It’s pretty damned inspiring to wake up in the morning and there’s your six-year-old already at the hotel room desk hard at work.
Love among the ruins
This photo of ruins in Antigua, Guatemala is one of my favorite images from the past few years of traveling. (Not shown: the picnicking teenage sweethearts. “Love among the ruins…”)
I’m back in Austin, Texas after several months away in The North, living not far from a city with actual ruins. What hits my eye and sticks in my brain are the cranes and the half-finished buildings. Maybe it’s just the dark mood in me, but the unfinished buildings all look like ruins-in-the-making. And some of the finished buildings, like the parking garage I walked past last night, already look like ruins.
The most recent issue of the Austin Chronicle has a rendered image of a post-apocalyptic Austin on the front cover. (On Twitter I saw somebody joke that it was a well-played “don’t move here” measure.) There’s a creeping feeling that this won’t last. There’s a “correction” coming. But how bad will it be?
Everywhere you go there are abandoned scooters littering the sidewalks, like scooter cemeteries. (Undead? Waiting to be reanimated?)
I still hold love for the place. There’s still some magic lingering here, just as there is everywhere in America. A sunset helps. I walked past that same parking garage a half-hour later and the ruins were glowing, with the moon overhead…
Oh no we’re still us
This is one of those rare New Yorker cartoons (by Will McPhail) you clip out and stick on the fridge. I thought about it the other day when I read the obituary for Dean Ford, lead singer of the Marmalade:
I wanted to start over. I wanted a new life. The trouble was, I brought myself with me.
That’s the beginning of a country song, right there. Here’s an old poem of mine to go with it:
It’s like Thoreau wrote in his journal (he could’ve written some country songs):
It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.
Update (5/19/2022): After reposting this recently, several people sent me this hilarious SNL bit:
Spirits speak of possibility
I saw these images walking around Pasadena this morning, the day after the Day of the Dead. Later, back in my hotel room, I found out that Nick Cave has started The Red Hand Files, a site where he answers questions from fans. He’s written about boredom and Grinderman (two of my favorite things), and, in a truly lovely letter, his thoughts on grief after losing his son:
I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.
Read the whole letter here.
NYC snapshots
“I still think of New York City as a powerhouse of a place in which human energy, imagination, and spirit are nourished.”
—Philip Glass, Words Without Music
Since I was 19-years-old and visited for the first time — a whole week! paid for! — NYC has been one of my favorite places in the world. (How could it not be?) One day I hope to have a whole week there again, but recently I’ve made quick, two-day trips: fly in one the morning, stay over, fly out the next night.
Never a resident, always a vampire. Flying in, sucking up the energy, then flying back out. But these quick trips kick up the bloodsucking a notch. (Last time was a visit to my publisher and photo shoot, this time a last-minute corporate offsite gig.)
“There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
On these quick trips, I like to let wherever I’m staying dictate where I go. This time I was staying near Wall Street, so I walked six miles, down to Battery Park for the sunset, then up the esplanade, then east to McNally Jackson to book shop, and finally back down through Chinatown while eating a heavenly strawberry ice cream cone that cost me $6 but tasted like $60.
My gig was on the lower east side, so I got to walk over to Katz’s and Russ & Daughters for the first time and load up on bagels and deli for the plane home. (My bags are stuffed and they smell heavenly.)
There’s still a little bit of funk around there, so I got to take a stroll before and after. Vampiring it up until next time. Now it’s time to board the plane for home.
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