Jimmy.Brainflush.com

A spotty poster, 5 days hiatus.. and already 5, yes five of you have asked what happened. Rumors ranging from being shot at on 270 in Columbus to running out and joining Greenpeace were in my mailbox. One person, who I would like to thank, thought I went to a boot camp.

None of the above are true. I’ve been busy prepping for the holiday, and observing the North Coast weather patterns. After two people nagged - I mean asked - about the book, I sat down and wrote another 7 pages.

I went to my first Browns game on Monday night and braved the cold and the heartache of another stupid loss.

For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve rejoined the land of vicarious living through sports teams. In this town, it’s an instant depression provider.

I love winter. I have been hanging around people who are having a rough go of it, and to say the least it’s given me a new perspective on holiday and cheer. I haven’t had an unabashedly cheery mood, but I have made deep strides to accomodate the holiday songs into my daily routine. Isn’t it f’d up that most of the great songs were written before 1960? It’s like after 1960 the innocence and suppression of bad things ended and suddenly “dreaming of a white Christmas” became a foolish thing to do, ’silver bells’ acquired too much rust, and the rightness of our nation and her expressive clarity disappeared.

It’s sad, really. We can also make the same distinctions of American Life before 9/11 and after. While the effects have been swallowed into the subtlety of our daily lives, the ringing sound of it still annoyingly persists, like when you have that high-pitched ringing in your ears that envelopes everything and everyone around you.

And on that note, I keep coming back to May of 2002, when I was in New York City, setting up our offices there. It was after 11 o’clock PM. I was alone in the Manhattan office, save for the cleaning folks, pushing out the last 5 desktops in a total rush of a spent second wind when I was given pause by something simple, breathtaking, and solemn.

At one of the secretary’s desks, on her purple/burgundy fabric wall divider, sat a loose Kodachrome picture from I would guess late 80’s early nineties of the midway between the two towers, hanging on a yellow pushpin. The midway was decorated with what I assume to be the same decorations that had been used five years prior - a simple “Merry Christmas” in red lettering around the fountain and Christmas tree.

I imagined the full scene. I could see a fog in the background, and rain pellets frozen in mid-air during the brief frame of this picture. Tough New Yorkers were walking into the wind, bent at a 78 degree angle, head down walking presumably towards the subway, not paying attention to the view.

I felt the frustration of the picture-taker, debating whether waiting in the rain for enough people to clear out of the view, or exposing the camera to the harsh elements on such a cold day would be worth the effort considering they’d probably have the same decorations up next year and in years to follow.

I’ve had dreams that I’ve walked there, and saw the person snapping the photo. Just a simple black silhouette and a flash - the flash always coming when I look in their direction, shocking my eyes and not allowing them to refocus on the individual who took the photo. It started a whole cascade of uneasiness that lead to my purchasing “What We Saw” the CBS report of 9/11, which included the video from that day.

On some kind of sub-conscious level, I thought that if I watched it enough times, the gnawing uneasiness would change to a numbness that I could tolerate and move off from.

I have since found that occupying myself with other things seems to be the best medicine. But back to the desk, in the office, in the quiet of the city night…

.. Dangling from the yellow pushpin, hovering above the photo, in the same exact tint of yellow.. maybe yellow number 5, hung a rubber strap who’s sides fed into a fiber painter’s mask, still improperly thread from what I assume was a hasty application in a moment so unreal that words cannot describe. The criss-cross yellow grabbing stitch of the strap clung awkwardly against the mask with a large gap of excess between the mask and the end of the strap, creating a bow like shape that reminded me of hanging yellow ribbons on our house during the first gulf war.

The mask front had a slightly gray hue of dust, with finer, more boldly defined lines along its sides.

In the darkness, in that moment, I made a memory of a lost time, a jarring reality, and the textile sense of presence that you connect with a few times in life. The moments where the voice in your head that’s always talking gets quiet.

You hear yourself breathing, the lights humming, and off in the distance, over the late night quiet of a Memorial Day holiday patrolled Brooklyn bridge, you hear a taxi’s wheels humming their way across the metallic pattern of ninety degree angles that support life in motion.