Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
Before the clock rolls over to midnight, I thought I’d get a post up for today. I just made some substantial updates to my MySpace page. Now you can listen to Ginsberg perform America or Kerouac read from On the Road while scanning my hobbies and a descripton of the type of music I like to listen to (go ahead, knock yourself out.)
I’m not sure what it is – maybe it’s the format – but when I’m making additions to my page, there’s a voice that comes in that sounds awfully familiar to my internal editor. He whispers that this business of joining the social media discussion is especially trite and trivial. Maybe I don’t understand the medium fully yet. Or maybe I don’t care to see my identity as it’s spilled out on the page – a hodge-podge of incongruent thoughts and random media selections.
My friends’ pages capture who they are and what they believe in so powerfully and succinctly that I imagine them clicking save with a sense of inward pride in having expressed themselves so fully – and humorously. But I’ve managed to create a dull bookworm with poor taste in music and film, who idolizes popular literary figures to a point of worship, which is a latent indicator that he might never become one himself.
Part of the issue I have with my page is that I want to keep it somewhat professional, so I’ve excised a great deal of MYself from MySpace. I think that seriosuly undermines the purpose of the site. You won’t find any photos of my family or me on our recent vacation excursions. Comments that friends post will be genteel and far from profane given their understanding of why I began the page. Most of my friends that I will link to will be serious-minded professional colleagues who are interested in establishing connections, not seeing images of my kids heading off for the first day of school. This is all in addition to another fact: I have a bit of an identity crisis as a writer, living in the suburbs and writing magazine articles about happenings in the urban core.
So, the troubled MySpace saga continues. When I’m comfortable with myself, the page will come together. Until then, MySpace is the perfect realization of who I am at the moment.
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Tags: Social Media
Let Me Fly
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Not high, just creative …
Constant thronging from the sleeveless laborers woking jackhammers and machinery up the block lifts me off the cold bedsheets and through the window. Bubbling as my body sucks past the plain, the pliable glass is my gateway out above the city, where I hover for a moment while the force decides where to pull me. Airy and ethereal, it floats me slowly over the tarred and antaened rooftops of stunted buildings, by the cracked flower circles that are spun into the mosaic buliding ledges, past the smoked and mirrored glass in the taller structures where I can’t see but instead picture office workers lost in mindless business, balancing coffee on bellies, slumped in poor typing posture. Below is the entire city grid and streetscape, manholes dark and obvious in the asphalt streets, blemishes – imperfections – in the city’s aerial complexion. Time has seemingly locked up, but I can tell it hasn’t in the real world where I cab still distinguish taxi cabs by the yellow rooftops and the people who move in tiny black pinholes across intersections and up and down sidewalks. Minutes ago – what in real time could be hours ago – I was asleep on the 18th floor of what used to be the Federal Reserve Building that has since been converted to upscale, cosmopolitan lofts. The coffers once kept in the basement were filled with skids stacked with millions of dollars in gold bars and cash. Buried beneath the city block, locked behind vaults, all the money in the world and no freedom. No love. No view. I’m not afraid. I’ve finally lost the need for material possessions and the lost burden has separated me from gravity. The sun has slipped down the sky right at the place where the orange and pink hues combine in golden rays, each one distinguishable to the naked eye. Like lightning, they pierce my body and hold me, just for second, as though I were voodoo doll against cork board.
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Tags: Free Writing
Winding, narrow lanes lead up the hillside to the limestone university buildings. In the fall, students walk along broken sidewalks through shimmering light let through by 100-year-old tree branches, past the old two-story houses overgrown with thick foilage.
This being the first full week of August, the streets will be alive again soon and these houses 50 feet or so off the walking paths will become the havens students imagine them to be, near campus but worlds apart all the same. The proprietors of these dwellings have long since been saved from the pressures of pop quizes, lab experiments gone awry and research papers. (more…)
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Tags: College
Here’s my first shot at poetry (on this site, anyway.) It’s an ode to something sweet and unexpected on a desert night, in a place where people would never be if not for man’s persistence, inventiveness and greed. Vegas, of course. Mandalay Bay … all taken from bits and pieces of dialogue around me. FYI: Corona is my love dressed in white (label.)
By pool water colored electric blue by floodlights,
found love unexpected leaning on railing.
Hawaiian shirt, casual, shorts,
found love in white in unpretentious conversation, in pop culture,
watching first and saying nothing, then
a pleasant introduction sharing 80s and wine cooler embarassment,
relating to childhoods in Seattle Kansas City.
Beachboys play nice bartender pouring drinks,
kabobs with shrimp as table displays, golden rooftops seedy gambling.
An incidental audience fades away,
my heart comes clear and my thoughts go clouded,
how can it be this love in two places at once,
in tall free drinks searching us out on a trip that was not amounting to anything,
talking about moving to Hawaii with no money and making it last, riding Stratosphere roller coaster, Christianity, spirtuality, and drug mistakes.
Truth Project, indeed – an emissary close to the creator’s own heart.
Last call too fast and shuffling down narrow sidewalk like cattle under Palms.
Drinks carried out and promises to meet at a later date, fulfilled.
“How about those Mariners?”
One last squeeze of hand to wash down the desert,
on burning windswept dry streets and cab rides illuminated with rolling lights and foreign accents.
Sweet Corona, sweet as lime and bitter as salt, my love witness.
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Tags: Poetry
Lil’ Guy
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
My latest story was published online today in Present Magazine. Take a look and, if you are so inclined, leave a positive word.
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Tags: Comic Books, Present Mag.
