Welcome to the Now.
28SEP2011 – Advancing the film while I still have a camera. The back of my head feels like freshly mown velour; the inside contains high-speed footage of plant tendrils whipping outward in ever-widening circles and tender leaves unfolding from careful storage with tiny clicks, tracking the sunlight across the mottled sky like ancient satellite arrays hidden deep in the jungle. (Thank you, David Attenborough, but just once I wish you’d swear…)
Magic is dead. That’s just my opinion. That was always the divider for me; the left hand versus right hand trade off in fiction between dragons and death stars. “One was, one will be.”
Welcome to the Now.
Somewhere in the distance a herd of wild motorcycles gallops down some temporary straightaway, tearing the air with a mighty roar, passage granted by a sequence of swaying green orbs, aligned like tumblers in the lock of the night.
There’s a church outside my window. It’s just across the yard, beyond the dead limbs, rasping leaves and sprawling web of ivy that provides this area with soft green silence. And through the doors of that church comes the voice of a kindly man with a winning smile and purple robes, professing his love for strangers from the safety of a TV screen. Syndicated salvation, savior songs and collection plates have paid for his designer eyeglass frames, the lenses of which are barely thick enough to physically restrain his eyes, which appear capable of growing teeth and gnashing hard at your face like a rabid weasel were the laws of physics not there to prevent such a thing. In between songs of praise, jokes are told. I’m too far away to hear them.
Saturday night: Operation “Explore Massive Overgrown Graveyard” was a wash. Razor wire encircles barbed wire which tops wrought iron spikes guarding three sides of the city block it occupies; the black windows of residential living rooms stare back from the full four like a panopticon for the dead. Plenty of gaps in the fence, but not enough opportunity for an unobserved entrance and I can’t say I was properly dressed to wade through brush and bramble.
A good assassin is always pregnant with another version of himself. In the event of fatality or termination, this second self will tear free of its protective shell and finish the mission.
Now on a train to Coney Island, watching the jagged shapes and shadows of the landscape rush past the car window, each tooth ripping another chunk of flesh from the prone form of summer.
Sometimes I can almost feel what Brooklyn must have been like twenty years ago, or thirty, or even forty. Light flashes through the trellis of a bridge and the red brick tenements float past. Flashes of fire escapes, rooftop hideaways and rusted graffiti tags. The moment is a yellowed zoetrope of crumbling memories and faded dreams, like radio signals expanding outward into the blackness of space. That was. This is.
Nothing stands still.
Nothing. Stand still.
Nothing stands. Still.
Welcome to the now.
