rue

i visit the same cafe each morning. old habits, to ground. my feet have become raw from walking, pacing, tirelessly strolling through street after street of new.

yesterday, i sat down near shakespeare and company for an overpriced orange juice, something in my eye, a hangover dryly coursing through the circulating seine of my blood. three american girls freshly made-up and showered took a table in front of me, proceeding to speak some of the most asinine words i'd heard in awhile, i left them, and only later along boulevard st michel did i recall "are your croissant's here good?" "we totally have to go to argentina AND costa rica!" "machu pichu, that's my favorite song." and i thought about them with this mock, i've been here for five days assimilated superiority, and i looked at myself in the mirror of a storefront, with checkered gap flannel and black sweatshirt tied around my waist, grey american apparel t-shirt hugging my health-conscious torso, and starbucks, yes, starbucks iced green tea held in my right hand with too-long straw sticking out of its top and i laughed til i cried. the convulsions were from a sad wellspring and rising up became joyous and hysterical and self-conscious but all too pleasurable to deny as i went from one bench to another now in the jardin des luxembourg, frightening those across from and passing by my fluffy haired clown.

and then i laid down on one of the properly designated strips of lovely grass, with everything on my nerves dripping away.

5am

The first thing you notice about the Eiffel Tower is that it's ugly. From afar it's vertical and caged like one of those Zion machines from The Matrix movies. (Obviously it came first) then you get closer to the landmark and the height begins to do something wonderful, like Superman the Ride at Magic Mountain in California, even though obviously it came first, the tower. Then the base, the base is like a mechanical unmoving half spider which when glanced through maple trees becomes more and more ornate upon wide open viewing, the scale of its beauty obvious like something that came after.

SMC

This morning I was stopped in my car on the corner of Pico/20th, hours before the Santa Monica College shootings. For whatever reason, my attention was struck by a Powerball lottery sign outside of the liquor store, "believe in something bigger" it said. Grumpily or smug, I laughed to myself at the seemingly shameless merging of two perceived opiates, the debasing of spirituality for dumb hope, dumb belief in dumb luck. I was even about to take a picture with my cell phone when the light turned green and I drove onward. Now, I can't help but suspect that I noticed this sign for a different reason, not spiritual, nor a clue to go try my numbers. The something bigger, I believe is a human decency and logic, where in a modern society striving for peacefulness, there is a stark indecency in the availability of purposeless weaponry, specifically guns, designed, not for hunting or sport, but reckless violence and inevitable tragedy. The something bigger is knowing that we're capable of higher thoughts, feelings, actions than are capable with streets and homes stockpiled with brightly inane mechanisms of inhumanity without cause and hideous in effect. It's time as an advanced people to recognize that changes must be made in our laws, not to strip us of our liberties but to allow the return and acceleration of a flourishing of freedoms, to be able to sit in our cars and uninhibitedly wonder at the bigger things.

purple flowers

we're not making something out of nothing, we're chiseling off a chunk of everything. shaping, forming, providing distinct context to our knowing of existence. this is what we have to work with, these hands, arms, eyes, this body, heart, mind. a unique sensory experience to detect the environment, the invisible, a stripped away still different truth. time and life in enough agreeance for at least a sweet instant, a non-binding contract, month-to-month lease amended moment-to-moment and here we are and we're doing these things, some horrible, others feeling innately bountiful, all insightful. i don't know that art is a savior, i only feel the recognition intuitively. a farmer, greek playwright, naked philosopher, silent film actor, radio voice, a poem and a question.