Where coyotes don't pay taxes

I went on my first real vacation this past weekend to celebrate my soul sista Nida's birthday. I went there expecting to fall head over heals in love, and I didn't fall head over heals in love but I did fall in love. Now I understand those stupid t-shirts that say I<3NY. It is a city that doesn't end or stop. It is bursting at the seams with human life. From the musicians in the subway and on the streets to the theaters to the dance clubs to the museums to the maniac and brilliant taxi cab drivers to the food on the street corners to the infinite variety of people, it seems to have a little bit of everything.

Alex showed me a cool thing called pandora where you get to make your own radio station. I'm listening to Samiaradio right now. It is an awesome radio station!

I'll sing about an emptiness the East has never known
Where the coyotes don't pay taxes and a man can be alone
And you'd have to walk forever to find a telephone
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

Hoffman showed me a thing called postsecret where people send in postcards with their secrets on them. It is interesting, sad, and funny.

Ayayayayayayayaaaa. I think that one way to make NYC cooler is if it was located in Texas and there were horses walking around and bull-runs at high noon and coyotes paid no taxes.

Here are pictures taken from the Empire State building. It cost 16 dollars to ride the elevator to the top.

Being But Men

I like this poem.

Being But Men
by Dylan Thomas


Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, afert the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

Howl

I just found out about beat poetry and the beat movement by listening to Doug Schulkinds radio show. He played a musical rendition of Allen Ginsberg's the Howl and so I looked up Allen Ginsberg and then I found out that people like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and even Bob Dylan and Hunter S. Thomspson were associated with the beat movement too. It is interesting and I want to find more... it reminds me of Catholics speaking in tongues, except it makes more sense. Here is the end of Howl:

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time-- and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Ecology of Commerce

I'm reading this book called the Ecology of Commerce, and it is interesting. Some parts are depressing other parts are hopeful. Here are some depressing parts.

p. 3

A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent that we understand the relationship between business and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on the verge of a new millennium we know that we have decimated nintey-seven percent of the ancient forests in North America; every day our farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala Aquifer, an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body of fresh water on earth, will dry up within thirty to forty years at present rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheatfields in Australia. These critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that ever natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air, and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

p. 4

I came to understand well the despair of one epidemiologist who, after reviewing the work in her field and convening a conference to examine the effects of chlorinated compounds on embryonic development, went into a clinical depression for six months. The revelations of that conference were worse than any single participant could have anticipated: The immune system of every unborn child in the world will soon be adversely and irrevocably affected by the persistent toxins in our food, air and water.