feeling around in the dark

It happened after a night of bowling and heavy drinking. A new year's celebration but it wasn't new year's. Couch, cold, morning sun, had to go home to recover. Standing in the hall, the conversation between Sean's mum and my mum was knifing through my head. I was resting on a bench, wanting water and silence, but before I could leave I had to tie my laces. Bent over to find my shoes and fell over into blackness. Apparently, just before I left, I went "la-la-la-la" .. Maybe I was thinking blah-blah-blah, this conversation is blocking my escape. I hit my head when I fell over, and left this place for twenty seconds.

Une episode de evanouir. It felt like nothing felt. The nausea hit fast, maybe a second or two of intense ordered thoughts like “must vomit! must exit to vomit.” and then a levitating light-headedness.. like when you get punched in the stomach, but in the head instead. After a brief second of that I remember falling, and that perfect surround of blackness before I came to, coughing and sucking in the air for the first time in so long. Nothing felt so real as my lungs and heart pumping again, the circuits in my head turning on and my soul tuning in, out. I even remember waking up and my mother was cradling my head, a good image.

So my head was fluttering in and out, and though it was violent, the breathing was wonderful.
They said my eyes went back into sockets.

Once

A story from long ago.. winter 2003-2004.

After five or six beers and calling the bartender Lou, I drank a few more whiskeys on the rocks with no ice, and we left for toboganning. Some of us made it up to the top of the citadel. The point was to slide down. I tried to put the garbage bag on over my head so as to poke my arms and legs through it but instead it just made me blind and I rolled down the hill. Eventually recovered and looked around and it was just Beth and myself.
We heard people in the distance calling our names but at the time we pretended to be spies and hid behind trees. I think it was a snow storm. We walked about and eventually found a snowy outdoor stable. We entered and declared it the James Bond-rolling training ground. We practiced barrel rolls and also spy techniques. I found a chain for horses and draped it over my neck, she put a pylon on top of her head. These were our 'burdens'. Don't remember why. We then noticed that the little Bobcat snow-clearing machines - the little ones that clear sidewalks, were everywhere. I ran beside one for a while and knocked on his window. He stopped and I asked if he by chance had room for us to get a ride home. He said there was very little room and apologised. Beth asked if we could sit on the shovelling thing on front. He said this was not safe, and apologised, and left. We then tried to climb into a compound to steal horses or something but the police paddywagon came by. They shouted and asked what we were doing, climbing the fence. We just apologised and they let us off. By this point we were by Quinpool and we decided to visit the hospital for some heat and maybe the cafeteria. Unfortunately, and strangely.. it was locked! Must have been a wrong entrance.. but we just kept repeating in wonder, how can you lock a hospital?
Eventually found our way back to Spring Garden road and Beth said we should stop at the Dandelion Cafe. I knew the guy there was sketchy, you know, he's always peering out at people from his window. Anyway, we went because she claimed to be friends with him. He wouldn't let us in because he was starting to paint some canvas, but he said if we stayed inside naked he would let us in. Well.. yep, you guessed it! No, we politely declined and walked home. We made hot chocolate in the common room. I had never done anything like that adventure with anyone. This was before we started going out. I knew she was special. I woke up with no hangover but so many bruises. Later she told me that she wanted to kiss me that night, when we were warming our broken bodies in the basement.

pulling weeds with my friend chris

My tonsil is so swollen it droops down to my tongue. I have to forget about it. Out the door clanks shut behind me and I step onto the sleeping street. Black rain is splattering the street and the dead leaves lie curled and brittle on the ground. It smells good. Musty and natural and real. The sticky air tastes faintly of smoke. I pick up some leaves and rub them on my face. Where do the smells come from? They come from memories. Well where do all the memories come from? They come from encounters. Where do the encounters come from? They come from smells, of course. Strange, no?

Walking home today I saw a child picking up grass from the sidewalk and throwing it onto the street. He approached me with rubber boots and flashed a smile. He cried out in excitement:
"I am cutting weeds!" His little grinning white teeth were three or four years old.
"You are indeed. You're like a lawn mower." Does he know what a lawn mower is?
He picked up some grass in his hand. His bunched up face and fist flung it on the road with style. He turned back to me and smiled again.
"There's so much!"
There was actually much more grass than weed but he couldn't tell the difference. He was pulling all of it out. Clumps were scattered around him, a sand pit for a gardener. He kneeled down and I liked the sound his plastic jacket made, swishing back and forth with his arms.
"Do you want some help?" He nodded. Must get serious now. I bent down and tore a big clump out of the earth. Left a mark. The child was tiny, I nearly stepped on him when he jerked up and down.
"That was a big one!" He was stunned. We were pulling weeds forever, having the most beautifully simple conversation in a perfect state of stasis. I was completely happy with this child, but where were his parents? I turned around and saw a burly woman smiling at us from the laundromat. Folding sheets and watching through the glass.
"You have to pull really deep." I pulled out another weed but made sure to get the roots. "See the dirt? Weeds eat dirt." I was worried this was confusing. He was unsure to pull either the weed or the dirt. He looked at me, at the ground, back and forth, pleading- help me in this one task. But I have to go. The mother is probably wondering about my motives. Playing in the grass with somebody's child, fucking lunatic. I told him to keep up the good work, and I started off. Then I remembered something.
"What is your name?"
"Christopher!"
"Christopher, I'm Adam."
"Adam!"
"Bye."
"Bye-bye!"

i was walking home
this little kid was pulling grass from the sidewalk
flinging it onto the street
this tiny grinning child approached me
telling me he didn't like weeds
making them go away
we got to talking, he accepted my offer
we sat on the grass pulling weeds forever

The rain
Smells like gloaming? Fire burning? Smoke churning and water pouring all around. A torrent of the briefest senses pass by you.

Well all the souls are tucked in to bed, swallowed in the night. The quiet streets here smell of smoke and cold crisp decay. They smell of something else too but I can't figure it. Last week in the thickest night Stef and I walked through a heavenly downpour drenched us all the way to the water. It seemed like the whole city was draining down this street. I loved the sounds. A moored boat creaking back and forth, the sudden showers splashing the rocks and the water, all the voices muffled in the rain. I love the smell and feel of the rain.

But it never stops. The rain keeps beating on the window pane, scattering down on the pavement, spitting and tapping the surface of your skin. You can't get it off you. It sticks like glue you know. Well maybe it doesn't. I wish it would stop raining here. The idea is you can only truly escape from the rain when you go underground. And you don't want to live underground, do you?

Swallowed by the Sea

With white sand and smooth stones underfoot the grey sky clouded my vision. We had Crystal Crescent beach stretched out before us and boxes of fish and chips for the journey. A good feeling. We crossed a wooden bridge, a razor that split the world in four. Water below, clouds above. Ocean and bush on either side. My friends and I were looking for a place sheltered from the wind and the people to eat les champignons magiques and digest the world for what it is. I opened up the toxic fungi with my teeth and gazed in wonder: it was bright blue inside.



I fell down to look at the sand and found a single ant on its own journey. The analogy- Ponder the Ant. No direction, no path but the one your feet create. The need to go further, to never stop, to claw and climb your way through the land until you come to the water's edge. You will end your journey in the sea. Your life will end, in the swirling crash when the waves come together and the moments stop. I stared at this ant, talking to it, watching its path for a sudden lifetime. I should have read a Japanese death poem: "My wake leaves little; but as ripples reach the sea, they become great waves." As it crossed the desert of sand I wondered if it had a destination, a purpose. It seemed to be wobbling towards the water. We dragged our feet to make walls of sand to see if this would change its decision. Not at all. It kept going, dragging something the whole way. My friends were moving on. To bigger and better things no doubt. It was both awful and wonderful to watch this creature was flirting with a certain death. The waves looked big to me, but to Ponder it must have been the noise of life flooding in and out. I realised I had to leave, and start my own journey. I hoped that Ponder would drown a painless death and float into a fishy's lips who would be devoured by a shark that would swim to the Bahamas and Ponder would finally come to rest washed out on a warm beach, stung by the sun in a rotting carcass of bones and sand.

We were covering less distance than the ant. Maybe thirty steps in thirty minutes. We were stopped by a red stream- the kool-aid river. Someone had the wise idea to ditch their shoes, and then they all came off. I hurled a couple pairs back towards our camp and the colour flew my eyes through the sky. I could throw shoes all day long. But this little river was a sight to behold. It painted your feet copper when you stepped inside. I admired its shape as it wrapped around the stones and wandered through the grass, with squishy mud on the ends where it swerved and split in two on the ridge. It formed a little pool there and we skipped over the ledge. Beneath this ledge the kool-aid emptied into the sea. There was enough colour and substance and beauty in there to paint the world over again and again. Were they the streaks of pollution or chance? I did not care. It was a stream of foamy goodness and I was sad to leave it.

Stef and I returned to the camp to get juice packs and shoes. There was a path that cut through the bush to lead us home to the camp, and back to the others. But this wasn't just bush. This was a huge sprawling field of thorns and flowers and wild vines, all of them fighting for space. We made it back safe. But the effects of the toxins were coming on strong. I stopped and stared at the sea. I was so happy to look at the world. I remember thinking we should all spend more time observing. Seeing all that can be seen, the patterns and mysteries. I had to go back to the boulders and tell the others that people are ridiculous for not seeing the world as it is, as it should be, waking and breathing and dying all at once. Stef and I ventured off the path to make up time, and we paid dearly. The thorny jungle invited us in, clawed at our skin, and nearly took us down into the ground where the sun don't shine.

The boulders.
Scampering along the stones. Hopping and skipping off them, not waiting for a place to stop, only to go faster and further and on and on. Your feet will find the right places. You wobble and bobble and stumble forward. You stop when you forget to catch your breath. You stop and think of the past. The red river cutting through the rocks was another lifetime. You will never be here again, but it will always be in you. Memories like barnacles, some stick more than others.
I know I have to make it to the hump of stone in the distance, jutting out like the belly of a giant. Is it really there? You don't know until you arrive. You close your eyes at night and see the waves explode in your sockets, you hear the crashing surf. You close your eyes, hands pressed up against your face, and the waves explode into patterns and fireworks without noise.
You remember you were a child, lying on the sand and running your fingers through the million grains and laughing and laughing because there's so much, it's too much. It starts to hurt in your belly. Not pain, but a twisted empty feeling. A hunger you can't satisfy.

I climbed the giant's belly. It was a massive ridge jutting out into the ocean. I peered inside one of the crevices on the way up. A thousand little bugs trembled in the air when my shadow covered their home. I climbed higher, to the very edge, and I sat down. I watched the infinite waves rising cresting splitting.. and then battering up against the wall of stone. They seemed to grow larger and larger. I thought it strange that the water was so shook up and upset. I felt something tug me towards the ocean. I leaned closer. There was a language in the crash of waves. There were voices and whispers and screams. The waves were like people, throwing themselves against one another and shaking with terror. The water would never feel time or decay. I was jealous and scared. I felt like shrivelling up into my insignificant bundle of flesh. Just blood and bones. Those waves would communicate and exist with more certainty than I ever will. But somehow, all the water, all the ocean, everything slowed to an instant here and now at the edge of the world. The savage sea swallowed into the giant's belly of rocks and crevices and shadows. Something happened. I waited until I could feel my soul leaving my body behind, and I tumbled down into the thundering percussion. I felt the silence of death wrapped up against me. I almost died in the waves, but it was beautiful.

The cold grey curtain is tucking in the sky to sleep. You see the monuments to human existence in the tangled blurry distance. Skinny communication towers with red pulsing tips. We drive our nails into the earth to make the necessary connections. They all glowed red together, breathing in and out. Ugly metal totem poles in the sky shared their own harmony.

The tide had come up past the old familiar stones. We had to get back to camp! Stef took off like a guerilla into the distance, flying through a messy path. He rescued the keys to the jeep and the campsite. I dashed faster and faster, skipping ahead of my own feet, and I was flying off the stones. I was a grasshopper, a stonehopper! I soared over crevices and gulleys. I danced. But there was too much freedom. I gambled on a triple one-step and got my foot lodged in a crack hidden by some shrubs. It was less than a second, but enough to twist it, and I felt the reassuring surge of pain shoot through me like electricity. Keep going. Further, further, the darkness is swimming closer.

I lost my other companions, Sean and Jocelyn. They were shoeless joes swallowed by the darkness, and I never wanted to look back. I would return for them after finding Stef, who had vanished. I found his bridge mixture candy scattered, the half-eaten remants resting on some bush. A sign? This way, he must have said. As I crossed the familiar markers, the terrain became less rocky, more forgiving. I waited for a second in the thick murky air. I watched the lighthouse make its pass, lighting a path in the shroud of clouds, alone and deserted. We looked back and forth at each other. I tried to meet the light with my eyes when it came back around. Looking back, my two children had all but disappeared into the night. I could no longer make out their outlines. They became shining ghosts, swinging their bodies over the stones. Up and over, up and over. I slowed down, but knew I wasn't home until we passed the kool-aid river. In a small field of shining stones, I stopped. I could see something moving up ahead. I yelled his name. He shouted back a nonsense. Crashing the silence, two dark furry little animals scurried off into the bush. I turned and shouted something to the ghosts- something in their language, I hoped. They shouted back.

Chocolate Lake

The arm of the ocean stretched its soggy hand beside us, all the way to the rotary. Walking over a bridge, scales of grey and murky shades of blue crept towards me. A muddy mess of dark swirling colours, slowly blending together like oil into something solid and crusty, seeping to a stop at the edge of the arm. We walked past them, up the hill towards Purcell's Cove. We crossed the bobsled flow of traffic and made a beeline towards Chocolate Lake. Along the path, the roots were surging everywhere out of the ground like the rocky veins of an ancient hand. The path to the lake ran along the water's edge, all along the skinny strip of land. I watched the rippling blue shaded and shrouded by trees that arched over our heads. Walking towards the sun. I love walking and squinting through the sun. Yellow rays were casting beams of light down to the earth, slicing through the leaves wherever there was open space. The ground felt less calloused and tangled now, more yeilding and soft. I could hear the cries and shrieks of families. One of the guys there was from a pizza store, and he was having a friendly conversation with a middle-aged pale character. The path opened up in the near distance. Ahead, the grass changed slowly to a pool of sand, stretching out in front of my waiting feet and a blue blue lake that hurt my eyes was waiting on the other side. A few families scattered around. Last call. Last swims before the sun comes down. I waited patient and anxious at the entrance, unwilling to break the spell. It felt like an enchanted hideaway. I waited on the edge. Inching forward, bit by bit like a caterpillar. Watching the water come slowly into view.

We plunked our bums down on a blanket of sand. I zigzagged down towards the water, relishing the feeling of dryness right before the big drenchcoat of liquid flowed through my bones. The water was clear because of the low pH. There was probably no life in this lake, only on top. But it was so lovely. It was like Otter Lake. I miss melting on the water. I floated on the surface on my back. Water floated and shimmied up beside my ears. Into my ears. The earth wobbled in my eyes skaking up at the dark skies.

Elements

"You two gentlemen look like you can read."
A scruffy middle-aged man in a faded purple shirt reached in and left a flyer on our table. Barely had the time to turn and catch his face as he plodded away. I looked down. An iron fist clutching a cannabis leaf: "Free Marc Emery - Marijuana Solidarity Day" The sun was shining. Stunning headless bodies filed past the patio, faces swallowed up by sunglasses. I tried to squint enough to see only the vague outlines, the bright colours, the wonderful bundles of flesh. The people were young and strung out. I thought of a clothesline being reeled past. Scraps of sidewalk conversation floated up into the sky and the metallic fabric of the streets rumbled past. The glint of the sun sparkled white, reflecting off the noisy cars. I moved side to side, positioning myself behind a telephone pole so the rays would quit heating my cheek. There were two empty pitchers in our bladders and grease in our bellies. We had the time and place to be here or there. Usually if I'm happy I stay where I am, but the chattering street and glowing sun was distracting my fuzzy buzz. Sean decided to go home but Jocelyn was more enthused, and so we began the expedition.

We came to the grand parade square where the potheads gathered in twos and threes. The park was below us, saddled by a little valley of green wrapped by thick trees. A war memorial statue was stone in the centre of it all, and a modest little podium and van made noise in the distance. There were only a few officers standing along the ridge of trees, fenced off from our little gathering. Speaker after speaker. Marijuana use does not pose a threat to society. Marijuana use is good for some of the sick, and bad for some of the healthy. Our government should enforce marijuana laws rather than be coerced into action by the US. There were no more than 100 people there. No one (on the stage) was toking, but the words evaporated into harmless puffs of smoke. I looked down at the orange leaves sprinkled beside me. I ran my hands through the leaves and rolled my body over them, crunching and crackling. Spent some time laughing in my head about younger days, memories of falling backwards into a huge pile of autumn. Before you can say Jerry Garcia, it's 4:20. There was a raffle to win a handsome bong, but we lost. I saw the energy of bodies glowing and the sweet pungent smell of summer wafting from the statue steps. Jolly good music came from the speakers, and we ventured down onto the statue to fetch that special leaf.

Walls were nowhere I could see. Everything was happening in synch. The young bongo drummers drove the tempo hard and slow, then faster, and faster still! I stared at the one who looked like Anton Newcombe's little brother, pulsing and vibrating the air with primal noises from the skin of the drum. The ones who fed us, they were just children.
Free Mark Emery!
Under some swinging trees, autumn was splashing the ground with brown leaves. Funny. It is supposed to be a gradual process, but one day, you open your eyes and find yourself in another season. On all sides we were surrounded by buildings and streets, but it was the orange trees that fenced us in.
Enter our friend the rastaman, Cumin. He spun some wonderful stories, dramatised but believable little movies from the everyday. A natural-storyteller he was, with light brown smooth skin. A happy face, a strange smiling accent.
Suddenly, skateboarders invaded the land, rushing past like jet engine turbines taking off. They whirled past us and around us, grinding on the statue like sharks circling the living dead.

I sensed the stream of effortless thinking. I sensed a breeze that cuts you and reminds you what it's like to be cold, cold with the blood circulating through the circuits of your flesh. On the walk home, the world turned all the sun rain wind and warmth into one moment. There was a moment where everything came together. The yellow sun setting on our faces and the wind ripping sky tears through our hair. The dark smoky cloud hovered over us sending misty drips. What a cruel cloud, that bubble of grey trapped in the wide blue sky. Everything was still sharp and clear and my feet stumbled ahead. I caught the world in a sweet embrace.

One night in Prague

May 27-30

I knew I would be lingering in the old city around the drunken revelry with masses of foreign tongues stampeding in the centre. Spent days watching the effervescent tourists swarm Wenceslas square, Charles bridge, and the citadel across the river. I was torn between an intense love and hatred of this place. The drunken hordes of swerving shirtless Brits mingling with shockingly attractive women. The tourists sticking to the pavement like jelly, stopping every second to take another snapshot of the ancient panorama surrounding them. They are everywhere. Roaming in packs, marking off sights like homework, postcarding themselves in this fossil of a city. Touching as much as possible as if it were on display, feeling nothing. I heard more English than Czech in the downtown streets. But for all its weekend visitors and stunning tourist traps, the city was impeccably quiet and clean. Instead of cars, pedestrians rule the streets, as cruel stoplights rule the pedestrians. I loved the ornate, decadent, colourful architecture; every building completely different than the last. I loved walking beside the dark river and beautiful graveyards. I loved the massive park on a hill in the west that looks over the city. It was good to go there and sleep. We were once three travellers who climbed to an empty patch and sprawled out, soaking up rays and basking in the earth. We slept and dreamed of solid ground. I awoke as a laughing family shuffled into single file, taking turns running through the fountain to cool down.

I found my hostel after much chagrin and many tired exchanges with the locals. I know that all you need is a bed, shower, and toilet, but this place was crummy. I chose it solely for its location, free breakfast, and cheap rates. There were shared unisex showers operated by a push-button which gave me a light tepid stream. That sprinkle lasted for ten seconds, and then you had to push again, or you got no more water. Breakfast was as hard and chewy as crusty dirt, but there was free coffee. Entering my room at night, I noticed that many bunk beds were packed in far too tight for the size of the room, and the only window was screaming red advertised light. This came from the street lamp but also the football-field Star Wars billboard across the street. The room was always scarred with red light, and everything creaked.

I wanted so fiercely to write about one night in the square, with the noise hovering, the chatter and banter of drunks and the shoes scratching on stone, the thick urine-soaked air, all around me broken glass. I remember treading down street after street, noticing how each one formed a different pattern of cobbled stones. I remember the fairytale castles looming side by side, distant and solemn, commanding concrete respect. The bright orange streetlamps lined my field of vision. I remember watching people staggering towards them, friends huddling beside them, and couples flirting between them. Dancing clowns, all of them. Happy as children, spinning out of control, feeling safe because everyone else was doing it too. Someone launched a frisbee through the air. A brief instant of a thousand eyes catching its path, waiting and watching its gentle descent. It skidded and landed beside one of many paddy wagons. The glazed eyes returned to the wobbly world of streaking orange madness. There was me in the middle, floating through the craze. I wait patiently for something to happen as everything flashes past. I sit on the curb and touch the ground with a stick, trying to trace my path through the world; I move the stick from stone to stone, listening to the circus of noise rise up the ancient walls. I try to remember these feelings but they vanish and fade into the next moment.

I remember waiting in the hostel for this Brazilian girl to return to pick up her bags. Renata was a fine creature who happened to be in my room. She had dark hair, long and straight down past her shoulders. She was small, with a muscular but feminine body. She wore a plain shirt with green shorts, tight and accentuating, with wonderful curves around her hips, breasts, and mesmerizing ass. She had a shy face, tanned mahogany brown by the sun. I struggled to distract my gaze from her dark eyes and coffee coloured skin. I could tell she was intelligent, from the way she described her travels so far, her life back home, and her knowledge of five languages. We talked about favellas – slums and ghettos outside of Rio/Buenos Aires, the ups and downs of travelling alone, and other stuff. We could have been talking about the finer aspects of potato peeling for all I cared; the moment I made her laugh and a smile snuck across her face, there was nothing else happening around me. It was gorgeous. She was gorgeous. I could not look away, and she may or may not have sensed it. I quickly decided to cover my tracks and informed her I was here with friends, and we were going to stay out until dawn, and that she should join us. This was all very difficult because the other girl in my room stood in direct opposition to everything Renata embodied. This other one was a stringy blonde, buck-toothed, with a cockney accent and a sour look that made me cringe. I managed to keep her away from the conversation, but Renata was unsure, and eventually declined our company. Maybe she thought my travelling partner was not simply my travelling partner, maybe she wanted to be alone. After a long night, returning to the hostel, I ran into her at dawn. I decided to sleep for a couple hours but urged her to wake me up when she returned. I vaguely remember someone dark standing over me, repeating my name, and me repeatedly groaning. I never saw her again. But I was so taken with her. And now here I wait, some dumb fool. Everyone in this hostel seems to be three or four years my junior. It feels very strange, because everyone else I have met in hostels have been older. This is crazy. I am in Praha, my last night, and what am I waiting for? A last fleeting glimpse of a face I will never remember, but always recognise. I have some charming abilities, and I have been called a sweet young thing. But let’s face it; the chances of me altering her path are slim to none. I might be able to spend a half hour, a few hours with her at most, depending on my luck.

This luck never came. I stepped out for a quick supper and when I came back she had taken her bag and left, leaving me only a note and a slight stinging sensation in my temples. There was no throbbing sensation in my trousers or painful heart palpitations, as I had hoped for. I was just slightly bitter, and tired. Foul animal that I am, I detached and displaced my lust instantly. The young woman at reception was a true Czech beauty. She had long dark hair as well, but she was tall and thin, with long long legs. She was in her late twenties, around six feet tall. Her face was equally long, and she wore perfect skin with a sexual grin. As if she was amused with my weakness. She sympathised with my torturous waiting for the unknown goddess to step back into my life. I notice her watching a video on her computer with a familiar casual dialogue: Seinfeld. I ask her if she has seen this episode and she says she has seen all of them. We get along well after that. She promises to leave a message from me to the girl in case she returns. Jaded, I made it as vague and brief as my directions to the new hostel: “Get out at Vysherad station. Take stairs down into valley.” On my dejected way to the second hostel, I witnessed two wonderful events. Stepping out of the Vysherad subway station and walking down through a forest in the middle of the city as the sun set above me. The sky was slashed with red and it warmed my soul as I descended into a thousand trees, a quiet valley of green. The sun dipped off the edge of the earth but I could not see it happen. When I emerged from the valley the world was cold glowing blue. Upon arrival I climbed out onto the small patio. On one side, a train thundered past the subway bridge which hung over the forest high in the sky, and on the other, there were fireworks off in the distance. I was too far to hear, but close enough to see. I realised I left a huge plastic jug of juice at the first hostel, and decided to retrieve it. There was no way I would make it through the night without that flavoured sugar, pumping me sober energy.

I made it back downtown and walked towards a sign prohibiting the presence of pigeons. Though I did not know exactly how this law would be enforced. A pigeon inside a black circle with a red line crossing it out would surely alert the other pigeons to their wretched fate. There were a dozen benches under trees, evenly separated in two lines, with an unobstructed view of the square. There were all sorts of characters. A group of teenage misfits, drinking and tossing their finished beer cans, impatient for their friend to finish rolling his joint. Meticulously waiting for perfection. A half-dozen crooked men were sprawled out on the wooden benches supporting their dead weight. A few restless souls drifted in between benches, floating comatose zombies. I felt their lifeless eyes and saw their hands and knees, quivering for a moment of chemical release. Everyone was starting to look the same. I put streets and distance between us. I looked for people that were more alive. I wanted to dance, to feel life, to shake out the dust.

In a narrow passage between two streets, there were dark figures playing music in the shadows. Closer to the sound, I recognised riffs and chords of classic rock. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. I slowed my pace and fell out of place in the stream of crossing people. There were two young men with long scraggly black hair beating on old beat-up acoustic guitars. Busking for food or money or dope or whatever. Such pale gaunt faces, all pock-marked and hollow. The one with a bandana said something in Czech and pointed to the giant plastic juice box I’d been slugging from all night. I walked over and handed him the tasty fruit drink. I motioned for them to finish it, sat down cross-legged on the curb beside them, waiting and hoping for the warm familiar rhythms to begin again. There was a third one who stood in the middle of the alley, a dark-haired woman, rushing from one person to the next, pleading for handouts, arms outstretched and face upturned, moving relentless and desperate under the stars. She looked straight ahead as the rushing flow of bodies moved through her like a turnstile. I tried to talk with the guitarists. I asked them how long had they been together, played together, been on the streets, been fighting for meals, where was home? They were from Hungary or Slovakia, and spoke next to no English, but we made motions and signals and sign language and communicated. I rolled a hash cigarette and asked if they would play me something, nothing I would recognise. Bandana laughed and told me they only played for money. But they started strumming old folk songs, rasping and painful and playful and beautiful. I wondered if you could get through life without sharing language, without sharing moments. The woman stood still out there, glaring at the world that would not look at her, glaring at me, tired and resentful and just dog-tired. We passed the juice jug around until it was empty. I was there for twenty, maybe thirty minutes, turning to peaceful jelly as the hash hit me and my mind felt pleasantly wordless, cupped by my weightless body. So much life was cradled in those instruments. They looked transparent in the night. Completely alone and barely alive. The woman looked at me, distrustful. I dropped some krown into a small tin can and decided to leave. The three haggard gypsies wore all black, pierced with metal and earrings and bracelets they jingled out of the night, ringing out of my life.

My sense of direction was fading. As the a.m. people drifted off to fumble with locked doors and sleep to life, I was losing myself towards the next empty space. Tired steps traced a clopping path hopefully towards the silent river. What did I want to see here? Everything dead and obsolete was fenced off. I wandered past ancient relics, buildings and statues, and felt quiet admiration until next to nothing but mild surprise. Culture and civilisation was not here first. The river was here first. The river and fish and trees and birds and land and animals we drain and drill and crush and kill. Ignore and forget, and you feel no shame or guilt. No one has to think about wilderness in cities. But there is peace there, when you find it. There is also peace in the streets. In the foggy haze of bodies whirling past you. On subways and sidewalks where we move the living; in museums and cemeteries where we preserve the dead; at concerts and festivals where we make our noise. The hushed starry night is wrapped up tight, holding its breath until the next circus troupe noises past. They say everyone is heading for Charles bridge. I suddenly felt so completely removed from life, a spectator of the spectacle. I curled into a ball, looked at my hands and knees, and started to wonder why everyone felt so free back there in the square. We are all just trapped in the current, clinging to debris in a cloudy river, holding on to moments tightly like a child clutches candy. Do you relish the safety of that familiar feeling, when you think time stops for you and you alone? Touching on those beautiful lapses in time when you become unstuck. I walked along the river, running my hand along the railing, the walls, wondering if you could touch something and a jolt of electrical sense data would hit you in the head with a mirror into the past. Who else walked liked me? Was I really so alone? Everyone has these thoughts. Man small world big. Man thinks man made world. Man takes all the space from world and pushes himself off the edge. I walked towards Charles bridge, in order to look off the edge.

I had been there during dawn with the travellers, as a million wispy balls of pollen, a million flying bugs swarmed the view. The chunks of pollen floated up and down like fat snowflakes in a storm. I thought of the bubbles we used to blow out of a little bottle, watching a child put the key to their lips and let out spheres of fizz. The bugs moved like we did, roaming in packs and attacking someone unsuspecting as they circled and tossed in the wind as the giant victim flailed their arms. Now it was night, and the people were clustering near the sound of guitars. I walked towards them and watched and listened. The one with the biggest audience was playing tunes of love and peace, man. Imagine, Let It Be, and others I forget. He had them all wrapped around his fingers, strumming the chords with too much drama, drooping his head forward and snapping it back with the motions. There was a smaller number of people, myself included, hanging around the fringe of the love circle. One gloomy girl lit a cigarette, cast an indifferent look back at the fools, and snickered to herself. She was lonely, waiting for someone who would not show. There were other sitters and squatters and standers hanging back, watching and hearing the music float into the sky. The guitar player asked everyone to clap their hands, come on now, sing together. The voices formed a gospel chorus while the faces glowing in the heat and the smiling teeth lit up the night. Everyone was being slowly propelled forward, closer, tighter. Swaying with the song as the wind whipped up off the simmering water, everything felt scripted. A commercial of happiness, a postcard from life. I think, in a minute they are going to join hands. All the sounds rolling into each other, echoing in and out. The stars and moon reflected off the water, bodies simmering, everything moving, raving blue. I walked back to the square.

Alone for only this one night, my friends having left for Germany earlier that day, I decided I wanted to have sex with a prostitute. It did not start out this way, and it certainly did not end as planned. I am not a perverted individual; I only have certain needs which must occasionally be satisfied. Besides, I have nothing but respect for professional lovers. Prostitution is the oldest profession, and it will outlast everything else. I headed for Václavské Námestí aka Wencenclas Square; the local hotbed of prostitution. Wandering towards the unmarked exit to leave the old town square, I was carried through the dark narrow alleys by lively bodies. I felt lost in the current. Wavering in the night, they swerved back and forth like a nebulous mass towards their next drink. I sat down on the street curb and exchanged glances with the masses. One Irish bloke sat down next to me, told me his name, his troubles, and his desire to sin. I absorbed everything and spit out callous indifference. “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked. “Nae, ahve lost me friends,” he answered. In all this mess, we cannot even lose ourselves. The people danced in and out of the square for hours, forever, and I tried to leave.

On my way home that night, I was accosted by ugly prostitutes. A tiny brown woman with black scraggly hair, eastern or Hispanic, old enough to be my mother, approached me and asked for a light. I handed her the fire and then she grabbed my hips and thrust her crotch against mine. “Vat are you, German?” I then saw her drugged out sickly old face, and decided, despite her forwardness, I knew she wasn’t the one. I told her I was English and not interested in French. She whispered “I suck your coke, I do anal, vat you vant?” Her starved little body wrapped around my legs tighter. I told her NO, get off me now. “How much you got, I do special price for you.” I eventually peeled her off me as she ironically told me to fuck off as she took jogged towards her next victim. Other women with the same gaunt faces on different bodies snuck across my path. Something dark in the shadows suggestively whispered “blowjob?” and others tried to grab me. My foggy unfinished thoughts were interrupted as I dragged myself back down into the valley I felt trapped in my body, wondering if I could ever leave my head behind. I watched myself stumbling through the night, like in those dreams where you see yourself and have no control. Slowly spiralling down the cement trail, waiting for crazies lurking in the shadows. I found my way to the foam mattress, sank into the pillow and fabric clutching a glass of water and heard the birds rising with the sun. I fell into a dream and hoped someone would wake me up, so I would not miss the train.

my pink eye

found this when cleaning my room. not sure when.. sometime in high school. there are some funny pencil illustrations on the side. i have the copy unedited from its original state.

my pink eye by Adam Ilustrations by Seiji

my pink eye
it makes me cry
fluid flows from it, clear like water
it makes my eye grow hotter, Father.

drench my eye
before I die
with copious amounts of H2O
or gouge it out with an angry crow

trying not to touch it or
think about it,
but it itches little by little
my pupil looks like a red skittle

robot said I have pink eye
if this is so, I might just cry
it may be true that I just rhyme
for a lame excuse to whine and whine

seiji think that I'm a baby
well I don't care, he's just crazy.
I want so much for my eye to shatter
nothing else in lifes seems to matter.

who is to blame for my misfortune?
my parents should have had an abortion
now all that's left is me and eye
try as he might, I will not cry.

Home for the Aged

Behind the windshield my eyes swim in a sea of blue as my father spins through suburbia. We are going to visit his mother. I watch the white and yellow streaks on the pavement fade in and out – a feeling of lost time creeps up out of nowhere. Where did that come from? There must be something sacred about travelling without moving, moving without a sound. My father and I do not use many words on these journeys. I pretend there is some form of unspoken communication, but it’s not that. We’re thinking of different things. A heavy lulling sensation hangs like fog in the car. I reach out, wave and flap my hands around fanatically, desperately slicing through the cloud of quiet. After I stop, he looks at me, silently amused and confused. In the dream again, I am sinking into the gentle motion of the wheels.
In my half-conscious state we dip into a parking lot. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, for this is the Cummer Lodge Home For The Aged. I see a large wooden cabin, looming over the empty spaces. This log cottage holds together the ancients, waiting for disposal, unwritten depositions, forgetting they are already forgotten ashes. We pass through its majestic arches and electronic entrance (keeps ‘em from runnin’) arriving at a wide red door fitted with a security code. A cavernous room, actually a hallway with bad lighting, extends out into other passages, small and narrow, with individual rooms which contain individual artefacts. We don’t have to go that way. Here there are plush green couches, loveseats, clutched by old bones and leathered skin. Famous prints of paintings on the walls. Pastoral, scenic, soothing. Why don't they let them paint their own walls? Mental graffiti sprawling everywhere, instead of this pacified art. They don’t have a say because they mumble too much.
A few limp about here and there, scattered around like a party slowly sobering near dawn. The TV hangs suspended in the absolute centre; loud, deliberately turned up maybe, blasting crude Fox entertainment that flickers through squinting eyes. As these explicit images are opened and closed, they go tumbling out of glassy eyes and get discarded through open mouths. Removed from the trance, a woman approaches me and touched my shoulder. She looks at me and gave me a wordless singsong hex, chuckling with hanging spittle, merciless. The moments here are epic spiritual confrontations.
It suddenly occurs to me they know no more then we do.
I am happy to see Darryl, a tall gangly black man with a toothless wild smile, someone with enough life to overpower the zonked. He sees my dad making contact with grandma, and he yells, ecstatic, breathless: “Is that yo mama! Hee hee! Oh that is a good one!” He cackles some more and slaps his knee. Full of soul and the holy spirit. He clutches his ribs to muffle his laughter and has to sit down. Someone in white informs us that if he becomes bothersome, he can be restrained.
We see her before she sees us. My grandmother faces our harmless questions, but, refusing or unable to concentrate, instead listens attentively to the gruff man beside her, who speaks an endless stream of his foreign tongue (something Slavic, maybe Ukrainian?). She answers his nonsense in equally nonsensical English and then, searching for a word only to find it in Yiddish, shrugs and offers up a look of “Why not?” and soldiers on, plodding through their exchange in broken Yiddish.
Trying to reach out to his mother, my father reveals something else every time, and this is partly why I join him. I’m sure guilt and fear and love are in there somewhere. He might get upset, turn away, as his hands fall limp to his side. He might dance, hit himself, who knows. There are no expectations. He just wants a reaction, some justification, some reason to take part in this silent reunion. It is sad and beautiful, as I wonder how I will cope with the slow decay of my parents, as I wonder whether my friends will come see me drift away from life and reason and still find ways to make me laugh. Maybe it will be easier, I think to myself, as I watch.
Her eyes are bright and blue.

Sound of Silence

Your little brother and father are watching Charlie Chaplin films. You hear them laughing for what seems like the first time. Mother is lying down reading, fading in and out of consciousness, and you hear the occasional scratch of turning pages. They all go to bed. If you could sleep forever, would you still dream? You wonder. The faint hum of the fridge signals a change. You open the screen door and step outside into the blackness, but you are standing in between two lights. On your right, high in the trees, there are wooden planks illuminated by a green lantern, something you have never seen before. A patio in the sky. On your left there is a light, attracting countless moths. Cloaked in the darkness, dancing circles in the neon glow. The insect nightlife is vibrant, full of quiet excitement surrounded by the still night. There is a gentle wind rushing through the leaves. There always is a breeze, sweeping sadly through the silence. You hear the faraway horn of a train, the never-ending train that passes by every twenty-one minutes or so. This is the only measure of distance; here you step outside of time, immersed in a moment. The melancholy howl of the loon, the wailing in the night, does not make an appearance. With eyes closed, you feel the leaves rustling in a tender sway that makes your bones shiver. You reach under your shirt, and clutch your flesh in that familiar way, making sure you exist. Completely alone in the night, the woods listen and watch your every move. You pull your limbs around the deck, trying not to disturb them. There is no one around you in every direction; only one soul deserted in the wilderness. Of course, the family lives asleep behind you, but they are as far as the moon. Up above, the dark clear air speckled with stars reminds you of something unreal. You open the screen door and step back inside to sleep.

recent happenings

Today there was a fantastic reading by Chuck Palahniuk at Indeego with the mouse. Our first encounter since I got back from Europe two weeks ago. There are many stories and images to reflect about the backpacking experience, but I am taking my sweet ass time. Chuckniuk relayed some gruesome but hilarious vulgar stories about failed masturbation attempts with foreign objects. He held everyone's ears locked and guts churning. The funny thing is, he looks so preppy - a cheeky geek with the heart and humour of a fourteen year old. He confirmed that we grow old and rehash the same stories over and over. We cling to our experiences, and the indecent dialogue is always the most entertaining. The best stories to hear about are the most shameful and embarassing. Maybe I will tell one sometime.

On the way home, I was aware of a scattering of things. A young woman sitting in the back of the bus had normal clothes topped off with a pink beret. We accelerated towards a red light. The bus driver was drumming sounds to avoid the silence. Looking around at a haze of clouded faces, trying to exist somewhere between awake and asleep, I opened the window and swallowed the air in hungry gulps. We rolled down a hill and the world flew by, a dark pink sea of sky. A magic bus ride for my tired eyes. Walking home along Leslie I noticed grass where there was once a wild hedge of sprawling bushes. They used to own that stretch of sidewalk, but now there is nothing left. There was also a big tree missing. A handful of stumps and limbs, severed and stuck in between the chain link fence in so many places. The suburbs take precious care of immaculate grass. Nothing growing outside of its prescribed boundaries. I felt as much as I could and then walked away.

identity

who am i?
sometimes i think of myself as an absent-minded professor.
and when i say my mind is absent, i really mean it's absent. there are times when altogether it's not there.
people i love have called me a terrible communicator. i agree with them.
if i am perfectly comfortable, i can slip into another stream, and i submit to my senses. i see through the tiniest lens sometimes.. i can think so carefully and feel the vibrations of a single moment, trying to isolate the active parts of life around me.
all this is telling me nothing of my identity.
another few seconds pass, and nothing moves.

you feel torn between realising the person you've become, and becoming the person you believe to be. holding fast, grabbing on to the fraying seams, you can't even stand still. there is nothing pushing you around. you look around yourself, desperate and hungry for advice from the unknown.. but as soon as you see something, you know what it is in all its lonely history. you crawl around upstairs, but you've been there before. so you go outside into the wind, and let your bones sway away the time.

The Scientist

Berlin, May 30

There was a friendly scientist on the train from Vienna to Krakow. Or was it from Prague to Berlin? A mop of coarse dark hair ran ragged across his round face, from which he sipped his coffee innocently. He had glasses, and a flattering stare. My attention was framed by his rotating expression, which varied from warm nervousness to thoughtful deliberation. We shared the world from that tiny compartment, eyeful of the landscape racing forward and backward, as we sat opposite each other. Frequently he returned to his work which, as far as I could tell, involved wildly jotting down scribbles on graph paper. He was watching me with care; such a warm stare it made me uneasy. Whenever travelling alone with foreign faces, for any distance in any place, you form and unfold imaginary stories that fill the void of communication. I briefly imagined him as my real father, having left me for adoption years ago to help me escape a brutal Soviet life. Upon realisation that his long and forgotten son was actually here with him, he struggled to keep the smile from stretching across his long, thin lips. He kept glancing back to make sure, with smug furtive looks that hinted a secret known only to him. I should add he was feeling quite pleased with himself for having wasted no time whatsoever in a futile search for his lost son, to finally encounter him as a fully-grown child, travelling confidently without the use of his paternal wisdom. Now he opens his mouth, ready to snap me away from my daydream, unable to use him like every other listless plaything.

Dialogue/Friedensreich Hundertwasser/The spinning boy

Strasbourg – May 21
Words seen on the walls and floors of the tram station underground:
Vous pensez à l’histoire. Vous pensez à ceux qui ont vécu et à ceux qui sont morts. Vous pensez aux objets et images qui racontent comment c’était. Vous essayez d’avoir les idées larges. Vous essayez de comprendre les autres. Vous essayez d’être gentil et généreux. Vous êtes très seul. Vous avez tout votre temps. Vous n’êtes pas pressé. Vous marchez dans la rue et le soleil vous réchauffe. Vous êtes heureux.

Far now, far away, but far too many one-sided conversations with you in my head.
But who are you? Are you anyone?
You know those conversations, the ones where you make up the rules, when you know what the other will say, but you still want to hear the words, because the repetition is something you trust, familiar, numbing.
Sometimes I lack the will to resolve my thoughts. I let them twist like open endings.
Do these words give you hope?
Watching the world around you as it dissolves into a second scene, where the faces melt, indistinguishable from one to the next. I like open senses. Not moving, just receiving. Noises are muffled by the panasonic surround that absorbs everyone into everything. You either focus on one instant, pinpoint its most subtle quality, trying to notice all the rotating vibrating actions that give the moment life – or, you focus on everything at once, and you hear nothing.
Does any of that make sense?
A whirring blur of choppy dialogue, French and German, it hovers around this bopping space, becomes the same. People watching people watching people. I cannot talk about myself now, only the slices of peoples’ lives that encircle me. I am only the lens, the only lens I got. My senses are not my own, they belong to the world. I study faces, invent the lives behind them, because it is better to guess a life than to know the real, pathetic truth.
Do you see your face changing?
I cannot trust the faces I believed in, because I was a character in their stories, and I am guilty of losing my identity, implicated in my own game…

Late at night, falling into wide open barren spaces, falling in love with stranger faces.
In between the curbs, scraping the stones lit up by streetlamps. I am a sensualist, and maybe I will never change.
I live and breathe all the little vibrations. I don’t like being interrupted. But I must finish the thoughts I begin, so you’ve told me a million times. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere, just round and round in circles.



Vienna – May 24

What a wonky one that was. The architect of the creative spirit, Oh Hundertwasser, I have a crush on you! What was it he said? “Our greatest illiteracy is our inability to create.” The lines, they go spinning round, and you bent the ruler until it was destroyed. Straight lines are an abomination in our world of nature. It is our crude, scientific attempt at perfection. Oh Hundertwasser! You even had a spiral on a flag. How could I not fall for that, or your clever Palesraeli design. You were a peaceful hermit who came down from the trees, and built your identity into your constructions, for all to enjoy.
It’s not just that, or your psychedelic graphics, or your beard I could get lost in for ages. No, there is something immediately connective and convincing about your words. We are stepping outside of the places we belong, constantly pushing nature back and beyond our reach. We build high buildings, walls everywhere, we blot out the sky. We build these towers where we spend all the hours of our days, and we run out of spaces for parks.

I am sitting in a tree-lined café, just behind his colourful, bumpy building. A wild child is hopping in hysterical footsteps, running from his father, tugging at everything, clinging to the foliage like a monkey on acid.
He has blue and white striped pants, so baggy that his knees are invisible, and all you see is this waddling harmless menace. Again, another animal comes to mind… a penguin. He scurries frantically in circles, twirling in freedom. He keeps running from his parents, escaping the adult ways of sitting and staying still in slow motion. Run little one! Free from the (illegible – “chair of polite restraint?”) I take a picture. He is my favourite child in the world. For the twentieth time his legal guardian leads him back to their table, holding his hand.

I have spent the last hour or so walking to the Wurstelprater amusement park, several miles away from downtown. There is an open field on the way in, where people relax in the grass. Napping couples curled up, Turks playing chess, young and old rolling dice, telling stories in canes and suits, everyone seems to be downing beer and lighting smokes. I look up and ahead to my destination, the Riesenrad, an enormous ferris wheel that spokes the sky red.
No tickets needed, so I’m walking through the funhouse, past the zero gravity seats and bumper cars and the carousels, not taking any rides but watching the attractions, and it is a surreal feeling. There is a chill, so the park is not very crowded, and this strange haunting breath comes over me. Those eerie carnival sounds, those lifeless faces behind concession stands, I did not want to write about it.

Went into a bar, completely lost on my way to cross the Danube. I was looking for the metro station to get me back to the hostel. Opened the door to old scarred Austrian faces, completely at a loss as to why someone who could never belong to this place or this moment would step into their scene. They seemed frozen in there. A deep low voice struggled with me to find a way out. I ordered a beer and tried to look as tired as them.

Train

May 19

I write this on the topmost bunk in a room (7x7x10ft?) with six beds. Sleeping up here gives you control over light and darkness. I am the Sun god. Left that cramped mobile dorm, treading lightly on to the john to write on the toilet. Having finished my business I stumble and shuffle down the narrow corridor into a coach of seats instead of bunks. I realise I have not written very much. The mind has been too busy absorbing - this must come before any sort of release. The moments I wish to record are witnessed by my senses. It is in the sandy courtyard, hearing eerie churchbells of Almería, children howling with laughter and in another language at dusk. People-watching is a timeless activity, just like pegging and plugging made up stories into faces, and you can watch a whole dialogue unfurl between two people walking past. You create a story, invent an inner monologue.

I have noticed as much as possible. Awareness has led me to my senses which are piqued by the world that surrounds. It is necessary to connect the mind and body this way, spiritually.

We have stretched ourselves through a melting pot of scattered alleys and sunlit strolls, through markets bursting with flavour and people groping for a view, gasping for a breath, in a place that caters to your every delight. In Madrid there was a chain of miniature bookstore kiosks, all lined up in a row, dozens of them parading thousands of books (from the rare to the kitsch) to the passerby. Here you are as an eternal pedestrian, swept up by the moment of something new and unheard of. You focus your sights on everything at once, but it is impossible to notice everything at once. All the minutia, all the common and uncommon elements of life working at once. So instead you watch and experience a chain of events unravel naturally, the progression from action to reaction to rejuvenation all through your unsteady eyes. I am drunk off my senses!

It is a challenge to be a faithful and honest witness to the world around us felt by our eyes and ears, internal pleasures and fears, fixations neuroses etc. In short, everything that gives off a perpetual motion that reminds us we are caught in constant motion. Ex-stasis?

Whipping through a green French countryside, everything is polite and nothing is obtrusive. Plaster white homes with rusted iron roofs scattered like salt. There are wires of course, and the odd industrial warehouse. But nothing obscures the view; something is missing. Gone are the corrosive elements getting stale in our consumerist age- I see no advertising, shopping malls, no giant wastelands of parking fields and outlet stores and so on. Simply farmland mixed with forests and sometimes the rare relic of nobility- a castle perched on a hill, a beautiful shadow on the land overlooking the peasants of old.

Almería

I decided to slowly transcribe some things I wrote in Europe.
May 14-16
Almería, Spain -
A sandy haven from the overcrowded cities of culture, no teeming tourists down here. We are south, near the sun, and I lounge on the beach surrouned by Spanish, Catalan, French and Arabic. Morocco is a ferry away. I need a moment's peace. Here the beer is cheap and dry, one litre for one euro. A flawless blue cathedral of sky, tanned exotic buildings and bodies dot the landscape. It is a quiet wonderland of sand and smiles. Countries of the sun cannot be blamed for basking in a lazy harmony. I squint and frown through the glare. The sun and sea swallows up the hours. An old wrinkly woman stares ahead, and someone loves this sun-dried tomato. I am crushed under the power of things that wrap the mind in a comfy slow-motion collapse. Infinite distraction is surrendering my senses now.

Climbing the Alcazaba fortress. Cactus, sand-swept hills, tiny lizards and starving bushes living off the land. Where am I in this deserted myth? The city is a random mess of plaster, I don't look at it. A million glittering shards of glass twinkle and sharpen my eyes to the rocky desert around me. Up above, a swarming mass of black birds circle and dive and rise fanatically like mosquitoes. The sun melts the ancient walls of a time so far gone and forgotten. I am parched and perched, feeling accomplished for being high up above it all with JC, a grandiose white statue who welcomes every visitor with hands and arms outstretched. The minutes linger. I stay firmly planted on this ghost fortress that looms out over the world.

On the train to Madrid, tracing and carving our way through a twisted path that cuts the dry rocky hills. I see the backs of heads in front of me. Beside me a scenery collapses and rises endlessly against the window. Tiny green bushes and cactus are fastened to the ground like stubble on an old man's face. My cheek edges closer to the window, trying not to hit it when the world bumps up and down. Not quite mountains, but bigger than hills. The graceful motion of the ground races by. What is passing? An old stony wall. Deserted sandy houses. A small ranch, a few cows or bulls. A white home with blue doors and windows. Mossy cliffs, shadows clipped by the outcroppings. I see my face in the mirror in dark tunnels and try not to recognise it. I am tired. My body and mind exhausted from travel. My eyes flutter open occasionally, comforted by the glimpse of a repeating scene.

the view from here

A man decked out in neon nylon pedals down the road at an awkward crawl, trailed by the awful sound of his flat bycicle tire. It bounces clumsily over rocky pavement and makes his body vibrate. It's painful to watch him push his legs to grind the chain. His stubborn refusal to get out and walk a broken machine with his working legs is strange, strangely amusing.

Sarah and I are on another one of these walks with uncertain destinations. We see incredible things together when we are aimless. Hordes of cars, families of students and someone with majestic dredlocks pass us. A castle-like house (but really a house-like castle) looms to the right, and a house with a hundred windows of all shapes and sizes stands on the left. We walk through the arch beside the castle, it turns out there is a hidden basement apartment that backs out onto their deck. We cross streets and find ourselves drawn to a hideously large storage facility of some sort. It feels like another city - suburban quiet emptied streets, one sapling per garage. The grass is neat and trim. A father stands protectively behind his daughter, tricycling in a pink parka. She gets out and decides to fall down, kissing the sunny pavement with her cheek. There is a dead end here.

We walk towards the giant cylinders, offwhite cream-coloured tubes in wonder. It is as high as the highest building in Halifax. We both think of the possible view, looking at the ladder glued from the bottom to the top. We shuffle down a little hill, cross a marshy moat, but are held back by the triple barbwired fence surrounding the big view. I find a shovel, but a sign warning of video surveillance makes me think I'm being watched. I decide to come back another day without her.

We walk to the end of the facility, and discover it is next to a commercial wharf. There are a hundred colourful containers, red blue green. I think of christmas ornaments. We find our way up the grassy knoll, where I find a pair of discarded pants, as we walk to the end of the suburban street, sloping upwards. At the end, below us is the train tracks, and a view of the seaport. There is nowhere left to go. We scale down the stone mixed with broken beer bottles, torn fabric, and everyday junk. Lying on the bottom, twisted, discarded, an old 386 computer, smashed to bits but not unrecognisable. The keyboard is dismantled, propped on its side, compressed in the wreckage. The mouse is nowhere to be found. We walk in the direction of home along the two tracks, separated by the gravel, the sun beating down on our backs. I watch the planks skipping in and out under my feet. We travel through the valley of rail while rocky faces stare us down. The sun reflecting off the skinny metal road that slowly curves in and out and onward into the shrinking perspective. We get out of the valley, delicately scamper up the side, and sit on a giant rock looking out on the tracks. I am happy as we take turns throwing stones into the abyss, trying to catch a rail and make a sound we can hear.

watery tomb

I am camouflaged, immersed in muddy colours, streaking in the rain. I feel dilapidated.
I climb the stairs to the attic of the grad house. No one in the room, just empty chairs, tables, an ancient piano and me. No ghost tapping black keys, not this time, just scattered crumbs and coffee stains. I close my eyes and run my hands along the objects. The wood is cut and chipped, the edges are dull. Out in the blue, where the rain muffles light, my lens is blurred again. No one is watching as I twist and pirouette and deke out the furniture until I reach my fabric lover under the window, and I fall back, sunken soul in my favourite recliner, soft and ratty. It is dark in the room but I turn out all the lights to see the rain better. I like it this way. The surfaces are gleaming in the street. Students with heads hung down, heels splashing and scraping past the million drops exploding around me. I tap my fingers. Umbrella one, umbrella two, lost in step go me and you and Bang
snaps the screen behind the window, it flutters awake with the wind, and I see me looking at myself in the glass, in a room that knows more than I do…
A gradual panic begins to unravel. What do I know? I will never be able to leave. Leave my body, to escape my self, my thoughts, the endless stream of poobelle that plagues my conscience. This is no dream, I am terrified right now. I am shut up, cornered in this tight compartment. I am always going to be this rambling clumsy hulk, I do not know how to tear this back. Where will I go, to get outside myself? Maybe a love and fear of observation is the escape, a way to leave yourself behind. Bearing witness and bearing grudges, up against a world of inner space. It makes me wonder, it makes me sick, why can’t I leave me?
Avoiding reality, French class today bothered me more than before. I heard and thought I understood all the professor’s words, but they never made a point, not a dent in my head. He was constantly alluding to the effects of lexicology, psychotropisms, run-on sentences about how the author was unable to differentiate between sense and experience; it was all vagueries. Clever words to cover all the basis of experience, and he could not explain a single thing without using a metaphor. Those words I could not touch, words that could not reflect the feeling I enjoyed; me being carried on the imagination of someone else. Words that led you outside myself.
Of course I kept thinking about the room. It was my cozy cell, where I could not exist before this moment. What big sweeping statements of insecurity. What you had here among the furniture were conversations frozen in time and space, conversations that would not let you breathe. You cannot remember who spoke first, who left last, but the words are still hanging, a film of dust, getting old in wasted time. But out there, nothing is still. It’s really a torrent now, you could see it, cascading reflections of water stains shimmering back and forth along the street. Time to leave these reflections on pavement. So I stepped out of the room, reborn, and became a puddle. I was outside looking in, squinting through the rain, and as feet skipped around the puddles I thought I saw someone flickering in an out.

Frank's theory

All of a sudden he started drooling absurdly over everything. A little puddle of liquid disbelief started forming in the bottom-right corner of the page. His theory was finally justified. Wars, poverty, hunder, inequality... humanity would change forever. Knowing his name would be uttered in the same breath as all these historical plagues gave him a sense of pure, medieval happiness. He tried to restrain himself, but he even became aroused to the point of a bulge in his trousers. He realised it wouldn't matter if he ran down the streets fully naked yelling about the apocalypse; his power was godly from this day forward.
"Sheryl!" squealed his noise hole in childish delight.
She waltzed into the room, smelling of potatoes. She always smelled of potatoes, ever since he accidentally spliced a potato gene which entered into her soup. Coincidentally, from that day forward, he was swayed tremendously by her opinion.
"I don't know, Frank."
"What do you mean you don't know?" he thought to himself. Either you know or you don't.
"Is the world really ready for something of that magnitude? It seems a little too abrupt."
"Well Sheryl, the world can't survive off fish heads can it?"
For too long, Frank had been ignored by the fellow scientists, colleagues, friends, and now family. He alienated himself with his ridiculously empty pursuits, fashionable to dreamers. Would the president have time to pencil him in? He wondered. Every crisis, every issue, every single minutia would be subject to the theory.

so

swept under the current
pulled the cover over head
a glimmer of light bleeds
through the closing curtain.
she doses
breathing into my ear.

dusted off my shoulders
soldiered through a wide open field
a sad happy sucker wandering why
it's time to bathe in the sky.
she leans towards you who
drowns in the blue.

Noticed

A chronology of frozen moments wrapped around my conscience.

I notice the unending stream of student passengers shuffling through the doors. There is trouble: too many are caught in the enclosure, bottlenecked, between the arts building doors and the doors to the outside world. People look out longingly and look in drearily. Avoiding the chaos I take the quiet ones on the side, to the left. No one ever thinks to use the perfectly functional three other doors around them - people wait their turn patiently or impatiently, and squeeze by gracefully. Apologise when necessary. Stranded on the stairs is a girl reading On The Road. I smile at her but she is submerged with zen. I look back, transfixed, to the nebulous mass of chattering wavering bodies, that multiply and shrink and fill up again if I stare long enough.

I notice the unending stream of little children file endlessly down the street, around the corner, and presumably into infinity or at least until nap time. I have never seen so many little ones all at once. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, but probably not. They are from a preschool in the area, on a preschool trip to bask in the sidewalk sun. They are out for a walk. A walking carnival of coats of every colour, some have locked hands, some are out of order, forming groups and ranks of their own. There is a teacher every so often, to maintain peace and good conduct among the rabble. They are happening. A kaleidoscopic horde of munchkin. They speak their own language, yelps and hoots and cries, frenzied distractions of the world.

I notice the unending stream of jovial twentythirtysomethings with black shirts and bad haircuts enter the coffee shop, formerly known as empty. There was peace, once, in this land. The Trident was packed, so we tried the place next door. It was perfect - quiet, doowop and soul on the radio, bright with light, and deserted. Minutes later, we discover that we have stumbled upon the testing ground of a geek fantasy world. They are a rambunctious bunch, each cradling the same box. Tension fills the air as they await the hour of redemption. There is no authority, and every single table has filled. Enough! They devour the cardboard all at once, empty the contents (beautifully crafted miniature metallic creatures) and with unabashed glee brag about whose statue has better statistics. More and more keep filing in, one by one. I can't believe this. Someone unravels a poster and fastens it to the wall: "Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures - Deathknell Prerelease Event" I am in their domain, but they don't seem to notice.

Cold

(I was running around my place furiously looking for something I once wrote that really frightened me at the time. It was supposed to be for someone, but it came out really cold. Found it.)

But she only got as far as the door. Familiar shivers paralysed every bone in her body until she was numb. Legs tingled and carried her back out into the lifeless street. If only there was some sound... some noise that distracted her wandering mind. She gently sung (gently? crooned?) old corny pop songs to the trees that glistened with snow. Why did everything seem so... foreign? Even the crunching under her feet felt different. She stopped and stooped and made sure her toes were alive. They were. As a child, she would often escape outside and run as fast and far as she could until the whole world was (behind her?) unrecognisable, and she would find a new way home. Back then her mind wasn't limited by reason, and she believed that she would explore the world this way. Now she was convinced that the people she knew were forever asleep, clutching their blue flesh.

Everything around her hung limp, motionless, passing through her trembling stare, framed by the deserted streets that passed like the breeze. She would find others, she would find a way out.

winding down by the water

Today was a good day, satisfying.

Midday we decided to watch the sun come down on the water. In the evening we met up and walked down to the end of the street, across a parking lot, down a string of straight and windy streets until finally we met the shore, the arm. On our way there was a balcony missing a door, and skeletons of red bushes. There was an alcove etched into a sidewalk wall, with thin branches drooping over it.. I thought instantly of a waterfall and desperately wanted to claw my way in and lie vertically against the cement and look at a world full of lines. An industrial-sized pipe was drawn across the valley of the train tracks. They lead to a shipyard by the sea. We stumbled through a muddy forest and zigzagged our way to the edge, flanked by majestic monstrous homes that tried to outdo the view. The glowing sliver of red sun was already swallowed up by the tops of pine trees across the arm. Too late. Dejected we climbed the hill but the water left our eyes, and we quickly turned back towards it, scampering through properties to trace a path through a darkening sky. Stepping out onto the quiet shaley rocks, I could see forever in one direction into endless blue. Elemental feelings I can't express in words. A smattering of rocks are stranded in front of me. Everything is quiet, I keep my eyes and thoughts to myself in the dusky grey. We walk by intermittent docks, stepping carefully along the edge. Two ducks float by politely. I'm faced with a distance. Always something humbling but reasurring about the water. Nothing is passing the time or piercing the silence. It is brisk down here, so we pick ourselves up someone's stairs and walk through a vast immaculate lawn.

There I am, contemplating how blissfully content I become on these adventures, bottled and bundled up in another world, when a train whistle completes the day. It is so close it rattles my bones and fills me with childish glee.. I race up the embankment and watch it clatter by noisily. I tell my companions that when I was young my grandfather drove me out to the train tracks where I would count the endless colourful cars slowly streaming by. The train rambles into the disappearing distance and I forget the long walk home.

On a plane

(written in the air some time ago, not sure where i was going)

Clenched by polyester fabric and polite warnings all around me, expecting to fly, a flash of sun-drenched sky lights the narrow path that splits the plane in half. My fellow passengers are all within sight but all out of reach. Waiting to be catapaulted into a sea of clouds and fuzziness, I await release.

Flashing lights are carried through the crisscrossing veins of the city. A city that makes no noise when you’re flying miles above it. Only in the darkness everything sparkles and glistens. The further you are, the more it begins to look the same, as everything fades into itself. Shame that we live in these concrete wastelands that sprawl outwards, clawing their way into the horizon, or to the edge of the sea. They can be beautiful, but never as a whole. Communities should try and reflect their natural surroundings, instead of dominating them. If only we could give up this urgency to move great distances, always with the help of pavement.

(The plane points its nose towards the ground and there is some turbulence.)

The tip of the wing is slicing through the snowy sky (clouds, sprinkly whiteness and everything!) but we never move so fast that we cannot slow down.

Focusing my thoughts is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. Describing observances is bothersome, since my life consists of pointing out absurdity in and around observations. We think of death when we're on a plane, don't we?

The plant in my apartment is slowly dying lonely. There was a time when I watered it diligently, about every two weeks because it was a desert plant that required little maintenance, and no grooming. But now the soil is nutrient-less. Its impending death is impeded by its stubborn refusal to give up. Ever so slowly, shrivelling up and drying out, leaves curled inwards empty of colour. Brittle bits snap off without even the help of a careless caress. "Losing its hair" I think to myself. Shrinking and recoiling into itself.. no longer eminating life, but never fully ending, its resilience gives me pause for thought.

Will my death be a grotesque spectacle for someone else? Maybe someone clutching my listless hand grinds their teeth as I take a pained last breath. I always dreamed of falling to my death, but from a great height, in order to take everything in.. but the ground would still rush up too quickly, near the end – this was the only problem. I've considered other possibilities.. maybe climbing the highest mountain and rolling off it. Drowning would be too poetic, a bullet too simple, an injection or pill too sterile. Maybe sex, or a voluntary o/d on a wide array of tranquilising drugs. Maybe it won't be up to me.. an embarassing accident that turns out my lights. I don't want to make a scene or disturb a silence when it's time.

I wonder if in the future they will find a way to make death efficient.

spiral

(niina lüus and i wrote this on a whim last saturday. i did one paragraph, she did the next and so on.. it has a wonderful distinct flow to it, without drifting too far into meaninglessness, and i dig the characters. it's also bizarre how similar the writing is..)

Trembling from being indoors for so long, she motioned me to waltz towards the trees.
“?” I wondered with my eyes.
“!” She exhaled, thrusting her cheekbones to the sky.
“...” grumbled myself, too subtle to make a scene, but just barely out of earshot, so she wouldn’t know what hit her. She groaned, mockingly, as I started to fall behind. She took large flamboyant steps, tucking her knees up to her waist, in a flagrant display of her annoyance.
I laughed as she tripped over a twig, picked it up, started chewing it nonchalantly, swatting flies with it when I needed to.

Downwards we crept, closer to the hypnotic water. Chasing it like lemmings to the sea. Ending our gray-skied days and snow blown nights in a watery orgy of splashing colours.
When we finally arrived, two ducks greeted us and warned us that once we entered the watery abyss, we would never leave.
I dipped my toe cautiously into the water and then tasted the sweet drops.
“Ah, caramel” I exclaimed, and threw my new flyswatter into my watery home. She walked in up to her ankles and wiggled her toes with joy, realizing that our earthly hibernation of twenty years had finally ended.

Thousands of pebbles gently rubbed each other under my feet, making a noise that could only be “kishaaa” as my wild eyes scoured the beach for something with meat. The waves were glittering, the sun was shining brilliantly – everything was blinding my eyes and obscuring my view; I wanted to weep and somehow add my own tears to the vastness that leapt outwards. I felt outside my body, firmly rooted only by the fleshy skin wrapped around grey-blue stones with my toes. I made the face the cloud above me made, and spent an eternity in all the energy of one instant.
I nudged her shoulder with my jaw: it was time to go.

Eyes smiling, she laughed and pushed me backwards. Head over heels, heels over head, I spiraled ahead to heal from my wintery grave. The sun streaked through the stream, and a high-pitched ringing vibrated in my mind, calling me to new levels of understanding. Alone in the womb-like gel, I continued spiraling to the innermost darkness, free at last from the airy superfice. I held my breath until my lungs almost imploded from the pressure.
Suffocating
Decaying
Entropy took willing control of my body.

It took all my strength to break free of the spiral, but with this rupture came a tremendous relief, a masturbatory freedom if you will, and I stopped trying to move. I let the waters flow around me, past me, even through me. I joined the salmon, and smirked at how our paths are so similar; immersed in a substance beyond our control, only able to alter ones’ direction, and how easy it is to be caught up in the spiral of existence, to let go.
I clamped down on something pink and felt scales separate in my noise hole. I emerged from the stream of life, dripping wet from the mouth that fed me. She pulled me out of the womb; shivering, we lit a fire and gorged ourselves on nature’s creation: sweet and sticky.

gestures

How about those moments, when you're strolling down any street, and you encounter someone exactly like yourself - a passerby. You know instantly that eye contact is going to be the key issue. You analyse your every movement and gesture, however slight. (?)

Sharing a moment of intimate understanding with a total stranger in a public place about an event that only you two have witnessed. The sly grin of mutual recognition.

Little sensations - not the objects themselves, but the sensual instants, the subtle phenomena that you're sure you're noticing, but no one else/while everyone else is in motion (perpetual).
These instantaneous moments of creation, teeming with vibration. My mind is vibtrating. What am I noticing? I am noticing happening. It is happening, before my eyes.

I must come back to this later.

silly talkers

(this was actually written october last year, and i always thought it didn't make very good sense at times and that's what i liked about it. maybe i can develop it some time.)


and then the silly talkers jumped ship. they got the hell outta there. no one saw them leave the building. they gently traipsed over emptied bodies and broken glass, then leapt from the tops of things to the bottoms of things.
they were very discreet. the only sound the pitter-patter of feet.
the current leader of the silly-talkers was a human undercover spy. he was granted this position mainly because he spoke the silliest-less. he kept the key to his life with the secret that he possessed no power at all to lead them, and he decided to always choose randomly. whatever the situation, it did not matter. he was able to survive this way; why and for how long, he did not know.
so in short, they had a direction – but no sense of direction. they were careening through life and everything faster than something you can’t even imagine.

opening doors and scrambling down emptied passageways, they looked for an exit.

“Exit!” screeched one of them. but it was never that simple. the same one continued, “we can exit everywhere, but never escape.” and then laughed manically. the others pondered quietly. like wallace stevens, the silly talkers behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
they decided to tackle the one with ideas. besides, the more ideas one has, the less likely one is to act on them. the mind just masturbates through the infinite possibilities and you’re just as impotent as the rest of them. like when a senile smiling old lady tells you a joke[1] in kindness, but you aren’t sure if it’s genuine or she simply has nothing in her life but you for one instant, and that is the ultimate truth she has chosen to reveal to you.
ask yourself, “what?” and hold on to a second.
intermission –
passed a man today who is always smoking a pipe outside on the veranda, cradling his life away in his rocking chair. end transmission.

anyways, the simply adorable silly talkers had this nasty habit of ‘overthought’… such a shameful thing to be cursed with sometimes. don’t you think? well the silly talkers came together to chew their way through human society with their gift of overthought. why you ask? for the Underground. “the Underground?” you say? what is it?
…
just imagine it. create it and then forget it for your life.

…
you lazy bastard.
the way i see it in my loony bin, is that the silly talkers came from an entire society of living things that has been thriving under your feet for millennia. the world that exists is only the one you see with eyes wide open.
the silly talkers loved having tea-parties and discussing the wonders of humankind. they often wondered, out of the many possibilities, how exactly the most unique species, the one they always knew had the most potential (suppose it turned out equally for good and bad), would constantly tease themselves with total destruction of their physical existence. one big-ass flood was the going opinion. it happened once before, but the silly talkers decided to change their ways this time around and drown the animals rather than saving them from the water. but really, as the silly talkers often reflected with universe-pride, natural disaster was the most poetic way to go down the drainpipe of existence.
the silly talkers maintained existence by dining on human brain (they found the cerebellum was the real treat, it was often divided up amongst the littlest silly-talkers to share). the human was full of poetic irony. the human type often went outside and stared back at the stars that projected their lives back to the planet, and one of these humans desperately avoided stepping on ants in the twilight. her name was, unfortunately, unknown to us. it came from a bizarre mixture of backgrounds, and was thus unpronounceable or even translatable into the alphabet.
the modest ones were forgotten and the insane ones were remembered. they did the same things day in day out. they claimed not to be scared of other planets, but they were terrified of something invisible they celebrated on the same night every earth-year. constantly scurrying about, coming and going, taking their baggage with them: that was humanity. and the silly talkers, unlike humanity, were brutally honest.

reeling from mind-jump, the silly talkers picked themselves up and dusted off the sleep from their eyes.
with emptied conscience they scanned for a target.
“let’s cross a desert!” yelled the smallest one, who bolted across a perfectly flat black surface, with colourful metal strewn across it in neat, pretty rows divided by lines.
“i’ll never understand why they keep building deserts.” whispered one of them. i’d tell you which one, but they whispered. oh, i forgot – silly talkers are tone-deaf. silly talkers led lives which strongly resemble a rambling hoard of barbaric philosophers. constantly forging ahead disputing what they had been taught, was the pursuit of the most brilliant humans. funny, they called themselves philosophers too. the silly talkers rushed to new heights, carrying their zealous prejudice against sense talkers with merciless vengeance…

the silly talkers went through some revolving doors.
“hey! you need a pass to go there. ugh… what the hell are you made of?”

the fattest silly talker then put his Noise-Hole Sucker 3000™ right through the noise-hole on the security man’s face on “high”. the man’s eyeballs flew across the floor into a man’s yawning mouth entering the building.
just kidding. but it was pretty sweet, even by silly-talker standards. the fat one exclaimed with delight: “opened up the other doors in their foreign language in a ham and cheese sandwich they levelled off the bloody cloth they tried to hide their selves inside the shelves that decide their every move to fling themselves into the abyss of meaning!”

the human collapsed on the floor in a mess of neurons and bloody body parts.
“NEXT!” screeched the little one. the blind guide restrained him with a leash.

[1] an old lady approaches and stares into your soul with a cute, buck-toothed, goofy grin:
– What did the cat eat for breakfast?
– I don’t know, what?
–“Mice-Krispies!”
*maniacal laughter for an instant, and then her eyes faced ahead with intensity. She plodded on with brief little baby-steps.