poorboyoftroy

And after a prolonged send-off of plangent well-wishing and affections, I find myself wending my way down a nameless road, an immense old-growth forest hunched over me as though it were straining to preserve its angle of repose and thus avoid eroding on top of me.  I’m driving a moped.  It’s raining and the sun is setting, the darkening verdure expanding to edge out the already attenuated light seeping through the canopy.  I’m bound for Montana, and I know this in the way one knows about the impending future in dreams, not as occurrences one can foresee by drawing inferences from preceding events, but in that gnostic, intimate way of knowing that always outclasses the empiricism of waking life. Similarly, I know that I am expected in Montana in an unreasonable amount of time.  I can’t be traveling any faster than 25 mph, which bodes poorly for my prospects.  Of course, I may as well not concern myself with covering a certain distance (600 miles) within a certain, expedited timescale,

On his way out the door, a muscle-bound guy approached the girl sitting behind me, said, "You look really busy, so I don't want to bother you, but I wanted to give you this," and tossed a piece of paper with his number onto the table. Without a word from her in response, he about-faced and left.

What signal did the otherwise dormant katydids receive this past week notifying them that it is time again to awaken and take up occupancy in DC?  They are out in droves, he noticed, perched in the elms and dogwoods along Wilson Blvd, hunkered down in the oak trees of Farragut Square Park, and ensconced, he assumed, in the balance of DC's ample greenspace that he never sees.  The infernal chorus, which lasts somewhere between 5-20 seconds with intervals of roughly equivalent length, no doubt shocks tourists as it did him during his first summer here two years ago.  At that point, his body was still grasping for equilibrium with the punishing mid-Atlantic climate.  He was trying to determine the sacred ratio all DC-ites who manage to live and work here year-round seem to know: how much exposure/in what type of clothes, multiplied by a coefficient for level of exertion = a relative level of comfort in this ambient extremity?   The katydid chorus only seemed to add to the unbearable

...at the seam by some sibylline strength at imperceptible speed.  Projecting that sound on to a two-dimensional plane dangling in front of the Walmart semi storming south carelessly through the corner of SE Morrison and Grand, he saw the gaping seam transform into a portal on the other side of which lay the perimeter of space and time.  There was no more proper way to conceive of death than as a radical repositioning of the self.  Best not to dwell on its organic realities.  Never a process, always a new geography.  That was death. But he didn't pass through that plane, not this time or any time before.  The adrenaline that had flooded his system for a split-second subsided as he realized the semi had passed and that he had, regardless, remained firmly planted on the sidewalk, toes akimbo.  Most Portlanders, being non-native, couldn't remember a time when this neighborhood had not been the province of pedestrians but of commerce-serving trucks that used MLK and Grand as int

I just finished re-reading William Gibson's excellent 1993 novel  Virtual Light , one of the books I was certain, as a 16-yr old in the 90's, foresaw the contours of post-millennial Pacific Rim society.  The book depicts a highly dystopic yet nevertheless engaging   2005 troubled by many of the common tropes of near-future speculative fiction: deadly contagious disease (though HIV/AIDS has, thankfully, been annihilated thanks to the unique blood of a messianic figure in the form of a gay male prostitute), lifestyle-altering pollution, and the collapse of national and state governments and correlative, unchecked rise of evil transnational corporate entities to supplant them.  It's not an objectively desirable place to live.  Ultimately, these are some of the less interesting points of the book.  Its handling, too, of future technology is also only marginally interesting, especially in re-reading it in 2011, given that we now have smartphones with many of the reality-augmenti

Now that DC is becoming a proper coffee shop town, it is developing a solid corps of eccentric coffee shop knockabouts. In Arlingon, these marginally employed, gregarious people divide their time among several coffee shops and diners. They frequently start up conversations with strangers, and because I'm very nearly one of them (especially this past week as I've spent more time out due to my beloved being out of town), they invariably strike up a conversation with me. Tonight at the coffee shop, a man I've seen many times on the Arlington scene started talking to me about the weather and then proceeded to talk about a website he was building. The service? A database containing the STD history of subscribers so that whenever a subscriber is pressed by a potential partner to prove his STD status, he can simply pull out a smartphone and put his money where his libido is. It really sounds like a great idea...oh, except for the multitude of privacy concerns, lack of health syste

Washington cycles out its losers every 2 years, thanks to term limits and/or a mercurial electorate. After the indicators shift ever so slightly on the spectrum of the two party political system, a new regime sets to work rectifying the real or perceived shortcomings of an outgoing government that, no longer around to scurry to/from meetings on the Hill, is quickly forgotten. This exodus of incumbents and their staffs occurs so suddenly and unceremoniously, though, that one wonders if there isn't another, say, entropic, force speeding the unfortunate masses out of town. Enter Anish Kapoor's "At the Hub of Things," an extraordinarily clever and engrossing fiberglass sculpture that, for more than 20 years, has sat in the bowels of the Hirshhorn Contemporary Art Museum. Situated as it is in an all-white alcove with track-lighting positioned behind it on the ceiling, it offers two entirely different experiences depending upon whether the viewer approaches its profile o