angoisse et tristesse

Angoisse: the name of the cat, paralyzed with fear, caught in the canopy of a weeping willow.

My nostalgia for sitting all night as a security guard in a dilapidated, abandoned building. Every broken window boarded up with night. In a small, flourescently lighted room, sitting in the midst of the dark forces which calmly lie in wait for man. The damp, chilly, cement solitude for which I am sometimes lonely. . . .

Sad and confused, I seek out stationary stores, to wander through their orderly aisles of organizers and reams of virgin paper; I leave, a cleaner slate.

I change the blade of my razor not for physical reasons-- because it dulls-- but for psychological reasons-- to sharpen my mind.

Why is the number nine (9) my favorite?
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It is the threshold, the limit, but the way a door is a limit;
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It signifies the end, but before things begin again;
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It is failure, but at the same time maximum achievement.
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It is the silent "e" spun around, screaming.

When traveling, one all too often spreads limited time thinly over vast space; better to heap the time you have over an appropriately small area. Linger, retrace your steps, cross your own paths, become familiar with the connective tissue between celebrated sites.

That cute, petit eruo-girl smoking a joint in Montparnasse cemetery, she helped me find Cioran's grave.

Eating a croissant filled with almond paste and covered with confectioner's sugar while sitting on a bench behind Notre Dame cathedral on a sunny Paris day.

Paris sites as parasites.

Paris: museums, cemeteries, strip-clubs.

Manhattan plan, Paris plan. One's orientation within the former is through logic; within the latter, landmarks.

La âme - soul, spirit. Le âne - ass, donkey.

Vive la chance.

I often listen to recorded bird calls while driving. So piercingly clear, so solitary and soothing, they make me feel motionless, focused, no matter how fast I drive, no matter how much a blur I make the roadside trees. This sense of stillness while traveling allows me to experience a rebirth when I arrive at my destination, when I crack open my car door like a fragment of shell.

Hands wrapped around the steering wheel of my car. The frame of our camera lens severs them from the body, somewhere along the forearms. We look through the windshield, down the linear interstate, and see it as I, myself, see it. I have often peered from my head as through an old, cumbersome movie camera while driving, lulled, recording and simultaneously playing the opening scene of an unfinished film, my hands on the wheel disembodied even in my own eyes. It is often difficult for me to snap out of this trance of dreamy objectivity; of being both audience member anonymously tucked away in the darkness of the theater and simultaneously the anti-hero, whose hands are steering; of being both God hidden in the dark recesses of the universe and the slug glistening in the sun. Now music is all that is needed-- a sound-track. The right hand releases the wheel and disappears from view. We hear the fumbling clacks of an inserted cassette tape, the click of a turned knob . . . We hear carousel music.

Pivotal dream emotionally, simple to decipher intellectually, of me running in army fatigues and fifty-pound pack around the university campus on a hot and blindingly sunny day, passing a Klaus Kinski dressed in his Fitzcaraldo whites sitting in a lawnchair at the corner of every crossroads.

Gospel choirs which make me feel I can leap right on up over those pearly gates, whether they're locked or not; flatulence of the jazz sax, orgasm of the muted horn.

Sweet cello strings of sorrow strung from the diaphragm to the heart-- real cat-gut-- the ones the rain plays while you stand in it until you can honestly say that you are happy to be alive and able to listen so deeply to its aching serenade.

To walk under the sun, along a narrow cobbled street, slightly intoxicated with red wine, in the arms of a lovely woman-- forever.