Honey Dripper

(Stealth Site No.1, 2011)

We lost him. Never been sure enough about anything. I sat there watching the road move in reserve, the yellow dotted stripes slowly passing like star trails during warp speed. The rain came rolling down the window, my eyes were dry but I felt like I was crying, watching the darkness of the world creep into my very soul. Every now and then headlights would shine through the darkness, coming close to hitting us, and veer just in time, just in the nick of time, and pass by. Darkness returns until the next car, or truck. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with this bus driver.

Jimmy Page was a chocolate lab, I took him everywhere I went, not that I did a whole lot of traveling, he was just always there, with me, waiting for me to return from work, waiting for me to finish my shower before finding his favorite spot to sleep, at the end of bed. I never married, not that it is too late for that, nor did I have children, which was too late for that. And I was fine with all that, as I walked Jimmy Page through the park, throwing him a tennis ball with my catch/toss stick. Sometimes I'd imagine myself deaf, blind, and mute, and when I really let myself go into that idea I imagined Jimmy Page being able to guide me through my world, he would save me from a burning building, a vandal on the street biting him in the boys. Perhaps I would never know my life was being saved, the world would be lined with fur and sharp things, all darkness, just that fur keeping me there, safe, never alone. I started to cry, thinking of what that dog would have to go through if I had lost all those senses, walking aimlessly, and depending completely on him. He would carry the weight of two on his shoulders.

The snow hasn't fallen, it is actually quite warm for November, the sun is out, and on a day everyone was expecting rain it is quite lovely weather. I can't help but feel miserable, like a part of me has been removed, and perhaps that is more true than anything. Something is missing.

There is a moment just after I wake up that I feel free of this feeling, like it was a bad dream and I escaped. There is no mercy from my feelings, my dog, my Jimmy Page died. I feel caged in a small box just large enough to fit my bent over body, the walls are cold and the tips of my fingers stick to its surface. Everyday this box oscillates from bigger to smaller, on the days it is smaller I can't help but feel absolutely lost. On the days it is bigger I can appear to be happy, content with life, which is far from the truth, what if I went blind, lose my hearing, and worst, I can't talk, what then, who will be there for me. Not Jimmy Page, as much as his spirit was with me, he was very much not here anymore.

One day, wearing my shirt that has Jimmy Page's portrait on it with the numbers, 1999 - 2011, a coworker of mine asked me if I believed in reincarnation. I never gave it any thought, thinking it was some Buddhist stuff about watching where you step, not to eat animals, and to believe life never ends -it just takes on another form. She told me that she once had a rabbit when she was a girl, and that one day it stopped moving. She had carried it around for hours before her parents realized that her rabbit was dead. She was seven when this happened and instead of her parents telling her that her rabbit, Fluffles, had gone to rabbit heaven, they told her that it went on to become another animal. Sofia, my coworker telling me this story, tells me she didn't believe her parent's words, that she was too sad at the loss of her dear Fluffles that she didn't want to imagine him anywhere but here in her arms. It wasn't until she went on a camping trip with her parents when she came across a frog by a small pond. The frog stood there, watching young Sofia slowly approach him, and when her small little fingers came climbing over his head he didn't move, he let her take him into her hands. Sofia looked long and hard into the frog's eyes, she saw something in them. After about a minute of this staring contest she let him down, the frog stood there for a moment before jumping away into the bush somewhere. Sofia, the one which has turned into adult, tells me she believes Fluffles, her rabbit, found new life in the form of that frog. And that she was happy, knowing that he was free now, beyond any kind of Heaven, he was to roam the earth in all walks of life. Something in her words struck me, gave me peace, and that night I found sleep that wasn't followed by tears. I prayed to Buddha, I asked him where my Jimmy Page was, what was he now, if I could see him again, to have a moment like Sofia's, to say goodbye, I really needed to say goodbye.

Every minute of free time I had I spent on looking for Jimmy Page. In those days I was neither happy nor sad, but anything was better then how I was feeling prior to Sofia's words. I read everything on the subject of Reincarnation, with a focus on pets being reincarnated. I came across personal accounts of owners finding their pets in new forms, they all talked like they had been abducted by aliens, no one believed them, only the ones who knew their pain and didn't give up on their pets even after they passed away in whatever form they were would understand these stories, these pet owners. I wondered what Jimmy Page was before he was a dog I owned, I imagined him as a wolf, where he was free in an endless desert, I imagined him as an owl flying high above looking over the forest late at night. I imagined him as a human, a small boy, with parents, did they know he would be a dog some day? I wanted to meet these people, I wanted to live in the forest he was an owl in, the desert he was a wolf in, I wanted to be reincarnated as well, I wanted to be whatever he was, I wanted to be happy with him again.

Every weekday I worked, I can't remember the last time I took off, my days all blend into each other. Eventually all the material I could gather stopped bringing anything new to me, and that was when I decided to leave, to take my search out from the books and into the world. I started by spending my Sundays feeding the pigeons and squirrels in the park. I took the bus to Montauk, to Mashomack, to Rocky Point, no sign, no frog, no cat, no such thing sitting there, waiting, looking at me, not running away as I approach it, no staring contest, no soul that matched my Jimmy Page. I was sad again. I wanted to roll up and die, as pathetic as that was, an middle-aged woman wanted to just die-die-die. For the first time in my life I had no purpose. Sofia, save me, tell me something new, something that would give my spirits some energy, I was down, I needed something to keep me going, I couldn't do it alone, I need some guidance.

...

And something did happen. I swear to God, I swear to Buddha, something very much happened. In all my doubts, after letting go of everything, everything being everything but my will to find Jimmy Page again is when it happened. It was a day like any other, I was looking down to my feet, I felt strange, not having any hope, little will to live, and just kept on going on in whatever this life I had when I stepped on a dog. Rather than it barking out in pain, or even moving, it just continued to lay there. This was in the middle of the city, coming from work. I stepped on its tail, not all the way, I realized halfway into it and pulled back. He looked up at me, it was a white lab, he had a smile on his face, he looked to be still a pup, no more than seven months old. It had been seven months since Jimmy Page had passed away. Things were making sense. I kneel down and pet him on the head, he gets excited. I scratch his neck, focusing my efforts behind his collar, he loves it. At first I was afraid to look him in the eyes, I didn't want to look into them only to realize he wasn't Jimmy in there, golden boy, a miracle, but miracles happen everyday, I needed to know, I needed to be strong and so I took a leap of faith. Into his eyes, they were the same eyes as Jimmy Page's, and in a vortex of black we made a connection. I thought of Sofia's story, and something was complete now, I was no longer a bystander to it, I was experiencing exactly what she had, I was staring at a life which was thought to have ended but had transformed, finding its way into another vessel, and what a beautiful vessel it was. Soft to my hands, I heard a voice calling out.

"Roberta. Roberta Plant."

Roberta looked over to her, then back to me, he was a she. I can't tell you what I thought about him changing sexes and how that would feel, and how I never thought about sex change during reincarnation ever. Her master came up to the two of us, she looked over and apologized. I didn't know what she was apologizing about, I was the one who had stepped on her dog's tail, and started petting it. I asked Roberta's master how old she was, the dog that is, and I was right, she was seven months old. I told her how beautiful her dog was. She thanked me. I told her I had a chocolate lab just like it, and when she asked how old it was I started to cry. I wasn't sad, nor happy, but in something bittersweet, I had found Jimmy Page, after all was almost lost, I found him, her. Her master, Patricia, asked if I was ok, and when I didn't respond she came over and padded my back then started making small circles. Her face said, I'm really confused but something inside of me feels pity for you, you look like you've gone through a lot, a lot of what, I don't know. I stopped crying, and showed signs that I was returning back to my normal self, Patricia had been with me the whole time, and it was getting dark. Patricia excused herself, said it was really nice meeting me, we didn't exchange names so we introduced each other while shaking hands.

-Laurie.

-Patricia.

-Nice to meet you.

-We honestly must be on our way. I hope you feel better, I am sorry about your dog.

-Jimmy, Jimmy Page.

-Yes, Jimmy Page...(linger)

As they were walking away my thoughts were all over the place. By the time I cleared them up enough to talk they were far away, faint representations in the setting sun. I ran after them like a crazy lady, and when they stopped I came up to them in a pant.

-Could I. Could I see Roberta again someday. Your dog reminds me of my dog so much, and like no other dog, it is the only thing that makes my heart stop hurting so much?

Patricia's choices were to run away, say yes and give me a business card with a false number on it, no, or yes, and actually yes, I will let you see my dog every once in a while you crazy lady.

She said yes.

Now every Sunday, instead of going alone to the park I see Jimmy, I see Roberta, I see him, I see her, growing up again, growing old again. I know I must sound crazy, I know I must be ridiculous, but there are things in life that are as simple as a dog's love, as easy as petting its fur, as loving as you know you two were meant to be, in this life and the next. Some things are strange, some things are stranger, where one life ends another begins, and this keeps on going on, over and over, until my mind starts to swirl, and I fall asleep, but this time without the tears. I know how to smile again. The bus continues to move backwards, I forgot where we are going, Patricia lost Roberta, and we're going to find her, and somehow I feel like it won't be hard at all. Not this time...(again with the linger)

"A Shitty Way To Go"

(Me, Alone in the Tub, As My Whole Family Watches, 198-something)

I can't remember a lot of my childhood, and things before twelve seem vague and far away. Only bits and pieces come to me, like a desert with only a few trees large enough to make a mark on the land when viewing from bird's eye. Usually photographs this old allude me, seeing a smaller and younger version of myself, somewhere I don't remember with smaller and younger versions of my siblings, and younger and dated versions of my folks. Not with this photograph, at first I was really confused when I saw the reflection in the mirror, my entire family, my sisters laughing their heads off. My father is wearing some funky shorts with that nineteen-eighty's splashed paint effect, a flash illuminating from his head like the poster for John Carpenter's The Thing. My mother who is the family documentarian is off on the sidelines, coaching my father in composition, she was able to convey him well enough the photograph is perfectly composed. The question of why I was abandoned, why is there this separation between me and my family, why am I alone, left there, in cooling water, being laughed at. The adult in me sees something that hasn't changed; I always felt that way, alone, in cooling waters, naked and alone, with an expression on my face between confused and contemplative, a face I still make that confuses people as they remark, "What's with that strange look you gave me just now." Perhaps that is the reason why I remember it so well, that it was the moment I realized I will never escape this, this loneliness, I am bosum-buddied with it in a three-way with fate. My whole family lies ahead of me, but they aren't there, in the same room as me, no they are in a parallel world, separate from where I am. I am in Phaedrus' glass sarcophagus, seeing my family from behind glass, being able to see their faces, as they look on to me, I try to talk to them, to tell them how I feel but they can't hear me, the glass separates our realities, they can only look at me, see in my face that I am frightened, not ready for this life, that I am too young, too inexperienced for my heart to break, to be mended, broken, and to be alone. All goes dark, I am sitting alone, the water has cooled so much that it makes me shiver, the water feels like blood, but not mine, it is someone else's blood, I start feeling faint, the air is thick and sticky like a swamp. Soooo cold. Soooo alone. (as white mist appears from my breath)

Now I remember what was going on in that photograph, I remember I once pooped in the jacuzzi (my father had turned our standard tub into a jacuzzi with jets), and that my poop just orbited my entire family, around and around pushed along by the jets. I remembered how we all took baths together, and I was allowed two toys to play with. At some point my family jumped out of the tub without me, they all looked at me and laughed, I was so cute, I just pooped the tub and I was cute, who couldn't love that.

Welcome To Earth

(My Father as a Monument by the Sea, and Fan-Submitted Image of Me Photographing My Father, 2011)

Something comes along. It pulls at the roots until what was once foundation is ripped, teared, and shivered (forever). Of course there will be blood, the roots were veins and the veins carried blood throughout the body. Everything is a mess, this something just came out from nowhere, batoutofhell-like, and when it left it left a grand ruin. Of course we're all standing around, handsinpockets-like, wondering how to clean it all up, to restart, and to find normal again. The way of wicked passes, one must fall, and peace will return.

There was a great meteor shower the day you were born, did you know that? Those who weren't sitting in the waiting room went outside, it was dark, Uncle Bobby took his telescope out of trunk of his car, and we all sat around looking at the stars, the ones that were shooting. One by one they all fell, and soon enough they came showering, by the word, by gully, it was something to see! Everyone was silent, everything was still, we all stood where we stood, adam apples poking out as our necks bent our heads all the way back. Wow was the general feeling, dumbfounded and whoa whoa wow. I couldn't remember ever seeing something that spectacular. The closest I ever got to seeing that shower was the time my mother took me to this bat cave somewhere in Northeastern New Mexico. We arrived at the scene just before dark, there were about twenty others, wearing flannel and fleece, warm looking couples, gray in their hair, lawn chairs spread, all was quiet then too. The pine trees in that region weren't tall, but old, and strong, they produced seeds the native kids would harvest every year. Through the pines, the chatter of a million bats sung, it was a dark-dark blue when they first appeared, like an evil cloud, a school of fish in pattern, as they pierced the early evening sky. All around, swallowed whole, they came one by one then by the thousands, their number uncountable but someone was counting. The meteor shower was just that, but with small balls of light falling, burning up, disappearing, no sound, just the faint breath behind our tongues.

Auntie Barb came out to tell us you were born. Bobby broke down his telescope as we headed towards the light of the hospital. Something magical filled our hearts, it seemed like a perfect moment, a baby girl being born during a meteor shower, memories long-forgotten coming back, everything felt warm, and it was, it was July in the Sonoran desert, we were all in shorts and t-shirts, smiles and something sweet, nothing for words, just something that came along.

Eyes still closed, the florescent glow sagging to yellowish green, Ruth holding you, sweat drying on her face, us all standing around like you were a campfire. Inside a fire burned, it kept us all warm, a warmth against the coldness, -a coldness that one can carry even on the hottest and sunniest of days. At the sight of you, all slimy, confused, gentle, soft, lovely, it was absent, the cold, replaced by something else, something warm, something forgiving, something that seemed to give us hope. It was in everyone's eyes, I speak for them all, on behalf of a mutual feeling, and when the lights went out in the hospital there was a brief moment of silence, in the dark, and I swear I could hear the hissing of space rocks burning up in the atmosphere above.

The lights came back on only a few seconds later, the darkness was soon forgotten and we were welcomed by your newborn face again, never losing that warmth.

Tearing through the planes, all turns to crumble, crumble turns into bramble, apple crumble, and oh-my-my-apple pie. All delight, fallen, broken up, eaten alive, the yum going around like the sound of thunder in our stomaches. I'm hungry. I really am.

The End.

New Odor

Chih-Han from New Odor, a lovely blog on contemporary photography, did a little interview involving my work, my dreams, and my likes. Learn about the weird dreams I've been having (if you haven't gotten enough from what's written on this blog), and the books I've been reading. I read. Books. Click here for the interview.

Stargazer

(Beach Baby, 2011)

I call to you, Stargazer. The sky opens, what was once day in blue and white is now black, the air is being sucked out and lost in the cosmos and the little dots of white that float aimlessly in the darkness are burning balls of nuclear fusion. I sit back in my lawn chair smoking a pipe I found in a box of my grandfather's things and just say to myself, yes yes yes... I put my Ray Bans on, I smile, and take puffs of mary until I am completely numb.

A comedian once said that out of any other death, no matter how unique and bizarre it was, dying of the apocalypse would outshine any death. You'd arrive in the afterlife, a celebrity, "Hey, that's John, he died from the Apocalypse", the man eaten by a shark would say.

I often wonder what I'd do if I were to face something so brilliant so fearful it made no sense and yet it made all the sense in the world. I wonder what the end of the world would look like, then I wonder how I would feel about all of it. Inside me I'd want to capture that moment, remember it forever, it was one of those photographic moments that speak for the crazy world we live in, it would have to be captured and shared as a mark of history. But there would be no history afterwards, everything will be gone. I really hope the animals and plants can go on, just take us, humans, in whatever blast of furious energy that sends us all to our deaths. But let this planet keep going, let us go the way of the Dinosaur, may our bones serve us as vague reminders of our existence, may it take generations after generations to put the pieces together. May there be movies about whatever intelligent beings that come after us interest us, such as Twenty-First Century Park, The Humans (a spin-off of the 90s Television show, The Dinosaurs), The Land Before Time-Time, and then go as far as to name basketball teams after us. The list goes on, we will be remembered but remembered for all the wrong reasons. All our mistakes will be buried. All of our greatest achievements gone. Beethoven, Space Exploration, The Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, The Internet, The Computer, Classical Rock, Dancing, Michael Jackson, all forgotten. Somewhere in the future they will discover an iron-clad instruction of how to do the Thriller dance, all is not lost.

The moment it actually does happen, that flash of light, like lightning, silence as the sky starts to burn, then moments later the sound of explosions, and everything going to shit. Everyone's head is looking up at the sky, some are crying, some are lost in thought, some running with their children (running where, we're all fucked). I'd use those last moments to think about the life I lived, what it all means now that it has a definitive ending, perhaps then it will all make sense, perhaps then we can all truly appreciate what limited time we had on this little big now fiery rock.

When I think about my childhood I think how amazing I was at Legos, not to brag but I was honestly the best out of anyone I knew. While I was watching my friends put their yellow bricks mindlessly in their already blue and red wall I made functional vehicles in uniformed color schemes, in perfect symmetry, and they wouldn't fall apart. I would take a kit box, build the model from the image, and then deconstruct it and improve upon a previous idea. I thrived for perfect in my construction, there was an idea in my head that must be achieved or else it was nothing, it fell short, it was nothing until it reached that high. My very nature was defined in Legos, I thrived to achieve what my mind saw. Over the next couple of decades I'd come to learn the meaning of this practice, why it was so important to convey something inside of me in an external medium, which has been many of things, and now that the world is coming to an end, at least for my species, I could contemplate if it ever reached what I had in mind. I wonder if anyone has ever successfully conveyed that, that sort of reversed transfusion. And then, did it ever really matter, once it is a medium it loses something, it is given form, it is given a body, it is its own, it is no longer yours, just like a child is not it's mothers, but it's own. It becomes an episode of How We Say Goodbye as we watched our creations become their own, you as the proud parent, the medium as the offspring going off into the world, it learns to crawl, then fall, then walk, and then run, it survives on its own, becomes greater, becomes worse, it learns heartbreak, it learns love, it goes on to impregnate others, and as a result parts of it get broken down and reassembled with parts of another, and form something new. The idea is born, and then it is born (again) in new form, and the jolly Elton John sings on something from the Lion King Soundtrack. It all goes on, the idea, influence, and the creation.

In the end, the real end, when all that matters matters not, we are given a new purpose and that purpose to give our bodies up, to fall, to be blown away, and to turn to dust, our bodies become something else, our spirits, I'm not entirely sure what happens to them, but the idea of us floats on, lingering underneath the ashes of what once was. When the Earth is bald, stripped of humanity, and the landscape returns to nature again, time has happened, something has happened, it made take years before this brief and crazy history of us is recovered, in bits and pieces, sometimes more wrong than true, we continue to live on, like the dinosaur that lives within us, we will live on in animals, as they learn to trust the world again, not fearing a hunter's bullet, a fisherman's hook, Rambo's knife.

Up in the stars they watch on, as one episode ends another begins, or they grow bored and surf the channels of the Universe for something more interesting. AND SO IT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS, WAS, WAS, NO LONGER, BUT NEVER SAY NEVER, JUST STOPS, FOR HOW LONG, I'M NOT TOO SURE, BUT IT STOPS, AND IT BECOMES SOMETHING THAT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS.

Hot Shot

Qian Ma wrote some really insightful words about my word for a submission I did for Hot Shots, a photo-based competition for a shot at a group show at Jen Bekman's gallery, with the potential of cash prize and future exhibitions in her space. You can read the article here. As for the words themselves, they reach deeper than my smallish artist statement, and make me happy to hear that visually my thoughts are being understood for exactly what I intended them to speak for.

Let's Give Them Something (to talk about)(ver.1)

(Untitled, from We Soon Be Nigh!, 2011)

Sitting across from a complete stranger I stare into his diverted eyes, he's reading something. He looks up and sees me, I am an attractive young woman, I have very beautiful eyes, and he smiles, I don't smile back, and my eyes continue to stare, looking for something. Eventually I divert my eyes, off to the scene behind him. He didn't have it. Have it. The room grows cold, people leave and people come and the hours pass unannounced. It is going to rain today, the air is cold, stiff, and almost completely dead. It is a feeling that stirs in my head, that I need to get out of here, but I don't leave, I go nowhere, for there is nowhere to go, I am neither here nor there. The room itself fades away and I am left alone. All is quiet, the book in my hands fades into a new reality, I make my escape and I am gone, so gone that I am dust, dust that is so fine that if it wasn't for the occasional sparkle in the dark it would seem not to exist. Just. Like. Meeeee.

(fade out)

When I return to my body it is no longer mine. I walk, my feet which aren't mine touch the ground differently, the bareness of flesh against the hardwood has a different slickness to it, I could be pushed and I would fall. In the mirror I see a face, my mind tells me it is mine, but I know it isn't, something else tells me so, something hidden and ambiguous, it is my heart. I point and probe my face for minutes, trying to return it to normal, normal whatever that is. Normal never happens. I put on clothes that aren't mine but are, I play a role that isn't mine, and I leave the apartment I woke up in. Down the street it is spring, it is in the flowers, it is in everyone's hair, a small white dog comes up to my leg, it seems to know the leg I move to walk more than me. My feet seem to walk for themselves, where I am going I don't know, I move with the flow, hiding amongst strangers.

"How's it going?" says a young woman, her eyes shaded by sunglasses.

"Oh, you know, pretty good."

"Come here."

"Where?"

"Here." The young woman points to her chest, she starts unbuttoning her brightly colored blouse, then when she peels that off she starts to undo her bra. Her breast sit there in front of me, I look at her face then back to her nipples, feeling like if I look long enough some form of answer will appear in their shape. Her hand grabs mine, they are cold and dry, and she places it over her left breast, it is not cold and dry. I try to say something but she shushes me before I could complete a word. She closes her eyes, opens her mouth slightly, taking a breath in, I follow suit, closing my eyes, taking a breath through my mouth, and focus on my hand within her hand lying on her soft left breast. In the veins of my hands I feel a pulse, at first it feels violent like an erupting volcano, it kicks my hand, it turns into a sort of pain only a heart can produce, I am being kicked, my eyes still closed, I am falling deeper and deeper into a darkness. The pulse continues, the connection between my body and mind grow in distance, I no longer feel my palm, the pulse is all that is.

A voice in my mind starts to speak, it is not my voice for I still have my own voice as I think, as I realized this voice is not mine.

Do you feel me. Are you apart of me. Are we one. Are you there. Are you afraid. Come with me. Follow me. Don't look back. Just come. Bummm-puh Bummmmm-puh,..Bummmmpuh-baaaaah-bump. Follow me.

My body no longer feels surrounded by my person, I am freed of it, I float, without levitating, I roam without leaving, I am one but now two, I carry the voice inside of me, the darkness echoes the pulse, and I am two, three, four, diversion, cells multiplying, becoming two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etcetera, etcetera.

And soon even the pulse of the heart disappears like the constant of chatter that fades to deep thought. The feeling of my hand that isn't my hand is gone, and I reach a new level of loneliness.

The woman that was before me, the nude one, falls to the ground, I look down at her, her face is in stock, I don't know how to feel, I feel an impulse to feel sad for her, but there is no sadness to feel, just a voice that tells me I should, but I am not. I reach my hand down only to fall myself. There is something in the air, something on the ground, something that is making everything fall apart. I lie next to her for what feels like eternity, I look at her the same way I looked at the man yesterday, when I was more myself, and in her eyes I search. Is she, I wait for a feeling, a gut feeling telling me yes, without a doubt, she is a clone. I look at her, something tells me something but I can barely hear it, my heart is being pushed down my throat by my thoughts. Like Galileo, I have discovered something profound and yet far away.

I cannot feel like you human, your flesh is not right to my soul, my body is too large too clumsy, your feelings are not mine, your life is not mine, you may fall, you may cry and I may cry back, only because I am confused, I don't know what you want me to do, I feel void when I am here, I feel lost in thought, not as much as heart. It is gone...

The voice within me called me out, put me in my place, my face which was never my face looked like mine. I looked at my body, it wasn't mine a minute ago but now it is mine. And as the rolling stone raced down the hill, the mountain, the peak, the erupting volcano, I realized this life is mine, very much mine, the only one of mine, and the only one I'll ever get. One step into the future, dragging my hide leg from the past, telling it, it is time to leave now, come-come-now.

Outside it is a city I am familiar with, I have lived here for five years now. In any moment now it will transform into a place I am vaguely familiar with, the landscape will be a distant memory, one in which could be from my distant past or embedded within me from someone else, all-in-all, uncertainty covers the land. My hair will turn from black to blond, my heart will oscillate from there before me to once there behind me. I care or care not, I see and see not, for the person inside of me is shifting, I am losing grip of who I am, the only notion with foundation is the only notion that is challenged the most. I slip away, I turn into her, I call up her friends that are strangers to me, I lie to them with my eyes, my uncanny resemblance to their friend, snickering at the fact I am getting away with it, without a doubt without a thought in their minds I am not who they think I am and yet there is no mistake, I am who they think I am. We decide to go to the movies, we see a film, we talk, we head to the bar, we drink.

"Hey, Charlotte, remember that time you fell so hard you fractured your hip?", says Charlie with a face I mistaken for a goofy expression but really is just his dumb face.

I think hard, what would Charlotte think, how would she feel,

"I try not to think about that, when it rains I still feel it."

"Sorry to bring it up."

"That's ok, what is done is..."

"Done. Yes, buried."

"Yes, buried, alive."

"Why alive, it didn't die before it was laid to rest?"

"Nope."

"Did you at least say goodbye?"

"Nope."

"Why not."

"I was done with it as soon as it stopped hurting."

"Oh."

"Besides, pain is all the same, it hurts, it reminds you that your body doesn't like falling, neither should you, so you should try not to fall so much."

"And..."

"And. What, there's nothing more, nothing less, we fall, we get back up, we continue whatever it is we were doing before that, avoiding making that same mistake twice."

"And so goes life."

"Exactly. Now enough about my hip, my fall, I want to let that movie soak up inside of me for a while."

"Wasn't it good?"

"It was, but I'm not sure yet."

"Sure of what?"

"What kind of good it was to me, I mean, somethings take time to comprehend, you need to experience a bit of life with it inside of you, and then when you have some good examples you can compare your life with a story you saw, you read, you heard."

"You lost me."

"Forget about it, are we going to dance or what?"

"YES!" says the entire group unanimously.

We're all walking down the street, it is a Saturday night and the feeling is alright when I stop, leaving them to carry on a few steps before they realize they're missing one.

"I hope you've been practicing those dances moves because this time there will be no curfew to save you from the Lord of Dance." I gave one of my menacing smiles but it didn't translate as devious as in my other body, the one in which was truly mine.

Gist, Jest, Geist, Christ

("Aliens are beautiful," 2011)

The grand and late mister of the cornflakes fell to his knees saying, "Yi-yi yi-yi", over and over until no one can hear what they were thinking, just "yi-yi" in the air, in their minds. Everyone fell to their knees shortly after he did. It made people cry for some strange reason, the words were insignificant, it was how he delivered them, how it made so much sense at the time and yet now, in retrospect, it is completely and utterly nonsense. When you talk to people that were there, the ones who do talk (most being quiet about the whole thing, giving you the impression that people think they're nuts), they say it was something that formed a plane beneath their feet, that before them was an infinite horizon, the plane was black the sky was as well, a faint red glow grew in the distance, that was him, his words were the rumble of that plane, their foundation was being touched, rocked, and turned upside down. That's the gist of it. Always the black sky with the black ground, the faint red glow. Some decided to leave one element out, or describe in great detail of how the sky black was a different black. Is there a difference in black? If we all see colors differently, how can we see the lack of them differently, there's nothing there, black is the neutral, it represents the void, space, darkness, and the unknown. But this person who saw blackness different, he came up to me during the interview, grabbed my hands, his hands were like sand paper, unusually cold, but not moist, they felt like my father's hands, but less worked. With my hands inside of his he then felt comfortable with telling me how this black wasn't like any other black, it swirled without swirls, it moved like an explosion traveling through a viscous fluid, slowly turning, spiraling and twisting in a pattern that exist in nature, it was forming and deforming to the laws of nature itself. To spite how scaring the sight sounded, it did not scare the sandpaper hand man, if anything, he said, "It felt comforting. Somewhere in all of that I felt like the day I was born, one world ended, my whole universe and all I knew and thought existed disappeared in an instant and was replaced by pure white light which was then was replaced by objects and people slowly fading in from the brilliance." I stared into his eyes, he didn't once blink, his words stuck with me, and I felt my ass start to numb. Later when I reviewed the tapes I noticed that I sat there, frozen for twenty minutes, the crew didn't want to interrupt the scene so they just sat or stood in whatever position they were in, the boom operator's arm started to shake, but kept the mic out of frame.

Years have passed since that interview, I have gone on to do mediocre stories since, all dim and meaningless in comparison, and as a result I have grown bored, cold, and almost lifeless. A connection with another human being, a certain connection, a certain human being goes a long way, so far of a way that it pushes you up into a plateau region when you are still able to communicate with the sea level below, and those snobs in the mountains, but there is still a distance between you and them. Once in a while my eyes do this thing to me, they zoom into to someones face, and it's the worst when I'm doing an interview with someone, especially if it's the first time they're meeting me and we are a little awkward with each other. I think it's some sort of tunnel vision, it feels like I'm high, but I hadn't taken any drugs, my eyes just zoom in to their faces, my eyes feel lazy, endlessly staring, and when I get this sensation I am absolutely lost in it, staring into their faces. The room fades away, and it's just their big ole face in front of me, around me, all of what I see, my words as I give the occasional response to their words is never effected by this phenomena, and for the most part it is a secret I have against them, that my eyes may be a respectable distance from them, but in actuality they are closely orbiting the surface of their face. If I may say one more thing on the subject before changing the topic, it first started in 99', when I was interviewing this group of men who had claimed they were abducted by aliens. Each gave their account of the clearest detail, and not once did I feel a lie was being spoken, I believe them like I believe an old man telling me he remembers a time without television, when photographs did not have color, and that it was harder back then, whenever then was then.

In the summer of 02' I was sent on assignment in Nebraska, not far from the house of Mister Cornflakes, I decided to venture up to his place. He had passed away a few years prior but I was curious who was living there, if he had any family, or if some young couple were now living in his house. I looked up his surname in the yellow pages, and found one Cornflakes in there, gave it a ring, and after the fifth ring an old lady picked up.

I asked if it was Mrs. Cornflakes, she corrected me and told me she was, Miss Cornflakes, that they hadn't married but she certainly and legally changed her name. I asked if she would be as kind as to exchange a few words in person about her late partner and she agreed. It was a Sunday afternoon, without a cloud in the sky, the sound of chainsaw echoed down the streets, it was late summer. When my rental crept up to her driveway, Miss Cornflakes came out to greet me, as if she had been waiting the night before and in the morning after. I grabbed my notebook, a recorder, and exchanged my sunglasses for my regular glasses and greeted her with a smile, a handshake, and a pleased-to-finally-meet-you, giving her the impression I had been interested in The Cornflakes for a while now. She took me around the back, telling me she doesn't let anyone in through front door, not since her partner had died. We walked through the garden, a beautiful one at that, and I could tell it was something she worked hard at keeping it as beautiful as it was, and that it was the best time of year to see it (I felt privileged to see it in this state). We entered the back door, the interior was completely naturally lit, looking dim at first, a touch of gloom but I passed it off as just the lingering feeling of entering a house of a widow. She made tea, and we sat at the kitchen table. I asked her when Mister Cornflakes had passed away, she said a two years ago, in a cold winter, and that she was actually talking to him at the time he suddenly stopped living. She wasn't sad, nor in stock with his sudden death, it just felt natural, it was natural, to die, and to die without some sort of unusual cause. She told me she kept talking to him before she decided to call an ambulance, and when they took him away, she returned to the chair she was sitting at, and continued to talk to a now (then) absent Mister Cornflakes. She had been doing that ever since. She says it helps her avoid the loneliness of having something and not having something anymore. She may have lost her partner's responses, but she hasn't lost his presence.

On one wall in the living room there is a large collection of images of Christ in various sizes, frames, both catholic and protestant depictions. I pulled a camera out of my breast pocket and photographed the wall as Miss Cornflakes filled the kennel for more tea, she was in her own world at the moment. In the corner of my eye I saw the table where we were sitting, and there in my seat was a figure, white glow, and when I turned around I saw a table, empty, with Miss Cornflakes putting teabags into a teapot. We continued our conversation, and eventually it led us to the significance of the Yi-Yi. She grew quiet, as if lost in thought, and after a few minutes I looked at my watch, not as a sign of impatience but to make sure I make it to the airport in time. Time was running out, and it was on my mind for the remainder of my visit. She eventually broke the silence with a call, a cry, something animal-like, the words were, "Yi-yi". As if it opened some portal within me, the words were just words, a key to a door to another world, necessary but functioned only to summon something much greater. I started to stare at Miss Cornflakes aging face, white with small folds, pleasant but lost, and her slowly disappearing nose, and though I was looking at her, I wasn't. My mental vision was all black. Two black parallels, one red glow in-between, I was racing towards the glow, as if I had been waiting a long time for it. To spite my velocity, I felt nowhere closer to the glow, it seemed to continue forever, and to keep its distance. Yi-yi...yi-yi. Over and over, calling me, what did it want from me, why me, who was me, the sandpaper hand man's words came to mind as I looked to the ground as I looked to the sky, there was that black, that black like no other black, that was formless and black but faintly changed, melting within itself, in a slow explosion, and yet its surface remained solid and unchanged. The rest is indescribable, something I only knew from an experience of having my hands in another man's hands, and hearing him make sound with his mouth, being in his house, and his story. Now this was my own story, I was experiencing it with my own body, I was there. And somewhere in all of that I thought I have to remember this, as if I'd forget something this significant as insignificant as it was. I wanted to be able to come back to this place, this dream-like place one day and escape whatever reality I was living to be lost. When I returned to Miss Cornflakes dining room I was on my knees. I felt embarrassed and she smiled at me from her chair. I apologized and thanked her for her time. She was happy to have company she told me. I was happy to be that company I replied.

A photograph of wall of Christ sits at my desk at the office, on the back of the print I wrote the words, "Yi-yi", there is something sad about those words, as magical as they are, written there, on the back of that print, they are powerless and without magic. Grim reminders, they fall short of something breathtaking, and even maddening. The memory of that moment they represent has reclined far back into my mind, as I watch it from a great distance now, seeing a shade of myself that has died and been replaced by many generations of me.

I scroll through my Rolodex and find Miss Cornflakes address and decide to write her a letter. I started writing it, but stopped, and it has been left unfinished at my desk, covered in papers and cards, and will probably never be completed, sent, and received. I close my eyes and try to put the pieces back together, I sigh as I fail to recreate a moment that has passed. Yi-yi where have you gone.

Worth A Thousand Words (932 words)(not including the intro and outro)

(Quiet, static popping, the record starts off slow, but promises to build up.)

I can talk to photos. I can make someone up in my mind and hold both sides of the conversation pretty well. I think I've been doing this my whole life, as if I lived on an abandoned island, that I was a lonely boy when I was a boy and a lonely man when I was a man. And perhaps for the most part that is true, but isn't the truth, the whole thing, from all angles and that can truly be a fair representation of one's character. No, it is quite far from that.

I can hear a voice through video or audio recordings I had forgotten I had (I don't really make much of the two). When I hear the voice it brings me back, perhaps more than photographs since it changes before me, not in a silent way that occurs in the mind like a photograph, but kinetically, with a life of its own. I think of Stone Tape, how crystals in the ground record energy signals given off by humans, mostly during grand tragic moments of their lives, and once they die, those energy signals continue, in a perfect loop, over and over until the energy in those crystals dissipate. I can be interacted with, the voice calls me, the face, in movement, an uninterested expression turns to a smile then looks away, hair flying in the wind, I hear myself say, "Take off your shirt". The video ends, and it starts from the beginning again. I let this play over and over, taking in each nuance, trying to find something I didn't see from the last viewing. I hear a voice, it is familiar but distant.

As much as I want to interact, I want to place myself in that scene, and say, "Take off your shirt", with my voice now, I can't. Ultimately, this amateur footage of a vacation can only bring me to close, before I start to feel supremely disappointed. Only memories. A stack of photographs sit collecting dust on my desk, I know each and every one of them, could play the moment before and after each image, and though they illustrate a week quite well photographically, there is something that is supremely missing, missing in a way that beckons emptiness, loss, like the interior of an abandoned house that represents a family (that once lived there). All they represent is something missing, something not within the photograph, that is perhaps hidden behind the photographic surface and before the paper backing of chromogenic print.

The space between forms a natural vacuum, keeping things in as much as it keeps things within. If one were to enter into this realm it would be like entering the cosmos, a space endless void would unfold before you, it would be tiring to look to where a horizon would normally be. Here is where time is infinite, yes, infinite, it continues before the surface of the photograph, it exists beyond the photograph, and it is there as a byproduct of the photograph, that the photograph captured this endless space vacuum when the shutter opened and stole it, storing it on a light sensitive surface. Later it would go through a chemical bath of bleach and fixes, changing the very property of the light-sensitive emulsion, and rendering it blind and mute, no longer able to change (fixed). Each grain reflects and represents the reality that was placed before it. And each neighboring grain to it gives it a place, a portion, and scale. Together in a matrix they form a flat surface of reality, and with each moment passing, the reality is falling apart, being replaced by grain by grain by the past. The reality eventually seeps from the surface grain and enters the void, what is left behind is a graveyard of dead stars, hence the appearance of the cosmos. Far off is the present, it is the only thing that travels faster than the speed of light, bending time/space around it. It moves so fast that humans struggle to comprehend it. Like a darting bird that flies passed the peripheral it is a blur at most, but even then we are able to conduct it was a bird, and even the color, in this case, black, but the present doesn't move as slow as a darting black bird, it moves so fast that once in a great great great while we are able to catch a phantom of it.

The owner of the voice, the same owner of the image in the photograph comes to me in a dream, I wake up alone, and reach towards a photograph on the ground of my bed. I whisper something to it, and put it on my window sill and examine it for a while. I imagine it coming alive, like the video I watched the night before, on loop, for twenty-odd times incision. But of course the person in the photograph doesn't move, the prop shark's jaws do not close down on her face, they do not rip her head apart, and she doesn't smile back, or looks worried, or blinks, or even breathes, she is dead, not in this reality, but in the reality of the photograph. Grain by grain that moment happened, each one of those grains perfectly represent a reality of the present that has passed, and is now lost, floating in a void, in a dead cosmos, and the real person is somewhere off, living, alive, breathing, blinking, un-looped, un captured, changing, sleeping, waking up, talking, eating, running, walking, looking at photographs, looking deep and long, and is thinking, what is she thinking...

(The record comes to a peaceful end, the piano repeats its last bars endlessly, each time it is questioning itself, has it become something better, each repetition means something, without each one it is not complete. The needle reaches a treshold and signals to a specific motor to lift the needle above the moving black surface and for the arm to return to the rest. Once the arm and the needle fall to the rest the turning table stops with only a brief moment of still-movement (it doesn't last nearly as long as belt-driven turntable, it just ends in an satisfying instant)).

H.M.A.I.W.

(Untitled, 2011)

Skating on the thinnest ice imaginable I didn't care nor did I realize what I'd do if I were to fall into the chilly waters below. I remember watching Man vs. Wild, with Bear Grills jumping into ice cold water, he was testing out his body under the cold shock, and he swam for a while, and couldn't really imagine that being useful for survival. I remember taking a trip up to Northbay once, and a friend of mine decided to jump into the water, completely naked, it was early December, snow everywhere, not the type of weather to be naked nor getting into any water, but there he was, first his toes, then his legs, hand still cupping his boys and then splash. He made all types of sounds, sounds I hadn't heard from him before, he was suffering, he let out more man grunts and we both watched from above as he struggled to submerge himself. Later he told me that seconds to us, watching him from above felt like minutes, hours even, was it that cold that time itself froze in those waters. Perhaps to something not used to it. When I think of time now, not skating on thin ice, but just waiting, sitting, reading, writing, living my life, waiting, how used to it am I, for time itself seems to have slowed down, unbearably so. Waiting, waiting for something.

I stopped skating, took off my skates, and walked back to camp. There I was frozen, waiting for the fire to grow large enough to throw my entire body on to, that sounded like paradise right about then. I rolled up a joint and occurred my time spacing out, watching the fire dance before me, thinking of all types of things. Out here, alone, it felt nice, at first when I was being dropped off, the radio on in the truck, the driver speaking, made the sudden drop out from civilization feel awfully isolating when he finally left me. Now that feeling was replaced with peace, time slowed down, but bearable. The pink of the sky, the blue of the snow around, the simplicity of land and sky, unobstructed, endlessly, I could die somewhere here I thought, but death would not come to me for a while, I don't think I earned it yet. After the last puffs of pot left my lungs I was beginning to feel all good inside. The fire was perfect, perfectly warming me up, and my tent, lined with mounts of fur, and inside was cozy as hell. To have a woman out here, right here, right now would be fantastic, I pictured me telling her things like, "Looks like we're going to have to warm each other up." I'd shoot her off some hungry looking eyes and she'd give me some i.r.f. eyes and we'd just go at it, surrounded by fur, animals! We could live happily out there, there was a fair amount to eat if you knew how to go about doing it. I had a hatchet, a rifle, a pipe, a hook, some line, a knife, a will, an iron will, and I had a lady to impress. Coming home with a deer or a line of rabbits on my shoulder, a proper beard on my face, with some flannel over my chest, a beanie, and eyes that pierced the soul. All types of images conjured up and before I realized it I was hungry, high, and getting sleepy.

When I woke it must have been sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning, a person was sitting by my fire outside my tent. He looked endlessly into the fire. I watched him for a while, not sure if it was real or not. Eventually I'd get some heavy clothes on and exit the tent. Approaching him he did not move one bit, just kept on looking at that dancing fire. I sat beside him and pulled a blanket over him, he was only wearing a business suit, and yet wasn't trembling at all. A faint, "thankyou", came out of him, I wasn't sure if it was some bird flying above or if he was actually addressing me. His hair was slicked back, it was gelled and I couldn't tell if it was frozen or just stuck like that. He looked about his mid-twenties, and when I asked him what he was doing all the way out here, why he wasn't wearing something warm he just said, "uh...uh...uhhhhh. bah-bah-bammmm".

"In english, please."

"Iwas. Iwasjustsenthere."

"Sent here, but who?"

"Thethesameasyou."

"You must be mistaken, I came out here on my own merit, no one telling me to come freeze my ass off."

"Youweresenthere."

"Fine. By who sent the both of us out here."

"Thewave."

"The wave?"

"Yesyesyes."

"Yes."

"Ok."

Silence fell over the both of us, I could tell he wasn't one for words, and I didn't feel like talking to someone who made no sense. I liked him more when he was just staring into that fire, not talking, not making any sense but not making any nonsense either. I thought about how I got here, I decided to come out here, I planned this trip for weeks, and finally got the time to get out here. I was happy to leave, I was really getting sick of the city, the life, I needed a break. No one sent me here. At least directly. But I felt something stirred up in me, something loosen, and it was itching to be picked at, but something told me not to. It glowed a bright white, almost blinding, it was eclipsed by something blocking it, a door, it called to me, to be opened, but I was afraid. Let's just say that light is the truth, and perhaps somewhere deep down inside of me knew exactly what was waiting for me. I knew I was running away from something, but never did I realize I was being sent somewhere, by something, that isn't here, that is there, waiting for me back home, and that same thing was the thing that drove that guido-looking fella out here too. I just thanked the stars I wasn't sent here without notice, he looked like he was in some club downtown when all of a sudden this thing sent him hurling in the tundra. He was still looking deep into that fire, his eyes marked some great sign of despair, he was lost.

"Hey, what's your name, kid?"

"Greg. Gregthegent."

"The gent, huh. I'm Survivorman."

No response. I thought he'd be taken by surprise like most people who discover who I am, but he wasn't with us anymore. Off on planet Greg the Gent, I was orbiting him at most, watching him, without him noticing me. I cleared out some of the camera equipment from the tent, mustered up some form of blanket and pillow and invited Greg in. Waving my hand in invitation he followed, hunched over with that blanket still over him, for the first time ever Greg started to look cold. His hand brushed my arm, and I realized he was frozen to the touch. When Greg was inside, I closed the tent, I threw my sleeping bag over him and made him look like a fur/fabric burrito mix with his head poking out. I knew if he didn't get warm soon he'd probably die before rescue could come around. I started to shiver when he started to cry, or rather, when tears rolled themselves out of his eye sockets. I wasn't sure if he was in pain or was just sad, either way I gave the kid a hug, a bear hug. Sometimes its the touch of another human being to make you feel like you're not alone for a moment. My arm grew wet with tears, and I felt something inside me again. That glowing light again. Blinding as ever. That door pulsed, the light seemed to be brighter than before. I couldn't look away. I wanted to douse it with water, pour it out like a campfire not needed anymore, but there wasn't enough water in the world to exhaust this light. Only one way about it. I touched the door, it was flesh-like and woody at the same time, some sort of hybrid texture, I moved my fingers across it looking for a handle, and when they reached one it burned to the touch. I didn't care, I had been branded before, there is a way to ignore the pain of being burned, and I pulled back with one mighty swing. Light flooded everything, and was no longer just inside of me but encompassing the entire tent, then outside of the tent, and the fire, and the frozen ground that the fire and tent lied on, and then everything, white, bright, glow.

Somewhere in all that I was still holding Greg, crying myself, or rather tears rolling themselves out of my eye sockets, and I knew right then and there that I was sent here the same as Greg, not knowing why, nor where we were exactly. The only difference between us is that I was pretty prepared.

Morning came, and I made us both some coffee and sausages. Greg seemed to be back to whatever his regular self was. He fist pumped to get his arms back into gear, and if he could leg pump he would've done that too, but instead he just stretched out. We both looked on and watched the sunrise.

"Isn't it something, Greg the Gent?"

"Sureis."

Kinda made it worth it, whatever drove us out here, whatever and wherever we left wasn't this, it wasn't peaceful, tranquil, endless, majestic, mysterious, timeless, enchanting, and and and...

A Dog That Looks Like Tim Allen

(Bad Girl Natasha, Hanging Out Beyond the Keep Out Sign, 2011)

Woof!

Can you hear me?

Woof woof!

How about now, was that a bit clearer?

When I am alone I just curl up in a ball. I have no one to look cute for, nothing to wag my tail to, just me being me, the me that isn't so eager to please, that lives to be petted, and that is quiet, to himself, as he just sleeps curled up, occasionally looking out the window, and waits, waits not for my master but for something, I don't know what, but I wait. Some days I wait for so long that I forget I'm waiting. Some times I try to imagine what it is that I'm waiting for but I'm never quite sure, maybe a man with ice cream cone for flesh and a face of melting ice cream, little clusters of chocolate chips for eyes. I want to lick and eat him out of existence. Maybe it will be another dog, this thing I'm waiting for, another Pomeranian as well, and maybe it will be female, and just maybe after we're done smelling each other's butts she'll like me. Just maybe she is my type, she's cool, beautiful, and makes me laugh. At night I bark profusely, completely out of control, my master yells at me, telling me to shut it, but I don't, I can't, and so he starts padding me, hitting my nose, and finally I stop. I want this something so bad I can't control it, maybe it is just being out there, outside, and that I stare endlessly, day in and day out, looking forward to something I don't know what is, but it is there, right in front of me. Maybe I'm blind. I close my eyes and try to imagine being blind. The world disappears and is replaced by my memory, I picture a chair being placed in a certain place, beside the chair is a couch, and beneath and before that couch is a carpet, and at the edge of that carpet is a coffee table, I am given an empty room, darkness and give it life, light, and furniture. I imagine the circumstance of being blind, there wouldn't be a seeing eye dog for me, for blind dogs don't have such things. I'd just bump into things where I was new to. Running would be out of the question, and I'd avoid outside, and hard surfaces, thinking that they were road, and roads being where cars drive on, where drivers may not see me and hit me. I didn't want to think of being die, that I would never see or get to this thing I've been waiting for. I want to know real bad, I wage my tail in distress, it is the only thing I could do. I feel powerless. And so I start to bark some more. My master is out so there is no end to my barking. I bark and bark until I lose my voice. All barks become dry and drier until there is nothing left. The motions of barking remain. I imagine being a mute dog, having to watch strangers come near our house or even into it, without me to warn my master, or to scare them off. I'd be able to watch this stranger step up the stairs and enter my masters room with something sharp in his hands, I'd chase him, tug at his pant legs but he'd kick me off, I was a small dog after all, I'll probably be broken from that one kick. Then I'd be mute, broken, and maybe even my eyes would go blind too, with no seeing eye dog to help me through the world of infinite darkness.

I wake up, curled into a ball, I see my master stepping out of his truck, he's got a lady with him, he's wearing his best and has sunglasses on, the same ones he wears, and only wears when he takes me to the beach, not anymore. Of course I try barking but it doesn't work, I'm the only dog that has ever lost his voice as I scramble in a panic. I don't like this, I don't like this at all. She's going to enter your room with something sharp, I know it, I know it. When my master opens the door I rush to his feet. He almost trips on me, not noticing me by his side, trying to save him from this stranger. He calls my name in a stern voice, I feel helpless and point my nose down.

"NO, Lucifer, no..."

I feel like I am powerless, I walk away because there is nothing more I could do, I tried, I tell myself, I really did try. I find my spot by the window, I try to go back to sleep but I can hear her talk, she's annoying, her voice too high pitch, she's a cat, I hate cats. I try to distract myself, I look outside, I look at the mountain, cyan chill, a steep face, the sky overcast, it is quiet. I can still hear her in the background, her high heels clicking on the marble, her and my master head up to his room. And as I point my head towards the stairs I see my master with a bottle and the lady with something sharp, twisted, a spiraling pin. I imagined the pain it would cause to be stabbed by that twisty pin, I run over to her ankle and give it a good bite. In my fangs I say, NO, you will not get that far, NO, you will not do him harm. I don't remember the rest, I just wake up concussed, at the bottom of the stairs. I hear heavy breathing upstairs, and as I enter my master's room, I see a trail of blood. I reach him, his arm reaching over to the phone which was knocked over at some point. I'm not sure if he had dialed for help so I did it for him. 9-1-1 with my wet little nose. A voice appears on the other end, and I try to tell her the address, what's going on, but she can't understand me, I try again, but she just seems to grow impatient. My master's hand pets me, his eyes are fading behind his eyelids, and I wag my tail. This is my way of saying goodbye, I curl up next to him, and want to die there right beside him. But I don't. I wake up surrounded by something cold and the night has come. My master was no longer there, just his body, and as I walk down the stairs I see the door is open. The door is open I repeat to myself, it is open, it is open, it is open. One paw then another, step by step, come on rear legs, let's go.

I go, I dip my head outside, I venture to another world. And though I witnessed my master's death, his last breath, the soul that carried me to where I am now, fed me, and everything, there was nothing I could do for him, not now, not then. I took a few more paw steps forward and said, "I am no longer waiting, I am going, going, and gone, gone gone."

Angell 2011 - 2012

The lovely folks at Angell included me in their annual catalogue, and inside they wrote up a one-pager on me, and included some of my best work from The Barking Wall. It is a really beautiful publication, full of amazing artists that also show at the gallery, and who actually look really look in their bio pics (unless me, I'm a total dork). If you find yourself at Angell, pick up a copy, and check out the work there, where you can find some of this city's finest and cutting edge artists.

Toronto-based emerging artist Brendan George Ko won the Flash Forward Emerging Photographers award in 2011. Still quite young he has an impressively expanding exhibition history, and his work has already attracted attention for its stylistic maturity. The almost rococo beautification of his images borders on morbid obsession, and a tendency to characterize all subjects - whether living or inanimate - in much the same terms, somehow equating them materially, describes the initial gist of his photo-based works.

Ko's art is dark and moody from one angle, but light - both as a symbolic agent and pictorial aspect - is paradoxically the purveyor of the spookily mythical atmosphere we encounter here. From individuals shots as portraits or figures in dramatic contexts, to objects as still life, Ko manages to make them all seem like denizens of the same flash-lit, momentary world.

Ko fuses memories of game-playing and dreamlike fantasies and as a result, his images express a double-edged, troubling sort of insight. The trope of hiding in plain sight is important. Bringing our attention how masking and deceit can produce a clearer metaphoric representation of reality than a blood and guts, existential expression of angst or struggle, his glittery pictures seem to glow intensely. He assembles the incidents of a broken narrative, as in his haunting piece Doreen's Bible, often borrowing stories and incidents from his own life, but altering them so as to become discrete and synchronic objects as much as images in their own right.

Glimmering with the force of having excluded all other possibilities of being, a chandelier shot by Ko as much as a person's face obscured by a nimbus of dazzling light, is rendered as imminent, somehow on the verge of the supernatural.

The problem of belonging, to place or to story, of being and incarnating a vaguely uncanny hybridity are of great weight for Ko. His symbolic phantasmagoria thus engages a Poststructuralist theory in what might otherwise remain a photographic almost expressionist art practice. Double natures and binary realities, both inner and outer, fascinate Ko and provide his point of departure; and in this he doubles his doubling through dialectical action that relies on constant juxtapositions.

Brendan George Ko is still in flux - changing, improving, modifying - but already highly achieved in what he is trying to do, for himself and for us.

Feature Shoot

The folks at Feature Shoot did a bitty on me. You can find it here. And while you're there do yourself a favor and check their fabulous website, full of some of the hottest in newschool art photographers. Here. Thanks again, Alison!

New Mexico July 14th, 1997

(Animal Stage (Abandoned) #2, 2011)

We're all cursed in the end. Some more than others. And that's the balance. Sometimes it's easier to imagine that we all lived lives before this one, and that the balance of life is not determined by the lives that we currently live but the lives we have lived and are living. It is easier to think that how wicked and twisted our lives are that we must have done something equally wicked and twisted in another life, sometimes going as far as thinking what if one was Hitler in another life, Jesus that would suck. But if that theory was true, I can imagine you'd be the world's most unfortunate soul if you had in another life been Hitler.

I remember once writing about that feeling of past lives, how life itself is so full of different phases and periods and divisions that the borders of one reality to the next, how one's mentality changes throughout a lifetime can sometimes feel as if one has lived previous lives. When I think back at my childhood in New Mexico it almost feels like another life, and even further back when I was living in Canada that life recesses so far back it is prehistoric. But to spite the time and the places in-between, I still don't imagine them as another life, no, but some memories that have been forgotten, that could be just as much dreams as lived experiences that are only conjured up by flashes of Deja Vu. There is a certain type of uncertainty that is associated with those memory flashes, this confused memory. Somewhere in all that mess of tangled memories, forgotten and distant is a childhood, are dreams, and are memories that one either wished to be forgotten or your mind simply shut them out, tragic kingdom forgotten.

I'm not the reincarnation of Jim Morrison but I did once witness a road accident in New Mexico as a child. And on that day I did once witness an Indian fellow die as our car passed by in slow motion. Looking out the backseat window, I saw people crying and a man covered in blood and dirt looked at me, but looked beyond me, endlessly, staring without a blink or a breath. He died looking in my direction, and like Morrison I wonder if his soul entered mine, through my eyes, the windows or THE DOORS to the soul. I have yet to forget about that day, just like a lot of the things that happened in the desert, I just find them less relevant with a life in the city, where there is nothing sacred nor haunted, to spite how historical a site may be, the hairs on the back of my neck have yet to be moved and the only goose pimples I get are from the cold heart of winter or stepping into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario.

Something occupies my soul, I was a child when that man on the side of the road died, and I was changing everyday, but something unnatural and perfectly natural in a supernatural way changed me from that particular point of my life. Just like how my boyish voice changed over night into a young adult voice. I swear it did, I had been at a punk concert the night before and was screaming and pushing and kicking, going crazy and wild, and the next day I had lost my voice and when it returned the following day I was a man. This thing that lies within me, that changed me that day in the summer of 97' has been the source of inspiration as well as spirituality within me. But I often wonder if it could have been a curse, a curse that isn't black and white with bad things being death and direct results but something like a slow working poison (it was far more twisted than that). The string of cause and effect was so complex and so extensive that it was impossible to trace other than going back to that particular day in the summer of 97' when it all started and recount each and every tragic and less-tragic event since. For years I believed I was cursed to remain to walk this earth alone, but then started to come across beautiful creatures that would walk along side me for some time, that never completely dissolved. Perhaps my curse isn't my curse per say, but the curse of the soul that is exists within mine, thatthat Indian is dead and yet living within me. I can name off 50+ dispositions I find myself in, that the word hybrid and in-between-ness is like breathing, I am neither inhaling nor exhaling nor holding my breath, I simply am in that brief pause between, in a temporary space that the likes of infinity hang out in. Nomadic, the mind is split between the right and the left, the borders of the soul and the body are undefined and obscure, the race I run is few and far between, I am the crack and the rumble, the moment after lightning the moment before thunder. The unspoken saying that exists between the glass half empty and the glass half full. And somehow I let this betwixt feeling invade everything else, that even the way I saw things were split, I lived and breathed a parallax view of the world. And perhaps I never had a choice, that what existed within me was me, a me that I had no control over, just like almost everything in my life, if not the entire shebang. I was born, given a name, put in a place, and grew up around certain people and all my primary establishment as a human was made without my choice, without my say-so, so how much of me remains original, of my own doing, that my choices haven't been preconditioned? The curse grew more complex, further I travelled along the belly of its length the darker it got. Something existential about the whole thing blew up, and at that point I decided to quit. Yes, to give up. What has been done is done, what is going to happen will only just happen, and if I were to die right now the world will still carry on, just as it was before and after me. The curse though will continue, I imagine that is was something far greater than me, my life, and even the people that were mixed up with it. That even before that dying man who sent the curse spiraling into my very soul, the same curse that had entered him, and it enter the thing that was the host before him, and so forth. No one could be blamed for cursing who and that, I just wondered which poor child or thing I'd curse myself. How the curse would resonate within them, change them, would they too lose their boy or girl voice over night, and will feel in-between just about everything. The crack would be back, and the crack was perfect word for it, the bottom side of humans once was an uninterrupted mount of flesh, such as the back until some point of history the curse introduced it's self to our species and split the two legs apart in two directions, and when early Man tried to sit he sat between two great divisions, where they met was a great blade, and the blade broke the even flat of the bottom of Man and produced a crack. We would never be the same, we started to wear underwear from that day on, though in those days it wasn't called underwear just a lion cloth then robe then something else then underwear. We decided to hide it, shameful of our disposition, our indecisiveness, and most of all, ashamed we were cursed.

The world is divided by two hemisphere, where as one half has winter the other has its summer and vice a versa. The toilet boil water flushes to the right in one hemisphere where as the other half it flushes to the left. I often wonder if people tend to walk differently in the southern hemisphere from whose of us who walk in the north. There is night and day. Tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. Lovers and haters. Birth and death. North Korean and South Korean. Going uphill and going downhill. Rockbottom and Rocking the top. Flying and falling. Sleeping and being awake. Being happy and being sad. Feeling full of hope and empty and hopeless. We live only in the present and yet we are divided by what just happened - what did happen, and what will happen. The present only last for that brief pause of time that is invisible to the eye, and as soon as we see it it is no longer the present but the past, if we try to anticipate it it is the future. And if we focus too much on both the past or the future we will miss out on what is right in front of us. There are a million Hallmark quotes and there is a million more, you can probably find the answer to life in all of that, but we choose not to taken by a cheesy little card written to a mass audience for times where we can not think of the right words to say ourselves.

I reach a point where I find myself as an adult, in a car, in New Mexico, but instead of being in the backseat I am driving, and we are slowed down, there is an accident ahead, we see flashing lights, and a broken parts and smashed up cars appear beside us. Through the window I swear I see the same old Indian fellow from years ago, he is even wearing the same things, looking the same after all these years, and I wonder to myself, has he been here all this time, or is this some sort of roadside attraction, something synthetically acted out day in and day out like the Waterworld show at Universal Studios. There he is, Kevin Costner, the man in the other vehicle is Dennis Hopper, and we watch the protagonist die, but this time his soul, his curse did not fly into my eyes and into my soul, not this time, something leaves me, and I feel light and lighter as something heavy and sticky leaves my body and enters his. His eyes roll back and an eagle above shoots up into the sun, eclipsing it for a moment before I realize I am staring at the sun. I turn to my passenger and grab her hand, I tell her everything is going to be ok, she looks back at me, confused, and doesn't say a thing, we ride pass the accident and soon forget it entirely.

We are at a crossroads. I slip the words beneath my tongue in a secret exchange I keep to myself.

(low whisper) "See you at the crossroads, crossroads, crossroads."

The eagle flies on heading north to what appears to be an endless landscape.

"...So you won't be lonely."

The Light Shines Through Me

(Rachel Somewhere in the Woods, 2011)

When I think back at the time my father and I went over to Jorge's, the real Jorge's, house in Albuquerque, NM in 99', I remember being confused. No one ever sat me down to tell me what had happened formally, that he had disappeared and left all of this things behind. I was given bits and pieces of information, where I catch the chatter of the adults as I roamed the empty house. There was a strong sense of emptiness in there, and his things, the things I grew to know were his, had a life of their own, now were just things, belonging to no one. I never got to see the letter he left behind back then, I didn't even know it existed. Eventually I would have to ask about Jorge, what exactly did happen with him, over the phone with my mother, who still wasn't sure herself. He had left this world, but not world as in he died, he had vanished like a phantom. He could be amongst us right now, camouflaged as everyone else, and all we have is speculation. All I have is a feeling, and at the end of the day, that is the only thing that seems to remain true. He is far away, amongst strangers like he always has been. Seeing the world one last time, as Jorge continues to explore the world as well as himself. And perhaps he did die that day, leaving this world, in an Obi Wan Kenobi way, watching us as he is gives up his life only to guide us, to be that voice in the back of our mind when we most need guidance.

I have yet to hear a voice calling me from another universe, and perhaps I haven't been in need of anything that deep and immediate yet. Something in me changed that day, and I haven't been the same since. All I know is I feel less alone, that Jorge can be anywhere, but most of all, he is with us, inside of us, carried in our hearts and minds. I've never told anyone before but every once in a while I have this reoccurring dream that I am in the desert, sometimes alone sometimes with old friends, and the sand and all the plants are an ashy black. I could see storm clouds far off in the distance and the little blankets of rain fall beneath them. Two glowing eyes appear from far off, and come closer and closer, floating as if they were just two spheres of light. Then they disappear. A moment passes and I feel fur against my body, I look down and it is a black coyote, brushing up against me. I pet him on the head, then the heck, and he brushes up against me some more. The moon is out, and he howls, I turn into viper and cover the moon, the light shines through me, and the dream ends. It almost always happens exactly the same, with the same sequence of events and atmosphere, that coyote and the moon. To me it is Jorge inserting his presence in my mind, telling me he still roams, and that he is by my side, brushing up against me.

I wonder if I'll ever seen him again. I picture that being the climax of my life, during this huge shoot out, and I'm on the run or something, and when I am all alone against some army of thugs or cops or something, he appears, and is some badass god of destruction blowing them all away with a lifetime of experience of doing just that.

When the whole world is against me he'll be there, and perhaps he was always there. Right by my side, waiting for that moment to happen.