Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Snowing Buckets

There has been this obnoxious intermittent drumming behind my building for the last half hour or so. It has been driving me crazy. Nearly 1am and 27 degrees, and some idiot is out in the street banging on an overturned bucket like he thinks he's a subway musician. Not even any good rhythms, either. Just this moronic drumroll, every minute or so.

I had my phone in hand, ready to speed dial the police, who might remember me from last summer when I kept calling about other idiotic neighbors who'd forget on a nightly basis how to disarm their car alarms, usually starting at midnight and lasting until 3am.

I decided to poke my head through my curtains to see if I could pinpoint exactly where the bucket drumroll was coming from. I wanted to make sure the cops knew exactly where they could nab this bugger.

Instead, I saw this.


And I laughed, first because it wasn't a bucket but a bucket loader that was making all that noise. And then because the truck oddly reminds me of those four-legged AT-AT walkers from the Battle of Hoth in the Empire Strikes Back. There is something very anthropomorphic in the way it shakes the bucket to get all the snow out.

When Allah gives you the strength to laugh, then Mamma, you will survive all things. - Baba Abdullah, "Abdullah and Miriam" (Maria Thomas)

And now onto the drawerings.








Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Where New York City Winters Aren't Bleeding Me

I ran out of places and friendly faces because I had to be free...
I took the sweet life, I never knew I'd be bitter from the sweet
I've spent my life exploring the subtle whoring that costs too much to be free
Hey lady
I've been to paradise but I've never been to me

-Charlene


I turned down several attractive plans last night to go to my usual Monday night drawering studio, only to be deterred by a possibly imaginary fever and an impossibly undeniable sleep.

So I'm posting some drawings from the archives, one of which made it to my Kenya blog back in the day, the others of which should have but apparently didn't.

Yes, I do need to get a scanner.

Scenes from a train. Elburgon, Kenya, 7/21/2006.


Crashing with the Kivindyos, my Kenyan homestay family. Kitui, Kenya, 6/1/2005.




Site visit to my future home for a year in Kobujoi, Kenya, 7/13/2005




Jomo Kenyatta Fairgrounds, Kisumu, Kenya, 11/29/2005.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them
as you desire, and you send it where you will.
Aim my road on your bow of hope
and in a frenzy I will free my flock of arrows.

    - Pablo Neruda, "Ah Vastness of Pines"


My friend Joyce introduced me to Neruda more than five years ago, and I finally sat down with a thin volune of his love poems (and one song of despair) on the subway this morning.

Reading Neruda is like having someone tar and feather you but with rose petals and nectar, then roll you over the edge of a cliff because they want to show you how the sun sets in the most beautiful valley they've ever seen, and as you're appreciating this breathtaking light show on the western horizon, you're also in a screaming free fall towards an uncertain fate, until you land on a bed of cacti and every needle pierces you with an intense pain that you recognize as beauty and truth accosting your soul, and despite being so intoxicated by the ambrosia of your rose petal garment and the plummeting spill you just took, you know that everything that has ever permeated your senses this profoundly is proof that you are deeply alive, thanks to being told a bunch of old secrets left to the world by a dead Chilean poet.



















Monday, January 3, 2011

Sounding My Barbaric Yawp

Today I really needed a primal scream. And I was painfully aware that there is No Where On Earth that I can have my primal scream. At least not without a Zipcar, some trail mix, and my hiking boots. And then I needed a primal scream even more.

In college, during the week before finals when there were no classes and everyone was buckled down studying for exams, we had an official campus-wide primal scream. People would just stop what they were doing at 9pm on Saturday night, open the window and

ROAAAARRRRAAUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHH

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

GGGGGRRRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHHRRRRR

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAHHRRRRRAAAAAAA

It's the only space I've ever had like that, and at the time I didn't take enough advantage of it. Mine was an anemic scream. Mmmaahhhhhhhhhh. Like that.

I had a friend freshman year who would occasionally get so pent up that he'd let out a spontaneous primordial roar in inappropriate places. Once he did it in the men's restroom at the library. People were around. They stared. He didn't care. He didn't end up murdering anyone, either.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break. - Katharina, Taming of the Shrew

And now, the drawerings.