Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

A beautiful day in Brooklyn. All of NYC I'm sure.
Early morning, coffee, the L to the Q allll the way down to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
Anyway, it was a real picaresque day with the sun and the breeze. The Gardens are huge, we didn't even get to see some of it. Maybe another day.
Going to schedule more days just to see things. I know most of the time on my days
off I don't want to get out of bed, but there's really too much to see here. I think the next trek out maybe to the MOMA again.
Right now trying to order these two gems.This
and this.

Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

The BBQ on Troutman (Heralded as "the" place to be on a Thursday evening) was a success. In echoing much of days spent in college there was a lot of cheap beer, pita, hummus and hot dogs. A lot of people showed up, music was played and people sat around the fire trying to tell the best ghost story in all of Brooklyn. Whoever won was awarded with free coffee coupons to Oslo.
Listening to: Paul Simon. I had his album Graceland for years and years, and somehow through all of everything it slipped through the cracks. I heard a snippet of Mother and Child Reunion the other day from one of the Bodegas on Central Ave. and it was a very Proustian moment. Gems: Kodachrome, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, Rene and George-Magritte With Their Dog After The War.
Reading: The Game- Neil Strauss and Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert Pirsig. The Game... it's gotten a lot of heat over the past few months. It's basically a social look at this underground group of men who use basic psychology to pick up women. They have techniques and styles they apply to get a number from random girls wherever they are. A lot of customers (dude customers) treat it as a guide book though, wanting to learn the secret art of wooing a woman. I think there is a pretty high success rate of some of the men in the book, but still, it's like watching that documentary on people who prefer the love of a rubber doll than that of a real person. Some people I talk with say the methods really work, some just laugh it off.
Zen and The Art... It's great. I've never read a lot of philosophy (outside of Kant and Wittgenstein) but it's actually very captivating. Pirsig retells his tenure as one of the radical professors at Bozeman during the 1960's, and the philosophy that he was teaching. He ties it in to motorcycle maintenance simply by analogy- two types of people, one who works on their motorcycles themselves, and the others take it to a mechanic. Classical though and Romantic thought.

I was really hungry a minute ago, I almost made a kimchi sandwich.

'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry.

I always knew about catching your second wind whenever you're tired and you're out of energy, but I think I catch my fourth or fifth wind nearly everyday.
I noticed about after a week living here that standing on the 9th-Smith Street platform that every time I breathed in it felt like sharp, heavy air. And I panicked- this was the air that I breathe all the time. It was a split second of panic, and then I thought about the air here- how people have to get adjusted to it. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere you had to get adjusted to breathing the air. A coworker, Heather- mentioned the fact that although we do live here with the garbage and the dirty air, people in NYC live for a very long time.
I have a lot of photos to upload, but the camera and the Windows Vista don't get along so well.
I just got an e-mail titled "We found your baby in the dumpster."

Dictated. Not read. The management.

Days off are few and far between.
Sleeping has become a luxury since moving here, and the more chance you get to sleep the better. Amy was right, you have to plan your days out, almost to the tiniest moments of where to catch the train or how fast it takes to walk from this corner to that corner.
Last night after leaving Amy & Ryan's, I got back to my stop and there was guy in the turnstiles (the cage-like turnstile not the bar type) and he was stuck. He had his bicycle wedged in between the metal, and he couldn't go backwards or forwards. He told me he'd been there for around 15 minutes (the exit I take is a very dingy building. Everyone goes out the other side). He was really fucking drunk, and he promised that if me and this girl helped him he would give us his address and make us dinner. So I pushed against the metal and she pulled the bike and he just sorta stood there dazed. We got the bike out and went out the emergency exit.
As soon as we got out he hoped on the bike and sped away yelling "so long suckers!" and adding a drunk cackle.
Lateral shrugging.

Tonight is Modest Mouse, this afternoon is Talib Kweli down the street. For fucking free.

Valhalla is where Vikings go when they die.

...and Bushwick is where you go when you want good Puerto Rican food.

Day two on Troutman street. The neighborhood is jagged, streets cutting into each other with a plethora of hipsters, Hasids and Puerto Rican families. There are PR flags everywhere, and the infamous "NYRICAN" t-shirts are 10 for $3 down the street at Willy's.
The neighborhood is recently and often described as East Williamsburg, but that's because of places like, Goodbye Blue Monday, Brooklyn Natural Foods, Life Cafe 983 and The Archive Coffee and Independent Video Store. I've only popped into a couple of them.
In other news: I realized how close I work to the Empire State building and have never even bothered to look at it. It's big, and I thought it was bigger... Amy and I talked about how New York looks amazing and grandeur when you don't live here.
Rilo Kiley's Under The Blacklight is a good album.