To provide some background to the next few posts (hopefully), I'm currently in Paris working with a former professor on a video/photography project about the Communaires. I was warned that it was easy to get lost in Paris. The roads don't follow the grid structure that one may become familiar with in the US. Even the supermarkets here have their own nooks and crannies. You can backtrack through streets you were sure you had gone down previously, pass the same boulangerie three times, and still get lost. This turning about of orientations is, of course, a result of the combination of having never been to Europe, not knowing the language, and hopelessly trying to take in all the stimuli that attacks unrelentingly from all angles.

I know what it feels like to lust after someone. I know what it feels like to imagine how they taste; to imagine how their wet skin would feel, tangled with mine, in a post-coital ecstasy. I know what questions will swirl in my mind in those moments afterwards. How fast is their breathing? Can I feel their heart steadily pumping blood to all of their oxygen deprived body parts? Does sweat pool at the small of their back? How smooth is the groove of their spine as I trace my fingers down to that pool?

I know what it feels like to lust after someone to the point where it isn't lust anymore. It has become an excercise, a repeated meditation. It is a carnal desire that becomes a series of images, played over and over until the fiction of it all threatens to turn into a fond memory of events that have yet to pass. 

Man

- "So these memories...they're not real?"

Author

- "Certain details - the color of a car, a person you may know, a special date - are culled from your biography to enhance them but, yes, the stories are manufactured."

Man

- "They felt so real."

Author

- "Thank you."

*silence*

Author

- "You're unsure of what to say next?"

Man

- "What do you say to the man that has been writing the last 6 months of your life?"

Author

- "You say that you wish to restore your place within the narrative. From the data we've gathered, we've been able to identify what woke you up. You go back under and rejoin the others."

Man

- "But how can I just agree to walk back into that....nightmare?"

Author

- "You will maintain no recollection of your time above. It is indeed a great sacrifice, but up until the moment you close your eyes you will know that you are part of something good. You are making better lives for them. You are making their dreams better."

An old photo I made for a friend as part of an art exchange:

The air was so thick with bourgeois, you could spread it on breakfast toast like soured cream cheese. The meal would betray your constitution and leave you with a hollowness that could not be fulfilled by food, drink, sex, or any other worldy desire. 

"To crawl or be dug out of the rubble that day, was to know that death had passed over you with nothing but a kiss on the cheek." 

- Wayne Goodman, NPR report on the tornado that destroyed Moore, Oklahoma. 

Fuck swag.

Forget flash. 

Never mind cool. 

Loose the bling. 

No ritz, glitz, and all that other glamorous shit.

Don't go ham.

Or ball out.

Don't even make it rain.

You only need to ever do one thing.

Exude class. 

Hold open a door for someone. 

Wear a tie or, even better, a bow tie.

Say, "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Make eye contact.

Respectfully disagree.

No matter what you do, always exude class. 

"My favorite part of riding on an airplane is when the aircraft passes through thick patches of clouds. For a moment, just before you recognize the wafts of gas and condensation passing over the wing, you lose any sense of depth. Outside the window, there is just stark, white emptiness, and turbulence. The only thing separating you from certain death on land or at sea is metal, plastic, and 20,000 ft of air."

Journal entry, Dallas/Ft. Worth - Narita, Japan, May 2013

"I'm glad we were able to come to an understanding," he said. "This is exactly the kind of nonsense the Ministry is not inclined to abide."
The leather in his uniform creaked and stretched as he shifted in his seat.
"You see, we like to consider the actions of the Ministry more as interventions than coercions. Encouragement. Guidance. Never so much force as to make our citizens feel manipulated, but just enough of a push to get them marching in the proper direction."
The steadiness of his voice began to disappear, slowly replaced with a trembling that betrayed his meticulously crafted image of self-control. 
"It is our duty to assist those living within the ranks and files of our society with their acclimation. They must all fall in line. You must fall in line. There is no alternative."

The feeling of ants crawling on your skin.

The bees don't sting as hard as they did last winter. 

Perhaps they've lost their will to protect. 

Autumn has come again and we bitterly watch the ice cover that once picturesque landscape. 

Sheets of white that turn the horizon into a sweeping gradient like some abstract expressionist painting. 

With grit teeth, trudging on, one foot after the other, onward. 

The compass spins, dancing around the letters. 

North. Please. North. 

If the shoe fits.....wear it.

Then use it to kick in the face of the person accusing you of wearing that particular kind of shoe. 

You only wear a size "brutal."

Three year old vaseline

The water came up to our knees
You cried and cried
And it churned the seas

No surrender. No retreat.

Maintain eye contact.