disciplines

His cause had come up as short as the banality "it's fallen on deaf ears," which is precisely what his brand of self-indulgent activism had accomplished: nothing. His words might as well have been scattered into our perpetual gust like dirt unhinged from the crotches of a corn stalk's numbered crevices. He relished in referring to his job as an interlinked triumvirate of duties: it was not, I am this, or, I am this and this but, instead, I am this, this, and this.

For the fourth time in as many months, someone has asked me (when I told them I'd come up from A--, an excuse I implemented often to excuse my idiotic sense of direction or lack of, say, knowledge of certain eateries) why I moved here (usually followed--solidified--by the prepositional phrase "of all places"). I am beginning to, already, run out of proper responses to this. Let's, quite briefly and for the sake of nothing-better-to-do, retrace some of the commonplace actions. First, I think, comes a small chuckle, then a tired grouping of head nods, finished by an overwrought explanation (not to be duplicated here--you will not infringe on my emotions, my choices; you must forge your own, I cannot, I will not, help you here).

He liked to create internet sites because he could. Paradoxically, he liked to harangue, in a passive fashion, you for using new technologies, thrusting the, apparently, undying praises of vinyl, analogue, and celluloid into your eyes from your high-definition monitor which you purchased just for editing images on the latest software. That is what you did, didn't you?

I am inside an octagonal square (this makes sense and you know it) of brown leather club chairs. Classical music and the biggest fucking rug I have ever seen laid out. A covered baby grand piano and mis-awarded local canvasses (the pastelly modern bits have lost out to the romantic landscapes of prickly pear cacti--then again, they always do, lose out, that is; and how fantastically so).

He enjoyed hosting photoshoots, for no real purpose except to buttress his projects, with the aforementioned film-based vintagery. Revamped warehouses reverse-gentrified their subjects even more extraneously; pebbled alleyways forced a beauty where they had never been some before. And he employed (not in the traditional sense, they--forthcoming--were paid in gift certificates to the local taverns which, he near-mandated, always be frequented over anything nationwide--this, I'm afraid, was one of the few areas he and I found common ground on but our manners of execution were vastly different) a small band of young girls to assist him. Assist: to hold those enormous silken pads with the one side that shone like aluminum foil or late 60's NASA moon-landing equipment to reflect the light onto his subjects, who, in my two witnessings, became paralyzed beneath its aura. And in our perpetual gusts (the same as earlier), the poor American Appareled waifs seemed as if they would take to the sky like dandelion seedlets, not stopping until a cluster of bamboo sheaves would do it for them.

_____

Andrew flew away with safety and coherence.