the life of a phd and lake effect snow....

The man grown from the boy above is not currently walking a nondescript section of hallway in Rochester, New York passing posters for campus events and frantic last minute calls for room mates. His stomach does not grumble with hunger from forgetting to eat again. There is not a meal of spaghetti waiting to be made in a package of pasta, sauce, some bologna left over from sandwiches and a paper plate to save money.



He is not thinking of snow on a break from researching syntax, punctuation, sentence constructions and the flow and erasures in meteorology while finishing his dissertation after all these years......passing a row of windows while missing a point about collapse in rain storms.....

He has not been there for 8 years now.

A non existent snack of some peanuts from a bag from his backpack is touching some alternate non-formed version of his lips in this unrealized instant,...diverted...unborn by a piece of paper in an envelope in 1998 rejecting him for a PHD at Rochester, in that instant a plane flight decoupling, its trajectory and
flight number unmoored of his single strand, a seat available that hadn't been booked yet, as a room on campus shed its details, colors , smells, the width of its walls and bed of him, of a million filaments to other moments in his then 29 years..





this is a still from a film he never made of lake effect snow clouds to compare to the ballast of years and seeming depth in the vagueness in old words like "sea" "Sky" "Grave"












this is a photo from an album of the outlines in the snow of him and his room mates at Rochester New Years day 2000