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