Monday, November 22, 2004

to the one borough

I'm in New York again, Brooklyn to be specific. Again, the silence. I still don't have a place to live, or to work, which is the one thing I need to secure when I get back to Seattle after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday we went to the MTA museum and walked around in old subway cars. We ate lunch at a Vegetarian Chinese resturant and sitting near us was this wonderful group of elderly people. For Dawn there was a woman with purple sequined shoes and purple glasses who insisted we eat at a cafe on West 83rd who had steamed eggs. I chatted with an ancient guy named Jay who was known at the table as being their human garbage disposal as anything they wouldn't eat he sure would. He was a Russian immigrant and vet of the Korean War. I told him my mother was grateful for his service. That seemed to make him really happy in a way I don't think I'll ever understand. But it's true. She is.

I read Paul Auster's Oracle Night on the flight over, cover to cover. Really good, better than the last few books of his I read, and personally overwhelming - but the end I still have a problem with. A punishment of sorts is meted out in such a cruel way that it just strikes me as too much. Yet it's inevitable in the text.

Right now I'm slogging through Lewis and Clark's journals. Still hunting for where it all went wrong.

I've been writing a lot lately. It feels good.

I carved "Dawn Rules" in wet cement last night, at the corner of Ocean and Atlantic in Cobble Hill.

And for bedtime reading, who wants to soothe themself with insight into the mind of an actual interrogator?


Information is the beginning of interrogation, and if there is none, if there is no language between you and the detainee, sometimes you will use more power. That I presume is what happened in Abu Ghraib.


Link

Dawn and I talked about the past and the present yesterday. Like many things, we disagree. Dawn wants to live in the present, which is admirable, and which is what I wish I was capable of. But our day was set in the past, in old subway cars and in the memories of elderly people. And our future, me wanting to carve and set in stone some name for future reference. She talked about some distant instinct she has about the far future, how it cannot be focused upon because there is something horrible on the horizon. And for all my love of the post apocalyptic, all my nightmares and daydreams about that possibility, I still feel holding her hand and being around her that there is a truer possibility, that everything shall still go on.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Dawn really does rule. Tabula Rasa.

3:13 PM  

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