Knotty pasta and imaginary movies.

The other day before work, I was walking to the Starbucks around the corner and listening to something on my iPod. I wasn't really listening though. Sometimes I just like to have earbuds in so I don't feel obligated to acknowledge anyone and let low music dull the sounds of the city. This day I was particularly distracted by everything around me.

In general, I have a slight obsession with shapes and the way they look, how they interact with other shapes and the spaces that are created between them. As I type this I realize that I'm at a round table, with my rectangular-ish laptop in the center, my cell phone carefully placed to the left and my coffee to the right, both spaced perfectly between the side of my computer and the edge of the table. Equilaterality is key. Anyway, this is one my my many neuroses, but sometimes it is a fun one.

This day, the sky was a brilliant blue and there were plenty of fluffy white clouds cruising across the sky. Quite fast actually, which is why they caught my eye. What really struck me was the way all of this combined with the appearance of the buildings on New Montgomery St in San Francisco. It is a one way street and you are surrounded on three sides by buildings. Everything was so picturesque, I wondered what it would be like if my eyes were movie cameras; each blink a carefully placed cut, changing my focus between this or that like the careful artistry of a good director. Then I think about what it would be like to make movies, or rather, to be successful at making one box office smash after another, and it all goes downhill from there.  When I finally come back from my fantasies, I let my brief thoughts be what they were; a fun little moment that was exclusively mine. The camera panned up the side of an older building as clouds shot over the roof and across the street.

Sometimes, it's little moments that nobody else can possibly understand that make life so exciting. No amount of explaining can do it justice.  I felt like I was 9 years old at Disneyland and they had created a ride where you're inside a dream like in Inception and the laws of physics were obliterated as the ground before you bent up toward the sky like a dandelion on time-lapse.

Rereading that, it either sounds like I'm crazy or trying too hard to talk about a brief moment that nobody else could ever really understand. Maybe this moment only existed for me because the tangled spaghetti of neurons in my brain were overstimulated because I finally gave them a chance to do as they willed.  The following poem is not very related except it's about a moment that nobody else can understand, and it's stated in a much more elegant and concise way than my knotty pasta is capable of.

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey 
by Hayden Carruth
 
Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
weren't we fine tonight?
When Hank set up that limping
treble roll behind me
my horn just growled and I
thought my heart would burst.
And Brad M. pressing with the
soft stick, and Joe-Anne
singing low. Here we are now
in the White Tower, leaning
on one another, too tired
to go home. But don't say a word,
don't tell a soul, they wouldn't
understand, they couldn't, neverin a million years, how fine,
how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.
Go outside and don't forget to look up. You just might end up in a movie.

---
Starbucks Coffee
74 New Montgomery St Ste 100
San Francisco, CA 94105