Opportunity.

In the morning, I did not get up until after my alarm had died. I lay in bed and kept my eyes shut. I was waiting for that frisson of cognition where one realizes with a certainty that this cannot be the dream, and that the dream cannot be reality. It is like catching the clutch on a stick shift. The gears mesh, the wheels turn, the sunlight goes from blue to grey and I open my eyes.

Outside I can hear cars going up and down the small street that leads to my parents's house. The neighborhood is a fortress now, and I live in a garret. Once people lived with each other as a community. Now the community lives without the people, a lumbering golem whose life begins with the sound of money being transferred. Everything is changing these days. I don't even carry coins anymore, I just throw them as tips to the girls at starbucks, those flashing bright eyes that seem so full of purpose and potential but instead lead to nothing more than a frayed black smock, turning grey with fingerless age.

In the mirror there is a person looking back at me who desperately needs a shave and will not get one. I examine my face for signs of emotion, some quality that might bleed through my pores and run colorful. There is nothing there - there never really is anything, except around the eyes. That's how I am different every morning. It isn't the hair, it's the eyes. Today they are sliced brown, the color of tea at the bottom of white porcelain cups. There is a flicker behind that dark golden bruise and perhaps it is something left of my dream, a dream wherein I stood on a vast vield of terrifying grass and watched the sky write words with a piece of charcoal.

Today I am going to work but I don't really know where I am going - my briefcase holds a sandwich and a though and maybe that's enough. I think about Deepak and I think about the sea, and perhaps that is why I think about Deepak. We can take this boat. You're damn right we can. You're goddamn right.

-Rich

a whispered wild gyre plays

undercurrents.

I talked with Giulia last night. We discussed things that had happened recently, and as is the case with people who are comfortable with each other's voices, the words didn't really mean anything.

Giulia mentioned a myth wherein a man holds the entire universe within himself. We both believed this myth to be true, no matter whether the story was an allegory or not. The human body is a mystery of subtle action, which is why creationists often use the body to affirm their belief in a higher power. Simply put, everything within us is so complex that to have evolved from nothing at all seems arbitrarily impossible. I digress, though I would like to talk about that argument(and why it is facetious) in another post.

The universe does rest in my body, because it is in everyone. It is simply a matter of understanding that the universe that we are in is solely based on how it reacts to us - reality is a selfish thing, and we should be glad this is so. To have existence depend upon another person would be a dangerous thing, and though sometimes I think it is possible to fall into a situation in which this is true, I do not think that is the norm. Then we move in closer and examine the cells that make up our bodies. They are these small, fragile and self contained worlds. Each cell pulsates with a life of its own, each one lives and dies over a timeline that to it must seem to be an eternity of existence. There is a heart to each cell - a center in theory, and it may or may not spin like the spiral arms of a galaxy we would like to call home.

Closer in, and suddenly the atoms exist like ray traced planets. The modern conception of the atoms suggests "shells" of probability - where an electron may be discovered, if one bothered to look. It is like finding a treasure at a yard sale. One of the more beautiful things about the atoms themselves are the strong and weak gravitational forces...atoms repel themselves up until a certain point, and at that point they hurtle together and latch into one object - that crushing momentum creates a massive amount of energy discharged as heat and light. Isn't this love, right here? Isn't this exactly what humanity does, what humanity eschews in favor of rigid formality by CHOICE, because we are afraid of that explosion and we are afraid of that hurtling fate?

The universe, if one thinks of it as anything but love, begins within our stomachs, it begins as a writhing fabric soaked in stars.

-Rich
tomorrow we can drive to Europe and see the sights

Songtooth

It is a Tuesday and I feel like Monday was lost, left somewhere in America's biggest mall and taken by someone who wanted it more. It is strange that we can want things that we do not love, with such ferocity as to rival the strength of any other desires. We don't give a damn about things but we will fight for them. Maybe that's a terrible thing. Somehow I am certain that it is a good thing - somehow I know that within that kernel of knowledge is a truth about humanity that I would rather choke on than laugh to.

When I sat in that hospital corridor and looked up at the lights I left like a camera was watching the weight of my throat as I breathed in and out, and I thought about that crippling grasp of old age which curls slowly around your neck. We know it is there - it sometimes touches us on our veins, where we can count our pulse in fear. Yet it does not scare us - there is a gentleman's agreement between ourselves and our age, in that we may ignore it until our bodies remember the weight of gravity. When we are children we fear gravity and cry, we cry arrogant until rooms are full with the sound. When we are old we remain silent. We have lost a game that mattered to us, and only too late have we realized that it was never a game at all, it was a tease, tantalus with grapes above his head on prescient branches.

This girl is seventeen and she is terrified and when I held her hand I remembered being terrified and seventeen and part of me was in love with here, there, where white lights played cheerful pantomime on her cheeks.

Later in the night I found myself drunk, sitting in a bar and laughing, because I could. I laughed and the sounds fell out over my feet, crawling towards the windows and railing and searching for escalators to the stars. I let them go and drank another shot. There was a full moon somewhere but I didn't feel like looking for it that night. I still don't.

-Rich
somewhere in this shaved undying boneyard

the sour.

The sky is grey but clear. It shines as if reflecting light from the earth - light pollution from every living thing around us. I lay on my back and let the cold air wash over me. It feels like carpet being pulled over my body, starting at the feet and moving up slowly. I let my fingers dig into the ground and my heels follow. It seems like only a matter of time until I am swallowed up by the earth and perhaps it is. If I lay here, unmoving, the grass would grow around me, dirt would cover me, and I would sleep under a mound of life - teeming with insects and worms and those stable roots of grass and weeds that push their faces ever upwards.

In my hand is a stone and I am feeling the surface as well as I can without looking at it. I think that I should be able to know what a stone looks like by what it feels like. It shouldn't be a struggle to associate one reality with another - even if they are different in appearance, they are the same reality. The stone I feel is the same stone that I see if I look at it. The essence of the stone remains - it is hard and it feels rough like old leather. It does not fray under my fingers, nor tear...it is solid and in my mind I can see that solidness as a wash of brown. Reality bronzes itself if we can remember it.

There are clouds above me and I wonder if perhaps it is going to rain again, and whether I will feel it this time. Rain was something that I struggled to ignore for a good part of my life and to this day I still sometimes walk outside into the rain without noticing it is even there. I have trained myself so diligently to only see those things I want to see, to feel the things that I want to feel. It is a training that I fight now to forget. That is why I am lying on the ground, prostrated before myself, in an effort to remember the world around me. I am scared that nothing will ever match what it feels like, nothing I see will relate to anything I know even if it is inside of myself.

A bird flies over me and with each wingbeat I can see the air moving down, that motion dispersed through the atmosphere until it settles in my heart, a shimmering ocean of waves that shine in the light of an overcast sky.

-Rich

cash rules everything around me

The Sun is Down.

I had just gotten off the phone with a friend of mine when I realized I was hungry. The realization was stark and sudden - it felt the way it does when you see a person being shot in a movie. There is a moment of plain confusion, a wide open space full of blank pages, and then everything is filled with scribbles and words that only make sense when the camera pulls back. I was hungry. I was surprised I was hungry, and perhaps that made the hunger seem more important. It wasn't the kind of far of hunger that one sees...hunger that slowly humps the horizon as it makes its way to your stomach. It was sharp and painful and required immediate attention. I did what any other man would have done. I ordered Dominos Pizza.

I used the online order because if technology has done anything for us it has made us cognizant of the fact that we can be as lazy as shit and get away with it. This is something that I am not particularly averse to, except that my vanity is affected over time(I would get fat) so I tend not to use the laziest methods available to accomplish things. In this instance I did - even knowing that I could simply walk outside and a few blocks away to procure food. Midnight, the clock hitting 12 and striking 12 times, does not mean that food is unavailable, unless we are counting in pumpkins and glass slippers.

The pizza arrived at 12:20 and I went downstairs to get it, where I discovered that I had not paid with a credit card online and had, in fact, been required to have cash. This was news to me - if there is anything else that the internet has begrudgingly taught us, it is that electronics muck things up just as much as they speed up the process. In the end everything tends to average out and you find yourself a little more frustrated, having saved no time, and really gained nothing except a tingling need for Excedrin. I had to go upstairs to get my wallet and, as I was turning to enter the secure door of my lovely apartment/fortress building, I noticed two teenage kids standing outside walking past. I paid no notice to them(who pays attention to teenage BOYS) and went upstairs, grabbed my wallet, came back down, and walked out to find that those two lovely rapscallions had robbed the pizza guy of his money. Which amounted to 13 dollars. Which was somewhat on the same level of sadness as the fact that he had been robbed.

I ended up calling the manager and doing a CC transaction and paying for the pizza while tipping the poor guy 13 dollars to make up for the loss. That was when I discovered that the kids had stolen my goddamn pizza along with the money, and I was furious.

I was hungry, I was a bit scared, and the security guards that finally showed up did nothing to assuage my problems. It was absolutely wonderful.

-Rich
I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden in the shade

Indiscreet.

Outside it is cold in the mornings but when I wake up and look, all I see is a wide swatch of sunlight that is laying over everything. It even manages to make it through the manmade canyons of reflective glass and red stained bricks to come through my window and cover my face. My face is turned towards the window and when I open my eyes every morning, if it is sunny outside I wonder if perhaps I am dead, and if this is what heaven is supposed to be - cold and white, starkly dangerous and yet soothing to the touch. It reminds me of holding a jellyfish through a rubber glove, where nematocysts are unavailable for comment but the soft and wavy motions travel from fingertips to the palm of my hand.

The walk towards Fell's Point is thick with the smell of seawater, and it cuts further towards the back of the throat in dry winter air. The distance is dotted by people in various levels of exertion, and their words echo across the point while their mouths exhume thick slabs of steam that trail behind them like grey and fibrous scarves. I walk and breathe quietly. Sometimes I worry that when I am breathing out and steam rises, I am losing part of myself that I can't recall ever having had. It is a short and childish fear but it hits so quickly that I am really afraid, very much afraid until I remember that I am no longer a child. I am not afraid of the dark anymore...secretly I still fear the amorphous mass of shape that is the evening. I think I always will.

I recall during my walk that this world is really a million worlds, that the world I am in is not the one that you live in, or the one that the girl walking past me lives in. All of us have our different worlds and all of us can almost touch the others around us when we kiss or laugh, or hug to share warmth. A girl told me about penguins and I wonder if perhaps we are like them in more ways that we like to imagine - except that they are better dressed. In an existence where death remains so close, laying next to them in sleep like a deposed lover, understanding comes much sooner. They understand that everything changes so quickly that it seems like nothing has changed at all, and they are dressed for the occasion. No matter how hard we try, we never will know another person or their world - we can approximate it but that remains the best that we can ever do. A friend of mine is colorblind and he will never know the difference between red and green. That fact shocked me, but it shocked me more that I did not pity him in any way - I simply felt jealousy, clear and smooth jealousy for a person whose world was that much easier to understand. In a perfect world everything is the same color and when we close our eyes we see it, glorious and triumphant, the silver color of trumpets in the sky.

I stand at the end of the point and I look across the water at tall ships and for once I think that perhaps the sea is nothing but a marble in a pond, and that we have thrown it there.

-Rich though we remembered it didn't matter in the slightest

Weathered.

Today is the first really cold day of the season and I am sitting in my office wearing a winter jacket. My fingers feel a bit like icicles, except they aren't melting to the touch. I think that icicles are fairly interesting objects. They exist perfectly in form during a very well defined range of temperatures and they only really change when we interact with them. It reminds me a bit of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If we are observing the action of a particle of light, we are "pinging" it, which changing what it is doing and where it actually is. hence we can never really know for certain what anything is doing, though we can be reasonably sure where it should be. Or so science has told us. Whether or not that theory is true remains to be proven.

Thinking about the change in weather makes me think about being weathered - it isn't a matter of changes in a physical sense that make something weathered. A house becomes lined with the grooved and toothy marks of the years, whether or not there are multiple seasons or just one. Being affected by the environment is in itself the act of being weathered. We are a particle of light and the world does not know for certain where we are, but it knows with some probability where we should be. It is refreshing to think that all of us are in some way protected from the possibility of really knowing where anything is. It gives me hope that perhaps I might reach out my hand with my eyes closed and grasp the warm fingers of someone I love; when nothing is certain, everything really becomes an option. This is different from the life we are hemmed in by on all sides, of course.

Though in that sense, perhaps it is because we are observing our life in the first place. Perhaps our lives are not hemmed in at all except for when we attempt to figure out exactly where we are in our downward sloping journey. If we didn't care about 401k plans and retirement and children and love and always, always love, then wouldn't we be more alive? Wouldn't we live just as happily and just as easily as that? I like to think I am right in this matter; of course it doesn't matter when a person considers themselves as a separate thing from what I consider them, but I still like to think I am right. It gives me a sense of hope that buzzes around me, and which I casually swat at with unsurprisingly virgin hands.

Sarah Stevens had her birthday yesterday and I wonder if perhaps she was ever born at all, whether she will be born in the future when green lawns are green and not grass.

-Rich

it's not easy trying to have yourself a good time

Before the keys.

I am sitting on a bench that could also be called a stool, and I am perched above a set of piano keys. There are 88 keys on a full keyboard and they shine like teeth cut by mountain air and before I can begin to play I have to speak to them.

This is not a real piano in the sense that these keys are connected to electric circuits and parts that barely move. It is a piano in theory - it is connected to the idea of a piano in much the same way that I am connected to the idea of a human being. Perhaps that is the source of the emotion that begins as a hard knot of twine in my heart, when I place my fingers on the keys and gently press down.

I am playing now, a warm up to remind my fingers that they are not simply for show, they are not there to give the tailor an idea of where to place the cuff. Here, in this room, they are working. They have been employed and I am making sure that I get my money's worth from their tired backs - arched joints a bridge between hand and key. That bridge attaches itself to the base of another bridge - one between key and mind, between our ears and the song that we are singing. It is amazing that we can sing with our fingers, and I think about Sarah or Giulia because that is what they do naturally. I am taking lessons to learn how to do something that other people can simply DO, and it strikes me that this is not a bad goal to have. There is another shining thread in the room between what I am playing and what I am thinking I am playing, so I watch it sing under tension while the song continues. I cannot imagine the song ending but I know that it will, soon. Everything will end too soon, and that shining thread will fade away into the boxed in corners of a room, where music changes the warp and weft of the boards that shape a room. That room holds me in its palm and I know that I am being shaped by that song as well.

If enough harmony echoes through my bones, will I somehow become harmonious? If enough music plays through flesh to flesh, will I one day become music itself, that quicksilver remedy for fear and pain, that brooding antigen for love? I can't know that answer - I can't know that I have changed when the change occurs so slowly as to seem like nothing at all. We know ourselves only briefly and only when we are left and leaving. That is the honest truth about our song, the ones that beat against our ribs, a hummingbird fading away in a cage. Our cages are found outside of this room, outside of what we have made.

The song ends. I let my fingers come to rest and then begin to play again. I know that I will do this over and over until it sounds right, until I know that it is correct without having to bridge those gaps again. My fingers are stiff and cold and they move like dancers and I let them.

-Rich

somehow you knew that we would give up

On crabs, and parties. (2)

It was while sitting outside that I learned the proper way to eat steamed crabs. The girl who was throwing the party sat with me and helped me remove the top of the shell. I have no fingernails, as I am a biter out of habit, and I could not scrabble my finely honed fingernails into the conveniently shaped key of the crab's underbelly. She slipped a nail under that protruding piece of shell and I did the rest, opening the crab like a book, where the sound of a page turning is the same as a breath being drawn in. Next, I removed the head and brain. I could not touch it due to squeamishness, so I used a napkin and broke that part of the crab off and placed it aside. I removed the arms and legs and finally I was left with a bottom half of a crab, robust with secret meats and covered by treacle thick fat and gills.

The next move was to snap the body in half so that each moon-pie shaped piece sat heavily in the palms of each hand, and I watched as the girl demonstrated. Her face was the full of tired glee and her fingers shone bone white before a crack signaled the real death of an animal. I can't eat an animal. I can eat meat though, and up until this point I still saw the crab as an animal, albeit an animal without legs head or arms. I did the same and grinned when the body snapped open and I knew then that I had fallen in love with a process. It is in well defined processes that I most easily find something to enjoy, and this was truly enjoyable. The fact that I was making this transition on my own, from animal to meat, was something that I very rarely had the fortune to encounter. I looked up and around us there was the cold evening, where even bugs found no reason to fly anywhere but towards the light and I thought for a moment that we were on an island in the middle of a dark sea.

The next step was to hold half the crab as if genuflecting, and to pull the body apart, revealing ample space for slim fingers to gently pry meat from small, egg colored cavities. After seeing it done, I attempted to do the same and it felt like prayer, it felt like I was praying at last and that God was away but he would be back shortly, just leave a message after the beep.

I ate a few crabs and used the hammer as a visceral tool to get the meat in the claws. After a few crabs I was sated and I realized that it was cold outside, I realized that I was shivering not only from a blistering hangover(which even at this point hung over me as a shroud) but from the intensity of the temperature as well.

After washing my hands I stood on the porch and watched people by the bonfire talking and laughing and having a good time and I wondered if I ever really belonged in a place where people are doing those things - I wondered if I am even capable of faking talking and laughing and good times and all of that which remains a necessary disjecta in this world. I could have kept thinking about it to the point of going numb. Instead I grabbed a bottle of water and made my way over towards the warm red glow, that glow which speckled the crowd sitting in chairs around a blaze, that shimmered as it flew from mouth to mouth in the form of a smile.

-Rich

so we couldn't make out that night, so what