Take an old gondola from on top of the Queensboro bridge through the city, as high as the skyscrapers over to Roosevelt Island. Same system as on Grouse Mountain, but this one is $2 for a ride rather than $20. Wander around the island, 800 feet wide and two miles long, known as Welfare island at one time, boasts one dilapidated building that might be a hospital dedicated to small pox victims that I read about. But its mostly this strange island of new communistic-like condos and people in wheelchairs with breathing aids and feeding tubes. One out of five people had to have been in a wheelchair. Ate lunch overlooking the East River and the East Village of Manhattan. Saw a make shift photo shoot, the photographer an early twenty something, overweight, his pants falling down in back revealing too much, with a bright orange bath towel covering his face and camera from the sun, the model, a bundle of sun-browned sticks placed in a diagonal against a cement planter, good dappled lighting, however.
Subway to Williamsburg-er, for a chocolate banana milkshake. Start to feel a bit ill, sit amidst the sunset overlooking, once again, the east river and Manhattan.
Home and sleep.

the more i see the more i want to live here.

wtf coffee laboratory for morning cold brew, into the eighties by this point. cafe where science and coffee collide, at times it takes up to 10 minutes to make a coffee with beakers, a lab coat, and long metal tongs. take a broiler train to 81st, no air conditioning. the sweat on my chest pools in small cluster-like cesspools through my white shirt as my cup of ice melts in minutes over my leg that offers little to no relief. my thoughts are slowed and bewildered.
natural history museum. scads of children in uniform colors from various elementary schools all holding hands like little wrecking balls catapulting each other through the halls. the worlds oldest sycamore tree cutaway, like the scene from vertigo; I mapped my life, a life-size replica of a blue whale, the largest and loudest animal to ever exist on the earth suspended from the ceiling, and an eerie corner where lights were off, and only a few people were meandering, exhibited a frightening scene of a sperm whale attacking a giant squid in the depths of of ocean, a scene made famous from the film The Squid and the Whale.
Headed to the planetarium to be guided through the cosmos 13.4 billion years ago with Whoopi Goldberg and a few crying infants. The foodcourt was an exhibit all to itself, occupying nearly an entire floor with foodstuffs ranging from comfort food, mexican, quick bites, Italian, to gourmet cupcakes, it demonstrated extreme amounts of wealth, gluttony, and what confined, panic-stricken, low-blood sugared mammals of the homo-sapiens do in a food frenzy.
stumptown coffee at a place in soho!
flash forward to a bombardment of senses in times square. I probably ended up in over 40 different family snapshot photographs.
Headed back to Soho to the International Film Cinema to see the late screening of The Future.
Figuring out how to get home for 45 minutes in the subway system as a Chinese duo play overly dramatic music on an authentic stringed instrument.
Get back to Green point and eat cereal on the roof at 2:30 am. locate the familiar city constellation, the big dipper.

botox in your balls

get into seatac around one in the morning. two backpacks on, both chest and front covered. the airport is dead, no flights in or out until 5. go through security and down to our terminal.
find some armless black chairs hiding behind an abandoned shoe shine station, watch several episodes of 21 jump street well into 3:30 when we decide to attempt to sleep. sprawled out on a shoe polished-stained carpet under heavy fluorescent lights we attempt to sleep with shirts over our faces, but spend the time hearing enclosing beeps coming from a broken people-mover. Time passes, a flight that seems to be from the southeast or east-coast (based on the attire and the time difference- everyone was quite perky) and i watch from under the cover of my t-shirt cow-boy boots, flip flops, and slippers trot on through into the soundless abyss of empty waiting rooms.

Time lingers into the morning and crowds pour in, almost at once, most waiting for the doors to open at a starbucks, including a man whose physique is like that of a standing polar bear, only he was carting a flat of Tillamook cheese.

Got to our terminal along with 20 some odd other stand-by travelers wanting to snag a ticket on a sold-out flight. No more flights until the day after.

Downtown Seattle we end up on a bus darting through a subway tunnel under the depths of the city. A man drinking coffee, his jaw hanging open for the twenty minutes we were traveling, his head bobbing here and there from monday morning tiredness. tattoo'ed onto his knuckles "game over". Very confused and slightly delirious.

Find an amazing breakfast place called oddfellows in capital hill, good eats and a treasure trove of great artifacts. behind us a woman talking to herself, eventually gets herself thrown out.

finally make it to kansas city, after being awake for some 40 odd hours. wake up call for 445am for a continental breakfast of biscuits and gravy with orange juice. hands swabbed at the airport for god knows what.

new york is humid. our neighborhood sketchy. a woman with a nickel in her ear, little quantity of teeth, and 4 foot 8 was peering into the window as we ate egg and plantain sandwiches dripping in sweat.
pouring rain, totally impressed that I am functioning off that 4 hours of sleep in nearly 70 hours.

"botox in your balls will stop them from sweating" -overhead in Greenwich Village.