As I type I sit on my roof, laptop perched atop my lap in one of the few instances it's lived up to its name.
Above me is a clear night sky, as unblemished as baby's skin. Beside me sits a cat. She purrs loudly. I see right through her ruse. She wants food. A bowl of kitty crunchies could turn the most faithful feline into a stonehearted deceiver. Two feet away from me is my open window. On the other side of that window sits my all the stuff--clothes, books, CDs--that identify me as me. My phone sits in there as well. I'm done talking on it.
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light
A fitting way to describe the scene above my head, albeit not original to me. I'm surrounded by large crowds of crickets making cricket noises. I interpret their noise as ordered, intricate cricket music.
This idyllic scene is marred by the newly opened can of Dr. Pepper sitting on the windowsill, a testament to ubiquity of consumerism. I close my eyes and push the can farther into the shadows so as not to ruin the moment.
You could compare the stars to diamonds against a backdrop of black velvet, or you could compare them to the metal rivets in the black leather trousers of an 80s metal guitarist. I guess it depends on whether you want to create gravitas or comedy.
Tonight I'm leaning more toward gravitas. It seems more fitting. Generally we stare up at the stars because we want to see greatness, magnitude, eternality, just something bigger than ourselves and the things we made. So I ignore the soda can and the vinyl siding on the house and the neighbor's telephone wires and the dull glow that hovers around the night sky from the several hundred thousand lights of the town.
If you have an imagination, or if you are a hallucinogenic substance abuser, or if you're just desperate for guidance, you can look up and see all sorts of patterns in the stars. You can find warriors, mythical beasts, various carnivorous or herbivorous mammals, and even kitchen utensils. All human constructs, of course, but quite useful. And if you just so happen to be adrift in the middle of the Atlantic without rudder or compass, you might be able to get some idea of where you are or where to go just by looking at your friendly star formation. Now the stars, by themselves, don't really say much. They just stare back at you mutely, a sort of astrophysical mime act. They are...(pardon me if I'm an eager beaver about using a cool word I don't get to use often) taciturn in their reserve. Taciturn. Try using that word sometime. The stars don't say a thing. But if you use your creative powers you can turn them into a bull, a lass, or even a set of non-conjoined twins. You see what you want to see and then you can milk the system to get all the guidance you want ouf of a few stars strewn randomly across the blackness. Use your creative powers. Do what you gotta do to stay sane.
I spent last weekend with a pastor, a New York bound designer, Brannon, a blind, morbidly obese geriatric Golden Retriever who didn't answer to the name "Paddington," and 8.1 million people. I and Brannon McA burned off our excess carbs gallivanting about the Large Apple.
We visited several apparel stores and I purchased footwear which I have declared to be "hip." They are extraneous to my wardrobe and stunningly impractical, but I satisfied my primal consumer urges and took my part in humanity's eternal and universal effort to fill up the infinite void one shoebox at a time.
We stopped in at GAP and I felt at home, sort of the way you do when you find a bunch of Americans huddled inside a McDonalds in the middle of Tokyo. I felt that the employees there liked me, maybe even secretly knew my name.
Then we visited the Diesel store. It was as if I were in 7th grade all over again. That's when you start the school year only to find out that being unathletic like I was is akin to cross-dressing, and having your mother still pick out your clothes earns you a non-refundable one-way ticket into Dorkdom. The store had its own DJ, for goodness sake, a metro-hipster dreadlocked giant-headphone-wearing DJ. And a single pair of pants would cost a week of my wages. The employees, I'm sure, snickered silently as I walked by, and they leaned back a few inches lest they be afflicted by the fallout of the Southeastern hickness I radiated. I combated my self-consciousness by telling myself, in soothing motherly tones, that I was the normal one here. Normalcy is the consolation prize of bumpkins.
The dining fare was exquisite. Brannon and I traipsed about Times Square very late Monday night and we managed to slip into this neat little Italian joint I discovered (View image) for some grub. We tried out various hotbars, unfurled our prayer rugs at several of the local Starbucks, and I even got a Gyro (which the waitress politely informed me was pronounced Jai-Roe) at a Mexican restaurant.