Those new stores in the neighborhood that open with happy fanfare--balloons taped to the doorway or maybe even a little champagne party the night before the official opening. The small hair salon, the Tibetan handicrafts "bazaar," the tattoo and piercing "center" where you watched the young owner and his wife work night after night to clean up the dumpy basement space, the pizzeria run by the fat Indian family... Almost as soon as you see these places deep in your heart you know they are all going to fail sooner rather than later. Why would someone come to this part of town to buy a Tibetan statue? The pizza is truly awful, or the shoes in the window at the new Italian shoe boutique all look like they'd fall apart instantly. Inevitably you walk by these places a couple of months after they've opened and see the owner looking gloomily out at the street, the sadness of their brightly lit, still new store empty of everything but too much product and slipping hopes.

"And now I drink a toast to your coffin. May it be fashioned of lumber obtained from a hundred-year-old cypress tree whose seed will be planted this week."

Rob Brezsny

To everyone's surprise, the bus driver is extremely friendly to passengers getting on or off. He gives a big "Hello!" or "Goodbye!" to all. People are so shocked by his warmth that they don't know how to react. It's fun watching each one's individual befuddlement.

The peculiar tilt of the head many blind people take on when they are being led by those who can see. I've also noticed blind people tend to smile more no matter if they are with someone or alone. Why is that?

graffitti noticed on a wall-- "I don't love me anymore"

Some homes are the perfect friend, womb, safe harbor or hiding place when one is needed. Others are nothing more than neutral spaces to sleep, eat, and store your belongings in. The last and worst kind of dwelling doesn’t even deserve to be called home because it offers no comfort, rest or shelter. You get the feeling that if it were a person, it not only resents your presence, but would likely turn you in to the authorities if you were in trouble. Bad moods darken in these places; despair grows like bacteria.

"You have to cross the river first before you can tell the crocodile he has bad breath."

Chinese proverb

Sometimes memories are like those huge sea creatures that for mysterious reasons, rise from the bottom of the ocean and wash up on beaches. Some are so rare because they have come from unimaginable depths. It takes five experts to even figure out just what the hell they are. Others are instantly recognizable but still marvelous because of their size, shape, and mostly because they haven't been seen in years. Once in a while you suddenly remember something from your early childhood, say, that's just as huge and momentous. You wonder how did I forget that?

When I was very young, my family went into New York one day to attend a play (or something). When it was over we walked down Times Square and 42nd Street. Somehow I got separated from the others. I could not have been more than four or five and I was lost in what at the time was a bad part of Manhattan. I was so young that one of the only things I knew about survival was men in uniform could be trusted. So in the midst of my fear and weeping I went looking for a man in uniform, any kind of uniform, to help.

In those days on the long traffic island in the middle of Times Square was a military recruiting center. 4 men from the four branches of the military sat at four desks, backs straight, wearing beautiful different colored uniforms, waiting for potential recruits. The small building was almost all glass. I looked in, saw the uniforms and that was all I needed. I crossed the street with the crowd and opened the door. The only thing that I remember clearly now, half a century later, is that one of the men looked at me standing there and said, "You'll have to come back in a few years, Sport." All of the men laughed and laughed at his joke. But then I told them what had happened to me. Like the superheroes I knew they would be, they somehow magically found and contacted my frantic parents. In what seemed like a very short time, my mother came flying through the door and snatched me up in her arms.

How could I have forgotten this?

Like my mother and father, it is very likely that all of those men are dead now. And I am now older than any of them were that day.

from a friend's letter:

"I realized last night that having to read this play in French is very interesting because it's not just the language that is different (obviously), it's that I'm forced to read much more slowly in this foreign language. As a consequence, I find myself thinking a lot more as I read. That in itself is a very strange experience because at school the focus was on developing the ability to speed read: i.e. to become faster and faster without losing comprehension.
However, I now realize that what's really wrong with that approach is it makes reading a purely passive experience as a consequence because the focus is on the rate of absorption rather than on your interaction with what is being said: i.e. it's ignoring what you might have to bring to the narrative...it becomes a monologue rather than a dialogue. Anyhow, reading in French returns me to dialogue mode."

There's a wonderful passage in Rousseau's THE CONFESSIONS that I often think about: something along the lines of our lives are generally boring and bourgeois. But we so long for excitement and days full of Hollywood moments that we make drama out of the stupidest, most mundane things like the bakery not having raisin bread or the cleaner not having our shirt ready... An analyst friend said that in his professional experience, most people's problems are due to our winding ourselves up for no other reason than we actually like the nasty adrenalin rush of worry, anger, fear...or whatever flashy emotion raises us momentarily from our normal rut.

Snowing hard in Vienna.
Some thoughts:

No one looks chic or fashionable in a real snowstorm. Even when they're beautifully dressed, their scrunched faces betray them.
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Heavy snow at night is romantic and mysterious. During the day it's mostly just snow and quiet. Sort of like an old person, napping.

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No one has more fun in the snow than a dog.

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I pass the blind woman on the street and think if she lives alone, how does she know it's snowing outside?
Does she always put her hand out the window to feel the weather before she leaves her apartment?

On Valentine's Day one of the Austrian political parties was giving away free carnations to everyone who passed. It was a nice scene-- men, women and children all holding single long stemmed red flowers, up or down or to the side as they moved along. Most of them were smiling at this unexpected gift.

People poo-poo Valentine's Day as silly or crassly commercial, but secretly we are pleased to receive flowers or for that matter any type of Valentine's recognition, even if it's only a virtual tulip via email, or a bright red carnation handed to us on the street by the Republican Party.

How about a Lesbian punk rock group called "Ben Her" ?

"Anyone can be an asshole but becoming one is a personal decision."
-Jeffrey Capshew

"Writing is like taking a rubbing of your brain."
-Lucius Shepard

Be the person your dog thinks you are.

She secretly perceived herself as Heaven; some kind of ultimate blissful destination. In truth she was really only a very good restaurant.  

We all know from experience that when you go to a restaurant on a day it's closed, you frown at the inconvenience, but then quickly shift your thinking to where else you'd like to eat.

One of the ongoing theories of where the word "sincere" comes from is this: In Roman times if you were rich, the thing to do was to have your bust done in marble by a famous sculptor. Unfortunately marble is notoriously hard to work with and often cracks. The dishonest artist would hide those cracks with wax ("cera"), and they could only then be detected by an expert. The perfect sculpture would of course be one without cracks. "Sin"--without "cera"-- wax. I told this theory to a beloved smarty pants friend of mine. She immediately looked it up on one of those "urban legends" sites and apparently the theory is debatable. But I like it anyway.

But for those who like their ideas pure, today's Bulgarian proverb:

"You are permitted in times of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."

Across the street from me they have been repairing the facade of an old apartment building for a month or so. Total scaffolding across the whole face of the building. A while ago I was staring out the window, dreaming, when the thought "What if people lived on that scaffolding and never came down? What if it were really angels dressed as people doing secret work for God over there. We just THINK it's workers repairing a facade." It gave me an idea for a story which I then wrote quickly and sent the final revisions on the story to CONJUNCTIONS magazine last week. This morning when I woke up, I looked out the window and saw lots of fire trucks down on the street. They were there because in the middle of the night the scaffolding had for some reason completely collapsed. The only thing left was piles and piles of metal stuff strewn everywhere. It felt like now that I finished his story, God said okay, away with that stuff. I don't know if it felt cool or creepy.

Books say: She did this because. Life says she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; Life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own."

from the journals of Gustave Flaubert

One of the noticeable differences about growing older is in the way you use the words "love" and "hate."

When I was younger I used both with the profligacy and happy recklessness of 10/20/30... Twenty things a day were "loved" or "hated," whether they were people, ideas, food, places, etcetera. Which of course meant you didn't really love or hate those things. But for the spurt of a moment, you felt a certain intensity of emotion towards them.

These days I rarely use either word to apply to anything. Because honestly used, they are huge and decisive. Today when I genuinely hate someone, I wish I could erase every pixel of their being from my memory.

"When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?  

"Isn't it wonderful how we never recover?"

- Will Eno