What you'll find below this pygmy Helvetica is a collection of things of little interest to anyone but myself. It's my way of lighting a match in the dark damp warehouse we call the Internet.
Ask me anything
"Hullo, person!"
May 27, 2012
April 19, 2012
It’s only through the invasive dark that we’re permitted to see lightness, love, the spectra of our miraculous humanity, our shared jaunts to rebirth.
April 18, 2012
“‘I suppose I’ll just have to live with this grief,’ he thought. A grief that one might feel when a loved one is dying slowly, painfully, letting their life evaporate in a thin mist over their head while getting nearer, ever nearer to the boatman. “Out of my hands,” he liked to say to himself, though he knew that he could never let that be the case. He shivered, felt that well-known pain swell in his chest and looked at the souls all around, freezing in their skin, traipsing around a cold shelf in Hell.”
April 11, 2012
"Space is the breath of art."
— Frank Lloyd Wright (via elenahol)
April 11, 2012
They prodded the thin skein of an unintelligable dimension and, realizing its properties were those of a manmade thing, fell back into themselves - into an embrace which embraces only what it can measure. Fluids, hormones, the relentless flow of presupposed hate.
April 11, 2012
She came to visit one night after you’d gotten home from a bad date – a really bad date, you thought, the whole movie seemed sour as you were sitting next to this stranger and waiting for the hurried outpour of couples and quartets. After a hasty goodbye and a cold walk home your mother told you she’d called. A lifetime had past since you’d lost her number.
“Is that right?” you asked, remembering keenly how your mother never liked her very much.
Immediately a little slideshow started and brought you back to a few summers prior. You were on a stage in her high school’s auditorium, playing a concert with a community band whose repertoire consisted solely of Sousa marches and Broadway medleys. A friend you met that spring had thought to come and bring an attractive, slinky companion, graceful in her jauntiness. You looked down to the front row, between bars of “The Liberty Bell,” and thought they were being awfully chatty. A few weeks later, an area church hosted a carnival and you met the two of them there. They had taken some tequila for the walk, and you were amused by their careless manner of speaking, by the awkward French of the tall, pretty one.
You called back, not wanting to deflect the attention of an old friend, and after you hung up you paced the length of your room a time or two, put your jacket back on and walked out to the front steps.
She had dyed her hair blonde since you’d seen her last and you wondered then as you looked at her whether or not she’d been around the block in the interim, the headlights of her eyes cast into your suspicion but not suspecting a thing. That month in English class you were reading Jane Eyre, and your teacher submitted that it was a purely Victorian notion that women thought with their hearts, and men with their heads.
Far too polite to ask for a history, you still weren’t sure the next night when you kissed her and draped her grey sweatshirt of mock-chinchilla over the passenger seat in her mother’s car. It was bewildering, you stopped to think, how lovely was the comfort she felt in her skin in those moments; all that exposed olive gently bathed in streetlight. You hadn’t the faintest idea of what this anxious, ancient glow would be like, how its physical reactions to movement, breath, heat, and sound would play with one’s boyish conception of rapture. Looking back through the glass of these years, it’s a wonder no dog-walkers had called the police.
April 7, 2012
Lowell
I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.
April 5, 2012
April 5, 2012
Love isn’t something that can be reduced to a fourteen-line poem. It’s not something that can be shot and spliced to a ninety-minute film under the auspices of any shamelessly consumptive market. What it is, however, is one of those forces - much like gravity and memory - whose ineluctable logic pulls everyone together, pushes them apart, and sets them amid Indian uprisings and their own personal Elysian fields.
I love you, but trying to shove that sentiment into a letter as short as this would be like handing you a Lenape arrowhead and only saying “this is what it used to be like.”
April 5, 2012
I attended an author’s funeral when I was thirteen. I heard the mutterings of far-flung aunts and uncles. I bore their condolences, half listening, half fixed on mortality and the sight of him lying in a walnut box. I thought about the animator who decided his that project was too old, gone to senility in his last years, rearranging his room to no effect, moving his socks and underwear from drawer to drawer until he was put to bed by a friendly nurse of eastern European descent. What use was his shuffling from room to room, his well-intentioned but unhinged dinnertime conversations and his pleas of coming home? His house had been sold, the past had been thrust out of it with the daylong market we held on the lawn. I thought that this animator, though possessing a scope far beyond that of any natural law, was cruel. I felt that his promise of eternity was a clever trick, because it’s impossible for one passed to phone his loved ones and say “well, it was a hell of a trip but I’m here, safe and sound. Babe Ruth plays a mean game of cards.” The dead man had authored the lives of three children, all born into the middle of the last century, bobbing about through life and love until they found themselves, in the present moment, at very different points throughout the country. Mary Ann, John, Robert.
One midsummer Sunday we drove to the nursing home, stopped in to give our hellos to the staff and his neighbors, all of whom had also been taken from their homes, their lawns, and their cars, and picked up the author for dinner. He appeared tired, and when he looked at me he said “hey Bob.”
On the highway leading us away from Wayne, we passed mini-malls, car dealerships, and the occasional outcropping of trees surrounding a golf course. At the time of his birth, this road had been paved of dirt, the few automobiles gliding like steel angels past the wooden wheels and plodding motion of surreys and larger wagons. He sat in the front seat, staring out the window and when he turned his head to my mother he asked, “Marie, how far can you take us?”
April 5, 2012
