Vertigo

(Trey Speegle, Benrimon Contemporary)

I can't sleep. The canine started barking at some thing perceived in the hallway and that was the end of it. The end of the night.  I tried to go back to sleep but without much sincerity or success.  I will wait until Rachel has left for work and will try again, but that will be in 5 hours.  Being a light sleeper seems to have mostly disadvantages.  I fail to recognize any advantages to it in this brave modern age.  My wife wants to have a baby soon, and she sleeps in a near catatonic state. So I know how things will go.  She denies this, and probably will continue to deny it.  But I know.

I am bored and dulled by trying to go back to sleep.  My body is fatigued and not quite recovered from whatever sickness I've had.  I had thought that it was something that I ate but now people are telling me everywhere I go that there is a stomach virus going around.  I was its next victim, apparently.  People tell me to go to the doctor and get something to help resist it, but going to the doctor almost seems worse than enduring it. The doctor and dentist have not been much fun for me recently.  My dentist uses scare tactics on me.  I caught him doing it the last time and I cornered him with some questions, he will be fired soon. I suppose it could be easier to just stop going, or challenge him to a game of Monopoly, but what's the fun of just not going any more? I will call him and tell him that he can't scare me into dental hygiene any longer.

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe it's easier to keep the dentist and avoid the doctor. That seems more reasonable, and I... a reasonable man.

I wish there was a single beer here. It helps me go to sleep sometimes.  But there is none and it is too cold to try to go out and get one.  So I suffer on, nearly silent.


Recently I re-watched the film "Vertigo."  It is among my favorite films, and most likely the one I would name as my favorite, if asked. It is powerful and mystifying in continually unexpected ways. Even after seeing it several times it still maintains an odd effect, suggestive and counter-instructive.  The idea of obsessions, contrary urges, and forced shifts in identity, and how "love" plays a part in those things.  The dual nature of us all, the pleasure one extracts from what is frightening, and the strangeness of recognition. It is a fear of heights and a fear of falling all at once. The desire to jump exciting the mind, drawing it near the edge; the erotic fixation of abandon.  It is a film about the roles we accept and the effect those roles have on us.

The film seems to barely say or do anything.  There is a sequence of events but they don't make sense in the traditional narrative sense, not on the first viewing anyway. The events seem to follow an impulse that is vague, even doubtful at first, but the tension builds and builds. There is a climax and a resolution at the end, though even that seems inessential to something larger that is happening.  As if the ending of the film, and what it suggests, is incidental to inducing this feeling of spinning, falling forward into something unseen, the spiraling blind vortex of the dark heart.

There is an ambiguity to it as it develops.  I am never sure how to feel, but the feeling begins.  The options we are given at the close seem to be either moral or emotional, yet neither of those somehow seem right, neither of them stop the film from turning. The viewer is left with the same sinking sense of descent that the film suggests to avoid, and that it itself has perhaps transcended.

With no way to stop it, no way to yield, and no way out but down...

.

Peacorking

I shaved my head last night.  I got tired of having hair. Or, I should say that I got tired of having some hair.  It had grown long in spots and was beginning to bother me.  My wife encouraged me to get a haircut, so that was happening a few seconds later, to her mild surprise.  She says I look too mean when my head is shaved, like a convict.  The women elsewhere have universally loved it, saying I look 10 years younger and dangerous, though I don't see how that's quite possible, looking any younger, that is.  They flatter me, and I allow it.

I don't want to be 10 years younger.  I want 25 back, maybe even 30.  Just drop me off right after puberty around 1985 with a flash car and 20 thousand in cash...  Then come bring me back just as the summer ends.

No, that is not really what I want at all.  Though it would be nice to return and re-experience some things, but only knowing what I knew then, which wasn't much. I wouldn't change much about my life, though I would spend less time repeating myself, both in action and word.  It is the recurring theme in my life, etc.

Here is a picture of my face before I shaved it all off last night:

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Tar Beach

I was walking the dog yesterday as the sun was going down and I quickly snapped the picture above.  People tell me all the time that it is great to take pictures at sunset and sunrise, but I don't listen.  I don't know what's wrong with me.  It's as if through my entire life I've taken in information, repeated it, but rarely benefitted from it. I seem like a sensible guy, reasonable and partially knowing.  But at my core I'm an ignorant hillbilly that just keeps trying, sometimes getting lucky.

To wit, I took the dog up on the roof with me to get the picture below, shortly after our walk.  I brought a tripod and tried to capture the moon before it went below the false horizon of buildings, but I was too slow and inexperienced.  The dog was in complete cautious wonder at this strange place that exists above our cave.  He is conditioned to think that down the stairs is the only way out of the building, but then this...  He stayed close to me as I was trying to shoot, though I walked him around a bit to put him at ease. He seemed deeply unsettled by this new land, which might as well have been the surface of the moon.  I told him that it was. I showed him the 'pee of tranquility', where we landed in '69.

I used to go up there and sit in a chair in the summertime to try and get some sun.

Tar Beach, I called it. The place smells like urine now, but it used to be nice.


My friend at cafeselavy sent me this link earlier today.  It has depressed me because it made me realize that I'm not taking the pictures that I really want to take.  I am taking pictures that require no courage.  I have not learned how to ask people if I can take their picture, or do not have the nerve to just take the pictures and act as if it what I am supposed to be doing. The pictures in that link make me feel stupid, lazy and craven.  But they inspire me also, there is that.  My consolation for feeling cowardly, artistic inspiration.  Jesus that sounds pathetic.  I take it all back.  I am brave to have even looked at those pictures, you are the cowards for reading my inner ramblings.  What a bunch of creeps my readers can be.

Ok perverts, if you look carefully you can see somebody furiously typing out the manuscript to their first screenplay in the windows below.... have a quick peek...  It is a story about the government fabricating our moon landings, as told through the eyes of a dog.

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Da' Lub Ma'Sheen

I have spent many precious hours defending the good name of the Sheen family. This much is a known and well established fact.  But people are starting to really turn on me this time.  They say I'm going too far.

As if....


Charlie is an air to the thrown.

Apoxycontin Now!




"He broke from them, and then he broke from himself.  I'd never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart..." - M. Sheen, Apocalypse Now

(portrait of petrified djna, encased in amber)

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Zero O'Clock

After many months of going into work in the afternoons I have been scheduled to go to work at 7am today, then back to the afternoons tomorrow.  It is a shock to the system, to every system.  Coffee has abandoned me, the dog refused to wake up with me, it is still dark outside, I think I fell back asleep while typing the word dark, I wonder if there are cabs at this hour.  I wonder what hour this is.

This must be what it feels like to fly.

Liaisons

(photo taken from a Soho shop window, artist unknown)

Last night my wife and I lied in bed, discussing infidelity. We had been watching a film with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, "That Hamilton Woman," detailing the scandalous lives of Admiral Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton during The Napoleonic Wars.  We discussed the unfaithful lives of the actors in the early years of their relationship. The conversation turned to infidelities that we had experienced, those actively participated in, or disloyalties we had either been the knowing or the unwitting victims of.  

The conversation did not last long. We took renewed interest in the film at one point, you see. But just as The Hollywood Code does we took the time out at the end of the dialogue to denounce infidelity as unattractive and made sure that the perpetrators had suffered rather than been rewarded for it. We both agreed that, "It is never worth it" and we can't understand how other people say that it is among the most exciting sexual experiences they've ever had.  The movie continued.

I admitted that the most affecting experiences I had had in this regard were when I had fallen in love with a friend's girlfriend and I had to have her.  I arranged some truths in such a way to ensure that this would happen.  Though there was never any actual infidelity involved, it only lacked infidelity in the physical sense, every other aspect was there.  We waited until she had broken up with him.  She came to my apartment only minutes later and we had sex for the first time, including our first kiss, with her crying through some of it, towards the completion of the act.  It all improved later, but we needed to get it out of our systems, or into them.  I'm not sure if that phrase quite suits the subject.

Once when speaking to a friend who had begun dating my girlfriend sometime before the actual end of my relationship with her, he assured me that she: had never cheated on me.... I responded: When you form an intimate and affectionate relationship with a man that you plan on being with, that is cheating.  He agreed. Towards the end of the relationship her sex life had became more active than mine, that's all.  It is simple when looked at this way, from a great distance.  The same girl had cheated on her previous boyfriend with me, in a similar way, and we had devised agreed-upon assertions that were not to be deviated from in the event of independent questioning.  This is how the world works for some.  

I began a new paragraph where I lapsed into pontification, then started another, then deleted it all.  I have nothing noble to say about infidelity, nothing new.  

I think back to a post from a month ago or more when I was discussing with myself the desire to live a certain type of life. If you want to live an expansive life of great experience then read books that explore lives created from the same and that in turn might help inspire you towards greater experiences. But so many of the great books that I've read explore infidelities, and not always using The Hollywood Code as a guide through the experience...  

It is a perennially fascinating subject, especially when it unexpectedly emerges in the lives of others, at a safe or fictive distance.  Up close it is much less fun, though some seem to relish the very idea of it, along with the act, or the acts. 

I wonder about the souls of others, the shape and size of them, the capacities for inflicting or enduring pain, the selfishness of the human heart, the absorbed grasping for either substitute or genuine pleasures, and the many justifications for actions unseen.

"People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty." - Richard Needham

"But Napoleon doesn't want peace!" - Admiral Horatio Neslon

(Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier)

Rabid

I have been terribly sick since yesterday morning.  I ate something, something bad.  It took me half the day to figure out what had happened, which changed nothing, but removed the mystery of the thing.

I told a friend that I was, "Sick as a dog."
He said, "I hope not. I saw how Old Yeller ended..."

the sun sets on the east rivers

I met an awful, awful
man tonight

he's probably my
land lord


the pockets of his heart
are filled w/ weeds

upon his soul
earthward, thrown. tossed.
lost seeds

I met an awful, awful

man tonight

he's probably my

landlord

Anasyrma

I went on a photo-expedition yesterday, to the west side of the island.  Nothing much came from it but I did develop an idea for a short video project.  I will have to check into New York law and see what the requirements of shooting video in the city are.  My friend said that as long as I'm not using a tripod then it's permissible.  Once I verify then I will proceed from there.  The project will work better once it warms up a little bit, I think. So I still have some time.

The Hotel seen in the background of the mirror is the one that is famous in NYC for having people appear naked in the windows.  Exhibitionism is the term for it.  We saw no nudity yesterday but it is very easy to understand how the fascination developed, the situation virtually begs for it. The Hotel was constructed straddling the High Line on the west side where public nudity is perhaps more popular, encouraged by the tourists, and conceivably conducted by them as well.  

Interestingly, the name of the hotel is The Standard.  Here we were looking up the hotel's skirt.  All pretty standard stuff, really.

These were just silly pictures in a fun-house mirror.  I spoke with a friend about getting a lensbaby lens.  We decided that we would split the cost of the lens and share it, as neither of us really needs it in a full-time way.  I suppose I should check with him and see which one he wants to get.  He had one before and it got stolen.  I hear story after story about stolen camera gear in New York.  I know that the phenomenon is not exclusive to this city, but it strikes fear into the heart of the marginally impoverished nonetheless.  

The picture below reflects my fear of theft as I am keeping the camera in the most direct possible line of sight imaginable, for the purpose of insurance policy and procedure.

First Lady

The security camera was perhaps installed to protect the plaque.

I've seen this plaque before but never paid much attention to it.  Yesterday as I was walking around the "villages", both East and Greenwich, I noticed the dates on the plaque and it occurred to me that those dates coincided almost entirely with E. Roosevelt being the first lady of the nation, when she would have resided elsewhere, presumably.  Strange, I thought.   I wish that I had taken a better establishing shot of this apartment building.  It is overgrown with vines, in need of a paint job, and high on the list of places to go to buy cocaine when the guy has turned of his phone.

No, I'm kidding again.

I sat with a friend yesterday and we discussed drug use, mine.  He has been a confidant for several years and for some reason I get confessional with him after a beer or two.  Each relationship has its variety of functions and for whatever reason ours functions in that way, at times.

After many years I finally discovered why I should not do cocaine, beyond the obvious health considerations. It is because I do cocaine as if it were crack.  A normal cocaine user, of which I am at all times surrounded, can moderate their intake of cocaine so that it augments their intake of other intoxicants.  I am not of this sort.  I do cocaine as if there is a moment of epiphany awaiting me, as my heart surges upwards into rhythms unknown.  Others are able to ingest cocaine as if it were something barely made of drugs, mere children's aspirin, made for ease of use, for the relief of imaginary pain. They squirrel away little bags of it all over their person and are capable of stretching out the experience for hours, even days, on end.  I treat it as if it were the DMT experience and should be done to the full, as if some psychotropic enlightenment awaited me just on the far side of those fueled intake obsessions.

The approach itself is wildly unattainable. I know this.

I resist the word "addiction" as well as its attending concepts, but I often wonder whether my unique attractions qualify, or if the behavior of those around me suits the spirit of the term more fully.  I am able to stop most habits with relative ease.  Whether it is eating a certain way, drinking, ingesting drugs, masturbation, whatever.  I tend to do things to an alarming extreme, but also tire of said extremes much more quickly than others.

Often I will hear my friends confuse the shrewdness of drug use with actual cunning, or wit. Unable to un-blur distinctions in that glowing frenetic state, unwilling to engage in any meaningful way, they suspend one set of faculties for the acceleration of others.

I can hardly tell what is being abbreviated and what is being stressed, but that is because in that advancing state I can hardly even see sentence fragments through to completion, much less sentences. Sustained dialogue is universally impossible with cocaine users, instead there exists only unique successions of rapidly repeating monologues, interspersed with interruptions, independent of grace, resistant to diversion.

I should make note here of the important detail that I really don't do any drugs on a regular basis any more.  This conversation was mostly reflection, etc.


Wait... I was talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, wasn't I?  I know very little of her life.  She is often accused of being a lesbian, though I'm unsure of the validity of the claim.  She was not a very attractive woman, as my senses report. She was strong and represented a new type of woman during a time that perhaps the country desperately needed such. She symbolized some changes towards the Democrat agenda that were resisted by the other side, and whose accomplishments are scoffed at by many die-hard GOP'ers now.

That's all I know, and little of that qualifies as actual knowledge.

I have been having some political squabbling with an old friend of mine, mostly surrounding partisan differences.  He seems to embrace the Republican myth and today I became an avowed anarchist, so there is tension bubbling on the haunted shores of facebook.... Tonight I awoke troubled to the memory of the last post I had made, in response to his. I responded again to him, then couldn't sleep, put on a shirt, poured myself a beer, wrote this post.


But now the beer is a fading memory and the bed songs me gently onwards.  The persuasion of sleep suspended in front of me, like the memory of pain under the effects of morphine....

 

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No Toxic, Just Waste

Last year when this site was in its early fledgling-reporter days this faithful community watchdog of yours published a potentially serious health risk expose concerning the neighborhood.

The full account can be read here....  Religious whistle-blower, I.


It was all speculative, of course, but jesus crispy, isn't that how one accumulates wealth presently?


Well, it turns out that the flea market is jumping again.  Now the crazed thing happens once more on the inside of the gates, and it is a genuine weekend extravaganza, a spectacle, a real freakin' bazaar.

Where else might you find such utter curiosities, such relics.... 

and these oddities were nearly abandoned as useless remains, deserted...

They spring back to life here as casual commerce.  

I found an old videotape in a disused cardboard box called, "One Man's Junk"  

Very telling, no?

I am cursed with this evil witchy world of ours, and of course amused.  

I walked into this open coven with some friends of mine just this last weekend. After what could not have been more than a few minutes I had to text them to find out where they had gone, why had they left me.... 

I imagine that heaven must be this way also. 

Time stands, 'till.  

I occasionally casually pray there will be free-texting and wi-fi up above on high. Though I've heard rumors Verizon got the deal.  Apparently The Holy Spirit liked the name of the company.  

In the Hereafter they'll be know as "Event Verizon        " 

It's a very composed branding decision, very sensible.

The unforgivable sin... blasphemy to the holy Sprint....

All non-venial sins aside, mounting a puppet harlequin inside a monkey's cookie-jar brain.... really?

I swear here and now to you, my unswerving and mostly Catholic readers, worldwide and beyond... I did not stage the picture above. That is exactly how nature intended monkeys and fools to coexist. 

Ok, I'll admit it... I'm not sure if that's a monkey or an Eddie Munster bear, but I am absolutely positive about that evil exaggerated carny possessing its poor primate skull. 

Unless its a bear, of course, then we'll go with "Ursidae Cranium" instead of primate skull.  

Hmmm, no real ring to it...... Ursidae's not a phrase that's exactly sweeping the nation.

Who is sweeping the nation any more? 

  

Fuck this!!!!  THAT ceramic is pure porcelain primate.  

Bears can suck banana as far as I'm concerned. 

But c'mon, let's not argue.... we're all carnivores here, right?

For purposes known mostly to me, I prefer to believe it's a monkey, and probably will.  

What self-respecting primate among us would not house a harlequin or two in their whore's attic?

I might even have room for a few old mix-tapes, just some monkey-businesses....

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Cookies, confessions

I don't know what has changed, but something has.  I tried to log in to this site today and it wouldn't let me. Then it gave me a warning about not having cookies enabled, which I did.  So I went into the preferences pane and enabled "Always accept cookies" rather than "Accept cookies only from sites I visit" and voilà....  But that can't be right.  I have had a lifelong policy of always accepting cookies. But we live in unhinged and menacing times.

Charlie Sheen is the only person who seems to have it all figured out.

Google wants me to accept all cookies just to use my own site...  Strange.  Well, they must know what they're doing.  Their track record has been nearly flawless when it comes to matters of privacy. So, why should I worry.  I have other things to worry about, like the "Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress"... I really should have bought the book. Since taking the picture above I've been curious what Dungeons & Dragons fans would be reading about, especially in that regard. I wonder what a few lucky polyhedral rolls of the dice will get her to admit to....  Truth spells, power pacts, princess-warrior panties, secret succubi, who knows...

Does the world change for the worse, or for the better?  I don't know.  I suppose most people have an endearment towards their own youth, those times, their coming of age.  I remember I used to ride my bike to The Interstate Mall on 436 with my brother. There was a record store there that sold ecstasy and there was a gaming store there in the mall also, with metal figures of dragons and sorcerers, elaborate chess boards.  I gravitated towards the record store.  Don't believe what anybody tells you, ecstasy was $40 each before it was legal.  I always hear about it being $5 in 1984.  Bullshit.  Well, maybe in other places, but in Orlando, at that record store, it was expensive. I wasn't about to spend $40 of my hard-earned lawn-mowing money on a little white pill.  That all changed, of course.

One of my deepest regrets is selling off my record collection when I was younger.  I thought that I would replace all of them with cd's.  I didn't.  My brother and I both bartered away most of our collections for a small fraction of what we had paid for them.  I believe my brother might have sold his entire collection in one go, at a record store near the Jai-Alai, across the street from Club Juana.  The name of the store escapes me now. All of the artwork, the liner notes, the tactile sense of holding the records, of sitting on the floor and reading the lyrics while listening to the albums.  All gone.  Well, sort of.  A few years later I started re-buying records, but ones of a different nature.  House music... house music, house music.  I suppose when it really comes down to it I don't care much about having Jethro Tull albums any more.

I think it's funny that the sorceress above is only "part-time"....  One must wonder what Dairy Queen she works at when she's not casting spells over pubescent fat kids dreaming of Princess Leia and Boba Fett with the Solo, Han.  I bet she makes an absolutely enchanting banana fudge sundae, a bewitching root-beer blizzard, and a charmed chicken strip basket....

Confessions of a Drive-Thru Demon...



(Disclaimer: I made the mistake of reading selavy before sitting down to write today, so C. Sheen's exploits were freshly imprinted in my mind.  I wish Charlie would name one of his children Afro. Nothing would make me happier: A. Sheen)

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madamdrone

Relationships are difficult, of course.  There is always much to consider.  Time must be taken, attention must be given, care.  The other reflects the other, both for good or ill.  Having yourself reflected in another is no easy task, no simple thing to accept.  One begins to see the weaknesses, the faults.  Then it seems that the other is the source of those faults rather than merely the reflection.  One must always be on guard against blame.  Once blame takes hold then resentments are sure to follow.

People rarely change, they merely adjust.  There is some truth hidden in that, some grim glimmer of it.  It is important to know this in advance, to know what you can accept, as well as the outer reaches of your own abilities in that regard, to know your limitations, to know when you're surpassing them, leading either course.

If only each partner could see one direction as clearly as the other.

I am not talking of myself here, of course, merely offering my wisdom for those of you less fortunate than I.

That last sentence was nearly a palindrome.  Well, it got off to a good start and had an equally good ending, it was towards the middle that it fell apart. "Tulsa slut" is my favorite palindrome, because word games are not supposed to be naughty, limericks aside. And I know no women from Tulsa that would not find the phrase humorous, and neither insulting.  Also because "madam" is one of the most common palindromes and the one most likely to be used to express the form, and that slut is no madam...

Are we drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to a new era?

Ah, Satan sees Natasha. Do geese see God? Dogma: I am God

What forward fun and then back again... always repeating, like groundhog day but without having to wait.  Ok, I hadn't thought to write about palindromes today, but they have gripped this post and made away with it.  They're about as interesting as writing about Sudoku, an engaging game but not one that has produced much literature.

I've been trying to set aside more time to learn Aperture.  I see many photos that have been processed and improved because of it and I want to learn the processes, to move beyond just snapshots. There is much to learn and always so little time.  I just discovered how to flip an image, for the express purpose of this post...

Of course, relationships are difficult...

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Sperm Walls

 My nemesis over at Selavy has embarked on a new series loosely called Bonerville.  It will more resemble a pornographic Amityville by the time he's done with it, but it is his new fascination. I merely offered the name, and I applaud his endeavors as well as his particular enthusiasm for the subject matter.  I suppose it could be called Bananaburg just as well, keeping with the theme, but he seems to have fiercely attached himself onto the particular word, boner.  Its possible double meanings seem to suit his tastes.

It is likely that he will later try to elevate the project by assigning it loftier meanings.  There is no doubt that he'll be calling the whole thing San Salami by the time it's over, such is his passion for merging the sacred with the profane.

I trust that he will immerse himself into his Tool Town project with his usual gusto for visually climactic moments, his unique enthusiasm to reach the optical apex of his subject.  Though I am concerned that he not get into the same trouble on this project with under-age models as he has in the past.  He could re-develop a reputation in this regard, if he's not cautious to the point of secrecy.

But I'm sure his Pickle Pictures series will be a great personal success.

At the end of the day, what piddling matter are finances when you are happy?

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Sherman

I've decided to once again shift the focus of this site away from sports-poop stories towards canine portraiture.

Sherman is a seasoned veteran, having worked very closely with a neighborhood photographer already.

No, I kid again.

I did take this picture today at the dog park though, and I was so excited about it I had to post it.

No wild back-story, no shenanigans, no amassing of dreams nor cloud-hunting fantasy scenarios, just Sherman...

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My time keeps on slipping

I awoke from another dream, another place, another time.  Winter is coming to a close soon.  It is getting warmer and raining, though not always in unison.  I awoke much earlier than I had hoped to, still wishing myself backwards into the night, I only desired more sleep and the dreams to allow that time were ever renewable there in the dark mindlit glow, that I held vast sums of it, fortunes in hours, a mint of minutes... that legions of camels transported my time in all directions across the deserts of the world, safely overseeing the transference to pastoral nomads, who then whisk my time away stealthily to yet other places, mountain hideouts, high plain plateaus, where my transitory gems are increased nightly through the returning generosity of the stars... or, alternately, my vast sums are multiplied through shrewd trade, plunder and pillage.  Genghis Time, I am.


The other day I texted my wife that, "The birds are back..!!!"  She responded, "What birds?"

Today we will make a plan and go do some thing, or things.  It is my only day off, though I have had more days off than usual lately.  I have not felt well enough to go into work some days.  I want to learn how to better use my camera, but it takes time and discipline, something that I might not possess in the way my newly warmongering morning moments had envisioned.

I hear her waking up in the other room now, talking to the dog, praising his steadfastness in sleepful guardianship. He is the sentinel of the end of our bed, ever on watch of our dozing kingdom, responsible for overseeing my vast hordes of eras, he rides them across oceans of galaxies each night, returning them safely each morning with a yawn, eternally in service to His Royal Rolex....

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latch-22

I walk home each of the days that I work, by or near, the street on which these posters are hung.  Or is it posted? I wonder about the goings-on inside the storefront where they are, behind the steel black door from which they must emanate.  Artists, I'm sure. Perhaps living a life that I might want to, or perhaps living one that resembles the one I've already lived, the one that I chose to further avoid, whenever possible.

I heard myself tonight in a bar, after work, drinking a beer, offering sagely advice to one of my work friends, telling him to produce more than he consumes, and other gems on how to get by, how to accept the dull slow-motion death that is subsistence, how to negotiate his own way across the river styx.  

I had to leave.  I couldn't bear to hear any more, another word and I might have cut out my tongue.

"Femme fatales emerged from shadows to watch this creature fair,

 boys stood upon their chairs to make their point of view,

 and I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey..." 

    -David Bowie

I want to know what goes on behind that door, that latch, 22.

It might be like overhearing a foreign conversation, fascinating and intriguing at first, but then dull and disappointing in time, once the details emerge, when the result becomes clear, evident.

All of the conversations of strangers end up on Facebook eventually.

One need only like away...

Facebook is not the breakthrough in insincerity that we had hoped it would be, that we had all secretingly longed for.

It's not even a secret steel door with a ramp.

I must know....

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Wonder

Grey day.  Not even the thought of coffee could get me out of bed.  Just Barkley and myself watching tv in repose.  Not even good tv.  My favorite programs have all fallen apart on me.  I won't tell you what they are, it'll age me too much, and old selavy will see it as an "in" to denounce me as being "orthodox", a damning assessment in the edgy world of the internet.  A risk I simply can not take.  I don't even watch new shows on tv, all of the ones I watch are in their 5th season, or more.  The dog and I eagerly await the the return of Mad Men...

Ok, the coffee is taking hold now.  It's making me want a beer.  The body's chemistry is a delicate balance and much care must be taken with it.  Also, I have to work today... Wait, I choose to work today, so a beer is almost out of the question.

A car alarm is going off behind me somewhere, out the window, down on the street, fighting its way through the thick grey to get to my ears.  It stopped, then it started again.


I would describe myself as a Stevie Wonder fan.  I have all of his albums from the 70's, even the Syreeta stuff.  I have several of the 80's albums, though I don't often admit to it, much less listen to them. I actually love "Journey through the Secret Life of Plants", an album that most people dismiss as pompous and self-involved.  It WAS a soundtrack for fuck's sake.  What other artist gets so disregarded for a soundtrack?  Thank God Prince stopped making movies....

I own absolutely no S.W. material after 1985.  "We Are The World" ruined it all for me.  I can even occasionally stomach "I Just Called To Say I Love You" if nobody's watching.... Has there ever been a more arrogant song than "We Are The World"?  Talk about defining others through otherness, wow. Wait, I was going to make fun of the song but then I went back and watched it on youtube.  I'm a hopeless sucker...  I think Bruce Springsteen might have crapped his pants during the filming of that video, twice.

Ebony and I'mverywhite...

Does anybody remember in 1999 when Oscar De La Hoya pooped his pants in the first round during the fight against Felix Trinidad?  This is all speculation, of course, but an early punch thrown by Trinidad in the 1st round stopped De La Hoya and I predicted then that he had pooped his pants.  Nobody else in the world has ever agreed with me, and certainly no boxing fans will listen to my wild theories for very long without offering to knock my nose in, but I believe my boxing-poop stories, each and every one of them.

Anyway, I often play S.W. albums at work in their entirety.  There was a girl there who was attempting to sing along with one of them, expressing her like-minded fondness for S.W., in her own way.  At one point Stevie launched into some solo acrobatics and really flexed his vocal talents. She exclaimed simply, "I'm not even gonna' to try to keep up"...


"You've been out of key and out of time for about an hour, why stop now?"

It is for this, and things like it, that people hate me.  I am certain of it.

I would say that, "I don't know why I don't keep my mouth shut" but it wasn't me that needed to this time.  Why must the suffering of the world go on and on and on and on, perpetually, ad quod damnum.

I am the victim here.


Ok, nothing else to report today.  I will be updating the world with my boxing opinions, especially on those fights already discussed into the ground, ad nauseam. I will be bringing fresh and much needed perspective to the sport in this way.  Am I the only one that thinks Bert Sugar is the white Don King?  Just having to look at pictures of him in the daylight turns me forever off from the sport.  I prefer Teddy Atlas's good-hearted mispronunciation and misuse of phrases any day.  My dream is to watch Bert Sugar give up smoking cigars and lose that awful bookie's hat, then retire from public life altogether.  A meager dream, but it is what gets me out of bed some days.... that, and the coffee, and the car alarms.

...the lingering amorphous masses above

There is hardly a cloud in the sky today.  A beautiful (but very cold) northern winter day.  The only clouds above aren't even worth mentioning, just little tremors of lingering water vapor.  Just enough to remind one that the sky above is often ruined by those pernicious fuckers.  But not today... today, the blue alone wins.

I miss Frisco.  I have been devising of ways to get him back, arranging scenarios in my mind in which, under dense cloud cover, we would re-abduct him, enter him into the feline witness protection program, assign him a new identity, move him from safe-house to safe-house… Wait! Frisco's a she, so a sex-change makes the most immediate sense to conceal her identity.  I wonder how much such a thing costs. Never mind the cost, it's worth it.

Perhaps some research is needed here though, before we strike.


I wish that Rachel and myself didn't have to work today, or ever again.  I would take her out cloud-hunting.  She is my favorite cloud stalker.  Sometimes we bag as much as a bursting skyful in a single season, though often stopping for coffee and beer breaks helps, as is shown in the picture below when we were hunting the infamous Brooklyn billows:

I took Barkley out bar-hopping for his 3rd birth-doggy-day (21 in human years, legally able to drive drunk now if he chooses)...  The picture below was taken just before we went out.  The "after" pictures are too shameful for a respected journalistic site like this.  I will save them for a more late-night post when my daytime readers will perhaps be asleep.

Barks is an invaluable asset to any serious cloud hunter. Whether we use cloud baiting, calling or flushing he stands eagerly at wait while we take those shapeshifters down. Once the clouds have been clipped he merrily retrieves and bags them, never destroying the delicate cotton pelt or gilded linings.

Not to fear: we use the entire cloud product as either food, shelter, clothing or commerce.

(Barkley: adult male billow-killer)

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In search of lost notes

I keep waking up and falling back asleep. I can't tell what is dream and what is half-imagined memory or fear.  Strange things find their way into my waking thoughts, unquestioned and unable to escape. I dreamt about a lost book of photography and when I awoke I looked for it for several minutes before I separated the dream from my morning, the fantasy from my apartment bookshelf.

I found a way of searching my mail app. for the lost notes.  The problem is that I must find a unique word in each of the notes to search for it.  They don't show up listed in any normal folder, but they are somehow searchable.

I found one late last night and it was updated up until the night before.

The problem is that no matter how many of them I find I will always believe there was some lost brilliance, floating out on the aether, unreachable.

Probably not, but such is the fantasy of loss.  The one that got away.

The pictures above and below were taken by me at The Met.  Pictures of pictures. They are either Stieglitz, Steichen or Strand.  I believe it is Stieglitz above and Steichen below, though I'm not sure.  There is, of course, my reflection in the image above, and some hairy-faced pervert that would not go away.  I enjoy the walls of The Met, but the people can be tedious.  It is always a depraved wonder to overhear their conversations.

Yikes, speaking of overheard conversations.  I went to the lobby bar at The Parker Meridien Hotel with my buddy and his wife, who were celebrating her 30th birthday.  While I was waiting for them to arrive I overheard a woman, she was discussing the lobby of the hotel, the ceiling.  This is her gem, word for word:  "It's like Paris.  I've never actually been to Paris, but it's what I imagine it to be like."

This was from one of the saved notes that I recovered.

The word that I used to search was "whiskey."  This was the sentence I was hoping would be found: "It's somewhat difficult to get drunk on beer, very easy with wine, and impossible not to with whiskey."

All true.  I think I might have even used the sentence in a post from a few days ago, referencing the self-governing properties of beer.  I'm too lazy to search any more.  It is an odd thing to use your computer to search for yourself, for your own thoughts.  Knowing that if even a single unique fragment would spring to mind then you could use it against the machine and regain some lost piece, some semi-coherent fragment, of self.

I think my reflection taking the picture of the picture in the image above is all that I can stand to recover for now.

My two written examples just above prove that the notes might not be the lost writings of Joyce, but sometimes all it takes is an idea to get you started on something, sometimes not.

It's just like real writing, I've never actually done any real writing, but it's what I imagine it to be like....

Notes

I have not felt good for days, a terrible headache.  I went to The Met to try and get out of the house for a couple of hours yesterday. We wandered from room to room and looked at images and stared down artifacts.

I discovered that a great many notes that I had made in my phone had been deleted.  A long and disconnected stream of ideas for writing, snippets of conversations to myself, randomly overheard statements, phrases, poems,etc.  I had thought that these notes were being backed up in my mail app. on my computer but when I went and looked I found that they are sync'd, so the notes had been deleted from there as well.

How much more useless can technology be?

I plugged in my external backup drive and figured that I'd search through the mail folder on there and recover the documents from that archive.

Nope.  Failed, all of it.

So what started out as an attempt to recover a few lost files from my phone has revealed systemic failure from the ground up.  It is heartbreaking, of course.  Not because of the lost files, but because now it means I will need to do many things to even get to a point that I am comfortable with believing my data is safe.  I will need to spend money, and time.

For weeks there were double copies of all of my notes being generated.  I never bothered figuring out why. I won't bore you with the details, but it was something that I couldn't bring myself to troubleshoot.  I was able to delete the extra notes without a problem and I figured that I would just figure it out eventually, but not now.  Now the phone seems to be randomly deleting the originals, some of which are not backed up anywhere, though they should be, somewhere.

I logged onto gmail and searched my trash folder. Every other imaginable worthless and forgotten communique was there, no notes.

There are so many systems in place that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but there it is.

Unstoppable, it seems, progress.

My headache marches on and on, unreachable by the disaster of technology, but somehow preserved by it.

Frisco

Last night, after our second trip to Brooklyn and back, when we returned home, after walking the dog, we found a cat stranded in the hallway of our apartment building. As we were walking upstairs only a few minutes earlier we had heard the celebratory sounds of a party, the youthful bursts of laughter, barely distinguishable from the sounds of breaking glass. Then there were the sounds of a great argument, some unbridgeable misunderstanding, or sudden unexpected knowledge, perhaps an infidelity, the slamming of doors, yelling, the sounds of breaking glass.  Something had shattered the mood of the party.

The very friendly cat remained in the hallway, looking for an entrance to return home.

We knocked, there was a sound behind the door, we knocked again, more sounds of movement.

We said, "Your cat's out here, you've got to let him back in."

Nothing.

This went on for minutes.  Nothing.

We took the cat into our apartment.  Barkley, our dog, responded immediately and in kind.  The cat, however, had claws.  Barkley was simply too curious. They must be kept apart.  We tried everything.  There are no doors in our apartment other than the front one.

I went down to the superintendent's apartment and knocked. It was after midnight. He came to the door, shirtless.  I asked if he had keys to the apartment on the first floor, in the back.  He said, no. I questioned his opinion on proper procedural protocol. He was as useless as the day he was born.

I returned to the budding zoo upstairs.  It had become clear that the cat would be with us for the night.  My wife and I created a hodgepodge stronghold against canine/feline interaction between the bedroom and the living room.  It was also becoming clear that I would be sleeping on the floor of the living room.  Frisco, as I had already named him, even though she was a female, was not about to allow us to lock ourselves up in the bedroom while she was on the outs.  I prepared my fate with pillow and comforter, a crepe thin yoga mat would be the only thing between myself and the carpet, then the wood floor.

I took a klonopin and awaited its many anti-epileptic comforts.

Nothing.

The cat purred and rubbed its head against my head and gave me cat mustache with its tail, ever returning, ever purring.  I could feel the sleep window passing by, forever.

The sun came up after 20 or 30 hours of waiting.  I went back downstairs and knocked on the door, no movement this time.  I left a second note:

We have your cat, if you ever want to see it alive again you will do exactly as you're told with no deviance from our instructions.

No, it was our phone number, and instructions to call.

Nothing yet.

Tomorrow we will have her spayed and declawed, get her booster shots, perhaps have her hair dyed to conceal her identity, get her an identifier tattoo on her inner ear, and a new collar.


Frisco sure seems to like it here.

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Brooklyn Heights

We went and looked at apartments today, with the thought of buying.  We looked at empty rooms and imagined our things there, our lives there, or there.  We opened cabinets and looked out windows, remarked on views and directions, distances.  We shook hands with strangers and expressed interest in everything that was said.

The last apartment we looked at was still inhabited.  Their lives were not very far off from our lives, it seemed.  They had a young diaper-wearing boy who slept in the bedroom with them.  There were bookshelves covering one wall, several cameras and lenses on the shelf, Nikon's, a large monitor and a powerful computer.  They thanked us for considering their apartment.  They seemed nice and not unlike us.

They were seeking more space.  I imagined them having sex quietly in the bed with the child sleeping.  Under the covers. Him likely entering her from behind, as she lies on her side, so that it would raise no suspicion if suddenly discovered, found out, etc.  Her emphasis on his near stillness as she arches towards him in what might be misunderstood as a sleeping position, by a child.  Or do they sneak out onto the couch quietly, a yoga mat, standing in the bathroom?  How does a couple go about accomplishing the act when there is suddenly an alien life form in the room, curious about all things at once, at all times aware, except perhaps when sleeping.

I wondered about other things also.

We walked around neighborhoods and discussed the various charms we happened upon.  We looked at electronic maps built into our phones and stretched and compressed distances to our liking, to our elastic understanding of this new world.

We rode the subway home and approximated our new lives.  I again imagined the act of secret sex.  I envisioned tactics of concealment, explanations.

I conceived many things at once, unexplainable things.

I wondered about other things also.

Diary of a Madman

So, we went to see "Diary of a Madman" last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. It's based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol. It is a funny and disturbing near-monologue in which the main character, performed by Geoffrey Rush, expresses his descent into madness and dissolution.  Lots of laughs at first, not so many in the second half.

The quest for identity, for voice, can be a difficult and lonely one.  I missed the very end of the performance. I mistimed a bathroom break, then made the mistake of taking the word of the usher on how much time was left in the performance.  The last few minutes becoming increasingly uncomfortable to witness.  They were lost for me.  As I was waiting to enter the theater I said, "I had thought that this was Diary of  Madame, I expected a very different performance..." Always the quipster.

I would go see it again. I doubt I'll have the chance. Apparently the tickets are nearing selling out and we were very lucky to have gotten the seats that we did, just a few rows from the stage.

I doubt that I will watch "Pirates of the Caribbean" with any renewed interest, but I will be more aware of Geoffrey Rush.   If nothing else Pirates succeeds on the level that it hopes to. What more can be asked of a film really?  I always find it funny that my friends here in New York feel obligated to denounce films like "Charlie's Angels"... as if they expected to get in the theater and "Doctor Zhivago" would emerge on the screen before them instead.

What can be done?

The character reminded me of old mange-knuckles over at the DMV but I've run out of time to draw any coherent comparisons.  It is time for my wife and I to go buy a home in Brooklyn, she tells me.  It did occur to me that ever since I wrote the DMV piece I've been struggling with what has become an unwieldy blog, a forum for either my complaints about age, or me positioning myself against subjects that I clearly know little about.  My buddy at selavy warned me against this, said it makes me sound like a politician.  He couldn't be more right.  So, for now, I will stop with all this senseless campaigning, and get down to balancing the budget.


Until then, your faithful despondent,
-April 43rd