jolie laide: January 2008

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

1.07.2008

I need a map. I need a lot of them. We are running out of the mountains in front of a snow storm. The clouds are gray and puffy, like the mourning doves trying to keep warm in the weak winter light, Lower East Side fire escape. Lowering in altitude my ears pop, the population sign reads out elevation 3,000 and I don't even know is that a mountain or a foothill or where I am, really, as the highway cuts away and little clusters of buildings nestle and cling. People are trying to tell me how to go, where to go and I can only prepare for this so much, then I want only a rough guide, a skeleton trail, a picked bone with just a whiff of information, I want to do this myself.