go places: my favorite place
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go places: my favorite place
Contributors
Nick Adams- flaktastic@gmail.com
Mac Faunlker- http://seasonseason.com/
Marcy B. Freedman- mbf@bestweb.net
Julie Lousia Hagenbuch- http://www.2cupsvegetableoil.com/
Gordon Holden- http://www.gordonholden.com/
Kim Macron- kmacron@gmail.com
Tiffany Navarro- http://www.tnavarro.blogspot.com/
Amela Parcic- http://amelaparcic.carbonmade.com/
Simo Peretti- choosedesiredname@gmail.com
James Scales- jwscales@googlemail.com
Rachel Valinsky- rachelvalinsky@gmail.com
Monica Wendel- monicaewendel@gmail.com
Brian Evans White- brianevanswhite@gmail.com
Cover design by Kim Macron
There’s Nothing, music by Simo Peretti, mixed by Nick Adams
Created and curated by Hannah Raine Brenner-Leonard
www.hannahrainebrennerleonard.com
go places: my favorite place
Dear Friends, This is my favorite place:
At night or in the middle of the day I would sleep and every minute of every second of
every day I would hear the ocean sounds within a yard of crunchy grass. A stair
covered in red ants. Sounds lost to the wind. Pushing behind when my own body was
flung forward in the shape of a kite, my own hand cushioned by the sunshine,
protected by plastic. Later, when we tumbled down sand banks like a rain stick when
the sand was nice and warm. Inside a musty smell hung on deep red curtains around
windows with lace doilies on side tables. A fireplace. My mom ties rotten squid with
twine to lure blue crabs in small waves, their sideways walk in a salt-water pond
sprinkled with reeds. In the evenings we would dress up and they would fall into
boiling water. When they looked up there was no ceiling. Just walls of wood panel that
hold a hollow sound.
How I used to be in my favorite place:
To all the artists and writers who have shared their thoughts on their favorite places:
thank you!
I hope you love this one.
Truly,
Hannah Raine Brenner-Leonard
go places: my favorite place
Inheriting The Precipice—
(excerpt)
by Brian Evans White
Knifethegun pulled an empty milk crate from a stack against the wall of the warehouse, turning it up with a
confident flip-a-da-wrist gesture—lumping his ass into the diamond patterned spaces with a squishing
discomfort. He folded his hands with verbose demonstration, placing them at his lips. 16SaggySaggy and
ThePrecipicePiano she spoke so much about had sobered his demeanor, focusing him, perhaps in reverence for
the capacity of such a⋯ thing? It was, what seemed to be, a player piano—88 keys and a glass pane which
revealed the mallets and gears, as such 16SaggySaggy would confirm. It was beautifully varnished, though
faded in the years of neglect that had passed.
He felt ThePlayerPiano giving off an energy, he felt its unearthed expanses waiting just below the surface. He
trembled. “But!” (And, he even thought “But!”) “I feel its-its-its⋯” (and so forth) “...capacity.” KnifeTheGun’s
hand shook. “KnifeTheGun get a grip,” he thought. Had he whispered it also? 16SaggySaggy was staring at him
with a puzzled intensity.
Knifethegun turned to 16SaggySaggy, “So this piano⋯ You tell me I go and stick myself in there... And I’ll be
what? Inside the player piano? And⋯” He struggled around the fleeting thought, hoping to trick himself into
finding the proper vocabulary. “Your sister, Bee200Celia, figure she knows about this too?”
“I imagine she has no idea,” she answered. Her eyes locked on KnifeTheGun’s trembling hand, “If you step into
it, you’ll know that she’d never choose to give it up willingly.”
“What about 60-50-50-60?” He leaned forward, accusingly.
“Who?”
“The porter of this damn music warehouse of yours! He’s worked here... longer than you’ve owned the place.”
“I see... Hard to say. When was the last time you saw him?” KnfieTheGun backed away. 16SaggySaggy sighed.
She felt her stomach fill with an electric air. A sensation she’d felt in her earlier interaction with
ThePrecipicePiano—when she previously entered it herself and was (for lack of more specific phrase) spit out.
Her composure slipped suddenly into impatience and brevity. “You’ll never understand it scratching your balls
wondering like that.” She wrapped her fingers around the cheap fabric of KnifeTheGun’s Hawaiian shirt and
tugged him upright. “Come on.” She smiled eagerly.
“Don’t! Stop it!” KnifeTheGun freed himself, overpowering her easily and pushing her face away with his
hands. “What couldn’t have possibly come over you?” His thoughts slurred in the pulse of his fears. “Just calm
it down for a moment here. I-I just⋯ I just don’t want it to be⋯” He backed away from the piano and pushed
his hair back, adjusting the collar of his Hawaiian shirt. The fabric remained clenched and wrinkled where
16SaggySaggy had grabbed it. “This isn’t going to be good trip/bad trip situation here, is it? I’ve been down the
shit end of some weird stuff... I don’t want this Piano here to ravel up my mind and free-throw it down some
cosmic toilet and forget about me.”
“No, no, no. It’s not like that at all.” 16SaggySaggy wove a smile across her voice, she put her hand on his
arm, “This is something I can’t explain. And, I understand your reluctance. But please... you just couldn’t not do
it⋯ right?”
He sighed, knowing himself and the sick-sad-sold in his heart, “I guess I couldn’t not do it. I don’t have it in
me to not.”
go places: my favorite place
ThePrecipicePiano held a hand out (in a way)—a pull that conducted in his thoughts in such a way that he
couldn’t not process it.
16SaggySaggy looked around the room at the pianos that filled the warehouse, she felt the pulse of each key:
88-176-264-352-440-528-616-704-792-880-968-1056-1144-1232-1320-1408 and so forth. She
calculated over 10,000 notes to choose from (in later speculation, she’d calulate over 250,000 possible notes
from the whole warehouse—that is considering the inclusion of the harmoniums and violins, woodwinds, brass
and guitars). The tonal power of the warehouse embraced her. 250,000+ simultaneous notes filled her. Each
note focused towards the precipice, as magnets herald true north from their core—ever-always day-night
day-night. The tensions of the whole world seemed now focused on the precipice (or had to). 16SaggySaggy
was only now seeing its pattern and tone. She felt the room and the neighborhood at attention to the
PlayerPrecipicePiano—the ball bearing that spins the LazySuzan.
The sick-sad-sold songs of the PlayerPiano began to clink a-tat-tat-tat-ta-ta. Programmed to break their
little hearts with mechanical precision. KnifeTheGun’s already-broken “let-me-attem” heart aligned to the
pitch and frequency—“Oh, sing me more softly to my bed, sing me more softly to my death.” Without taking
direct notice of his actions, he stepped in towards the melody, curiously at first, though ultimately with a
drunken divinity.
Just before he reached out to touch the precipice, KnifeTheGun turned around to see 16SaggySaggy—her hair
bellowed, her toes curled in her shoes (Or, had it been his?).
He remembered the planter that had been on her porch for many years—a gardenia. He smiled. Had he thought
about the planter or spoken aloud about it?
16SaggySaggy leaned forward to swing her hair back into her hands, swirling it into a knot. The fibers crashed
with singularity, splashing through the air with a natural intensity that seems reserved for women and their
hair. A glance—a locking eye. “You know, I’d water that gardenia and think about my sister Bee200Celia.
Every morning. It gave me an embracing light that’d stay with me through the day—it was the butter that
glistened on my morning toast!” A smile. And a return.
KnifeTheGun turned to the Piano, “Couldn’t be all that bad if you come back from it acting as casually as you
are now⋯”
A peppermint scent approached KnifeTheGun from the direction of the precipice—weak at first, like bubblegum
in the mouth of a passing stranger. Growing further, the peppermint became stronger, as smelling a candy
nearing his mouth. Eventually as eating a peppermint leaf. Entering a peppermint extract facility. Falling into a
vat of extract. And so forth—the peppermint gained inertia, until it reached a pure form—KnifeTheGun touched
walls of pure peppermint and heard resonant peppermint tones in his ears—a vibrating humming pitch. It had
placed energy where it had once never been.
He turned again to 16SaggySaggy, saying, “The gardenia, remember how you’d fuss over it, like⋯ It’d kill you
to see it die.” He spoke with an even candor, passing peppermint from his lungs and up his throat. “Remember
I’d house sit for you and 50Harry50Saggy? Feed the cats and whatever else... You act like I had nothing better
to do. I didn’t of course, but⋯ well, except the beers. I had beers to drink, of course. We all have beers to
drink...” He lost the thought.
He took pause, reminiscent of the beers. He felt the beers of his past stacked high, the weight, the speed, and
velocity of it passing through him—down the throat and out the ass: day-in-day-out. “My decaying body: the
beer mausoleum,” he thought.
go places: my favorite place
Shifting his weight he returned to his original thought—the house, the gardenia. “You acted like the house and
the cats meant nothing, remember? But you’d hide that gardenia from me. And, I’d notice it alright, but I never
asked, ‘cause I knew you thought I’d fuck it all up, kill it or something. It used to piss me off. Made me want to
refuse your hospitality sometimes. But that plant⋯” He gleaned a sense of understanding, suddenly. “It’d been
you, y’know? It’d been you so many times before you, y’know?” She looked shyly at the floor. “Ever see a man
with his eyes wrapped around a trigger? You can’t unlearn yourself like that once it’s passed through you.”
16SaggySaggy nodded solemnly.
The clankity tune concluded and KnifeTheGun had only now, in its absence, realized it had been playing at all.
The pastoral tune with a slow thoughtful harmony and Victorian flavor was only resonant in the hallows of the
warehouse now.
KnifeTheGun’s hand shook, his heart raced. 16SaggySaggy stood a few yards behind him, she began a
countdown, trying to hurry him along. She wondered why it had been her to be pushed away by the precipice.
Was there a hierarchy that she just didn’t understand? Her impatience pushed her again and in a rushed
whisper, as quickly as her breathe would let her, she counted down from twenty. In the breathy tone she
slurred the words into one large collapsed mineshaft of syllables:
“When-dee
Hine-deen
Ehh-deen
Ven-deen
Si-deen
Fev-deen
Fud-deen
Hur-deen
Welv
Ev’n
En
Ine
Ehh
Ven
Icks
Ive
Or
Ee
Oo
Un.”
And when KnifeTheGun hadn’t moved at all, she’d begin again, indicating nothing more than her need to diffuse
her energy and tension—looping what seemed to be the same moment of complete hysterics. The loop had
made its run three and a half times when KnifeTheGun felt something happening to him. The peppermint had
filled his sinus cavity, he thought he might die from the burning sensation that came over him. Stereo had gone
mono and the instruments that filled the warehouse now stared, their facades all registering to his mind as
faces. Acoustic resevoirs—A pursed lip. Taught strings—an eager villain, breathing down the back of his neck
and tickling his skin with the touch of eyelashes.
ThePlayerPianoPeppermintPrecipice wrapped around KnifeTheGun’s head (for lack of genuine explenation).
Wrapping in such a way that he’d felt his head was an inconvenience between the symbiotic energies of the
peppermint and the piano. The drowning ecstasy of the capacity warmed him. “If I just, If I just, If I just,” he
stuttered.
go places: my favorite place
His last thought was: “How could I not have noticed the air had been so heavy all my life?”
KnifeTheGun stood up in an unfamiliar garden.
Was it a garden or had ThePlayerPiano simply made it so? A synthetic sense came over the flowers and trees,
the greener grass, always greener, ever-green and overwhelmingly beautiful. His heart raced, dropping the
clutch on his heart’s BPM 40-50-60-70-80-90-100-110-120-130-140-150. Time fluttered with breathtaking
pulse. Wide strides and deep villainous heartbeats pushed blood through his body. His face turned a wet cherry
red—glistening with sweat and throbbing with intense harmonious rhythm.
The perfect rows of flora would imply that the garden could not have been a naturally occurring place. At the
base of his feet were perfect rows of cabbages and on the periphery were two rows of shrub-type bushes, the
genus and facts of which were inconsequential and happenstance and symbolically irrellevant. Surrounding the
shrubs were trees that grew outwardly height wise, or, were planted chronologically, a new row ever few
years. The shortest growing from the center, waist-high, subsequently gradating to twenty or thirty feet tall.
It was ThePrecipicePeppermintPiano, logically. There could be no other way. “Ever-ever-ever⋯ What was it
to be these synthetic cabbages?” KnifeTheGun wondered, his heart raced again—40-50-60-70-80-90-100-
110-120-130-140-150 BPM, etc. (and with a huff-huff-rip he pulled himself from the thought). The
centrifugal joy of ThePrecipice had infected him, just as 16SaggySaggy had said it would. He began to take
stock.
His heart, he noted, only raced when he noticed that his heart was even beating at all. Only in the moments of
his awareness of breath had he even been breathing. The peripherals of his vision were, in fact, empty, void,
or, simply a peppermint precipice (of a sort). For example: KnifeTheGun, standing at a meditative distance
from thoughts of his body, heeded no gravity. After a long periods of sterile gravity and no breathing, he
shifted his body (to test the pull in a moment of need for it), gravity returned. L-R-L-R-L-R. A grunt.
At his feet he pulled a cabbage from the ground—an intense connection with the cabbage occured, staring into
the details of its leaves. His eyes tunneled through the molecules and details until it seemed there could be no
more details—there the process looped around from his visual cortex again, back through the air and through
the cabbage and through the details and through the molecules and through the visual cortex again.
Again, a huff-huff-huff and with a rip he tore himself from the transient state. He was experiencing detail at a
capacity he’d never imagined could exist. It may be said that a thought occurred to him that it was a
heightened visual sense that had been granted by the piano, or, had this world had more detail than his own? A
world identical to life, but with increased chromatic, emotional and visual data? Or radiation? Had it been
gamma rays, that now his eyes could detect? KnifeTheGun laughed at himself, his speculation held no
importance, he had no idea what he was talking about.
Caverns had unfolded into canyons—a gesture never to be unlearned by KnifeTheGun.
KnifeTheGun grew tired and lay his body in the mud, propping his head against a cabbage. He closed his eyes,
trying to calm his body, his heart specifically, and give his eyes a break from the intensity. The moments that
followed would, in common circumstances, feel as though his body were shutting down—but here, it was a
fulfillment. A joy of pensive dissipation—atoms collapsed to a serene unutility. He felt the unuse of his legs
turn to unleg and the unuse of his hands and arms turn to unarm and unhand. His heart stopped and the unuse
go places: my favorite place
of his heart turned to unheart. It felt like a kiss, letting go. The flapping skin that pushed his blood was
unhinged. KnifeTheGun was in a static drift. Feeling and thinking nothing—leaves flickered with a breeze.
He felt the leaves flicker.
He felt the dirt breathe.
He felt the cabbages yawn.
His body gave a violent jerk—an instinctive pull from the other side. “Other or OTHER other side?” He
wondered. His head and toes snapped in rubber-band oblong contortion. He opened his eyes to trees and
cabbages as before, flick-flickering between what would be two contexts.
With his eyes open he saw from the sky down to the rows of trees and cabbages—and with his eyes closed he
saw from the dirt where his body lay to the sky where his body float above it. In blinking, he capsized between
the spaces with noematic gesture. Sky-ground-sky-ground, he fluttered. Staring always at the elusive magic
of the space just occupied by himself. KnifeTheGun made an effort to keep the time split between the two
distinct and considered separately. The switch between the two was on-and-on-again but within
ThePlayerPiano (had it in fact been in?) there was no difference. And though, the leap may be grandiose to
consider, he felt that even while in an aerial view over the land, he felt the resonance of the view of the sky—
as if overlayed in weak opacity, ambered and elusive. He was unable to find his body on the ground or in the
sky.
It was a warmth to feel these things—as all things in the precipice were a joy beyond itself. A joy more than
the dry heave of life could imagine. ThePlayerPiano garden-hosed where life only crawled.
KnifeTheGun, thought about his previous life: “I held my head, it was a beer. I held my beer, it was a beer. I
beer my beer, it was a beer.” It felt to him to be an oom-pah tempo of decays and retreats. A leaf flickered
from within him (on the trees) in coordinated effort. What of the leaf that flickered? That breeze that came
from within him? KnifeTheGun laughed and the trees waved their branches, clapping them together.
Again he grew tired.
The garden (KnifeTheGun) lay down on the silicate rocks that lay deep below the soil, propping his (... head?)
against the deeper terrain. He didn’t close his eyes, but fluttered them, as to stay outside of both (...bodies?).
Leaves and branches petrified, the soil calmed, his cabbages stood stock-still. The precipice was pulling him
further and further. Protons and neutrons collapsed to a serene unutility. He felt the unuse of his leaves turn to
unleaf and the unuse of his cabbages turn to uncabbage. His two sights turned in on themselves, into an
oblivion. The breeze siezed and became unbreeze. The air decayed to a state of unair.
He felt a grid where the sky had once been.
He felt the grid move aside—making way for a more perfect silence.
16SaggySaggy waited in the warehouse, pacing-pacing-pacing, staring intently at ThePrecipicePiano. Weeks
unraveled and it became clear that KnifeTheGun, that sick-sad-sold drunk, would not be returning.
go places: my favorite place
Valentine’s Day - Mac Faunlker
Gone North
by James Scales
It’s the last run that you get hurt. The snow is trampled all day and melted from the pressure of being run over and frozen
again in the air. The shadows running through the scrub pines on the high slopes of the mountain get longer and longer, and
when the sun gets behind the peak the shadows are everywhere. Going down you try to turn back and forth over the slope but
the edges won’t dig and you scrape across the ice and only go faster down. In the watery light low through the branches it’s
nearly impossible to tell where the bumps are or what’s frozen. All you can do is hold the pace and bend down your legs.
Tom hit the small bump before he saw it. He was a few feet in the air and his heart paused for a moment. Then he was
down and so fast he didn’t have time to land, just hit the snow and momentum pushing him. Up ahead he saw the trail slip off
two ways, the right was a wide turn through the trees and on the left was only visible the edge of a quick drop. He arced left
slowly, and tried to turn right to slow. He scraped down without turning and came to the edge of the lip of the drop. The pace
got too much and he was afraid of the drop. His friends were nowhere around, they were all meeting at the bottom by the lift.
Tom put all his weight on his left thigh, and pushed the skis transverse to the slope. He didn’t want to fall but he couldn’t
hold the speed. He scraped for a few moments over the ice, the lip getting closer. Slowly he began to circle to the right. As he
came up turning he saw down the slope. The drop was steep, and there were moguls, frozen now he thought, which you could
go places: my favorite place
only avoid with quick, sharp slaloms. The slope went down all the way without a landing; he could see the lift and the club at
the bottom, all the way down. To the right through the trees the slope got slow and flat. Better to be comfortable, he thought,
heading for the trees.
Many buses came but his didn’t come for a long time. It took him a long time to get to the bottom, and his friends were
gone when he arrived. He had to ask twice which bus to take. When the bus arrived he dropped his skis in the plastic tubes
bolted to the side of the bus.
—Frederick Hill? he asked, stepping on board.
—Yeah, said the driver. The driver had dark skin and wide eyes. His hair was grey and his nose was large and fleshy. At
his feet sat a case of beer.
—A snack? asked the man entering the bus behind Tom.
—Dinner, said the man. The two laughed. The bus lurched away from the clubhouse and across the parking lot. As they
were waiting at the stop sign to cross the small bridge that went over the stream and took them to the highway, a group of
people came up and knocked on the side of the bus. The driver looked out and opened the door. Two ladies entered
breathless.
—Thank you, they both said, thank you so much for stopping.
—No problem, said the driver.
—You should have waited, man, said a man getting in behind them. Unbelievable. This is ridiculous. Everybody else sat
down as the bus started over the bridge but the man stood behind the line and looked out the front window.
—Alright now, said the driver.
—It’s unbelievable, how did you not see us all running?
—There was nobody else there at the stop when I was there.
—Is your mirror? Is the mirror working? said the man, pointing. You know I can talk to your supervisor. I’m gonna call your
supervisor.
—Alright, then. Just you don’t need to give me all this attitude, said the driver, flexing his hands around the steering wheel
and starting over the bridge. This is a service we provide, okay? This is the town’s service with the resort. You need to sit
down.
—This is so unbelievable. I’m not giving you attitude. You’re not doing your job right, is what’s happening.
—We don’t have to open the doors once we leave the stop, okay? Now I got stopped at the sign...
—It’s about civility.
—and I opened the door for that young lady, and she was kind enough to thank me for it.
—I thank you people, I thank you people ninety-nine times out of a hundred, said the man, exasperated.
—All right.
—This is so crazy, how is it my fault for getting mad?
—I don’t need to listen to this, said the driver.
—Are you kidding me? This is a free country. I can say whatever I want to.
—You need to sit down, sir, and calm down.
—What, are you saying this isn’t a free country? I can say whatever I want to and you have to listen.
They turned up Frederick Hill, where the lodges were.
—I can’t believe you guys, said the man. You know what, I pay your salary. I don’t have to put up with this. I pay taxes here
buddy, I pay your goddamn salary.
—I’m in number 24, said Tom, standing up suddenly. The bus was quiet. The driver eased to a stop. Tom walked past the
man and the driver. As he was taking his skis off he looked back in through the door.
—Thank you, said Tom. Thank you very much.
—There’s no problem, said the driver as he closed the doors.
When he got to the porch Tom felt his pockets and realized that he had left the gloves on the bus. He stomped off the snow
and leaned his skis against the wall. He took each boot off with the heels of his other feet. He came into the breezeway. The
house belonged to Mike’s parents. It was the first time in three years, since high school, they all had come back. He opened
the door into the main room. The room was tall and drafty, with a large gas fireplace in the corner. Old wooden skis were
mounted on the wall, and an afghan blanket was spread over the one long couch.
—How was the run? asked Bill from the hearth.
—Scary, said Tom. I almost crashed.
—That’s why you have to be more careful, she said, sitting next to Bill. You ski like a cannonball.
—I could go for some whiskey, said Tom, moving his hands together.
—We have a few beers in the fridge, said Bill. Also, Tom, if you want to shower, you probably have to wait, there might not
be enough hot water for more than four people.
—Where did Jon and Stacy go? asked Tom.
go places: my favorite place
—They had to go home, Stacy had some work to do, said Bill. They drove back to Boston as soon as we got home.
—That sucks, said Tom. We only had one night to see them.
—Yeah, said Bill, looking at the fire.
Tom went to the fridge and took a beer. There was only a six-pack. Through the serving window he saw them each
looking at the fire.
—Thanks for waiting, by the way, said Tom.
—Does anyone want to drive me to the store, to get some beer? asked Tom, finishing his beer. Are there even any stores
around here? He laughed.
—I’m not driving anywhere, she said, not looking back at him.
They went to bed early and woke early the next morning, but he did not get out of bed until breakfast had been cooked,
eggs with coffee, upstairs. He had stayed up most of the night reading in his room, and drinking from a tall glass the bottle of
wine he had meant to leave for Bill’s parents. They had eaten and were putting on their gear when he came up.
—Morning, she said. Have some eggs.
—Is there any coffee, asked Tom. I like mine black.
—Since when do you drink it black? she asked.
—Since I got hair on my chest, said Tom. He laughed.
—Tom, I think you left your boots outside, called Bill through the breezeway and into the kitchen.
He wore two pairs of socks and had to borrow a pair of her gloves. The snow was good in the morning: they had sprayed
overnight. The first few runs were the best, before those not staying near the mountain could arrive. They rode up to the top
and came the whole way down three times before there was a line for the chairs. They got separated, Tom the least
experienced skier and Bill taking all the diamonds. Tom’s favorite trails were quiet in the trees with the rush all around you on
the soft flat slope, then a big long dip and always up ahead in sight the landing where you flattened out for the next drop, like
the slopes in Europe when his parents took him that once.
They met for lunch and Tom and Bill had a beer, sitting out in the sun.
—Did you see that guy on the chair, said Tom pointing.
—Where, she said, squinting against the light off the snow.
—He almost fell off.
—Oh, she said, looking back at the table, I missed it.
He always enjoyed the runs right after lunch, with the beer in you and hearing music in your head the whole way. Bill left
for the north peak, where there was no easy way down. Tom went back up to the middle and came down drifting back and
forth across the wide slope through which the chairlift ran. They took a few slopes together, and then she left to find Bill. He
took a few, tucking his elbows and feeling the big wide drops in his stomach. After a few hours the sun began to disappear.
They found each other at the chair and agreed for one more together. They were driving him to the bus to New York tonight,
and wanted to leave early. He was coming down, through the shadows, when he began to slip. He could just see her bright
jacket, and Bill’s farther ahead. He was slowing now, and losing them. It was a green trail but they had not sprayed, it was as
icy as yesterday. He was watching her jacket leave the corner in front of him when he hit the jump, hidden by the light. It was
big this time and he was in the air too long.
When he hit the ground he couldn’t breathe, only gasp weakly. He saw white, then grey, and his face felt red, raw like a
wound renewed. His goggles were cracked and snow filled them in. He shook them off and tried to call
but only gasped. He lay there on his back in the snow and was glad they had not seen him. Nothing’s ever different, he thought
to himself, and grinned like he had a stomachache.
go places: my favorite place
On the day I am teaching Oedipus:
by Monica Wendel
I think of the Greeks when I stand on a slope and see a theater
that could be built into the curve of the earth, or when I dream
long dreams that weave between nights, like last night,
a girl wearing my boots, people from a horror movie
cut off her leg below the boot, so knee down. I couldn’t see
her face, just the member, my own foot in it, it became mine.
I woke with the fear that everyone could read my thoughts.
Today I wore different shoes and my sister’s sweater for comfort.
Oedipus is a widower and orphan both and an only child
unless you could his half-sibling children. On Long Island,
there’s an abandoned gold coast mansion with an amphitheater
built on its grounds, and from the ruins there you can see
through the trees to Oyster Bay. Is this why Jocasta’s womb
is a harbor? What would it mean to see her standing
in her hallway, smelling the sweat of her son, her lover?
Did her menses follow the moon and the tide?
How wrong that she killed herself by hanging, feet
above the ground, swaying, rocked by her own guilt, and us
complicit in her death, watching her secret again, again, again.
go places: my favorite place
Mussel –
by Monica Wendel
Not muscle as in strong, but mussel as in
the blue-black stone that opens to orange flesh.
Axel, your kindness reminds me of those moments
when my brother and sister and I waited for the tide
to pull low, and in the flat that was left, lifted snails,
horseshoe crabs, fiddler crabs; watched bodies retreat,
sometimes killing them, sometimes throwing them
back to the water. Mussels we usually killed, not
believing our father when he said people eat them,
and we would hit a mussel with a rock for it to break
and for the orange and pink to show. It sounds cruel
but it was not. It was quiet. It was unquiet. It was a body
meeting another body. It was a body returning to water.
It was the color of the sky over the city when it is snowing.
How many things we wish we could define.
go places: my favorite place
Untitled
by Rachel Valinsky
5.1.12
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot "Little Gidding"
6.1.12
Ellis, KS
St. Louis, MI
9:36 pm touchdown west coast
8.1.12
Big Sur
Driving up the coast on 101 all heads spurted out the window lungs emptying against the strong wind with the
mountains flanking us on one side and the great Pacific to the other.
go places: my favorite place
Following trails up stopping at spots with benches or small rocks appropriate for sitting or crowding bodies
together. The waterfall where Erin and Sophia went to touch the water. More trails and then off the trail towards a
tree sized perfectly for five newcomers looking for a place to post it. Sandwiches and fruits eaten after a fall and a
shallow cut to my hand slipping down towards the tree where I fell.
On the other trail at Valley View looking out towards the ocean we omed until the harmonies made us laugh and
slide out of focus.
Holding hands toward the ocean and the sun yelled at it, setting its colors swallowed by the sea in waves of orange
pink and grey, falling asleep to the stars coming up above me, Neptune, Anka, and Jupiter next to the moon, full
and bright like a button in the sky.
Coming back to a home full of Californians smoking a pile of weed and watching Futurama from their sunken
couches, where they stand up to repack bowls or cook butter and I am sitting on this broken in couch with two
friends and their pens writing what they have seen and done.
There is the sense of the smallness of our things when standing on a cliff surrounded to all sides by the great
mountains of the American west and the vastness of the ocean, and the voice when it travels through the ridges
and rivers and valleys.
Survival instincts born from those who first walked on unmarked paths kicked in every
step like the last I could take.
9.1.12
Every once
Sometimes now
Driving - always driving - out of SLO now, now on our way to San Jose for a day or two until we leave and
again for the bay area, San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Berkeley, Oakland.
Has could be.
Has it were.
She wrote: shall I project a world?
I lost you at concentration
10.1.12
Who is it that is aware that I am thinking?
(Jim Carey on DMT)
11.1.12
San Jose San Francisco via Berkeley
I will miss all of it but in short salt factories where the sky and its reflection in the pond and the salt and the
terrain and the mountains all merged into a pale purple grey amidst the desert of the san Jose county wasteland.
In Berkeley seeing Eric and Rin in the car picking us up, immediately driving up an incredible hill till we saw all the
bay flooded in the bright California sunlight driving around with the view on all sides and the view always outdoing
itself. Then Berkeley with the dank burritos, the aged hippies and the college, standing in the warm winter glow
and the wind of another time blowing by.
All with cigarettes dangling out of hands strew over windowsills, the golden gate bridge the mansion the drive to
the pork buns going back I remember also the feeling in the car over the first bridge.
12.1.12
Sonoma the wine country: the ride there through red patches of ground moss and arid looking California beige
mountains. Smoking doobs out of sun roof windows and listening to Jefferson Airplane free ride in a small town
with green shops and fiesta plazas stoned as fuck.
Going up the country with the sun pouring in onto my hair and there is a lonesome cowboy shop and suddenly
Mexico and lamp repair shops and the water tastes like wine.
go places: my favorite place
Light in California blue with everything contrasting against it and popping out and in Paris so bright you can hardly
open your eyes and that's how it feels, too, and in New York so grey and in Berlin so earnest and true and in LA so
synthetic
I've had friends who've had water bottles full of vodka
Someday is not a day of the week. Can never get enough of the light, never.
Retinal memory will retain this. All of it if not most.
(continued)
Felt northern California at once America, at once all of it.
Remember to read Artaud and Blanchot and de Nerval's last book found in the coat pocket from which his body
dangled when he hung himself.
13.1.12
Soft shoulder. Hippie tree and Tiberon Belvedere Island and 5 story houses like giant yachts much larger than
humble sailboats propped up on the land and views of the bay and hazy purple mountains and washed out misty
rainbows into pink and orange bursts and light beams projecting forward toward us but further (/closer to) over
there.
Re-membering again, today, as I do on some days, and feeling the shiver that usually accompanies the event. Am
reminded that I am in California and it is not just California it is also me, and I remember myself, and I catch up
with myself. Some over floods the rush but most of it is manageable. This is because I am here, too, and feel as I
feel, now. But also because I am not generally unmanageable and as marred down in old news as I may be I am
still as full as I am always. On the freeway in California, the sole pedestrians in a pedestrian prohibited land stretch
pink pink with the pink sky and only a few
numbers and names in mind and our feet and San Francisco ahead if the bus ever comes. Max said he hated New
York but loved it more than he hated it which is also how I feel.
I could breathe for hours.
14.1.12
It is strange for a freeway spot to be a spot
Woke up with Steinbeck in my head the line that said that a journey can begin before you arrive and can end before
you leave and I woke up to the warm glowlit room and I woke up a little. I am leaving tomorrow.
Dreamt something last night that I remember now recording within the dream entirely convinced I was awake can
remember the feeling of location and of physically holding my phone to write and wrote it out and again realized
within the dream that I was asleep and that nothing had been written down so I should remember it and write it into
the journal upon awakening. Upon awakening I had forgotten. Needless to say – well it is pretty self-explanatory –
I can see myself doing that but I don’t remember doing it. Those are such well-kept hedges
Back at the bunker watched a sun set, literally, from its full reflected frayedness to its orange whiteness to
pixelated pinks and purples and saw it diminish slowly in the horizon and it formed a small shape with a sun hat and
then a sequence of other shapes and then we watch it disappeared and I almost cried because I had never seen the
sun, really tracking it, in that way.
Exploratorium. House of air.
Burritos in the mission and El Rio joints and PBR flowing and me buying a round like I always think of doing and
knees and legs rubbing I wanted to ask "am I completely off?" and conversation flowing and always feeling in it on
my left and on my right and Greg came too and Max and Claire and then a succession of a whole lot of people this
was the spot and people flocked to it.
Asking myself whether like Jim Carey we are always trying to get back to that feeling like in the car when we
connected lines between the points at which we had all tripped in geometric combinations of twos and threes but
not fours yet.
Everyone has been remembering a lot that is not to say re-membering fully but at least in that general ballpark and
I am wondering why and for what reason there is a need to do this California has its own diction I want to use new
words.
I want to go to bed so I can dream.
go places: my favorite place
15.1.12
Riding backwards, Marin ahead the city behind the sun on my left and the bridge on my right and my friends on the
road to Tahoe. I am riding backwards and seeing you get smaller. I am going to New York today.
Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands.
Up there where it is cold by the lake they drive through Nevada to get there and are under so many stars lit up
more than in Pawling, more than in Berlin, more than in the Bay. They will be pacing through the sky with their
eyes while I am flying over.
I left but left a part of something here, which I will come back for.
Needless to say, California.
"and then there was one"
go places: my favorite place
Dresses (Mexico City), 2011 – Tiffany Navarro
Mexico City is my favorite place. I always enjoy walking around the streets of Mexico City because I never
know what I am going to see. The people live very different lives there and the mixture of all of them in one
place fascinates me. This photo is of a window display to a dress store. There were tons of stores that sold
dresses with window displays similar to this one. I like this photo because it is haunting and sweet at the same
time.
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