Seasons Change

on the cusp of another break in seasons, i feel a tension everywhere. it's like electricity, sizzling all around as currents fork and shoot to make an infinity of connections with all of the other charged objects that surge and whir in this seasonal transience. it's the energy that comes from forcing opposing poles into close proximity and then keeping them there. the power in a Contradiction's stubbornness to avoid looking at itself in the mirror, i guess. it comes with every footfall on the concrete sidewalk, baked warm by the daylight and cooked cool in the evenings. your body starts to sweat at illogical moments because the hot and cold air mixes together to create a burning sensation that can't be justified. it's in the flowers and the trees and the vines whose blossoms are coaxed outside by a mischievous and deceitful sun only to be stung by nightfall and rendered cowering and frightened beneath the moonlight.

this pushing and pulling so close to one another infuses the air with such a reaction potential that it seeps out, supersaturates. it touches us all. the effect isn't immediately palpable, no. but, it's there. it's there in the smiles and the laughter and the hellos that come calling through the breezes. you hear it between all the honking and over the sewer steam, hissing from the manhole covers. it's the time of year when you start to notice people living. and that seems to drown everything else out.

this is the last gasp of a season that doesn't want to die.

and, perhaps it is that our very living eggs it on. so, we walk livelier and farther in the face of the long frost, in spite of it, in the hopes that we may in fact scare it away with laughter--with life.



...or, maybe it's just Denial, manifesting itself because everyone knows that we can't stop the seasons from changing. we can only hope to.

you be the judge.

Woof Woof

i think it's funny to see owners who look just like their dogs. i think they take cues from one another, and their behaviors become amalgums of each others', whether they know it or not. ultimately, i can't separate dog from master or vice versa. i end up seeing them as one and the same.

In One Place

i've bought things. i've worked at stuff.

i own a television. i have a modest dvd collection. i like my stereo. my bike is nice. i've filled my time and my life with small goals and seemingly smaller, emptier possessions. i went to college. that was indulgent. i have a job. i've had two. and a few internships at cool places. the cumulative effect of all of those things has led me to fill my relatively small apartment with a relatively unnecessary amount of useless things, the worth of which i find hard to pinpoint. better yet, the worth of which i find it impossible to derive satisfaction from. sure, they might satisfy an urge or an impulse. a wish to be instantly distracted. a need to be immediately pleased. but the half-lives of these things are uncannily volatile; their purpose expires quickly, and their existence is soul-less.

nonetheless i trudge forward. although, i'll stop myself and admit that 'forward' might be an audacious claim. there isn't a direction to the movement. no momentum, no intertia. let's say that i'm walking in place rather well, at a hearty pace ...knees high, good form. it's curious that only rarely do i take the care to notice where i've gone. and even then the observations are superficial at best. their notation in the great Book of my self-logging is simply an act. as if my remarking of them would be anything more than just that.

well, secretly i hope they are more, but i know better. what's the harm in a little self-deceit?

normally, during a journey, one would expect the scenery to whisk by. maybe a bug might hit the windshield or something. a speeding ticket perhaps. yet not only have i managed to neglect these passings (or rather a lack thereof), i've downright ignored their absence. and, instead of leaving things behind, i've collected things, piled them high to fill the void. and, among them i continue marching in place. maybe it's because of them that i can't go forward.

i wonder if i'll actually ever take the odd step out and look at the heap i've created: the mausoleum to a lack of achievement. maybe that will scare the shit out of me enough to make me get going somehwere.

because really, what prompted all of this was the simple, self-posed question of "what have i done?"

all i could come up with was that i haven't done a whole lot, but i've got a ton of stuff.

Industry

i've long had a bit of an obsession with the products of industry that sit as skeletons across our countrysides and cityscapes. something about these rotting places with iron and glass and stone all withering slowly make for a beautiful sight ...oddly.

anyway, i'd been thinking about it a lot. and then i went to the MET today to see a presentation of modernists and abstract expressionists. that's when i read this:

every age manifests itself by some external evidence. in a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. industry concerns the greatest numbers--it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.

it's from an artist, charles sheeler, who's passion was precionist paintings of factories and the like.

now he may have painted them in their glory, but i still find something epic in their abandonment and degredation. that's just my way of saying that i think even in the death of these factories, his statement still holds true.

some of his paintings are on the left.