I wandered home from Chinatown today in the usual rain, eventually giving up and collapsing frozen onto a sticky bus seat. Each damp block looked like a poem that is meant to be written on postcards and left in farmland gas station racks, hazy and grand and meaningful. As I walked I watched children try to light firecrackers in the drizzle, succeeding only when they least expected it, leaping backwards right on the edge of losing fingertips.
This is the year of the dog. I was born in the year of the dog, and so I have decided to take this as an extra sign that this year will be better than the last one.
It's been a busy weekend, full of music and drag shows and movie screenings. There was even a fist fight once.
Stendhal talks in "De L'Amour" about how in the salt mines of Salzberg the locals each winter toss a branch down into an abandoned shaft. When they retrieve it a few months later, the branch is, "covered with sparkling crystallizations: the smallest twigs, those which are no larger than the foot of a titmouse, are covered with an infinity of diamonds, shifting and dazzling; it is impossible any longer to recognize the original branch." And that's what I'm trying to do with my days, trying to toss them out into the darkness in the hopes of someday being able to find them again, transmuted into something lovely.
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