nine years ago today

i was en route from North Carolina to Washington Heights. i was 22 years old, and i knew everything. i was in love (obsessed) with a beautiful dancer from Sarah Lawrence College i had met that summer in Durham.

i fell in love with Manhattan the first time i saw it. i was 18 years old, and i knew some things. i was in love (not obsessed) with a beautiful opera singer from Duke University i had met that autumn in Durham.

i decided to move to New York on February 10, 1998. i was 21 years old, and i knew i was going to become a lighting designer. it was in love (at first sight) with modern dance after a performance by Parsons Dance Company in Chapel Hill.

moving there changed everything, but:

it wasn't the beautiful dancer.
it wasn't the designing.
it wasn't Manhattan.

moving there changed everything, because:

if i hadn't moved there, i couldn't have left the beautiful dancer.
if i hadn't moved there, i couldn't have left the designing.
if i hadn't moved there, i couldn't have left Manhattan.

and

if i hadn't left, there would be no Part 2.

to be continued...

dancing monkeys

i read this morning how W.S. Burroughs once remarked to a student at Naropa that "[he couldn't] see what the government would want with a bunch of international homos sitting around hatching cancers of the prostate." i think he had an excellent point, but that's besides the point.

the point is that i had a vision last night before i went to sleep. i reached a stopping point in my book and closed my eyes for a moment. i was overcome by a vision of giant monkeys.
it was beautiful.

i watched as these behemoth Old World monkeys danced their timeless dance on the top of the world, playing in snow-capped mountain tops until -

i started named things, and the monkeys became Hanuman, and the icy peaks became Kailash, and my beautiful vision came collapsing back into this flat reality my mind was able to comprehend.

chocolate cake before bed =

i woke up with my ears ringing from a dream about a circle. James was in the passenger seat and responded "French Aquarian" to questions unasked. i was looking for sushi on the winter solstice, and there were children in the gift store demonstrating their ESP while an ice cream truck drove by playing "Fur Elise." but all this is besides the point.

the point is that a beautiful, wise woman i've never known once asked me: "does your soul cast about like an old paper bag?"

and i didn't know what to say.

my morning so far (in 3 parts)

Part 1 (ritual)

i go to my favorite corporate coffee shop for my daily caffeinated sacrament. on the way in, i see an incredibly beautiful woman in her late thirties. i do not let the child in her lap get in the way of the lust in my heart.

Part 2 (oblivion)

i read the local arts weekly, wholly oblivious to my surroundings as the barista learns how to use the coffee grinder. the article deals with Griselda Blanco and her one-time lover whom she met while incarcerated in California. the man was nearly 30 years her junior.

Part 3 (circles)

at the condiment bar i hear a man talking and place my attention. he asks me if i knew the man in front of me in line was Fred Thompson. i said no, but that Arthur Branch was one hell of a district attorney. the moral of the story?

this morning i lusted after a failed presidential contender's wife.

a (nerdy) joke

i was driving last night thinking about my time in university, and i thought of this one-liner:

i wanted to become an autodidact,
but i couldn't find anyone to teach me.

i just caught myself

typing the "1" key three times in an attempt to enter a period in an email to a friend of mine. i was totally befuddled by what was happening until i realized: dear god! my mind thinks my fingers are texting! and so,

texting is a treacherous, subtle media devouring my soul.

i never texted until about two years ago, and it has slowly been rewiring my neural pathways ever since. when i first started, i refused to use the auto-spell and so my communications were stunted and infrequent. but over time i came to trust my phone's brain and the texts became more frequent. there was even a manic period about a year ago when i became obsessed with texting non-traditional haiku. trite little compositions like:

here i go again
throwing art into the void
haiku text couture

but thankfully this passed after a couple of months.

i then started examining the text as a media as the result of an intense flirtation in September 2007. it felt like i was instant messaging, but - as i observed my anxiety grow waiting for her response - i realized that it only seemed to be instant, that in fact the person's phone may be off or the SMS gods may be frowning. i realized that texting is, in essence, a one-way communication. it is the perfect medium for communication in either very quiet places (like libraries) or very loud places (like concerts).

we are paying a premium for telegraph technology, and somewhere Samuel Morse is smiling.

i woke up mid-sentence

in a rumbly pile of words with sweat on the backs of my knees. i was dreaming of my friends, ripping apart their lives and putting them back together, making a collage so much greater than the whole.
my life is the pieces, these words are the glue and it's all true -

except for the parts that didn't happen.

[lapse]

i spent yesterday morning washing my karma and it felt sad. when i went to bed, the Manhattan dread of not being able to fall asleep was on me.

the experiment ended 15 minutes ago

and i drove home from West Palm on US-1 dodging the drunk drivers with my ears ringing and the beer drying down my back, listening to Neko Case. but all this is besides the point.

the point is that i spent half the night looking for her,
the girl i didn't want to see.

"it's getting kinda quiet in my silly head"

not really.

but it's not so noisy as it was, and i am learning that karma is what compels us towards our dharma.

lumpy throated Thursdays & the sobbing altar blues

the experiment continues and my mind has been a wreck for the last 24 hours. but all this is besides the point.

the point is that tonight a little girl handed me a pink rose from her bouquet at the end of the performance and said "this is for you." it was less than five days ago that i tried to tell a friend of mine with a heart murmur that the entire universe lives in the center of a rose... but i never knew it was pink.

backstage

i am in the middle of an experiment not of my own design, outcome uncertain with upwards of 30 children on stage. the children are not related to the experiment. but all this is besides the point.

the point is that i have no point.

but if i did have a point, it would be that as an adolescent i read a collection of Ginsberg's journals from the Fifties. since then i have - from time to time - mimicked his practice of keeping dream diaries. i woke last night at 1:26am and wrote:

"dreams formed of chocolate ice cream. waking with leg cramps and plans to do it all again. Tommy's voice in my head from hours before. retardation, gas stations and discipline. i will not text her. waking with an erection in Brooklyn."

it's raining outside...

and my carpets are soaked from writing around the things i want to say. there is a madman in my living room, and i am learning the joys of Internet radio. i have not slept well for more than two months, and attention is always placed; nothing is ever brought to it.

i focused mine today on Vishuddha chakra,
as i breathed through the sob tears.

a quantum love story

last night,

we watched quarks falling in love with neutrinos, dancing in and out of existence in the skies over Miami, talking about love in the bed with the lights on. i drove home alone - with my shirt smelling like her - and i went to sleep.

i dreamed of my first true love. she told me to remember 1994, and how she had left her smell on me as she stuffed my clothes back in my suitcase. i woke up at 5:27am.

i do not know the meaning of these things.

tonight:

there are Russians slipping notes under doormats and i am walking the line between homage and plagiarism, stuffing letters into self-addressed and stamped envelopes marked return to sender. i am trading for sonnets with Renaissance women and theorizing about the homogenization of experience in parking lots. there is mattar panir in my refrigerator, and police tape holding together Mardou's apartment.

tomorrow: i hope to midwife a manifesto.

i have lust in my heart...

for my friend's new computer.

i have had Mac envy since the late Nineties, and over the past decade every time i've stood at the precipice of taking the plunge i've pulled back, afraid that it just wouldn't be there for me in the future.

things started to change this past December.

i downloaded iTunes on my PC, but it sat on my desktop uninstalled for more than a month. i didn't want to convert file formats. i didn't want to be stuck with a software i didn't like. i didn't want to be that guy. so i made duplicate copies of every mp3 on my computer - thousands and thousands of songs. but eventually i mustered the moxy...

it changed my life.

i bought an iPod, i started visiting the Mac website, i started thinking about buying a computer even though it wasn't time yet. worst of all, people started coming into my life who were Mac users. but these were not the emotional, PC-bashing, militant Macophytes from college. they were level-headed adults who spoke of their MacBooks with the same quiet confidence i use when speaking of my favorite pen (Pilot Precise V5). and then my friend - the one whose computer i covet - made the switch. she had been a PC girl all her life, and now her transition could serve as an experiment to see what happens.

now i find myself, blogging in one tab, pricing Macs in the other...

i woke up this morning...

with the unwritten poem of a dead man stuck in my head, and i am left wondering which is more odd:

1) that i thus woke.

or

2) that i no longer consider this odd.

last week...

i decided to spice up my reading list, which typically consists of the writings and rantings of degenerates and madmen. i figured Wuthering Heights would be a nice transition. i remembered enjoying it in college, and i took comfort in knowing that Bronte died when she was barely 30 years old from consumption. but all this is besides the point.

the point is that i have been in something of a funk since Friday the 4th. i initially blamed it on the jingoism, but my melancholy has outlasted the celebration. i now think maybe it's the novel that has me down. so i am faced with two options:

1) continue on to the bitter end, and find what humor i can in picturing Heathcliff not as an "imp of Satan" (p. 43), but rather as a fat, orange cat.

2) abandon this experiment, and return to the familiarity of self-absorbed post-modernity.

time will tell...

in an act of super-genius...

i dropped last night my phone precisely into a glass of water as i finished watching a documentary on Jeff Tweedy. i immediately pulled it out, turned it off, and spent the next hour in triage. i left it at work, under the watchful gaze of a fan.

i knew i would know nothing 'til the morrow, and i watched my reaction that night - how much emotion i have invested in that tiny little plastic rectangle. i imagined turning it on and finding it alive, but much like a stroke victim or head trauma survivor. whereby the 4, 6, 8 and 9 survived, but the 2, 3, 5 and 7 were only quasi-functional. all my beautiful prime numbers diminished into a the uncertainty of Heisenberg. and the 1 entering as 0, 0 as 1 - a binary Bizarro world where digital determinism is turned on its head.

the phone returned to life today at 10am, uninjured.

as ever,

i just finished As Ever, the collected correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. the first letter is dated January 1947 and the last April 1967. this is what i think:

twenty years of letters, lust, Zen and prison.
how long can we hold onto our youth?

until we let it go?

or

until we realize that nothing important
ever grows old or changes.

(i'm going to meet a one-shoed Moldovan
who cried last night over the death of her friend's cat,
declined credit cards and graves
in lieu of cremation)
she asked me why i read the book.

i said:

for fun,
because it's there,
because it's a testament
to the endurance of friendship,
how lovers of youth
can age with grace,

and not go fleeing
from amphetamine-stained sheets
into the San Francisco night.

how to let go of those that leave us,
and love them just the same.