One Foot in the Gutter

In the back of my head, I can hear that nagging voice, and I think of the reason I would give.

You see, I’m too perfect as it is. I need something to tie me down, to anchor me to reality and all the normal, mundane, humdrum stuff.

I shelter the cigarette from the wind with my body and the cup of chamomile tea, the lighter’s flame licking up in the dark, the orange glow illuminating my face to passersby.

Over on Bedford a roar of voices comes rising out of the night. But Jefferson is quiet, and only the occasional car or cyclist disturbs the uncharacteristic stillness.

In the gutter, a few blackened chicken bones. 

Up above, gray clouds drift through the orange-black sky of Brooklyn, veiled through the branches of the tree that stands in front of my apartment.

The landlord comes and sweeps the entryway and puts down new mats. Nothing said about the roaches and black mold. Happy New Year.

I look across the street at the houses with new TVs, visible through the windows, giant garish mind-numbing magic mirrors to dumb people down and suck their brains out like a milkshake.

I climb the stairs to the second floor, each wooden step frozen momentarily in the slow process of disintegrating into matchwood.

“See anything good lately?” my little brother asks.

Noir movies from the 50’s and 60’s. Alan Watts lectures on Zen and Hinduism. The moon.

We make shaky plans for New Years but they fall through. I clean my apartment after work and heat up leftovers. Sew two patches onto my camera bag. Listen to Kei Marimura sing The Very Thought of You.

The soft warm glow of the lightbulb in my office seems to be pushing me towards sleep.

I kick back in my chair and put my feet up, feeling Kei’s voice tumbling down my ear as I tumble into the dark of sleep.

I dream of Salma being vulnerable and exposed to something dangerous. In a red room full of books, a chaise, and a roaring fire. 

Salma’s naked, crying, shielding herself from something in the room. I reach out to her and she shrinks away from me. 

When I call her later, I lead with this. “May I call you back?” she asks politely.

But she doesn’t.

Maybe I was the something in the dream.

Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to me.  

“I don’t think that’s it,” Garrett reassures me. “She’s the kind of person who would want to hear every detail.”

I wash my face with cold water and look at the reflection in the mirror. 

A question I cannot ask myself. A question I cannot put into words.

I stare up through the branches of the tree and tap the ash from my cigarette. Sip chamomile tea. Think about the past year.

Important things that happened to me in 2021:

  1. I photographed Olivia
  2. I changed my wardrobe
  3. I was made a godfather
  4. …

Fuck. 

Is that all I did in 2021?  

Did I get a raise? Did I write anything astounding? Did I start any new photo projects? Did I accomplish anything?  I wrack my head for some crumb of progress, but all I can turn up are a few book titles and things that seem to mean even less: conversations and nights carousing with Alex in Williamsport, plans to learn French and take dancing lessons, a bank account that should probably have more money in it.

“The fool is always getting ready to live.”

-Seneca

Well, I also took up smoking again, I think to myself. There’s an accomplishment.

I smile to myself and feel the twinge in my chest. Twisting up over my right breast and clawing to my neck.

That’s okay, Carroll. Everything that lives must die.

My apartment is filled with Stuff. Too Much Stuff. Needlessly Useless Stuff. Luxury Stuff. Stupid Stuff. Repulsive Stuff. Stuff I Want to Throw Out in the Street.

Think of all the stuff you bought in 2021.

Sick of buying. 

Sick of owning, consuming. Sick of acquiring, of being burdened with things I don’t need.

“I haven’t dated anyone in six years,” I begin, taking a drag on my cigarette and holding it in my lungs while I take a sip of lager. “But I’m thinking about going four more.”

“And make it an even ten?” Alex laughs, grinning ear to ear.

I laugh too. 

Maybe it’s sad, or pathetic. Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding something. Maybe I’m trying to figure out if love is a noun or a verb. Maybe I’m trying to figure out if I’m the kind of dog you pet or the one you put on the end of a choke chain.

Maybe I’m just wasting my life alone.

Anyway, what do I have to offer anyone?

One foot in the gutter, head in the clouds.

Something to tie you down, something to anchor you to reality. 

A lead weight. A dead albatross.

I have nothing to teach, I have nothing to sell, the Zen master says.  

Aspire to nothing, a voice in my head tells me. Get back to meditation. Get rid of all the stuff.

 

But I’m a selfish and vain person; everything I do is calculated to make you think more of me.

Don’t think more of me.

Divide

If I’m lucky, I’ll drag three or four hours of sleep out of the night. 

Then wake around 2 or 3 and try to get back to that place.

“You know, it’s like, something good happened once. 

And I keep doing the same things over and over again, because I want to have that good thing happen again.”

Sounds like addiction, I think.  But it isn’t an intentional thought, instead it is a knee-jerk reaction. Thinking longer, it seems more common than addiction.  I think most people feel this way and act on that feeling.  

It probably takes a lot to move outside of yourself and see it for what it is.  

“Are you depressed?”

I don’t answer right away.  I try asking myself the same question inside my head first.  

What the hell is depression?  I sleep from 4 am to 2 pm most days. I let things pile up because, well, what’s the point of staying ahead of the curve?  

Late at night when I can’t sleep, I might walk around.  Down the hall, turn into the empty living room, through the kitchen with all the cracks in the walls, into my office where photo and art stuff takes a backseat to boring Dayjob Hack Writing junk.  Then back into the hall again.

On the floor by my bed is a copy of John Lawrence’s The Cat from Hue – a book that I can’t bring myself to pick up and start again.  

When I was younger I would vehemently deny being a failure in any shape or form.  But whenever I think about reading this book, I just think about what a failure I am, and how while other people are out there telling real stories, important stories, stories with real worth and real value, I am sitting here writing out a lot of nothing.  

Sometimes, in the dark, when I’m laying on my back and gazing up through the black towards the ceiling, I think about just giving in to a kind of mad rebellion.  

I think about tolerances.  

One time I asked my little brother, “so what do you do at your job?”

“I’m an Experimental Aircraft Engine Technician.”  

“Whoa,” I exclaim, almost involuntarily. “That sounds cool as shit.”

“Dude, it’s really not,” he half groans, half explains.  “Basically I just sit in a room and run things until they fall apart.  It’s all about testing tolerances.”

Testing tolerances.  Running things until they fall apart. 

I wonder what kind of tolerances exist in your mind.  I wonder about the point where I could push myself over some figurative divide.  I wonder how one might get there, and what it takes to separate from reality the way a great artist might, or a great philosopher or monk might.  

But I know  I’m not any of those things.  I think you just need something to work towards.  Some sort of thing to strive for in your head.  Though you’re not so much striving as you are pointing to some distant spot on a globe and telling yourself you’re working towards it.  

You might as well tell people you’re going to be president one day, or walk on the moon.  Or just come clean and admit to them that you’re too dull and unoriginal, too cowardly and simple to roll the dice and actually take a leap at Something.  

Or look in the mirror and at least admit it to yourself:  you’re a talentless hack.

I don’t know anything.  

Everything seems fluid sometimes.  

It seems like nothing is quite capable of being held fast.  Everything slips through your fingers and mind. 

If you close your eyes long enough, it all goes away.  

I need to take a shower.  Wash my hair.  Long now, and causing me to sweat as the temperature climbs.  

I think of shaving it all off again, of being bald and ugly and simple and avoiding vanity.  

I think of keeping it long. Stop trying to change things.

I think of vanity.  And people who cling unnecessarily to a previous time and the person they might have been then.

I think about who I was at twenty two or twenty three years old.  

Why those particular ages, I don’t know.  

Points somewhere far behind and over the horizon.  Maybe the background in some faded photograph.  

Now everything is upgraded.  The backgrounds are sharp and clear.  There’s less magic when you stop using crap cameras.  More definition means less guesswork, but less imagination too.  

Sometimes I look for side work. 

“Tell me what kind of camera you use.”

Can’t get away fast enough.  Those are the only people who want to work with you.  

But every camera has a soul.  Some souls are paper thin or transparent.  You can’t even tell they are there.  Some are clean and clinical, almost sterile.  

Others are stained with light leaks or haze or fungus.  Dust and debris from years of adventures.  Some can’t see color straight and still others have a natural knack for contrast and sharpness.  

Granted some of those things have more to do with a lens than a camera body, but it all feels like one machine when you’re holding it in your hand, when you bring it up to your face, when you look into it and through it and become it.  

It’s like trying to separate your own soul from your mind.

Or inspiration from the crystallized result.

I can feel myself chipping away.  It feels like disintegration.  The things that make you up, becoming disattached and foreign, no longer of consequence and no longer holding weight, and flying away on the wind.  

Sometimes I feel this happening with photography. Between one good picture and the next is a feeling of disintegration, like nothing is held together anymore, like what it is inside of you is ebbing away.

Sometimes you wonder what you’re doing, where you’re headed, what you’ve become.  

Sometimes, under your skin, you can feel your blood boiling, and your organs shouting.  You can feel your extremities and veins itching and you see without looking.  And there in front of you everything lines up like a sudden jolt, a kind of clairvoyance where a sliver of the future is laid out for you to stab at.  

Then I know.  

Then I think about a kind of mad rebellion.  

And I wonder where the divide is.  And how one might get there.

Last Little Piece

Write check.
Shower.
Go to post office.
Eat something.

Sometimes I just wrap words around my fingertips to make sense of things.  To reorient myself into some new, less confused state.  

But always a little confused about the way a spool seems to unwind.  The way things seem to go away.  And sometimes I think the only sensible thing to do is go crazy and just stop trying to re-order the chaos, and give into it.

If you can’t make sense of it, maybe you can at least feel it out.

There’s always something slithering around in my mind, and I’ve always got a tenuous hold on it.  Gripping it by the tail as it tries to squirm free. 

Every little thing is something when I go out into the night.  Soft shadows looming large and melting away, a nagging tightness in my chest, and my hungry lungs gobbling down the night air.  

“It’s not gonna be that bad – at least, that’s my honest prediction,” Tom tells me, as I cook a steak and pour a glass of seltzer.  

Still, I wonder how much I would need to drive around aimlessly for a year.  Camera, food, a few changes of clothes. And money, more money.  And then even more money.  Maybe not even drive.  Trains and buses exist.  You could physically walk across the country, right?  

I don’t know which is worse, being cowardly or being poor. 

I try to reason it all out in my head before sleep comes clawing its way in.  Never there when you want it.  Always around when there are more important things on the brain.  

I wake up worrying about my father, but he died eight years ago.  In a dream, I’m hunting for him in a city filled with sick people.  I’ve got to find him before it’s too late.

But the sound of an alarm brings me back up to wakefulness, and for a minute, a kind of confused panic lingers in my brain.

For some reason there’s an alarm on my phone that wakes me up every Saturday at eight or nine o’clock.  But I always turn it off and go back to sleep, until about noon.  

I could just delete the alarm. 

Or wake up and actually be more productive on my Saturdays. 


Laundry is piling up at the foot of my bed, beside the mirror I never really look into, and next to the boxes that used to hold various pieces of camera equipment. 

I go into the kitchen and wash some dishes; fry eggs and bacon; make a cup of tea.  

I look for some news to read, but decide it’s not worth it.  

Some people I work with get furloughed. But they decide to keep employing me.  A bunch of work from a former employee winds up on me.  

Higher-ups deliver motivational speeches.  

But everything seems a little easier, too.  Easier to not care, easier to make excuses.  Easier to avoid taking the supplement that alleviates my social anxiety.  

Once in a while I pull aside the blackout shades in my home office and look out on quiet Brooklyn backyards.  

In my dream it’s nighttime, rain on cobbled streets, like in Berlin, at Checkpoint Charlie, with empty streets.  I’m walking down the street with my father, telling him about the subway in Berlin, the streets, the graffitti, the sound and the feeling of it, its pulse…things that I would never bother trying to explain to anyone else.

Then I go on ahead maybe two or three blocks until I come to a large commotion, and find myself in the middle of a crowd.  And everyone is sick, coughing on one another.  

I walk back up the street, back in the direction I came in.

Two, three blocks.  Now four and five.  The sixth block is empty.  Did I pass my father and not see him?  

Did he run into that crowd?  

I look for my phone but it’s dead.  No, not dead, I just need to take the SIM card out and put it in a smartphone.  Why did I ever get rid of the smartphone?  I don’t have the tools to take my phone apart, but then I do.  

I must be dreaming, I think to myself.  I have these moments in my dreams, every so often, when I can actually comprehend this.

Then I’m down by a river or a canal, looking down at the water, where the moon stripes the water.  And the sound, the sound of water at night, soft, languid, deep and intoxicating. 

How long I sit there, I don’t know.  But I have to find my father.  

I look down at my phone.  I’ve taken the back off but I’ve lost my SIM card.  It’s useless now.  

I look over the canal, at railings and apartment balconies, and people there…the outlines of people, people in abstract, people boiled down to their most basic shapes, chipped and gnawed away by the night.  Stick figure people and misshapen clay figure people and beautiful blown glass hourglass people.  People of every shape and angle, cutting up or cascading down against the yellow lights of their homes.  

Homes as varied as they are.  A million little tiny worlds, that might speak volumes about a person.  

And then my phone rings.  

And I wake up.  

I listen to music and think about things.  Smoking cigarettes and my fire escape that needs cleaning off, and the bare living room that needs a couch, and getting fit or just giving up.  

And I think of new places I haven’t been to yet, people I haven’t met.  The soft touch of summer and the old, familiar embrace of late, late nights.  A kind of feeling I’ve loved since I was a kid, and staying up late all alone.

The feeling of watching something swallowed up, almost whole, lapped by the water, the sound of the  water at night, and that tiny bit of land that is you.  

That last little piece.  

All that’s left.

Someday Someone

I miss the sound of crickets.  And the breeze coming through the window late at night.  And going outside and smoking a cigarette and looking up at the stars.  

Now I can’t do the math.  Can’t make sense of numbers.  I’m the person who tries to please everyone, or I was that way once.  Now I ignore everything I can. I keep trimming away at everything around me, hoping one day there won’t be anything left.  

It’s a very gradual process.  

“You know you can just turn off your cell phone?” someone tells me.

But I like it better my way, always have.  It always has that dash of Carrollness about it.  A little bit extreme, a little bit crazy. A little idealistic, a little naive.  

That’s probably what people think, anyway.  

I have a dream about Katelyn, who I probably haven’t spoken to in a decade.  She got married a long time ago, and was living in St. Paul.

The last I heard, anyway.

I remember something she said to me once, about me being unrealistic.  About how no one else would go along with it. About how impractical I was, about photography and the projects I wanted to do, the people I was willing to photograph, maybe a lack of orthodoxy or my reluctance to go about things the way they probably should have been done.  

It seems strange to me to try and curtail what you really are, deep down.  The gut instinct or impetus to go out and do something, raw and uncut, that pure genesis.  I know we’re all getting older and trying to be better, but that doesn’t mean some things about us weren’t right from the start.  I guess the hard part is figuring out what to keep alive and what to let die.  

Outside in the street, I wear an N95 mask and a tee shirt and jeans.  Late at night, I love the feeling of the cool just-before-summer air on my skin, my long wet hair growing longer, and the sound of Brooklyn winding up, winding up for a change of season. 

I think about empty subway cars, and empty streets, and empty shelves in busy grocery stores and the news always the same, same, same.  One could think the world was coming to an end, the way people seem to be collectively losing their minds.

And I think of things I can do to stay busy, until late at night when I open a window and listen to the sound of crickets, playing on repeat.  

A box fan set up in my living room to chip away at that heat.  A cocktail sweating on the butcher’s block while I cook dinner, alone in a lonely apartment.  And I could swap out this chunk of time for so many others in my life, I realize, almost sadly, or sweetly.  Years of living as a bachelor, years in Philadelphia while I was in school, and the times I lived with women, a parade of girlfriends who didn’t get me or maybe got me too well.

Maybe it’s who you are, the kind of person that keeps coming back to loney apartments.  Walls bare from all the art you never hang there, but print out and send to other people.  Furniture you never buy because there’s always a better use for your money – a friend who might need help or more photography equipment.  

 A mobius strip is a one-sided non-orientable surface.  “One-sided non-orientable surface.” It has a kind of poetic beauty and horror to it.  Something you can never make sense of, from now until forever, just going around and around and never going anywhere, never knowing anything, never able to get anyplace else.  Something blank and immutable, as wide as the universe. 

Nine days.  Nine days of whatever.  Nine days of sunshine through the blinds.  Nine days of mindless errands and chores. Nine days of check-in phone calls.  Nine days of thinking, of mulling things over in my head.  

It looks like a circle, broken, and re-joined.  But something is off, something is wrong. You’ll come back to the point you started from before you’ll be free from it.  

No matter how old you get.  No matter how much better you feel, or how highly you think of yourself.  You are where you are, chasing your tail until the breakdown.  

I stumble upon a Reliant K album from 2016 and listen to it, and think about how things continue long after you leave them behind.  When I was 15 or 16, I would hang out with some Christian kids who turned me onto that band and some scripture.  

I find a particular bible on a bookshelf in my mother’s house and take it back to New York with me.  “Did you want any other translations?” my mother asks.  

Just this one, I tell her.  There’s an inscription inside from the friend who gave it to me.  

CP,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1

What impact words have made on man.  Love, your friend.

(I pray God will reveal his Word.)

I think that’s a beautiful gift.  Whether you believe or not, a gift of philosophy seems a very wholesome and pure thing.  Those Christian kids all got older and probably found smarter ways to ease the pain, or explain it all away.  Maybe they didn’t need those particular words anymore. And I can’t fault them for any of that. Everyone gets older, and starts to feel wiser, and maybe they’re still at it.  Maybe there’s no real weight to any of those words. But I still find comfort there sometimes.  

Some years ago I tried to reach out to Josh, but I guess he didn’t want to talk. 

I feel like that a lot, too, these days.  

Having slept away another day, I wake up at 5 and make dinner.  Then I have a handful of drinks and edit some photos.  

Later, I remove the neck strap from my 6D and replace it with the hand strap from my old Nikon.  And I hold it up and feel the weight, the leather strap pulling at the back of my hand, feeling tight, feeling solid, and a warmth spreads from my wrist to my forearm and up into my chest.  

“How would that even work?” Katelyn asks over the phone.  Many years ago, I was laying in the grass in the backyard of my childhood home, looking up at stars.  Maybe I was trying to convince her to let me photograph her, trying to show her what I could see ahead.

I had theories.  Now I have guesses.  Life has tempered some of my confidence away.  

But there’s an unshakeable core that seems to stick around, infecting my thoughts still.  

Pretty sure I can make it happen.  Pretty sure if I find a way, the rest will just fall into place.  

And if no one else sees it that way now, someday someone will.  

 

it was always summer

It was always summer.  

That’s the first thing I remember, every time it comes back inside my head.  The heat and the sun, the green grass, mountains and lakes. An infinite, crushing, maddening sense of directionlessness.  

There are two M83 albums I listened to that summer.  The 2003 album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, and Before The Dawn Heals Us, released in 2005.  Every time I hear certain tracks from these albums, I go back to certain places:  lakes, and creek beds, or fields or mountaintops. 

Late nights driving around, doing nothing.  Always with a camera. Straining to create something.

My parents angry, slipping in every barb and jab.

Me ignoring them.

Making up excuses to see Sarah, always waiting for her to give me some sign, some little clue.  

Driving up to Firetower Road one night with Kit and Hamel and setting some dead wood ablaze.  And sitting there shooting the shit while it burned away.  

Or sharing a joint in a dried up creek bed one afternoon, after having gone swimming, and the sun warming us up and drying away the cold water, and feeling drunk in the sunlight, and letting the marijuana climb inside our heads, until we couldn’t speak without laughing.  

The memory of time not progressing, but standing still for a season, and nothing amounting to very much, and the desire, the ache, the derangement to be somewhere else, to get free. 

To at last get free.

And it was always summer.

That’s the first thing I remember, every time it comes back inside my head.

Black Hole Machine

I can remember the exact moment it happened, and how it felt in that moment. I was walking up a crowded stairwell at some lecture hall, jammed up against all my fellow students, camera over one shoulder and a book in my left hand.  Up, up, up, maybe two or three floors to my next class. And something started welling up inside me, from deep inside my stomach, a weight or a pain that rose up into my chest and began clawing at my throat.  

My head grew warm.  First my temples, then my forehead.  Suddenly my brain was on fire. My feet were tired.  My chest ached. I could feel something pressing down on me, something flat and cold and lifeless.

I tried to shake it off.  I went to class anyway. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I stood up and walked out.  My instructor, who was nice, left the classroom after me and asked me to come back, asked me if something wasn’t wrong. 

I turned back, maybe ten or twelve feet from her, and just looked at her.  I wanted to speak, I wanted to say something, I wanted to put it into words so I could understand it myself.  But I couldn’t think of any words that could describe what was wrong.  

Years later it came to me that I felt like I was being swallowed up by a black hole at the end of a conveyor belt.  That there was some great, terrible machine inside that black hole. Every idiot and asshole I was in school with couldn’t wait to go headlong into that black hole.  

I kept thinking, me too. But something happened.  

I didn’t want to be a product.  Something processed and molded and shaped.  And all to conform to the world on the other side of that black hole machine.  Not better or smarter, not wiser or more complete. Just a brainwashed dolt, indebted and weak and dependent.

For me, it happened there, in college.  I guess different people probably find it in different places, and they probably never see it head-on, but askance.  Glimpsed out of the corner of their eye. And I imagine some people are able to write it off, and they get swallowed up and destroyed by it.  And they never know.  

But there have to be others, too, who see it on the drive home from work, or feel it lurking in the corner of a bedroom at 3 am.  Who encounter it on a date in their thirties, or who catch sight of it young and never explain it away.

I still can’t explain to people how I feel about the machine.  I can’t articulate it, and I don’t think many people can really recognize that kind of insanity or revulsion that comes over me when I think about it.

But it also occurs to me that I’ve never passed through a fire.

And that makes me wonder if everything I say isn’t just bullshit.  

And then I read what I’ve written and wonder if everything a person says isn’t bullshit,
regardless of what a person has or hasn’t been through.
That you can’t listen to anyone at all.

So I stay up late, not sleeping, but thinking about what it would be like to die.  And I think about Camus’ Stranger, and how he thought it didn’t matter if you died today or in twenty years because you were still going to die someday.  

And I think about how it might happen, if it might happen gradually over a period of days or if I might blink out of existence when my heart or brain suddenly stops.  But then I think of it happening somewhere far away, in a place I can’t yet even conceive of.  

I think about getting inked.  And I think about breaking all contact with friends.  But I’m nearly there, anyway. I already talk to practically no one.  

Just family, and my roommate.  

Salma calls me when I’m cooking dinner and talks and talks.  

I finish the jerk seasoning and soak three pork chops in it, letting the molasses and rum wash over and work its way into the meat.  I wash dishes to the sound of Chet Baker and Salma running on. Reasons to stay quarantined and this country sucks and she can’t wait to leave.

Everyone eventually goes away.  It isn’t a tragedy. If you want something, or a taste of something, fucking take it or don’t.  

I’ll call you and we’ll do a photo session, she tells me.  Such a treat. Why waste another minute? Save money, buy photo gear.  Save money, buy computer parts. Save money, buy airfare. Save money, fund projects that matter.  

But I still pretend to care, and I tell her I can’t receive texts.  She suggests calling me when Corona ends. I tell her that’s a great idea.  Then I save her number in my contacts list. Why? So I can avoid her calls better in the future?  

It’s funny that the more bitter you become, the more intact your pride seems.

I am sick of it.  I don’t want to talk and hang out and drink. I don’t want to bullshit and catch up on something better left behind me.  

I don’t want to be stuck in the same shit, year after year, until I die.  Stuck in a compromised, dull existence filled with shallow entertainment and soullessness and hyped news and advertisements and boring jobs and being surrounded by people, always people, who aren’t going out of their skulls, who seem resigned to it all, like it ain’t so bad, like it’s not sucking every drop of sanity out of your head and leaving you starving and lonely and crazy, like it’s not gnawing away at your heart and mind. 

Like we aren’t all thirsting for a better kind of life.  Or just a better kind of living.

I can feel it now, every day, the overwhelming sensation that all of this is bullshit, that none of it means anything, that you might as well just do whatever the fuck you want, whether it’s ignoring people or calling them up like you’re some sort of pal or building churches and hospitals for people who have nothing.  

But when I look at my own life, I feel like I’ve wasted so much of it doing nothing of consequence, and nothing of much purpose, at least to any greater good.  

I get paid to make corporations more money.  I retain a weak hold on my sanity by taking photos of the things that I photograph.  If I go out with people, it feels like walking along a shore. We have running conversations, and the pieces I remember are broken shells.  

But if I disappeared tomorrow, there would be no deficit.  And that makes me wonder if I really exist.  

I think I’ll go away for a while and get lost and forgotten.  

I think it will do me some good.  

I think I may be able to find some reason to live, some way to make the world a better place, to put in some work and do my share, and come out a better person on the other side.  

Revelations at 11:13 PM

The world seems to be losing its mind.  

Around 11 pm, I go out and buy some junk food.  Tearing myself away from my father’s old slides is Hell.  

Outside, it’s empty and quiet.  I put earphones in to drown out nothing.  Walk to the end of the block and think about how I want to smoke.  

I won’t buy a facemask.  

Even if I get it, I’ll just stay inside until I recover or die from it.  Seems like the best course of action. I tell my little brother as much, but I don’t tell my older brother or my mother.  They don’t need to know how I feel about all this.  

However slim the possibility, once you think about it, you begin to move a lot faster, and with greater purpose.  

My problem is that I’ve always been a romantic, I’m always daydreaming about dying some tragic death.  

But that probably won’t happen.  In the meantime, it’s spurred me on to complete this next project, even while reconsidering some things related to my photography.  And now I’ve come to wonder at why I talk to certain people, or spend time doing things I don’t really want to do…taking photographs I don’t necessarily want to take, because I long ago lost a sense of direction that only now seems to be on the verge of re-materializing.  

“Some really crazy shit happened to me one year,” Steph confides. “Three of my best friends died in really fucked up ways, each within a few months of one another.”  

I haven’t seen him since, but I’m sure he’s still doing his thing.  

Sometimes you’re human and you behave in a way calculated to hurt people around you because you’re hurt, and you want someone else to feel it too.  But despite that, you still love the person.

“So I decided to start living life on my own terms and going after what I want – you know, what I need.”  He takes a drag on a cigarette outside the Cock and Bull. In my memory, it’s raining.

It’s important to be honest with yourself.  Sometimes I want to resent the people who ask me to photograph some events or things for them.  

It’s a little insulting.  

I wonder how I should take it?  Most of the time I feel like I’m just a passenger.  I’m not the one driving, I’m just enjoying the crazy ride.  So I go along with shit I don’t really care for. And I wind up somewhere strange and new, shaking my head.  But I can never account for anything I’ve done, and most people can’t relate to that.  

Most people have plans.  

Important Plans that have required much thought, and a lot of money, and years shaved off that unknown block of time.  It’s shrinking and melting away every day, every hour, every minute.  

That thought sends a chill down my spine.  How much longer do I have left? The cost of everything suddenly seems too high.  A job, a relationship, obligations. These things are gnawing away at what little time might be left.  And none of it is worth what it gives you.  

Except maybe the relationship thing.  That can be good.  

In my bookcase is a photo album with prints of an ex girlfriend.  Sometimes I wonder if I might finish it some day, if we might get back together and I could resume taking photographs where I left off.  But I have a better chance of getting sick and dying at 31. Besides, I heard she’s getting married soon, and we stopped talking some time ago.  

But that’s not a bad thing.  I told her when we split up – she deserves someone better than me.  

Scanning some of my father’s slides, I find a photograph of him as a very young man.  Though there’s no date, it must have been before he turned 30. His hair is swept to one side.  A woman has her face pressed up to his and she’s smiling. There’s a nervous, apprehensive look on his face, not one that’s unhappy, but one with a sense of reserve to it, maybe a tinge of fear that the photograph won’t turn out just right.  

He looks just like me.  

Now he’s buried in Virginia.  

There are things I remember that I can’t tell anyone about. If I tell anyone about it, things might fall apart.  Plus, no one wants to hear someone speak ill of family.

I work all day from home, and without the usual flood of office chit-chat and annoying people yacking around my desk, I find myself being more productive.  

All day I think of calling someone when I finish at 6 PM.  But when the time comes, I feel better not making a phone call, and cooking dinner alone, and going to sleep.  I actually do feel better, the same way I feel better when I lift weights or take care of some chore I’ve been putting off for days.  I feel like I’m making progress.  

Every time I pick up that phone, I think:  They could have called, but they didn’t.  What does that say about you?  

And back down the phone goes, and no one ever calls, except family, to tell me they’re worried about something, or if it’s my little brother, to nerd out over computer parts.

But it’s good to be alone, good to go through a period of thirst.  Good to know that things run out and dry up and disappear forever. It’s good to know that time is running out, that things aren’t getting better, that the whole shebang – the whole world or just your conscious perception of it – is slowly going off the rails.  

It makes you want to make progress.  It makes you want to be someone better.  

another kind of life

Just a clot, nothing serious.  

I am already on the train when I get the call.  Jesse tells me vague things. 

It didn’t happen to me.  

The guy next to me talks on his cell phone the entire time.  

Outside the sky changes from pale green to dull gray.  The rain is forever coming down. The train moves slowly from one station to the next.  Each small black sign heralds a new town, then shrinks from view. 

Finally the towns run out.  The train stops, and then begins moving backward, returning to the place it came from.  Inside the hollow and empty train cars, the bare seats are dark and forlorn. 

I stand in the rain and look at a train schedule.  Columns of numbers meaning nothing. The pages of a novel, partially thrust into a jacket pocket, slowly becoming wet.

Eventually a new train comes and takes me the rest of the way.

At the station most of the other passengers seem to evaporate into thin air, or vanish into a handful of cars in the parking lot.  In front of the station, a narrow bench sits beside a locked door. Salt has been dumped on the ground in a haphazard manner.  

The soles of my sneakers dig into the salt and pierce the silence of the empty parking lot.  

In the distance, where the cracked surface of an asphalt sea ends, a few black lines cross overhead.  Beyond them, the remains of a hotel seem to stand defiantly against the onslaught of weeds, neglect, and the slow march of time itself.  

To the left of the parking lot, a line of dead trees halfheartedly obscures a large wooden sign advertising topsoil.  To the right, a highway meets the train tracks, where an occasional car comes to rest only for a moment, the crossing gate providing a slight hiccup in the grand scheme of things.  

And the rain is forever coming down.

I mix rye with Coca Cola and throw in two maraschino cherries.  

When we drive, empty and dead fields zip by the windows, forming an endless brown canvas.  

In places long since put out of mind, I seem to be tracing old steps.  

I don’t see much of anyone this time.  Just my nieces and my little brother, his wife, and my mother.  

Just the same, and all too soon, that out-of-place feeling comes sweeping in.  I panic and wonder how quickly I can escape the feeling of not belonging, sinking back into my familiar under-a-rock routine.  In New York, where a man can be mercifully swallowed up and forgotten, I can slip back into the featureless waves and eddies of lost souls and soulless people.  

I read incessantly and sneak some M&Ms to my oldest niece who laughs when I whistle.  

“I am very glad you’re here,” she says in almost a whisper.  

In the morning I pour milk into sippy cups for her and her sister.  Then we go into the playroom and color.  

“I’ve noticed you haven’t been smoking,” my sister-in-law says.  

Hearing those words, I immediately want to feel my lungs tighten beneath tobacco smoke.  

“To be fair, man, it’s not like you even smoke a lot…you know, one after another…” Tom reassures me.  

But to me it’s a familiar weight.  Something I miss bearing down on me.  Something I long to have eating away at me.   

I get hugs and kisses from my nieces, and pound my little brother on the back.

The last glow of sunlight is disappearing into low, dark curves of horizon.  Soon a train will come and take me back to another kind of place, another kind of life.  

Finishing a short story by Haruki Murakami, I sink back into my seat, to mull things over and collect my thoughts.  

In the window, the reflection of someone old and tired, someone pulled this way and that. Stretched too thin.  And the feeling that there’s always some part of you, torn away and left behind. And that it will always be that way, until there’s nothing left to feel the loss.

a sharper picture

There are things I like, and things I can’t get enough of.  And there are things I love, too.  

There are things I don’t like, and things I hate.  There are things I abhor with every fiber of my being.  

And then there’s being factually incorrect about something.  And that burrows under my skin and drives me insane.

I don’t like to admit it.  I like it less when I’m hanging out with someone and they challenge me and I find out later that I was right.  

I always find out later.  I always let it go in the moment.  

 

I run into Clive one night outside of the New Yorker.  A big smile. A strong handshake. Speaking in Patois. 

Vicky and CJ gone away, to ——.  

“Of all da places, mahn,” Clive drawls in his deep, subterranean voice.  

He tells me he’s heading to work.  I tell him I’m heading home. We smile and part ways.  I tell myself I need to call Vicky, but I keep putting it off.  

I need to call a lot of people.  

I keep putting things off.  

On my work table, on top of my film scanner, there’s a lego set and two stuffed animals for my nieces.  I look at them throughout the week and smile to myself.  

Sometimes I get lost thinking about my own childhood.  And the things you remember.

On Saturday afternoon I get a tooth pulled, though it’s not so much a tooth as the broken remains of a tooth. 

“Well, it’s out.” Doctor Singh tells me.  “Thank God,” I say, almost reflexively, unthinkingly.  

Doctor Singh chuckles.  On the tray beside the chair, there’s a tooth covered almost entirely in blood.  Next to the cold steel tools, it’s almost beautiful. I lament not having a camera.  I almost think to ask him, to plead with him, or bribe him…if he could only take a photo and email it to me.  

Why didn’t I bring my camera?  In my pocket is my flip phone. In another pocket a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.  I look at the tooth and think it’s beautiful. After a while he comes back and hands me painkillers and antibiotics, then I pay and leave.  

When I was younger I had everything figured out.  

I don’t think it was ever a bad plan, really.  I just think I lost focus as I got older, and stopped sticking to my guns.  I started listening to other people, and thinking maybe they were onto something.  

But now I feel like even if they are, or were, it’s not for me.  A really simple, basic, elementary goal. A really personal kind of code.  A very idealistic and maybe unrealistic outlook. But if the shoe fits.  

Late at night, I lay on my back, and twist my head into my pillow and look out the window behind my bed.  And I think, I could just pay someone to be the kind of person I want to meet, and tell myself it’s the real thing.  

I keep telling people I’m going to call them back.  

I’m not.  

I keep telling people I haven’t met the right girl yet.  

And that I quit smoking and drinking.  

I tell myself I’m getting better every day.  But that’s bullshit. I’m just hurting myself less.  That’s not really making me better.  

When I find out I’m wrong about something, I pull my head down my collar and into my chest.  

When I find out I’m mistaken about something, I might spend five minutes or an hour berating myself in my head.  It’s important to really rake yourself over the coals here. You have to do it so that it almost actually hurts.  

When you’re feeling worthless in your ignorance, you know you’ve done a good job.  Then you tell yourself that this will never happen again. And you say it over and over.  And you dig down deep and pull that horrible, black, hopeless feeling back out of your soul and hold it in front of your eyes.  

“No one’s perfect,” someone tells me.  

“Yeah, not with that attitude,” I shoot back.  

The key is to be the pain you don’t want.  Because it takes strength to make you smarter.  

I keep thinking about addiction.  The way Natasha Filipovna rejected the Prince for fear of ruining him.

And every time I hear that Alkaline Trio song, I just want to smoke a whole pack of unfiltered Camels.  Leaning against a brick wall in Manhattan, and watching the lights of cars and buildings blurring away.  

People always turn to alcohol or heavier drugs.  They get really fuzzy so they can lose focus and forget some pain.  

I want a sharper picture.  I want to feel every little bit of sorrow and despair.  I want to go over it like it’s a topographical map. Every little line and detail.  I want to burn it into my brain.  

I want to know why and how it is that I’m so fucked up from other peoples’ perspective.

Sometimes I think the only way to make myself whole is to carve out a little more.

It’s the thought that there’s an unknowable timer on all of this, on every person you meet or face you see, in a glance on a packed train or crowded street.  And kids grow up into people and raise their own little people in turn. And no one is doing shit. No one is doing anything.  And you smile and laugh and you feel like you could give away everything and go live in a cave, for what it’s all worth.  For what it all means. 

And why am I singled out?  Why am I set apart, left out, on the other side of a divide?  Time is running out and I can’t fix what I am. 

Sometimes I can feel it clawing at my heart.  And I grow panicked and want to yell, I want to grab people by the shoulders and shake them awake.  

But they are awake.  I’m just crazy.  

And there are people I ought to call back, but probably won’t.  

There’s shit I should admit to, and be truthful about.

Strings left loose, promises unkept, and confessions silently sealed away. 

 But like most of the things I’ve probably felt at one point or another in life, it was all probably one-sided, and there’s no use in telling anyone anything.  

new morality

I end up leaving the apartment at eight-oh-six, even though I woke up earlier than usual.

I walk blearily down the street, hang a right on Nostrand, and walk down to the A. I can’t really think. It’s a struggle to untangle my headphones and avoid the trash on the sidewalk, spilling out into the street. A mild 23 degrees but I barely feel it.

Ahead of me, a mother and father walk with their children, four abreast.

I dart past, but still arrive at a packed train station. The word DELAY flashes overhead, and I lose myself in music and a book.

I jump on the nearly empty car, forgetting to think, it would seem.  The reek of piss hits my nose. At one end of the car a man is curled up in a fetal position, bare feet rubbing against one another.  Further down the car, at the other end, a man and woman huddled beneath hooded coats appear to be sleeping.  

So I stand in the middle of the subway car and try to read and not breath through my nose.  

And after a few pages, the idea appears:  to slip $10 or $20 into the man’s pocket. It just appears.  Small. Like a drop of water. Something condensing in my brain.  Give that person some small amount of money. But I try to lose myself in my book.

I glance down when the train reaches high street.  He might be crazy. Who wouldn’t be? I’m not normal and I’m not even homeless.  Yet.  

One night drinking with Garrett.  “I think I gave that guy money because I feel like one day it’s going to be me,” he confides.  At that point where the drink starts to lap at a precipice of honesty jutting out into deep water.  

But I keep trying to lose myself in my book.  

He might be crazy.  What if he makes a scene.  What if you come off looking stupid, and everyone’s staring at you, the idiot who tried to give a crazy person money on the A Train when it was reeking of piss?

My brain has a million reasons not to go over there, not to squeeze among the other people, the man standing with his back to the homeless man.  

Later on, when I’m at work drinking some tea and trying to make sense of my computer screen, I think about buying a bouquet of flowers and sending them to someone.  

“Did you take the employee survey?” She asks.  Not making conversation, just doing her job, I know.  

And since the first day we met, I felt like there was this thing, awkward and tense between us, but something that could be something else.  And I have that kind of gut instinct sometimes, and it’s usually correct.  

I tell her I’m going to take the survey.  I resolve not to. But a day later, harangued by emails from HR, the department head, and other company drones, I make a half-hearted attempt to care enough to form an opinion about where I work.  

“It’s a job.  It pays the bills.”  I write in the first box.  Then I erase it and leave it blank.  

I think about buying a bouquet of flowers.  Purple roses. White roses? Red? No, purple, I think.  It’s gotta be purple.  

Every time I see you,

I forget everything

For a moment.

I see her so infrequently.  I might go a month or two without seeing her at all.  And then when we speak again, casually, like I’m asking about the weather, how did you like the flowers?

But a person can tell himself all kinds of lies.  And I know that.  

And sitting there, trying to get my brain to work, thinking about bouquets and surveys and homeless people, it comes, like waves.  And the tide pulls me out and into soft sand sliding away beneath me.

I’ve been a coward.  In everything I’ve ever done.  And everything done cowardly, done cheaply and badly.  Once real, once feeling and genuine, stepping out with every crazy idea, and never giving a damn. Giving away things of no consequence others held dear and coveted, living in wealth or poverty depending upon the week.  Loving when possible, not above hate, but never indifferent. 

And here you are, telling yourself you’re some kind of person.  

But you’re just a shade or a ghost, something flitting from place to place, without any shred of substance.  A fake person. An impostor.  

And you go around making other people think you’re something.  And if they can see right through your bullshit, you must look like a fool.  And if they don’t and believe you out of kindness, you’re a liar.  

My heart has been hurting lately.  Not my heart, my chest.  

A tinge of pain, at times just a dull ache, and then again a sharper, stabbing shard of white hot fire.  

I make a fist and hit myself in the chest a few times.

I smile, because I’ve been smiling a lot more lately.

I miss a cigarette, but I’ve been free from that for almost two months now.  Gotta keep going. Get better.  

You’re still a terrible excuse for a human being, but everyone likes you a lot better when you’re not smelling of cigarettes.  

Or piss.  

Or a million other things that could be unpleasant or pitiful about a person.

But I feel like it’s all the same thing.  

All sinners.  Taking trains and cabs or driving or walking.  Holding our nose up like we’re better than someone else.  And maybe we’re all trying to get our brains to work, and thinking we should make some change, but still trapped inside our heads about how to best go about it.  So we find our distractions. We go about our jobs and we try to make stands against proxy injustices. Invent romances that don’t exist, wear ourselves out running around and doing mental gymnastics, and we go home satisfied.  

But nothing’s changed, and we wake up again and do it all over.  

I make a fist and hit myself in the chest a few times.  

I listen to music and try to get lost in my book.  

“I feel like one day it’s going to be me.”

I can feel it in my brain, the pressure building up, the weight like a block of lead, bearing down on my thoughts.  And my fingers itch and my right leg bobs up and down in fits of energy. Irritability creeps into my thoughts and my speech.  I’m talking out loud to myself, criticizing myself out loud for past mistakes.  

I can feel it in my brain, getting ready to snap. 

Something long held, something wrong and rotten.

Some diseased idea that I might be anyone or anything.

 

And I smile to myself.  

but few words

I want to tell you, now.  

To make up for never telling you then.  

The way I repent now.  

For the kind of person I used to be.  

And go through days looking for a way to make my spirit whole.  But I’m coming around to the idea that there’s no one waiting at the gate.  It’s just me again.  

And I keep trying to chip away at the most substantial things.  I think of ways to get rid of things, and friends.  

The only reason I don’t sever ties with my family, because I’m weak or I love them.  

Everyone else seems to boil away into vapor.  

It’s funny what you can accomplish without trying, or caring.

But who am I anyway?  I can feel it in my hand sometimes, the muscles going slack, like just before darkness and sleep.  

I could probably lose my cell phone.  Get a simple phone plan that only accepts calls.  Live on rice and water. Fast four days out of the week.  Read more books.  

Try to think in verse.  

I could probably lose the people I talk to, who talk back out of convenience, but don’t really care.  

Hell, I don’t really care either.  

It just feels like something is being let go.   

I think about how I don’t talk to anyone at work, besides my manager, and maybe one or two other people that require talking to.  

The Dao says “To use but few words is natural.”  

After food, water, clothing, and shelter, what do you need?  A bit of conversation? Some basic distractions, meaningless banter?  

It seems like the harder a conversation is to come by, the more precious it is held.  

Over years, and growing more golden with age, becoming a cherished thing you only once knew.  

Wherever they go, wherever they’ve been, and whatever might have come to pass, I wish them the very best.

Under your skin there’s an animal that wants out.  Something basic and mean. But something pure and honest, too.  Held in check by shreds of morality and scraps of ethics. All the shit they put in your head to program you. 

Split me right down the middle, divide me up into the good and the bad.  

Feel like you’re drowning in the everyday barrage, the sharp buzzing distraction of emails, text messages, chit chat, and bitter memories.  Try to block it out with music and art and hear or see nothing. But people still prying their way back through the shutters.  

“People were doing it for ages before cell phones,” someone says.  “If you get lost, you’ll probably figure it out.”  

Makes you wonder how much you could get rid of.  

Late at night, eyes closed and waiting for sleep to come creeping in, I think of living alone in the wilderness.  Far from any town.

A gun to hunt.  

Pen and paper to write.  

Not much else.  

A bank account to see me dead.  Whatever comes after, let someone else bear witness.

on outtakes

Hard drive woes force me to stumble upon a forgotten photo, a picture taken maybe eight years ago.  

A car parked by the side of the road at night.  A street lamp supernova, a midnight sunburst. In the muddy fields of north central Pennsylvania, another chain link fence and facade looks like Angkor Wat.   

Just another photograph, something instinctual, something bestial and thoughtless.  And soon discarded, in favor of other photos that night and in the days after – ones more immediately gratifying.  Ones looking better, more aesthetically pleasing.

A lot of people aspire to take a pretty picture.

But some lives are like one outtake after another, a tapestry played out on a screen inside your head, like a silent movie, and you keep going ‘round and ‘round, and getting no younger.  

Sometimes I ask myself:  what is it I really want to tell people?  

But the truth is, I spend most days in silence, and I don’t even mind that.  The truth is, I kind of enjoy having nothing to say. To quote the Dao, “To use but few words is natural.”

And if that’s who I am, nothing to say, nothing to voice, then what kind of message could I possibly have?  

I don’t want it spelled out anymore.  I don’t want the dichotomy, the binary, of  black and white. I like my shades of gray. And the feeling that everything is the way it is, and I’ve always been as much a part of the problem as I will ever be part of a solution.  

A message.  I hate it when people ask for that.  When they want me to refer to myself as something important, so I can have a message.  There ain’t no message, just pain, and words I’m trying to get out, to exorcise that pain.  The rest is meaningless, because there is no meaning. I’m crazy and the people who read or listen along are probably crazy, too.  

When I was younger I thought I felt distant from people due to some special quality. 

A part of me still wanted to be close to others, but I couldn’t figure out how to bridge that gap.

Now that I’m older, I think that it’s the feeling of being distant that makes a person special. Your inability to fit in nurtures a different outlook and provides you with a different constitution. Your path is different, which means you see things differently and have different ideas about certain things.

Now a part of me still wishes I could connect with everyone around me, to share whatever I have to offer the world, but I don’t know if it’s possible anymore.

 

I watch Sami walk into view almost by mistake.  And she doesn’t see me. I barely realize it’s her before she’s gone.  

For a split second, I think about calling out and greeting her.  And even then, it’s less of a thought and more of a reflex, welling up from my chest.  

But I close my mouth, and watch in silence as she walks in front of me, and disappears into a parking lot. 

And I go to a deli and grab coffee so I can wake up and stop being stupid.  

And on the way to work, I think about sending her flowers and writing her poetry.  

And then I resolve to double down and continue to fast, continue to trim away, continue to find every excuse not to talk, and not to return phone calls, and not remember to keep in touch, and drift away from everyone I can. 

Fold away into thin air.  

Probably forgotten now, anyway – about loving and poetry. I don’t know anything about those things anymore. All that’s left is silence.

Just one Outtake Thought after another, footpaths leading nowhere, and one potential future after another, rejected in favor of that old, familiar, inescapable road.  

It’s a certain kind of crazy that sees you happier with losing more and keeping less.  

And it’s a certain kind of photograph that stands the test of time, shorn of its surroundings, and standing alone, and still meaning something unspoken and unspeakable.  

Can you feel it?

SCENE PLAYING OUT

It’s just a scene playing out.  

Over and over again.  

You can feel your brain coming out of your skull.  You can feel your jokes landing flat. You can feel the impasse, the general failure to communicate.  

I wish someone had prepared me.  “Prepare to be alone. Prepare to be unable to relate to other people.  Prepare to live in solitude. Prepare to be rare, and different. Prepare to be gifted or retarded – it’s the same thing here.  Prepare to be set apart.”

That’s what it feels like.  A stranger even to people I think I know.  Still too weird to make it work. I’m always lost. 

I hate crowds.  They make my skin crawl.  Lines and busy restaurants.  All the people pushed up against one another.  Or worse, glued to phones.  

Like vegetables.  Like statues, or dolls.  Empty and bereft of life.  

It’s a feeling.  It’s just a scene playing out.   A train sliding by. Too quick to be caught.  Speeding on to the next station.  

It’s a feeling.  Means nothing. Adds up to zero.  Let it go.  

People want to leave their mark.  But that’s not art. The cavity your body leaves in reality is your legacy.  An empty apartment. Faded photos of a person who never comes around. A name you only dust off in remembrance.  

I don’t like it, the lines.  The sewer water they freeze into ice cubes, then serve up with your drink so you can taste it there, too.  

“What are you drinking?”

Seltzer.  

Stupid boring people always want to get fucked up. I find myself there whether I want to or not.  Sometimes it’s good to feel out of it and sober. Maybe it’s a chemical imbalance. Not enough calcium or something.  Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe tonight is the night.

Sometimes I think, maybe I’m not even here.  And I take photos to prove to myself that I exist.  Long after I’ve taken them, they seem to mean something else.  

But the events that pass by still feel like nothing.  Just a scene playing out. Something underpinning your being, Your existence, the thing that assures you:  you are.  

Incurable.

Can’t change it.  Embrace emptiness.  And cultivate it.  

Unbalanced.  Crazy and lonely. Sick, and over time, getting sicker.  Faithless, til finding faith in Nothing. The dim flickering hope that at the end of a road awaits some reward.  

Artful people make Art that looks like Art, to be sold as Art.  Meanwhile artists make real shit.  

If something would be beautiful, crass and cruel folks scuttle by and pluck it up and put it on a high shelf.  

But I want to find the people who look at it and drink it in for a moment, before moving on.  Or who wake in the night, recalling a prior vision. But who left it there, untouched, unplucked, knowing it isn’t something to be owned.

I want to find people who still have souls.  Who still think, and think they can be better, if only practicing a little restraint.  

I want to find the people who know the way, but never call it.

Why do you have a camera? She asks.  

“He always has a camera.” Someone tells her.

I always have a camera, I tell myself.  

The things that make you unique aren’t named.  They’re something asleep in the dark, deep inside your chest.  Or locked away inside your head. Bringing them up, they seem to evaporate into thin air, appearing lost.  But you never had the words to bring them up in the first place.

You’re a dash or an ellipse. Negative space between two black lines.

But it’s the emptiness of a vessel that makes it of use.

2020

For a minute I get lost.  

In the humdrum everyday sluggish flow of time.  Over the course of minutes. Staring into space.  A dusty and sun-bleached “Be Back Soon” sign on the front door of my mind.  

Every once in a while you get this thing under your skin.  A bit of stone or wood. Shrapnel or splinters. And this thing goads you into a rash decision.  

But a decision so steeped in crazy, there’s no room left for regret.  It’s as much a result of pure animalistic instinct as it is the result of pondered and drawn out thought.

If you told me ten months ago what I would be doing today, I’d be skeptical.

Every year it’s the same thing, I just have no clue how I came to where I am.  And then I push that further and further, and think about the last decade, and the two decades before that.  And all together, that’s my life so far.  

But it’s absolutely unhinged and crazy, and it erases any fear I might have, because I know, it’s all going somewhere strange and new.  

I got a feeling, that 2020 is going to be the best year yet.  

New job, more money in the bank, big apartment, new ideas, new photo projects, and getting better every day.  

A lighting kit in my living room.  Photo books and a stack of prints on my work table.  

A smile from a stranger on the sidewalk outside my apartment door.  Growing my hair and beard out.  

Plans to see my family soon, very soon.  

The feeling that some major player, some monumental plot device, or the sudden cut to black lurks right around the corner.  The feeling that I’m drawing something out, something beautiful, something that could one day mean something.  

Keep going back up against it.  

Over and over again, struggling.  

Knowing some people are buried beneath the deluge of years.  

Parts of myself now cordoned off, or placed on a high shelf.  

But the narrative continues.  

Sick as ever, can’t stop.  

Living life like poetry, drinking in images, and bleeding out my sorrows.  

A Window Backwards

It sticks.  

And that’s the main reason I don’t really use it.  Slow and kludgy. Inept. A poor tool.  

I got a quote to repair it once.  

Like a lot of other things, I never followed through with it.  

There’s always something else you’re focused on, than the thing at hand.  The things directly in front of you.  

Always busy looking into them.  Never really understanding them on the surface.  

But if a camera can have a soul, if a machine can feel something, if it can have a temperament or a character, proclivities and justifications.  

I can’t remember when I even bought that camera.  When it came to me. But I don’t remember when I came to other people, either.  Suddenly, things were just a certain way. And feeling like they’d always been as such. 

One winter, I think back in 2010.  Before Kit and I drove to California.  

In ten years, there are other cameras.  Some of them I gave away – the Holga to my little brother, the Leica/Minolta to my older brother.  My father’s Pentax ME Super and Olympus PEN FT still sit on a shelf above my bed.  

Sometimes, I dust them off and take them out for a few frames.  And the tiny moments of past years are building up inside.  

I still prefer 35 mm.  It’s more practical, more plain, more atmospheric.  Even if it isn’t as deep or detailed.  

Sprockets and metal canisters.  And 4×6 prints from Walmart.  

Like digital, but slightly slower.  And with more soul.  

A window backwards, to minutes and slivers of moments rediscovered.

Masculine Spelling

“Does your cousin have any allergies?”  I ask.  

Garrett looks at me for a moment, his eyes digging into my face and mouth, searching for some trace of a punchline.  

“Um, carrots.  And eggplant.” The briefest of pauses.  

“And some nuts.”

 

My face cracks into a huge grin.  “You’re too easy man, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” I tell him.  

“What?  You’re gonna say ‘but not deez nuts’, right?”  His voice drips with a comical irritation. It grows in pitch, sharp and pointed towards me.

 

“I would have told him ’your words, not mine’” Tom tells me, laughing. 

He asks if Garrett is coming to dinner. “I mean, if he is, you want me to clean up around the apartment, bro?”

Maybe…if Olivia comes too…then let’s roll out the red carpet.  

 

But I’d be too ashamed if a woman came by.  Four seats in the entire apartment, the accumulated mismatched ensemble of countless residents, coming and going over the years.  

I keep telling myself that I’ll buy furniture.  But then other things pop up. And those other things seem to deserve more attention and money.  

 

 

Maybe when you die, you realize it.  You realize, “I died”. And everything else after that is just fighting sleep.  Maybe you could spend five years fighting that feeling, the feeling of being right on the edge, and drifting off.  

Other times, the feeling of just too much to do before the lights go out.  

Days of work, and days of errands, duties, obligations.  Days of commitments, engagements, and obsessions.  

Late nights listening to sad songs.  Smoking and drinking in the moonlight.  Alone. All along.  

 

Everyone is the victim in a love story.   

Stay gone.  

Leaves have fallen.  Snow comes now. On the other side, the green tidings of spring and another year.  

 

Conversations of Getting Better, conversations that mean nothing.  Tell a joke to laugh, to slip away from the seriousness for a minute.  But that’s what people always come back to. The progressive march towards a towering gate, torches blazing there on either side.  On the arch above, the word: Success.  

I feel sorry for so many people, but mostly my friends and lovers.  And the people I know who might be interesting if they weren’t so busy trying to gain an inch of ground.  

 

Miss visiting Rich by a few minutes, maybe.  Already gone to physical therapy. An empty bed and a window looking down on cold streets.  

“Tell him Carroll stopped by,” I instruct the nurse, after she asks if I want to leave a message.  

She peers over the top of her glasses as she writes it down, incorrectly spelling it.  

 

“C-A-R-R-O-L-L” I spell it out for a customer on the phone. 

“Like the masculine spelling…” the man says.  

 

For some reason, I can’t sleep.  Not ready yet, maybe. Not slipping off the edge of consciousness.  Not sinking into the dark.  

My eyelids just won’t close.  

I think, and the thoughts dredge up emotions, and from there it all goes to Hell in a handbasket.  

A breadcrumb trail, back to a place full of creaking floorboards and cobwebbed clocks.

It’s my own laughter that I can hear.  

It’s what you do that comes back to hurt you. 

Soaking in the feeling, of another book coming to an end.  The flutter of pages, the whisper of a closed cover, the silence of finality.

a definite beginning

In your head, in your head.  

The problem with writing is that it always has a definite beginning and end. 

In this way it feels a poor tool to capture the feeling of consciousness.  Being finite. Being set in stone.  

Still some times feel that way.  Like you’re hardened and stuck in place.  

No going back, and everything before just a murky primordial past.  

The future no clearer.  

Going full tilt, the momentum carrying you off the tracks.  Where will you go?  

Go out with Garrett on his birthday, somehow ending up there early, talking to Olivia.  

All night, somehow I find the sense not to ask her.

In the dark, swimming.  And wanting to go back, through all those lost years, to a time when I was younger, and more handsome.  Back to a time when things might have meant more. 

When I was still crazy, but tempered by the best intentions.  

Swimming at night, in a pool, naked with two girls I went to highschool with.  

A strange feeling now, to be adrift in a sea of people like this.  Washed and lapped with new waters.  

But still always the same person beneath skin.  Scathed and raw, letting the light bleed in. What am I doing here and why am I staying?  

In the darkness, a million points of isolated light washing over me.  But every star is dead when the light finally arrives.  

Under any veneer of sociability, gregariousness, or even general warmth, there’s still a rotten, unreclaimable core.  

Under every finite word is a slippery, slimy concept that bends and flexes like a strange, sick shadow. Try to nail it down and it squirms away.  

Keep going.

Listen until ears hurt.  Smoke until lungs hurt. Walk until feet hurt.  Work until soul hurts.  

Stare into windows and steel and water seeking something there.  Now familiar, now strange.  

Wondering if.  

First comes art and photography.  

Second, family.  

Then friends.

Fourth is your soul.  

Fifth is the earth.

Sixth, a livelihood.  

Seventh, promises made.  

Now good acts.  

Next to last, your humanity.  

Finally, romantic devotion. 

Thankful

Now she’s asking if you’ve got a girlfriend.  

“Tell her I just haven’t met the right one yet.”

Tom laughs.  

I should be working on something.  Instead, I’m writing this. But maybe that’s okay.  Things on the brain. My head aching. Two days straight without the usual cocktail.  

Maybe I should get back to learning Japanese. Maybe I should learn to play the banjo, like I’ve wanted to, for so long.  

Maybe I should take better photos and write better sentences.  

But I keep on doing this Same Old Thing.

I think about telling Garrett to give me Olivia’s address so I can ship her a print.  

But he’d just tell me to ask her for it myself.  But I can’t be trusted to not say something horribly stupid.  Can’t be trusted with phone numbers, either, anymore. Just gotta keep away from other people, or avoid direct communication at all costs.

I’m all eaten up inside with rotting loneliness.  And I’m sick in my gait and speech, and the way I look and talk to other people.  

If I were an animal, I would be avoided by my own species at this point.  But I’m a person, so I have to keep up a front of normalcy.  

I keep thinking about asking.  Or taking.  

But it would all end up the same way.  

It would start out great, and go on for a while.  Til everything crashed and burned. Til it bought the farm.  

Deep down, I know I’m not anyone, really.  A pit stop at best. Maybe a derelict building on a lonesome stretch of desert highway.  Where no one stops anymore. Except the hopelessly lost types. Until they find their way again, and keep on moving.  

And why not?  The well has run dry.

Revolving around in my mind, tumbling around over and over, manipulated, is the idea that one day I might amount to something.  

But only wishful thinking.  Incorrigible, fucked up. A “fixer-upper” as one of my exes put it.  

Just something out there on the periphery.  

And maybe it would be better like that, just that kind of person, always.  And feeling the pain, and turning it over in your soul and your bones, like a coin dancing along knuckles.  And sticking close to the beautiful things that slowly kill you and draw you into Hell.  

Who will wail for you in death?  Will you hear it from oblivion?  

What gets left behind?  A string of images, hopefully, that carry a message.  But the words that would frame them in context carry away on wind, and lose themselves in the ether.  

A real pretty face.  A laugh that melts ice.  Eyes that dance. A body I want to touch and hold and caress.  Late at night until the dawn sky eats the darkness away. And the warmth of her body against mine.  The smell of her hair. The taste of salt and sweat on her skin.  

Things I could know.  

Ugly and twisted, strange and different.  Nothing normal, nothing right. Nothing to give, nothing to lend.  No reason for anyone anywhere to desire my company.  

In the night I stare up at curtains of rain forever coming down.  And I poison myself a little more, for the final painful payoff. And I think about what it means.  And what worth one could draw from it. But all there remains is pain, and sorrow, and the unwavering hurt that I wear like a second skin.  

It doesn’t matter.

Thankful.

For my day job, which pays the bills.
For my apartment, where I stay up late cooking, and sleep in on the mornings.
For the sunshine that comes through my windows, bright and warm.
For the cold and the snow and the wind on my scalp.
For the quilt my mother made for me.
For Tom, who keeps me company.
For Kit and his 1 am phone calls from Pittsburgh.
For Garrett, who makes me want to be a better version of myself.
For my family members, who seem to love me.
For my nieces, who make me smile when I see them.
For bourbon, mixed with coke and a lemon.
For the sound of rain.
For a cigarette in the morning before work.
For a cigarette in the evening after work.
For memories of people I am no longer close to.
For memories of women I used to love.
For memories of childhood.
For the silhouette of a bird, flying high above skyscrapers and landing in the eaves of churches.
For the words of prophets carved into subway seats.
For sundowns, and moonrises.
For a good joke.

High Life

They say everything worthwhile requires sacrifice.  

Now Abraham dragged Isaac up that hill, to speak as much.  

In the corridor of days, it makes about as much sense.  In the sound that still gets through. Air being pushed up out of the dark underground. 

Missing sleep until it’s something  that comes and goes. Vision blurry and out of focus.  Mind not working right. Coming and going, like bad wiring.  Kill it with booze and cigarettes.  

I’ve been feeling rotten and reptilian, but only when I read scripture, or other religious or philosophical texts.  

Never when I’m in the simple day-to-day, in the mode of working, and coming and going from work.  

The way her voice sounds, soft and sweet.  “For sure,” she says in answer. It rolls off of her tongue.

Like an animal, what I would do.  

I crack my neck and knuckles waiting for my stop at West 4th.  I feel like I’m coming alive, my head breaking the slimy surface of a black pond.  

Rising up.  My eyes roll up and focus on the light above me.  

Somewhere up there, I think.  

My little brother tells me he wants a copy of the print I gave to our mother.  

But what good is art if you give it to everyone?  

The same thing, done well, over and over again, becomes cheap, and ordinary.  

After days of obsessing about models and projects, they seem to like what I’ve done.  

But what I did is just everything except what I didn’t do.  

The part you hide away from everyone probably wants to get out, too.  

Eventually you’ll tear yourself in two.  Right down the middle.  

The holidays are right around the corner and already my body begins to slow down.  One by one, the lights go out in all the rooms. And my brain grows darker.  

One day Garrett laughs about stupid nu-metal lyrics he found online.  

The next day I come clean about asking his ex girlfriend to work with me.  

I never know how to factor anyone else into the equation.  In my mind, when I do the math, there’s me and there’s a camera, and a woman, and photographs.  Everything else is just interference.  

Some nights I sit at the bar and stare into a glass and drink in the static.  All the mindless chit chat. All the wasted minutes and hours and days and years.  

“You’re lucky because you got out early,” Garrett confides. 

“Smartest thing I ever did,” I tell him.  But sometimes I wonder if I had that piece of paper, and I was just another fucking idiot brainwashed by the American Education System, if things would be easier.  

If ignorance is really bliss, maybe stoogery is only a slight downgrade.  

At night I edit photographs for a job.  And in between the looks is a Look. I know it means nothing.  

I’m just at the point where anything could seem like something.  

Tilt my head back until it pulls at my throat.  And the tension begins to drip down my spine. Wipe the sleep from my eyes.  And brain.  

Not yet.  Not yet.  

Photographing stains on the subway.  And on the platform when the train comes, I think about killing myself.  

Just a thought.  What will I have for dinner tonight?  Hey, photograph that stain. You know, you could jump in front of that train.  

Life is getting easier.  The less you talk, the more that fades, the smaller the circle gets and the colder you feel.  Maybe depression gets worse, too, this time of year. But if you’re a man, who the fuck cares? 

(And who the fuck should care, Carroll?  If you would be a man, take it like one.  Go if you want to go.)

 

Holidays and the biblical flood of imbeciles it brings to the streets.  The cold. The general bullshit and misery of the holidays. The invitations of family, invitations that force me to question whether I really can’t make an appearance, or if I simply want to remain away from warmth.  

But then I wonder if anyone really wants to see me, and I begin to think it’s all some big lie or joke.  Like they’re all in cahoots with one another – to make me think I’m part of something I’m not.

But I’ve always felt that way, about everyone.  

“Tomorrow is another day,” Tony says.  Then he utters his goodbyes and melts into the night.  

I stare up at empty windows.  

And I rake my brain for a reason.

Honest Communications

I think the second rail pushes me over the edge. But the first one has me feeling nice. Energy pours out of my eyes, ears, mouth, and fingertips. I grab my camera and tell Amanda I need to photograph her.

Something stirs itself, like an animal awaking from sleep. Its back shaking and bristling, arching up with life, claws spreading out and digging in to flesh.

Like a gun. BANG!

Suddenly everything seems laid out in front of you, in black and white.

Time seems more fleeting. What if it’s running out? What if it’s already close to the end?

Maybe I’m crazy, or more crazy than normal. Maybe I’m sliding down that slope to whatever is at the bottom. It seems like a lot could be swept away – the bullshit, the conventions, the niceties. Just tell them what you want. Just dig your claws into flesh.

So to speak.

I think.

Maybe.

I wonder if I’ve been sleeping for a long time. Years and years. I can’t remember. I feel like I’m in a dream, or that I was, and now I’ve only recently woken up.

Everything feels like a distraction, or a waste. Everything. The little detours, the outings, the gatherings, the socializing, the small talk, even the relationships. Just delve down to the heart of the matter, what you want, someone to stand in front of a camera for fifteen minutes or five years.

That’s it, that’s all. They can have what they want, or take it in kind. Money, love, time, attention. It’s all currency. It’s all secondary. It’s all a write-off in the end.

When I think about what Alysia taught me, it was that I like women with loose morals. I have very few myself, and they seem more like a rough framework. Concrete rules or principles? Sure. But mostly non-religious. A slight bent towards Buddhism. An intellectual curiousity towards Judaism and Christianity. A mental resonance with Daoism.

But I’m still savage and animalistic and carnal underneath the skin. A photo just takes that to another level. It turns something sensual and blasphemous into a form of visual sculpture. More permanent than poetry. More ephemeral than prose.

Kick my brain down the stairs when I’m fed up with it. Who even am I? What gives me the balls to talk about anything to anyone?

Just a guy.

With a camera. With words. Loving art. Worshiping idols. Under a strange sun. Searching for a tribe of people like myself.

The older I get, the louder I want to scream. The more I seem to be pushing up against the limits of my skull. Burn money. Throw out possessions. Speak in tongues. Keeping doing it. Keep doing it with your whole body.

Until the end.

Nieces

It’s always good to hold them.  

Like you’re young again, being held too, being cared-for back.  

Like you aren’t alone, or doomed to live like that.  

Almost had a child once.  Almost became a father.  

Sometimes you stand back from something and watch it pass you by, and there’s another you there – a you that might have come to be.  

But it’s just a mirage, something that only might have been.  Something that never really was.  

“You would be good father,” Mira tells me over the phone.

I stop in my walk home to light a cigarette.  

“Trust me, I have feeling,” she says.  

She’s not the only one.  

They tell me I look like I have baby fever.  

But I just like being the uncle.  I like pretending to be a dinosaur and chasing my nieces around.  Or snuggling up on a Saturday morning to watch cartoons.   

I like laying on the floor and drawing, or building with legos.  And I like showing them a trick or showing them how to do something.  

I think about the two people I ever saw myself marrying.  I think about the two people I ever saw myself having children with.  

Then I think about where the train is headed.  Sometimes, it feels like you’ve already missed your stop.  

Sinking back into the feeling.  Into that gnawing anxiety.  

No one’s dumb enough or crazy enough to go along with that.  

I take photos.  

I remember Heather’s voice.  

I ask my little brother how she’s been.  She’s good. She’d love to hear from me sometime.  

But too much has happened.  Even if she’s family. She’s seen me in horrible ways.  

I like to wonder what it might have been like.  

How it might have been to grow up normal, or how it might have been to be a dad.

Sometimes, deep down, I feel like a monster.  

But there’s a hope or a desire that no matter how reprehensible or fucked up or hopeless you are, you could still create something beautiful.  

Under black end-of-October skies, I step out.  Fresh cuts in my head from the cutting-it-off-again.  Staring up at the branches moving in the night. Inhale and exhale.  

Inch a little closer to oblivion.  

Waiting for days to come and go.  Waiting for the clock to roll over, again.  

Waiting for the thing to come down.  For the world to stop. For a touch, a word, a sign.  

Already swallowed whole.  

Planet Rose

It feels like a narrow spit of land, growing narrower.   

It feels like being swallowed up by water.  

Losing touch with something bigger.  

Always the right thing – what you want to say, what you never do.  

Every night, in the red glow of city lights, I think of going wandering.  

If I spend time with people, we will talk bullshit.  And I’ll make a fool of myself for a laugh. But things will wind down and slow to a halt.  

Eventually, I will be alone, taking the A Train back home.  

Maybe everything is written.  And there’s really no room to move, outside of a narrow track.  

Robbing you of complicity, or at least agency.  

But I think each one of us can make some difference in the world.  Each one of us can choose what life we live, or at least how to view that life.  

And sometimes I think the two aren’t all that different.  

I miss the forests.  The mountains I used to hike in.  The sunlight through the trees. Everything laid out before you, youth was a mystery.  Nothing could hold us down.  

Now I’m maybe halfway or a third-of-the-way done.  It feels too far along.   

And every time I try to talk to anyone, I find it harder and harder to recall familiar territory.  We’re just strangers now, who remember one anothers’ names. But there’s no ritual left to follow, and every sacrifice feels forgotten.  

In time, everything dissolves.  

I kiss the top of Salma’s head as we stand on the platform waiting for the L. 

“He only went ahead of us because he knew that I was with you.  He wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” I tell her.  

“How can I repay you?  Can I buy you dinner? Some ramen?  Carroll, let me buy you some sweet-ass ramen.”  

I tell her not to worry, that she’s cool, so she kisses me on the cheek.  

“I bet you didn’t expect your night to end like this,” Lamia says, as the three of us follow behind, through a construction zone.  

But I never know how it’s going to end.  Sometimes I never even know where I’m at, much less in which direction things are headed.  

Maybe two days after I text him, Garrett responds.  And I wonder if he’s angry.  

But it doesn’t matter; I’m angry at myself.  

“You are a good man.  So things are going to come harder for you.”  Salma says, dragging on my cigarette.  

“What makes you think I’m good?” I ask, feeling a little defensive.  

“The minute you start talking about your nieces, a woman is going to know – come on, Carroll, you’re good.”

“I’m not that good,” I protest.  

Thoughts spring up in my head, leaving me feeling rotten inside.  

But even a person like me feels a sense of right and wrong.  So I don’t touch Salma.  

But when she puts a hand on my arm, it burns.  

Obscene thoughts.  

Rotten inside.  

I’ll go out into the night and wander.  

Listen until it becomes unbearable.  Open your senses until it hurts.  

Like a dog sniffing at city streets.  Every drop of sound. Every stab of light.  But nothing left to remain loyal to.  

In the gutter, you can only go up.  

Everything beautiful will break your heart.

Even as my eyelids seem to close, the train pulls into the station at Franklin Avenue.  With some last vestige of energy, I hazily exit the train and go up to the street.  

Is it really 4 am? 

Everything is closed, shuttered, cold and dark.  

I feel like the last person in the world.  

Fake

It’s all fake.  

I don’t want anything to do with that.  

Need another drink, some rum and some ginger beer.  

Thinking about seeing my family in another week or so.  Two cigarettes left in the pack. Tomorrow I’ll buy more.  

“You were doing good with quitting,” a friend tries to tell me. 

But quitting wasn’t doing good with me.  

Gotta punish the thing you are, still.  

Late at night, just before the sleep comes.  I look out the window at apartments like mine where other people are living their lives.  

 

I should edit her photos.  I should give her some to post to Instagram.  But I don’t want anyone to know I took them. I hate myself for having taken them.  It seems like there’s nothing there. Just someone smiling back.  

Fake.  

It’s all a joke.  Photograph me this way, doing this thing, saying nothing.  

Need to give them money, pay a model.  No one wants to get out there and create art.  People just want basic shit for their instagram or social media. 

People just want a pretty lie.  But an ulgy truth is better, if it has to be ugly.  Just let it be true.  

Let it be real.  

People still telling me to make money at it.  I could make money at anything.  

When I pick up a camera, I want to create something good with it.  Not a pretty picture, not a photograph someone pays a lot of money for.  

Something I can’t live without.  Something that changes a person’s life, just looking at it.  

A mandala.  A revelation.  A sunburst, or life, or death.  

But that’s self-important bullshit.  I am not that kind of person. Just want to clean away the clutter.  Live and love simply. Every day I step out, a camera over one arm and my mind purged of pre-conceptions.  

“Come do weddings,” my little brother says.  And there was a time when I wanted the two of us to work together – him posing people and me slipping like an eel through crowds to find that zen shot.  

But now, I think, I am shirking the commercial, and the money, and the greed that drives for more.  I’m obsessed, still, with photography. But on my own crooked terms, in my own bizarre way. What good is clarity without the madness?  Deep down I know I’m not a straightlaced professional type. I’m a shoot-from-the-hip while cursing-a-blue-streak kind of guy.  

Deeply, sincerely unhinged and harmless, but hell-bent on divining something moving from the mundane.  

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

No one will be knocking at my door.  Truth be told, I’m not all that good.  Even I know it.  

And I’m just another jackass with a camera.  

2 am phone calls

Up late aching for that 2 am phone call.  

You know the kind.  

Yearning with a heart you didn’t know you still had.  

I yearn with my teeth clenched through strange dreams.  

I rail against the knowing that we never got close enough.  

Now everything feels too late, and too far along.  But maybe there’s a little crazy left in the tank.  

What would you do to become unstuck?  In that moment.  

“Maybe you should go make someone else uncomfortable,” a friend tells me.  

And I can feel something break down in that moment.  

In reflections in windows, I see it too.  

“He’s ugly,” she says.  But a soulless kind of ulgy.  A hopeless kind of ugly.  

A concrete knowing, something never coming undone.  Scathed and raw. Arching your back in the moonlight.  Gross and misshapen.  

I could scream in the light of a full moon. 

Scream until your throat bleeds.  

Does it even matter?  What’s the difference now, between the good life you live and the sinful existence you want?  What good is virtue if it’s a struggle for you?  

Wouldn’t it be better to be real and rotten?  

No one’s even looking.  

Let em try it.  

Like a gun to the head.  

Some people don’t know.  How close it really is to the surface.  

Some things move in perpetual shadow.  

I can feel my teeth aching for something to sink into.  I can feel my lungs aching for something to soak up. I can feel my fingers itching for someone to caress.  I can feel my eyes aching for lines to follow, contrast to discern, colors to bleed.  

I can feel that 2 am phone call.  I can feel silence coming down like storm clouds.  I can feel something turning away in my chest.  

Steeped in night.  It seeps into my pores and mixes with the sweat oozing out, into the night air.  

The lights.  The sound.  

Moving slowly, as though in a dream.  Like when I was young, and I would wade into the surf.  

Wandering around in circles that spell out nothing.  

And then realizing, deep down, that nothing has changed.  That you’re still the same.  

On the train, the eyes like mine that look back.  No words, no nothing.  

I can lean my head back against the metal and feel every shudder and shake.  

It’s just pain and then you die.  

Until then, you’ll go on.  Following it.

Something glimpsed through a door, a key hole, a window.  

Something never spoken.  

Something held secret.  

Something held dear.  

Forever.  

And never uttered.  

Too Many Jokes

Too many jokes I tell myself.  

My brothers.  

A handful of friends.  

Over and over again, too many jokes.  

Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck wandering.  From one place to another. No place feels quite right.  No place feels like home.  

Nose to the ground, searching for traces of something.  A memory,  

Reality feels like a dewdrop on a leaf that shakes and drips.  Blink for a moment and it’s gone. Disappeared. And you disappear with it. 

There’s a memory filed away of a cold night drinking somewhere.  The cold getting to me, and talking to friends until that feeling slipped away, forgotten.  

Sometimes it occurs to me a person could do that his or her entire life.  Just autopilot the whole fucking mess.  

Wake up one day and finish it off.  

You’d like to think you’re one soul in a brotherhood of man.  But no one wants to get his fingers dirty pulling things from the muck.  So it’s up to each of us to out-do the rest in all varieties of vanity.  

I shave my head and slowly trim the colorful clothes from my wardrobe.  Even when I splurge on a pair of colorful sneakers, I wind up rebuking myself.  

Like whatever you like, but do nothing which is of no use.  

The process is its own reward.  

After it calms down, the person looks away.  Tapping into that pure moment. It will always happen.  

First some small talk, small feats to break the ice.  Maybe too many jokes to make the person smile. And then a bit of conversation, only half-carried, trailing off into silence.  And on that threshold, a gentle lapse into that state of honesty.  

I will put some fives in my wallet.  

And walk through the city.  In solitude.  

But if I find someone like me, hanging out, with that nowhere-to-go look and nothing-to-do attitude, I’ll pay them for a portrait.  

Something carved away from the whole, floating out there in the periphery.  

Shorn from your origins, belonging nowhere, and to no one.  Like a bird taking wing.  

Climbing high above metal valleys.  Poured from molten sunshine.

In Berlin

Over cobbled streets.  Through public parks and gardens.  Past large empty buildings, cold and ornate, like tombs.  By fences and plywood walls with advertisements for brothels and cigarettes. 

In Berlin, I quickly break vows.  My will, so strong back in New York, seems to buckle and disintegrate beneath the pressure of a new city.  

And Berlin feels that way – new.  It feels that way even as you pass the old buildings, with new scaffolds all around, harbinging a new spurt of construction that will bring new homes and new people to fill them.  

The art is new and fresh, too.  Not the shock that they sell on the streets or in the shops, but the tags and graffiti the kids put up at night.  

Some of it is even written in English – the new Latin.  

I find excuses to be alone and wonder where my feet will lead me.  For a moment I follow this person, then that one. And it’s not long before I’m just walking anywhere,  

And I could disappear.  

I think about how slippery of a slope it is, to go walking, and then have a thought just pop into your head that you could disappear in a place like this.  No need to let anyone know. Sell what you have and get a plane ticket.  

People must do it all the time.  

Never heard of again.  

Tell people a new name.  Tell people a new story. No one will ever know.  

The train comes surging into Stadtmitte.  I get on and watch the girl across the aisle who watches me, in between starts and fits of conversation with a friend.  

Down the platform and down the steps.  To the street. Where Tony and I stand, waiting for the gates to open.  

It’s an odd sensation.  

When I am alone, I walk and look for cracks.  For a place I might skip into, or through.  

From windows above, a child watches me.  

And people come and go around me as I pause to photograph some piece of vandalism.  Like an edying stream, they pass on.  

But the more I see, the more I look and take it in, the more I feel a need, welling up in my chest and clawing up my throat, to get out and shoot, shoot, shoot.  

Ideas need to be formed.  Projects thought up, sure.  But at the heart of that mania is an impetus to go out and do.  On shoestring budgets. Bartering if need be. And when everything else should fail, roaming the streets at night like a wild dog.  

Maybe at thirty I am already past middle age.  Maybe I don’t have all that long left to leave a mark, to reach someone, to be truly heard, seen, or felt.  

There is nothing to delay.  The important thing to do now is to keep shooting.  

No matter what comes.  

Every spare moment.  Every nickel and dime.  

And just keep shooting. 

On The Mend

I was probably always dumb.  

When they yanked me out of classes and stuck me in an empty room with puzzles.  

I was dumb then too.  

But people get really fucking proud of the things that make them different.  

Like the doctor who pointed out the birthmark on my back to my parents.  

Now I wonder about the moles there.  

I keep telling myself I’m on the mend.  

And every time I pass someone smoking a cigarette, I fall back into that part of me that is still an addict.  Doesn’t matter what it is – cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, opioids. Give me something dangerous to play with,  

Give me a way to numb my brain, and edge closer to death.  

Just waiting for you around the bend.  Still fucking dumb.  

When you realize you’re the reason you are the way you are.  

The kind of rebellious half-wit who couldn’t finish school.  And turning away, one by one, people who might have settled for you.  

I was probably always dumb.  Doesn’t matter what you create.  Matters what you make. 

Maybe.  

I never wanted to be like them, anyway.  Kids who could get it, laugh it away. I was always the one off by myself, alone.  Grew up alone, and still dumb.  

Deep out there on the periphery, in the hum and murmur of the day-to-day.  

I like to tell myself I am getting better.  

I’m not.  I still dream about people I used to love.  

And I think, maybe I should reach out.  Be a little human and communicate.  

But what kind of poison would I spit out?  What havoc would I wreak? I don’t want to be human.  

I want to be loved again, and in love again, because I’m weak and sick and an addict.  

Because I’m dumb.  Because I always have been.  

Just let it go and accept what comes next.  

What’s the fucking point?  Nothing to kill yourself with.  Just one day after another. Doing the same thing.  Making money. More than you need, more than you can spend.  

Come home and cook a meal.  Drink and fall asleep.  

Nothing.  Nothing. Nothing.  

Meaningless work.  Meaningless words. A life full of the emptiness you buy and sell.  To people who can’t wait to buy emptiness, and hold it over others’ heads.  Brand Name emptiness and Quality emptiness. Emptiness on sale or at a discount.  

Just as long as people buy and sell.  

The world continues to spin.  

Tell me what’s the point?  In hollow days and empty rooms, in the spaces between moments pouring by, it’s me thinking everything to death, and getting nowhere for it.  

Everyone needs a purpose.  

I feel like a dead end.  

I was probably always a dead end.  

Vacation

I keep thinking of extricating myself.  From a realm of thorns. Claustrophobic.  

I keep thinking of going out, by alleyways and streets, into roads that run on into highways.  Out into the country and far to the south, where not so many people live.  

And I think about finding the water at night, lapping at the shore and the inky blackness.  And no voices, no people talking. Just the quiet, and the waves’ gentle caress.  

I keep thinking that something is wrong.  As though a clock knew it wasn’t telling the correct time, or that someone had forgotten to wind it.  

And instead of moving itself to tell the correct time, going out into the country and staring into water, far from the sound of other clocks.  

I wonder how a photographer could take himself out of a picture.  It’s not so much myself there as it is traces of what I am.  

Less than a picture of a broken clock, it’s the footprint of a broken clock.  And the shadow it casts. That gloomy pall, jutting into and overcoming the frame.  

I want to say I never liked being photographed.  But as a kid I could handle it sometimes. The older I got, the less happy I became with the way I looked.  

And I always felt like it was something that someone would use against me.  Just a picture, but there’s this weight to it. 

Draped over your shoulders like a yoke, or around your neck like a penance.  Bowing your head like a source of guilt, or shame.  

I was never that person who really cared about his looks.  Or at least, not when I was younger.  

If I see them – people I could get to know, on the subway or in the street -they will pass by.  Like ghosts. Locked into paths their footsteps follow.  

If I’m programmed too, surely I wouldn’t know as much.  My footfalls are as much a mystery to me as them.  

Unless I’m the ghost.  Something lingering on.  A bit of dew clinging at a thread.

Utterly insignificant.  Breathe and I might turn to vapor.

I keep thinking about time.  And how I won’t own a watch or a clock.  

And time moves by like a leaden river, slow, powerful, and all-consuming.  

Wherever it goes, whatever happens.  

Broken and telling no time. 

Walking Alone In The Dark

I like walking alone in the dark.  I like being the thing that goes bump in the night.  

I like being that person who slipped away, who disappeared into thin air.  I like the thought of never being heard or seen again. I like slipping quietly, calmly, into the unknown.  

A coworker tells me he wants to quit smoking.  “Marijuana,” I tell him.  

“Just replace one thing with another?” he asks, dryly.  

Just replace one thing with another.  Places, people, memories, your job, answers to yes/no questions…

It’s really easy to replace one thing with another.  Just make sure they have the same weight.  

That’s all people ever really miss – the weight of something.  

My back hurts from carrying a camera all over the city.  And I’ve been getting uglier.  

Feeling something, I shave my head again.  And then I wash the hair away under cold water, and still feel the skin burn.  

I like walking alone in the dark. 

The same way I like coming home, and putting on music, and cooking and cleaning, or washing dishes.  

There’s a three foot version of myself curled up with his arms hugging his legs to his chest, sitting on the countertop, watching me.  Another version of me, but he wants to know why.  

It’s been six weeks since I quit smoking cigarettes.  I drink more water now and cook all but one meal per week.  In the mornings, I lift for 30 minutes before work. I don’t speak unless spoken to.  I’m reading again, voraciously, and trying to keep up with writing and photography, when I’m not working on little pet projects.

I stand more than I sit when taking the subway to and from Manhattan.  

And soon I can hopefully find a way to volunteer an extra day somewhere.  

I no longer think about suicide.  I no longer feel hopeless. 

And I’m sinking, down, into an abyss.  And I can feel it happening. And I know it’s actually happening.  

There’s nowhere left to hurry to.  No one left to go looking for. Nothing left to worry about.  

Like being swept out to sea, beyond sight of the shoreline.  No chance of ever being found.  

Every minute of every day, you’re becoming something better.  But it still feels like you’re waiting for something to arrive, something to come down like manna, or lightning.  

A caretaker for an empty chapter, waiting to begin, and become full.  

And looking out at night, at cold dark buildings congealed into masses of brick, metal, and gloom, with warm yellow eyes. Right before the walls of sleep close in.  

Hoping something is coming down.  

Every Breath

Every breath is a yawn.  

In my sleep I have dreams about sleeping.  

I’ll catch someone looking to see if I’m looking.  Fuck I hate games.  

I know I’m an adult because I’m worried about not having enough time left to take care of stuff before I buy the farm.  

I admit that I sometimes think about settling down and trying the wife-and-kids thing.  

 

I can’t even imagine that, Kit says breathlessly between pulls.  

But it’s strange to me too.  

 

I guess a part of me – a very small part – doesn’t want to miss out.  And I’m not convinced it’s all roses, but the way the light might hit from time to time seems pretty enough.  

Stretched too thin.  I get way too fucking high most nights.  Feeling like I’ve let myself go.  

Catching an unkempt reflection in the grimy window of a subway car.  That night I shave my head again, for the first time in many months.

Then I wake up early and lift weights.  

 

Lose a little more, I think to myself.  Carved and hacked to perfection. Sleeping away my days in a cloud of smoke.  

 

Calm up there.  

A guy I know who lives in the county and makes bank as a doctor complains about delays.  

If I delayed Very Specific Medicine to my patients, do you think they’d like it?  

It’s a great business model, I tell him.  When they finally get it, they’ll be more than happy to pay for it.  

They’d be dead!

So what do you care?  They’re not sick anymore.  

True, he admits.  

Underground beneath Lower Manhattan, I’ll trade glances with a stranger.  

Like tunnel scenery, something beautiful glimpsed in the window between the quickest two seconds.  An ephemeral twist of the neck, a body that twitches and contorts like smoke.  

Shouting body language.  

Gone forever.  No knowing. In a sea of 8,600,000 people.  

And others passing through, for a week or a day.  A few hours of overlap.

 

“So many walks of life,” she says.  

“There’s only one walk of life,” I want to shoot back.  But I stop talking to her after that. And let her sink into memory.  Blotted and burned.  

I’ve reconnected with a lot of people, she said.

To what end? I wanted to ask her. But I didn’t. I know better. I can live without hearing whatever she thinks the answer is.

 

Bitter and scathed when it wasn’t you.  And it hardened your heart against some things, after that.  

Her older sister stuck up for me. “He’s fucking cool,” she said. 

I wonder where Rachel is now.  

new

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Divide
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