quite a lot has gone down over the last month, big events and small perfect moments. when i'm in transit, on a plane, out walking, the subway, the bike, i compose little essays. the moment i sit down at my computer all that remains are meaningless platitudes.
this happened so frequently when i was living upstate that i bought a microcassette recorder so i could save my driving musings. i didn't end up recording my thoughts, but i did use it to record harmonies to practice for the band i was in at the time. one night when i was driving home from a bar i hit the record button by accident and the whole cassette was taped over with me singing along to bjork's album post in the car.
on sunday i had two accidents on the bike which left me uninjured but still feeling kinda bruised and beat up, so i took a few days off of riding in to work. it should have been much worse, but all i got were bruises on my arms and a perfect row of delicate pinpricks on my thigh from my big chainring. so i've been taking the subway, crossing my legs carefully. in the sterile endless frankfort airport last week i bought orhan pamuk's black book, and it's been unsettling my travels ever since. the main character wanders the streets of istanbul, ostensibly in search of his wife who left him, the only woman he's ever loved, but he's losing his mind in this idea of disguise and becoming someone else. he wants to become another man, so he starts inhabiting his life. i have a bit of a horror of stories in which people lose track of their identities, where who you are starts to slip... but i read them anyway--paul auster's new york trilogy, philip k. dick's flow my tears. it makes even creepier travel reading because when you travel you are already in an altered state, underslept, disoriented, in between. religions have figures to protect travelers like the orisha eshu and st. christopher. i've been doing a lot of traveling lately and a lot of thinking about identity and transformation.