I travel the lines of books soaking up a phrase here and there and then letting it float outside the text...does it still resonate--does it still ring true?
I've read a few books in the last month...and have played more arcade video games in my leisure time than I think I have in years. Escapism. Lesser of two unproductive habits...the meaningless novel or puzzle games...hmm.
I was thinking about the photograph of three of my closest friends. A snapshot of them on Castro Street while we were shopping in the mid-90s. Seems forever ago and I can remember little from the day itself (although I think two others of the group would have no problem recreating the entire day from memory). Three people who know me best, could finish my sentences, could comfort my pain and make me laugh louder than I thought possible.
What are they like now...I converse now and again, I catch-up but I take in the e-mails without surprise. Two of them have suffered terribly in the last year, the third I can only imagine the daily horror of working in pediatrics...the suppressed outrage at the preventable and then having to repress the enormity of a condition in the here and now when a child doesn't have chance. And yet, they have all found themselves a little further along the road...the experience is not killing their spirit...they are truly living.
...distance...and I wonder if this is age/time/the self evolving...I wonder if we all sat down to coffee if we could just be...be engaged in hearing each other...genuinely interested in where the last ten years have gone. If I snapped a picture in the here and now...would the faces be light, whimsical, aloof, wondering?
~~~~~~
"My theory," Simon said, "is that you measure your arrival in New York by when you stop looking at other people and start assuming they're looking at you."
~
"...Meaning bad isn't the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it's not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don't define you as much as you define them."
~
"She met my glance, then peered at the photograph. 'The complacency of extreme beauty,' she said. with a little sniff.
I laughed. 'I was thinking she looked complicated and mysterious.'
She shook her head. 'That's what they want you to think, but she's like a Matisse odalisque or something, blissed out on self-approval.' She stood there for a moment, then turned around and studied the shelves behind me, where a little wooden shingle hanging into the aisle read PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION.
I turned back to the book, disappointed she hadn't said more. It was another New York moment, like at the photography show with Simon: a stranger delivering up an inscrutable, glittering sentence--pretentious, maybe, but also unforgettable--and then moving on. Maybe that's what New York would end up being to me, a collection of such moments that would accumulate into life."
~
"Oh, he was kindness itself, he was compassion, understanding, but it was all coming away from him and there wasn't a single way in."
~
"New Yorkers were different. Old or young, crazy or brilliant, plain or gorgeous--they didn't just walk outside, they made a presentation, they presented themselves. They said, This is who I am, today I'm someone wearing these boots, I'm walking with this look on my face, I'm having this intense and troublesome discussion with this difficult but beloved friend."
~
"...one person's 'Just Do It' is another person's Mount Everest."
~
The sun is setting, the rays glistening off the buildings outside my office. The clattering of the machines pounding away...another building...progress. Off to home...to the train...then the drive...hitting the repeat button on the CD player.