an extract from History of an Imaginary City, originally uploaded by heyoka.

I work for an organisation where some of the rules and processes would fuck with Kafka's head. They've been fucking with mine.

I have been having over-detailed, practical dreams about images and about printing, about about darkened rooms with glowing glass plates, and about making hugely complicated books. My night brain has very ambitious plans. I wake up and realise I don't have the skills. Not yet.

I dropped a whole pile of glass plates on Sunday. Fortunately they were still blank, not even washed--I hate cleaning the glass, so that would have been howl-inducing--but of course I have twice ended up with almost invisibly thin glass splinters in my feet, puncture wounds. One mid-exposure, and, I couldn't bear to lose the image I was making but, and was hopping round madly with the timer in my hand while Snarl hunted tweezers and I swore and we both scrabbled at the glinting shard in my foot. And extracted it just in time to snick the shutter closed so I could step tiny blood spots all the way to the bathroom (one sock on, one sock off) to develop the plate before it dried.

Friday, after work, sitting on the bench outside the park--the local park is far too swanky to allow mere locals inside, it's keyholders only--drinking wine in the sideways falling sun, squinting, and rambling and ranting about language and perception and the naming of names while almost-neighbours walked past and pretended not to see the slightly sozzled riffraff on the bench outside their iron-gated park.

Making loops of history and now, with blackened fingers and half-told stories from someone else's memories.