jan 7/BIKE

bike: 35 minutes
basement

Met my running goal for the first week of 2024 yesterday, so today I biked. Again, no problem with my left knee, which is great. I’d like to do more with the bike this winter — maybe try to bike for a little longer? Watched the tokyo triathlon mixed relay. I don’t remember what I thought about and I don’t remember hearing/feeling/seeing/smelling anything while I biked — oh, one thing: a strand of my hair was out of my ponytail and it kept touching the nape of my neck — irritating.

Right after I got up this morning (I slept in until 8:30!), I found out about John Cage’s A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity. Very cool . I found it while reading this:

When I am stuck, I walk. I don’t wear earbuds or headphones when I walk, nor when I travel by train or bus, because I want all of my senses to be centrally alive to what’s around: the music that lurks in the crevices of city sounds, forest sounds, desert sounds. I am reminded of John Cage’s art piece A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, a map with colored lines and vectors that reconstruct the city transversely from without in the layering of aleatoric drift over cartographic direction. To this end, unstructured walking, the pure derive of walking, can become something like a divinatory practice, chance-based yet ritualized.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma

today’s windows

  1. bedroom window
  2. front room, my desk windows
  3. picture window from desk to living room
  4. kitchen window
  5. car window
  6. looking up in grocery store, ceiling window
  7. back door window
  8. sliding glass door window
  9. basement windows — one to the north, one to the south, one west that is dark because it’s under the deck