April 2010
32 posts
3 tags
Think Cosmic And Die Forever
Thinking cosmically gives me vertigo or the feeling right after vertigo where you know you know your feet are on the ground but everything is spinning regardless.
The Egyptians were almost thinking cosmically when they built their massive capsules for what they thought was forever. Asimov was almost there too by asking to be shot into space. But almost is next to nothing in something that’s...
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I was just scanning the headlines
And today I read
“Lindsay Lohan Fights, Tweets For Cash, Holds A Gun To Her Mouth, Pulls The Trigger, Buried Near Marilyn Monroe, Re-animates Unbeknown To Others, Digs Own Way Out Of Grave, Secures Book Deal, Secures Movie Deal, Back In Rehab, Runs For President, Poet Laurette, Begins Visible Decay, Ready To Go Red Giant, Gives Up Los Angeles Un-Life, Returns To Los Angeles Un-Life, Gives...
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A Legendary Rise of Hairs
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili’s mustache grew up in very similar circumstances to Jughashvili himself, destitute and abused in a small town in late 19th century Georgia. Where they differed was in education. While Jughashvili excelled in formal studies, his mustache learned from its mother and the streets and developed a latent knack for prophecy that came from its gypsy roots.
By the...
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Some Subway Sketches
How does a sparrow wind up down in the subway? How confused does it have to be finding itself flitting between crusted steel beams? Little bird, please leave, you’re making me sad. A pigeon accidentally winding up down the subway I can somehow understand. Perhaps because of how easily pigeons are connected, in the city mind, to rats. And as for rats, it’ll take just one ambitious one...
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My public trade was as a minor-league hockey player in a small city in Minnesota known (as far as it was known at all) for raising hippos. I’d just returned, by bus, from “the big city” (Minneapolis?) attending to something business and injury related stemming from my private trade which wasn’t spoken of but often involved the mixture of business and injury. My family picks...
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“Life must be understood backwards … but it must be lived forwards.”-Soren Kierkegaard
The (upon reflection seemingly ridiculous) things I noticed in the moment included, but were not limited to: how my bare hands felt as if they were wearing my clumsy 12 oz. gloves. How a yell caught and died in the back of my throat as I moved forward, maybe I was moving too fast in the same...
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Some Subway Sketches
At Grand Street, the middle-aged and elderly Chinese pour through the door in a solid stream, but instantly break up and bee-line for every open seat once they’re in the car. At the same time they don’t mind standing at all, they seem to mind less than most. What always strikes me is the proliferation of orange plastic bags with their entrance. They carry these bags on and I...
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Punches I Have Known
Ben L’s “orange punch buggy!” on the way home from 5th grade where I could have sworn his arm telescoped to twice its natural length as he whipped his fist up and around and into my shoulder.
Grandmaster Leung Ting’s slipping right past me and placing his fist gently, but definitively in the space between my jaw and collar-bone, like fighting a helpless battle against a...
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Some Subway Sketches
There’s something I love about professors and teachers grading papers on the subway. There’s always a focus on their work as if it’s just as well that they were crammed between other people and balancing piles of paper on their knees rather than at some well organized desk. In the evening trip home they seem pretty contemplative about it. I wonder if the train noises force them...
counting flowers on the wall
watching a traffic light three blocks away that I know no cars will stop at change from red to green and back anyway.
a face like a house cat’s disdain.
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an untold american tragedy
Following the execution, Vanzetti’s mustache snuck out the back and a replacement mustache was put in his place. The synthetic mustache has its own history as a long-time vaudeville actor doing small shows in New York most his life. Far ahead of his time, the synthetic mustache (for whom we do not have a real name) decided that an act of performance art would be his last and died a living...
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“Tony… you ever get a thought in your head what you wanted to say but it sounded crazy so you didn’t say it, but you kept turning it over in your head and maybe that was driving you crazy?”
“That sounds nuts,” he replied flatly, without breaking his stare from the balcony across the street.
I shifted in my seat in further protest of the silence, but it...
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Some Subway Sketches
There’s an older businessman who has two shades of hair on his head that help me understand the difference between silver and grey. But what I really want to know is, does he feel insulted having to stand on the train with barely a place to hold on to or does he always wear some sort of indignation underneath those tortoiseshell glasses?
What is the aroma of the Grand Street station?...
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Each Of Us An Ozymandias
Most of us are creating something every day, whether for work or pleasure. Then we edit it and shape it. Enhance this process by going about it with a question in mind: What if this is the last thing that survives (and thus, represents) the human race?
Imagine working on a Power Point presentation with this in mind. You’d probably scrap the presentation after just three of four efforts....
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The Case of Grassy Rolls
Walking across campus I noticed a pair of trucks parked with rolled up sod and grass on their backs. My mind started doing the math: Each roll looked about 16 feet wide. Let’s say 20, because I’m terrible with math. Another 20 feet or so in length tightened into the spiral. About 13 of these rolls in each truck. About 10,400 square feet of lawn ready to become itself.
By the time...
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whatever, whatever asshole, asshole
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Some Subway Sketches
Preacher man with a pocket protector, you’re yelling so loud I can’t even hear my headphones and you can’t hear yourself and you didn’t hear the train starting to move so that when it jolted you were thrown forward onto your hands and knees. I wanted to say, “Where is your god now?” but that’s far too mean and, more importantly, you were finally prostrate...
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The Case of the Insides Out
Watched a fight on the television and one of the the fighters was impressively injured by a cutting elbow.
It was a real gusher. Blood was smeared across the cut man’s face, usually in a deep red that in its thickest parts bordered on black. It reminded me of color gels for stage lights and for a second I imagined it’d be nifty to film a stop-motion scene using color gel paper as...
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The Case of the Critical Impulse
I was critiquing critiquers when I said, “has anyone said, ‘Modern art? Yeah I could do that’ and then actually DO it? I’m doubtful.”
And a friend critiqued my critique by saying “Andy Warhol?”
And I was frustrated for so many goddamn reasons among them being that that wasn’t really what I meant and that I wish I could be more clear and that I...
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more than somewhat amazing that you get the same sense traveling inside out as outside in. The vastness of space is explained in terms we can’t really comprehend and we explain in large numbers that lose us and Fermi’s paradox and the force of the big bang going on forever and ever amen.
We make greater strides studying our insides and understand them just as incompletely. But...
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Broke Down in Tully, NY
The car service ended up sending a malfunctioning car. Now we are at a Burger King parking lot in Tully, NY. The shape of the building doesn’t say “Burger King” even though the sign does. It probably used to be a Bob’s Big Boy and something else before that. There’s not anything else here. There’s out of season farm land. And in the distance there’s a...
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“I’m not gifted, I’m just educable and I caught a break. And anyway, you do anything for four years and you start to get pretty good at it. Think about how easy it was to coast through senior year at college. By then you know all the tricks.”
“But you couldn’t hack it for more than a year in grad school?”
“For the same reasons. Because it...
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I understand the explicitly unshared and implicitly shared hermitage cult of writers best when I am sitting on the toilet, defecating.
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Some Subway Sketches
A father & son duo are wearing matching light blue jeans and matching white sneakers that you wouldn’t take note of except for to say, “Hey, they’re matching.” Jr.’s just old enough for the beginnings of a mustache you’d be more likely to mistake for a shadow and Dad’s just young enough that his clean shaven head might be a fashion statement rather...
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He was never comfortable riding in the car. The train was public, but more isolated. Being a part of everyone else offers anonymity. In a car you must be a somebody, being behind tinted windows makes it worse. The world is exposed to you too, but too rapidly to make sense of it, even the landmarks. It’s better to sit with people, use the types of person as your general geography, identify...
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The four human elements
The honest professions are as follows:
farmer
builder
healer
story teller
Everything else is just window dressing. The farmer maintains the flora & fauna, the builder maintains the shelters, the healer maintains the bodies, the story teller maintains the souls. Each is intimately involved with processes of creation and destruction. In the complex present age most of us have been squeezed...
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It was the first time I’d ever been sucker punched much less the first time I’d ever been hit in the face by a stranger. The blood in my mouth had a metallic taste to it just like the books and movies always say and I found myself smiling and thinking, “I’m really going to enjoy this.”
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Some Subway Sketches
middle-aged women with short hair and white sneakers who waddle more than walk and talk to their children (grandchildren?), always in tow, patronizingly and loudly
men with bald heads that shine to the point that you think it might be the source of the smell you notice before you even see them with their faux-worn jeans and teeth really fucked
Blue collar workers who actually wear...
