i take it all back, everything.

because suddenly, it all… makes… sense…

or this

…

I am fascinated by the fact that somewhere someone got paid to develop the process of printing a little M on billions of M&M’s. “So when you look back on the period February to July 1973, what exactly were you doing?” “Ah was designin’ the M printin’ machine, yer Honor”.

And really, where would we be without him? So a silent thank you. And to the team that drew the reindeer on my paper-toweling, and figured out how to plastify the tips of shoelaces, and mass produce corduroy, and let’s not forget the man or woman who figured out how to make ridges on toothpaste tube caps.

Who gets the lifetime achievement award for the envelope folding machine? And the discovery of that pre-dried glue that tastes like earwax that you always slice your tongue licking?

—

I’d like to say a big fuck you to the members of the great worldwide disappearing act (you know who you are) all those hugs and promises of see you soon. There are degrees of bearable hypocrisy. Or rather necessary disingenuousness. Still, utter complete silence rather gives one the distinct feeling of not existing at all.

—

I’m really tired of wearing the treads off my mind, spinning but not really gaining traction. So lets simply reverse and try something else for a change. Any colorful local insults you’d care to share? As for my own contribution, I do have a couple of properly pronounced Greek and/or Lebanese ones, but repeating them would apparently get me chased down and thoroughly beaten up. Everybody seems to be particularly sensitive when it comes to the juxtaposition of their mothers and animals, body parts, women of ill-repute, etc. An old semi-Israeli friend would always follow his mother insults with “lo nominativ” which was meant to indicate that it obviously wasn’t your specific mother he was referring to, but rather an abstract and universal hypothetical mother-concept.

can’t one be all things, and to all people, all of the time?

the illustrious K. once said to me, in his icy bitter new york matteroffact way, that one can’t do all things in one’s lifetime.

i’m not sure yet. but i can state for the record that i seem to be trying, and rather unsatisfactorily at that.

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je ne dis au revoir a rien, je ne pars pas. je prends tout avec moi. et je laisse tout ici.

i am not saying goodbye to anything, i am not leaving. i am taking everything with me. and i’m leaving everything behind.

love and elation follow crisis and need. again and again.

the heart is a moebius strip.

tonight it really is the end of the world.

i sit here perched on the 19th floor, looking out on a city extinguished by fog, disappeared in a blanket that has the bridges and buildings out like night.

i see through windows across the street, into apartments that are always illuminated but never inhabited. i hope for some sudden display of life, a twirl of movement across the window, the unmistakable hue of flesh. but no one lives there. or there. or in any of the two hundred windows i see.

night skies in london are an unhealthy green or orange, in vienna they are gray.

the faded purple of new york night.

living at the top of the world in a glass palace, isolation indeed.

ah, the joys of house-sitting.

Work from 6-1. Lunch with L from 1-3. Scanned two dozen slides from my cross-country trip. Went out for Mexican food with K. Had a single solitary margarita. Got drunk. Went to a large Barnes & Noble, leafed through some magazines on creative writing (booo) photo editing and a collection of photographs from Life magazine. Went home to my temporary home. Watched four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. wrote this post:

“Reach out and touch someone”

there must be a better word for it. infatuation sounds so petty, wonder sounds so bland, everything being alight sounds so New Age i want to put on Yanni and aroma-euthanize myself.

but anytime everything’s on fire and you beg for someone to just acknowledge that it is so, and no one seems to have an inkling of what it is you’re on about or what you want from them (do i?), well apart from certain expletives born of frustration, that good old AT&T slogan comes to mind.

Then I went to bed.

How did any of that lead to me dreaming about a couple of quarreling lesbian train conductors who abandon me at the control post of a speeding train just when the tracks suddenly become so much entwined and diverging spaghetti? And when i finally take a wrong fork in the track and bring the train to a grinding halt, the chief lesbian conductor comes out and screams at me and then proceeds to make out with me, or rather, chew on my lower lip in a very unrelenting way.

How then did the dream segue into me being part of some extreme family gang lead by my father, with members ranging from my brother to other cousins, and us killing at least five people in gruesome ways and having the cops show up the second we do away with our last victim, in the filthy laundry room of our house which incidentally has an open screen door that the cops simply sidle up to as we go about our murderous business?

is it the tequila? or the salsa? a combination of both? the carrot cake i had yesterday afternoon?

Or was it all about, um… finality?

it can’t be a literal return, i am not the same, i will be -must be- different there or it will be like i’d never left, a return as opposed to a move forward.

four weeks is such a short time that i am suddenly panicked, not by all i still wish to do or accomplish, panicked at the end of limbo, this suspended state of flux where all is up in the air, potential, possible, within reach. the fact that my grasp consistently exceeds my reach tells me my one great talent lies in being nowhere. minor accomplishments and minor setbacks.

chassez le naturel, il revient au galop goes the old adage. Fight your natural inclination, it will come charging back.

fine.

the attention span of a four year-old, interested in the chase, but not knowing what to do with the prey once it’s in my grasp.

*****

what i want to understand now is when everything is. today a sudden change in the weather and i find myself thinking of my visit with D in Birmingham, the first time i tasted salt and vinegar chips, the way the air smelled and the color of the light, and it is all right now, except i was nineteen, and it was eleven years ago.

now that i have so successfully taken down the support beams, taken everything apart, it all collapses in on itself, telescoping in random ways, then is now is later. and it all makes sense in a self-referencing way, if not held up to outside indicators of where it -where i- should be.