Central Park Again

I go to Central Park three times a week now that school is out and I'm also slightly unemployed. Pardon the dust, we are renovating here.

My friend Mike calls and asks where I am. It had been raining off-and-on all day but it was finally clear so I told him to come to Central Park where I was being a cliche, some Lou Reed that my big sister gave me in my headphones, a paper cup of Earl Grey, and the newest New Yorker. I walked with it hanging out of my backpocket so that people would see. I've got to be special.

There was a man skating at the Mall, east of the Ramble and south of the Bethesda angel and he could balance two Nalgenes on his head and everyone stood in awe of someone who had made a talent out of nothing...he's got to be special.

a different skater fell flat and his girlfriend laughed at him, I thought he did it for her. I can relate. On second or third dates I like to go for sushi and handle my chopsticks badly so I can be nice and vulnerable seeming; the reality is that I don't handle my chopsticks well regardless of the company.

It was a normal day in the park in the way that it's normal when it's not the weekend. As always a movie was being filmed; I've reached the point where I've stopped being curious about those things...someone better will tell me about it even if I was there. As always, by the Ramble there was an Asian bride posing for pictures in her wedding dress.

At the Bow Bridge there were couples posing for pictures and making out. They were happy and European. They made their way down by the water, furtively passed some baby strollers, and fed the ducks bread because they were much cuter than the pigeons.

I don't know if I read this somewhere or heard it in a dream, but I remember a voice telling me not to write eulogies for people you don't know. It was the same voice that told me that everyone does the right thing in the end; they have no choice but to.

Being weeks shy of a birthday hollows out those corridors so the voices come through. It sounded like a poet I studied with in Prague. Marvin Bell; in a poem to his wife he wrote a child said it, and it seemed true: 'things that are lost are all equal.' The rest of the poem was that good too.

Some things I didn't write down, especially watching the boys play baseball, which is good because who wants to live with his pen always out, it's like a person who brings a camera everywhere and doesn't actually live in moments, only in the mise en scene. I don't know what I am trying to say here.

Two girls in a rowboat passed by, they were taking pictures of each other rowing and almost falling out; pictures that were invariably bound for the facebook. We are being a country of individuals on display, we have to differentiate ourselves, we have no common causes. I am a major offender.

I hadn't aimed to go emo but I am writing this late at night...and the three poems in the New Yorker were about recycling in Santa Fe, love and geese, and movies that feature rain. But then, what weren't they about?