cutting great neck

today, august 22 2009; 2:00 a.m.

there's a lightning storm outside. a metallic flash, like a pinch in the sky behind the black obscured nothingness of trees, reverbreates through my window. i feel dulled, silenced, like the great tomes of time that have slowly degenerated into papyrus piles, collected in heaps across ancient tombs and museum libraries; the only thing that rejuvenates me, as the sounds of rain slide in and out of hearing, is the nostalgic songs on the most-played list of my itunes.

how uncultural.

i find that birthdays are often dull and silent. they're trifling and, when depicted as days to observe upon the future and the amorphous prospects that have yet to reveal themselves, often depressing.

sometimes, the thought that all these years--1- to 15--have all been utilized, all been chucked out like used clothes or garbage, has debilitated even the most optimistic of minds. the thought that life encompasses no second chances, and that the passage of one year does not represent the renewal of another but rather an extension of this one, is disconcerting at the least--the thought that i'll never be 15 again, never be able to experience this year again...



to me, birthdays are reflections on a year well- or ill-spent, of a year productive or redundant, a year spent learning, or a year spent forgetting.

15: it was grand.



the crickets have returned to their stances. they ring off in hidden trees, in inky scaffolds, swirling trees, swirling stars, giant flames of crooning insects leaping into the sky like church steeples. a song--the fifth one on the most played--starts, at the moment, and, memories--of israel, of childhood, fields and fields and more black fields penetrating the horizon, obdurate and yet so remarkable in their power, creative power for a lack of a better word, like Van Gogh's The Starry Night...

...and now a Diane Keaton song from Annie Hall--Seems like old times... having you to walk with...

and how i wish i could have lived in the city, in the 70s, in the 60s... the night--slow, dripping. buildings swaying in the distance, their lights fixed stubbornly somewhere in space.



time is like clouds. when one tries to focus on the larger picture--or rather unfocus, or gaze at a different object, like a tree or a building--the clouds seemed so fixed, so unyielding. but when you start looking at the clouds--at their edges, at their shapes--they move, they tremble, they shift at an adament speed. perhaps that's how time seems like to me--so stable and so immovable when you seem trapped in it, when you try to look at the world as a whole as being a part of time. and then, when you start concentrating on the little things--on last month, how you met someone you liked--or how you got that A--time seems to swish off by.

it's 3:09 in the a.m. here in long island and my eyes are slowly shutting. i'm about to snuggle into my andrew jackson biography and fall asleep in my own warm bed after two weeks of nomadic ritualizing across canada. post tomorrow. night.