beach, September 7th

Last days of summer; the sky the blue of more realistic expectations and the air smelling just slightly threatening. The people out get their enjoyment with a more grim cast, sucking the last goddamn bit the season has to offer even as their shadows lenghten. The dunes are sparsely peopled now, we cling to the sand against September's wind even as we are bathed in August's sun. And the dunes are thrown into sharp relief. And the water is empty of boats. And the gulls have moved in, surprised and annoyed at finding a human population. There is a man in front of me swathed in a blanket, wearing a long-sleeve shirt, yet he is gazing at the sun like a lover reunited. The gulls take us as an affront, one moves closer to me pointing its beak with indignation.

the begining of a story

He was sitting in a park, Jonathan was, a small park beside a large church. A cathedral really. The park was Victorian, resplendent in its restored rigidity; hard edged gardens circling around a bronze fountain. The gardens were just dirt this early in the season, but the black soil held promise. The church soared. The angle Jonathan saw the spire at made it seem much taller than the towers a hundred years younger behind it. Neo Gothic popped into Jonathan’s head as a cloud of pigeons described an arc around the back end of the church which was hulking like the prow of a ship. Jonathan liked the symmetry, the arc of the doors matching the windows, matching the holes in the tower that let the bell noise out. It made him feel relaxed.
Jonathan needed to feel relaxed. He’d woke that morning, for the first time, a murderer. Something he would now wake up as every morning for the rest of his life. It made him feel sick. When he woke, and now.
Jonathan lit a cigarette, watched the birds, watched the people. He tried to let the normalcy of the surroundings spread over him like a balm, but it just made him feel more separate and different.

monsters

On a tranquil night like this people sleep. That’s neither here nor there really, their sleep may be troubled or erratic, or they may worry at their sheets like a rosary or fetish; but the night itself is tranquil, piano music plays. Clouds move silently, lights flick off, in short, night arrives not with the garish cheer of day but gradually, like sinking.
Somehow, it quiets complexities. Surely horrors happen at night, maybe even most of them, but the feeling hangs that maybe even the monsters have gone to bed.

old lady on subway

There is an old lady on the subway, of the type that wraps their heads in floral scarves and carries buggies with wheels. Her buggy is aqua ripstop, and I wonder if it contains her morning shopping or her worldly possessions. Or possibly a cat. She’s reading, staring down through filmy glasses at a book in her lap, a children’s educational book about birds. She is reading about flamingos, or possibly just looking at the carefully rendered illustrations. She gathers the folds of her long, down filled parka around herself with a shiver, as though her mind had meandered off somewhere the pink birds lived native and then, with a jolt, the salt stains on the subway floor reminded her that where she was, it is twenty bellow.

night time walk

I tried to get into the cemetery tonight but couldn’t.
They seal them up at night with a padlock and a chain like a bicycle.
It’s to keep people out, teenagers who taint and disrespect everything they touch, but I cant help thinking it’s to keep something in too. The horror movie buff wants to see hands coming out of the grass.
I sit, instead, in a playground; somehow no less morbid. Absent of children, with drug-use preventing safety lights casting shadows off the see-saw and making dog prints on the sand look like acne scars on the moon, it’s like a mythical underworld.
A fat man in a tuxedo and bowtie walk a dog no further than forty feet into the adjacent green space. The clouds in the sky reflect the pink-orange glow of the city under them and look a little like renaissance flesh.
But there is no magic.
A darkly sensual vampire does not emerge from the mist to sit opposite me on the see-saw, I do not hear the distant howl of a wolf, only traffic. The jungle gym gleams in the energy efficient white light. It looks like plastic candy.

Spring!!!

Spring happens every year. Without fail the sun comes out more often, the temperature climbs from the negative and into the positive in increments of five and then ten degrees. Leaves, flowers, weeds and all manner of living thing unfurls itself and proudly proclaims that it is Alive. Today I saw a bumble bee floating by me as I drank my coffee on the deck as if it was just as entitled to life as I was.
This happens every year and people always act like it is an entirely new discovery. Like vampires clawing their way out from under the dead soil they don their gay apparel and race out to ENJOY themselves. Women put on bikinis and short skirts and men shorts and flip flops (the gay men and the straight college type guys become identical now), and they go out to parks to play volleyball or have a picnic. Sucking down the sun and drinking in the warmth as soon as possible as if squeezing every drop of pleasure out of this newly discovered spring is entirely vital to their survival, they clog Queen Street and fill every park flaunting their tanning-bed pre-tans and beaming smiles so bright they compete with the sun. And they make you feel guilty if you are not doing the same. “Can’t wait to get outside!” they say on Facebook, “Who’s up for some fun in the sun?” they Twitter.
Relax guys. Nineteen degrees in early May does not make it summer, and there is much more warm days and sun ahead of us.

Portrait of a Marriage

What an amazing book!
Vita Sackville-West was so far ahead of her time, a creative and edgy visionairy the likes of which we need around now (LinLo could take some tips).
The book is one half Vita's diaries and one half her son, Nigel Nicolson, writing about his parents, which makes for an interesting format. He disputes some of what his mother says, backs some of it up and generally fills in the details one would not think to put in their diary.
Highly recomend this!