describe it.
February 17, 2004 04:46 PM

There are many things that defy description. We are we, so we describe. I describe.

Some things are a little bit secret. However. Some things are hidden in corners by crazy rich old ladies where anyone could find them but you have to look. I could send you on a scavenger hunt for a piece of historical wall, a glitter ceiling, some very very old statues of Asian fratboys, seventies cartoons made huge and brass, or stone tapestries; you might find these things.

[Do you remember, are you of the age to remember, the cartoons from science class and the Smithsonian? The ones drawn in that style, like The Phantom Tollbooth, that animation of sketches. Do you remember? Sometimes no one remembers but me, and I wonder if I've this whole other world of art, just made up in my mind.]

I'd like to be the sort of person to hide things where anyone might see.

[A long time ago someone "reviewed" my journal and asserted that the style, the punctuation used to describe how I'm actually stopping, thinking, breathing, made it less readable or more pretentious or something. I read something pretentious about the SAT writing test in a pretentious magazine, where poets were bad and the Unabomber was okay, if you graded the test as told. These things are related. A long time ago I liked school, but I'm glad not to live like that anymore.]

How many of us are deliberate enough to realize the variance between what we feel and what we place in front of it? I'm not. I'm always surprised by this juxtaposition of what you think and what I thought you'd think. But I still cut some things out as not fit for consumption.

I'd like to collect restaurants above cities. Not in a save a matchbox/book sort of way, just to visit. The ones that rotate atop the highest point, after people peer out glass elevators filled with a sort of "over a billion served" perfume. We saw this in Willy Wonka.

It's the story I always tell about gravity.

No, it's what the story about gravity represents. A different sort of gravity, the kind that sets in with a city blinking around you.

People are always a thousand times nicer than you imagine them. Is it because they smile? Because they grab your hand with excitement?