Slick on slick

Well, that was disgusting. I was just up on Sohn Avenue trying to find some cantaloupe that didn't completely look like it had been kicked here from California, and as I was coming out I got a glimpse of some really stark black-on-white graffiti framed against the grocery store's roof. There's a two- or maybe three-story building next door (it's hard to tell from the ground), like an Italian cafe thing below a head shop and maybe some apartments, and someone had obviously gone out on the fire escape and tagged the shit out of the Guadalupana, probably with a Bela Fleck banjo line still tick-strumming in their mind's ear. Graffiti shots have really kind of been done to death, for the most part, but I thought I saw something interesting there. From the right angle, you know, with pedestrians down in the lower left frame, hats and haircuts trafficking past, and maybe a measure of sky in the top right for symmetry. Anyway, I can't know until I get up there. I went around to the back of the cafe to check out the accessibility situation; it was not what you'd call enviable. I guess that's where they dump all the grease, because there was this unpleasant patch of Crisco-looking shine about the size of a parking space radiating outward from the back door. Scraping that shit off the shoe was not fun. It was all over my knuckles, too; I kept having to stop on the way home and wipe my hands on people's lawns. Gloves next time, and I'll probably bring the board as well. I guess I could just ring the bell on the head shop and ask to use their fire escape -- I have no doubt that they'd let me -- but I feel like I should pick up some skills in terms of infiltration and quick getaway. I can't be going to war zones and asking the murahaleen for permission to get a couple quick rolls of broken children corpses.

Speaking of photography (and when am I ever not), holy good God, there are some beautiful girls in my Italian class. Some people are just good-looking past the point where they'd ever need an education. Like, you can get any job you want. You look like Anne Hathaway, or that girl from the Weezer video. What are you doing here? You will never get fired from anything ever. I'm guessing the ridiculously beautiful girls must perceive the world very differently from everyone else -- I'm thinking their major idioms of social interaction are aggressive friendliness and hostile resentment, with some bitter competition thrown in for variety. Actually, I probably wouldn't want to be transcendently good-looking and female. I'm glad they exist, though, because wow is the camera friendly to them. Often it feels like kind of a crutch, you know, like it doesn't matter what else is in the frame as long as I capture Kyra von Heijne in midstride, with her hair in any condition at all. Automatically people are going to call that a good picture, and really all I have to do there is hold down a finger. Plus it seems faintly icky to just take pictures of hot girls and be like "no, it's cool, this is my major," and then have all these contact sheets of goddesses saved in plastic sheeting with the rest of my negs. I kind of feel like I should be modding a They Might Be Giants wiki and memorizing a Playboy Advisor about chiantis when I do that. But damn, man. Okay, I'm imposing a limit: For every picture I take of a beautiful girl (or a beautiful guy -- I'm not going to pretend like I don't know what constitutes a good-looking man), I will take four pictures of landscapes, or trash, or fat children, and make them just as pleasing to the eye. Yes. I will do this. Shortcuts are no way to get better at anything.

Speaking of shortcuts (I like the segues tonight! I will try to do more of this in the future), my friend Harry Stroud picked up something called the Elizabeth Rathbone Miracle Ball. Have you seen this? It's like a soft plastic-ish sphere, about the size of a grapefruit, that you can use for apparently a thousand and one limited-space exercises, on a plane, at your desk, wherever. Harry hasn't put this thing down for three days. She's got it between her shoulderblades, under her neck, she's bowling it lightly down the street and running circles around it as we walk. There's an aperture to poke a straw through and do breathing exercises. Nothing Harry has actually done with the ball has required any greather physical exertion than the contraction of an elbow, but she's convinced that she's on the fast track to the Iditarod. Should I say something? She is kind of entertaining with the ball. It's like having a cat. I'll let her flex those thumb muscles a little while longer. Everyone should be able to play with a ball now and then.

Le Big Mac

I had a bad moment today where I was boarding through the parking lot behind the biology labs and saw a chick talking on her cell phone. Her head was encased in some kind of unfortunate orange cloth helmet (it's been mild here but wet, the kind of suspended-moisture situation that clams to your skin and drops the body temperature in a really unfair way), but, you know, her ass was decent and I was enjoying the view as I rowed past. Getting closer, though, I heard her voice and realized it was actually a guy. The egg-shaped head covering thing had completely neutralized any cues. Fortunately I don't think anyone else was close enough to notice me checking him out, so I just jagged right the first chance I got and found an area with some actual females. Simon Federales: stopping mistakes before they happen.

I was hoping to avoid it this year, but today I set my alarm for six. January is a great and terrible time to take pictures: at certain hours the sky provides the kind of flat, unaffective light that people spend days trying to recreate in a studio setting. If you're lucky, of course, that light has a lifespan about the same length as a tampon's. My class schedule hits the clock in such a way as to almost completely lock up my usual shooting hours, so it looks like another winter of early mornings and early retirement. I need the weekends for homework and shit, plus the refinement of existing shots, and the occasional trip out to wherever. A couple of my friends have been leaning on me to get back into snowboarding as well. Oh, about that: I almost wish I hadn't mused my way backwards into this idea that most of my friends are consumed in some way or another by their own egos. Now that I've picked it out, I can't stop noticing it. The guys I used to board with, Trese and Ian, are perfect examples of this. (I'm only exploring this subject right now because it's more likely that I will run to the top of a mountain and eat a dinner of microwaved dung than that either of them will ever read a paragraph on the Internet containing as many words as this.) They are both great, fun guys, both of them working hard to earn degrees in fields that will ultimately allow them to do much good for others, but they are both so full of themselves that they need bags to carry around the surplus. I don't know. Do some people just not know what doubt is? The full-speed-ahead mentality, I understand it but I don't know what the appeal is. I'd rather get to the right place than get to the wrong place fast. But yeah, they've been talking about boarding over at the Swan resort and I probably won't have the heart to defer much longer. It's been awhile -- maybe it will feel good to get the snow back into my lungs.

I was at a party a couple nights ago where somebody had the idea to throw on Pulp Fiction and play probably the most basic drinking game known to man -- just sip every time there is profanity or drug use, basically every time the R rating is earned. I usually crap out of drinking games way ahead of everyone else, and as I think I mentioned my tolerance has been way down lately, so after a while I was just watching the movie. What a good movie. I mean, the dialogue is as bad as anything Tarantino has ever written, but visually, kinetically -- the guy knows how to run film. I actually slowed out of the rounds a little sooner than my body chemistry would have demanded, and I noticed that most people were pretty much doing the same; by the time Mia was getting around to explaining Raven McCoy, almost everyone else was just watching the movie, you know, and enjoying it. I guess one of the other guys, this Canadian kid named Will who is shaped like a gumdrop and has one of those bowl cuts that don't look good on anyone past the third grade, noticed it too, because at around that point he started announcing the drinking cues in his terrible systems-analyst voice. "Coke is fucking dead as dead." "DRINK!" "I don't want to hear about no motherfuckin' ifs." "DRINK!" Then there were the debates about whether "nigger" is a curse, and whether it was actually "nigga" when Jules said it. Jesus, Will. If everyone wanted to drink, that would be one thing, but I think most people were just going along with it because Will basically has no other friends. I hate when someone can't catch the vibe of a room, though. Mainly I just feel bad for the guy, but regardless I don't think I'll be visiting that hall for a while.

The persistence of grappa

Alright, I'm back. I know I haven't updated for a bit, but I was busy shuttling my entire life down to Baltimore and reconnecting with my people here. It occurred to me over break that my friends at Lohan tend to be either monumentally self-absorbed and -promoting or quiet and inwardly focused to the point of actually deflecting light. My two tightest guys here are probably Granver Elios, who you couldn't pull out of the library with an air raid siren, and Dave Del Mar, whose whereabouts on campus are known at all times, since his every line of conversation is delivered in a shout -- not in an angry way, and oddly not in a manner that becomes annoying; the guy is just so happy to be alive, and pitches his voice accordingly. This is one of those things where I don't know and can't ever find out whether things would be different if I hadn't been born with pieces missing. Between Dave and Granver there is almost no overlap, except that both are absorbed to a huge extent by their own agendas. Is it possible that I can only become good friends with people who are so self-preoccupied that they don't bat an eye when I swing myself onto a couch or hit the dance floor on my fists? Not that I have encountered anything like hostility or even hesitation here at school -- everyone is friendly, if momentarily awkward on first introduction, which I can forgive. Still, I don't know. This is one of those life issues Dr. Seakins recommended I spend a quiet hour thinking about, when there's any number of things I'd rather be doing.

Classes begin Monday, so it has mostly been a weekend of heroic stupidity, early breakfasts paid for with fistfuls of dimes, and way, way too much alcohol. I guess in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I have been sucking on a bottle of Svedka this evening. It's been a few months since I got properly toasted -- the semester took an early dive in November, and I ended up having to hold myself to a schedule of something like twenty-one shots a day in the run-up to finals week, so I was too cashed to drink in any event. Then I was in Sweden and then home, both of which experiences were disorienting enough without the aid of distillates. All of which is to say that my tolerance seems to have dropped significantly. It was never that high to begin with, for obvious reasons, and I have evidently lost about half the ground gained in the first three semesters of college. This was to be expected. What I didn't foresee was that I have pretty much lost most of the desire to be drunk -- it's just not doing it for me lately. Having your brain revolve like a phonograph record on that needle called equilibrium, seeing each motion in ghostly advance before executing it blurrily -- I don't know. I kind of like having a clear head. This whole last paragraph I have been working on a half liter of Poland Spring, the sobering powers of which are supposedly a myth but usually hold in my case. It is nice to be back at school, nice in a lot of little ways. For right now I feel good just keeping the Vaseline off my vision and appreciating what is there. I'm sure I'll be back into the cocktails by President's Day. (Interestingly, Lincoln's birthstone is the amethyst, which was thought in Greco times to be a powerful ward against the effects of intoxicants. Oh well.)

All right, on a trip to the bathroom I am basically fluid without possessing false knowledge. Bless you, bottled water, and call on me if you ever need a character witness. Also, if anyone is reading this and feels like reminding me tomorrow to for God's sake go get a Dustbuster, I'd be greatly indebted. The hall here is still three steps down from horrific in terms of cleanliness. It's not the maintenance staff's fault; they can't keep up with Heusinger freshmen, and the sophomores are not much better. I hate to be that guy out moving past your room in a Dopplering whoop of whining suction, but on the other hand, I really don't mind so much at all. Empires could be built from the dirt ground into that carpet. Actually, if you are going to be reminding me of things I need to do, be a mensch and add something about getting my bus pass refilled. I need to carve out some new loops of territory in the city's junk orbit. Lohan is a beautiful campus, looking every day like the catalogue, but it has been snapped to death, cut into a billion squares and proudly hung on clothespins. Time to forge new ground. Way past time.

Neutropenicism

So it turns out that my grandfather is back in the hospital. Dad and I went to see him on Sunday. Strange day all around -- the room itself with its unstabbed fruit cups and craning, inquisitive flatscreen TV was the least unearthly passage. We drove to Washington Heights through a thick haze of fog; the hospital is ten blocks from the bridge, but we could see no trace of it from the visitors' area. It's been a while since I was in the city, and I felt it as soon as we parked on Riverside: this is really where I belong. Baltimore is great, but it's no place to stay. Things come from the earth here, wet and yellow, new and receptive to the air. It is a city where things begin. We humped it up the hill, past the Marta Velasquez memorial playground, slicked over with wet leaves that in any other year would have been snow. Dad was muttering things about the Dominicans the whole time, but I think that was just to keep his mind and his mouth moving.

We found Abuelo on the sixth floor. That hospital is really inescapably a box; you can't stand anywhere without being aware of your own small size in the greater spatial arrangement. From the window of his room you could see a jackstraw ruin of a construction site, collapsed or halfway to ascent. He was not in bad spirits but seemed incredibly enervated. I spent last summer with him up in Maine, where he and Herminia now spend most of their time. He's been undergoing rounds of this experimental chemo treatment, and I guess it hasn't been kind to him. Dad's sister showed up with my cousin Jaime, who is an advertising major at Boston University. Herminia was also there, completely responding to Abuelo before he spoke, anticipating what the rest of us could not really guess at. He was exhausted and dehydrated. Herminia had brought him in after he'd lain there in bed for thirty-six hours, barely moving or talking to anyone. Dad told him what the Steelers had been up to and Abuelo told us about when he'd overseen the law students in their offices on 136th Street, how in the spring they would fill paper bags with water and drop them from the windows in an early-May courtship ritual.

On the way back we listened to Steely Dan, Dad fast-forwarding through the tracks that didn't have Fagen singing. Later that night we went out to dinner with a couple my parents are friends with and they asked if I was still taking pictures. Cally and I screwed around for most of the meal and I taught her how to send text messages. I'm not sure what an advertising major does -- it seems that most advertising is designed to strike at the lonely and the vulnerable. I wonder what my cousin is learning up there.

Thick, sandy fog, as I mentioned, so this weekend was pretty much a wash for outdoor shots. I did get a nice piece of someone's fence over which the vines had completely crept in a pubic snarl, at once immaculately arranged and unmistakably wild. There was a moment when I was heading up Cassidy Street to buy some fruit and had my camera out to get a shot of the asphalt slicked with rain, and realized that I am completely sick of taking shots of streets and sidewalks. It's actually sort of nice to access that disgust all at once. My father and I passed by the ruined construction site on our way out. It was an awesome tumbledown catastrophe, impressively mountainous from the mouth at the bottom, through a broken and stained fence tagged with the calligraphy of the local lords -- MOOKIE RAM, SKONK, STELLA 95 -- but man, I am tired of shots that put you into a small feeling. I am ready to get some height. The gray dishcloth light was draining away as we left. My grandfather did not have the light on in his room and as we swept over the wet January leaves back to the car, I knew what it was to be in that bed, alone, a dent in the gathering dark, the hall beeping in a symphony of interrogation.

If you strike me down

Today had all the start-and-stop charm of a YouTube video over a 6.0 Mbps wireless connection. I've been working on different applications for this summer, mostly magazines in New York, although I have a couple of contacts in local studios that also look promising. The city would be ideal, though -- I have nothing bad to say about Baltimore, but there are downtowns and then there are downtowns. The bulk of today was taken up with this Harper's app, where you basically get to create half an issue of the magazine, on spec, for no pay, in the hopes of moving up to the Broadway offices and working there, also for no pay. I know that's what an internship is, but you would think Harper's would be a little more sympathetic to the starving idealist. I'm not even half done with this qualifying literature and I'm pretty sure I've already worked harder than I would if I were actually on the staff. It's very much designed to weed out the people who don't know the magazine all that well. I'm personally going off the three issues I could find in the house, none of which is more recent than 2004 and two of which are actually from the Clinton administration, so it's all a lot more frustrating than it really needs to be. On the other hand, a big part of what I've been doing all day is combing through pre-refinery news sites for items of interest, which is how I learned that the Indian village of Lakhanow recently pledged to give the name "Saddam Hussein" to all of its newborn males. They already have about twenty Saddams -- the oldest is about eleven; the trend dates back to the first Gulf War -- and I guess they just decided to make it a town policy. It's things like this that make you feel good to be American.

Picked up the car from Joel's today. As far as I can tell it no longer makes that Tuvan-throat siren song; now it sounds more like a jet is about to land on the hood. I tried to case some parts of town where the tracks edge close to the street, but for some reason there were cops out in record numbers. Tagaste has been really territorial about its train system the last couple of years since this kid just ahead of us in the high school got killed out on the tracks one night, and civilians get chased away if they're spotted. I would go out at night to get some shots, but broad daylight is pretty much the only option with this camera. Maybe I could talk to someone on the force and get a pass or something. On second thought, fuck it; I'm only in town another five days. If someone really wants to give me a problem I'll just take. It's sad but most cops seem really disinclined to chase a half-person if the terrain is rough.

My father seemed pretty distracted today, maybe because Mom hasn't been up from her office in a while. He fried up these sausages which I don't know the Spanish for, but they're complete Quiebra Hacha comfort food, and just wandered off to his library halfway through dinner. Cally sort of picked at hers, so later on, while I was trying to track down the primary document on this bulletin circulated by the Church of Scientology to the Berlin municipal government (this is still for Harper's, which again, I read maybe twice a year), I invited her in and just motioned discreetly to the jar of pretzels I got for Christmas. (My parents didn't really know what to get me this year, so it was just a lot of food and iTunes cards, which is actually kind of ideal.) She stayed around for a while and we ended up daring each other to eat these Muhammad Ali protein bars called "Who's The Mango." Do you remember Floam? That Nickelodeon sickly-pink moldable squishy stuff that came packaged in what looked like a brain? Who's The Mango bars taste a lot like that. I can't see Ali stretching out at the end of the day with one of these. I wonder, between him and Foreman (speaking of identical names in freakish multiplicity), how many products have their signatures slapped all over them, and what percentage of those products they might actually use. Maybe there is a Harper's piece in this somewhere.

Exile on Main Street

So I slept in yesterday, which is not normally something I do all that often, especially in winter, but I'd had to take the car up to Joel's garage the night before -- it had been making some weird threnodic singing noise when I tried to start it in the mornings -- and the parking scheme there is like one of those honeycomb triangle puzzles you get at places like the Museum Store. I don't know why Joel doesn't just tar over the whole lot and get it on the Western grid system, because you basically have to juggle geometry problems and maybe an exponent or two if you want to back into a space, and this is assuming you have two hands free to manipulate the steering wheel. I actually found a space in not too much time, but maneuvering into it and not bashing the hulking ATVs on three sides just left me with all this residual adrenaline hanging around in my system. I tried working it out on the way home, punching mailboxes and stuff, but going a mile in freezing January conditions is more likely to wake you up than lull you to sleep, so once I got home I stayed lit for hours. I ended up crashed out in front of some crap on Comedy Central with a stack of white cheddar rice cakes about as tall as me. I don't even like those things -- it's like the cheese destroyed itself in some long-ago war and you're just coming upon the dust of its civilization.

Anyway, I stayed in bed way longer than usual, and what woke me up was Lillian, our cleaning lady, bashing around in the bathtub downstairs. Lillian's a sweet old woman, but you really don't want to be in her way when she's on the job. I wasn't even sure she knew I was there -- my mother is the one who pays her and arranges schedules and stuff, and she's barely been up from Union City at all this week, the post-Christmas hangover being her busy season. Lillian and her brother basically shot their way out of the favelas in the eighties after her second kid was born, so I definitely didn't want to surprise her, especially after having been so quiet all morning. Real quick, I rolled out of bed and ducked into my brother's room.

It was kind of creepy in there, not least because I felt like I was fourteen years old again. It's incredible, but I think it really has been that long since I was last in there -- Luis got all closed off and weird while I was in high school, and the last year he was around, he pretty much never moved from the family room. It was a rare day when I needed to borrow something from him; the pencil sharpener was basically the only thing of his that I ever needed, and he gave that to me for Kwanzaa one year (the year he decided to start observing Kwanzaa, obviously). I hopped up on the bed, which was still the same slate-black comforter he picked out to match the navy blue walls, which in turn were only painted that color so he could slap tiny glow-in-the-dark moons and constellations all over them. (Luis spent most of middle and some of high school thinking he would go into space.) The desk was untouched, the same abandoned Rubik's cube and dinosaur erasers, with like eight books on the shelf -- Carl Sagan, the second or third Hitchhiker's book, something about human biology. The thousand-dollar telescope, which he spent two weeks glued to and then only used occasionally to tell if the neighbors were out so he could have band practice, was still set up near the window. The posters were still Kurt Cobain slumped over a guitar and Jimi Hendrix aiming his at the moon, even though Luis never owned or, as far as I know, learned how to play a guitar. I wish I could report that there was a photograph of him and me somewhere on a night table, or even a shot that I took, of Cally maybe, but Luis didn't much like things that reminded him of starting circumstances. I don't know that there's a single thing in that room, actually, besides maybe a wallet-sized map of Cuba, to indicate the places or people that Luis was from -- just where he hoped to go.

I don't know why I'm talking about my brother like he's dead. He's probably not. We haven't heard from him in two years, but he's an idiot, and I've noticed that idiots tend to find great favor in life.

Lillian left about an hour later, by which point I had already drawn up a list of all the places in town I could remember where the railroad tracks are accessible on foot, so to speak. Once I get the car back I'm going to make some rounds and see if I can't get some good shots of train-blown debris. I have this idea for a series that would basically be pictures of wind, in different circumstances. Now's the time to really start working on my portfolio, and anyway there doesn't seem to be anybody else in town to hang with. I thought I saw Marty Krasinski up by the high school a couple days ago, but he looked like he was shouting at something so I just drove past. Marty's a good guy but you definitely have to be in a certain mood.