Winter in Dreams pt.2

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

-Rich

a whispered wild gyre plays

undercurrents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Songtooth

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

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

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

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

-Rich
somewhere in this shaved undying boneyard

the sour.

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

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

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

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

-Rich

cash rules everything around me