a non-writer by the bay

He is not sitting on a bus packed across the aisles on his second part of his ride home. It is not another cool evening in San Francisco. He will not eat spaghetti in an hour or so before his small t.v and then call his friends to share anecdotes of their jobs that mean as much as a pair of socks or shoelaces and will see if the bitterness can stay in check when books or writing comes up. There are not a dozen or so notebooks of thwarted ideas for conceptual work, for experimental music and odd hybids that will never be made. The notebooks spill from a non-existent dresser with

a dent on the second drawer found on some illusory unborn corner on a Sunday...all forever to float like astronauts untethered.

He does not hate the noises of the city at night, which are not to him like the chassis of a car with all the pretty glass and upholstery removed, not at all tied to a life he sees as just the dull momentum onward, the little explosions.




photo of the pile of stories written about city transit and downtown mar 07








view out of the bus window toward the stop light as drawn by his friend who also never left

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

autobiography told in what could not be and never came to pass

The boy above does not have blonde hair now. It is not golden as the sun and he is not sitting in a lab studying cloud patterns in 3d models as atom by atom this was cut at the stem.



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There is not a man sitting reflecting on a life of science and wondering about what could have been in something in the arts (he was lost in 1987 in a teenage version of
the boy above in a struggle with math,possible futures and choices..). The man did not publish papers on hypothetical weather event models that are immersive and his phd vanished into vapor somewhere over Oklahoma one day while a boy in California applied for an English degree during a heat wave and a link of dull afternoons.

When the pieces are collected after the crash and pieced together as best as can be in recollection and collection of artifacts in a hangar is it there at all? or is it a constellation of tiny pieces and the concept and notion of what once was that makes it whole?



There is a photo here of several cities and college adventures never born collaged together.






















This is the exact measure of 12 journalistic articles, a 2 year professional bowling career's trophies and prize money on a shelf made of mahogany, the photo albums of archaeological digs as a grad student ....they all float astronautic in unsung molecules.........thwarted detritus...........near satellites clipped from invisible almost rube goldberg contraptions of small incidents, questions and perceptions in time






There is not a sense of measure here. There is not a sense of time and it is graphed above. The trajectory of all the paths unborn that tick of in seconds like clouds of arrows invisible

.......