80/twenty

 @midtown. This came out nice.

I don’t believe in phone-mance. You have to squeeze an arm and touch and hand to know anything.

Names matter. They carry feeling. They linger, hitched in memory, barbed with sentiment. Like small songs.

A pause, a reflection into the past, is a moment. It’s a use of the present. Do this sparingly.

You are not a snowflake. You are not special because you exist. You are special because you become special within the time you have, but it barely persists. The grace is only for the present, to make the actual lives, yours and those around you, better or worse. The ripples your life makes through simply being thrown into the pool of time are meaningless. And considering how the future forgets you is nothing more than vanity.

To understand yourself: is that a discovery or a creation?

Someone else said this, but I don’t know who.

“The fear that life remained incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become the one we came to be. That’s how we had finally interpreted the fear of death.” – NTL

@Michelle’s

Outside of Spreckels, CA

White tigers. In cages. Salinas, CA

@ Guggenheim Zero Exhibit

@Delta 402, 5A

Watson @IBM

@Grand Central Station

Man-o-war Beach, Cat Island, Bahamas

Cat Island, Bahamas

@Cat Island, Bahamas

Keble College, OX

Maybe rather than escaping out of the world, like Gauguin, in the modern condition we must escape into the world. Disappear into a town, a community; garrison in Garrison.

Harriman State Park, NY

Glass Houses on the pier. Dumbo, NY.

@ 135

People should speak the common tongue.

St. Giles Festival. Oxford, UK.

Seed ticks. 86 bites on the right foot alone. 

@3 Mile Harbor, EH

Near Wood Tick Island, Acabonac Harbor, EH

1 John Construction. Unnecessary luxuries where there should be a park. 

Biggest shooting star ever

135 Plymouth St. 

@Sagaponack, NY

Queen of the Damned

Just a game. No need for an umbrella. 

Dumbo, Brooklyn

London, UK

Dumbo, Brooklyn

@Coney Island, NY

I’ve been around long enough to know not to trip into something and call it falling.

Brooklyn Bridge, NY

We grew up at the end of magic.

@Great Salt Lake

@Office, Hoboken, NJ

Can you shelter and still educate about the world?

    @Grenada, Spain

Evolution: before it helped them fly it helped them jump.

Somewhere on the West Side, maybe @Armory

From the boat @Anguilla

“Even smart people fall prey to an illusion of control over chance events.” – Langer

I say especially smart people.

Now we’re just slaves with perks.

@Big Sur, CA

How long before going to be becomes aren’t?

Last days @ 420 Clinton

We’re all celestial bodies. Bits of matter that put off heat. We’re all stars.

@Pulaski Bridge

Don’t make presumptions about the safety of ordinary things.

Things sometimes come easy, but they rarely keep easy.

Amagansett

Back then, you could be a regional star.

Amagansett

It’s easy to be reminded of things you’re not ready to forget.

You’ll always be reminded of things you’re not ready to forget.

I don’t know which one I like better.

Sometimes (I feel like) I chase plastic idols around the grounds of an unlocked prison.

And I liked it.

Cheetos have “vanishing caloric density.” It’s what it means when it “melts in your mouth.” Vanishing caloric density.

Snow on the beach. Amagansett Dunes.

The presents are out, everyone is asleep.

The myth of the genius: there is always an averaging.

The tree near the rink.

People think freedom is doing what they want. It’s not. Really.

It’s control.

Roosevelt Island.

Amagansett

What you don’t realize is that you have so much currency in the economy of popularity that you can buy anyone in.

I sometimes feel like I wasted my life by living it.

Hudson Valley

@DA’s

If you’re going to fail, fail on your own terms, not in the shadow of some lie.

Me: Do you like it?

Other: It’s me. I love it.

The job: selling individuals to masses.

I don’t understand why this exists.

@29

It’s such an odd roulette, where we lay our roots.

From my tire. I wonder briefly where it will turn up next…

Dumbo, any given day.

@ 29 WSP

“Never forget, your friends will eat you if they hunger.”

Davis Park, Fire Island

Near perfect lighting. We all looked so pretty. Davis Park, Fire Island

Fire Island

Chelsea

Chelsea

SZ

Harbin

The Warfield, San Francisco

The Warfield, San Francisco

An almost home.

@29

Delta, 4A

I settle too easily into the comfort of opportunities. Perhaps it’s better to be without them for a time…

If you watch the whole time, you miss out on the best parts of the story.

Washington Square Park, NY.

I’m bored of all the right things.

In the burnt streets of Havana

behind the peeling pastel columns

shrugging under the weight of patched, hot tar roofs baking in the island sun

are the pits where they pit the birds against each other.

Behind the porches, once lavish

are the ramshackle bleachers where they watch

in torn old cotton and brown skin

the frenzied fowls fight

to death. For life.

Behind the rotted infirm doors, and through the dim dusty halls

are the calls for violence, the screams of hope for the right murder.

Behind the bedrooms lit by gap toothed chandeliers

and lonely bulbs, flickering through the shaded afternoon;

behind bathrooms of chipped and broken Chinese porcelain;

behind the balconies built of felled centenarian arbor;

and behind the gap-toothed balustrades

with their delicate carvings, worn indiscernibly into tumorous lumps

are the money lenders and collectors, the betters, and voyuers.

Behind these old mansions

a new people, squatters and opportunists in a craftsman’s world,

wager on a worthless war

between animals who are no real foes.

I wagered my heart on Casual Thunder.

And I lost it,

not because his blood pulsed fleetingly into the brown sands where he lay

but because I bore witness to a senseless death

and did nothing.

When you use what’s there you don’t work for what you need. In the long run, this doesn’t get you what you really want. Sometimes the easy way is the hard way.

Maastricht, Holland

Audrey, in center. The best of the lot.

George Washington Bridge, NY

Without implying anything about the relative complexity of my life, it is safe to say that my life would be much less complicated if there was an asteroid hurtling towards earth.

Westside, NY. 

HP, Washington Square Park, NY.

Just because everyone says it doesn’t make it a universal truth.

Toronto, Canada.  Apparently, this is the largest television in North America. The fact that it is in Canada should offend Americans.

Fulton Street, Brooklyn.  

… brown skirts on strong hips

… kindness that could probably be friendship

… lingering pale yellow pulp crusted and clinging to hastily cleaned steel-ware.

Show me the proof…

The G train, Brooklyn. 

One of the great accomplishments of art is that it sometimes becomes a part of one’s own memories. A part of a personal permanent collection. We can be touched, moved and changed by an otherwise purposeless production. The quiet gift that art can move us to remember.

Too big for its message.  Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

London, UK

It takes a village they say. But that’s only where kindness came from.

It took a village to get here. From here we don’t know what it takes.

Delta, Flight 5, Seat 3A

Often I find that the smaller the event the more it tells me about the person.  Everyone wants to be a hero, few people want simply to be good.

The moon opens wide outside,

settling in the sky like a streetlamp.

It hangs over a canopy of undulating clouds,

below.

We coast along the dark, empty boulevard of our night.

The descent has started.

We fall into the treasure box of the lighted city,

bejeweled below,

and bright with early evening hope.

Embankment Park, London

Outside London

When you make yourself you know yourself. And only then can you fix yourself or love yourself.

Belgium

London, UK

She doesn’t need to be fireworks, just a sparkler. She doesn’t need to wow the crowd, just you.

You’ve spent so much time in the shadows

you think the world a dark place.

But something casts those shadows.

Something stands bare, exposed.

A world in the sun.

You’ve been surviving so long in the shadows

you think the world’s a dark place.

And you think you know what it takes to live.

But there are many ways to live.

Things are different in the sun.

All your lessons are learned from the dark.

You haven’t been exposed.

And so you don’t really know

what you could be in the sun.

“As a means of uncovering truth, the experimental method is superior to intuition.” – Vaillant

I didn’t really live today but if I died today I’d leave more behind.

Bordom is a kingdom easily reached.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

Hudson Valley, NY

Miami, Florida

I wonder today what it feels like to be a migrating animal in a zoo. With the turning of the seasons, do they feel a longing they don’t understand? Some unknown pull, deep inside, left unheeded? Unheedable. A sense that something is supposed to happen. But it doesn’t. It can’t.

In some ways this must be one of the loneliest feelings in the world. The rooted sense that it is time for something, some change that rests known but unknown, felt but without a concrete thought to reason.

Do they, these animals in zoos together, share in empathy over this mysterious condition? Like a colony similarly afflicted.

Of course in other ways we are all in our cages, it’s hardly like we can just go anywhere. It’s all zoos.

The accumulation and protection of great wealth, wealth beyond reasonable use, is a frailty of the human condition. It implicitly reveals an underlying fear that once lost, the fortune may be beyond reach.

Someone once said that most men are in their lives like the carpenter whose work goes so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he has not the time to sharpen them.

The June sun sets stubbornly at this height, “at 35,000 feet” floating east toward home. The cabin lights are low, no smoking and seat belt indicators glow like streetlamps down the rows. Everyone around me is asleep. The awkward posture of airline slumber consistent like a military protocol: mouths open, chins forward.

The setting has a quiet intimacy, a romantic calm. The sun has largely been put down, inaudibly exploding on to morning somewhere far away. The hues of the set mostly absorbed and refracted by the earth leave the sky an inky marine darkness. Another day surrendered to the inexorable invasion of time, aided treacherously by my eastward journey.

An urban dusting of light below reveals fields, streets, dark paths, neighborhoods and thoroughfares. A thousand little theatres, lamped stages. One cannot see people from this height, only possession and control of the land. It is vast in scale; accumulated ownerships like snowflakes blanket like snowfall.

New Delhi, India

…a pattern for a purpose.

…a theme for a destiny.

The girl next to me speaks a Quebec French. She is thick but small.

Attraction stirs, but is incomplete; not compelling but present.

I want her casually, like dry snacks at a long cocktail party.

The mood word tonight is elevate.

Lifted.

Up.

Am I Icarus?

No.

I don’t think I’m free. Or boundless.

That’s not my delusion.

A simple reprieve.

And I know it.

Unshackled from a watchtowered mind.

That still watches.

Unshackled for good behavior, perhaps.

But not, really.

The mind does no favors.

Its grip eases only as it secures itslef.

Like we share food when we hunger not.

Clinton/Washington C train, Brooklyn.

Fort Tilden, NY

Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

he could build

a paper airplane

which when the wind was right

could settle on the air

like a confident gambler

rumor had it he got one to go fifty yards

the dogs would tire waiting for it to land.

DUMBO in La Guardia. 

The Clerkenwell, Lower East Side.

Rockefeller Center, NY 

cornerstoned as i round

a bend

in my years

marked by calendars and

lines

on the edges of my eyes

i arrive at a place in space

and time unfamiliar

i hear

the easy chatter of my

youth

back around the bend

but i can no longer

see it

not turned away

but turned around

a corner

in my years

less impressive but stronger

founded perhaps

not floating

cornerstoned

not cornered.

Maybe Nashville, I forget.

the echo of a dry river trickles

30,000 feet below and to the left

a tan line

worn into a brown valley

mere memories in the land

of a river that ran

Guggenheim.

I have a subscription to incompetence; it’s just one issue after another.

Toronto, Canada

If you have been under fire for long enough, you start firing into the wind. The sounds of a normal life have to be relearned.

Outer Banks, North Carolina

Clams don’t smile

or care

about you.

it’s not indifference

or apathy.

if they had clam hands

they would not hug you.

with clams mouths

they would not talk to you.

At the bottom of the shallow sea

they bed

concerned not of you or me.

cupped by the large earth in displaced sand

they exist for themselves.

you cannot win them over.

you simply don’t matter

to clams.

Nags Head, NC.

Nashville, TN

a frayed edge of a toothbrush

or a rug

tell me i’m truly alive

in case i doubted which

i do, sometimes

it wears on me

time

like my teeth

on brushes

or my feet

on rugs

i am being erased

by moments

and i bristle, but this encourages

my erasure

the present cleansed of me

by time rubbing against me

and time cleaned by me

like teeth by a brush

bright white

as always

while i fray.

because time has an appetite for memories.

Looking the part just gives you more chances to fail.  We want things to make sense.

To watch TV is to watch people die.  We took the peaceful world we fought for and recreated the violent world we overcame.

do not be influenced by the charms of youth; but do not lose sight of the fact that they are charming.

Amagansett, New York

There is so much to challenge the mind and keep it from task.

Fire Island, New York

… small faces eating seasoned corn.

… old dogs and old owners lonely and left like molted skin by renewed but once-familiar streets.

… the remnant of plantains, sticky and loud in their smell, hardening in a too large bowl.

One cannot predict from hope alone how two people will get along.

Central Morocco, from the train.

A giant macaroon in Paris, France. 

Lac Ste Croix, France

Provence.

collected wisdoms are like bookmarks, often used to keep one from getting lost in the story of one’s life.

New York

James Hotel, New York

Miami, Florida

The Arno and Florence, Italy

Tuscany with my brother.

London

dawdle about with concepts

touch, test, tickle, ideas

play

until they smile at you

and show you their teeth

then you know you have them

strike

betray

steal them for your own

and cage.

then

show them to your friends

ha!

look what i have

mastery

command

of a pocket full of thoughts

that i will use

to make you smile

so that i will feel better.

Brooklyn, New York

Sydney, Australia

All the structures that shelter the poor are made of straw.

There are two types of surrendering: surrender with and surrender without.  It is so hard to know which is the better path.  Without calls courage, with whispers compassion.  Both demand acceptance, which is the hardest part.  But sometimes the struggle simply needs to end.

This isn’t automatic.  Like talking.  The words aren’t effortless.  Is it practice?  The permanence derails me, perhaps.  The notion that these words are launched irretrievably into “space”.  Once fired they wander like wind forever.  It’s daunting, because I care.  I care about what is permanent in the world.  The indelible is the only thing that matters in the end.

Sometimes things get lost in words.  There is a presumption that communication is inherently clarifying, we talk to understand.  But sometimes the better route is to stay quiet.  I’m terrible at this, but I know it’s true.

Today I tossed my iPhone on the couch and a message came up that said, “nothing to undo”.  Untrue, iPhone, untrue.

Today I came home early and watched TV.  Every afternoon in Sydney they show episodes of Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, and the Brady Bunch one after another.  Today I watched all three.

Mork released the full range of his feelings, learning how to manage the complicated landscape of human emotions.  In Happy Days, the Fonz realized from his friends that he was fighting too much and learned to control his anger.  In the Brady Bunch the youngest son won a bet against the oldest, but learned that managing winning is as important as not losing.

I learned that TV really was different before.  In all the episodes the morality was unforced and kind.  It was human, not divine, in its source; humorous and not didactic in its delivery; genuine and not artificial in its sentiment.

We’ve lost this these days.  On our televisions our kindness is violent and our violence is extreme.  To watch TV in the modern world is to watch people die.  Mostly anyway.

Sintra, Portugal

Sydney, Australia

Wineglass Bay, Tazmania

I don’t know if I can want you to be anything less than what I want you to be.

It is better to control an army than to be a good soldier.

You feel the heat of the sun and you feel it shines harder on you.  But it shines always and inexorably in all directions at once.  And so it is that the actions of the world are so rarely personal.  Even where we are chosen, it is always a byproduct of available choices woven into the moment of election.

my slightness rubs up against the largeness of the world.

Los Angeles, California.

Sir Thomas Moore and Diogenes get into a bar fight while talking.  Who wins?

Diogenes.

Right, but why?

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you?

Estragon: You let me go.

after plot

i reflect on ideas

i had

about us

you and i

we were going to do

something

we didn’t

i don’t

know what i thought

i don’t

think what i knew

i shrug

i’ll understand later

i assume

like finding the lost keys to a car

long sold

there is nothing to do

and besides

only the sun announces

its intentions

and does exactly that which it promises

i don’t.

seeing inches of time

little spaces

made of a hesitation

reaches

to connect larger spaces

fuse and bind

inch after inch of time

life then is an allotment of inches

circumstances

formed by inches of temporal spans

a sigh

a snort

these are obvious culprits

with red hand the inch is found who snorts

at a funeral

or sighs

at a wedding

but is it not more exciting

and even romantic

to exalt in the more muted inch of moments

a lingering hand

a slow withdrawal from embrace

how we pursue these tiny pieces

these fractions

the two by ones in lego we search for

at the bottom of the bag

blistering, chaffing, scratching our hands

for the glory of the smallest square which

makes a difference

not in use

but in wholeness

they are the sequins comprising the vestment of our sum of days

the pageantry of relative perfection

completion of a life’s work

in a final, solitary knotted thread

after all, we die in an inch of time

only then made whole

people always clap for the wrong things.

you should embrace failure early in life so that you may grow old with dignity.

Investing in a moment’s moment I write.  Not expecting much and without destination in mind; a farmer walking his own, untilled land.  The paths are not well known, but worn enough to follow.  Like the melody of a once heard but largely forgotten song.

The problem with technology is it’s neutrality.  It invites all behaviors because it really only augments the abilities of the user.  And the user is us.  Frail but hopeful, conflicted us.

The afterfun moment’s calm after the special has been memorialized. Tonight has been realized, now release me from the burden of reaction. But, if you can, bring me back. Reinspire tonight. Another time.

I know what’s on the other side of that rainbow, and it’s not a pot of gold.  It’s as heavy as one, but that’s not what it is.  No fortune for me there.

Physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.

… what we hoped.

… the culmination of events beyond our control.

… sufficient.

… how we expected.

… what we should have known they would be.

… what they are.

Achievement keeps me entertained.

I didn’t do it.  Like Shea’s parents.  I didn’t run back in.  I didn’t stop it.  I didn’t save it.  It is such a complicated map, this life; I have drawn it so large.

Forsake adjectives.  Surrender color.  Stale the phrases in a typist’s palette.

Actively pursue words, chase them around the corners of sentences, through the rabbitholes of paragraphs and across the chasms of chapters.

Be bold in pulling letters from the void of imagination, from the shelves of like items scattered about the superstore of the mind.

And through an exercise, strengthen and empower a language which begs for no descriptions, that is confident in its nouns, purposeful in the richness of the color of itself.

No more love stories.

“But what do you mean by ‘a return to normal life‘?”

Tarrou smiled. “New films at the picture-houses.”

– Camus, The Plague.

How many mistakes do you have before you’ve made too many.  How many chips have been played.

The same range that burns us makes us well done.  The burden is on us to manage our exposure and understand our thresholds.  Lest we burn, releasing what we had to share, failing at whatever purpose our potential promised, and rendering what we hoped others would consume with glee into an ugliness.

We feel the waste of good meat more than most other wastes.  Somehow we see it could have loved, hoped, lived, cried, helped, played, sang and danced.

You opened up a sense of wonder in me. I’ll miss this the most, the grand limitless potential of our wonder.

I’m not sure if you’ll understand all this and I suppose it can’t matter either way. But I just want to remember it a last time before I forget it. Not the words, which are saved, but the feeling. How close we were to the wonder we wanted.

You have carved such a small hole in the blanket of your preconceptions.

Floors above in the urban canopy, I see me in this evening reflection. The cities bright night lights twinkle beyond the glass.

So benign in the day, my window and my beautiful view, but in the evening there I am clear as the image in a mirror.  I think of myself over the years, swiveling on an Aeron chair as the clock moves past the twilight hour, when the window closes back on me.

Watching myself age in that reflection, it is not enough.

The shrapnel of exploding love has scarred me.

The human world is built on the frailty of human nature, defended by the good fraction.