Category: Quotidian

-There are days filled with other peoples’ faces, people you haven’t seen in years. It’s that small apparatus in your mind that responds to a certain scent in the air, to the afterglow of a day present in the fading horizon or simply to the numbers that mark the passage of time. Today, she’s the one that floods my mind. It’s June first today and in some parallel dimension, the one in which we remained friends, we’d be celebrating her birthday. But in this one, I simply think of the fact, that like me soon, she’s a year older. One […]

-The smoke idles, caressed and molded by the wind as it takes on mystical shapes above my head and then dissipates into nothing, like the many ghost that surround us but are nothing of the Ten Thousand Things. And perhaps that is the connection, the communion that binds us, the one that I have been unable to break. Perhaps when I was younger, it wasn’t an excuse but in fact a moment of calirvoyance, when I would respond that the impetus to smoke was a desire toward the secret fellowship with death. It must be still, even now, the driving […]

-I’m deserted in time and space. I feel a disconnection from the reality that created each of my perceptions and each of my insecurities. At the moment, I’m lying with my eyes closed but my thoughts find themselves here. I can’t sleep. When the sun’s left the sky vacant and the shadows disappear, I can’t sleep. I close my eyes and pretend but the thoughts parade across my mind, the images flashing through with different colored light, like some avant-garde experimental film strip, shot by a man who as a child always mixed his peas and carrots. And I ly […]

-There’s a warmth I feel as I crawl back into myself and lose grip of consciousness. Somewhere in there, between the sober reality and my sonambulistic subjectivity, I know I’ve lived this day twice and still have no memory of the day itself. There are these vague images, like sketch art, forming this montage in my head. A terminal, people, suitcases and cars, but in my state, now, as I ly inert it makes no sense. It was the sleep of leaving that cradled me from six thousand miles away, and now, it’s the fatigue of the momentary lapse between […]

-The cold chill wind, the vacant dark of night and the sweat running along the length of my nose, each drop falling to the leather jacket I have on. I’m wearing layers and it’s not even snowing. The truth is, it’s not that cold, but I’m leaving. I’ve learned, when you leave from one place to another, you wear many layers. It gets hot, but if you’re going for comfort then you leave things behind. I’m lugging my life around in two suitcases, a camera bag and a back pack. It’s amazing how twenty four years fit in a finite […]

-Everything smells either of kimchi or seaweed, they say there isn’t a difference and that the smell really emanates because of the kimchi. It’s kind of a funny thing to think about; a whole city that smells like one of it’s favorite side dishes. I keep thinking Mexico, smelling like refried beans or salsa. This maze of kimchi smell, sometimes I think it’s seaweed. It gets crazier. Sometimes I’ll be watching a downloaded movie in the apartment or we’ll have a Soprano’s watching and I’ll forget where I am. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with my […]

-I have found that it is ok to stand motionless without a word to disperse into the troubling cold wind. That even when the wind is calm and words are still frozen, that you will be fine. Every moment does not require the noise of a voice, but rather the stillness of thought. When words repeat themselves, perhaps it is these that need be expelled into some fantastic rant. And when you talk, sometimes it’s simply what you think, not what you add or that it adds to conversation. Those moments are special. You can dance to any song, and […]

-My steps make their way through the melting snow. It’s almost gone. Crazy how in the same week it could snow about a foot and a half and then melt all away. My breath no longer freezes before me and and I start sweating as I make my way to that building where I spent most of my day. With each step I take on my own, when my thoughts start to flare, my decisions revisit me and they become more fixed, more concrete. I see a path opening before me and it seems interesting. Not necessarily Kerouac or Rimbaud, […]

-I’m in Korea. There are flashes of consciousness that seem so familiar and there are moments when I couldn’t feel more alien. I feel like I’m looking through a kinetoscope and none of the images hold long enough to leave any impression on my eye. A whirlwind of familiarities and oddities. I still wake up weekdays with the heaviness of slumber on my shoulders and I’d prefer to keep the cover over me. Weekends bring some new experiences, like becoming an unsober zombie for a night, but I question if any of these, perhaps, if not all are to my […]

-The snow falls against my little apartment. It sounds like rain and rouses me from my sleep. There’s not much I want to do these days. Even my appetite waxes and wanes. I spent most of the day trudging through the snow to work, to the dentist here, then to work, then home and then home again. I drink too much here. I’m sure it has something to do with my dreams. They have a tendency to be more elaborate even while I wake several times a night. Freud would have said that my waking life was sexually lacking. I […]