crepuscular

outside d.b.a. brooklyn 8/09




Different from the Nocturnal, or the Diurnal,
there is a shy, little known third sleep-habited sibling,
the awake in dawn and dusk,
those who live in the gloaming, only
twilight, Mourning Doves, that nameless rat and deer.
How strange that they have twice as many
days as us.
What will happen
when dystopia finally rolls around, huh?
In that constant grayed dim,
moths beetles guinea pigs
and cats will rule over everything
and be dayless,
sleepless and powerful a giant particulate
Leviathan in the translucent darkness.
And now,
this tangerine tastes alcoholic like a cider
and dusty like moths and garages, and I think
of fathers, yours and mine,
getting troubled in the twilight,
using days up twice as quickly after all,
theirs and ours, and those of many other
Diurnals (now insomniacs) that we love.





Crepuscular is a term used to describe some animals that are primarily active during twilight: at dawn and at dusk. The word is derived from the Latin word crepusculum, meaning "twilight." Crepuscular is thus in contrast with diurnal and nocturnal behavior. Crepuscular animals may also be active on a bright moonlit night.
The patterns of activity are thought to be an antipredator adaptation. Many predators forage most intensely at night, while others are active at mid-day and see best in full sun. Thus the crepuscular habit may reduce predation.

&&&, #1

hopkinton state park, MA / 5.09


I’ve been living hedonistically.
But I’ll always love shade plants more than sun plants,
their humble leaves rounded and tougher, duller darker
nothing showy like those dry bright noisy spangled
sun plants.
I prefer shade plants in the same way I will always prefer
The East Coast.
And still,
for someone who loves weird screensavers the way I do,
I make a good try at being useful.
Post-apocalyptic skills list into the double digits.
I don’t even run from bees anymore.
The houseplant has much in common with the shade plant
And is often a shade plant itself,
taken out of the ground with a little bit of dirt
to help us out up here.
Thanks Spider Plant.
My alley cave seems nicer now.
The day was so dark that the morning birds
never stopped calling. They
faded right into the evening birds.
The one that goes,
{Play or Sing: E sustained, B, B sliding to B flat}.

There’s only so much you can do
with what you get,
a broken chair,
a can of crushed pine-apples.

I Propose A Toast -

knees, mine / central park NY 8.09



Here I am finding myself wishing I’d have made something
and not wanting to make something. This happens to you too, right,
When Son House presents the Pony Blues,
When you hear the insects recently born in your alley,
new empowered party crowds arms bared
legs allowed by the new air’s slow
warmth, when radiostation is being created
somewhere close to you and you know
(because you and radio both agree,
you say Yes, exactly, to it)
and who could know about how here feels if they weren’t here now.
Radio and I should talk.
Someone tell them to say their phone number slower between songs,
like they would if they were expecting someone
to actually call.
There are more electronics home than people right now. When did it become like this?
To Do:
Sleep again
Wake again
Close the windows
Ask the city politely to stop pressuring me to participate
Participate
Pick up laundry.
My spicy breath feels seasonally inappropriate now. I must add
to my list,
Eat a cucumber.
And,
Buy a box of Sun, like the one Cara sleeps with, on like the day, plug
for indoor use only.
Set it on a timer to give the real Sun
a good example. Good examples always help
like the answers in the back of an algebra textbook help lazy students.
I ate the apples you left here last month.
They were gritty and old like the city and fermented like you.
Gritty and old like you too come to think of it.
You too had the chance at those new seeds but I ate them and have shitted
them out generously to this city’s soil,
made previously only of dead squirrels motor oil and newspapers,
now made also of cucumbers, this afternoon’s tacos
and the appleseed’s future apple-trees that should rightfully be growing from
your dead posthumous humus-dirt chest
sprouting in the center of your fertile pickled heart.

To Spring---

I never was a listmaker until my brother told me he was a listmaker

sagaponack, another family's, ny



This is the first year I've spent in New York City without a south facing window. It's taking a toll on me, or it might be that all of the plants died. Maybe it's that the nights have grown taller than their parents (the days) and now the nights bend and loom over all of us nightly when we take our seats in the pews at church.


Perhaps it is that we use coasters now. Possibly it is that I need an electric sunlight box. I can see myself sitting & warming my head in front of it in the dark (but not curtained) room while it's daytime outside.

Yes! Or
Could it be that I decided to stay and (therefore) need to leave? Maybe. Maybe it is that I have sweaty palms and need a way to type that isn't so hot. Perchance it's that I haven't been taking my multivitamin, which doesn't have enough calcium or iron for vegans anyway, and makes my piss the color of a.) highlighter fluid or b.) cheap white wine by the name of Wally's Hut. I could posit relatively reasonably that it's the decline of my eyesight into complete and total oil painting oblivion and my residual former grade-school mortification coming into full bloom (again, like a pushy garage amaryllis or some shit) from the mere thought of wearing my magnifying glasses on my face and in public, therefore preventing me from reading anything  (or even seeing anything particularly well)  in the sunlight ever again, because in this city you can never be outside and alone, you have to pick one.

For all one knows it's that we forgot to pay the laughing gas bill and the landlord shut it off,  or that there's a television in our apartment now that is mostly black-screened and frightening, or that it lately has been making that noise that the obelisk made in 2001 A Space Odyssey but our cat can't hear it, or that we have a coffee table and I'm often concerned about it, concerned about its well-being, not concerned that we have one.

Conceivably it is the giant wooden sailing-ships arrival of spell check, and nootropics, and digital point and shoot cameras, and digital watches, and protein bars, and cliffnotes, and energy drinks, and anything that makes people like me feel bitter for making things easy that shouldn't be easy because it makes people who can do hard things less special, or maybe it's the shame I feel when I misplace the I and the E except after C and take a sip of my red bull and look over at the VCR clock instead of my wristwatch and realize that it's been saying 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00.



But the fact of the matter is, my cat keeps taking off his collar and hiding it (congratulations cat), the neighbors haven't knocked on the walls in a while, it was warm enough to let the breeze on your arms today, it's 4:24 pm which is a good time and I need a haircut which means I'm still alive. Dinner's tonight. Dinner's every night. And I've got a long long line of dinners stretching out forever into the vanishing point until I won't need dinners anymore.

Reasons

Assorted Stars Of The Sagaponack Sky (In August) (In 2009) (Above Us)

• Embroiderer for the curtains that go behind people in photobooths
  
• because no cameras in the outside world
  
• 
  
• Also, rhythm of the church bells chiming five w/ the sirens.
  
• Someone took a photo to save you.
  
• And your blushed face from being drunk in wintertime.
  
  
  
  
• Things want to exist.
  
• Things have been so been persistent about existing.
  

Ouch Ouch, That's So Important

matt and nantucket massachusetts 8/09



Well my computer was broken for a week or so, and it reminded me to tell you to take extra effort in not spending 3 years of your life watching commercials, because apparently, most of us do by the end of it.

And by "it" I mean the end of your life.



Sincerely and Hopefully,
Elise

been missing porches, real mailboxes

long pond docks, nantucket massachusetts



it's really hitting me now, that this is the final push towards the Rest of my Life, i have a couple weeks til the GRE's, have to write my rationale, my IAPC, present my colloquium, get fluent in those 25 books, figure out if those teeth growing in can stay there, get some lenses because i can't see anything and stay healthy stay sane stay good stay kind.
some days i wake up and walk in the city and know i could never leave it
and some days i wake up and think i could never stay here
can i just take you all with me, we'll have a house with a veranda in iowa city or oaxaca,
i just don't know if i can trust a small town again after a big town brought me you.

starched collar girls

matthew on smith's point july 2009, mass.




summer was beautiful but school is just feeling so good. there's nothing quite like a goal, or that lovely illusion of working towards a glowing noble purpose for us goal-oriented animals. when it's not about finding and killing your food, when it's not about a safe place to sleep or staying warm anymore, it has to be about something else. we'd all go crazy and destroy ourselves from a lack of a goal if it wasn't for Learning. or i would.

getting up early and having just enough time for an apple feels good. empty pretty friendly-city-looking streets in the morning feel good. yawning in class feels good.

i'm an okay waitress but a better student. i love the restaurant but it challenges me in ways i know i can't answer, like high school phys-ed, like working at that donut shop, things i feel like i should be able to excel at since i can do these other supposedly important things, like school and books. but waitressing and schooling inhabit two different worlds of ability and i'll always be the fumbling waitress who cannot ever remember where the peach mint sangria is or how to void a credit card.

so i suppose i was born a little malevolved, little baby brain thinking oh well okay i'm fed and happy and warm and not in the rain or in the stomachs of terrestrial superfauna so maybe i can just disregard all of those necessary things, things like attention, memory, sight, acting without thinking, running, a grasp of numbers and distances and time and an ability to devalue lacy silly things like emotion and big Cosmic Crisis in order to function as a cog, a useful gear, because things still need working to produce the fantastic world i was born into and i haven't quite yet earned my vittles to the extent where i could just sit and learn and worry and love and have the world trust that this was how i fit and work into the gears of the machine of the earth running from approximately 1989 until 2079 A.D.

No,
I need to learn some real earth skills. and i can cook and clean and sew with the best of them, i can grow food on the little pots of dirt i own since i don't have any claim to dirt on the ground. i have some post-apocalypse end time skills.

but i could never be the best waitress, i'll always be silly and ridiculous to the good ones i'm sure. any register job i've ever held has concluded with my boss thinking that i'm an idiot, and they ask the grades i earn concernedly.

so i'm glad i spent the summer as a waitress feeling incompetent but the sort of incompetent you know is internal and unchangeable,
but damn it feels so good to be back in little rooms with big books silenced by the total concentration and love for what you are thinking about and knowing that this, maybe, is the part of you and life and skill that you are able to become better at.

it feels a little too cozy but i'm okay with that for now.
there are things i'd rather be
and i could never deny my admiration for the incredible people i worked with, so high functioning, how does a person even become that perfectly sensible, perfectly working. i want to be that serious, i wish i wasn't embarrassed by my silliness, my impractical and unnecessary skills and loves. i wish i didn't feel the guilt that makes me call them impractical and unnecessary and silly, and i wish i knew if that guilt came from me or from the world i've grown up in and known.

someday maybe i'll smash all i've learned and all i've thought and amassed and combed through into a large level brick and something can actually sit on it, be elevated by it, because if i don't do something concrete before i die it'll just kill me.

I'M IN MY NEW DECADE NOW. let's get going elise.

last day of summer slowness

jess @ coney island july 2009


school tomorrow, i'm excited like a misfit middle schooler

august and september are really far away from each other

coney island brooklyn 8/2009



so september has rolled around and we all know what that means,

it is time to straighten our laces

(they've been loose all summer)

so much to love lately it hurts me

sagaponack NY august 2009


been doing a lot of thinking, not saying much these days

small red woman walking away

madaket, nantucket MA july 2009



summer is slowly closing and i don't know how i feel about it, like any other year



edit: but i definitely feel about it

i guess the question now is whether or not i should move to iowa city

edward someplace in queens july 2009

i can see my breath it's the cloud around the city

sociopath dan and that guy he brought along somewhere in queens in july


Well now my brain's on gas stations

Gas Stations Forever

the heat

sagaponack NY in august




no one even wears clothes anymore and this heat is still melting people and the sidewalks are all sticky with it and the air is thick with it so much that they issued an air quality alert telling us well okay we know you have to breathe but it's bad to breathe right now so maybe just stay inside or something,
and we do and we pull the blinds and drink jars of water and eat bowls of fruit and sit as still as possible but then the white noise of the heat gets to be too much in all that stillness
and even in the night it doesn't let up because the buildings and the concrete saved it, and the heat just hangs as if it was heavier than the air above it
but since it's not, you know that it's just heat all the way up to heaven and god

and in the nights we convene in little basements stupidly windowless trying to hear some music to drown out the heat noise
but since we're all melting and can feel the little rivulets of sweat down our sides and are almost blinded by the shine of lights from the droplets of sweat falling off our chins
we all leave and sit on the curbs of the gas stations drinking 99 cent cans of arizona iced tea as brooklyn literally dies all around us

and then i smile to myself and think
no matter how far i travel
there will never be a summer where i will avoid hanging out on the curbs of gas stations

this cold front is so welcome so loved

matthew - smith's point nantucket MA 7/09

YES

self @ moonrise madaket MA 7/09





I am in love with my EveryDay
And it is all the romance i will
ever
need

ninety

jim 6/09




ninety-five, five away from 100 degrees it was and I saw an older man so bored he was playing with the garden hose. hosing in the alley at the tiles. drawing on the aluminum siding like a child but gray and top-bald.
that kind of day with the air again. thick like a soft pillow all around you pushing in so that all your movements are slow. the light tags behind the sound now, its first embarrassing loss in its race to you in Ever.

home life

annalise and jess on our roof, manhattan. 6/09

women with swords

annalise & jessica, manhattan june 2009