Thursday, October 24

Reykjavík → Copenhagen. The airport in Reykjavík feels like a miniature of the shiny parts of Heathrow. Or maybe like Schiphol. You start to wonder if they don’t have a clean-flat-expensive airport assembly line somewhere.

I’m surprised at one point to hear Hungarian. Everything else is pretty much indistinguishable, so far at least.

I’m operating in a near-total vacuum of actual knowledge about any of these cultures. A tourist, in other words, I guess. And who doesn’t hate a tourist?

★

Could eat several small animals. Here’s a lesson: Don’t travel without snacks.

★

Earlier: The not-quite-triangle of the wing. The waning moon and Orion, ahead and to our right. The low flat surface of the clouds.

posted February 3, 2014

p1k3 / 2013 / 10 / 24

Wednesday, October 16

Outside the trailer - the waxing moon. Everything still and bright and cold. Distant noises, distinct ones. The subtle ways you know the difference between village and suburb. I try to smoke a cigarette, for some reason. I suppose I’m just playing a part here.

Inside I’ve made things comfortable. Drinking water, a space heater running almost constantly. Sleeping bags on the couch. A few candles, a couple of books, all my traveling stuff. My typewriter is on the table. I almost totally fail to use it, as much as I like the idea. Writing has almost died for me. It’s like a sexless marriage.

posted February 3, 2014

p1k3 / 2013 / 10 / 16

october 14

it's a hard thing
to be no kind of apologist
to carry no water
to sell no goods,
broker no deals
compromise nothing

the world makes
borrowers and thieves
of us, the multitude
lenders
and claimers of need
mendicant scribes,
prostitute lovers

but lovers all
the same, most
of us

sincerity is
written in our
bones

and often stays
legible
no matter to
whom we have
sold the goods.

posted February 3, 2014

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2013 / 10 / 14

october 6

i guess it still colors the air around me
but it's like the light from some object
in the sky; some nebula or star
it's been old news
longer than i've been alive

when you're young you long for it
(as even then you know the lights in the sky
are impossibly distant)
with a longing bigger than the absence of god

in later days you long
for the longing you felt when you were young

posted February 3, 2014

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2013 / 10 / 6

October 5, 2013. Hygiene, CO

I’m writing this, imprecisely, on a typewriter I only half remember how to use. It’s not exactly a romantic typewriter. It’s a product of the death throes of an entire category of consumer utility item. An entire technological mode, really. It must have been sold some time in the 1990s, after the obvious total superiority of computer word processing had emerged.

“Word processing.” There’s a bit of dead marketspeak / jargon I never would have thought I’d have any lingering affection for.

*

The last thing I wrote in my journal was about how my experience of coming to Colorado was outlined in rainstorms. How, in my imagination, rain is bound up with change.

The flood started a day or two later.

posted February 3, 2014

tags: colorado

p1k3 / 2013 / 10 / 5