2

The theme of Saturday turned out to be flea markets, each surprisingly small for such a big city. The ones down South were ten times as big.
Stepping through the stalls was different from walking on the street. I played a computer game while deployed where the avatar was human and living in a Star Trek style world. The game propelled itself by having the player over hear the conversations as he walked past people. That’s what it was like in the flea markets as I stepped carefully through, hoping to find a small silver chain necklace for myself:
A young female voice: _He was trying to hurt me but not you know? He was making a point that he knew would hurt but he wasn’t being hurtful. That’s how I see it anyway._
An older woman: _She was working the Picasso, but now she’s working with the .._
An obviously gay middle aged man, explaining his art/craft/invention: _Okay, see most corks expand when you insert them into the wine bottle but you see these .._
An older man, seemingly talking about his daughter: You know, she’s outspoken, confident. You gotta know that about her or some will find her rude._
I walked a long way to the Museum of Natural History where supposedly there was another flea market. But it turned out to be only for Sundays.
I passed a clarinet player and an empty bench. I sat down because these notes hit were different -- simple melodies, simple rhythms, including the theme from Love Story, my favorite to play on the piano -- but this old man took the notes farther, going to that scary, wordless place where perfectly played notes graduate to Music.
E__ taught me that, my first lover as an adult. She was a pianist; really she was in love with Beethoven, a choice she’d made seemingly so she’d never have to enter this horrific world fully.
I tried to listen to the music different from how I did before I Remembered and began a Purgatory existence, free but not free, trapped by the pain of a body that keeps it from catching up with the freed soul within --Him.
I know how to do it because shortly after I Remembered I listened to Louie and Ella and Billie and realized that when you listen to music you weren’t hearing the notes but the person creating them. You couldn’t listen to music any other way.
I hear the old man. And I take a picture of him to mark the occasion.

__________

　
The city has an affect on me.
I noticed when walking this morning how Real New York was to me. The feeling has lingered all day. New York is as Real to me as the flashbacks I had that first night I smoked weed with House.
I get that the old hotel encourages it. I don’t need to be high to see that everything alive is already dead and it’s only wordless poetry in between.
Black and white pictures are everywhere showing the soldiers utilizing the hotel back in its heyday: ballroom parties, dances, World War II uniforms.
The twin beds are metal and antique, even the lamps beside each bed. Everything about the hotel exudes the presence of past lives long gone.
When I am in the city my inner voice easily becomes one that reminds me of the inner voice throughout the film Momento: low, with an easy rhythm; each thought begins with a short sentence, then ends with the longer one of a slightly faster rhythm. I like it; the one down South isn’t that free. Weed is required to make the difference.
Because I write, I always know I will have to answer for every moment. Maybe that’s what others get out of religious confession. Maybe the whole secret to life is articulation .. (presence?) For some reason it’s easiest for me to write in New York.
As I grew up New York was the setting of all the TV shows, the sitcoms, the films. So its qualities were understood by me in that way. When I‘m here in Real Life the same qualities are still true but of course in a totally different way.
Something about the sharp contrast of perception cures me of something unnamed, if only for awhile. So the spots and rooms in New York become just as Real as the rooms R__ would rape me in.
I passed a glass bus stop and saw L__ in the reflection. At least it wasn’t R__. Later I looked in the mirror, trying to decide who I really looked like, what relative, what side of the family. No one before me looks like me. I have the classic high-testosterone look: easily muscular, a tall-but-not-too-tall frame, and a shaved head and face. If it wasn’t for the odd reflection here and there in random glass, I would wonder if I was related to them at all.
As I walk the streets I catch the strong smell of weed in the oddest places, with no one around yet it’s like someone must be smoking right in front of me, the smell is so strong. It’s freaking me out. An empty corner here, walking into a store, finding my seat at a baseball stadium.
Why does it always end here in New York? Because that’s where I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve always had a strong, inexplicable connection to New York. There will be no rushing into the apartment and saying -- too-cool-for-school -- I was just in Chicago or London or Prague to a New Yorker, because no place is as cool to me as New York.

__________

　
I had to wait an hour for Red to open its doors. I sat on the steps of another play, Next to Normal, which had a display just above the steps with huge pictures of the cast of the play. I sat against the face of some guy named Dr. Madden.
The fun part about people-watching is the remembering that there’s a real person in there, as Real as me, with all the pain, anxieties, and joys of Real Life, of a somewhat sordid past, and an uncertain future.
Each has a selfish sexuality only matched by the maybe-ability of love. Every single person: the old Asian man on the bike, the overly-angular fashionable Caucasian couple holding hands, the young, solitary guys, their danger implied.
_Well it’d be different if he didn’t give off that vibe to guys of ‘I’m into you.’_ a thirty-something guy walking by said obviously to his parents about a brother who wasn’t present. He looked a lot like the older brother in Death in Love, except with better hair.
When I see them as human instead of just the potential for horrific-ness, everything changes. The perception changes so sharply it’s like being high.
When I’m inside a Real person I’m making them feel something Real. The power between my legs makes me want to laugh out loud. Everything else, is articulate-able -- my holding their hands, holding them in my arms -- but once inside them it’s wordless poetry.
When I realize the people are all Real, I realize they’re all possible, and that opens the future up for me, including the futures of the generations between my legs.

__________

　
Red was about an aging artist pitted against a young one. There is only one set, only two actors. The characters worked closely together hence the friendship was implied and the drama oncoming.
The play was asking questions about life and death and art all of which were ironically answered by the three metal lights shining down on the stage.
They were metal, not glossy, flat-grey colored, a circle with a light bulb in the middle, held by a thin metal tube each connecting them to the high ceiling.
I remembered how the compounds were what was eternal, not the ions, how they were so hauntingly Real that the ancients responded to them to the point of making idols out of them.
The play kept talking about how the black swallows the red -- at some point you die. But that’s not true, the secret to the play is that really the red swallows the black, over and over, one generation to the next. Who knows which is scarier ..
_At least know them in silence!_ the older artist exclaims, _At least give the dead that!_
Because those human beings were wordless poetry, not some words in history books, not some creators of famous paintings.
When the play ended the intensity stayed with me. I quickly bought a script for twenty bucks on my way out the door. I understood why the younger guy won the Tony. His job was the difficult one.
The play starts out normal, comedic actually: an assistant being hired by an arrogant successful artist. He builds the intensity by becoming more and more vocal -- despite the risk of him sounding wooden, too-artsy -- and he does it just right.
The other guy remains consistent, unchanging, an entertaining tycoon. The young guy, the Tony winner, is only a little older than me.
I didn’t understand why I felt so affected, even intimidated. It’s still hard for me to accept that all art does is highlight the beauty of human life -- and I am a human life.
I know a sunset is life being reflected back at me, and an awe-inspiring view, and the moon sometimes when it takes over the night. Maybe I’m not confident enough to handle such an intense play reflecting myself back at me.
I walked through the streets with that angry, lost-in-thought look that I felt entitled to sense I had just walked out of Red, its script in my right hand.
Something important has happened -- not the play, I knew, the acknowledgement, the appreciation rather, of the beauty of my own life, and the youth it still achingly expresses.
The play especially focused on the concept or at least the dynamic of Dionysius and Apollo.
Dionysius represents the pure physical, pure feeling, pure emotion, pure expression.
Apollo represents law and order, restraint, self-control.
While deployed I knew it as the Raw one and the Tough one.
I’ve always understood this despite not knowing Western culture’s exact terms of it. I’ve always known the dangerous passion of the Horrific.
How it could consume the individual if felt freely.
It was the whole point of the numbness. The whole point of learning how to write.
To say I intend to feel all-the-way implies or maybe demands that I intend to write all-the-way.

__________