best of times, worst of times

this is part of our universe






as is this





I went back to the second layer of firmament this weekend, soldiered through the dirty gray slush where the sidewalks become streets, resurrected feelings that outstrip my power to apprehend, told stories about times I had forgotten, ate the shit out of some dank pad see ew, encountered revelations in forms I had unconsciously sequestered to the outer edges of awareness, existed in that slipshod passage of time made possible by a train ride surging past artless but authentic graffiti scrawled on the side walls of 3-flats and endless iterations of signs for Mexican restaurants, slipped dollar bills solicited by destitute HOMELESS ON CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR signs, and sat in a library whose arched ceilings and intricate Gothic characters made me feel at home and absent from home at the same time. Happy new year and all that jazz, good eventful times underwritten by good eventful times and strange compassless times. And I read me some Charles Dickens – on the plane from Omaha, the train, the cabs, and the couches of apartments on which I could lay my slightly addled head for four or five hours.

Dickens is basically voice-over, the kind of reading that goes off in my head. Add to that viewings of Planet Earth and the sonorous narration of Charles Attenborough (“It’s like God’s narrating to you after you’ve died) and I was very voice-in-head-struck. Plus I met my Sidney Carton, in the flesh, capable of manifesting that dark night of the soul at four o’clock in the afternoon as the wan light of Windy City winter sun streamed through the windows of a hipster bar with a stripper pole and passable meatloaf. In his Charles Darnay incarnation, my Sidney was all wit and Camels and snide remarks made in the face of authority and helping people across the street and not giving a shit if the thrift store clothes were exactly the kind the cool kids didn’t go there to buy, but just the functional cheap things that provided the requisite amount of warmth and non-police intervention, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at 17 and nanotechnology because the least you owe yourself is a search for moorings, and if you find none, then that blossoms into something – five or six years later – that begins to feel like a blessing to let it all just go. I kind of am thinking of that scene in the Usual Suspects when finster’s dead and baldwin’s character spits (literally) into Pollack’s character’s face: “We pulled more scores, and stole more money, than you’ve ever imagined . . . so FUCK you!” That’s not an exact quote, just the way I remember it, which is in spirit with the general drift of where I want this all to go, b/c he’s the smartest and most haunted person I will ever know and if I ever go to the city again who knows what possible incarnation I may encounter and that's that that's that that’s that.