Just reminded that Arches Watercolor Paper, cold press used above on something abandoned last night before I fuck it up, uses gelatin from slaughtered horses to create the retained brilliance of pigments (especially white) more after drying than cheaper watercolor paper, in protest I won’t buy anymore tonight!
Outside now twenty degrees, single-digit windchill and the ground covered in ice and snow and I’m wearing leather shoes and I won’t eat Arches Watercolor Paper, I can slough into my closet of constantly revised and updated My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game of infamies in the history of my complicities, That should be my epitaph, says Km’pec, drinking his poisoned blood wine
pjoepf Of vriecyh 
1/in november 2017, i read an article from the new yorker by joshua rothman, about south african philosopher david benatar
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born
the piece ends this way:
“On the street, we shook hands. ‘I’m just going to walk around a bit,’ Benatar said. He planned to wander the West Village before heading to the airport. I walked south and, near the World Trade Center, descended into the Oculus, the vast, sepulchral mall and train station that has replaced the one destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. With its towering, spine-like roof and white-marble ribs, it is part skeleton, part cathedral. Standing on the escalator, I watched as a woman with one arm in her jacket struggled to insert the other. An overweight businessman, his ears plugged with earbuds, brushed past me, jostling me with his briefcase. As he reached the bottom, he held the woman’s coat, and she slipped into it.”
[end of quote from article]
i thought of a proverbial jewish observation woody allen put into one of his later, less funny films, match point
“Life is full of sorrows – it would have been better never to have been born – but who is so lucky? Not one in ten thousand.”
in my imagination, i supplied the famous quote from rabbi hillel that rothman’s slice of life from the escalator implies – “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now, when?”
to unpack the article’s final paragraph a bit – the businessman who jostles the author with his briefcase, with earbuds in his ears – in other words, cut off from communication by sound, and not respectful of rothman’s personal space as he passes him on the escalator – in a hurry, obviously – nevertheless notices his fellow traveler’s difficulty with her coat, and takes a few seconds to help her
rothman’s evocative description of the station – “part skeleton, part cathedral” – reminds us of our mortality, and also of our spiritual aspirations, our yearning for eternity
2/i wonder – would the slaughtered horses have preferred to have never been born at all?
3/i heard tonio k’s “life in the foodchain” this week
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