Pier A in Frank Sinatra Park on the Hoboken waterfront has been a pungent part of my life over the past year. Stumbling upon it for the first time I felt like it was a place I’d already known for quite some time. In a relatively short period of time it has been the stage for some very important acts.
Today around 3pm I was walking about it, enjoying the fresh and sunny weather of the day. During this walk about I’d decided that I wanted to sit in the middle of this diamond shaped layout near the gazebo that points to New York City. The last time I’d done such a thing is when I had taken my most recent profile photo, smoking a clove. So before I sat down I was off to go get myself a pack of Djarum blacks.
On my way I get a phone call from Lisa about how she learned that our friend Mike had recently had a brain aneurysm, had brain surgery and currently resides in an ICU. While sad this news wasn’t a terrible shock to the system. Mike has and does drink entirely too much booze, is known for eating, on a regular basis, ungodly amounts of the type of food that is terrible for a person to eat on a regular basis, and smokes, easily, two packs a day of American Spirits cigarettes.
Naturally my impulse to purchase my pack of cloves was shattered.
Naturally, it was replaced with the need to get myself a pack of American Spirits.
Along with spending $3 on lottery tickets.
Pack of cigarettes in hand I walk through a small grove of ginko trees whose leaves have turned yellow and have begun to form little yellow carpets on the ground to sit in the diamond that points to New York City, a diamond that also seems to precisely point north, south, east and west. I sit and stare at Manhattan (one of the M’s?), smoke my cigarette after making a lucky cigarette in the pack, think about Mike recovering from brain surgery, think about Mislaw recovering from brain surgery…
Seagulls fly about
I look around me and notice three seagulls at various edges of the diamond standing about and a fourth one sitting, very calmly, just a few feet behind me and to my left. Looking straight in front of me at Manhattan, directly in my line of sight, I can see the Moon (M?) quite clearly over the city.
Still smoking I notice the little image printed on the cigarette; a native American style image of a bird. I think about my two winged tattoos.
The time is 3:33.
I cast my spells and make my wishes.
Wizards and priests have always held my fascination.
Smoked down till the wings on the cigarette have gone I put out the remnants in the center of the tile directly in front of me, one tile closer to New York City.
iPod in hand shuffle chooses for me Matthew Good’s Indestructible to play for me.
I walk close to the water along the path that leads between the two buildings in Hoboken with pyramids atop them, Indestructible playing in my ears, my perspective wobbling for the third or fourth time within that past hour or so.
My feet lead me to the corner of 3rd street where there’s a restaurant named Trinity. I walk to River street and hang a right to notice a big fucking sign that reads 333 River street, the address of a rather snazzy looking apartment building, at least I think it’s an apartment building.
All the while, and all the time since then feeling a sort of knock at the door in my head and then thinking that it’s not a knock at the door so much as overhearing a dance take place, a dance whose sounds are becoming louder and clearer all the time. Shiva dancing the Tandava in rhythm to my heartbeat, the dance steps that make all the hearts beat.
when the feeling of too much blood pumping through my heart
left me lightheaded, weak
and afraid of what might happen if any more were to happen
to increase the flow.
Now the feeling of too much blood pumping through my heart
makes me want more.
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.
don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in
you.
I love the good that people can do
I love the good that people can be.
I hate the bad that people can do
I hate the bad that people can be.
People, at their best, are angels and gods
People, at their worst, are demons and devils.
How to proceed?
Thank you for teaching me how not to be.
Thank you, for teaching by example, the things that are wrong with seeing things through a negative light.
The madness and the pain in that direction serve nothing.
One is best served not by taking down but by building up.
Build
Build that mother fucker.
Leave the tearing down of things to those that have nothing better to do with time.
So once again
thank you
for being everything that I never want to be
and showing me what it looks like
to be that way.
to the Yahoo! homepage for, at least for a wee time, featuring a video that featured a fellow named Andy Mckee playing the acoustic guitar like few people do.
Hopefully this link will work well for some time to come:
I am extra thankful because this video led to the finding of other videos of other fellows such as he that can play the guitar in such a way, such as Don Ross and Antoine Dufour.
May other people stumble so happy and so well.
On the teevee today were services for James Brown and for Gerald Ford.
I doubt if there have ever been services more different from each other.
The early part of the James Brown service was building up to be the party of the century!
Then they had to go and let people talk… big mistake as far as I’m concerned.
The parting services for James Brown should have been a week long party!
or at least 24 hours strong.
What did occur was still pretty good, and the rest of it was pretty powerful.
Meanwhile, the Ford thing was so, so white
so old
so dusty
so lame.
Gerald Ford was ballsier than that, if only because he knew he could get away with it because not too many people cared about what he would say.
But yeah… old, white and dusty.
Maybe Gerald and James are out getting funky somewhere.
Along with Saddam Hussein (who was executed today).
I enjoy that image.