Like window shopping, but with a cinder block...
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Here's the Playlist. More to follow.
Check out the latest episode of the Podcast!
Here's the Playlist. More to follow.
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Here is the playlist that is referenced in Sunday Bumps 19. Click on the images for more from the featured artists.
At the bus stop on the corner of Broadway and Monument I spotted irregularities in a venerable building. A hasty tack-on polluted the design with mismatched bricks and missing window adornments threw the facade out of balance.
The discolor of the bricks was close enough to make it apparent that they were trying to match the original. I don't know what sort of shenanigans they were trying to pull with the windows.
I must have stood at the corner, facing those building a few dozen times this year. Today was the first time I noticed the transgression.
I mentioned it to the man who was waiting with me at the corner. He was more impressed that the building stood all these years and with the marvel that is building construction.
"That's a lot of goddamn work! Think about it...think about all the buildings and the streets that take you all around the city, and the highways to take you to New York, or Cincinnati, or Boston, or Ohio. All the people who worked on that...I don't know, maybe all this shit has always been here. Maybe the world just came like this, with all this stuff already here."
I admired his sincerity and sense of wonder. Does he believe that even the sparkling new buildings that jut into the East Baltimore skyline are not the work of humans?
Sometimes it is hard to imagine what, brick by brick, line by line, step by step, can be built .
Magical fantasies are seductive, especially when the road ahead is long and uncertain and when we can't see the way; when the way seems too hard.
The highlight reel, the montage: magic.
At first sight, love: magic.
Effortless: magic.
There is no magic in the endless stretches of drudgery and grind. There is no magic in a fruitless harvest, in still-borne seeds. There is no magic in the waiting, in the meantime.
No magic, but there is meaning in the struggle and the process and the inching forward. There is meaning in one more rep and dusting off and going again.
Monuments are not borne not of magic, but of moments of intention stacked one after the next.
An artist, an addict: they sat calm in the eye of the storm; fell in love in the most human way. Destruction is compelling from up close, but the peace in the eye of the storm is a diabolical illusion.
Love fatally to edge of your capacity to feel. Surrender to your inevitable demise.
In search of love and a safe place to land when love and safety are incompatible--the love you remember most, it violently snatched you up.
Long-lived love is technical; cool to the touch. It is a series of doings that create a sense of solid ground to stand on, to build on. It does not consume you. It does not open you all the way up and stretch you to your edge.
It is the rare moment that violates you, snatches you up, pulls you completely into the moment and demands that you operate at capacity. Life is, for the most part, an extended reprieve from the terror of being fully alive.
The artist creates, the addict uses; both clinging to capacity they know from a former life. No wonder they spot each other across this crowded room.
Dread makes you stop breathing; makes you experience, over and over again, the sensation of taking your last breath.
How precious--but breath only works when you let it go. Like most other things, breath becomes toxic when you try to hold it.
The paradox of precious things: you have to let them go to fully appreciate their value. The stinging in your heart you feel when you lose something/someone is what love is. Grief for love lost is love's fullest expression.
Your dread and worry are an underhanded attempt to borrow from death's drama; a futile effort to pass into a breathless heaven of frozen memories. Rather than living your life you would rather watch it flash, frame by frame, before your eyes.
Every joy is tainted with the knowledge that it will fade into sorrow.
You construct shelter from impending doom in the space between breaths. If only you can somehow manage to not panic at the sensation of emptiness, you will find everything is fine in the space between.
The space between each breath is the only peace you will ever know. It is the container of soul and eternity.
There is power out there. He plugs in clippers and starts buzzing his hair. His companion holds open a plastic shopping bag to catch the trimmings.
In addition to power, the new plaza at Eager Park has jets that spray water straight up into the air. He has stripped down to shorts so he can walk through and get cleaned up once the three children who are playing there are done.
His companion does not have the luxury of removing her top. That would be indecent in the eyes of the law. Security guards and cameras abound and police heavy-patrol this oasis among waste-laid blocks of vacants.
She stands like a "brah" in sneakers and basketball shorts. A black t-shirt clings tight about her bosom. She solicits the help of another woman in the plaza to take her turn with the clippers. The three gather close to shield the spectacle from the curious eyes of passers by; gather close to be close to each other.
I buzzed my hair today too; standing alone, looking in the mirror, listening to some guys on a podcast ramble about the psychotic nature of pure stoicism.
I am familiar with desperation. I am less familiar with resignation and acceptance. I am not sure what I see in this trio. Looks like friends looking after each other, doing what they have to do to survive the oppressive heat of summer and whatever else.
We took a moment to compare notes on our experience moving about in the world. We talked about where the paths we are on might take us and about how/if it matters.
She was feeling some sort of existential crisis and by the time she left the sharpness had eased away from her tone.
I half expected to see her here tonight. I am sitting in the seat where she sat.
(aside)
Hey, in case I don't see you again and in case you are reading this...and you might be reading this since I told you that I sometimes feel like I am writing into a void. And you seem the recognize the gift that being seen/heard can be. (By invitation only, of course).
I walked on unfamiliar ground today and I felt fear creeping in. And even now, I feel like I may have to navigate streets filled with zombies. I have to focus on moving through and my ears must remain deaf the pleas of the un-dead.
It must be clear to them that I am not yet one of them. Else they would just let me pass. Somehow I still exist in the land of the living even though I feel like I am barely holding on.
Alternative eternity: to be not among the living, to suffer endlessly and find no rest.