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Random
A tropical modern building with an elevator. The name of a club in Brixton. A definition of narrative that resists complicated responses, because it's so fucking cool.
"What did you do on Saturday night?" "Oh, nothing much. Chucked back a few Malibu and Oranges, and all that." "Where did you go?" "Architecture 5." "Dude, that's really weird. That's where I went too." "No." "Yes!" "Shut up!" "No, seriously. I met this amazing, amazing guy. His name is Scott and when it was time to go, I heard this voice in my head, and it said, you have just met your future husband." "What, like a voice inside you or something you actually heard?" "I don't know." "Wow." "Yeah." "But, I think you should take it easy. You've been through a lot lately." "I know, but...he was really cute." "Define cute." "I don't know." "You're a little bit stupid, aren't you?" "What?" "Oh, I was just asking Terry where the olives were." "How is Terry, anyway?" "Terry! Terry, how are you?" "Fine." "He says he's fine."
61π 6π
The vertical axis of light, in the form of a hybrid being: half human, half bird. The act of opening your body to that light: that intensity is the angel too.
I dreamed of an owl-man and when I woke up, I tried to orient myself to him, geographically. I opened an atlas at random, thinking of the feral angel, and put my finger down. Where my finger landed, I went. I went to Colorado. There, in the color red, I tracked something and did not find it. It's too late now. This is what it's like to respond immediately to an angel. I don't recommend it unless you want your life to change forever in ways that unforseeable to you.
104π 48π
Any day that has an airport, from which you text-message a person you once loved, and they write back, after 40 minutes: "Wow. Safe travels." And, feeling stupid, you stare out at the Manhattan skyline, observing how the Empire State Building is both absorbed into the silver gelatin sky and periodically released by it, when the gold light floods the sky just after dawn. Clouds. Newark. The feeling that you are about to get on a plane and travel in the opposite direction to what the heart wants. That kind of bittersweet melancholy and imperfect nutrition -- you've just ordered a fruit salad that seems to be fermenting in it's plastic tub -- constitutes the soft day with no misgivings, but a profound inability to think things through.
114π 14π
Redness that's both linked and operative: mythologically unitary, but actually not contained. I refer you to the arteries and veins and also the valves which, on Miss Libby's echocardiogram, resembled baskets of kelp. Miss Libby is no longer with us. The heart fails. Perhaps it is better not to pick up with another human being. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and raspberry jam for breakfast? No. The heart is an open system. The heart is real. I don't want a boyfriend. I don't want another dog. I want red things: What moves my blood. Writing. I want the book to come.
What was the name of that French film? The one with Beatrice Dalle riding a dog sleigh at the end? I loved that shot where the girl's heart was lying next to her, wrapped in a T-shirt, throbbing in the snow. Did I really see that? I always like writing afterwards, but then I write something new. I wish I still had the soundtrack to Betty Blue.
131π 33π
The remarkable event of one's heart breaking at the exact instant that someone offers you a vial of their blood.
Rochester, NY: February 1994. Though chunks of ice were falling from the sky, he bicycled to Tops supermarket to get me, then a menstruating woman in her mid-twenties, the Sunday New York Times and a bloody steak. Now that's true love. Except, of course, it wasn't. Sometimes I think that love isn't something located in a particular person, like a husband, but, rather, something that's passed from person to person, like an albino rabbit at the petting zoo in Oklahoma City. But where is Oklahoma? This is the problem with not knowing how to position yourself appropriately in a restricted space. Though I'm now an American, I was born in a country where even the children drank tea for breakfast, like pirates in need of root canal surgery. Where were you born? Do you love someone? Describe your favorite lover of all time. My lovers have had the following occupations: bike mechanic, waiter, wedding video maker, performer in a miracle play, rabbi, merchant banker, poet (though I don't think they earned any money), professor, and...I think that's it. No. Art critic. Electrical engineer. Peace corps volunteer. The son of the Chief of Police of Rajasthan. (I believe he received a stipend.)
86π 51π
This is not caution. I am a university professor. It is not a particularly cautious act/behavior to write vaguely disgusting and diachronic definitions of angels, wolves and migration on a public dictionary site that anyone could read. I like writing my autobiography in the form of Urban Dictionary definitions. This is not, as I said, caution.
Writing intensely personal definitions of futurity, modernity, you name it, on a public dictionary site that you will have no access to once you press send. To do this without caution.
39π 23π
A grid system in four parts: site, threshold, damage, and a shaky content that's subject to change. Or: a way of holding things in one place long enough to understand what's happening. Narrative. Then it rains. It rains for three days straight, and the city disappears. Then you disappear. I am thinking of the night you opened the door of your house and threw the book into the garden. Dark garden. An intermediary text, architecture is not for babies. Architecture is not for the house, but what surrounds it. If the grid gets wet, then you just slide off it, into the rain. This is an act of repetition made possible by the structure, but only when the structure fails.
"Hey mister! If I'd of wanted architecture, I'd of asked for architecture." "It's architecture 1, dummy." "Who you calling dummy?" "You, dummy." "Don't call me dummy. Architecture 1, my ass." "I love it when you talk dirty." "Oh shut up, do you want me to come over there and..." "Oh shut your pie-hole. This ain't a donut shop, in case you hadn't noticed." "No, I hadn't, actually."
60π 9π