RECORD – FEDERAL SUPPLY SERVICE, STOCK NUMBER 7530-00-222-3525.

Between 11 and 31 January 2000, I kept careful track of all of my activities in a green government supply ledger. I filled five pages and gave up. Took longer to write my workday than to live it. Over the years, I’ve found dozens of these ledgers like mine, fragmentary records stuffed away forgotten in file drawers and credenzas. Each time, these abandoned ledgers bring to mind two contradictory thoughts. First is the sad continuity of things—how much the same our efforts appear beside those of who came before us. The second is the impossible uniqueness of life, how a million sentient moments pass per day unrecorded, how our attempts to record them are inevitably overwhelmed by the demands of the moments themselves. How the flow of life is incontrovertible. How despite even our best efforts to account for life, it almost entirely disappears.