wanderlust

We’re standing in the road looking at a dead fawn. His truck facing town, mine headed toward home. It appears to be sleeping on the double yellow, curled as if in tall grass or on a down comforter in a video someone has posted on YouTube about her pet deer. No sign of collision or gunshot, garrotting, heart attack: nothing but spots, cuteness. The name on his door means he works on the natural gas pipeline that’ll run from West Virginia to North Carolina. The company that pays him has a reputation for ruin worse than syphilis. Employees have been told to stay away from locals. They stick to a h.otel near the freeway with a decor I’d call modern roach; they drink there, hone boredom, look at stars. We both crouch to make sure the fawn is dead. ‘What the fuck,’ he says, staring at the desert of my face, where there’s no rain or hope, only cactus, as I search the dry lake-bed of his. He looks back at the fawn, brings his hands together as if waiting for a Communion host, makes a scooping motion with his hands, then slides his eyes to the side of the road: I’m being asked to help save a dead fawn from the bonus carnage of traffic, the shredding that suggests life isn’t just delicate but deserves to be erased. We are the briefest couple joined by common cause, move the fawn and stand briefly as men who have respected loss for sentimental reasons. Then nod, become ghosts of a moment we are the custodians of, holders of the unholdable, wind telling the story of itself to itself.

bill hicok

When you say something, you own it. You get to say what it means. If someone else interprets it differently, you jump in and correct them. To do improv, you need to completely change the way you approach conversation. You have to give away power and control, to the conversation itself. The conversation creates, not the individual speakers. The conversation takes on a life of its own. Meaning emerges from the collective, sequential, unfolding utterances of each speaker.

keith sawyer

Alright, so we’re all gonna die but now is the time to sing & see, to be humble, sacrificed, late, crazy, talkative, foolish, proud, indispensable, early, sane, silent, serious.

jack kerouac, book of sketches

I have always had a thing about old photographs. The older pictures have an uncanny ability of suggesting that there is another world where the departed are. A black and white photograph is a document of an absence, and is almost curiously metaphysical. I have always hoarded them. They represent a sense of otherness. The figures in photographs have been muted, and they stare out at you as if they are asking for a chance to say something.

w g sebald

A mind fed on words such as heaven, earth, dew, essence, cinnabar, moonlight, stillness, jade, pearl, cedar, and winter plum is likely to have a serenity not to be found in minds ringing with the vocabulary of the present age — computer, tractor, jumbo jet, speedball, pop, dollar, liquidation, napalm, overkill! Who would thrill at the prospect of rocketing to the moon in a billion-dollar spacecraft if he knew how to summon a shimmering gold and scarlet dragon at any time of the day or night and soar among the stars?

john blofeld