We have to remember what is worth remembering, forget what we should have already forgotten. Without selectivity, we know nothing. Without selectivity, we lose ourselves in a thicket of data, like one of the damned. Sensation just pours in aimlessly, we can’t interpret it, we can’t read the signs.

If you’re unhappy for a long time, you start to distrust happiness when it presents itself to you — that’s something I’m learning.

I think what’s frightening about the current state of politics is that too many people are defending ways of life in which they and everyone they know are passively miserable. Conservatism and progressivism stand for nothing: the right to live versions A and B of a banal, corporatized, American life.

Fourth of July was plain and pleasant. I met a friend for a beer in the afternoon, then sat in Fort Greene Park. Later, N and I carried an air mattress back from our old apartment to our new one, because we haven’t gotten a bed yet. In my new neighborhood, fireworks went off from the time I went to sleep, until 5am, just before I woke up for work.