Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The outside walls and columns of 30th Street Station extended high into an abnormally hot and blue October sky. I wondered what terrific and earnest work must have been involved in their erection. Italian stonecutters and laborers of every breed. If you removed a column, would the stone canopy above us fall? It didn't seem so. What if you removed them all? Even then. Everything seemed fixed in place by some immutable, ethereal force. It was stronger than a building: it was an idea. Below it cabs of various colors, many two-tone, drove in and out to pick up fares.

Monday, October 29, 2007

I decided to watch the last quarter of the Eagles game at our new bar, Dive 75. Beside me sat a couple, seemed like regulars. Someone else joined them and asked the obligatory questions, what've you done this weekend.

"I had the twelve-hour flu," the guy said. "You've heard of the twenty-four-hour flu. I had the twelve-hour flu."

He seemed all right to me. Prolly fully recovered. Did seem a tiny bit jaundiced though. Had that salty-eye look we've all been cultivating, what with the bars we frequent and the happenstance foods.

The Eagles stood up on defense, unlike last week. Last week is a story for tomorrow.

I left my tip and left a bit furtively, out to the crisp, fall air around the street.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

I'm coming down with affluenza.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 2

He shuffled to the window and stood up to it, terrified by what might have darkened the morning. He looked up at what he thought would be the sky and saw a ceiling of grass, ornamented with bands of cement and wider ones of tar. Trees and bushes hung down, their leaves and branches reaching toward the dark.

He looked down. There was an immense chasm, a vast, gray maw; it made a sound everywhere like a great inhalation.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

It's Just a Fucking Thing That Happened

Funny thing about mutation, natural selection and evolution: Even the most rational, science minded among us want to believe it's all pointing somewhere, that there's some kind of irreproachable merit to the process, some kind of reason if not design. Funny thing is, there isn't. A mutation - a generally unhappy thing - occurs by accident. And because accidents are governed by chance, very occasionally it's not unhappy. Others fail to reproduce and we have evolution. But there's it's neither here nor there. It's just a fucking thing that happened.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

One day shortly after I moved in in a pile of dark debris materialized on our roof deck. Old iron ladder fragments, trapezoids of bent, heavy grating. Elements of the roof itself, it seemed, fixtures of the building itself, regurgitated before us. In the middle of it all, a twisted and weatherworn deck chair, pressed into two dimensions.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 1

There was some kind of parade going on outside.

"What is it?" she said.

A muffled cacophony of whistles, drums and tubas.

"I don't know. Italian Day?"

"There's no such thing as Italian Day."

"I was only joking."

From their perspective on the bed they saw the Star-Spangled Banner floating by. A little jumpily so you could tell someone was holding it up.

"There goes the American flag anyway," she said.

A moment passed.

"Should we check it out?" he said.

"I can't move," she said. "I'm full to bursting with banana pancake."

Another moment. Then –

"Do you think –" he said, but then and there they were plunged toward the ceiling that they had for many months beheld together; they fell heavily upon it, the plaster cool and hard beneath their naked flesh, and the futon and frame bounced once on their backs, and came to a smothering rest upon them. He hit his nose and mouth, unable in his bewilderment to put his arms before his face. She fell a bit more on her shoulder, as she'd been facing him a little in their bed, her hand on his chest. They thrashed and cursed beneath their burden.

"Jesus!"

"Fuck!"

They managed to crawl out either side and face each other above the bottom of the frame. A deep murmur of dismay and terror emerged within her and rolled into a moan. The sound of someone sliding over a precipice.

"What the fuck just happened?!" she said.

He got up on his knees without an answer. She crawled around the mattress to him and was momentarily distracted from her dread by the sight of blood dripping down his chin and falling in rich drops upon the milky white ceiling, wispy with webs.

"Are you OK, baby?"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Baby," she said, "we're upside down."