new paths/adieu

in this little box, i've made promises of consistency that have fallen apart like the soles of my favorite dunks. since this weekend has seen what i hope to be the most drastic (and anticipated) of lifestyle changes, i feel as though it's time to close the virtual page on this humdrum nonsense.

as we speak, laura is working on the introductory post at cigarettes & singalongs, our second attempt at blogging and our first real attempt at collaboration. what exactly we will create on this, i'm not so sure of yet, but as with everything to two of us have ever touched, i imagine it will take shape as we slowly mold it.

so, good-bye, spring breaks in here&now&today, or whatever else you like to call yourself. if you're one of the two folks that was following me, hopefully you'll come and play with laura and i. lord knows that the two of us are having fun already.

two day's worth

parking garages remind me of you.  you, the red atm machine in the bar across the street, your first draught guinness, the take of whit beer and pizza on your breath in the hotel bathroom.  i used to stand still, but then i met you.  we can see every parking garage in every small city in the country, honor.  the lights will illuminate oil spills in fresno, burnt rubber in charleston. or anyone.  we cuddled on a bean bag once, and i hadn't slept.  you still say you were unsure of things back then, but i can't believe that. you held me by the pinkie once, on the floor of your dorm room. you kissed my ignorance after i quit.  and what of us now?  we're stains on a capet, cigarette ashes down a shower drain, a replaced street sign between worcester and berry.  i forget these things.  sometimes you mind and others you don't.  but to me, none of it matters so long as we're turning double plays. <$3

scribble a few things off the list, but it still goes something like this:

days in june without rain: one

dollar bill airplanes: two
pages left in book: fifty-eight

new album i've never heard: au revoir simone - still light, still night

record from jerry's collection: this rediculous album

linkity-links:

song: defiance, ohio - the list

purchase at no idea or download the entire album for free at archive.org, because the band is just that awesome.

ten things

1. i will spend june counting the days when it doesn't rain, and folding dollar bills into dollar bill airplanes.
2. i will read a minimum of 50 pages a day. this should be especially easy on days i work, considering i can read 18 pages between the silver spring and chinatown metro sations.
3. i will buy and build a new bookshelf.
4. i will write every day, with no set goal on word or page count.
5. i will right every day, with no set goal on soul count.
6. i will take one picture a day, with each ilaria and my phone.
7. i will remember july 1st, early august.
8. i will watch my sodium, and more beautiful things like FM airwaves and moving pictures.
9. i will listen to both sides of one pre-1985 record, and one newer album every day, from start to finish.
10. i will share at least two of the following things with the world every day: music, moving picture, still photography, my words, garbage.

i've made this list to keep my mind active, so active that at any given moment i might have an aneurysm or seizure. because right now, all we have is time, time, time, and someday, that time will run out.

that's the only thing you can be absolutely certain about.

"there's nothing more boring than a well-traveled person."

linkity-links
photo: my good friend daggar slade of san marcos, texas. his flickr.
music: paul baribeau - ten things, purchase at amazon or
quote: from don delillo's great jones street. save the publishing industry, or save some dollars.

10th grade reading list

the semester is drawing to a close, and as sad as it is to be on hiatus from the ever-so-inviting workshop environment, it's utterly exhilarating to suspend the workload that comes hand-in-hand when enrolled in an MFA program. spring is here, and the promise of leisure and productivity without hearing any disconcerting voices has me feeling happy to be alive. i want to i want to rope-swing into watson pond, to roll my windows down and blast my father's music on a drive through the chesapeake , to eat clam strips at a seafood shack in tiny maine vacation town, and (most importantly) read and write until the sun comes up.




my favorite AU graduate whose last name rhymes with ertania has this fantastic, masochistic habit of creating a much-too-large reading list over these sorts of breaks and laboring to complete the whole list before school starts again. i've completely hijacked this idea. he's set out to read 50; i'm setting out to read 30. i feel like a very good casual reader, but not a terrible writer-who-reads. so, to combat this, i've decided i'm going to knock a few things off the cannon that i haven't gotten to, and return to the classics that warrant a closer reading than i've given them.

the list! (bold means purchased)
Bread and Wine - Ignazio Silone
The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Damned If I Do - Percival Everett
Lost in the City - Edward P. Jones
The Liar's Club - Mary Karr
Don't Cry - Mary Gaitskill
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Collected Stories - Grace Paley
Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle
Waiting - Jin Ha
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Independence Day - Richard Ford
Where I'm Calling From - Raymond Carver
A Sport & A Pastime - James Salter
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
1984 - George Orwell
Great Jones Street - Don Delillo
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
That Night - Alice McDermott
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson

i've come up to twenty so far, and even these aren't set in stone. honestly, i'd really like some more suggestions. and some cohorts. really, trying this on my own feels damn near impossible. you should read some, too. it'll give us a reason to see each other and call each other beautiful.

island 01

looking out my window one morning, i caught a homeless person in a stained brown blazer stifling through our recyclable bin. i couldn't have been older than 9 or 10. he held an industrial-sized trash bag over his shoulder. it was stuffed with empty cans and probably two times the size of his torso. i tapped my fist on the window to shoo him away, like he was raccoon. he looked up at me with tired eyes and slowly moved to our neighbor's can.

walking away from the window, i decided that staten island would be the perfect place for a homeless person to live. my logic was based on the newly-acquired knowledge that the train that ran from tottenville to st. george was free. it ran twice an hour, all evening. i imaged a homeless person hopping on one of the cars and heading towards the north shore for a slice of pizza on bay street. they could spend a few days there, blending in with the urban decay before cashing in their cans for change. from there, a relaxing hour-long ride would take them to the quiet, empty beaches of the south shore. this itinerary didn't include any of the 13 stops between the end points, every neighborhood possessing their own individual draw.

back then, the world didn't seem bigger than staten island. And it didn't need to.

from a milkcrate in the attic: buddy miles, them changes

in december of 2008, my parents asked me what i wanted for a christmas gift. since i hadn't given anything of that sort a moment of thought, i used the recent economical crisis as an excuse to simply ask for the technics entertainment system that's been sitting in their living room, unused since the birth of the bose iPod dock. it came complete with a DC servo turntable, two-channel stereo equalizer (that doesn't exactly work), and a dual cassette player and recorder. my father informed me that there are at least 200 LPs floating around in the attic. i've found about 50 of them so far.



jerry says buddy miles was a session drummer, one of no particular fame. he said buddy did some spectacular sets, particularly with the beatles. my research found no evidence of such claims. he was, however, a pretty popular jam drummer. his played in electric flag with mike bloomfield, the short-lived band of gypsies with jimi hendrix, and later with carlos santana (in the late 80s, when santana was 35x less cool, but 100x less a poppy sell-out).

i picked this out the crate without ever having heard of buddy miles. looking at the jacket, i think it's pretty obvious to figure out what intrigued me. look. it's a fat dude with an afro, sitting behind a drum set with an american flag detail job. plus, he's straight grilling you. this guy was obviously the most gangster-looking mother fucker of 60s rock. try to deny it. you'd be out out of your mind.

the thing i love about them changes, buddy's third album and first after the band of gypsies experience, is that it's obviously not gangster, in any which way. sure, there are elements of hard rock sprinkled her and there throughout it, but this is r&b. soul. funk. buddy and his band take a journey across 60s pop, and they make every stop along the way. it opens with the title track, which was written for band of gypsies. wally rossunolo absolutely slays the hendrix-esque opening riff, and miles teams up with billy cox to deliver a flawless baseline. miles goes to town with his vocal range, and the dude can sing. this jam is funky as shit: if you hear it, you're dancing.

buddy's voice is pretty spot on. he kind of reminds me of a stevie wonder with a sore throat. he hits notes you don't expect a drummer to hit. he covers gary allman's "dreams" with such soul that it's almost unrecognizable. he hits notes he shouldn't hit and starts basslines that don't sound possible for an allman brothers song.

the album is, through and through, just solid. it's one of those records that once you know, you fiend for it every time you're sitting around in silence. you want to invite all your friends over so they can dance around to "them changes," day in and day out.

Buddy Miles - Them Changes

and purchase here
Amazon or

return from 524-day interval

it's been a very long time since i updated this thing. i would tell you that i don't know why i deserted it, but to be completely honest, i don't remember why i created it in the first place. honestly, i've always hated the idea of blogging: it's egotistical, pretentious, and downright pointless. the market for published literature has broken it's leg and the blog is the brace that keeps the body in motion, and i find that downright despicable. we've strayed so far from where we once were, and predicting the future of the written word - be it fiction or poetry, nonfiction or journalism - is both petrifying and impossible.

i haven't returned to this medium to reinvent myself or rejuvenate blogtography. the truth is, a lot has changed since i created this thing. the scenery has changed and the people i called friends have disappeared. 500 miles away from me lives a life that i have abandoned that felt realer and truer than anything i had ever experienced. if epiphanies exist and coming of age tales are possible, i lived it, breathed it, and tasted it.

now i’m in a new place, where skylines have replaced rows of birch and the homeless replaced the bulls. everything is beautiful, and as my memories from the seacoast of new hampshire fade a tiny bit with every passing day, i’m paranoid that i’ll lose these moments in the shore of this impending sea of adulthood and responsibility that looms around the corner of tomorrow.

i’m scared of every tomorrow, really. life, no matter how dull it should be, feels extraordinary. i worry that one day, i’ll wake up and have grown past every opportunity presented to me. what’ll be worse is, since times have changed and today’s photo albums have been replaced by flickr and photobucket, i will have nothing to remember myself for the person i used to be. even though times have changed, our memories still fade like the corners of a polaroid. i don’t want to forget today or tomorrow, since yesterday feels so remote and distant.

so, i’m back to create a visual journal that’ll hopefully still exist years from now, when my youth is faded and my skin is worn from nicotine addiction. i’ve changed the name and the links, because the idealistic narra i was 2 years ago is not the no-nonsense narra i am today. “here & now & today” comes from one of my favorite against me! songs. i think it fits with my current personality better than the bloc party song does.

maybe in twenty years, when i’m balder and grayer, i’ll plop a 5-year old with pigtails and brown eyebrows down in my lap and point at my youth on a computer screen. maybe she’ll be in awe at the places i’ve seen, or maybe she’ll laugh at the way i dressed. chances are i’ll sit there with my chest swelling and my eyes watering, and remember that everything is worth remembering.