Moving in a gprs-accessible Amtrak train, the Keystone, from Penn Station in New York across New Jersey to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The gauntlet at Penn Station included a heavily armed NYPD Special Operations officer with full body armor and at least 5 30-shot clips in his equipment vest. He was pulling random people aside for searches: NYC/Amurika post-9/11.
The ‘back-east’ trip continues with intimate encounters — old friends, and a few new folks met along the way. The impending house purchase seems far away, but it does put an edge on things when I talk/think about it. So many things to be done on a negative cash flow. Trying to absorb the mentality of capitalism: “takes money to make money” and such banal platitudes. Dealing (effectively) with an abstracted social instrument (protocol) predicated on collective trust requires a certain distance and disconnect. The level of internal disturbance that it precipitates is more than it should. The constant appearance that it makes in mediating social intercourse. In truth money itself it not the mediating factor so much, but rather what the access to money brings. And hard on that situation is the question why it is that I cannot convert some force of my intelligence and creativity into that particular form of social capital. It is a question for which I have not found any clues to the answer, except that I do not place the conversion process in a priority position in daily praxis.
So it goes.