Thursday, June 5, 2008

Sensation junkies

Last night, in a visiting-relative-paid taxi over the bridge I had that happy little feeling that makes me want to stay in New York forever.  I love riding in taxis at night in New York, especially when we are going fast (relatively) in one direction so I can see the street breeze by, or, when we are crossing the bridge and all the lights from the city turn into a dream.  It is the same feeling on an open road (again, in a car) with one of "those" songs and the sun baking your arm.  Or riding on a motor bike and dropping your head back so you can look up at the trees and the sky.  It is the feeling of being somewhere/being not somewhere.  It is the feeling of flying over a town in a dream.  You are there, but you aren't because your feet aren't on the ground.  

It occurs to me that much of New York (although this must be obvious) costs way more money than many people can afford right now.  And it isn't God that is magically changing the economy.  (Future president/any person of influence, please do something different because this shit sucks!)  So for the time being and perhaps forever I'll have to live vicariously through the New York dream of movies like "Sex and the City".  Great.

A note on other sensations of being alive:
Post-headstand balasana, my torso feels like it has an exoskeleton that is cracking at the seams.  Some days I feel shattered.  It feels like one by one, each rib is lighting up in the joint where it connects to the spine.  And when it lights, it ignites an electric shock down my spine.  Every breath shatters glass.  And then I realize that I have a dialogue running in my head and it is so loud that I wonder if anyone else can hear or if I have been talking out loud.  I wonder how long I've been here with my forehead on the floor.  And then it is over.

3 comments:

  1. for some reason this post reminded me of ginsberg's "howl"...

    "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
    madness, starving hysterical naked,
    dragging themselves through the negro streets at
    dawn looking for an angry fix,
    angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
    heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
    machinery of night,
    who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
    sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
    cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
    contemplating jazz,
    who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
    saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
    ment roofs illuminated,
    who passed through universities with radiant cool
    eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
    among the scholars of war,
    who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
    publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull..."

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