(Re-)Digressus

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(In-)Finitum

(or No Title)

by F.H.

July 2012

Hate the neon light and the humming of the AC, complain about the low temperature of the AC inside your head, feel an itch behind your ear, pull your ear, read messages on the shirts of males and become aware that most of them are absurd and/or meaningless,1 trying to understand what people whisper behind you, realise it is an unknown foreign language, scratch off the brand name of your pen, smell the glitter-stuff you just have scratched off and that is now sticking under your thumbs nail and making it look dirty, try to remove the glitter-stuff by using your other hands index fingernail, which, in return, is now dirty itself, imagine what the people at the door across the room are talking about and start becoming infuriated by (a) the noise of the talk, which is a perfectly reasonable cause for your lack of attention or (b) not being able to imagine something realistic they are talking about,2 look up angrily at the vibration alarm of a muted mobile, use the index fingernail of the other hand to remove the smudge from the dirty index fingernail, imagine the temperature in the reading room you are seated in without the AC and acknowledge its use, look at your sheet of paper and remember nothing, get hypnotised for over half a minute by a defect light above the bathroom-door on the right wall that constantly switches off and on without apparent pattern or reason, ask yourself if the janitor is already informed and on his way or if everybody just thinks the same and nobody ever went to tell him, so that the janitor does not know about the annoying light and which is, of course, not his fault, look at the slightly bowed and shaved back head of the male person in front of you, staring at his computer screen, his face illuminated with Phasebook-blue, realise the alienated and twisted form and the piggy-pink colour of ears, observe people running around seemingly aimlessly and as if they try to divert their attention from whatever they are actually doing, hear somebody cough on the other, invisible side of the bookshelf, feel frosty, ask yourself why the temperature of the AC has been set on polar, wonder if the janitor is aware that the ACs temperature is set on polar, wonder if the blinking light and the ACs temperature are sufficient reasons that would legitimate a complaint at the janitors

1 E.g. Waikiki Beach Surf 1976 or No Limit West Coast or the name of a brand and its founding year, e.g. Holfiger Denim 1958. 2 In other words: pq. Problem: logical language does not match our to natural language. pp, pq, pq are both true, unproblematic, while pq do not match. There is an option I may have not considered: pq?, or a different operator (p><q). 2

office, be fascinated by the choice of words in the previous sentence, wonder what the books without visible title on their backs on your left are about 3, look at your mobile watch after you have starred on your papers, acknowledge that the neon light and temperature perfectly go together with grey carpet and grey chairs and grey tables and grey books, think of what accountants in the tax agencies are doing all day and judge that their job is drowsy and much more boring than what you do, but that these jobs are important and irreplaceable, observe someone packing up his stuff (consisting of pencils (brand: Caber-Fastell), a college block (checkered, filled with all other kinds of dog-eared copies and sheets), three text markers (orange, yellow, green), a small eraser stub (brown, bought and used for approximately 2 years and 132 days), his pIhone, his sweater (dark blue, no message) and a bottle of diet-coke (but filled with water)), wonder why people so often play with their body parts while concentrated4 , hearing someone typing a message on his mobile, imagine what the guy next to you, headphones in his ears, is listening to, decide that most people listen to crap anyway, try to figure out the difference between house and techno, decide there is none, look at your sheets and realise that despite reading them for the tenth time you still can not tell what is written on them or even meant by it, look around and evaluate the breast sizes of women, discard the ranking because the whole package must be beautiful and remind yourself that you also have to take a look at their faces, abandon this thought because you realise that there have to be two rankings, one for breasts and one for the beauty of the faces, realise you are tired, weigh the possibility of using this as a reason to go to the vending machine in the foyer, think about your smell, observe a girl tying her long blonde wavy hair in a tight knot she then places asymmetrically on her head, pull your outstretched legs back under your table because a woman wants to pass the aisle in front of you, sit up straight, judge that the stuff of students of law and students of economics is much more boring than yours, look at your mobile again though there are obviously still no new messages, feel that the sweat under your arm has dried and left lakes of faint salt on your orange shirt, think about your smell, get annoyed by the neon light, again

3 Physics or economics or chemistry or linguistics or copyright law or some forbidden knowledge of Buddhist Mysticism? 4 Pulling ears, poke ones nose, scratch beards and chins, massage lips, rub eyes, looking closely/ cross-eyed at the hair twirled around a finger right before your face, &c. 3

think about going down to get a coffee, figure reasons why you should go to the computer-room and check your messages, feeling that unread messages are always the most important ones, judge that this is a silly thought and that you do not have to be connected to feed your status updates or to be informed about everything at all times because it does not affect you in the first place and that the, so called, real life takes place outside the computer5, deciding to quit the rat race, hum David Bowies wonderfully queer cover of Across The Universe6, look at your sheet of paper again, feel thirsty, get astounded by the sheer and vast amount of books and pages plastered with words, ask yourself why people study something they say they despise, feel sorry for students who will work in the tax sector but remind yourself that they have chosen this out of their free will, think about if the people who stare into the air are revising the Poincar conjecture or are thinking the same as you do right now, wonder why it is possible to sit in the most deformed and crooked shapes in front of a computer screen for hours without feeling uncomfortable or painful, while it is impossible to sit in an erect and straight and comfortable posture while you are trying to read a book or trying to learn, get fascinated by the thought of sex between the bookshelves, try to look at your papers, hear someone turning a page in a book, be surprised by the incredible volume of a girls sneeze, feel you have to pee, look for the bathroomdoor and again get annoyed by the blinking light, look at your mobile again without reason, decide you have to go to the toilet right now, because once you have given your attention to your pelvic muscles they become the black hole for attention and you the urge feels unbearable, you feel how your muscles and concentration start to falter, look at the bowed heads as you go along the rows of concentrated faces, (...)7 , walk back from the bathroom, imagine what else you could do right now, like taking a walk with your camera, reading Robert Frost,
5 This was a common thought at the time which should prove itself as unsustainable and unrealistic, computers and social media being, in fact, already an important and existential part of the so called real life. 6 But despite David Bowies courageous insistence, the world was going to change. 7 Cutting things out here. Imagine the echoing white tiles and the brown, rough paper dispersed on the floor. Of course you check each cabin for an un-pissed seat, a relatively clean bowl (which means that it should have been flushed by the previous occupier) and a sufficient amount of (the already mentioned) brown, rough toilette paper. You dont know if you prefer a cold against a still lukewarm toilette seat. Just imagine the smell, the strange and ruthless emptiness, only disrupted by plopping turds that fall into the cold toilette water, which splashes against your bare butt and that feels so disgusting and embarrassing. But you find comfort in the fact that this happens to all the other cell mates too. You are also surprised by the convention to let your thing drop into the water at the preferred exact time of the flushing of another toilette. 4

watching a movie, but you admit that, no matter what you can think of, you would find yourself in front of your computer most of the time anyway, wonder why your self is the ultimate and perfect center of the universe, realise the connection between postmodern self-referentiality and the modern view of the individual8 and be aghast about the lyrics you hummed before that now seem so much more intelligent and meaningful. Stand up and destroy the flickering light by throwing one of the fat and old and smelling books without visible title at it.

8 Why should the centre of the universe refer to some outer and peripheral star, when it can refer to the most important spot which, respectively, is the self, ending in the well-known empty circle of postmodern self-referentiality, which has no longer an object it actually refers to, but rather refers to the reference itself. This is why addiction so neatly fits in with postmodernism: the addiction is not about the object of addiction, but rather about the subject, the individual. It is about being addicted to the addiction, not the drug itself. This also applies to 2, which, in itself, is just an empty breaking the rules for the sake of breaking the rules. It contributes nothing to the main text, and of course, the reference to this postmodern technique I am doing right now (literally: right here in this words, as you, the reader, parses them in his mental lexicon) is also a reference for the sake of the reference to the reference itself. The object is the reference referring to the reference which you get the idea. Obviously, this leads to an regressus ad infinitum which is the reason for the techniques unnourished and dogmatic emptiness and solipsistic irony it evokes in the reader. 5