The rain is coming down in sheets- I’ve been waiting for this sort of morning. Every twelve minutes or so I ease myself off the couch and flip the record. Miles Davis’ ‘Sketches of Spain’. As the last note on side A fades out, the relentless rain comes into focus, and I let the calm wash over me. The dog lazes stretched out on the rug, casting me no more than an indifferent glance as I queue up side B. Settling back on the couch, Joyce’s words never rang with such clarity.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
I peered down the steps that descended into the subway station on 52nd and 10th. An enormous slovenly hand reached out and traced the shape of my face- it didn’t like what it felt. Easing its way down to my sagging shoulder, it grasped my lonely bones, spun me about, and sent me on my way. I staggered on down the sidewalk, considering the lovely cracks in the concrete, and longing for the warmth of the hand on my arm. So engrossed was I, that I collided head on with the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, dressed in a white painters jumpsuit and hat, splattered with black paint here and there. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said with a hint of resignation. Still, I felt her heat, and I won’t forget it.
The sky opened up, and I started to fall. The rain started to fall. I couldn’t stop thinking about General Tso chicken, and her, and where I might have been 10 years ago on a day like today. Yo La Tengo said it would be Painful, but I just wasn’t listening. I’m not sure I ever had the energy for it all, but who’s to say? People trampled in, barefoot and laughing, so I followed the outlines of their dampened paws across the dusty floor to the back, where everyone was sitting in a circle, dissecting the troubled expression that had bled across my face. They shined keychain flashlights in my eyes. ”Are you the older brother?” they asked. And though I shook my head vehemently, they seemed skeptical all the while. ”Go home!” they began to shout. I hadn’t the heart to ask what they meant by it all.
— To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
I kept dropping golden rings I didn’t even have and everyone was picking them up at my feet and trying to sell them to me. I watched a man propose marriage to a woman in the Luxembourg Gardens, a little boy riding a little horse alone in the rain. We ate anchovies and potatoes but I sliced the Roquefort wrong didn’t I? I read the poem in English you read the poem in French let’s do that all night we have a hundred bottles of wine. A woman in a cafe asked to read what I was writing in my notebook, if it was about her, and it was, so I showed her, and she read it in french to the man across from her, then told me it was the worst, that she could inspire better from someone who calls themselves a writer. But I am a painter, I said. And I only paint the dead. Everything is made of bread, even the buildings. A man with one leg played the accordion on the metro and I gave him one euro and everyone on the train laughed at me. I gave a barista in a cafe a tip and she laughed too and said she’d give it to her mother. I feel like I am 1000 years old and every year since I’ve been born I’ve grown another head. And I have to carry all of my fresh little heads with their 2000 eyes in my two old arms. I’ll sit in the cemetery and try to remember how I got there.
I’ve spent upwards of five years trying to disassociate with Long Island. I’m starting to realize that even if I wouldn’t necessarily live there again, it’s an important part of who I am, and I’m proud of it.
I’m not saying I want to die. I just want to crawl into a hole, and if I run out of oxygen I run out of oxygen.
Boston: Brookline Booksmith, Dorados Tacos, Great Scott, Larz Anderson Park, Boston College, New Hong Kong, Cambridge, Diskovery
New York: Music Hall of Williamsburg, Tap and Barrel, Rooftops, Little Vincent’s Pizza, Paradise Bagel, Short Beach
Venice: Devil’s Forest, the ledge on Servolo by the corner over the bench, the wood deck, every gelato stand, secret upstairs, all the wine
iknowiknowiknowitshows.
