Recently in home Category

the little leaves on one of the plants turned a green so pale that i am not even sure the poor thing is still alive.
what is it like to die as a plant? do the dreams of growth just evaporate? does the skin stop to itch? what kind of senses do plants have anyway?
the little ones. the gigantic trees.
they do have intelligence. don't they?

the fog was beautiful this morning. trillions of little water droplets between here and the horizon. some suspended. all moving.
the same water that has been around for billions of years.
so good to see it in ever new constellations.

i stepped outside and looked at the roof of the next building. the raccoons living in the garbage shaft had assembled a stone garden on the silver surface.
near the emergency ladder a small bottle made it look as if at least one of the animals were a drinker. perhaps it was. i would not be surprised.
the little guys behaved rather humanly when out and about early in the morning and late in the evening.
they probably still did that. except that the days were much shorter now. so the actions were less obvious.
tracks in the snow were actually proof that the raccoons still lived in the building not so long ago.

i am slowly moving books and notes and layers of information from one room to some other room. wish i were able to let go of things easier.
maybe if i knew that they could help someone?
not sure how this is best done.

here is it. the end of the year. it is in sight. just a few more days. snow. rain. sunshine.
not sure the little plant will make it.
eventually i will probably end up with many jade plants. each slightly different, even though they are actually just taken from the same donor.
and that plant was likely taken from some other.
i hope tomorrow will be incredibly foggy.
there is a certain pleasure in being able to stand outside in the cold and to know that the inside is warm and calm and allows to have a thought.
as simple as that thought might be.

after three weeks away from home, i am spread around the globe like fly on a windshield, except i am alive and will now reassemble myself slowly, before i jump off again.
first there was a week in beijing. and i have learned so much there about myself and life that i will need to think about it for a while, and maybe a while long enough to outlast me.
that is very possible.
the thinking i was pulled into on this trip to china was so fundamental and so deeply set in human existence that it is not something i can just simply put in words or write about as if it were just another occurrence.
not that i would write about any other occurrence here.
then the two following weeks were spent in germany, in some places familiar and in some places much less familiar. and the airline lost my baggage for about 10 days, so there was a very vulnerable quality to most of the time spent in bavaria and swabia.
i felt lost at times, even though i should not have.
and felt cornered, and angry. for no reason visible to the outside world.
so in a way this was also a very transformational experience, but maybe this time one i do not really understand enough to even interpret properly.

it is almost midnight on the first day of the first month of 2011. and i am awake as if it were around noon of the second of january. and my suitcases are still packed. i have not even looked at the pictures again that i took in the last three weeks. there is a hum in my head and my dreams seem to be straight out of inception's abandoned scripts.

it is incredible how i manage to throw myself into this similar state almost every year. it is not that i am placing any resolutions in front of myself. it is that giant shifts somehow happen around now. and it could just me that this might be the only time left for me to actually stop for more than a day or two and to look at my feet and the ground and the ground beneath the ground and to look at the sky beyond that.
maybe. perhaps this is the only time left when i can become a set of ripples in a pond.

and all of this will probably sound ridiculous to anyone outside. and it will probably all sound ridiculous to me in a few days from now.
but it will probably not make it less valid at this current moment in time.

This last visit to Germany really took away some years from the end of my life. And it was not the food, because that was rather good. And it was not the places where I stayed, as I seemed to get upgraded in every hotel now. And not even the travel. All modes of transportation were about as good as I could have hoped for.
No, it was the psychological underpinnings of it. And maybe the weather too.
I have been ground down to a little core of a grain at this point. And the nerves are blank now. And I overreact to the world inside and outside of me.
My biggest piece of good luck is probably to be surrounded by brilliant people. Or what might be the bigger piece of good luck even is that the brilliant people are on my side of the equation.

But that last trip managed to bargain out quite a price for what will some day be seen as "experience". Or maybe the memory is just freshest at this point. That's probably what it really is.

And now, before 4 am on a Monday. I should probably not be typing on the glass surface of a little device that really wants to grab more and more of my attention.
The moon is rising as a thin orange sliver over the outline of the King's county hospital. And I should be sleeping. Too much is too much. Sometimes it really is.

this is not a book with empty pages.

managed to not say a word to the guy sitting next to me on the plane. even though we appeared to be the same age, we seemed to read the same magazines, and even ordered the same food.
well, i watched "wickie der wikinger" right after "kojak" while he held his iphone close enough to his face to leave smear marks on the screen. with his eyelashes. it was some art movie. mostly blue pictures of people doing something.
it was not my seat anyway. i was supposed to sit two rows back, in a seat i had booked months in advance. but there was this father who wanted to sit next to his sons.
"i speak three languages" said one of the boys, maybe 8, instead of a hello, when i was exchanging my opened blanket for the one that had not been used yet.
"oh that's nice, what are the languages?" " i speak english, german, and french."
"das ist ja sehr schön, dann haben wir zwei sprachen gemeinsam" "ja"
i was a bit upset that we did not have three languages in common. today.
perhaps the boy will end up learning polish at some point in his life, or perhaps i will finally be forced to learn french.
that charles V quote i recently read somewhere made me smile... I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
he should have probably mixed it up now and then. and would he have used other languages had he not suffered from the habsburg jaw?

we are back in new york. the snow flurries are turning the palette of the brooklyn i can see out of the window now into something that one would probably use a pencil to describe, perhaps some dirtied sienna? a true lead pencil?
it appears to be cold enough for the flakes to actually bounce of each other as they land. they do not feel they should be come one cover of snow yet. right now they want to be new year flakes.

we travelled a bit too quickly in the last few weeks. it is so tempting to just jump on a train to go to a place that is so close and yet so different than the current location. köln is now about an hour away from frankfurt? really? that's pretty much the length of my daily commute today.

what is it like to express anything in more than 140 characters? how many facebook friends does it take to make one who will actually save one's life when it is threatened? not just like or comment on one's fall. or just retweet it.

jetlag can be a beautiful thing. and now i am even 5 minutes early.

Not completely sure what time zone I am in right now, or even what precisely a time zone could mean to me being here. There are several motors running in the apartment. The refrigerator is compressing something, the air conditioner is pushing cool air into the room and the little spinners in tivo and friends are busy remembering television broadcasts I will probably not remember once I see them.

Some of my sentences have turned from linear strings to circles, rings, some even bubbles. The visual world is gathering like the road at the end of a blur tunnel when in the left lane at high speeds.

I will need to slow down for at least a few hours this morning. The apartment is littered by objects a busier me has left behind for the me who has a bit more time.
This has happened so often that the busier me actually assumed that time can be just stolen from the less busy me.

And now I am not even sure where to start here.
It is odd how I have to somehow defenestrate myself into calmness.
At least for a few hours I have to.
Let's see if it works.

the plastic bird was not enough. now a fine black mesh is wrapped around several pots and places on the balcony. some monster had arrived to put pig back with eons. there were bits and pieces of bits and pieces all over the floor. had a visitor tried to make me hate them? were the gifts of guano expressions of love?
i was not very good at reading the signs.
not sure the mesh will do anything. if it will not work, the next step is going to be the purchase of a bucket of toothpicks.

walking to mr. suds later in the afternoon, i noticed a pigeon that looked as if half of it were glued to the middle of the ocean parkway service road. the bird must have broken a wing and perhaps more and was now trying to take off, in heart breaking slow motion, maybe at a wave a second.
almost wanted another car to arrive and free it of pain right there. or was i supposed to break its neck?
was this somehow connected to how much i had hated pigeons just a few minutes prior?
i imagined that the best outcome of this would be one of the cats living around the building finding the pigeon, killing it gently and then feeding it to its young.

when i walked past the spot a few minutes later, that seemed exactly what i saw about to happen. a not very large female cat was carrying the freshly killed pigeon in its teeth. the cat had to walk almost upright because of her front legs being almost too short to carry the large bird without letting it touch the ground. the pigeon, with its iridescent belly facing forward, had its wings wide open, together the animals looked like a griffin, or some other yet to be described mythical animal.

looked down on my neighbours balcony. the mother pigeon was still sitting on the nest she had made in one of my neighbour's flower boxes. next to her was a small open eggshell. i at first thought that some other animal had taken the content of the egg and that the mother was sitting there traumatized. an odd thought but probably conditioned by my experience of seeing a pigeon killed just minutes prior. when i looked again and from a different angle, i could clearly see a yellowish, naked, freshly hatched thing under the mother's belly moving slowly.
it looked as if it were two little birds even. but i think it was just one.

then i noticed a second nest on my neighbours balcony, in a larger, round pot. what just a few days ago appeared to be a lucky accident now seemed to be a breeding ground for birds right under my nose. my feelings for pigeons was split back into pigs and eons.

quite a circle of emotions for a simple gray sunday, maybe as gray as the underwing of a pigeon in flight.

I was told that it would have taken me less time to do the dishes than to write about me not having done the dishes in a long time. Doing the dishes did take longer than writing about them. I finished the work around 3am last night. The place is transforming again. I have entered that forgotten room behind a door in my bedroom, the stem-room, the trailer, the office, the studio. I have not been here for quite a while now. The images had started falling off the wall, so I took them off, most of them, and packed them neatly into one of the many boxes piled at the other wall. A lot is going on here on one hand, nothing is going on here on the other hand. And this is not good, no matter how I look at it. Need to do the work. Need to do it now. If not now, when? Oh, and it was interesting to find a very good photograph that shows the place where I was born. This here is the city where I am from. A very nice picture taken by Wojciech Wilczyk. The picture looks exactly like my memories of my early childhood and later vacations spent with my grandparents and my uncle. Even though the picture here was shot in 2001.

My windows in the bedroom now close. This is really exciting news for me. Especially as the weather is getting chillier and chillier. The wind is getting ready for its finest hour in January... well, hours. And not only in January, of course. My Landlord (~Lady) is of the incredibly responsible kind. Things just get done. We communicate via email. It is quite great. The rooms here are still mainly filled with an echo. It will probably stay like this for a little while. Slowness is okay. I use a box as a chair. I use a folding table as a table. It is great. I will maybe hang up the picture of a sea urchin. It is one of my favorite drawings. Well, it is a print. A great one. At least as far as I remember. I might finally have a wall for it... hmm... okay, maybe this could be a great last thing for today.

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