered and blow into dunes and traps—beaches even, where a fairly vast silver sea rides smooth to glowing orange streaked horizons, and slim creatures dance mamboesque.

A pin falling from the sky hits me in the chest, and like I was a balloon, explodes the membrane of my skin—excited neurons return to space like streamers of gas pulling the bits of me from my form. But it wasn't the heavens that split me. The source is a particular thing. It hits at an angle so slight, so perfect, so aligned, and so wrong, that it unlocks the pieces. What was seamless separates, stretches out, and tilts away just enough for a rush of air to fill tiny fissures and shadows to appear between parts.

Pleasure derives from that tension that comes in the scraping of surfaces against one another. The violent confrontation of surfaces tears small bits from each and deposits them in the minor pits and cracks of the other—even as these flaws are what produces the friction. They annihilate each other in the rough of their stroke.

Can the apostolic sense of it even be detected any longer? John 1:1 "In the beginning was the word ... " and John 1:14 "And the word was made flesh ... " Now, if the word has become flesh it is because it has become a matter of the basest kind: commodity.

How is it that I don't sit in prison? How is it that I have so far avoided a finger pointing, which would sit me there regardless of evidence and circumstance? And why, if I am free, do I think only of how penned in I am? Of real prisons, the descriptions of which I can compare to my cell, I have with an ample sampling. And none compare; this is ease, while that is surely hard time, torture.

Incarcerated as the cud of that ill-digesting cow that is the world, what else am I to be but bad. Whatever I chew has been chewed before and made sour by that bovine sluice. Therefore, inside I am bad. I am taken in. Take me out with the trash.