Autumn and the Order of Seasonal Clarity

Posted on 23November2013 by joeeirwin

berlin

as if all of us are water particles, we find each other when we’re in the same cloud. and for that time we’re in it together. sometimes we fall together and stay water particles together but water particles in a stream, or a lake, or a puddle, or a sea. eventually different paths part us. this doesn’t mean we won’t rise to a same cloud again but it does mean we won’t be in the same place as we are now.

autumn. the electric colors of the season with new found health and a love of life and spirit that hasn’t been felt since childhood. a phoenix rising off the grid from the ashes of a memory. a personal best in excess igniting a fire-lit path to the palace of wisdom and clarity. a milestone on the larger quest to find who-knows-what all the while learning that losing control is a winsome way to retrieve it. autumn.

listening to terry riley’s persian surgery dervishes performance two (1972)

And The Sun Doesn’t Care

Posted on 14September2013 by joeeirwin

spring in berlin’s a joyous time of year. mr blue sky’s in town for the first time since october and everyone starts waking up from their darkness. we all manage to lose track of a lot of time to a lot of fun.

summer is a lot more work. the initial excitement of nice weather sets in and you work to enjoy all the sun you can, while you can. “let’s go outside and enjoy the day!” it’s taxing. staying in working on “art” while the sun bakes your desk through your open window on one of the weeks that it’s actually hot enough to use the term “bakes” or have an open window but you don’t even want to go outside cause the sun rose at 4am and woke you up and it doesn’t care that you went to bed at 1am, or 2am, or 3am, or that you’re just getting home. it’s out and you’re feeling like Day of The Insomnia Zombie in-between sleep and awake but there’s no way out of it because it only lasts a couple of months and you have to enjoy it while you can

and then there’s need for a jacket in early august and it’s like fuck it! i should have done more when it was nice… now the nice is gone. it’s colder now. fuck it. im going to sleep when i want to sleep. im going to wake up when i want to wake up and im going to work on whatever i want to work on, whenever i want to work on it and it doesn’t matter cause it’s grey outside and this is berlin. it’s grimm brothers fairy tale weather. it’s autumn and the turning leaves are the blanket for our after-summer rest.

listening to tales of murder and death’s hallucination of beauty (2012)

Stadtschnellbahn PDA mit Kicks

Posted on 4April2013 by joeeirwin

this couple sat in the unoccupied bench across from me on the s-bahn. she took off his glasses and they start kissing. not passionately, just pecks. loud pecks. loud pecks because she loves him so much. for them, the rest of the world has ceased to exist. with every twist and turn and flip of her hair, her boots kicked my leg because the rest of the world ceases to exist: i am the ceased world. i reach into my bag, pulled out my camera, and start taking photos. i whisper, “ya that’s good. ja”. they asked what im doing, i gave them a closed-tooth smile and take another.

sometimes i hate love so much. today i didn’t want to get kicked by the couple making-out like virgins

Sain’t Louis

Posted on 1March2013 by joeeirwin

st louis. i went home in january. i could wax poetic stl history for days but it still feels like a compromised place. there’s gun toters, there’s abortion clinic bombings, there’s “legitimate rape”, there’s seedy strip clubs, there’s abandoned strip malls, but there’s jesus. in the black neighborhoods where the whites dare not go and want them to stay, there’s a lot of crime but jesus is also there. it’s a melting pot of midwestern simplicity with licks of northern and southern culture. the people and their varying groups, no matter how extreme, are separated by a single colloquialism: ain’t. some use it their Others don’t but they’re all St. Louis.