when i first entered this metropolitan world, i was lonely, sad, and generally miserable for a while. i picture that time as dark winter, although i know it was april in a beautiful spring. all journal entries of the period degenerated into a hopeless morass of self-pity. it was disgusting! even i couldn’t stand it! so i made myself sit down and write something every day, and the only rule was that it had to be connected to something i’d experienced or seen during the day but couldn’t have anything to do with my current interior state.
it was a terrific exercise, both from a writing/practice perspective and from a personal one. it took my writing from confining emotional malaise to real engagement with my new surroundings. i can’t say that i wrote anything too miraculous, but it was decidedly good for me.
i’ve been toying with the idea of starting again… for different reasons. i’m feeling a bit worn and tired, but not disastrously so. i can stand to read last week’s journal entries, which is always a good sign, and despite the usual number of obstacles and annoyances, i feel pretty fortunate to be where and who i am. but i could use fresh eyes for the city.
so.. i don’t know how many will make it here, or whether i can keep to every day, but i’m looking forward to revisiting the exercise. here’s the first:
there’s a man on the corner selling baby chicks. he used to have fish but now it’s little birds in an old aquarium. it reflects their cheeps like a glass armonica – thin eerie sounds rising amid the air brakes of buses and the thud and slap of dominican spanish dropping its s’s.
he sits in a wheelchair, with a great bunch of keys on a cord around his neck. i say hello when i pass. sometimes he tells me i’m looking good. never when i might expect it.
the sound of the chicks bothers me. it ruffles me. it nags at my ears when i pass. it disturbed me as i heard it creeping from a small paper bag carried down the street past my house by a young man. he held it apart from himself and walked quickly ahead of me, looking ahead intently, seriously. as if he weren’t carrying a cheeping paper bag. what could one do with a baby chick, here, in this city? its vulnerability pains me.
i know what they look like when they grow. golden down is soon pierced by stiff white fletching and the babies are suddenly awkward, rangy adolescents. they grow ugly. i smell the acid, dusty odor of their excrement, hear the throaty cackles. but for now they remain tiny, crystal voices, sounding as if broken from the whining melody of a wetted finger on the rim of a glass.
