I can't maintain a blog.

I just can't do it!

I can't share all these unfiltered half thought things with anyone but myself.   I can't even pretend that a pretend audience of two or three makes me any more likely to do it or do it well.    The only things I can show to anyone are academic things, warm and cold-sneeringly-academic at the same time, once they've been polished and parsed by me and approved by some higher sneering power, once the passion juice has been lessened by the sense of permanence.   One day I hope to publish something that can bridge those two mountaintops, cold-sneeringly-academic and passion-ful.  I've read many good things that do, which gives me hope. I think I tried to do it too. Most of the good things I've read are by anthropologists or geographers, but most clearly, they're human.

Anyway, but keep writing is the most important part.  Thank you world!

I just remembered
when I was 19
and studying Keats
and working at the Tasti D-Lite
meeting New Yorkers, discovering what that meant
and its clashes with my elite institution
which I also loved
and everything was so close together
I felt so overburdened with my lonely self
but so happy in the city's shadow that I could live in the lonely, too

Vaguely on the verge of tears, I recognized my privilege in the way that you can only
when you have hours to reflect on the spinning world around you, the different colors and city blocks eating through the fuzz of remnant adolescence

And there was no one to run through all the scenarios, the theories of the world, the stupid thing I ate for breakfast, with, so it all just channeled through and sometimes I'd feel this huge heavy need to write and an explosion of release from that act, no other release being at hand

I love that world, and I'm grateful for it.

I want to gain some of that self-awareness, awakeness, attuneness, attentiveness back.  Without all the loneliness. A silly girl lost in the big city, learning from myself.

Chicago

Beautiful cities, alive with people just spending time in shared spaces and walking and moving about in common transit -- in Chicago today, in Madrid last week
Each street, each rinconcito with character- and the feeling it gives me to  be somewhere exciting, somewhere with movement, makes me resent the sleepy Valley

or maybe it's reading "The Boy Kings of Texas" that's clouding my view and making me restless

You say you want to make the freelance thing work so you can just travel, spend several weeks in New Orleans, just get up and go
you say "You know how I am, by now", act surprised when I want to have a conversation about this, want to better understand what it is that you think you want, want to clarify where I fit in to this whole shebang

You say "You see the world differently, I accept that", but refuse to elaborate how I see the world - do you even know? I feel that you don't.  You certainly don't read my fucking poetry. And maybe you should. Maybe I should give you more, volumes of certain places and the way that they make me feel, and the way that living in those respective places have shaped where I am and where I want to go and what I think about, and more importantly the way that the city makes me alive and full of energy and vigor and potential so much so that I see flashes of my favorite rincones in moments of bliss.  Maybe you would understand me better, and maybe you would encourage me to pour more of it onto paper, like I used to do when I was lonely and living in New York and didn't have that many friends to talk to.

But ultimately, I feel that you just think about yourself and the path you're trying to carve. I guess it's natural to think that way, to not probe, to not know enough to care to ask or listen.  Maybe one day you'll find it's important to you to know me in this way.

Maybe one day we will live somewhere beautiful together, and you will understand me and I will understand you in this way of place, and all of this anger will go away, morphing into acceptance and something like understanding. Maybe we can share a love for a place. Because when I feel at home in a place, I just see more and more depths to uncover and interrogate and love, walks up and down the same decades of city blocks that help me when I'm stressed and make me feel at one with something larger.  When I feel at home in a place, like I felt in New York, I don't need to think about moving or whether somewhere else might have more for me; I start to think about how I can be more in it, and for it.

And that, to me, is Good.

Flying home

First 2 hours of my New England mini-vacation, following a full work day and 2 flights to get out of Texas  -
Frantic tunneling out of Boston in a newfangled rental car, exhaustion-fueled directional confusion until I'm safely on one of the long country roads that lead me back to this corner of NH
America runs on Dunkin' here - the girl at Alamo couldn't believe that Texas doesn't run on Dunkin, and after tonight, I can't either,
90s on 9 all the way home, the leaves rustling on the narrow winding roads a benediction.

At last at home, and the dog still remembers me, and loves me in his sleepy, middle-aged priceless way.  Embracing the antique, crisp clutter on the kitchen table, the three table lamps that suffice as lighting in my room growing up. Cool air the default, the heat not really on yet.  45 degrees in the middle of the night.  Forgot what fall felt like and tomorrow I get to see what it looks like.

autumn/feelings

Because it's beautiful to remember, looking back from another new place moving forward.  And because even though I haven't felt autumn weather for three years, I'm about to go back to the place where autumn and home both begin for me for a visit; and later, beautifully, the place below.


autumn/feelings [Madrid, 2011]


Something that catches me off guard, when living abroad, is just how easily life goes on.  My life goes on - a whole huge pool of experiences begins to form, interactions most of them shallow, but occasionally promising, vistas, steadily familiar narrow streets and the landmarks that you make of the places and statues you pass day by day, the things you teach yourself - or maybe the things the world teaches you and you ingest while walking through the park alone in the afternoon.  The release of finishing a day of work, a singular feeling inside of contentment that soon passes but was yours.   The flip side of that very contentment --  the swimming, the surfacing in this constant state of being in another temporality, while all the people you used to know in all of those places you used to live march on with their lives -- you do the same.   it's not dull, but it's much calmer than I imagined -- this steady opening up of your life, of what you are going to make of your life this year, of what you will fill the extra hours with, of how you will try to build upon yourself here.  Interactions in a language that's not your native one, the fragmented verse of  strangers trying to approach each other, the constant hum of desire to reach some depth through all these surfaces. the struggle to stay focused on what pulls you up in life, the search for patterns of meaning in all the experiences that have brought you here, and the feeling that I am quite simply just living.

3 SUVs and an ATV

3 SUVS, and an ATV - men in camouflage

In a public park by the University of Texas at Brownsville, down the street from la garita 

I had just parked there to head over to the library and continue reading "With These Hands", about those who labor in the fields in often oppressive conditions for their livelihood, allowing American Agriculture to run and the American People to choose from its cornucopia of fruits and vegetables in the supermarket

Three men running while the SUVS, white with the cheeerful green stripe of the Border Patrol, tore across the median and roared after the three dark shadows, running frantically, running chaotically 

As if it was the run of their life

One of them almost hit by the SUV, then doubling back into the woods behind the parking lot

Suddenly from nowhere, a green ATV came streaking across the parking lot toward the woods, a camouflaged agent began his descent, while back up agents in a mounting drove of vehicles gathered  across the street, to the left

I didn't know where the other dark shadows had gone to but I hoped they had somehow found freedom - I hoped they would be all right -

I didn't know what to hope for, but I felt a deep and useless grief in the pit of my stomach

and I got into my car and exited with a couple of other cars that had been waiting out the chase

It's no surprise here, next to the border, to see what must be routine, daily.  For it to cross over into the public spaces of the city when the city lives in the light and shadows of its sister country  

And who here would place blame on either side of the chase?  It could be that each is just trying to survive. In a city where both sides have grown up together, have evolved in co-dependence, share kinship with each other, it must be even harder.

Sentado solo en un banco en la ciudad

What hurts right now?
Being far from you -- estar lejos de ti, mi hermana  madrileña de Argentina, me hace daño.