Did You Like That Picture?

Did you like that picture? I sent it to you not to show off. I sent it to you to remind you of the god-damned man-made majestic beauty of our world. Of this perfectly primary-colored edge of our world, edge of our country. The perfect golden-red; the cocksure azure water, crisp as the air that breathes ocean mist onto my skin; the typical colored sand: because we no longer need to describe what color sand is (unless it's atypical), because I think about how much sharper writers of the past had to be with their words. But now, we all experience everything from the seats of our desks, and what we used to seek at the top of the world, we seek at the top of our laps. So: typical is what this sand remains. 

I remember being impressed by Kerouac for painting the entirety of America in one simple pamphlet-tome. Now I am the one, within a span of a few months, who has ventured from statues of freedom, arches of note, and finally this bridge, the summation of this country, the end and the beginning of this country, our country, our world. I've heard the blues in Memphis, I've heard the blues in Chicago, I've heard the blues in Austin. And I've seen the blues in all these cities and I see the blues before me: the sky, the waves, my shoes. And I hope this picture finds you back home to help you escape your blues. 

I am wearing a shirt that portrays a sketch of a sewer, a Chicago manhole cover. Our art is about the dirt, the filth, the overlooked, the dispirited, the dispossessed, the disposed, the disks that cover up our dirt, our filth, our waste. Our city works. Our workers make it work. Our civic pride is tied into the fabric of where we deposit our waste, our filth. We recognize the beauty of the sewer system and we're not ashamed to put our names on it. 

Later, I will read a poem that mentions the librarians and cultural ambassadors and museum directors, those that walk around shaking their high heads and

                                                                                 looking as if they never

                                                       went to the bath

                                                                     room or anything, as if they had a corner on the truth. It should be embarrassing to wear this manhole cover on a t-shirt, but it is not, and anyone who knows where I come from know it is not. 

In this picture I sent you, you see the crimson towers, the long suspension chords, and it's nearly impossible to define how this came to be. Who had this idea, then the skeletal sketches, the engineers, the builders, the financiers, and how such people with such means build things that mean such things to all people. It gets to be just a little bit too much when you sit, on a beach, and think about it. 

In this picture I sent you, I cropped out the nudists. I cropped out the decapitated sea lion, an excited swarm of flies harvesting on the corpse. I cropped out this dead single gull feather protruding from the dead log I am sitting on beneath a cliff. I cropped out the sail boats gliding wistfully along the calm ocean waters. All of these represent freedom: from society, from life, from the self, from land. And here I sit, fully clothed, alive, with all my feathers, on the earth, the edge of our country, the edge of our world. And I have to wonder if I am truly free. 

In this picture I sent you, you can't hear the waves. But they crash, a simple crashing background, forgettable and impossible to ignore. These waves, that will continue to crash, to call the nudists, to kill the sea lions, to bask in the sun, to allure the tourists, will continue to be forgotten and impossible to forget for far longer of a period of time than you or I are capable of knowing. 

When I sit on a beach and think about it, it hits me. “You dolt!” This sand is not typical. It is golden. This is the reason everyone back east flew out west and why eventually those out west will return to the east. Nothing gold can stay they say: and it doesn't. Because this golden constellation dissolves into the ocean, and those dunes dissolve into the beach, and those woods dissolve into the dunes, and the city dissolves into the woods, and we all dissolve in the city. 

Later, at a museum, I will think how contradictory it is to be an atheist in a country founded on such religious principles and morality. Now, it is time for me to climb these stairs, these logs blanketed with sheets of wind-swept sand. I am no longer satisfied with these waves, this beach, this rot, these cocks. It's time to climb these stairs because I need to go higher, to the top, to stand and see the world, to forget it, and be swallowed by it, to be dissolved, from the depths of this ocean, swallowed by the voluptuous plains, of the deserts, of the skyscrapers I know and don't know, to be scraped by the typical sand and to be carved up by these cliffs and suffocated by these dry woods and to never remember and never forget all these details that are and are not happening at the simple click of the camera in my hand.