maybe this image, maybe this image of a window up high oblong and someone working late into the night, hazy sky, some music in the background, things about to get ready to end, doors closing and shutting. maybe. that cliched cross-section of a city with windows lit, lit up with the color of incandescent-yellow, that's it.

what's the coincidence? nearly two years ago I wrote:

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tonight is probably deep and lengthly and stretches far lengthwise depthwise, a giant sheet hanging in the air extending further. In any loft or one-bedroom apartment could be the makings of a novel.

43 years ago aram saroyan types a word, not even paratactic, just before leaving his hollow obelisk to slip through tunnels beneath the surface. what? 24 years ago hakim bey sits in an apartment somewhere in new york, writing. 20 years later some kid picks it up, knows nothing but the sweet sound of words rippling off his tongue. now I look back in retrospect and understand it within a background of cheesy americana 90s 00s pay-it-forward tantra-and-mysticism mentality, but it still works for me, still toggles the right organ stops, the roof opens up, I see the side of a brick building sloping down and sideways trapezoidal perspectival, etc. etc.

clearly obvious but operating nonetheless.

from the top of roofs the sky is always lower, denser, weightier, about to come crashing down. from the top of roofs distances always change, zoom in and out, the precarious knowledge of a self against a sky above a structure, monolithic presence slumbering underneath here this place here at midnight, 1am, 2am.

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immediate experience. saturday I may go to a party. sunday I will bike forty two miles on car-free streets, and then go to a party with friends where I will lie on the ground and cut up a christie's catalog, put jasper johns on rauschenberg, lewitt on construction paper. we'll have fun. some beers later most of us will stumble out of the apartment all heady and lightheaded, and in the sparkling grid of the ues will try to form constellations out of windows the same way that subway journeys spell out words. the upper east side will be empty in that characteristic way it always is, like the upper west side, like the smell of the parents having gone to bed while the kids are in bed reading, some analogy so direct it ought not to make sense but still does evoke a lot for me. but right now in brooklyn the cat goes mrkgnao, there's nine people sleeping here, it's home. and still I will lie awake in bed and think about things to think about.