To think, we can fill a mansion with the things that round out our lives, or reduce it all to a single suitcase and by turns be tied. I set aside a little piece of my material world for later, and left the rest sitting on a Clinton Hill curb, where it was swiftly scooped up and scuttled away by unseen hands, good riddance to good rubbish. Is this freedom then? The contents of our lives hefted along on weary shoulders? Or do we now just serve a different master – one not bound by time or convention, this one full of surprises of a wilder breed.

The title and artist of this one sum up my sentiments perfectly, and the pace is on par with my own over the past few days. See you in four months...

The dull whoosh and bump of the train subdued him, and he didn't wake until Hoyt Street was just a dot on the wrong side of the line. "In each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence". He picked up his heavy head and looked toward a face vaguely Asian, a voice vaguely British, then down to the three fingers he had jammed as a placemark in the pages. He grinned. "Things separate from their stories have no meaning." "Movement itself is a form of property." He nodded his bowed head. "It's a good book."

Franklin came and the train hissed to a beleaguered rest and they rose and followed a crowd up the switchback steps toward darkened sky and steaming pavement. "I'm headed this way." They shook hands and parted, and the night lit up like a flash bulb. The ambling throng on Fulton quickened its collective pace a step, and sure enough, soon the sky was open. Voices cried mock surprise and whoops of laughter melded with the horns of livery cabs and Saturday nightlife, and he weighed the wetness against the blisters on his feet and the awkwardness of it all, then broke into a run, head bowed and shoulders bobbing.

When he was well soaked he stopped up under a yellowed awning and realized the futility of his prisance. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned against the corrugated metal storeguard and watched the rain as it came in sheets, dive bombing the pavement to explode in bits of translucent shrapnel which scattered in all directions and spread like waves down the asphalt in mesmerizing cadence and immeasurable repetition, punctuated by lightning and the pistol cracks from the sky above. He looked down Franklin towards dark enclaves huddled on covered stoops or waiting at the threshold of pulsing clubs and raucous bars, all of them audience to nature's ouvre, an act he might have missed had circumstances been slightly different. But could they have turned out any other way?

Everything is necessary. Every least thing. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away, what omitted. He put the book in the crook of his arm and stepped into the downpour, relishing in the respite from the late night summer swelter.

I know this one gets on your auditory nerves, but just try belting this out at the top of your lungs in a crowded mall or a busy subway. It's like free therapy...

In the late day's haze we watch a pink spotlight sun as it's swallowed by the crooked teeth of our cardboard cutout skyline. The city spits back a slipper moon, sliced and stained like a blood orange, to hang as garnish on the rim of the Paramount. All around there echoes a crackling cackle as the sky bursts forth in diadems and dahlias of every hue - not the excess of our Independence but an encore, the Maker meets His mark. The laude is applauded from the spectators watching from this Greenpoint perch, whose feet dangle from the roof's ledge over the denizens below. Just like that, the city we know is new again, an experience amplified by the presence of unfamiliar and rediscovered friends.

When we're young, they ask us what we want to be. Now that we're older, they ask us what we do, as if that quest to be something is a matter that should by now have been already been settled. As if we should already be settled. But settling is for settlers, and the matter of life is never settled. "I know my Self," the settlers say, and that may very well be true. There's great comfort to be found in the finding of one's Self. But there's joy too, I think, in the forgetting of that Self. In the invention of another Self. Feel free to ride the scheduled route, but know that there is always a detour. Vroom.

He was filled with common sense, possessing all manners of practical skills which were guaranteed to earn him a spot in the lowest income tax bracket later on in life.

At the center of the lake was where the biggest fish were to be found. Deep beneath the surface, in currents cool and calm and predictable. He knew all this and yet he trolled the shallows, where the tides were amplified and the waters turbid. It was throwback catch, of course, but how lovely it looked when it surfaced, scales laid bare to shimmering sun, swallowing the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!  
- Oscar Wilde

The unruly have the run of the town. Under the Falls a naked siren bores a crowd to stone through her monotone drone. On the south end, we narrowly escape a vampire crack den. Next in, the velociraptors are acting up again. Their paralytic convulsions shake the panes of fragile glass through which we pass. We head for a park that's not so Jurassic only to find Pleistocene homebros that are Encino Man spastic. Poker Face couldn't hope to clean the cages in this place. New York is a zoo that makes no ado. I can only pray it stays that way.

Celestial bodies that are time-intertwined begin to unravel as they unwind. Orbits once concentric now travel trajectories most eccentric. This two body problem ends in collision. On the event horizon only one question is left to decision. Are we approaching star-crossed singularity, or will our universe forever expand?