This was 15 years, 2 months, 22 days ago

I missed my flight.

One thing that strikes me, taking trains out in Queens so far out on the edge of this borough that it borders suburbia, is the amount of space here. Without any buildings to block my perspective from close up I see the horizon with sheer scale. I am struck by how large those manhattan buildings are, the verticality and closeness making the sky into a vertical negative of the skyline, rather than the gently punctuated expanse that i see here now. Negatively defined, the sky gets squeezed in whenever it can in the city, becomes molded, shaped, formed, malleable according to the whims of itself visually wealthy, graphically rich, optically abundant residents. The sky fills the apartment shaft, surrounding the contour outside a capital H. Phenomenological power is lost, given to the creators of buildings, the activators of light-switches.

In the country and the suburbs the sky is wider, flatter, larger, domineering. Scale provides this. The slope of a straight line from a point on the ground to the top of the empire state building drops exponentially as the y-intercept moves away from the origin (Macy's at midnight) towards infinity (jamaica, queens; lax; icn)...

What am I saying? The iphone keyboard is tedious to type with. Bottleneck squeezes things into indigestible chunks. Constipation pontification.