I lost your sight in the deep dark light.

Take this reaction and throw it outside. Remember to erase it's name and bury the limbs in the sand.

Do everything you can to forget your heart.

There is neither need nor want in the shallow palms of two hands disconnected by speech that never formed.
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Song of the second: Gimme Little Sign by Brenton Wood
Book of the moment: Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Spring 2010
Notes:

Three shadows passed above me as I stood below the bridge. The dust that sparkled with radiance of street light and lost cause filled my nose. It seemed that tonight she had been taken by surprise, nothing more than a paper bag filled with static eyes. I had become used to the feeling of no control, knowing that she would never take a turn toward my avenue...never would she think my name and want to see me in the same flash of memory. After this reaction of honesty, I walked down a sidewalk that had been cast so many years ago it would take five hands to count them out. Floating above this concrete nostalgia all I could imagine was endless time bundled with a thousand smiles that never gave up the hope of that single second of silent sound.

...thoughts rang loud in a head filled with water stung ears...


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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Spring 2010
Notes:

Before the explosion, the bricks sat in the same space for thirty years. There was never a thought of flying from the circle of permanence, this spot that was held together stronger than an arm wrestler. Pebbles would never speak badly of the horizontal stone they sat between and surely they would not think about interrupting the pattern.



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"An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way."
~Charles Bukowski
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shake the sun awake.

White pastels laid in the background as lines blurred together to form the smoothest transitions. I had seen moments through a lens that when my eye pushed back and looked into reality things seemed just slightly different, slightly altered. Everything was still there in the same point of light it had been roughly three seconds earlier. Nothing had changed or disappeared; yet, I knew it wasn’t the same. There seems to be a collapse as your elbows bend towards your ribs and you try and hold the box as steady as possible, with any movement resulting in a haze of rhythm.

All there is are vibrations. Grab them with open palms and find them in everything you do, see, hear, feel, and breathe. This won’t last long and you will realize it far to late.

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Song of the second: Firecracker by Steel Train
Book of the moment: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Summer 2010
Notes:

I leaned out my window yesterday, my elbow propping me as my weight collapsed onto the ledge. The air, moving over my hands and climbing towards my shoulder, seemed to shift in zigzags as if to say the storm would be here soon. The siren outside told me there were only minutes until it would be night at two in the afternoon. The thunder spread through the sky like a flower peeling open for the first time. Before I realized it was raining the beads were already racing down my forehead waiting to jump of the cliff of my chin.

The initial warning came about ten minutes after I woke up to another commercial on the television. It was the type of warning that shutdown every channel so no matter how vigorously you pressed the next button the only thing to change was the number in the top right corner. There was a moment where I saw tree's press their branches close together and tighten all the leaves that lay attached as if they were eyelashes guarding against wild sand. A smile came over my face and for the first time I felt excited.

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Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Date: Summer 2010
Notes:

Where did the list go that you made when you were twelve? It had all the things you wanted to accomplish. All the things you wanted to do. My list is buried in a backyard I can no longer find. I can’t say with much certainty that anything on the list was ever accomplished, though, I think that was the point of the whole thing. If you think there is only one paved road to go down then grip the steering wheel and turn your knuckles white as you cannonball through the guardrail. There is no path, only the many different directions you decide to go.

Break through, break free, break out…and just go.


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"The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter.. perfect in its bud as in its bloom.. with no reason to explain its presence.. no mission to fulfill.. a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist.. a puzzle to the botanist.. an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man."
~James McNeill Whistler
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Fiocco di Neve

In an unrehearsed burst, the clouds lose their grip and a snowflake is born. Shimmering like diamonds in the wrinkles of your palm, this tiny heartbeart of lightning bolts will live for only minutes.

Quickly, as I squinted, skyscrapers melted into my hand as jagged cliffs were reduced to tree limbs. Light bent backwards, rushing to find ruby sapphire cracks between each layer. As I blinked the snowflake was gone, I shook my hand and watched it explode; becoming tiny pebbles halfway smoothed from a millennia in some Colorado river.

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Song of the second: No Lonesome Tune* by Townes Van Sandt
Book of the moment:When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
*for the record, I couldn't find any video clips of the aforementioned song. Enjoy this clip of, waitin' around to die.
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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Summer 2008
Notes:

Verbs with lips
Tell you lies
Forming words
That breathe life



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"The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it."
~ Gustave Courbet
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Words without wings.

The flowers, like voices, shift with your mood. Each bursting bloom raises questions of when the color will run out. When the path is covered by branches, leaves, twigs, dust, vines, spiders and everything else that ever fell, the light my eyes leave will lead the way.

Find yourself, before anyone else has a chance to.
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Song of the second: Weekend by The Sea & Cake
Book of the moment: End of Food by Paul Roberts
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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Summer 2008
Notes: Two sets of arms raised in the air, neither knowing which expiring second would catapult the knuckles forward like an army protecting its king. Sweat poured, as quick as a rivers current, from the ghost white fists that found an inescapable jaw. The punch threw rivets of spit and blood into the air as quickly as it was thrown. In hindsight, the fighter now wishes he would have moved a single second earlier in any other direction.

The worst part of the whole evening was the car ride home, seconds slipped into minutes slipped into hours slipped into eternity. Flashes that were both bright and blinding tried sneaking past the tinted glass of his car door. The sunken fighter could only sit there, chest moving outward then inward, eyes twitching then blinking, heart pumping and then beating. There was nothing that could make him feel anything but defeated; which, in actuality, he had just become. He wasn't broken, he was just bruised, and another day he thought would eventually come and with it, another chance.



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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Summer 2008
Notes: It seems surprising when you can look into the bottomless sky and see beauty where no one else does. When you see it, like a child spelling words in his alphabet soup, there is that moment of clarity and exactness. Others try, but you can tell it simply does not hit them like it does you, straight in the face with no jokes.



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Location: Chicago, Illinois
Date: Summer 2008
Notes: Take the guitar strings of your life and bend them until they scream and howl.




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"What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with nature."
~ Paul Cezenne
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Broken Rubber Bands

This seems like the perfect spot for absolute silence.
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Song of the second: Galaxies by Laura Veirs
Book of the moment: Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser
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Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Date: May 2008
Notes: Jacob buried his eyelids and fell into his dreams. He listened and softly words knocked at his ears...

"This way to the light that is shining beyond those walls. If you run straight, legs like bicycles, you'll never be caught. Leave smoke filled paths that hide your shine like candles melting into wood."



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Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Date: May 2008
Notes: The sky, is there anything greater?



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Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Date: May 2008
Notes: As she raised the receiver to her ear, she could hear my lips parting and sensed my words slipping out . Then, for no explainable reason, the signal cut and my words fell to the ground, buried upon a dusty dream. She stood still, a vicious wind circling her water colored eyes. The receiver clicked, a sound so familiar, leaving her frozen until the next ring.



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Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Date: May 2008
Notes: "But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica..."

- taken from Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson



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"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley
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