HERE I AM

(Lava Tube, from And Cheese, 2013)

I go to the small places, if the party scene is too loud for me I find spaces underneath furniture, behind the fridge, under the covers of some one's bed and make myself as small as possible and wait.

During the time I was most afraid of Satan and demons possessing my soul I was out in this field stretched between my friend Ben's house and the Episcopalian church my mother would take me four times a year.  It was dark and a few of us were playing hide and seek.  It was my turn and I was determined to stay hidden for far longer than the others.  I found a nice hole in the ground that was surrounded by scrubs and yuccas and curled into a ball.  Time passed slowly in that hole and I could hear their voices holler in the distance, "Did you find him yet?""Where the hell is he?".  I kept at it, that human ball.  Their voices came closer and I grew excited, I didn't want to be found but at the same time I wanted to get out of that hole and join my friends again.  I kept quiet, someone even jumped over me.  What felt like half an hour passed by and I was sure I now held the record for longest hide-n-go-seek time ever.  When the second person jumped over me I immediately got up and yelled, "HERE I AM!"  Sean nearly tripped when he landed, they were all surprised to see me there, covered in dirt with thorns and all.

I had to run away that one night, my friend was leaving in the morning, all my things were there.  That was my bed for the weekend, the doors all locked behind him.  In some alternative universe I would've gotten to know someone better, create more inside jokes with a stranger, and let a moment carry on into the next.  The door closed and drunkenly I returned to the norm.  Over time those moments are all acknowledged and perhaps I grew too used to the saying, What happens happens: everything has meaning but most of it is meaningless to us, especially in the moment.

That saying came out of this one encounter and has haunted me since.  I was living in Chinatown at the time and I was going to art school.  I was across the street of the school where this religious paraphilia shop was (that doesn't exist anymore) when all of a sudden this stranger approached me, looked me in the eyes, and gave me the most beautiful smile.  I was catch off guard, and almost frozen in the scene as she carried on wherever she was going.  I could've ran after her, made something up in one or two seconds that declares that I'm not a weirdo, nor creep, just curious, curious like a boy but man enough to do something.  I couldn't think of anything and so I let it pass me.  Deep down I knew something, that that moment was too significant, that that person wasn't just a passerby, and that I will end up seeing them again and again.  I also told myself I won't let her slip away.  Damnit, I won't.
Months passed by and as I was walking with a group of friends there she was again, at the same school I was going to, and that eye contact, that smile, and this time I mustered a smile and she smiled harder.  She is playing a game I imagine.  Months passed and spring was on its way.  One day, I went to meet a friend and there she is, trapped in a room and that would be the last time we saw each other as strangers.  And that would be the last time we saw each other as strangers, as strangers, as strangers.

A letter was written years later.  I said everything I had to say on one US Letter standard, typed on a typewriter, then corrected by pen by hand and given in a moment that was carefully orchestrated, a trap was set, a scheme schemed, and I made things happen.

And that was the last time we saw each other as strangers.

Then another letter was written (there were several in fact but this one was very particular).  It said a lot of stuff in it and it summed up everything from the first letter to that particular moment.  It was also handwritten, corrected by pen by hand but this time it had instructions.  Like the first letter it was read with my presence in the room and like that first one I wanted to run away, never more awkward of a moment.

And that was the last time we saw each other as strangers.

Under some pile of winter coats, scarves, and beanies is a blanket and under that blanket is a full-grown man that appears to be sleeping but is completely awake with eyes open.  He doesn't look you in the eyes but just stares off, perhaps in shock that he was discovered.  He is still in the dirt, curled up in a human ball, surrounded by scrubs and yuccas in a dark night somewhere in New Mexico fearing the devil and wanting to be with friends again.  At the same time he wants to disappear.  He is neither and eventually he looks you in the eyes and the movie ends with a suggestion that the two hook up.

And that was the very last time we saw each other as strangers.

Y'Knot

(Yu Sum and Denn, at their house, 2013)

I've lost count at the amount of times I have been asked why my parents moved to Hawai'i.  The most common answer I reply with is, spoken cooly: Why not?.

I have never tried to properly articulate the answer, nor had I really proposed the question to myself.  It just made sense that they moved there, or rather my mother's desire to be there.  There is no way to properly answer that question, at least not without saying, "Long story short...".  But there is no long story short, just long story.

The ocean has always been a significant place in my life.  From as far as I can remember I always found comfort in its presence.  I always wanted to live by it, it was always something that I had been reaching for.  Retracing my past it was always a destination.  When my family lived in Toronto, we would venture down south to Florida to stay by the Atlantic, when we lived in New Mexico it was California and the Pacific, in Texas it was either Galveston, South Padre, or Penescola for the Gulf.  The end of a journey was always marked by the arrival to the ocean and for my parents now they have finally arrived.

If one were seeking out the presence of the ocean their entire life what better place than a remote island.  There are few places in Hawai'i, especially Maui one can not know of the ocean's presence, let alone its sight.  It is so ubiquitous that there is a reversed proportioning of land to sea: where as on the mainland there is the ocean as a shoreline and opposite is a land that continues far greater than one can see to the horizon over the ocean.  In Hawai'i, the land rarely forms a horizon.  And when land does it is often a neighboring island in the horizon, to which one can always see how dwarfed it is by its scale in a vast infinite sea which surrounds its edges.

God B'wy

(Sisters, 2013)

I can't say I lost you, at least not to your face.  I can write it here and I know there won't be any objections.  A distance has been growing between us for a while now and for the first time ever I feel like an adult, especially when I say goodbye.  

I remember that last night we shared together, how I left early knowing that there was no proper way to say goodbye.  I held in my mind many ways to do it, I tried to make one or two of those happen but they didn't.  I told myself it wasn't your fault, that you had people to see, and goodbyes to say.  We had dinner one last time and in the amber glow of a street at night we hugged.  I whispered something I can't remember into your ear and we held each other for some time.  Michelle was there, looking at us.  I didn't see her with my eyes as they were closed but I could feel her presence.  I can't remember the last time we were alone.  I said it sincerely then I had to be a joker and say, as my final words to you, "Smell ya later."  

The truth is I'm not sure if we will ever see each other again.  See, as in see each other the same way.  Nor do I claim to know what the future holds, how we will feel, how we will see, and the matter of all of that.  All I know is now: that I stopped carrying Liam on my shoulders, speaking for his absence, and acting like he was still in the room with us.  The other day I came across an old recording I had made, one that I recorded right after a certain phone call with you.  I remember that moment very well as I didn't have the strength to talk to you, I was afraid your voice would break my heart and that my voice grew more burdensome to you.  Instead of talking I just played, I Need You by America.  Hearing your silence and the song playing felt like forever passing, eventually after the second chorus I hung up.
***

The phone rang, it wasn't the usual ring but a distinct ring tune I programmed just for you.  I answered and waited, I heard nothing on the other side; I would've preferred heavy breathing from some serial murder to the silence.  Eventually your voice broke the silence, it was that fragile side to your voice, the one that worked like a key to some deep crevice within me.   

I used to have this gut feeling about you.  I franticly been looking for it everywhere like a mother lost child.  For years, for a long time I kept piling up fuel for a fire that had long been extinct.  I used you as a reason why my heart wasn't in it with others.  It was easier that way, but perhaps easy is the wrong word here.  There is no other way of explaining it.  I had always been lost, as well as I have always been alone.  What I tried hard to forget in those Infinite Moments we shared was that fact, but the truth is I never felt like I belonged (to you, and who I was to you).  The heartbreak that followed our falling out wasn't losing you and that place you gave me in your life but realizing that fact was fact, proven by trial and rectified by failure.  

To say something that shimmers with the warmth of hope here: All the love I have ever known, which has been many, with many faces, was all my own.  To those I thought it was for, they may have helped that grow, may have helped me discover it, but it had always been there, within me, and it took me believing in it and in myself for it to have ever been realized.  It took me a while but I finally have it.  There aren't faces nor names to place with this love, no this one is uncomplicated, never runs away (here one day and not the other), this one stays, it has picked me up time after time, and it hasn't never done me wrong, no, never, ever, ever, FOREVER, EVER-EVER.

TILL THE BREAK OF DAWN, TILL THE BREAK OF DAWN.  

Madness pt.3

(Something in the Works, 2013)

That feeling of missing becomes something without a shape. I can recall details: a smile, a face that holds that smile, scent, the shimmer in the eyes, and the feeling of being around this person and that person.  But something feels missing from the missing, that it is hard to imagine that person right now and here, that there are no caveats to the memory of that person around me in the scenery that is this place.  All there is is no lived experience of a place that only holds reference to Jackie Chan and kung-fu movies, a slight resemblance to Chinatown back home, and the few memories my father recalling of his homeland.  After that everything is new, and perhaps that is the excitement of being here.
Before arriving people would tell me about China, about how they knew someone that went and had changed.  Some of those people even returned to live there.  It is too earlier to point out what has changed in me, to acknowledge an alternative self, or if it was China that had the majority of the affect on me or if it was the experience of being with my entire family for the first time in over a decade.  Witnessing how we have changed, how we have grown apart, situated in a different circumstance from each other seemed to be an analogy to what China has become.  From my father's notion of the China, the China he had escaped, the Red China, the Mao China, the one that seemed too hard to speak of, the one that recalls memories of struggle and violent change.  That China was gone and in the void was a man in his late-60's seeing a new country from fifty years of being away.
Eventually the things I thought were strange, different, and even this notion of madness would subside to the everyday.  A child naked from the waist down is being held by his mother as he pees on to the street, the strong smell of urine in particular spots on the street, the cutest dogs ever, the massive crowds, the part of the street where cars, tuk-tuks, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycle, and people all struggle to move in each of their directions, the honking, the hawking, the spitting, the mixture of music, and the street sounds eventually fade to the opposite of white noise, a pattern from the chaos of everything happening all at once.  From how people looked here, communicating, selling, and buying, how it did not seem to phase them, that understanding of their everyday made it normal to me, or at least closer to understanding it.
Arriving in Shanghai was something else, I was still in mainland and yet I felt like I was somewhere far from the past ten days.  The same sense of order I knew from North America was here, walking was less challenged, the eyes need not pan and scan the surrounding in search of a steadily approaching vehicle, the sidewalks without vendors, the spitting down to a minimal, and the order of the buildings, of the overall was something I understood from the experience of living in a cosmopolitan city.  I had a good feeling about this place, as if I was searching for something, that something was just about to be found.  It was so close I could smell it.  And then I heard it, a whisper from the wind, "Are you ready?".

Madness pt.2

(Michelle and Maya in Dundas, 2013)

Early morning and there was that light blue hue to everything around.  Just behind the tuk-tuk driver I watched his hair flap and dance in the wind as the street scene unfolded.  It looked like a place that hadn't changed in a long time, everything fixed, old advertisement covered second story walls, and plastic burned in designated spots.  This was the old my mind told me, comparing it to the modernized Beijing I had seen the day before.  There again, yesterday felt like a while ago.  So-so-so long ago that song went.

I looked like an idiot.  A complete fool.  The dogs were barking at me as I got closer with my camera.  All around me were locals watching me get closer and reading the signs of the dogs.  The dogs were wild and had their own place in Pingyao.  There were puppies there and I cannot resist the charm of puppies.  Dogs were barking by my legs and yet I stay there, even getting closer until one came real close, its fur touching my fur.  I started to run out of there and I felt being chased as what was directly behind was obscured by my imagination and fear of possibility getting rabies.  I must have outrun them or they just didn't care to keep chase as the sun set.
We rode tuk-tuks again, packing my entire family while the other carried all of our luggage.  Imagine two motorized rickshaws: one carrying five adult human beings while the other was devoted to carrying all their possessions.  This image seemed to carry with me the entire trip, and even before the journey started the notion of "mental weight" was dawning on me.  It came up on a hike after a friend of mine lost a precious bracelet, we were all high out of our minds in the middle of the woods and she lost that thing.  We spent time looking for it but no success, it had become part of the woods.  Eventually we had to push on as the sun was getting to that place in the sky.  Though the physical weight of the bracelet passed by day to day undetected its mental weight lingers; its significance, its sentimental value, its memory were all too important to keep on travels and yet she carried it with her, as a keepsake and a reminder.  We tend to leave things at home we wish not to lose but there are some special things we keep with us to represent something or someone as we are away.  There was a book buried deep in the backpack I was living out of for the trip.  It is sealed in a ziplock bag and it is very old.  I had no immediate plans to read it it just had to come along.  There is something in an object that has been places and has been owned by people, who also took it places as well.  It is usually objects that only find value to us and that they lack exchangeable value, such as used shoes (these are my magic shoes), an old camera that your father or mother shot with when they were your age, a book, a hat, and lucky jewelry.  When those things are lost there is a release of mental weight, but because it has been weighing down for so long the gravity is missed and so it is we can often forget we are lighter and no longer have to bare the weight of the past.  That bracelet was buried somewhere in Dundas, Ontario, where it will never get more lost than it is found in those woods.
A piece of luggage falls from the tuk-tuk ahead and our driver laughs and yells at his friend driving.  We carry on and make it to the train station late at night.  They're playing a Jackie Chan movie on an old television set and this is the first and only time I will see Jackie Chan on my trip.  The train arrives, first appearing as a distant light floating in the darkness of a small town, then it grows and creates silhouettes of guards on wait.  On board everyone appears to be asleep, occasional someone peeks over and then acts like they were sleeping.  I quickly climbed up to the third bunk and passed out.  No window to fall asleep to, no way to see if the moon was shining, just snores and coughs and the sound of a train rolling on tracks.  Sleep-sleep-sleep.

Madness pt.1

(Some works in the works, 2013)

Just when the days were getting longer they're turned upside down. They were just as long but they started earlier and ended when things were just getting started.  And it being twelve hour of time difference I never knew what time it was as the actual time competed with my mental notion of time, and so for three weeks in China I looked at my watch with an abstract understanding and forgot what day it was completely.  I still don't know what day it is.

I remember seeing open doors for the first time, walking through the crowded streets in Beijing, there, open, families interacting, and I being able to see what they were doing, who they were, and them not giving me any mind as what they were seeing, me on the street, this staring and lost outsider fades into their everyday.  Often single lights would hang from the center of small rooms lighting everyone in as much golden light as shadow.  Where the room ended was only suggested by the lack of what could be seen, and the scene itself would soon pass as I carried on down the street.  Apartment after apartment mixed with smells that would vary each few feet and the moving crowd's configuration that would shift making my walking motions move me to the left, to the right, stop, and hurry up.
In all the rambling around me in a language I did not understand the only interruptions would be in English and would not be informative or delightful to hear as it was always someone trying to sell me something, these refreshments, these souvenirs, this mode of transport, or this place to eat.  Some were more aggressive than others while some could see a cheapskate right away.  I wondered if this is what you meant by "madness", that word that introduced me to this place, and something I had been looking for since I arrived (maybe even earlier than that).
We met a long-haired man that reminded me of my father, perhaps because he looked very Chinese, young, and always had a smile on his face.  It is those traits I saw in the long-haired man that owned the Quiet Bar by the river that my image of my father no longer possessed, whose hair was shorter and no longer looked foreign, different, but just a familiar stranger that hardly ever smiled.  We drank Tsing Tao's while watching tourists and locals interact below: tuk-tuks carrying white visitors in their tourist uniforms and an ancient bell tower just beyond, what change that lonely tower must have seen over the years.  Later we were walking down an alleyway full of shops and American Rock & Roll, every time I saw a white person look at me I wondered if they knew they could hold a conversation with me, that I came from somewhere similar to where they came from.  I don't know why I thought this each and every time a white person looked at me and perhaps I just wondered what they saw, if I blended in or if they knew I was half them, and all of them (being a visitor and an outsider to understanding all of this (points to any busy street in China)).
Walking alone a British girl looked at me reading on the curb with locals and smiled.  I wondered if I should have followed her, asking her where she was from, wanting to learn anything about this stranger just to have a conversation.  In my head I couldn't get past the first few motions in a preemptive conversation to declare I wasn't selling her something, that I just wanted to speak in my native tongue with someone who I wasn't travelling with.  She passed by and soon disappeared into the crowd and I never saw her again in my life.
We rented bikes on our last night in Beijing and got drunk.  Riding drunk through Beijing was just like riding drunk back home, and even though it has been a few days into this trip home felt like a long way away right then and there.  Perhaps it was me seeing the future for the past, that I knew this trip was long and it had just started, with many more places, people, moments, and emotions to go through before I can start thinking of home again.  So each passing day made the previous two seem like weeks ago as we carried on via train, bus, tuk-tuk, small van, bike, ferry, and airplane.  Where and what was this madness you were talking about, I was beginning to think that I could only understand that if I were to replace my eyeballs with your eyeballs and spent some time in your shoes doing what you do and seeing what you see.  Eventually I would come to realized the madness, but by then I'd be consumed by it...

Withrow

(United (from Withrow), from We Soon Be Nigh!, 2013)

Both the background character and the subject of reality television share a relationship to the real as well as to the viewer.  With Extras we see a living color filling scenes with life and with the subjects of reality television we often see an ordinary person stimulate interest through its observation and framing.  Both depict the everyday, the intra-ordinary, the impossible nothingness from ordinary actions and ordinary-looking people.  In films they orient us to the scene as well as our reactions as they form a mass, a micro-democracy.  And on television they are presented to us with flaws and imperfections, dressed ordinarily, living a life not too different from our own, and this only brings us closer to this subject of the everyday.  It is their obtainability and the notion that they are just like someone you know or even yourself.

With Withrow, a house on Withrow Avenue becomes the subject to a series of incidents between a family of four.  The narrative within the household is both a parody of reality television (Intervention) and of biographical fiction based on my own experiences growing up in an environment similar to the one depicted.  The presentation of the film is split into three channels, with two that split narrative into two perspectives and with the third forming a background that depicts the surrounding neighborhood.  In its installation it is impossible to view the narrative from one vantage point alone, forcing the viewer to move between screens.  

The dialogue that happens between each character conflicts the depiction of a filmic reality.  Though their actions are realistic, the tone and intensity in their voices true to the human condition, their words form an absurdity to the film as they speak in Walla.  They are saying nothing but they are saying everything all at the same time.  From all the arguments I have witnessed, from my own family to reality television and cinema, they all say the same things, reaching the same levels of intensity and tension, someone cries, someone is broken, and their repetition is so constant that I tend to forget why they are arguing in the first place.  The question I place before the viewer is whether the subject of reality television or the real-life situation differ from those characters found in the background, performing actions of the everyday so well they are undetected by the viewer.  When the ordinary appears to be nothing...

Walking down any given street, I wonder to what might be going on in any given household.  Is that same wonder so far off from the same interest and attraction that reality television and Extras provide?  A splice of life and a complete disregard to the integrity of reality, whether something is constructed, scripted, or real it seems to matter not as the representation and mimicry have replaced the real.    

Lizard

(Summer 2006)

Perhaps too much could be said with silence, and perhaps too much can be seen with distance.

That voice, she really had a sexy voice, but not sexy like Hollywood: red lipstick smoking (she did smoke), blonde hair, and looking dangerous sexy, no, it was something that had no uniform and words to form a crude substitute for something that had it going on.  I fell forwards and nestled my boyish face in her American flag shirt and just rested there for an entire summer.  Or I wished I had...

Her name was Lizard, she didn't have scales nor did she need the warmth of the sun to disgust.  She was bad for all the best reasons and she walked without an attitude, she just simply was.  We had made up stories of how we actually met, one was that I was getting off work when I saw her and pointed to her shirt and then to mine, we both sported the American flag.  That would be the story we'd tell people, as if the truth was so bad it could not be known.  Her eyes would stare right into mine and I'd look down, hiding from the brilliance.  I was older than her but she could see I was still a boy.  She smoked.  My mother told me she would avoid dating smokers in her day, she never told me exactly why but it seemed to imply it was because of a bit of attitude, a bit of smell, and bad taste in your mouth if you kissed them.  She wrote poetry and when she read her stuff I was surprised it was good, not that I was an expert nor great at it myself but she had talent.  She danced and had that dancer's figure, her hair would cover her eyes and they'd bleed through.  I still couldn't look for too long.

During that summer I must've written a hundred poems for her, along with at least two mixtapes, and took many photographs but years later, once I am more than twice removed all I can remember is what happened once summer ended.  And so the rest goes, somewhere in Markham or was it Richmond, at a particular Chinese food restaurant, with my two sisters, and my uncle and his family, I remember receiving a text message followed by another.  I let them come, one by one and returned to the table, and fell silent in thought.  I did a lot of thinking that summer, I lost hours of sleep almost every night just thinking, and all with one cause.  Lizard.  That and I was really making progress in my fourth attempt at Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  And eventually I got a call, my pocket vibrated and I looked around the table, I had to get it, and so I left the restaurant, and listened to the voice coming from within my hand.  Her voice wasn't the same, that sexy beyond words was the same, she wasn't the same, and yet her voice wasn't different from how I remember it nor was she.  She wanted to see me, after failed attempts to meet, after I had waited long hours at this meeting point and that, and going home after an hour sometimes two, and having nothing to vent my frustration, just some tears into a pillow, perhaps a few punches to my mattress before falling asleep.  That voice on the line asked and I can't remember what I said and I would like to think I said nothing and that she knew I was done. I remember the pillar, the warmth of summer, that bush-like plant in a planter looking over a strip mall parking lot.  The clap of my flip phone echos till today.  I hadn't stopped caring for her, nor did I never want to see her again, I had transcended my need to be the boy who fell in love with her.

That night I finished Zen and was left with a great accomplishment.  I wonder today which one was harder, ending a sad story or finishing that book.  The person that was born by that pillar on the warm summer, with Chinese food on his breath still lives on today, and never has a moment been so sharp in my memory of how I came into being.

For long after that summer of the Lizard I wondered if I could ever love, if it existed within me, and if there was such a human being to help me find it.  I think deep down inside me there was a voice that hadn't been listened to in a long time saying, "Yes, YOU WILL.  YOU WILL FIND LOVE, AND BE OVERWHELMED BY IT, AND IT WILL END ONLY TO BEGIN AGAIN, AND IT WILL END, YES, ONLY TO BEGIN AGAIN, AGAIN, AGAIN (echo-echo-echo)...I'LL BE BACCCCKKKK".

THE WAR ON MORE

(That Foggy Night in Galveston, TX, 2004)

Something in the falling time where all is quiet and shut into small little boxes.  Each moment passes, and it is all too fleeting to wonder right then, what is the meaning behind this?  There is that sand covered smile, interrupted with spitting and hair in the eyes.  The air is just right, the crashing waves, the sober gone and replaced with a stupor welcoming me.  My hands don't know me anymore and they just let go, dangling without dangling, holding on to something, and I watch myself from far away.  People pass us by and we carry on uninterrupted.  The sunsets and the glow of fire is all around.  Nothing.  Dig a hole in the sand, and bury us deep, and so we go.

Deep.

I can't repeat this.  With each it's unique, and with each is only the once.  I wonder what my grandpa used to say when something fell over and someone was reaching over to pick it up.  I never knew him well but I'd imagine him saying, "What has fallen can fall no more than it has already."  And so the broom would just rest there, the photo album on the ground, the chair tipped over and unbroken in one piece, resting there too, on the ground.  Once the sound of the crash echoes down the hall and into the ears of whoever is around, after all that whatever damage was made is made and can no longer grow or recede. 

It took five months to find every bottle and flask my grandpa hid in his house.  My uncle shown me one of his father's flask and told me it was his father’s favorite.  Out of all the flasks he owned this ordinary one, dull from being in his breast pocket for decades, dull from being thrown around and taken to this place and to that, and perhaps was even as old as my grandfather's time in Ireland was his favorite.  I often wonder how much liquor that flask carried over the years, where it had been, but most importantly how it looks from inside as I searched for the light outside reflecting from within.  Like the legs of a pier the salt of the sea along with the motion of ocean have taken their toll on anything man-made.

Not. This. One.  Repeated each and every time.  Not this one.  Sometimes a please is added.  Who was I talking to (God, myself, the person that made those words within me?)  When I act cool, when I appear to be relaxed, contemplative and composed I am at best a good liar.  When I fail to speak when I had so much to say prior to that fall in silence it means I want to say something honest, that has been on my mind a long time, just now, or maybe a few days, and everything but that thing I wanted to say is irrelevant, small talk to the big-big talk.  I lock up, the brakes kiss the machined surface, as I try to figure out how to say it.  Eventually the silence fades, I either say what I needed to say and carry on embracing the future, or you pick up the pieces and carry on for us.  It's just when you look at me like I haven't been looked at in a long time, that attention, that depth, and then...

We get out of here.  We take to the road to meet up with Buggaboo out on an island three hours north. There is something about that car you drive that just seems to scream good times.  Good times beyond the times we had in it, that I know you are constantly having good times in it with every trip, even when the good times are bad times, good times (if that makes any sense).  We share various fruits and drink one giant Arizona and we forget about it and it spills over my camera.  We stop to run on some old country road by a water tower, marked with wherever we are's name.  Passing cars slow down, first seeing the car doors open wide and then me running at full speed and finally finishing the narrative with you running ahead.  What is the meaning behind this? 

I remember the sunset coming in through your window and it was one of those images that cannot be photographed; red glowing sunlight bleeding through your hair, the reflection bouncing off the rearview mirror and on to your eyes, the tree line breaking up the sun rapidly.  You looking off to the road ahead unaware of the beauty of the moment, looking like you're used to this sort of thing, or maybe it’s just all me.  We stop for food along the way and I see you eat meat for the first time.  Night falls by the time we arrive at the ferry.  The moon is out and I can see that famous shrine of a portopotty by the port station house.  There in the distance is the ferry, the car is quiet now that the engine is off, we look to see the moon hovering close enough to the sea to see the ripples of moonlight.  And in that moment I see many others: there is Galveston on those many evening rides out there but most of all I remember that one time in particular when the fog came in and swallowed southern Texas whole.  The crew and I drove throw the fog with only a few feet of visibility in front of us, Beck's Sea Change was playing, I was glad Shea let me switch up the Sublime for that ride.  When we arrived at the seawall it was like there was nothing beyond the fog, as if the world ended there, an impossible distance.  

There was that time I was with my father waiting for hours for the ferry in South Padre and when we finally got on the ferry at 1am the moon also hovered low.  The ocean met with darkness and that darkness was breached by the moon creating these shiny ripples.  Now there was this, the ferry arrived, we drove on and parked and went upstairs.  For a moment we held each other like an old couple, the moon and us.  There was this feeling of knowing that there was this beautiful and indescribable moment about to happen, happening, and I knew it was coming, and I knew it was here, and I couldn't tell when it started but all I knew is I never wanted it to end.  We threw pennies on the lip of the ferry in hopes it will join the many others that have landed there and somehow managed to stay.  We wondered what the "Muster Station" was and soon the island was amongst us.  On the island the sky was illuminated with a yellow glow as clouds passed over the moon, taking their time.  We finally arrived, and yet I wished we could've kept on going, from one moment into the next, and other things indescribable.  

The War on MORE.  It is a story about one person's encounters with things sad and things wonderful and how the sadness kept coming like a soft-serve ice cream machine that filled the cone but didn't stop, it just kept pouring and what was once delightful was a messy frustration.  Then there are wonderful moments such as the main character falling in love with a stranger off the street, they get to know each other, and at first they spend as much time with each other, dropping out of their social spheres and getting little sleep, but then they have to go back to their separate lives, getting a healthy amount of sleep, working, and seeing their friends from time to time.  The protagonist longs for this new thing that came into his life and that gave everything a glimmer of delight.  He longs for it, and soon forgets the wonderful things that lay fresh in his memory and to cherish them, to remember what he had gotten.  It is a bit of cheesy story, the romantic elements are predictable and you don't really like any of the characters enough to really relate to them but for what its worth it made me realized what I had.  Sometimes you need to have things shaken up, and that there are wonderful and sad moments to be had, we need to observe them, give them air to breathe and to let them be absorbed into us.  The sad moments help us realize the good times, but they also test our strength and keep us lean of baggage.  And then there are the wonderful moments that stay and stay and stay with us.  And though sometimes we might not realize at the time how wonderful they truly are, it is best to enjoy them as they happen, without thinking too much, and once they pass let them be, and be glad they ever visited.  That is when they becoming meaningful.  The story ends with this line: It is the same as it is better to have loved and lost than to never to have loved at all but to go further; to be graced, to have experienced, and to come out of that knowing, the new person is within you as a seed in time grows…love this person and not the memory.