Jumps

Parting: So I travel from my city tomorrow. I leave behind my strange, agitated, inspired, beautiful, clarion, potential-filled mess. It's a really ambivalent feeling; on the one hand there is a definite need to escape a kind of claustrophobia which descends at moments that defy explanation; however, there is great familiarity which comforts. How can I leave my streets, home to so many boring epiphanies, the streets where every block has its own non-heroic story, the canals and wires and bent utility poles? And the people? This includes the bumblebee swarms of youth comng up the streets endlessly, includes the walking hills of rags, includes the drunks unhappily carried in archetypal shopping carts. My instinct is to hold on to them. But instincts need to be critiqued. I fall into too many holes in my rooms. New kicks are comparisons for the familiar ones. I will get to see how people are different and how they are all the same. Will I be greeted by the same stone alleyways or by much more garish neon marquees? What do you say to that?

Staying: So I laughed as a defense mechanism for a good half an hour when I saw the hotel room where a friend would be staying. Everything in there meshed together perfectly and in the greatest, most harmonious, cacophony of depression. The echoes of an old woman's death-cough down the halls. The painting which added no colour to the walls. The grooves punched into the drywall. The graffitti: a single inescapable crying eye which said "sorry". The guts of the sink hanging from the cabinet. The half-pried-open TV with only three channels, all cartoons. The view of the parking lot where the only sound is that of garbage flowing to the wind. Words don't do it justice. Maybe pictures will be forthcoming.

Consider: "When one must, one can."