London: The Many Lives of Travelers

It’s strange for me to look back and wonder how we’ve made it like this.  Because made it we have, maybe just barely, but still.  We’re back on the train from Harwick to London.  And it feels familiar to a comfort.  It’s almost the same, except we’re plus one now.  And that old couple musing on about the old days in England is nowhere to be found.  A part of me misses their tales of the old England team, and our jabs at the goal they let through playing the US.  The sun’s down now though, so it’s probably past their bed time.  His tweed hat and half-circle spectacles, her needlepoint on the train and the way she talked to us like our long-lost old English grandmother, I'll always remember them, even if it’s all so ancient now and in my memory with a sepia hue and cracked and frayed at the edges.  So long ago it seems, such a distant two months.  The longest, I think, that this young soul has flown through up until now.  My gray denim's worn through at the knee and left hand pocket where I put my iPhone.  There's a whole section of my bag packed stiff with stank-ass clothes begging to be washed.  Mine eyes are weighing heavy on my face, pulling down and darkening the puffs underneath, but they're still flitting about.

A dark countryside offers little satisfaction, but the cars are long and although our's isn't packed, not even close, it gives some solace, I suppose.  Those solemn eyes of mine, flitting about in their sockets, weary and restless follow all the lines in the place, the smooth window frames with rounded corners.  Those creases running the length of the car on the steel (maybe not steel, but certainly some train metal) ceiling.  The half-ellipses under Max and Grant and Mike's eyes.  All their headphone wires.   The handholds on the seats and hanging down from above.  The rubber-bordered aisle.  Down the aisle there's another traveler.  A lone vagabond with a heavy-looking pack like mine.  I think quick to talk to him, to hear his stories and tell him mine.  But he's too far down and my legs like sitting.  And LCD's Soundsystem is playing a slow song in my ear, like "Someone's Calling Me".  His pack speaks to me though, yelling from the seat next to his, covered in patches.  And thank God I've got good vision because, hell, I may never even have seen them.  There was a different one from each city, and the thing was covered.  A memorial.  A testament to his travels that everyone who gave him a thought could read.  So I read.  And maybe I not a good reader (I don't particularly like to) but it read like a poor man's tourist trip.  A boast of sewn appendages, like so many pictures smiling in front of things saying, "Hey, I've been here!"  And he'd been every which way and all across Europe.  For a second I wish I'd gotten some patches to remember it all by, but then I scoff to myself with a tired tut of a laugh.  What the hell am I going to do with patches?  Sew them to things?  To my bag?  Well first, I think patches are stupid (I liked them when I saw a kid and my parents took me to National Parks, but I was also a dorky nerd-face back then, and put stock into stupid things like patches and what people thought about me).  And second, I don't like sewing.  It's a thought worth a smile and close my eyes and try to find some sleep on this cradle-rocking ride to London.  I'm not searching long.  Sleep comes easy when you're smiling.

And then London is a late-night's dream.  It's a Burger King dinner at grand Liverpool station, nearly deserted at this hour.  It's a fare-thee-well to Mike as Max and Grant and I hop on the last train to Gatwick airport  (Mike's flying home out of Heathrow).  Our flight's not until 9:15 in the morning so we sleep in a manner we're somewhat used to by now, in a corner, on the hard, cold floor of tile or linoleum or whatever it is they spread out over second-hand international airports.  Nothing but bag-pillows, traveler's delirium, and some of that old familiar Cat Power and her jazzy, blue accompaniment crooning me away in my ears.  Dreams like these don't shatter until there's that feel of the old familiar about.  Homecoming.  Waiting by the curb as the sea of cars streaming through the LAX loop flood by.  There's no accents anymore, everything sounds normal, like it always has again.  A little glaze is still left in the eyes, but it's quickly fading as we acclimate to reality.  The sands of dreamland sieve through my fingers as Mom's van pulls up and we all pile in.  I just try to pool as many grains as I can into the palm of my hand for safe-keeping.  The one's that are too important to forget.  

Mom's full of excitement as we're just coming down.  Beat.  Worn to the bone.  "Hey, guys!  How was your trip? Tell me all about it!"

"It was good," I say softly, and I think she sees the tired in our faces and under our eyes.

"Do you guys want some In-N-Out, hmm?" she asks, baiting.

"Yes, please."

In the Equation of Life, Music is My Only Constant

It's the best constant to have, me thinks, because it is one so powerful, so strong, and so commanding.  Audible beauty that stirs in the mind that stew of moods and emotions into something almost palpable.  Deconstructing each one so as to float the purest form of it to the top.  To saturate the soul if you're really listening.  To bristle prickly the soft hairs on my arm.  To bring the tingly bumps of plucked poultry to my skin.  It's a wonderful thing this chorus of metered passions poured out in lovely words and well-timed twangs and drops and crescendos and hums and bum-bums.  

I LUH DAT.

I love the memories it grabs and the hued filters it chooses to see them through.  I love that it's my finger that presses play, most times anyway.  In the car, on the bike.  In the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.  Sometimes at work, but not always.  Even then though, it's still music.  It's a happy song.  It's a sad song.  It's a slow song.  It's a fast song.  It's the song so good your heart yearns for it by name and sings the lyrics true and whistles the melody through to the end.  Oh, "Cotton and Velvet" (I'm in a Cotton Jones mood).  It's the song I breathe when no one's listening.  And still it's all just music to me.  So commonplace.  So ready and available.  Mmm, music.  My drug of choice.  The highest on the totem pole.

Rome: Hearts and Shitty Trains

It's a night-time marathon.  It's Prague all over again.  Except this time, the end doesn't come so soon, and when I finally find my way through those shitty Roman streets, those smelly summer cobblestones leading every way but the one I so desperately need, through the city in the dead of night to the hostel by the train terminal, finally. Mike and Max and Grant are all fast asleep, and when I look at my phone it's five in the morning.  My top-bunk roost comes to me in a panting delirium and I pass out between heavy breaths, drunk and post-coitus.

[stop]

The next morning's our last in old Rome.  Not much in the way of remorse.  We came to the ancient city, saw what there was to see.  Covered it all in two days on foot.  The old, stone roads, and the hills, and the white stone palaces, and the churches, and the Vatican, and the ruins dotting and scarring the city like old, healed wounds, like a badge of honor, a testament to age.  The warrior Italy.  Conquered in two days, with a riotous pub crawl for icing.  Weathered travelers.  Experienced, and Mike's catching on quick.  Our bags are never far from ready.  And now, we're ready to go.  It's going to be an all day affair.

A bold task, but we want to get into France tonight, so at the terminal we jump on the first train headed north.  To Pisa.  We grab four seats facing each other with a table in between.  "All right," says Grant, "I'm breaking out the deck."  And he pulls a deck of fifty-two from the front pocket of his backpack before stowing it overhead.

"Yeah!" I'm stoked.  "What do y'all wanna play?"

"Well, there's four of us," observes Mike.  "We could play some Hearts..."

"Dude.  Yeah, I'm into some Hearts."  Grant's stoked, and he starts shuffling and bridging and shuffling and bridging.

"Man, I haven't gotten down on a game of Hearts for a hot second now."  I'm thinking aloud again.

But Max was a lost puppy.  "What the hell is this old-man 'Hearts' game?  Please don't tell me it's some stupid game like Old Maid or Bridge.  That shit's troublesome."

"What's wrong with Old Maid?"

"Nothing."

"You're being facetious, Max."  I retort to his retort.

"You are the one that is being facetious!"

Grant steps in before the vocabulary gets out of control, "Has a little hot someone never played Hearts before?"  He's using his Papa Grant voice.

Max looks down and twiddles his thumbs, "No... Never got around to that one."

"Don't worry, it's chill.  You'll pick it up along the way no problem.  And well, we've got some time 'til Pisa." So Grant deals out the deck, and we lay down the ground rules in a quick game summary.  We tell Max about the first pass and the Two of Clubs and the Queen of Spades and shooting the moon, and he hits the ground running.  Grant's keeping score in his journal.  Max is the first to one hundred on the first game.  But not the second, and that mother-fucker shot the moon on his third game in.  Like that, we've become old men squinting at cards with furrowed brows.  Spreading them out like an accordion, sorting them, closing them up again, and spreading them out.  Leaning towards the window or the aisle, not each other.  Eyeing with suspicion and daring.  Feeling the pain of defeat, and sipping the sweet nectar of victory for all to see.  It's funny how vested one can get into cards, into the emotion of them, especially when it's the only thing going, game after game after game.  The fear of the Queen, and the agony of taking her.  It doesn't change.  We just get faster, and the hours to Pisa fly.  We get there, the final stop, check the time-board, and the next train going north isn't for a measly forty-five minutes.

[stop]

So we rush headlong, packs and all, towards the other side of the old Italian city, towards the Tower at a brisk walk that comes easy with experience.  The buildings are old, the streets are old.  The river runs slow through the middle, past a modest pearl chapel on the south shore, and the whole place seems to be sleeping in the hot summer sun.  It's a quiet little whisper of a town, and we're to the other side in twenty minutes, with only a slight sweat on our brows.  The Piazza del Duomo, a high-walled castle courtyard at the northern edge of town, is lovely and strangely lively compared to the rest of Pisa, outside the plaza walls.  There's vendor after vendor slanging touristy trinkets.  There's people sprawled on the grass and taking pictures in stupid poses, trying to hold the Tower up.  It's warranted, I guess.  The Tower's got a mad lean on.  We see it.  We photograph it.  We mock the crowds.  Max smokes a cigarette.  Then we hightail it out of there, back to the station, and hop on a train to Genoa.

It's a bitch of a ride.  Hours upon hours on end, through little Italian towns and Tuscan summer landscapes.  Definitely not one of the faster trains we've been on, and the rolling brown hills, the olive groves, the scattered stone ruins, the trees that stand not like the evergreens of California, but quaint and puffy-bulbous like tiny green clouds stuck on toothpicks' ends, they all seem to be crawling by in this dreary heat.  This particular train's rather shittier than the one to Pisa.  No tables, just little fold-out side desks that remind me of college lecture halls.  Awesome.  No hearts on this train.  So I read through a handful of chapters in All the Sad Young Literary Men with some LCD accompaniment.  It's dry.  The author writes like he's writing a paper, but it's good, I guess.  It written well, and it's real.  It's real life and real drama and real growth, and his analysis of it all is meticulous and, at times, thought provoking.  In the intellectual sense.  In the world issues sense.  In the sense that it's someone's life.  Three persons' lives, in fact.  But it's so mundane.  That's not my type of living.  Their problems aren't my problems.  Or maybe they are, and it's just the setting that's different, and the way things build up over time.  I don't have that kind of time.  I'm on a goddamn train to Genoa.  And I'm tired of this man's words so I think I'll write my own.

[stop]

There is an inherent musk of shit encased in this, probably not the shining flagship of Tren Italia.  Couple that with the beating Italian sun and it's ensuing heatwave, it is a scent most unappealing to say the least.  But one can only hunker down in the questionably designed hard, rubber-lined seats and blissfully hope that this train to Genoa is not much more impossibly long than it already seems.


A rather curious seat choice lends to some unlikely entertainment.  Out of the fifty or so empty seats in the car, my new friend wisely decides on the seat directly across from me.  Same side of the aisle, and my feet off to the side now so we're not playing footsies. His beady little brown eyes only more pronounced by his exaggeratedly furrowed brow.  It's something that comes with the years passing, and by the gauge of leather exterior and the wizened, blatant way he keeps looking us over suspiciously, I would say he's passed quite a few.  He's grandfather-looking, his eyes deep wells, glazed and opaque with ancient knowledge.  I wonder what they've seen.

[stop]

We get to Genoa and the shadows are long, and the sun's soon setting.  Genoa's on the coast at the top of the boot Italy.  It's west, towards France, we need to go now.  There's a lurch in my gut that tells me we're probably not getting to Montpellier tonight.  We all feel it, so Grant e-mails our host, Elsabeth, telling her we'll be there the next day.  There's no trains actually going into France, but there's one to the coastal border-town of Ventimiglia in an hour.  Just enough time to stuff pasta in our faces at a cozy little sit-down looking out onto the station and the main square.  I'm famished.  Still, i eat steadily.  Slowly, there's no rush.  A little TV in the corner is playing some Italian reality show not unlike Punked.  Except without the celebrities or production value.  It's pretty much just some Italian guy fucking with other Italian guys, but we don't understand a word of it and maybe that's why it's so hilarious.  When it's over, the sun's gone down outside.  Our plates are cleaned, bone dry.  All the bread's devoured.  All the water cups empty.  Grant puts the meal on his card, we tally our debt, stroll back to the station and hop our west-bound train towards the border.  We get to Ventimiglia just before midnight, and there's no more trains across the border until the morning.  Well, looks like we're sleeping here then.  "Fuck sleeping in the station though," I say, "Let's go sleep on the beach.  It can't be too far."

"Yeah!"  And it's not far at all really.  Except there's just one minute detail I didn't account for.  The whole beach, as far as we can see in the dark, is rock.  Small rocks, not particularly comfortable.  Whatever.  We jump in the Mediterranean, for me the first time (the water's pool temperature and saltier than a sea dog), and then we all pass out on our bags on the beach in Ventimiglia.

When There's Nothing Left to Burn, You've Got to Set Yourself on Fire

Sure, it's a metaphor.  What else could it be other than an arsonist's inner thoughts just before the match strikes, standing there still, doused, with an empty gas-can in hand.  They are words kept to one's self.  Never to be uttered save for some sad prelude to a Stars song.  And those Stars kids are no arsonists.  At least, I'm pretty sure they're not.  No, it's a metaphor.  But I wonder what it means when it's not meant for me.

[stop]

Because personally, I believe I've burnt it all up inside.  And after that, that Paris love, found and not had, I'm afraid there's nothing left to set to flame.  Or at best, just a tiny bit more.  Paris accomplished what it was supposed to, it seems.  The distractions are gone.  There's nothing left for them to grab onto.

Not for a little bit at least, or not like before I left for Paris.  I have this sensational feeling rolling through me that's akin to knowing what I want.  To an exactness.  Or to a particular aura.  And it's not so specific so as to be a rare sight.  Just not a common one is all.  And at present she has a name and a face.  She stands out bright in a crowd.  But I won't see her anytime soon I think, or ever again really.  Nothing could distract me like her, and now it seems she never will.  Everything in that close depth of field is fuzzy and unfocused, and the distance is sharp as a morning cock crow.  It looks beautiful.

I'm stepping strong towards it now.  At least I think I am now more than then.  I just hope I'm on the right mountain trail.

Familiar Surroundings

It's getting dark now, and the lights have flickered to life on the pier.  But it's not night yet.  The stars aren't out, and the sun's glow is still lingering deep orange on the horizon.  The ocean's a rippley blue lake reflecting the sky.  And it's cold.  An LA chill that just barely bites through my thin pull-over.  There's three middle-aged maritime seamen singing songs and playing a beat-up old stained-wood guitar.  This end of the pier is an Eden to them.  This dry spring Christmas weather.  They love it, but only because it's something new and incredible to them.  They're not from here.  They don't love it like I do.  These numb fingers is not a braving for them.  Moving across the page with a graphite trail in tow.  And I feel like their moving is keeping me sane.

Munich: The Hard Rock Syndrome

We get to Munich in the late afternoon and, fuck, there isn't another train to Zurich until tomorrow morning.  Looks like we're spending the night here.  Here?  But where?  "Is there a hostel around here?" Grant asks and looks around outside the station.

"Dude, I don't know if I can afford a hostel right meow," says I.
"Me neither," says Max.
"Yeah... And this place looks too nice for hostels.  It's all fancy-shmamsy hotels," says Grant.  "Let's just go threesies on a locker and rock the night in the station.  Copenhagen style."  We're in.  It's something like four euros total for the night, and we shove all our bags into one of the deep station lockers, squeeze the door shut and turn out the key.

[stop]

Munich, mother fuckers.  Drink it in like a hefty German brew.  But chug it because the sun's already low on the summer horizon and we have to be in Zurich tomorrow.  If there's one thing I learned to do in Santa Cruz though, it was to gulp down beers.  Relax the jaw and open the throat, but get your tongue in there to get all flavors as you pour it into your gullet.  Ladies, take notes because that's definitely what she said.  We've got about eight hours to kill in this rich city, but there's no rush.  The less time we spend sleeping on the grit-grimy station floor the better, so we take the place at a casual stroll.

Stroll right into some glitzy hotel we do, near the station, and pick up a city map, get our bearings, and stow it, heading towards the center on foot.  Through a not-too-old looking castle gate with battlements on top and, voila, it's a wide pedestrian street straddled on both sides by boutique shops, department stores, and grossly overpriced restaurants.  It reminds me, strangely, but quite strongly of the Promenade back in Santa Monica, and I chuckle a little.  "So this is Munich, huh?  Super old-time-y German, this place."

Max and Grant laugh a retort.  The spirits are high and light, in part, I think, due to that fact that our shoulders also are without those cursed packs on.  And we point and giggle at funny things, and side-hand comments and quote movie nostalgia to one another, and get giddy in the legs at the prospect of Mike's so-soon rendezvous.

Into another square, Marienplatz, and ohh, ahh, the town hall.  Finally, something that opens my eyes to this capitol city, that arrests my attention after being unceremoniously courted by the mundane open-air Munich mall walk.  It's a menacing building, especially with the dreary cloud cover, overtly gothic and medieval, all pointy, stone-framed windows and prickly spires and a bell-tower.  Not unlike Prague.  But at the same time, markedly different.  Not so ominous, and with a definitive tint of Bavaria that tastes rich to the eyes like dark chocolate.

From the middle of Marienplatz, there's a pair of bell-towers looming not too far behind the town hall and, well, I love bell-towers, so we romp in their general direction.  We amble past an old-looking building or white walls and old, glass windows that shone unclear with a yellow from within.  It said HOFBRAUHAUS in bold letters, and a thin metal street sign hung off the side with the initials HB and a crown all in gold.  We had a sneaking suspicion that they served beer inside and when we came around to the front it was quite obviously a bustling, rambunctious beer hall.  "Ohhh!  Say what?  We should def get dinner here," says Grant.  And Max and I agree.  But first, the bell towers.

There's a lurch in the stomach and a tick of the head because across the skinny walk-street from the Hofbrauhaus is that silly staple we've seen now in every city of our journey.  No, not a kebab joint.  And it's not a McDonald's, but that's certainly closer.  "Oh, hey look.  Another Hard Rock."  It's the Hard Rock Munich, and it gives me a moment's pause, probably the first Hard Rock to do so, because it has been in every city.  We've stumbled upon each one, starting with original in London.  It's that something so American, like hearing the same pop songs on the radio over here, listening to the same music and I guess that's what it thrives on.  A universal love of music.  That attraction to rock legends' guitars on the walls, to be so close to a thing so timeless, whose strings echo with distortion through the ages and, for better or for worse, probably always will.  The good, the bad.  The bands we loved, and the one hit wonders.  Served up with chicken wings and hamburgers.  Now who wouldn't love that?  Who cares what country your from.  What a tourist trap-looking kind of a place, and there's some fat boys coming out with their Hard Rock t-shirts.

We'll pass though, walking past, down skinny streets and through tiny, old squares and courtyards to my lovely bell towers.  They're at the head of some grand cathedral called the Frauenkirche.  It's simple brick and baroque-Italian.  No spires or prickles here.  Just a red tile roof we can barely make out, tall windows, and green plumes (of bronze, I'm guessing) at the tops of the towers.  "This thing looks old," I observe with a guise of inflection.

"Mmm, indeed."  And we stand at the entrance and ponder it for a while, necks craned to put the whole thing in perspective.  There's some ancient stone-carved cartoons on the side, and I'm no historian, but the general theme of it seemed to be rape.  Got to love religious fervor.

After a minute or two Max chimes in, "So is it Hofbrauhaus time yet?"  And the trance is over and my stomach makes it's presence known.

"Yeah, dude.  I'm ready for some beer and bratwurst."

"Bratwurst!"  So fun to say in a German accent.

Prague: Nighttime Marathons

It's 22:00 and we've got our pretty clothes on.  I've only got one nice button-down shirt, and it's on.  It's some shade of gray, which I don't think ever gets old or blase.  Grant and Max have their black ones on, and we've all got our decent shoes on for once.  I don't think we wore them at all in Berlin.  Well, maybe at the beginning when we were in the hostel.  Hostels always demand the best, I guess.  There's three Austrians (not Australians) in our room also and we all get proper sloshed and riotous before we stumble out and towards the center of Prague.  Someone, I can't remember who, told us of some magical six-story club that we absolutely needed to see.  According to the map though, it seems kind of far, and before we're even at the old market square we run into a horde of drunkards, riotous and swaying as well, and among them is, of course, the dastardly duo, Bobby and Ryan.  It's the pub crawl, and they're on the last leg, going to the last bar.  What are the odds.  I hadn't even gotten their phone numbers and well, I don't have a phone so I'd thought that chance encounter after the weed deal would be our last.  But the fates had other plans, I suppose.  And we're already wasted so we forget all about the six-story mega-club and mesh with the crawl and end up in some basement bar with two big dance floors and free shots at the door.  Works for me.  Bobby throws me a courtesy cig and we just burn 'em down inside.  Smoke hang heavy over the whole place, even with the AC on, but it's a blast.  A dance riot.  A bunch of English girls and Aussies drunk off pub crawling, grooving to an eclectic mix of American pop songs from across the decades.  A lot of Michael Jackson, and thank goodness for that.  Grant, Max, and the Austrians leave around 2:00, they're tired.  But Bobby and Ryan are still down to rage, so I stay and we rage right up until they play us all out of the place after last call with an old Sinatra number.  Worth it, it's 4:00.  I say good-bye to Bobby and Ryan, that high school nostalgia, and I don't really know when I'll see them again, if ever.  But hell, it's a romping good time.  I figure I'll just go back the way I came back to the hostel, and it's a bit far so I pace myself at a fast jog.

Surprisingly fast considering how drunk I am.  And maybe I'm too busy realizing how fast I'm going to notice how fucking lost I've gotten because as far as getting lost goes, I'm pretty much peaking.  I'd made a wrong turn somewhere, I think, and I flat-out forgot to make a handful of them.  After thirty minutes, I'm sick of running, but too pissed off and aggravated not to.  The streets are all empty and lit orange gothic and eastern European by the streetlights.  They fork and split and splinter off in every direction at times, and I haven't the faintest clue of which one to take.  No cars, no people.  No clue.  Miraculously, I stumble upon the train station, and there's flashes before my eyes of our night-time walk to the hostel the first night we got here.  The place certainly isn't as inviting by myself.  It's rather gaunt and creepy actually, but I'm too drunk and annoyed to care.  And my legs are starting to burn.  Apparently, I'm also too drunk to even remember how we got to the hostel that first night because before I know it, I'm lost again.  Maybe it's the booze, or maybe it's the hour, but every street looks like the one the hostel's supposed to be on.  Same looking buildings, same looking intersections.  It takes another thirty minutes to find the stupid place.  The little walkway to the back, next to the closed tattoo parlor.  I'm panting and sweating in the lobby as I tell the young Australian (not Austrian) man behind the counter that I don't have my room key (Grant and Max had it).  He must've thought I was crazy, sprinting up into the place at five in the morning.  "Well, that's all right," he says regardless.  "What's your room number?"

"Umm..." Please remember.  Remember. "309?  Yeah, that's it."

He fiddles around on the keyboard for a bit, asks to see my ID, then hands me a key, "Here you go, mate.  No worries."

"Why, thank you," I say.  "And good-night."

Insight: I'm Leaving

Life's one of those funny things, a thing that laughs with deep breaths.  Screaming through the lungs, pumping red to extremities, and tearing from joy or sadness lest the weed's dried my eyes out.  I still feel it though, something I can't quite put my finger on.  And it's slowly seeping out.

Paris: Short of Breath Days

I hate these days.  When the sun's shining, and the air is dry and for no other reason, it's hard to breathe.  The days are floating by now like those cotton-ball, soft breezy clouds over Haussmann's Paris in the 14th.  It's not the brevity of our time here in the Old World that's choking my throat, slurring my words out in a soft mumble with no breath behind them.  It's just asthma, I figure.  That's what it feels like anyways, from everything I've ever heard on the subject.  I never had asthma as a child, but then again, these lungs of mine aren't what they used to be back in days of AYSO and swim team.  I've got a lot more spliffs to my name now and that's just one of those things you don't think about too much because the numbers'll make you dizzy, and you can almost feel the tar nestling in your insides.  It's just something to take note of.  Be weary.  Let it be acknowledged, but don't stop living.  Ever.  Snags like this are a dime a dozen on our vacation turned feat of survival, and I'm just trying to suck all the life I can out of it.  And out of my ever-dwindling bank account.  So as we're walking from Marie's with a Carrefour baguette and Tucs and stolen Carrefour cheese and meats and Granini fruit juice, to a lovely park she told us about in the south of the city adorned with bronze statues on tall white columns, I suck again, inward, pull the air in through my nose and hard down with my diaphragm to fight against the close.  Just another thing to fidget with, another road-block to bypass.  No sweat.  And now it's time for lunch in the green grass and a spliff and an epic tournament of gentlemen's hearts.  Ah, summer in Paris.  We play 'til the shade draws from the side tree grooves.  It's a slow sun these days.  Nico knows.

Tell Sylvia Her Library's to Die For

Fuckin' writer types.  They play with gullibility as a cat would with a ball of yarn, mildly amused because they know the privileged truth.

But here I am, always the hypocrite because who am I kidding, that yarn ball's damned fun to paw around with, just so long as I'm not the one coming unraveled.  Touche you company of Shakespeare.  Your wit is well-noted.  It's a pity I won't be joining your ranks because I truly love this place.  But maybe it's not so bad.  I hate that haughty upper lip of proclaimed writers, assholing their way smartly through life's bowels because the recognition of that privileged knowledge and tongue feels so good.  But it leaves a taste of shit in my mouth.  And I know, or fuck, I fucking hope that air never becomes my defining one.

Shh, now.  I think Sylvia's listening.  I wish, maybe, that she'd smile at my words and pull up a rug corner for me.  Oh, hey!  I think I see her though falling slowly before this one window here upstairs, and she's content, alive in that magic space of hers.  Hard to catch she is, and discreet too.  I almost miss her.  She's spinning webs of silk thread instead of words now, with eight arms and eight eyes, not two.  What more would a perpetual reader and writer want.  More eyes to read with and more arms to write with.  I'd like to see her web sometime, but I won't ask questions.  I bet she's the silent type.

Quote of the Day: Inside There's A Child

"Other men are the lenses through which we read our own minds."


~ Ralph Waldo Emerson