The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning. Baudrillard: The Ecstacy of Communication, page 30.

Do I have anything to say, and do I have a will to live? A dear friend works every day with the scent of the decomposing bodies of his former colleagues permeating everything. An other friend sees the smoke from her kitchen window, disabled and without the emans even to support herself she watches death like a grey fog rise from Manhattan. An I walk through the streets of Manhattan until I learn that the corner of Chambers street and Greenwich Street is the best place to see the rubble behind the streets closed by the police.

And I read Jean Baudrillard, seeking to hide in his seductive language, and come back to NYC with this:
It would not be too farfetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs. Man, with all his humors, his passions, his laugh, his genitalia, his secretions, is really nothing more than a filthy little germ disturbing the universe of transparency. Once everything will have been cleansed, once an end will have been put to all viral processes and to all social and bacillary contamination, then only the virus of sadness will remain, in this universe of deadly cleanliness and sophistication.

Did I hear somebody say The Matrix?

Friday I will be at New York University, talking about the challenge of methods to studying games - 30 minutes, and I will try to focus on the essence of games and how they need to be approached widely. But Baudrillard keeps creeping into my words, and I wonder if this need to teach means... that I have nothing to say.

Perhaps. But I also wish to live.