Living, Well Enough

Winter in Dreams pt.2

2008-04-03T11:37:00.002-04:00

Samuel spends the next moment facing the mirror, his eyes growing hard as they stare back into themselves. What is within that pinprick black of the iris? If he looks closely enough, he can see himself reflected and Samuel supposes that if he could look further he would see reflections of reflections, an infinity of self that shines back from that pure black, the overriding constancy of nothing. Samuel's eyes travel over the terrain of his face and note the lack of stubble, the errant hair. He wets his face with a rush of warm water and cleanses it, exfoliating with a non-alcohol based exfoliating cream. He then rinses off the cream, feeling the warm tingle of his opened pores as they react to the stinging morning air, and soaps his face using a bar of soap from Sabon...it is deep sea mud and when Samuel closes his eyes to avoid getting soap in them, he can see the pale constructed memory of the desert, of Jerusalem with bone white buildings that stick up from the sand like fingers in clay. Finally, Samuel applies a light moisturizer - SPF 15 in order to protect his skin from the intensely harmful light of the sun. He looks at himself in the mirror once more and satisfaction becomes evident in the set of his brow, the slight widening of his eyes...the next step is clothing.

The closet in his bedroom is small but relative to the size of the total room it is rather large. It has two sliding doors, one behind the other, and Samuel has organized his clothing such that his work wear is on the right side and everything else is on the left side. Samuel understands the importance of work clothes - they are the armored protection that a manager uses to deflect concern from his subordinates. A suit might be the most important piece of clothing ever invented by man. Samuel is certain that suits were invented by men. He does not believe in the efficacy of female innovation. This is not something he would repeat out loud to anyone in a work situation; the consequences for being unequitable as a manager are dire and he has no inclination to risk his position for a single snide comment to an employee or, God forbid, to a higher up. Samuel shudders from the thought, or perhaps from the cold air that prompts him to make a sartorial choice quickly.

Samuel has several suits but each one is cut in the same severe fashion. There are three summer suits and two winter suits - the summer suits include one suit from white linen for informal gatherings. This particular white suit is from Joseph Abboud and has typically American styling, the barely noticeable darts, the offhand stitching...the suit is perfect for company functions along the water or held during the weekend someplace. The cut implies subservience to the higher managers, yet the material and obvious casual luxury shows that Samuel is important enough to be remembered and ready for advancement. This is the philosophy that he considered when purchasing this suit and it took him several hours of diligent comparison to find what he wanted; to complement his look Samuel owns a braided leather belt in a very light brown with a gold buckle whose prick slots neatly between any of the leather weaves, and a pair of white leather shoes, boat shoes to be exact, that were purchased from a discount shoe warehouse. Samuel believes in the appearance of wealth but understands the difficulty of having it. His position is as a middle manager in a financial firm, yet he is determined to display himself as a much higher aspirant.

-Rich

I can see where we were falling

Winter in Dreams pt.1

2008-03-24T12:23:00.002-04:00

Samuel's eyes opened with the immediate recognition that his alarm clock had not yet gone off. His clock, purchased at the sharper image on sale during some holiday season, contained within its plastic guts a small projector that displayed the current time on whatever surface Samuel pointed it towards. His eyes adjusted in the early morning light and he saw that he had ten more minutes before he knew he must be out of his bed. Some men will take that time and add a few more minutes, discarding the morning actions that they perceive to be unneccesary at times, but Samuel diligently peeled his covers back at exactly 7:00 in the morning. It did not matter if the day was cold or hot - whether in the summer or winter, he woke and peeled the covers back, sliding his feet into slippers placed perfectly perpendicular to his bed the night before on the hardwood floor. Today he had woken up a bit early, and, feeling no desire to remain within the sheets, he pulled the covers away and stepped into his slippers. The cold shock of the floor was only slightly numbed by the fabric of his soles, and Samuel shuffled his feet a bit as he turned the alarm off on his clock. No need for it now, he was already awake.

Samuel's morning routine was a simple one - his father had always made it clear that simplicity was the mark of an organized mind. Samuel walks into the bathroom and turns on the light. His eyes peer at themselves in the sudden orange glow of the dim watt bulbs...he did not change his bulbs to fluorescent lighting because the color irritated his eyes and the article in Consumer Reports said that fluorescent bulbs were not completely cost efficient except over extended periods of time. His right hand pulled a tube of toothpaste out from the cup he used to rinse his mouth. The tube of toothpaste was rolled up from the bottom, using the crimped bottome edge of the tube as the center. He spread the toothpaste on the tip of his brush and then closed and placed the tube on the sink edge. Samuel spread the toothpaste with his finger over the bristles of the brush and began to brush with the kind of technique shown to him by a family dentist some time in his youth. Up, down, thirty times on each side of each jaw. Thirty times up, thirty down, right, left, front, back, top, bottom. Thirty times sixteen. Samuel did the math in his head, seeing the teeth being brushed as he did so. Four hundred and eighty. He spit into the sink, ran the water a little, and rinsed his mouth out. The toothpaste went back into the cup with the toothbrush, and Samuel continued with his daily ablutions.

-Rich
one of the great single tamed oh yeah

Pree tension.

2008-03-19T11:07:00.003-04:00

I was browsing through the latest NYLON magazine, mostly because I was waiting for someone and it happened to be on her table. The thing that I noticed immediately(besides the fact that NYLON is directed at girls who can only afford to wear shit fashion that makes them look like every other goddamn girl who lives and breathes the Olsen Twins for some reason) was the bald appropriation of J.D. Salinger's words. There were two sections called, "To Sir, with love" and "In Love and Squalor". When did this happen? It wasn't so terrible to note - it was a strange moment to see references that clearly were not going to be picked up by the majority of people that read NYLON. I'm not really saying anything terrible about the magazine, just the people that read it, which is fairly deserved.

However, this morning I was perusing the new Atlantic online, reading comments about Obama's newest speech(and feeling bemused about Britney being on the cover, especially given comments from the editors of THE ECONOMIST that were certainly relevant) when I saw another pseudo-intellectual reference. In this case, "Good Lieutenant" is clearly a reference to the harshly modern film "Bad Lieutenant" starring Harvey Keitel. I am omitting the glaringly obvious reference to pop culture with "The Clinton Supremacy", because it is pop culture...and who really cares about pop culture?

It does however make me wonder about what we are doing with our intellectualism. It feels like being educated is now just another way to feel "better" than other people - it brings about the starkly competitive nature of every aspect of our lives. How can we, as a people, hope to do more, do better for everyone when the only satisfaction we draw from any action is an intensely personal one? Being educated means that you have more experience to draw upon, and yet that simple fact has become, instead of a motivator to help others learn, a fetish. The best example being any sort of "snob" - music snobs, wine snobs, etc. I would go on but my point is made, I think.

P.S. The NYLON references are all contained within the Salinger short story, "To Esme, with love and squalor". I recommend the read, if you are curious to see just how much the story is NOT related to new spring fashion for men and women in the middle class income bracket.

-Rich
I can't wait to see you again

Inversion.

2008-03-18T16:40:00.003-04:00

In the air a shape hung under the moon. An inverted heart, the passage of jets or passenger planes. The ground crunched underneath Mikel's boots and he huffed small clouds in front of his face, still warm after passing through the scarf wrapped tightly around his mouth. Mikel's pace was brisk; his feet barely seemed to do more than touch the ground for a moment before he was off again, his hands tucked under the opposite arm, pressed firmly against his sides. He looked as one does when laughter siezes the entire body, shaking the ribs clean and pushing the air out of one's chest.

Mikel stopped and looked up at the moon for a moment. The air was crisply dry(as it often is in that area after a snowfall) and his eyes watered as he stared at the only companion he saw in the night. The road was empty of people, bereft of any animal sound. The cold and the snow had done much to send living things towards comfort, towards the familiarity of sleep and the zen adage of patience. Patience! Time will make the snow pass and melt, a sinking sugar rush for the earth below. Grass will sprout like soldiers from the dragon's teeth, and the air will feel thick with warmth, with diluted laughter that still echoes in the inner ear. In time the moon will set and all that is left behind is the memory of it's glow against the forceful attentions of the night, of the sun, of the girls and boys in our hearts.

Mikel's feet started to move again in quickened rhythm. One two, one two. The snowy ground cracked and sprang the sounds of gunshots across the city. He stepped for a moment between two lampposts along the sidewalk, and, in the inky perfect darkness of the abscence of light, he disappeared.

-Rich
this suicide

Avast. Daily writing begin anew.

2008-03-13T12:42:00.002-04:00

I am going to attempt to do my daily blog again - work has been intense lately, but if I can't take a few minutes out of the day to write, then why do I write at all?

***********************

When he opened his eyes, the fan above him seemed to quiver with anticipation. He examined it in the low light of morning. Each fan blade had been moulded to look like a ceramic palm leaf. The fan was meant to evoke the feeling of tropical relaxation - it failed miserably, instead evoking images of slaves chained by the foot to a throne, fanning a man or woman with the devotion of the damned. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the image blend into the shifting patterns of shapes and colors that danced across his vision.

As a child, he had noticed the drifting spots while falling asleep one afternoon, the setting sun caressing his gently rising and falling chest with deft fingertips. His eyes had closed gradually, unable to focus on anything, his sight already moving inwards, when he saw a fringed spot jump across his sight - seemingly from one eye to the next. It frightened him - perhaps this was an illness, perhaps he was seeing bacteria or germs, or something worse. Small feet in wool socks made a soft thumping sound, a body rolling over onto teak paneling, as he ran to his father, tears beginning at the corners of his eyes.

His father was sitting in the study, as he always was after a certain hour of the day. The study was a small room enclosed by two wooden doors whose faces were glass - always cool to the touch, even in summertime. The child's mother hated cleaning fingerprints off of each glass panel but the child could not resist placing his hands on them to push the doors open. There was something magical about the feel of cool glass against his skin - even in the dead heat of summer, where laughter runs liquid, the glass remained cool against his sweating palms. He noticed that sensation now as he pushed open one of the doors to enter the study and seek guidance from his father, unbuttoned shirt sleeves the mark of leisure and perhaps success.

-Rich

we all forget sometimes

In Parades, Pt. 2

2008-02-29T14:07:00.002-05:00

This morning was the same as any other morning. The sky was the same bluish grey color of illness, and still unnoticed by everyone walking underneath it. Alan walked in an unconscious rhythm that mirrored the walks of everyone around him. His fingers clutched impulsively at buttons on his jacket, pushing them through their holes and them removing them just as swiftly. There was something in the way that the wool of his jacket slid abrasively over each plastic button that comforted Alan's hands, and starting from there, it comforted the rest of his body as well.

When Alan walked into the square it seemed for a moment that he was the last person on Earth. There were no other pedestrians to be seen and the silence was coal black and heavy. The air seemed thick and cold, and Alan gasped once, his exhalation an exclamation point towards the heavens. He looked up and looked at the sky for the first time in what seemed like eternity, and the lack of sound began to close its many fingers around him. He looked desperately around him, the cobblestones slithering, scales on the back of the world serpent, whose teeth bite into its tail with the savagery of lust, of the instinct to rut with flesh against flesh. Alan's feet stopped for a moment, next to each other, and his eyes closed momentarily. he could still see everything around him. He could still feel the square folding its corners together like an origami crane, ready to flap into the center of the sky.

Alan began to run. The ground became a blur and his vision wavered with tears - of joy or fear or sorrow, he did not know. He ran, holding his leather briefcase aloft with one hand, the shoulder strap biting into his bicep, straining to pull himself forwards. The door to his office building loomed in front of him and he wondered if perhaps he would make it, if the world would stay solvent long enough for his fingers to find the door. His hand grasped the handles and for a moment he was shocked by the cold, before he wrenched the door open, stumbled through, and turned to close the door with all of his remaining strength.

His breathing, which had been ragged and blood red upon entering, began to slow. His shoulders straightened. His hands came up, still in their gloves and smoothed the hair which now seemed in a spray of disarray. Alan turned, his face a collection of tightly held muscle, and began to walk to the elevator. His heels tapped echoes on the floor, tap, tap, tap. Nobody noticed the deep stain of his eyes, until the elevator doors closed, and Alan stared with mournful intensity at his own reflection.

-Rich
the summer if we were deathly ill

In Parades, Pt. 1

2008-02-19T12:09:00.003-05:00

While walking through the city square, Alan felt that something was different, something had changed. He stopped and looked around but could not tell what made him feel uncomfortable. The air was cold, and he shivered slightly even under a thick winter coat which was ostensibly filled with duck down. Alan curled his hands into balls and screwed them further into his pockets before he continued walking.

Later, when standing in line to purchase a cup of coffee, Alan realized what was different with his daily walk. For the past few months there had been heavy construction on a few buildings that were undergoing renovation. While in the process of being renovated, the buildings had become steel skeletons, their innards in plain view of the world. Alan never looked at them while passing. He felt a sense of shame, a slight connection to the voyeur for whom nakedness means ownership. Instead, as he walked along the same route every morning on his way to work, he would read the signs proclaiming low rates per square foot, the signs claiming with forceful agression that the restaurant soon to be on the ground floor of this particular building would satisfy all of the diner's desires. The buildings themselves were not seen, the people that worked on them disappeared into a fog of apathy as soon as they began to work. Alan was not interested in any of it.

The only thing which Alan had come to recognize was the cacaphony of birdcalls that echoed through those steel ribs. Hundreds of birds had come to roost in the upper, unfinished floors where steel spars hung bone dry. Every morning when Alan walked to work he would hear that song - at first it was faint, a mild sound that reminded him of playing with other children, fighting over a ball. The closer he walked to the square, the louder the sound became until it was an orchestra playing in his ear, it was a dog laughing in the night outside of his window. Alan hated the sound of animals and his steps quickened without fail through the square until he was safely ensconced in the lobby of his workplace, glass doors a mirror through which that grating sound found only reflection.

The next morning, Alan woke with a start from a dream only half remembered, where a blank moon had pulled him across the sky as if he were chained to her. He dressed with the prim perfection of absentmindedness, and turned once to look at his apartment before leaving. With the lights off(for he always turned off the lights before leaving to save money on his energy bill) the room looked like a landscape painting, all hard curves and edges hidden under the blanket of nightfall. He closed the door and locked it, and made his way outside, still thinking with some confusion about his dream from the night before.

-Rich

something is in the air

The burning mount.

2008-02-08T12:56:00.001-05:00

Strange things have been happening in the past few weeks. I was in Milano, where I was also subsequently mugged while enjoying(some would say enduring) a wonderfully ancient city. I am now spending half the week or more in Huntsville Alabama, where my job responsibilities has very swiftly evolved from the sort of laconic turgidity I enjoy, to a more dynamic presence. I wonder whether it is something worth being happy about, or something worth being sad about.

At the moment I am sitting in a room with a variety of papers to read, my phone ringing as if Dire Straits are playing a two set show at the Orpheus and I have tickets, and I am wondering if perhaps somewhere along the way I have been letting go of the parts of me I actually enjoyed most. I still write but without the urgency of vanity. I still read but without the hunger of superiority. I still do everything I am accustomed to doing, but I have become accustomed to doing them.

There is a point in our lives when we have to deal with death, and there is no greater death than the ones we experience day after day, night after night, in the cool bosom of violent blue morning. I will continue the short story I was beginning earlier and it will progress according to the speed at which I let the words grow. The goal of that story was to capture a bit of the Russian/French ideology, that aging veneer of class that turns a sneer into a smile, that raises glances, always they are raised. There is something in that quiet moral solitude that I have recently been very enamoured of...perhaps it is the way it mirrors my own developments. A writer, even an amateur writer, has only the palette of his own experiences with which to explain an idea or establish a causal relationship. That is what we do, really. We create relationships with words, between words, outside of words - those relationships means something to us and the theory is that they mean something to you.

What then, is the point? If this is true, if we can turn our own experience into something the reader knows with salt stained conviction is true, then we have proven, in some measure, that humanity exists. We have proven that we are not alone, that even if the Earth is the last mourning son of the father, we are not alone. We can not be, we must stand for something, in the end. I think that is an amazing thing. I think it is an impossible feat. Yet there are those writers who have done so with an ease that is "tres terrible" and yet so full of despair that one wonders whether impossible should remain in the language of men and women at all. I am rambling. I hope you enjoy my thoughts. I will return shortly.

-Rich
though we weren't last in line

In Milan.

2008-01-20T15:12:00.000-05:00

The lightbulbs are moths dancing through the bars and streets. There are too many words in between our orders. Cappucino stained khaki killers stalk the streets with amber looks and black locks, soft mirages of love.

The hotel room quavers like a voice on Sundays, singing hymns. When I lock the door the key is heavy with trust. I trust the key. I don't trust men or women. How can we still live in a world where we don't trust anything with a heartbeat? If it is alive it will like to you and I understand that idea as well as I will ever understand it...I knew from the beginning that even our eyes will lie to us when they can, when we let them, when we cajole their condolences.

I count steps to the Duomo and the numbers click through my head with the precision of a wristwatch, of a sundial without numbers. The Church is silent on its own and no matter what we do it will stay that way. I want to scream, facing stained glass windows that must have tasted like they looked, raspberry kisses left on marble pillars. We are forgetful but God forgives us. It is important that we forgive God at some point as well. Morrissey knew it first, or last.

Montenapoleone is bursting with wealth, numbed sincerity that smears across the face like a cream. Everything is a cream. Everything can be rubbed into our pores until we believe it, until it is part of us. Italy wails unrepentant and I wish I were a bag of coke, swallowed up by a group of beautiful faces, lit fires under a brick oven.

It is Sunday but I wonder what day it is anyways and that, that has to be the meaning of life.

-Rich and I won't come down for anyone

The Sterling avalance.

2008-01-15T14:59:00.000-05:00

Emile walked out of the wake that evening just as the dew was getting tired. The air was wet and cold, and when he breathed out the cloud of grey air that escaped was peppered with moisture, like seeds on a fresh loaf of bread. Emile tightened his jacket around him and turned the collar up, shivering momentarily when the collar brushed against the back of his neck. He was warm and it had nothing to do with fireplaces or women and everything to do with whiskey.

His father had left the wake early, perhaps sensing the mood changing towards raucous appreciation for life, and wanting nothing to do with it. His boy was dead in a way that is different from the death that followed Emile, black and brittle like glass. Emile watched him go and then turned to the people gathered to celebrate his brother's life. They stood arrayed in front of him, waiting for him to begin the festivities. Emile felt like a murderer does when the first light of day crests the horizon and colors his hands red. He raised his glass and drank down a glass of wine, turning away as he did so. The crowd followed suit, and as the flush of alcohol threaded itself across the room, Emile allowed himself to blend into the feelings that surrounded him, pale vinegar stains on wallpapered rooms.

A girl was weeping across the room and nobody seemed to notice except for Emile. The girl was his brothers's girlfriend or so he assumed and he made his way through a jostling crowd to say something. He stopped in front of her, her eyes facing his shoes, and realized only then that he did not know what to say. He did not offer any condolences to her at all, even when she halted the flow of tears long enough to look at him, perhaps to vaguely recognize in him the features that she recognized in Mason's face. Perhaps his cheekbones were as prominent as those of a skull. Perhaps he had the same ring of grey around his irises that faded into a tired blue during the winter months. She looked at him and nodded a hello and then walked away towards the bar. Emile wondered why his brother had dated her at all - he saw nothing in her that traveled well with beauty. She smelled like lemons, Emile noted.

-Rich
the beautiful damsels watch television

the coldest air lives longer.

2008-01-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

Three days later the weather was unnaturally warm. The trees began to show the sprouts and bulging backs of leaves - tentatively checking to see whether it was safe to bloom. Sunlight no longer reflected coldly against the water of the harbor. Emile was wearing all black and standing with one hand crossed under the other in front of him.

Emile's father was not Mason's father and yet he mourned as one would expect from a father whose son is dead. His silence was broken by heavy breathing throughout the viewing of the body. Emile could hear his breathing, and would turn sometimes to look at his father who wept single tears at a time, each tear carving a path down mottled skin and next to an insurmountable nose. Emile stood at the other end of the coffin from his father and watched the crowd with his hands pressed together and he did not move them. He did not want to shake anyone's hand and he did not give the crowd any opportunity to do so - his eyes seemed focused on something above and to the right of the approaching mourners and he had stepped back a few steps towards the back corner of the coffin, on the side where Mason's head lay on a silk pillow.

Emile would look down at his brother when there were breaks in the stream of well wishers. His brother, despite the heat, looked so cold. The cheeks were ashen but with livid spots that looked like the aereolae of nipples. The hair was carefully brushed and the eyes were closed gently, as if only setting down for a nap. Emile thought he could smell a subtle note of chemicals and decay but he wasn't sure and he did not want to ask anyone else. He wondered if the body was frozen inside, to the core. The funeral home had taken great care to make the body seem alive, but this seemed only more distasteful to Emile. His brother was dead. Let that be the truth of it.

Emile stood and watched the sunlight move along the length of the coffin until it was almost at his brother's face. It worried him that the sunlight might hit and suddenly the face would melt, it would dredge away and the bone would stare mockingly back like a white canvas. He realized that his brother was dead and that he could no longer think of him as a person. He realized that the entire day, he had found his position tedious and that he wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep for as long as possible. He realized that he had not thought of this body as anything but a collection of parts and the realization tired him - his body sagged forwards as if his spine had lost all of it's resilience. Emile looked towards his father and not a single tear escaped his eye, even as he watched this man still crying, still mourning, still howling silently. The funeral progressed as quietly as before, the sound of shuffling feet and quiet condolences a roman candle in the bell jar of the day.

-Rich

sometimes it isn't you

In the gardens of a dream.

2008-01-04T20:37:00.000-05:00

At around the same time that Emile was helping an old man load what seemed like an inappropriate amount of luggage into the back of his car, Emile's brother Mason who was standing a bit behind him on the curb of the sidewalk was shot three times in the chest. The three shots echoed as if the bullets had been thrown against the rock walls of a canyon, and their dull reverberations were the loudest thing Emile had ever heard. Emile turned just in time to see a look of soft surprise fix itself to his brother's face, the eyes wet as polished marble, the lips a curious mix between bemused certainty and sudden embarrassment. Emile did not see the shooter; he saw with very little clarity(and even less after shock had chipped the edges of his memory) a khaki colored overcoat and the thin trickle of smoke that came from a brutish length of iron - surely the barrel of a gun. In the middle of his focus he saw only the three red roses that blossomed over the flat, canvas-like texture of his brother's trenchcoat. Later, Emile would recall that image as if the scene had been a painting from the Romantic period - every part of the body an icon and bearing as little relation to reality as the geometric boundaries of the human body, with all of the humanity clasped desperately to the face, the upturned face of sinful naivete. Emile would always see the roses blooming and a peculiar scent would tease him from the depths of that moment - a smell like that of rain soaked leather turned old by the color of water and the salt taste of perspiration. Emile's memory felt like a riverbed covered by the kind of pale sun that is almost certainly indistinguishable from the moon. By the time Mason's body had fallen to the ground, rigidly, unlike what one is accustomed to seeing in movies, Emile had noticed nothing and had not moved at all, not even to breathe. When he did breathe it was a sharp exhalation that felt like a soundless shout. Emile had held his breath for the few moments in which the shooting had occurred and only now did the air escape his lungs and only now, by the act of breathing, was that long, terrible moment ended. Emile mechanically placed the large parcel in his hands along with its brothers in the back of the old man's car. The old man was not looking at him, and it was doubtful that he was looking at anything at all - the shock had carried over to him as well. The old man's mouth was partially open and Emile noticed the space where one of the yellowed teeth had given in to time and decay, and had long since fallen out. It sickened him and a wave of yellowed disgust washed over his forearms, leaving him elbow deep in it's rubber texture. Suddenly he regretted having ever helped this old man. Emile blamed him, he blamed this old man's presence for what he had not yet fully comprehended...in assigning the blame to something, to anything, he understood, clearly, that his brother was dead and that he was dead because of this old man, this stupid old man who hadn't asked for help but who had received it and in doing so had taken Emile's brother along with Emile's good natured largesse. Emile looked at the old man only briefly and then stepped woodenly across the few feet of pavement to where his brother lay on the ground, unmoving. Emile noted that his eyes were still open and that the same look was fixed not only in the features of Mason's face, but also in the depths of his eyes. Emile closed his brother's eyes not because it was the right thing to do but because he could not bear to see that good natured surprise frozen deeply within the departed soul of his brother.

-Rich
the ember is full of you

Holidays.

2007-12-24T11:46:00.000-05:00

The Holiday season is upon us like rigor mortis. It seethes incandescent under floorboards. It rolls up against our legs and pulls the hairs from our shins. We are torture victims after the war.

I did not purchase presents for people. I decided to print some photographs for some people, and drew small things on cards for others. Love does not need or want a price tag - nobody values anything that should be valued. Assigning a value to love makes it nothing at all. Our hearts can't handle the pressure, and love dies softly, without a sound. Our eyes closed, we wouldn't see it happening until it was already over. We mourn loudly because death comes so quietly, and never on such tiptoed steps as when love is killed by passionate greed.

The holiday season is one that parts of me love and that other parts of me hate. I hate the crass commercialism. I hate the expectation, the driving desire to let our greed and vanity overcome us. It is one thing when we buy presents for others, but it is another thing entirely when we let ourselves expect presents from others. There is a difference. It is too easy to become caught in the moral ambiguity of those two thoughts. It is too easy to not care, anymore.

What then, do I love about the holidays? Perhaps it is the opposite side of the spectrum - the holidays let us expect ourselves to do wonderful things, to help people that we would overlook on a normal day, to intervene where courage is a gilded lily. We are human and as such we are capable of everything. Good and Evil taste the same to our moral hunger and the voracious appetite that accompanies our actions. We think with our bellies and our hearts think the same way - it is no coincidence that our instinct to kill and fuck are so closely related to our instincts to eat.

It is that humanity, then, which I love so much. It is our instinct to do all of these things except those things that benefit others. We do those things because we can, because doing them makes us human. We help others because it is in that tenuous contact that we can remember what it was to be in the womb - to be one and all, to encompass the world when our heart beats.

There is no snow this year but when I look outside I can see the light falling down like frosted dew and I remember that there were years with snow, and years with you, all of you intact.

-Rich

love in an empty room

Spinach pasta with a mushroom tomato sauce!

2007-12-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was supposed to be studying for finals. I did not do that. Instead I worked on a scarlatti piece and made food.

Stage 1: Pasta Sauce
handful of fresh basil
4 vine tomatoes
2 roma tomatoes
1/4 large white onion(peeled, minced)
3 medium cloves of garlic(peeled, minced)
1 can tomato paste
1-2 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste
sauteed mushrooms(see stage 2)

Stage 2: Mushrooms
1 lb chanterelles
1 large portobello cap
1 few drops truffle oil
extra virgin olive oil

Stage 3: Other stuff
1 large section of Kale(reduces down to a small portion)
1 ball of bufala mozzarella
2 packets fresh spinach pasta(in this case, linguini)

Stage 1:

The most important part of a chef's work? The love of cooking. Ha, no, actually it is the knife.

In this case, Henckels. Always sharpen your knives after a few uses, and store them separate from all other cutlery.

Take your knife and attack your tomatoes.

Your Vine tomatoes, above, and below your Romas.

In the picture with the Romas, you can see that I've already chopped my garlic(in reality, I had garlic left over chopped from last week's chili), so I am skipping that step for you. Chop the garlic, chop the roma tomatoes, and then Quarter the vine tomatoes. Don't go to slowly and don't press down - you want to reserve the tomato liquid as much as possible. Place the quartered vine tomatoes and the chopped/minced romas with the garlic, and chop your basil as well. Your first stage prep should look like this:

Throw all of this into a pot

and add some tomato paste and water.

more paste = thicker sauce. Add the paste in tablespoon amounts and adjust with water to get the consistency you want. It will get thicker as the tomatoes break apart, so don't worry if it seems a bit thin.

Stage 2: Mushroooooooooooms

As the sauce is cooking(turn the stovetop onto hi to bring to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer then cover the pot),

you will wash, remove the stem from, and then chop up your portobello cap

and then treat your chanterelles in the same fashion. Keep the chanterelle stems - they are meaty texture for your sauce.

Throw on some awesome music while you are at it, dammit.

And your mushrooms should look like this:

I did this all beforehand(in the pictures you can see the tomatoes still not in the sauce) but you don't have to. I just find it easier to get everything ready before I begin to cook.

Throw a pan onto the stove, head the pan FIRST then add the olive oil and a few drops of the white truffle oil. Then throw in the mushrooms and sautee the hell out of them. You want the smell of the truffle oil to lessen, as it gets pulled into the mushrooms and the mushroom liquid comes out. It looks like this:

right before it is done, at which point you throw the mushrooms(with about half of the liquid in the pan) into the sauce, at which point the sauce looks like this:

at this point, I removed the large quarters of vine tomato, put them in a bowl, and mashed the hell out of them with a knife and fork. I then threw the whole contents into the sauce again. Turn the heat up to about a 4-5 and leave uncovered. You want the sauce to start reducing. Throw in your chopped up 1/4 onion if you have it, and let sit.

Stage 3: everything else
at this point, you want to add a bit of oil to your mushroom pan and let it smoke a bit. Get your Kale and wash it and place it on your cutting board. It looks crazy. Like this.

Well, that is not crazy enough. Let's make it crazier. Chop it up into large chunks! Don't worry about it seeming a little too big. It reduces down a hell of a lot.

place the kale in your mushroom pan and cover with a lid of some sort to trap the moisture. As each batch gets smaller, add more and more kale until all of your kale is in the pan. Let the Kale wilt and absorb some of the flavor from the mushrooms - Kale is a wonderfully textural vegetable, and is basically a blank slate as far as flavor goes. It is not as difficult as some Spinach, and our pasta is spinachy anyways, which is a good complement. The kale, fully wilted, looks like so.

Throw on a song, and wait for your sauce to reduce. The song should be something like this,

and the sauce should look a little bit like this,

at which point it is pretty much done. You should take a large pot, add water with a handful of sea salt, and let it come to a rolling boil. Once it is at a rolling boil, add some pasta,

and cook until at the texture you want. remove the pasta and place in a container with a little bit of the starchy pasta water. Let the sauce continue to boil, and take your mozzarella,

and slice it into thin slices, maybe about 1/4" thick. set aside with the mozzarella water.

Yeah, then throw some pasta in a bowl, add the kale, pasta sauce, and some mozzarella. It should look like this:

and it will be DELICIOUS.

Till next weekend! I think I might cook something difficult, like short ribs with wheatberries and capers. Or I might get drunk at a party, so either way, someone is happy. And vomiting.

-Rich
the subtlety is reduced by two

The embuscade.

2007-12-14T14:07:00.000-05:00

Everything around us is like an explosive. Everything quivers when something else moves - a movement here means a movement there, and it spreads out like a dying wave across white sand. Yet nothing changes. Nothing is altered in any way - no purchase is found on any handhold.

We are all waiting for something. Looking around us, the scenery shivers, and we know that behind the horizon is something amazing. It thrills us to anticipate that unknown thing and we expect to see it soon, if not now. Yet it never comes.

It never comes because it is lodged within us. We are the mountain and the shade. We are the bell that never rings. We are the mouth that never sings. Nothing happens in this world because we are too afraid to act - if we act, then we change and we die. It is our fear of death that makes us indifferent to life. All of life is death and dying, everything exists for only a moment. The person that we are now is not the person that we were a moment ago, and somewhere on a very spiritual level we understand this fact. It seethes under covers.

I look across the sea and smoke cigarettes and let the ash fall into small tails that linger on the legs of my pants. I watch the water lap gentle, full of everything but grace, and I wonder whether my life is just as plain, just as certain as the bottom of the sea.

These last few weeks have been hellishly difficult for me to deal with, in the sense that I don't particularly give a good goddamn about anything. Life is an expanding concentric circle. It plays a rainbow melody, even when I can only hear the reds and the blacks. I am certain that after my trip to Milan I will be recharged. I am certain that I will be different. I wish that I could be the same.

-Rich
tomorrow washes stars in black brigades

waking up.

2007-12-06T21:40:00.000-05:00

I was standing and watching the creeping advance of cars outside when I heard that a friend's family member had died. There was a rushing sound of elevators in transit and then nothing. I stood at the very tip of a slate iceberg and when I looked down it was impossible to tell where the clouds ended and the water began. Everything eddies when we look at it from above, even people.

I remember watching my mother play with the telephone cord in a swank hotel room. The sunlight came in through a window blocked off by my father reading a newspaper that should have been important, and the television in the background played the kind of music that we have become accustomed to. The spring was dying outside and we ignored it.

When you do something like counting the curls in a telephone cord, eventually the act gains meaning. Buddhist monks use the same technique - they count the 108 beads on their cords as they chant their sutras and at some point the number 108 becomes the same thing as the number 1, and then numbers mean beads, and suddenly the world has become more precise. Even though everything is the same, it is that sameness which remains different - the thing that everything becomes is really the thing that everything is. It exists, always, like the world in a movie screen exists. It is there and reality attaches itself with hooks and ladders to it, and perhaps that means we can see it somehow. Perhaps when we count over and over, we are opening a door. This door is chased silver with acid etched patterns like the spots of a jaguar riddling its surface. It creaks on a single brass hinge tainted green with the patina of arrogance. It bleeds air where the frame meets frame. When people exist, when their frames meet the frames which enclose other people, the door opens and we discover that life is neither a lock nor a key.

I sat outside and a red car beetled past me. The road appeared as a withered branch and I reached out a hand to snap it off, to pull it towards me. I thought about the Casalinos and I wondered if in the perpendicular of the sky, whether their life was my life, whether my life was theirs, and whether this was the true face of violence - cold and laughing, voice choked sorrow by the wind.

-Rich
two out of three ain't bad

Opportunity.

2007-11-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-28T09:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-27T14:44:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-14T18:17:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-08T11:20:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-06T15:34:00.000-05:00

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)

2007-11-02T14:50:00.000-04:00

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

On crabs, and parties. (1)

2007-10-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

On Halloween I dressed as a kat boi, with ears and a tail, and a collar with a bell. I had girls tugging on my tail at a bar where I drank heavily. The colors of the lights behind the bar started off discrete and singular, and then all the lights began to bleed into one another and I realized that I was drunk. It was the middle of the evening, and I was drunk again. Life is a pattern that always folds neatly down the middle - the beginnings and ends are always the same no matter where we cut the cloth.

The next day I went to a crab feast north of Baltimore, where I drove for hours on 695 as I was lost. The road was an ocean and each partition of concrete thumped under my tires like waves. I began to think about driving like I do about swimming. My car ignored my thoughts and pushed onwards, leaning into the journey like trees lean into the wind and rain...Claire sat next to me and made my time passable. I wanted to throw up but did not, and that by itself was somewhat admirable.

The house where we finally arrived was small and cozy, and simple. It stood with little fanfare and I appreciated that - when we walked in I knew that this was a home and not simply a residence. We too often rent things spiritually, and never let our lives place roots out of fear. There was nothing to fear in this house except the scent of pumpkin pies, covered in obscene drawings done with shaking hands, a tremulous fork. I laughed as I ate cookies shaped like animals and doritos that vaguely nudged my Mexican memories before their taste vanished across the length of my throat.

-Rich

where the grain meets the heft of your skin

Poem.

2007-10-25T10:16:00.000-04:00

The harsh salt spray becomes wind again
and taps against the end of my nose,
rubs against the mercury of my lips
and I cough from the advent of evening.
There are no soldiers here but we salute anyways
when girls parade past us
their arms trimmed golden by the glow of every sun
that has ever set over the east coast
on their way out west.
I round a corner and then
and then the bricks change course below my feet
where a pattern comes undone from effort
from overweight tenacity,
from diligent hunger that gnaws nightly
from finger to finger along the railings of our well defined lives.

-Rich
too much for you to remember

Songbirds in Eulogy

2007-10-24T14:36:00.000-04:00

After a while life becomes a routine that we follow without realizing it. Even after we have realized it is a routine, we can never shake it. We may change the way we do things for a while but eventually our existence finds its own equilibrium, it's own level space. I wonder if perhaps I am in one now, or whether I have changed something just a tiny amount.

If I think of my life as a physical shape, it is flat. It is dry there, and in the distance I can see the faint shadow of mountains and foothills. I am certain that they exist, but I am afraid to extend my hand out past my body, for fear that I will hit a piece of paper. I live in that flat space where there is not even a grain of sand...fear keeps me from searching for one beyond what I can see. The sun rises and sets with variable times - it never seems to come up when I expect it to, and it sets when I am still cursing the sweat that stains my collars grey. My sweat stains grey and never brown. Brown is the color of the earth and perhaps a person has to feel connected to the earth to have that color. These days I look up and I know that the stars are lumped together into groups that make mathematical sense, that fall neatly into columns on worksheets. I have become a routine, a program that runs in futility. The air is dry and when I breathe in at night I know that I am tasting faint laughter that falls behind those mountains like a fugue of raindrops.

I have a textbook in front of me but nothing is coercing me to read it. Knowledge does not seem worth the effort to gain it. By the time a person learns something it is already meaningless - it has become less than nothing because you replaced something you knew with it. You replaced something you knew, that you knew! Truth is peeled away like the skin of an apple, and our innocence is held by the ridge of our father's thumb, where the blade rests and scrapes it away in spirals. After everything there is nothing but an empty striated shell and that is what we are now. That is what is left, that is what remains and I am certain that it is what we are now. A wind blows and I stretch like an accordion to sing with it - how sad that humanity has come to this, that we are only reactions to an impulse...

In the winter, snow will fall and cover everything. It will be like a Greek rite of mysteries, where phallic cults would sacrifice the King-twin, the tanist, and in that way preserve his innocence and his manhood. When the snow melts a wave of birds wil blanket those once empty spaces with song and we might even notice the butterflies returning, if we ever lift our faces away from the screens of computers. The earth will be renewed and it is a terrible thing that we will not. There is no spring for us...there is only this soft winter, this bleached existence, this wavering plane where sunlight dully shivers.

-Rich

you weren't looking for an answer so much as a song

Travel.

2007-10-23T07:13:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in my room right now and it is early or it is late. Time becomes meaningless after enough sleep is lost. I have sheep that never needed counting, whose wooly heads adorn fake cashmere sweaters in open air markets.

I have returned from traveling and it is sometimes enough for me to look around and realize that and sometimes it is not. I feel like shit, as I ate fairly unhealthy food the entire time I was there, so this week it looks like I am basically doing a detox programme. I like spelling certain words in the British sense - it gives them a more fair sense of dignity, like those words died for freedom and for the world to know that freedom was worth dying for, once. Maybe it was beyond the stark grey trees that bloom wherever men congregate, maybe it was before everything we loved became an epithet.

I am listening to a dashboard confessional song and it is moving me and that fact makes me want to never listen to music again.

I talked to Sarah last night and everything in me wanted to stretch across states until it could wrap itself around her and keep her safe from everything. I don't know that she needs to be kept safe from herself but I would do it anyways, I would let her hate me if it meant she stopped hating parts of herself. Every movement is a celebration, every song is another votive candle.

I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep. I cannot have any more thoughts. They sting and bite so deeply, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I stopped thinking entirely, if my body simply took over and lived as it wanted to live, if it fucked like it wanted to fuck and sang with every animal's death song.

-Rich
we were against the windowpanes

Interlude.

2007-10-20T23:31:00.000-04:00

There are trees in the distance that look like they were painted onto the mountain. The mountain looks like a sheet of paper and I have a growing urge to put my hand out and crumple everything I see into a ball. I want to tear the corners off of my view and unfold it again to find that everything has changed - that the trees are all around me and the room I am sitting in is far away, across the sea.

I have been lax in writing on my blog and much of it has to do with a sense of accomplishment with my last blog. Much of it has to do with how busy I am - and that bothers me. Writing has always been something for myself more than anyone else. I hate to think that I am starting to care less and less about myself, even if that is what appears to be happening.

I went shopping today and was startled by prices for just about everything. I am not a thrifty soul - far from it - but I have no desire to pay upwards of 600 dollars for a sweater. I'd rather just freeze my pretty little ass off instead. I am going to finish this take home final and then go back out for more shopping in the afternoon. There is no reason to be hasty about anything, anymore.

When I return I will call everyone I have missed so dearly and I will e-mail everyone that has sent me a missive. There is something about my home country that doesn't feel like home anymore, and once I noticed it I found that it wasn't my home country anymore. Perhaps that part of my life was folded up once or twice and rearranged where love touched love, where reality became thinner and gauze-like across the flesh of memory.

-Rich
me and you only in this heaven only here

Korea day 3, part 2.

2007-10-18T23:43:00.000-04:00

The airshow drew to a close in the afternoon and I felt nothing but exhaustion. We walked out past the security gate and tried to hail a taxi with no luck for almost an hour - Admiral Bae saw us as he drove by and picked us up instead. We arrived back at the hotel and I stumbled upstairs where I fell onto my bed face first and slept, still wearing my suit.

When I woke up it was about 8 pm, and my brother was ironing his fatigues in the middle of the hotel room. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself, a long and sallow look that meant nothing to him and nothing to me. I washed my face and went back out into the room to change into my normal clothes, stripping of the wrinkled suit that I knew I would have to iron the next morning. My nametag was still on and I threw it onto the desk along with my tie. My brother looked up from his ironing job and continued what he was doing. Ouside the sun had faded to a bluish grey recollection and the city lit up like votive candles in a church.

My brother called his friend who was stationed in the area, and we met him outside to eat dinner and get a drink. He showed us the hill of hookers as we passed by - phillipino women standing with restless eyes and all of them hidden by the scent of smoke. We walked on towards the international part of the city, where English was more than just a breakfast tea.

Dinner consisted of a meal had facing each other across a faux wood table. There was an omelette with rice, a tonkatsu, some ramen. We laughed and it sounded real enough when it came back to us in echoes. Everything that echoes is real enough. The bill for three people was less that sixteen dollars and I was fairly amazed by that fact - in a city where opulence is the norm, one could still eat like a pauper but dine like a prince. The world is a thing that only makes sense when everything is placed side by side, matching green bowls and the color of flavors iridescent dew overhead.

After dinner we headed into the city and found a small bar. It was a Tuesday and the normal tuesday crowd was present...we did not mingle with them but instead headed up onto the rooftop where we watched foot traffic underneath us. My brother ordered a giant blood dark beer and Bickford ordered a light beer and I ordered a diet coke because we all have to be healthy. It made sense under that cloaked sea of stars and we laughed and pointed out beautiful women, but all women are beautiful somehow so we pointed at all of them.

Eventually the night ran out and we yawned with the effort of swaying upright. Bickford walked back with us part of the way until we saw him off - a wave and he vanished down a side road towards his condo. My brother and I shuffled back into the hotel with the changing of the guard and sleep carried us up in velvety quiet elevators.

-Rich
we use our mobile mobiles to sing of stars

Korea day 3.(part 1)

2007-10-17T09:40:00.000-04:00

The Air show began early for us - we left the hotel to go to the Seoul Airfield at 6 in the morning. I was wearing a suit and a tie and I felt strange enough that when I stood in front of the mirror it did not seem like me. I waved my hand back and forth and watched my reflection do the same, but in a more snide manner.

The taxi let us out in front of the back gate and we walked the hundred meters or so to the show entrance. Our breath coiled sibilant around us in the cold morning air and my throat hurt from the dry atmosphere. It smelled a little of shit and of stale water from the river beside us and I looked at the shiny planes and helicopters in front of us and nothing really seemed to make sense. We walked through security and I headed towards our booth to help set up.

Our booth was surrounded on all sides by monsters - Northrop Grumann, G&E, etc. Companies that could swallow our company whole, even knowing how much we were really worth. Their booths were gigantic affairs with custom made everything - ours was just a little thing with a single device represented. I quailed in the shadow of giants. I set up the Blue Force Tracker according to instructions hastily read on our way through the gates, and loaded everything up. It was freezing cold in the gigantic tent that housed our booth and I walked outside to let the sun flay the cold from my body. Thick tendrils of sleep fell to the ground and lay belly up against the sun. I was awake with the country around me and I watched helicopters fly into the base in lines like ants following the scent of honey through a nautilus shell. Oh, Icarus you flew high but your real curse was not vanity but improper science - science wins, now, and God is dead and I wonder if we are all better off for it. I walked back inside and waited for something to happen.

The conference started off slowly - there were few people trickling through the show, so I went and viewed all the other booths. There was one beautiful booth babe whose picture I took and whose picture is at the top of this blog. Her name is Kim Ji Ae, and she gave me her information and told me to contact her. I am a beautiful boy I think I think I am when I'm not.

All around me were inplements of destruction and death and I knew that I was a part of all of it and it did not bother me. It did not bother me at all, and once again I remembered that everything comes with a price attached, even prices have prices and they are terrible and lean, like wolves through the fir trees. I went back to the booth and stood to greet people. I was a booth babe and suddenly everything was full circle and I was resplendent with meaning, a peacock feather soul.

The President of Korea showed up around noon and I went outside to take a picture of him. I was ushered back inside by security men and women with grey toothless smiles and I went back to the booth with my camera. Conversations were altered by the sounds of planes passing overhead and eventually sentences stopped completely. I watched the crowd pass and mentally compared every woman against the girl I had met and they meant nothing at all, less than sand at the bottom of the sea, colored pink and grey by fish bellies and semen from sewers.

Suddenly there was an ocean of security and the President of Korea was walking through the area with his wife. This is the man that I could have had dinner with and did not and I understood that his gravity was heavy because his position was heavy. I felt pity for him and I wondered if he felt pity for me - even if he ever saw me with that straightforward gaze. After the President left I went outside to the food court and ate a lunch with soldiers and security, models, CEOs, everyone who was at the show. I sat alone and munched on fish cakes and ate my jigae. The booth was waiting for me so I went back in afterwards with a cup of coffee, the rest of the day resplendent behind me.

-Rich
bottle poppin what's he droppin?
(I will upload the picture later...blogger in Korea sucks)

interluded.

2007-10-16T06:27:00.000-04:00

The weather is cold, and my thoughts are as cold. I will write more tomorrow perhaps - at the moment I am starving and tired. I took pictures of planes in flight today and I thought, for a moment, that I could have been like that once, before I knew what lips are like.

-Rich

korea day 2.

2007-10-13T20:33:00.000-04:00

In the morning I went out to the cafe on our floor and sat facing the windows that overlooked the city. I ate a brioche with a bit of butter and some strange cured buffalo meat. The morning had not broken yet so everything was quiet and muted - the cappucino makers hummed a lively tune and as I spread a pat of butter on my brioche and absentmindedly looked across the river towards the high tech part of Seoul.

We went to see my Grandfather in the hospital. He was recovering from a stroke and had been moved to a recovery hospital. The train station was a bustling mess and at first I was a bit confused by all the people walking around, everyone with shiny black hair and clothes that leaped off the front page of an H&M catalogue. Apparently, style does not come hand in hand with burgeoning wealth. There were full length mirrors all over the station and wherever I looked I saw girls fixing their hair or their outfits, staring with hard bored glances towards themselves. It made me feel a little sad to be there, a little embarassed to know that I could have been the same way. Thank God I was not.

The train ride was long and I fell asleep on our way to the small town in which my Grandfather was staying. I woke a few times to the sound of raucous laughter, to someone singing amazing grace in korean, and to the flashes of light off of mirrored buildings, sheathed in glass. It was a desperate thing to wake up to and I immediately sought the comfort of sleep afterwards.

The town that we stopped in was a strange mix of suburban and urban, of european and american styles in architecture. We took a taxi to the hospital and asked around to find the right building. We entered my grandfather's room to find that he was not there - it was a large room with six beds, and three were occupied by people whose grip on this world was tenuous to say the least. It was a terrifying thing and I was scared of the sick, immediately feeling terrible about being scared in the first place.

The hospital was grungy and small, not like the one where my grandfather was placed initially. This was a hospital for physical therapy and recovery - the worst had passed, and the long road to recovery was just beginning. At least, that was the sentiment which was not mirrored in the dirty floor, the lackluster service, the smell of preservation and forced cleanliness. This was the last station before death and the doors were not going to open. I was nauseated, and felt a chill roll through my body. I did not want to be here, not in this place where life was already spent, and no-one would understand what I was saying.

We went downstairs to the physical therapy ward and I finally saw my Grandfather. It was a strange moment- I have never been able to speak to him because I do not speak Korean and I never learned, and he does not speak English. Yet we have always had a very strong bond - one forged by blood, and by the similarities in our character. He was the one who taught me zippo tricks when I was fifteen or so, standing behind his house overlooking his farm, showing me how to light the zippo in a variety of ways until my mother stopped him. He looked up at us and for a moment I was afraid he would not know what I was, he would not recognize me. Instead he reached out his one good hand and I gripped it in mine. We stood like that for a few minutes while people talked, and I felt the beat of his pulse through his small and leathery fingers. The sun stood through the window and peered across a mountain range somewhere, and I felt the same way.

We left the physical therapy area and went back upstairs to wait. I sat next to my Grandfather's bed and looked at all the different things placed around him - teas and decaffeinated coffees, humidifiers, etc. Across the room a man vomited in pain and began to weep softly, a thin humming moan escaping from his mouth. I stood up and felt sea green, and walked outside where I ran into my cousin, literally. She is a middleschooler but taller than me - 5'11 or so. It was difficult to imagine that we were related.

When my Grandfather was wheeled back into his room a large group of our family was waiting. I had never really spent time with anyone outside of my immediate family before, and I was to learn why later in the day. My family history is complicated, and everything hangs upon the fact that my Grandfather is wealthy as hell. His farm and various properties are valued somewhere in the range of fifteen million, and all the heirs in Korea are fighting over the money like dogs. My family declined to be considered in the inheritance - why should we be when we don't even live in Korea? My father was proud the day that he decided that we would refuse anything, hoping that it would be a solution to bring together the other members of his family, his brothers and sisters. It did not work. Greed is a terrible thing, and as my father told me the backstory behind ths, I could see the pain that this caused him in the way he looked off to the side, as if seeing an old friend from a sepia toned memory. I did not ask him more, I simply sat by my grandfather and held his paralyzed hand, where fingertips flexed quietly.

Korea, day 1.

2007-10-12T15:58:00.000-04:00

I arrived half a day ago, carrying over a slight illness from the States but still avoiding the quarantine line. There is something so terrible about the clinical approach to sickness - not only are you sick but you are alone as well, in a country that perhaps you do not understand, and it is deafening. To die somewhere strange is not so bad, but to do so alone when there is life all around you is horrible. I hold in my sniffles and move on.

While on the bus to Seoul my father points out various places and how they are significant to him, to his history. He doesn't give a shit about the rest of the world and one wonders if it is ever really possible to do so when your own life is staring you down, when your own memories ressurect themselves through a smoky pane of glass. I nod and listen and I wonder whether I should take pictures. I do not - the windows produce too much glare for a lens. Machinery can't see what we see, and sometimes we have to help things along with gentle cooing, subtle coaxing.

The hotel is very large and it sits on a hill overlooking the city center. My windows have a view of all of Seoul and what strikes me the most is the number of red neon crosses that seemingly hang in the sky, suspended from the tallest buildings. Christianity grasped such a firm foothold here when the missionaries came and I wonder if I would be Christian as well, if I had been raised here. I tell myself that I wouldn't have been - but I know that is merely hope and I know, I know that my God right now is on the other side of a mirror.

It is five in the morning or so, and I cannot sleep. I will write more about Seoul and Korea and whatnot - in the meantime, there is a fairly delicious looking asian pear on a table next to me that requires some attention.

-Rich
never remember never remember what'll you say

Forget.

2007-10-09T11:03:00.000-04:00

I am walking next to the water and when I look to the side I can see the reflection of everything around me but somehow upside down and colored differently. They aren't negatives - it isn't a picture that I am looking at, but the colors are different and that somehow makes it more real to me, it makes it seem as if the world behind that sloughing sheet is better than this one. Even me, even us, we shed skins and the new us that arrives with eyes closed is more perfect and more beautiful and more meaningful that the us that stepped out of the shower last night. The morning bakes and hardens our spirits until all we shed anymore is red clay in our footsteps - you can see the hard, flinty centers of our eyes when we laugh these days, and laughter means less and weighs less than ever. This is the future and we are choking on it.

I try to remember her face and I remember the eyes first, always the eyes first. They are luminous and a color in between blue and grey, and when she looked at me I thought for a moment that storm was coming inside of her, and I was always right. It never mattered what we said or did, the storm always came and soaked both of us to the core. I never loved her but I said I did, I said it because I knew she needed to hear it, and I have not regretted doing so, not even now when I can barely remember her startling blonde hair, that shock of frozen lightning that wavered over her eyes when she looked from behind a cascading waterfall of light. I can't remember anything else about her, not her taste or the shape of her lips, or the curve of her back, but I can always remember her eyes and they mean something to me, I just don't remember what.

There is a stone shelf at the end of the canal and I sit on it with a cigarette and a homeless man digging through a trash can near me on the street corner. I watch him and he watches me, both of us suspicious, both of us hungry for something and then I turn back to the canal. The water is rising from the runoff, and with the water comes litter in all shapes and sizes. There are milk cartons like paper icebergs, bobbing up and down in the water. I watch a crab maneuver between two soda bottles, plastic the easiest way for us to assert that humanity matters in some way to all of us. I flick the cigarette into the water and it is gone before the smoke rises far enough into the sky for me to lose sight of it. The homeless man sits on the stone shelf near me and eats from an opened styrofoam container. We throw away life, we are so fucking rich that we throw life into the trash can for others to find, and I am okay with that. I am okay with that! I almost want to cry for us, for all of us, but I don't - it would disrespect the choices made by those before us, soldiers wearing fatalistic grey and singing songs in monotones.

Tomorrow the sun will rise high enough for me to watch it burn the clouds, and nothing will change except I will still not be in love with anything but myself, and you will be in love with me and that is everything. Corn will still taste like corn, and water will still drench our spirits in stalls, and mercury still coats us in fascinating colors when we cough. But I am not in love. I am not in love.

-Rich

something this way fell apart

2007-10-04T11:24:00.000-04:00

It has been a few days since my last post. Things have come and gone. A terrible weekend was had, and a dolorous stroke avoided by observing dolphins. Let it be known that the greatest cure for any ailment is watching dolphins jump through the water to tap a ball suspended over a pool some ten feet above the surface. I crowed and cooed like all the children in the crowd and for a moment I felt that perhaps I was not too different from them.

Tonight I am driving to Philly for various reasons - that is all I really think is necessary to write about that.

Last night instead of going to class I went to a friend's house. I had not seen him in a while, and when I first pulled up his driveway I looked around at the dilapidated walkway and felt slight apprehension. Why is it that in the absence of honest reality, we always assume the worst about things? Human nature is just that, it is human, and it falls more easily that it rises.

Yet the evening was normal. We talked about various things that had little to do with our lives, and then we talked about things that had much to do with them. There is a cycle of conversation that every meeting follows, no matter whether the conversation is long or short. Even a sentence can follow in the footsteps of noun adjective verb noun. Suffix and prefixes fix tenses. All problems are tense to begin with. We are all laughing soldiers, painted green by brass age, and smelling of ball-bearings under pressure. After a while the evening drew on and other people showed up at the house - people that I did not know, and did not particularly care to know. I left and drove home in the darkening night, highbeams on in protest. Every yellow line that passed me by was filled with a word, and the car wrote sentences that danced behind me in the red glow of stopsigns.

This weekend there are things that I have to take care of, and I am sure that I will fail miserably at some of them. It is responsibility that shaves so close to the skin, it is expectations that drag so heavily at the feet, and in the end we are all dead under polaris, under the only thing that never changes.

-Rich

as if we weren't enough for you

About Friday.

2007-09-28T10:14:00.000-04:00

I went out last night. To several places, after my piano lessons were concluded. I am recovering. I will write on Monday.

-Rich

continuee.

2007-09-27T09:23:00.000-04:00

I drive down 95 in the left lane, going as quickly as possible to avoid the slower cars on the right. It always infuriates me when someone is driving slowly in the left or the center lane - didn't the driver have to pass some sort of driving school? Aren't they required to know what the hell they are doing? Then when I pass, I see their somewhat sheepish faces and it makes me feel guilty that I am harboring such anger for someone who is probably scared. Then I feel stupid for feeling guilty for cowards - a coward is less than nothing, a coward is what remains after everything good in a person is gone. I make note to never give a damn about these people again. I know that I will. Human nature is as binding as anything else that humanity depends on.

There is a starbucks near my office and I contemplate going, but I am trying to detox my body in preparation for the weekend so I decide to skip it. I used to go all the time when the beautiful girls worked there but they all left, they grew up and got jobs somewhere else, they worked and laughed and some of them must have died in the time between now and then. I hate the burnt out women that remain. There are two in particular - one is a shrewish former riot grrrl with terrible red dyed hair and a nasal tone to her voice that makes my skin crawl. She is an idiot - fully incapable of actually working at a starbucks. Imagine just how stupid a person has to be to be unable to work at a starbucks. She can not remember anything beyond the first second that she is told it, and her utter complacency is annoying. The other woman is simply old and stupid, and I can not fault her for being old and stupid but I wish she were not old and stupid. I drive past the starbucks and head to the office. My shirt feels tighter around my wrists when I clench the steering wheel with both hands, making a circuit. My head is in the middle - that's the part that lights up but I can't, I can't see through the night like that, I can't.

I am merging into the correct lane with my turn signal on, driving at a conscientous speed, when the truck hits me from behind and flips my car over. I black out too slowly, unmercifully. The last thing I note is that my radio has died, and that the road is really a very loud thing after all, every car passing by sounds like an arrow loosed from a bow, and I am the target, riddled with colored circles and worth so many points. Have we made our point? It sings out of every wounded limb, yes.

-Rich
complete satisfaction spells a four letter word

Into Sinister

2007-09-26T09:34:00.000-04:00

On the molded and shaped bent walnut end table beside my bed sits a sleek black alarm clock shaped like a lozenge. It rings today at eight thirty. Eight thirty no hyphen, because hyphens are "bastardized English", thank you Mr. Hellinquist, my fourth grade teacher who did not know or care that my friend was a bastard, is a bastard, you are a bastard for life. I walk into the bathroom and brush my teeth while staring into the mirror. My hair is raked back from my forehead and I yawn while brushing. I decided that keeping my mouth closed is a better idea. My mirror is spotless and my cleaning lady deserves a raise but will not get one. I step into the shower and turn the knob all the way towards hot, and then back a bit towards cold until the shower is just hot enough to steam up the room and just cold enough to not burn my skin. I wash with a soap bought for its content of dead sea mud and then shampoo but no conditioner because today is a work day, today is one of the days when I go to work and work on my work.

Socks on, then underwear, then shirt, then pants, then belt, then shoes, then jacket. No tie today. It has been frowned upon before but I don't like ties. There is too much of a relationship between ties and nooses, slender silken cords that can still break a neck and dislodge the friendship that spines must feel for themselves. It is like a love in, but one that keeps you alive instead of slowly draining your life away. Drugs can't substitute for brains, even though we keep testing the waters.

I check my bag and I am panicking because I cannot locate my vitamins. Every day should start with the proper intake of vitamins B and A. B makes you relaxed and also increases your propensity for concentration. A is good for your skin and eyes, and any good businessman needs good skin and eyes. I locate the vitamins in a my disjecta drawer and pop one, holding my breath as I do so. Vitamins taste like shit but you can't disregard how much they help, you just can't.

I take the elevator down and I press the button for the parking garage with only the barest fraction of the tip of my finger. I dislike the thought of touching something that a child has touched, with their hands covered in the kind of shit that children play with. Environments should be sterile, like the feeling in the elevator. The walls are polished to a mirror sheen and when I look around I can only see myself and that seems right to me. The doors open on a different floor and a woman walks on wearing what appears to be a workout outfit and the illusion disappears. Suddenly there are hundreds of her in the mirrors and I look down at the marble floor of the elevator until we reach the second floor. There is a round of courteous sayings and I walk out and into the humid heat of the parking garage.

My car is parked perfectly parallel alliteration always alienates. I slide into the driver's seat and check my mirrors, adjusting the rearview a bit. I place my bag in the passenger seat and buckle it in - I once had it slide onto the floor and felt terrible about it for the rest of the day. Responsibility does not end when the things in your care are not alive. It is present and measureable. I start the car and for a moment the hum of the engine is soothing and I lay my head on the steering wheel, cold leather against my forehead, until I put the car in drive and head out into the world. I am a child leaving the womb. Let us mark our broken tomb.

-Rich
someone wrote a song about Jessie

2007-09-25T11:17:00.000-04:00

It was with some surprise that I viewed the seared foie gras on my plate. It was floating in what appeared to be a brown sauce whose base was mostly fat from the liver - there was a line of white truffled oil circling the whole ordeal. A small and thinly sliced piece of toast lay in the sauce, the smell of butter almost overpowering the smell of truffles, with a single quail egg laying over easy in a hole in the bread. It was poetic, it was prosaic, and it was completely unexpected.

My last experience with foie gras was an excellent one - Judd, myself, and a few others sitting around a table at Les Halles, using our forks to pull a bit of the ground of foie gras onto small pieces of bread. It was decadent in a way that most meals fail to be - a strange cocktail of luxury and of dirt stained elbows, sweat lined collars and laughter that starts from the belly. The foie gras lasted for only a few bites, but they were delicious.

This experience was a bit different. There was no sharing involved, there was no overt joy at seeing such a beautiful piece of food. There was only my intense focus on how delicious it would be. I used my knife and gently, with the tines of my fork gently prodding the top of this quivering block, I pulled the knife down and through. I picked up the slice with my fork and cut off a small piece of bread, and then ate them together. It was masterful and for a moment I forgot that there were other people at the table, people whose opinions of me certainly mattered in a business sense, and instead I let the sensation of eating overtake me.

It would be hard for me to determine which dining experience was better or more enjoyable; on one hand I had foie gras with friends and laughed about things that were more humorous because of the company I keep. On the other hand I was eating in the bosom of luxury, wearing a suit that is sometimes too tight on the shoulders, and which gives me the posture of a choir boy. I can't really say which experience I preferred - I don't know that preference for anything applies to either situation. I can say that both situations revolved around the same meal, the same feathery black earth sensation that spread from my tongue outwards. I can say that eating something so purposeful in its intent makes a person different, it changes not only who you are at the moment, but who you are in consideration. There is no other way to describe such an experience, except to say that it should be considered an experience and not simply a memory, or a story to tell friends after two glasses of wine.

Now I am sitting in an office, smelling faintly of recovery, that acerbic high tone of the nose, and thinking about how this moment will never mean anything more than a shrug, a glance, or five fingers drummed in quick succession.

-Rich
everyone we knew loves someone else

winding down.

2007-09-24T09:56:00.000-04:00

Outside the window are sidewalks and carefully trimmed islands of colorful poinsettas. Whenever I picture those hermetically minded flowers, I see colored pencils with their tops shaved into perfect cylinders, wood lightly dusted by the strangely shaded graphite tips.

Inside there is flourescent light that makes everything it touches the same shade of misery. White papers with black ink become pulsating tablets written all over with strange sigils. A blue covered book looks like nothing more than a bruise, a brush with strangers that ended badly. The red top of an aspirin bottle glares at me, furious intent that I cannot understand, or simply choose not to out of a sense of well-being. The wood paneled table in front of me, far from giving of that cheery visage of cedar smoked mahogany, seems to be febrile, so tense from expectation that a single touch would draw it to the ground into outlines. I look at everything and it makes sense to me, and perhaps that is the scariest part - that this all seems to make sense to me.

Today is a day of recovery, as Sunday was a day of recovery. Perhaps every day is a day of recovery for people like me - those who are less comfortable within themselves than they are without.

-Rich
one banana two banana three banana loves you

Last Niiight

2007-09-21T10:23:00.000-04:00

I drove the porsche for the first time last night. I also drove a stick shift for basically the first time last night. That is not a particularly comfortable thing, and frankly I would probably have done better to just practice for a while, but the concept seemed fairly simple: Clutch down, gas in, clutch up. What is so hard about that?

Of course, I did not anticipate the speed that the porsche is capable of...nor did I anticipate, at any point, how fucking dangerous it is to drive on 95 N and then in Baltimore with little to no experience behind the wheel of a sick sports car. So that was new.

Somehow I survived, and had no accidents or anything like that. I did learn that I do not like steep hills at all. Nor do I like stop and go traffic in the slightest. I do rather enjoy driving on open road, with the engine just purring beneath me. That, that I can understand, and understand rightly enough.

Today I get my nissan back, my reliable and trusty steed. I don't want him back. That is fairly clear. There is something about driving in a nice sports car that makes you realize just how terrible it is to drive in anything else, anything that doesn't have the same sense of motion, the same passion. A car is just a car. Unless it is something else entirely - those who have never driven one might scoff, but I assure you that it is indeed the case with this one.

I have a lot of things to do today, including dinner with a great friend of mine. I hope that I manage to get to everything. I hope everyone is doing well. Ciao, bunnies.

-Rich
let me know about summers in spain

A balanced reaction

2007-09-20T12:22:00.000-04:00

So there I was, man, standing in this hallway looking down and it was one of those railroad apartments that New Yorkers think is really cozy but really just seems like something out of hellraiser, you know? Like you turn the corner and you end up at the same corner, and finally you realize you are in a spiral and trapped forever. I guess spirals wouldn't really trap you forever - at some point a spiral has to end, right? It's not like a circle that way, it's not like you have to always find a new beginning and mark it or something. You have a beginning and an end and that's really all you can ask for these days.

Around the corner the apartment actually opens up a bit, like a scorpion or something. Like the door is the stinger and the rest of the place is the body and claws, clicking and clacking away, typewriters of nature. A thousand of them in one place could write a book about a monkey writing on a typewriter. Let's burn Bonfire of the Vanities later tonight, how ironic would that be? How deliciously ironic?

Anyways, she's sitting on the bed, right? Like just sort of sitting forlorn, and it jabs at me repeatedly when I look at her. I mean, I kind of want to be nice to her but I kind of don't and it gets tough when I think about it. All I do is, I end up sitting across from her on this big leather chest thing - I know that the top opens and I guess the designer didn't want anyone to know that it served as a chest as well as a bench, but it is pretty fucking obvious, right? Like politely ignoring someone puking into a ficus plant at an airport, especially when they are puking out something that looks like a bag of big league chew. Do you remember that gum? It came in a pouch like chewing tobacco and looked like chewing tobacco, and it was basically chewing tobacco for kids. I wonder how many of our generation have mouth cancer now because of some stupid gum we chewed on during little league games, that our parents gleefully bought for us.

Sorry man, I was distracted there for a bit. What? Yeah, I know, that's just something that I do...I feel like I can't really stop the brain from thinking, especially when it's thinking so quickly. Like normally I have one train of thought with lots of stops, but today I have lots of different trains and it gets a little crazy keeping track of all of them in my head, right? I mean, I'm not a MTA map or anything, all the lines are the same color, white as ghosts and bitterly cold enough to put in mugs of hot cocoa instead of marshmallows...again? Yeah, I'll get back into it, thanks for nudging me, and thanks for listening to me, thanks again.

So she's across from me and we don't say anything. I mean, it's one of those moments where you are afraid to interrupt the other person, and they are afraid to interrupt you and so nobody says a damn thing at all. We just sat there looking at each other's hands and I could hear construction going on outside, people yelling at each other, machines in that metal orgy of creation, that kind of thing, and I was wondering why life isn't more like that. Why can't people just talk to each other, yell across rooms and get their damn points across that easily, like pulling back on a bow and letting go? It just isn't that kind of world anymore - even when you try to be subtle and drop hints, nobody gets them at all. You might as well mail them around your state with those pictures of the missing kids and who they were last seen with. Nobody gives a shit, not even the people printing out the flyers.

-Rich
I know what you knew about letting our sympathies fail

2007-09-19T10:34:00.001-04:00

Some defining moments of the Dan Deacon/Girltalk show:

1)Dan Deacon was mixing, lying on the floor in front of the stage. He was sick or something, but it was cool. It was like a little love in.

2)Playing the entirety of his 11 minute song with lyrics projected up onto the screen.

3)people dancing EVERYWHERE

4)Girltalk crowd surfing and then surfing back to the stage and mixing it up.

5)When Girltalk mixed in Kelly Clarkson and every fucking person there knew the song. Hell, I know the song. Since you've been gooooonnnnneeeeeeeeeee I can feeeeeeel for the first time.

6)Dancing for hours and drinking water and not alcohol.

7)The casalino sisters are fucking hot.

8)I did not hit on Giulia, which is surprising even to me.

9)Leaving the show covered in sweat, walking to Republic, and getting my sunglasses back.

10)The cute little girl dancing in front of me, and the tall hot girl next to her. It was like, "take your pick, gentlemen".

So I am still basically recovering from the last weekend. I ran in the gym for a few hours last night and watched two episodes of law and order while doing so - I can't think of a show that I have seen more definitively. When I was younger I used to watch the episodes that came on during the day on A&E. Nowadays everything has to become so edgy - SVU and all of that shit is perhaps more indicative of the voyeur mindset than it is in any recognizeable growth in atrocity.

Yet where does it all end? Does it end when everyone is a criminal, when those emotions that define us as humans are no longer within us? How many of us, the somewhat priveleged generation, can say that we are not apathetic, that we are not spending our lives exactly as they come in - fuck the future. Look to the next generation and the discouragement is so strong that I wonder if perhaps there will be a generation after that.

Even in all of this, there is hope. There is always hope...though at times it can seem like an illness rather than a blessing. The Greeks considered hope to be the most dangerous of man's ills, as it rendered his ability valueless. I wonder how we will see it in a hundred years, whether it will still be a virtue in a sea of apathy.

-Rich

oh my my my my my my my my

Something is everything

2007-09-18T11:36:00.000-04:00

I was dancing in Baltimore the other night and I heard one guy turn to his buddy(they were both probably a few years younger than me, maybe 23-24) and say, "Dude, have you heard about this thing called Myspace?" Which by itself is a "zuh" moment, right? His friend goes, "No, what's that?" At which point my brain exploded.

Dancing has becomes my anti-anti drug. I'm not not drinking. I hate people that think wit is so easily discovered, so barely transparent. It is, instead, the kind of thing that sounds dry, even when underwater. Bubbles carry words for a second - for the first moment where your mouth is open, the sound is contained in that acoustic space. I am willing to bet that it is wonderful.

I have had a craving for Stella's Bakery for the last week, but am unfortunately close to broke. We will see if I can purchase a chocolate enclosing a bit of ginger, later on in the week.

My writing is burnt out for the moment, and I will return to it tomorrow. Love you all, bunnies.

-Rich
do you have another pool stick in mind?

mordant.

2007-09-17T09:01:00.000-04:00

Saturday is Caturday. Watching girls in search of pussy cats here kitty kitty kitty. Hung out with Two Tigresses, girls whose eyes reflected nothing but moonlight, nothing but net and the crowd paints a wave across those buffed and shined floorboards until we reflect madly, our laughter turning into a grimace. Frowns are smiles turned upside down, but only when our faces never change.

Girltalk girl talk girls talk girls talking at the Girltalk show me shows me showed me showing me that dancing is not a language that matters to anyone else but you. No-one but you. Beer thrown smells better than sweat until the beer smells too sweet for us to differentiate. I felt my arms and legs become weights and press agains the rest of my body, a sheathe of pain and numb sensations, soundwaves like paper balls against a chalkboard, the classroom saying no, no, hell no and the teacher writing equations that prove, somehow, that everything always works out for us.

It was my birthday. I am twenty six. There are twenty six versions of me, twenty six iterations and I think that I am in love with only two of them.

-Rich
we couldn't keep up with them

The food ban, and stupidity.

2007-09-14T09:27:00.000-04:00

Foie gras has been banned for a while because of "animal cruelty" laws. For those who don't know what foie gras is, I will briefly explain. It is the liver of geese which have been fattened by forcefeeding - the forcefeeding is done by inserting a nozzle and hose down the goose's neck and then pumping corn and whatnot directly into the stomach. The goose's liver becomes fatty, and the goose is then killed, the liver being turned into foie gras. The rest of the goose is eaten/sold at market. Such is the circle of life.

Foie gras is also fucking delicious. It is one of the greatest things in the world, in terms of sheer culinary impact. The taste of foie gras cannot be likened to anything else in the food kingdom...it is similar in texture to a pate, but the taste is rich and earthy, thick with a perfume that suffuses the mouth and nostrils, and which becomes something other than what it begins as. For those of you who don't eat meat, I'm not shitting on your dietary choices, so please stop shitting on mine...don't ban something you have in all probability never even eaten.

Whether or not the geese are actually experiencing pain is highly debated, to the point where this writer is certain that the ban exists because people just don't want us to kill any other animals. Animal friendly PETA members fail to understand what pretty much every other creature on this planet instinctually understands - every animal wants to kill every other animal. That is how nature works. The fact that other animals taste delicious to me is just a bonus, the proverbial "icing on the cake".

Morally, my argument is "who gives a shit about animals?" I posited my theory about PETA recently, and had a friend become violently angry. I said that people care about dogs and cats and other animals because animals can be owned. Humans can be confident in their dominance over these cute creatures that depend on them for survival - it is simply a power issue that makes people so eager to help animals. And yet those same people will ignore the homeless, the sick, the mentally ill. They will ignore these subsets of humanity because you can't own another person, because those other people might not be grateful, might never allow you to own the direction of their lives. It is a fairly common feature of humanity that we desire control over some small part of the universe, if only to truly ascertain whether we exist or not. It is also a fairly common feature of humanity that we become thirsty for power once we taste a little bit of it. Humanity is really only seen in a life where it does not exist - the ability to kill and indulge in the terrible things of this world are really what define us as a species. The murder trait is more endemic than any other in our world, it simply manifests in different ways for different people.

I would like to think that people could simply mind their own damn business and let other people do what the want to do. In a perfect world we would all be responsible for ourselves and that is all. This is not a perfect world in the slightest, but I like to think that we are trying to get there, even when the evidence is so obviously to the contrary.

So PETA, vegetarians, liberals who are only liberal when you agree with their opinions, fuck off. Nobody cares about you. Nobody loves you. Nobody ever will. A friend of mine described a girl he described as "sweet" as being very easily offended. This girl was ostensibly a hippie, open to the world...and yet when another friend said something he believed in, she decided that she hates him. I was only mildly surprised - most people are too stupid to actually understand a concept and stick to it. Kudos to the guy who said something she found offensive. To the girl and the other guy, fuck off.

Of course, now I am getting angry and invalidating my point, though not really. Ironic, no?

-Rich
sometimes we forget about labels

we weren't available.

2007-09-13T09:21:00.001-04:00

Bethesda, Maryland is the kind of place where you can keep time by counting the cars go by and actually enjoy it. Who wouldn't like saying, "Bentley, Bentley, Maserati, Ferrari...Volkswagon Golf?" It is probably the most wealth part of the state, and all of that wealth is concentrated into a perhaps ten by ten block square, centered around Wisconsin avenue, the road that leads directly to Rome. It is a strange thing to be driving up from D.C. and to pass a few strip clubs further down that road, sketchy areas where one doesn't normally see many white girls at night, the national cathedral, and then suddenly a bloc of power stores. Neiman's, Barney's, Dior, Tiffany's, etc. All in a row. Each store glistening in the morning dew, corpulescent and smelling faintly of old bacon or denatured leather.

Even stranger than the area is the fact that wealthy ne'er-do-wells coexist with hippies. You can see them grubbing for fun, living it down as it were at the flea market, or the little vintage clothing stores or the little faux poor cafes. It is interesting to note that the hippies are generally very wealthy as well but have simply approached the fundamental question of wealth in a very different manner. That question is of course, "when you have everything you want, and you don't actually have to work, what do you do?" The quick and dirty answer is that this is a trick question - we all have to work, no matter our finances. We have to want something, it is human nature to desire, to covet desperately. That a set of people have chosen to "love the world" and really CARE about causes only serves further proof that our lives have to mean something, or why live at all? Suicide becomes one hell of a viable option if we don't mean a damn thing in the long run.

That being said, there are plenty of things in the short run to irk us. Such as going into a posh store like Sak's in Bethesda and asking if they carry Dior Homme only to have them reply, "who?" Or learning that the Barney's will stop carrying Jil Sander soon. Or that Hermes only offers their caps and select, shit scarves at the Neiman Marcus. There is no market in D.C. for class with luxury. People in the nation's capital would rather the two be separate and equal, even when luxury carries a knife behind it's back to the senior prom.

It is enough for me to drive past these stores and to wonder if the life I am living is really the life I should be living. Look at all the faux glamour surrounding these pavilions to desire, to human desire! To want to be someone or something else so desperately that money no longer means what it used to mean - it only translates into luxuries, now. I look around and I drive on through, heading back to a friend's house, heading back to the life I am comfortable with, the life that no other American seems to want any more. It used to be that even the gangsters wanted class. Now all they want is another mink coat.

-Rich
I wouldn't touch things in here

Rendezvous.

2007-09-12T09:25:00.000-04:00

It is a miracle that miracles happen. Does that mean miracles are any less real when they are small, when their inception does not foretell their deaths?
People see miracles all the time in things like a jar of peanut butter, or a burnt piece of toast which, through the random jostling of space, creates the appearance of the virgin mary. More money is offered through ebay(as all of these objects do end up on ebay) if the virgin mary is either a)crying or b)accompanied by "The Jesus". Not the pederast. The one who died, you know, for all of our fucking sins. There is no reliable statistical information on whether it matters, to the collector, if "The big J" is an adult or a child, whether the Mary is crying a la the Pieta, or for some other reason.
What is there to think of those who collect such things - the detritus of humanity, of our ruminations. There is nothing that we would like more than to collect the proofs of our uniqueness, the signs that God whimiscally gives us, as a child will sometimes throw a pet a treat. Is that what we seek, then?
Not that I am particularly religious, or particularly not so. It simply fascinates me that people are so desperate to see something beautiful when it is so easily seen, all around us. It is said by many that there is beauty in death, but what most people tend to forget is that it is because there is beauty in life.
I will write more tomorrow - this will suffice for my first post to this board. Ciao, my lovely readers. I hope to hear from some of you.

-Rich
this is the pursuit of happiness labeled black and blue

Hmm...

2007-08-06T11:37:00.000-04:00

I am moving my blog to this site. Hopefully it is less tedious than writing where it previously was. I will be back later, I am sure.

-Rich
when in dubious life