Filed under: summertime
fickle thing.
it’s 62 degrees now.
tomorrow will be a sunny high of 76 degrees.
Wizard of Oz tomorrow at 8:30 PM — Pier 46. be there.
love (love!) this weather so much more than around this time last year.
Filed under: books
I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden–the role–of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible–indeed, it is common–to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.
This cannot be done my by memory, but by looking toward tomorrow, and so, to undo the horror, we repeat it.
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, p. 554
Filed under: in the city
see that picture?
up there.
with all the pretty colors.
that’s a picture the broja took on my rooftop. yea.
my rooftop. the manhattan skyline. silhouette. dusk. summer.
legendary.
but i don’t.
i can’t quite count the number of mornings i wake up wondering why my arm is bent in a ghastly position, why my mouth tastes like i ate a lemon (…that came back up, went back down, and came up again), and more seriously, whether or not my kidneys and liver have finally decided to call it quits.
just to clarify, that means there are too many of those mornings for me to even attempt to count.
but every time it happens, i’m at a loss. my cries of “whhhyyyyy???” go unanswered. the relief i need delivered only by the passing of time.
then there’s the foraging. it begins in my head. a cursory indexing of all the food i could possibly crave and a mental taste test to see if it would actually soothe my pain. when there’s nothing that sounds appealing, the semi-trained brain, knowing that i should at least eat something will reach for the last thing i found appetizing, which, hopefully, will still be the case. if i get it wrong, the body is quick to correct me.
i’ve got one more fry left from the cheese fries i ordered from Tick Tock. according to josh, carbs do nothing by themselves. it’s all in the grease. so i got grease and carbs. feeling a little better. though i credit time more than anything else.
the thing about this brain that forgets to drink water and forgets that there’s value in slow-and-steady, is also quick to forget the agony…very quick. all that lingers are memories of laughing, lots of laughing…and who wouldn’t want more of that?
oh and btw.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRANCIS!
Filed under: in the city
free drinks and schmoozing with the national champions of Rock Band last night. and that was just Monday.
