Neighborly

I am sun-blind, sauntering down the street with a cigarette. The air is molten weariness. I am sadder than I should be; nicotine stands in as a poor translation for the healing balm of time.

A lady sprays two boys with a hose. They laugh and run from the spray, chubby bellies wobbling through transparent while t-shirts. A young man sidles beside me and says, “Can I get some of that?”

I assume he is asking for a drag of my cigarette. “Here, you can have the rest.” It’s too hot for this poison, truly.

He laughs. He is asking about the iced coffee, or the hose water, or maybe my hips. Not the cigarette, though. “That’s alright, ma, I have my own…” He gestures to a joint burning in his cupped palm.

I perk up immediately.  “Oh word? That’s how it is? Let me switch with you!”

“I don’t smoke cigarettes but you can puff this, here. How you doing this afternoon?”

“To tell you the truth, I was feeling pretty awful.”

“What’s up? What’s wrong?”

“Well, I was just having an argument with my boyfriend about Trayvon Martin.”

He laughs. “What about him? What about it?”

 “It’s just… I’m not talking about the legality of anything now. I’m just talking about right and wrong, you feel me?”

“Sure.”

“He’s trying to say that if Zimmerman had a right as a neighborhood watchman to patrol around looking for suspicious people, he had a right to talk to Trayvon in the spirit of protecting his neighborhood and who knows what happened between them then.”
           I try to pass the joint back. He shakes his head, no, keep smoking. Fine. I continue after another long drag. 

 “Never mind about the gun, it’s not the right thing to do to look at someone and make an assumption about that person and decide that you’re the arbiter of reality and just get up in their space. It’s never the right thing to do.”

“Right. Like just because he’s wearing a hoodie that means he’s suspicious, that means he needs to be neighborhood watched. I was just talking to my brother about this, we should all wear hoodies from now on.”

I shake my head, “It’s too hot for that shit right now.”

He laughs. “Na, but like thin ones. Anyway obviously that’s some racist shit. Ain’t nobody trying to follow some little Asian kid in a hoodie.”

“Exactly. Like,” My face gets hot. I pull hard on the borrowed joint. Words stick in fits and starts. “It seems to me, on a very superficial level… I just, I feel a degree of empathy with him. Look at me, right? Look.”

I wave a hand up and down my body, Vanna White-style. Big booty, no bra, all mismatched spandex because I work from home and was just stepping out for a cigarette. He looks me up and down, nodding like he already knows what I’m about to say.

“People get up in my space all the time because of the way that I look. And it’s because I’m perceived as a woman of color, you know. Or because I have the body of a woman of color and society thinks that means something. There’s no respect for my boundaries because of assumptions people make…or because they don’t care how I feel, whatever. I don’t know why they do it. All I know is that I don’t necessarily have bodily integrity in the eyes public sphere, because of the way I look.

And then I think about Trayvon, or about you, and I feel like it’s the same thing, or something analogous at least.”

His eyes crinkle in laughter, the irony not lost on him given how we came to start this conversation. “Yep. Basically. What are you?”

“I’m part Mexican. Might as well be white. My point is, what are they telling us with this verdict? Or what are other people telling us when they try to justify the verdict? They’re telling us our bodies aren’t really ours because if someone makes an assumption about us, it’s fair for them to act on that assumption. We’re objects, not subjects. ‘Look at what she was wearing, she wanted it.’ It’s the same idea.”

“Yeah, true. ‘Look at what he was wearing, look at how he looked suspicious, it’s ok.’ People don’t think about it that way though. They’re trying to say it’s not about race, it was just the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a misunderstanding.”

“Do you think it was a misunderstanding?”

“I don’t know. I do know that guy was suspicious because of race. That was was not a misunderstanding. And six white ladies, I’m sorry, five white ladies and a Spanish lady on the jury wasn’t a misunderstanding. They say his father was friends with a judge or something…”

We pace the block, passing the joint between us. We offer other words to each other, other shades of insight or thin props to rest our thoughts upon. We weave a shared narrative from nothing in minutes, marveling at how simple it seems. The joint dwindles to nothing. We shake hands, finally exchanging names. I say, “Our bodies matter.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“We have a right not to have people in our space, no matter what they assume about us.”

“Not if you don’t want to get shot I guess.” He laughs, and I do too, in spite of myself, in spite of how the bottom drops out of my stomach when he says it. This chain of thoughts ends so much more violently for him than it does for me, so much more harshly probable. All the other privileges I have settle back on my skin.  I am playing at empathy, but really we aren’t the same at all. I yawn.

“It was really nice to meet you. I needed this,” I say.

“Come on, I was about to go roll up another one, I got weed for days.”

“Not the weed,” I say, punching him lightly on the arm. We both squint. “Have a really good day, ok? A good life.”

“You too, see you around. Nice talking to you, ma. Keep looking up, ok?”

“Yeah. You too. Try to, anyway.”

Šibenik

Triumphant approach after accidental highway through the hinterlands. Behold the quiet town, shimmering mirrored in the harbor.

Should we have come at daybreak? No: Šibenik’s stone streets are mute orange magic by lamplight.

Doors stand wide open. Ventilation trumps lock and key in the tiny town. Childishly tempted, we “break in” to an apartment building.

Plants in odd architectural corners of the stairwell. Our feet and mouths try to whisper. We reach an apex beyond which there are only locked storage spaces. Disappointed by the lack of roof access, our investigation yields no light bulbs, no reason to pick locks. The nudged rat poison lingers on his fingers as he touches my hair. He apologizes but I’m unconcerned.

We climb over fence and crumbled wall to make shadow puppets in a wrecked fortress. He’d like to steal the flag, but it is padlocked to the pole. Red lights blink in a triangular cemetery below. We contemplate death dates on temporary tombstones bearing the same surname.

Shall we? We nod to each other, sleepy, but a pontoon juts into the harbor: an invitation. I disrobe first, rapidly. The girls follow, orbs of pale flesh softly orange before slipping into the glittering black.

Adriatic silk on nymphean skin. We shout and laugh, calling into the dark. We hush, silent to meet the exigent still of perfectly doubled boats on water. We splash and swim and finally shiver, waiting selfishly for towels.

On losing things

I am shedding objects. Moving in, moving out, alone, with friends, with family. Everywhere things get left behind.  My passport in Madrid, sunglasses on the cruise, shorts, earrings, and flip flops in Ibiza, makeup in Brussels. Several lighters, a pack of cigarettes in Barcelona, a pipe, nice marijuana, some hash, a nail clipper. Many pairs of underwear stolen from off my bed in Amsterdam, along with my primary bag of toiletries. Two leather purses, an expensive digital camera, a notebook with a week’s worth of drunken and drug-addled notes regarding the meaning of life written in Brussels and Amsterdam. Late for my train to London and in a sleep-deprived fog I left a bag behind.

I am saddest now about the notes. The camera is insured, I only lost a day’s worth of pictures, money comes and goes like the tide.

This is a moment to reflect, to get my shit together and see more thoroughly: through my pen, rather than so obsessively through the lens. I will remain open to magic and adventure and I will write more dedicatedly, I will strive with more passion to sort out my dream and make it real. I will get more of it up, out, and on the net in case another notebook or this laptop are lost next.

I don’t need these objects, I don’t need these records any more than I need any thing. All I need is experience and language. To sharpen my pen, to forge forth with more gusto, to be stronger.

I will enjoy being lighter, being less fixated upon holding on. I will get square with the stream of the universe, with the fact that all fades and eventually no one will know I was ever here. Images are not superior to reality, they only offer us the illusion of immortality by preserving precisely the moments that slip past us in real time. We cling to photographs to fill our flawed memories, to give us narrative jumping off points when the mind fails.

We are in those images, our vision and our presence. It is not unreasonable to mourn the loss of that evidence.

Still, reality trumps its lens-snatched facsimile. I am getting closer to that in prose, close as can be; I am shuffling up to it, snuggling my skin against it like an antsy, coiling cat.

I must keep looking as if I have the camera; perhaps I’ll buy a new one when I head east. I musn’t be afraid of losing cameras over and over again because it’s just money, just hassle. Hassle moves and motivates like any part of the journey, I can’t be afraid or impatient with it. This is the worst that can happen, remember? I know my silly self.

“Ridiculous absentminded girl, how can she do this again? How does she exist this silly way?” I ask from the outside, feeling my purse like a phantom limb. But I know, I do know my silly self, I expect nothing less at this point. In spite of my disappointment, silver linings sink in like the gray relief of Dutch sky after so much scorching Spain. Luckily luckily I did not lose my passport again, luckily luckily I still have my ticket to London. I will get there, things are not so bad, nothing will stop my forward momentum.

Last week in Amsterdam, a mushroom trip dissolved into panic at the end of the night. The pleasant thing about drugs is that generally if you take too much, you wake up in the morning and everything is right with the world again. This is different; the consequences here are real. Canceled credit cards, lost equipment, another bump up in my mother’s anxiety. I wish I could turn it all back. I wish I was less like me and a bit more like someone else, someone responsible, someone fastidious and vigilant.

The roller coaster will take me up again, I’m sure. For now I dial these numbers again, where lost objects are meant to be found. I hope that someone kind will read my notebook, find my address, and drop it in the mail.

I find a nail clipper on the bench, waiting outside the station. I have no money and no heart, but a friend is on the way to rescue me. The sneaky universe has not forsaken me yet.

More on Barcelona

I arrive here by magic. Barcelona: the name jangles heavy in my throat, laden with expectation.

Awash in the sensual possibility of Gaudi, I scribble: don’t take convention for an answer. Write stories like Gaudi and poems like Gaga; disrupt and redefine and have boundless confidence. Hang chain from the ceiling to locate architectural stress points: stop hammering away at physics formulas.

Why shouldn’t every door handle be crafted lovingly for the human hand? Why shouldn’t every courtyard creep to the roof in a mosaic of undulating underwater blues? Seats contoured to the spine, rooms with adjustable folding partitions and stained glass different from every angle, windows of different sizes and orientations to best distribute the light of day: the Gaudi houses are truly made for human beings. They appeal to our senses, to our bodies and imaginations. They note our caprices and oblige them, rather than demanding that we sink subhuman to adjust to a shapeless, characterless box of concrete.

Why is this such a unique idea? Most people live and work in buildings. People, then, should be our primary concern when constructing buildings, no? All we do is slap up more concrete boxes, to minimize materials and maximize building profits. Why have we forgotten the wisdom in the hanok, the wigwam, the Spanish courtyard? There are too many of us, and comfort is expensive. Better a concrete box than a cardboard one, right?

It takes thought to design, effort to produce, and conscientious concern to maintain comfort. I understand that Gaudi’s details are expensive, but I don’t grasp why we all go so quietly along with the idea that everyday dignity and humanity are only promised to the wealthy.

Average people should be comfortable and happy in the spaces where they work and live. Artistic detail thrills us, color delights us, design inspires us. This is not frivolity chipping away at the bottom line: this is the difference between living like chattel and living like people.

The only limitations that exist are the ones we recognize. We are lulled into mediocrity by the conventions and habits we submit to. We can do better than concrete boxes - there must be an efficient way to deliver Gaudi-style concern for the physical and spiritual needs of humans outside the circumstance of extreme personal wealth.

And even if it isn’t efficient, we should do it!

(The pipe dreams of fruitcake.)

In which I visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum in 25 episodes as recorded chronologically in my notebook, titled with (mostly) Dalinean explanations

Sensory joy overload in the Plaça de Gala i Salvador Dalí. Approaching the building alone is a thrill. The day is beyond beautiful. I lose track of the ruminations that pursued me here and plunge.

____________________________________________________________________________

1 

“In which I enter the courtyard and use the restroom before entering the museum properly.”

Accordion sweep and burst of pubescent cynicism from wooden stupefaction toga bust and crumble television. Native philosopher, borrowed hat. Welcome!

Empty your bowels! You wont need them! This is the realization of surrealism!

2

“In which the geodesic atrium is even more beautiful from the inside than it was from without, and I am shocked by the number of Russians on tours milling past each other like rival ant colonies.”

Fantastic orb, dismantling gyrations. Cube head and wringing: Gala, Gala, Gala. Overwhelmed. Deliberate disorientation. A fight.

3

“In which I peruse the fishmonger's room, deeply impressed by Dalí’s mastery of craft at such a young age as well as the museum’s style of displaying work from all periods of his life at once rather than in any order; also in which I feel desperate to produce more, to be as prolific and consistent in my imagery and style, to create a true body of fully realized work.”

The melancholy of youthful effort. A painting on both sides, I lens-spy glass delight. Ceaseless production. Texture, medium, constant inspiration. Utter absence of inhibition. His sister, his model always in those years.

Ocell putrefacto: rotting bird. Rot and rot and fade into sky. Rearrange your body. Deface your printed signature and tumble the horizon vertical.

Be afraid of nothing. Make no sense. Prop with cane and melt clock open wide (open eyes, open mouth.) Mercury and Argos in ‘81: no chronology. Storm of rot. Recline.

Woman animal symbol, one old, one new. Satirical composition and enigma in landscape. Portrait. Cigarette. Work in gold!

4

“In which I stand before Dalí’s tomb in the crypt below the museum and realize that for a year we were both alive at the same time; I consider how unbelievably dynamic the world was during the 85 years he was alive and am jealous.”

Salvador Dalí i Domenech, Marques de Dalí de Pubol. 1904. 1989. (We were on the earth at the same time!!!!!!!!) Pile of rocks. Golden peacock lingering.

5

“In which I start to feel a mystical fatedness to my fixation with the birds in Gerona and now Figueres; the mysterious enigma of the cloud of black birds swooping and darting with electron probability before a bell tower is not one that only compels me, but also compelled this famous native son.”

Nails like black birds! My birds! Sky and sky and scale. Metaphor of material? Mysterious transfiguration and label-lessness. Tie a red string to God, heaven, karma; to nothing. An airplane unravelling its veins.

Nails are birds and likewise. Be liberated.

6

“Untitled” or “This is precisely what you should teach your children.”

Meteor and tear me open! Wet car cobweb and pick the boy up, hold him to the broken glass. Impress him strange with genius snail and mannequin decay, perpetual rain in a taxi cab.

7

“In which I stalk the halls, laughing alone.”

DELIGHT. Curtain and brocade. Sing it, alligator, illuminate windmill diagram and filth. Acupuncture cock and balls and ass march roll. See and see and see. Fill holes.

8

“In which I realize that we are all living components of Dalí’s work, our spectatorship folded in as the most important layer of his planned absurdity.”

How preposterous we all are! Gilded premonitions in the window.

[I am having a religious experience: the trembling, the lightheadedness. Chaos in me.]

Lick! Maze and Roil! Why not a mechanical crucifixion, why not a joke?

9

“Untitled,” or “Everything in the universe conspires for you,” or “In which I feel myself as the reincarnation of Gala and/or madly desirous for a Gala of my own.”

Gala’s crazy eyebrows are why I should work here - exactly like mine when I over tweeze! The tiny horsemen, the many lovely multitudes for her, for her, for her.

Where is her work, though?

And why shouldn’t I do whatever I want? Weirdo! Take it all! Yes! I never want to leave this velvet womb. I will be reborn in Dalism, in absurdity and surreal possibility.

Lounge chair bucket medusa. Reproduction. Tie me to the ceiling, too.

11

“Untitled.”

What is the date? This is the best day of my lie. I want to weep.

12

“Mae West cum apartment cum I am an asshole too cum this is exactly what he wanted” or “In which I grow tired of waiting to look through the lens at the top of the steps and some of the magic seems lost.”

Peek inside, vegetation. Be selfish, couch lips. Hair Curtain. What’s inside a face but a jungle?

Spacial interpretation of Mae West cum apartment through the eye of a camel with real hair and rhinestones. A fireplace in each nostril.

Have patience on the queue (imagine his delight with our obedience.) Bathtub ceiling.

13

“Untitled.”

Do you ever get sick of being absurd?

Ant and bread and chocolate pleasant. Gold cast of an asshole, again I am the only one laughing.

14

“In which I feel I cannot stand the stink of undeoderized Russians any longer, but then I do with much amusement.”

You cannot be alone here or anywhere, you must be irritated by idiots until you realize you are also a fucking idiot.

Glitter and splack and hologram never forgetting pencil, technique. Control. Mirror and bang.

Context! In Situ! Nothing is accidental. Nothing has meaning. Perfectly crisp nonsense.

15

“In which I become completely preoccupied with my camera for too many minutes after accidentally pushing some button that ruined whatever setting was working so well before that,” or “In which I fail completely to appreciate the irony of my frustration in failing to capture the ineffability of a moment in pixels.”

Fuck a motherfucking camera goddamn it.

16

“Untitled.”

Fishbone parquet duomo disappointment. Don Quixote, paint her hair gray in stereoscopy!

17

“In which I connect this visit to every trip I’ve ever had, be it a physical journey or a trip on hallucinogenics: I follow the same narrative arcs from unbridled positivity, to some negative sticking point that I fixate upon until complete despair, to coming out of negativity just as the drugs start to wear off/ the journey approaches its end, to a peaceful recognition of retracing my steps back to the start even as I mourn the fleeting nature of my euphoria; it is like trying to look at two mirrors that face each other, or giving up on the time machine.”

I’m getting sad, this is exactly like both acid and travel. All adventures require mishaps. I’m taking myself out, is the magic lost? Did I buoy the stakes too high? Roll over the rubics cube and weep for grammar, for sentences.

So much to learn! Don’t go, don’t go! But the lessons are the same everywhere, absurdity is not contained within this place. The come down, the stickiness. The rapture mitigated by irritation, by lack of affection for fellow men (though I do want people in my pictures, to record spectacular reaction.)

There are so many ways to feel (so few?) So many things to obsess over (indulge in.)

Cuant Cau Cau - “When It Falls Down, It Falls Down.” [So nervous! So excited!] Cynical and innocent; playful and deadly paradox.

To look through the window is an unending prism of possibility. Black birds overhead! Sinks around the rim.

18

“In which I realize I’ve been here for five hours and really need to eat something.”

Everything in everything. The pathos of this visit. Add hunger! Oh? A body?! I have one! It has needs so base by now. Every day a wind-up toy, winding down.

19

“In which I linger, afraid to go, to let go of this thing, when I realize there are a few more rooms I haven’t seen.”

Knights and piles of shit; loud, hip Americans. Nothing disgusts me but other people. Sailor hat, long nails, stench. Gifts. Prints.

Esophagus recognition, unwind it backwards now. Trace it back.

Oh! Octopus shoulder and Piranesi prints in the impossible stairwells of a madhouse. Copied from a Rubens, copied from a Leonardo.

20

“In which I recognize more than ever the power in names.”

Preliminary study of Gala for the painting “One hundred virtual virgins reflected by as yet unspecified number of real mirrors by cybernetics (etant donnes)."

LHOOQ under the defaced postcard of Mona Lisa.

Dalí seen from the back painting Gala from the back eternalized by six virtual corneas provisionally reflected by six real mirrors.

A Dalinean Michaelangelo Slave.

21

“In which a room is filled with pro-Israel art I did not know existed.”

Barbed wire. A black curtain to keep out the light. Ink dance and adept. “Eliahu Golomb” (?) Aliyah 1968. I had no idea.

22

“In which I hear someone say, “I had no idea he was into rocks and things,” but mishear it as “I still have no idea what it means,” and interject with an unnecessary treatise on surrealism.”

Rock bodies. We are so terrifically ancient and textured, conglomerated. How can that baby suckle at a stone teat?

“So into rocks”: foot-in-mouth time. (What journey is without one?)

The dream of a rock in lichen. Breast and ass and howl of agony in stone.

23

“In which, working my way out, I notice a plethora of details I missed on the way in.”

Jade armor in motherboard and Georgia O’Keeffe bull skull.

The painting I had such a hard time capturing is called “The Poetry of America.” I laugh, relieved. It’s all a part of the trip. Eye of the peacock.

Comfort again in the airy atrium. You’ve never seen it all, death mask and the pope.

24

“In which it takes money to make money.”

None of these things are cheap to make (and then the jewels!) The perpetual motion machine that is success.

25

“In which I read about the museum on the way back to Barcelona and I ponder the degree to which I’ve already internalized Dalí’s maxims without even realizing it it.”

 “Start building a house from the roof. Create by addition, not selection.”

The Black Bird Enigma

Before I left for Gerona, my shoes were of primary concern. Which to pack, which to leave behind in Barcelona? What would be safe, what would be comfortable? I regretted what I’d chosen upon arrival. (Such a silly fixation; ultimately I was better off sweating in boots on those cobblestones than I would have been rolling my ankle in flip flops.)

I went up to the roof of the hostel and forgot my feet. Immediately I sat and started to write. I cannot get enough of Mediterranean balconies and terraces, nor gothic bell towers dominating charming plaster horizons.

This time, the tower was accompanied by a cloud of black birds. I became fixated on them, their swooping and darting, their seeming disappearance before re-apparition in a burst of feather and screech.

For a week I’d been noticing an inordinate number of bird silhouette tattoos on Barcelona’s women; immediately I felt these birds overhead to be the inspiration. I am making this bond up. Who knows what each bird meant to each woman? But in my mind we were all linked, me and bird tattoo ladies, in this recognition of this enigma overhead.

What were they, swallows? I have no idea; I so lack the vocabulary to describe nature. I loved their punctuation of the burning blue slate sky, their sudden elusiveness when I tried to capture them with my camera. They forced me to be in the moment because there was no way to satisfyingly record them. The more I thought about them, the more I stared and tried to take pictures and wished for a clear metaphor or symbolic understanding of why I was drawn to them, the more mysterious they seemed. Why were there so many? What were they doing, circling and hovering like that?

More and more I noticed them, like clouds of electrons or harbingers of... what? There was nothing to say about them, nothing but this buoying joy I started to feel every time I saw them. My black birds, my enigma.

They are patternlessness with shifting form and shape, like a jazz improvisation. They are dance, grace, kinetic ebb and flow. They mean nothing, they are the great turning wheel of the natural world set whirling in miniature through the sky. They are primal, simple, functional beyond my understanding; beyond deliberation, they are thoughtless instinct manifested in multitudes.

Paradoxically they’ve acquired symbolism for me now, for their very lack of symbolic clarity. They are my personal reminders that life makes no sense; means nothing, says nothing until one stares and speaks or writes to lend it meaning. There is nothing to figure out, nothing to unlock; the locks are in our minds and all we have to do is free ourselves from the expectation that we have more control and understanding than we do.

Çok fazla!

Korean edition in the middle! 

On the road to Ephesus I let Amanda play photographer and focused on chatting with our cab driver using my ten new Turkish vocabulary words along with his five English ones. The first words in a new language are so delicious, like popping one tasty truffle into my mouth after another, unsure of what’s inside but delighted all the same.

I was a bit bummed about the futility of recording everything. Sometimes a photo or a note jotted down in my notebook is enough, but “enough” for what? To remember? To capture? To share?

Maybe it’s just to entertain myself, to become more amusing as an old lady, with a slideshow to accompany my stories.

Sometimes it feels aggressive or possessive, like theft. Like conquest.


I write everything down because I want my ideas and thoughts to be more explicit, to thicken in layers of meaning and metaphor. I love and enjoy visual art of all stripes, but my mind tends to move best in language.

Language is insufficient, too, though. At least my skill with it is: I try and try to get at the lushness of the vegetation in Laos, or the light that moves across the rooftops in Barcelona, but my pictures have me beat before I even open my notebook. These images are mute. They evoke whatever they do without words, without need of words. Images are so elegant and efficient in that sense.

When I feel like I’m overdoing it on the recording and analysis, I make deliberate efforts to put my pen and camera away and just look, just smile and talk and try to let go into observation and experience alone. But I hate for things to end, I hate to ever forget anything, lose anything, throw anything away -- in part because it feels like that’s all I do sometimes. Lose things. Break, stain, ruin things. Leave them behind, have them stolen, mail them somewhere to where I’m not.

Its tremendously comforting to get ideas out on paper or in pixels, to know that they’re in my pocket or humming in the internet, and I don’t have to trust this silly brain to keep from forgetting it all.

Anyway, Ephesus.

We first visited some ruins believed to be the last place where the Virgin Mary lived before her death. It was bizarre to think of her as a real person, someone living in a house as an old woman with caretakers and apostles by her side. I felt nothing but a bit of awe at the age of the building; a man next to me from the Philippines wept as he prayed.

There were prayers written on scraps of fabric tied to this wall outside, a huge knotted mass of them. I wrote similar prayers on wooden plaques at shrines in Kyoto and left paper flakes of gold on Buddha’s knees in Bangkok, but this time I took a pass.

It was partially to keep from holding our little group back, but it was also because Christianity has no novelty. I never believed that my plaques or gold flakes would get me anywhere but it was fun to bow and circle, to join with people of unfamiliar practices and try it, try everything.

I half wish I had tied a prayer to the wall now, too. Occasionally I treat Christianity like an ex, or like a friend who wronged me somehow whom I no longer speak to. That simply isn’t the case; Christianity didn’t wrong me, it just wasn’t right. It’s better when I treat it as neutral, as one amongst many religions I don’t believe in, though I happen to know a bit more about it than the others. The art is better when I think this way, the ruins are more awe-inspiring. Just another current in the stream of history: as an observer and contemplator of life, I can get close to it without expectation or intimacy.

The library of Celsus was awesome. Once it had space for 12,000 scrolls! Celsus was buried inside! I want to be entombed in a library! Wickedness all around.

I was also thrilled by the last standing column of the temple of Artemis... and by my camera’s incredible lens and its ability to capture the nest on top.