Feels like the right time to turn on the faucet as I remember yesterday's boots stomping through Chelsea Harbor to the beat of the gurgling bass in “Fly” by Low. Accelerated past a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, baby's cries punctuating each loop of “fly-eye-eye-eyeee.” I liked that groove, fly to cry to fly to cry to fly to cry. That little potato will want his wings one day.
Then tonight, after six hours tending the bar and a McDonald's double cheeseburger (with sweet curry sauce, thank you Calvin), the choral kaleidoscope of Sufjan's “Now That I'm Older” weaved a helix as I sat on the night bus and watched the reflection of a woman's fingers dance in BSL to her friend on FaceTime.
How about Golden chain? The title is from “Spinning Away” by Eno and Cale:
Up on a hill, as the day dissolves
With my pencil turning moments into line
High above in the violet sky
A silent silver plane, it draws a golden chain
Maybe a descent into the world these kids are being handed? Both a radioactive dumpster fire and an incomprehensibly vast petri dish of regenerating sublimity. Have also been thinking about children as vessels for truth. My niece at the full family dinner table: “Daddy made mommy cry.” If she didn't say it, nobody else would have. When, why, and how do we learn to plug those interjections?
A new painting is based on a little girl I was sitting next to on a bench outside of a coffee shop the other day. She was turned away from the harsh morning light, carefully dipping her pinky finger through wooden slats into the long shadow it threw next to her. That nanosecond before the first foray into darkness deserves a long freeze. When flailing one's arms while yodeling to the hydraulic hiss of the bus doors first attaches itself to the sting of annoyed glares. Or, (back to Golden chain), when one can fling open a burning portal to the heavens in the middle of the night on an international red eye because its pull is just too magnetic to resist.