here it is, a birthday.

tonight I did laundry for the first time in a month, I think, much needed rejuvenation. poured blue goo down a spout and watched industrial-strength centrifuges stir clothes into a frenzy, generate foam, agitate and reverse direction in such a pattern as to induce fabric to rub against fabric. little molecules of grease detaching away. the incessant whiteness of the foam. there's the television turned to the disney channel. the streets are still wet. a few people pass here and there, the guy with a beater and a celtics tattoo is cleaning the machines. it's absent, and it's quiet, and right now brooklyn feels like it's vacillating between home and something else. this guy is in the corner talking to his girlfriend, strangely half-hushed. crown heights isn't the crown heights of the 90s anymore, he says. you know up from eastern parkway to st marks, you know gaza, like in the middle east, gaza strip, they used to call it gaza strip. crown heights isn't the crown heights of the 90s anymore, he says, and I suddenly feel like I'm home.

I've been saying this often, this phrase, "I will always be busy", and I say it because it's true, but biking back home just a second ago I decided that the reason that I like the ring of it is because it's really optimistic. the busy isn't a busy of a haggard tiredness, or a ragged-down ness, but that I'll always be busy, I'll always be doing things. the idea being that: if I don't let life in, then time will pass me by, and I'll look back and I'll just do whatever I wanted to do. It's not about having the time to do 'what I want', it's about having the time to do 'side' projects; that is to say if you visualized paths of movement and activity as a single thick line, that it's better to really have a panoply of interweaving, complex web of interconnected branches. the morphology of one's logic of work takes the form of a branching rhizomatic interconnectedness rather than a single guided path, et cetera.

and that maybe movement itself is the busy-ness; you don't grab a point in the distance and march forward towards it with a stiff upper lip only, but that you bushwhack and traipse through brambles, forests, swamps, generating paths, creating movement. this sort of work, I mean, which is like saying: I will always be walking, hiking, biking, skating, riding, jumping, moving. limbs firing, fingers going. working, thinking. and I can see that, that it will always be so.

and, and, and: I have wonderful wonderful friends around me, and for that I am grateful, and blessed, and blessed.