Walkabout

A city at dusk becomes almost human. Almost a woman. Almost maternal. Her heart softens as the receding sun blurs sound and dampens movement. Light silently strokes surface’s contour, like a caress but passing. She seems obligingly stunned those last thirty minutes of the day — as if in a filmy pause. Sporadic bird calls out the shift from day’s warmth to night’s huddle. And indigo signals black’s drowning blue.

I like to walk, observe and not think in this space. From tonight's walkabout:

Liberated Intelligence

I listen to an amused Neil Gaiman defying literary scholarship’s desire to shove him within the pinhole of genre. It’s not magical realism, this is just where my head goes, he asserts Friday night to the 1300 sponge heads assembled for the MIT Comparative Media Studies lecture. He’d already had me at abandoned Victorian dolls are much more horrifying than a glistening fully functional iron maiden. He is explosive. I willingly surrender to the shrapnel of his imagination. Some of it sticks, pleasantly.

*

The next day I’m cocooned within the warmth of my car, reading alongside a road in a town with observable mathematics. There are more bookshops and music stores per square block than grades of milk. Men ride by on choppers, in measured intervals of three, silken beards lazily blowing in the breeze. Patience is dense. Smiles denser. There is dancing in the streets and jazz in the re-purposed cotton mills.

And I think to myself:

Everything that exists was once a daydream. A fantastical pastiche of man-made what ifs. So in essence, today and everyday, I am sitting within another man’s daydream. Even in my dreams, I’m still within the architecture of someone’s imagination past. Ha — to think I once believed it was impossible to enter another’s mind.

It’s very comforting to feel that I am creating within this gathered actualization. Hmm. Perhaps someday someone may appreciate living within my cumulative daydream.

*

Thirty-one-ness

I had some full-bodied, well-crafted sentences waiting for this morning’s release — then I fell asleep. I awoke a blank slate.

Yesterday was my thirty-first birthday. Today I recall.

I am 31 — round pointed. Hindsight reflects the exit from a very jagged round year. No one had warned me that curves could have such sharp edges, and I have a suspicion that my Saturn turned upon itself to test the very definition of the word resolve.

Personality became flaw. Leaves thorns. Honesty took on truth’s costumed lies. Body became unbearably light; the soul overwhelmingly heavy. Poetry became reality. And reality was an avoidable fiction.

No worries. Eventually — thorns became tools, attitude became awareness, body’s solidity grounded, and the concept of now became reality. But what a trial to get to eventually.

A candle hungrily ate its own wax, racing to find the source of the fire.

Simply put, the marked end of my thirtieth year left me in a matrix of tears. Wet relief. Last night, flanked by sangria and tapas, I sat opposite the only woman (besides my mama) who embodies continuity in my life. I sat, humbled and silenced by the warm saline etching it’s way down my face; sentimental un-sad tears for the successful completion of a massively tough year. I am grateful. I am older. I am 31.

When I was a little girl, I often wondered what it would be like to have the mind of an adult. Having arrived, I find that it is not much different. Adults are just questioning children with a deceptively mature façade.

1977


1979


1981


1981


1982


1983


1987

Ahead Of Thirty

I’m snug in my small flat donning an outfit (lined hoodie, yoga pants) more suited for a mid-winter Pilates class than an afternoon writing session; it’s bloody cold and blindingly overcast today. A friend aptly summarizes the atmosphere of the day via his Facebook status update:

S. is having a gray day. NYC is a little bit equivalent to an inverted, outdoor factory.

I find that most cities take on this desolate quality when a tempestuous sky-scape shutters away the early warming blues of Spring. A little slap back to the starkness of Winter; reiterating the tenuous freshness of the subsequent season.

Enough about the weather, yeah?

I’m still hovering solidly in the photographic realm, but I thought I would strain out a few extra sentences for those who care to be more in the know about the comings and goings of my daily life. The past weekend, I managed this short-list of diversions:

1) Trolling for Formica chips and spent signage around Boston’s Industrial Waterfront.

2) White-hot jazz song in an architecturally confused church, subsequented by the sanguination of my fingers de-foiling endless bottles of wine.

3) Gin, duck confit and a far breton.

The gawking expedition around Boston’s Industrial Waterfont District:

Eight For Eight

This blog has become a morphology. Para– to photo– graph. This’s probably a disappointing phenomenon to those of the set that are exclusively partial to the written form. Someone apologizes on my behalf. I'm satisfied.

The afternoon residue of morning rain is outside. I am inside. Safe from spontaneous fire, shadowy outbursts of late life shingles and incarceration fugues. From this vantage — I read, work on my manuscript, InDesign, OutDesign, portfoliate — multiplicitously mediating my many modes. Savvy?

But I do get out. Quite a bit in fact. Well, not nearly enough (residual wanderlust), but I do try to make the most of these excursions — be it a concert, a meal, a road trip, a pint, a daydream.

When kicking about, my camera plays the role of perceptual accomplice. We walk the streets like so:


Note: All photos were taken on the evening of Monday, May 5. All rights reserved.

Of Pictures and Words

A minor semantic debate is bemusing my mind. The issue — a phrase:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

So often uttered. Nauseatingly simple. Clichéd. Or is it?