I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half/ people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand
Hanging around in Albany, New York, the typical and now oddly banal stretch of Madison and Lark, cars lazily cruising by, with both somewhere and nowhere to go. There are only a few venues of entertainment that I will go into. More close minded, now. My current criteria for going somewhere, sadly, pretty much broils down to the fact that it must contain a Mrs. Pac-Man machine, which strangely, many places do. I will stay at that same machine all night, challenging passers-by to competitions, eliciting both strange looks and antagonism. Quarters lined up on the machine, jamming on the dial, right/ left, up/ down. The main secret, I think, is that you should never go for the fruit, which is something you learn early on. This is one of the things they teach you in religion class, and now I see this same virtue manifested in video games, making you think twice.

Out of the bar and into the night, taking cold air into my lungs and blowing it back out again, like a cigarette smoker. Down Madison, the architecture looming large in the night. Walking around the empty plaza in a suspended state, cars whizzing by and yelling things at me. You just cannot be in the presence of this kind of architecture and not be freaked out by it. Coming home from a road trip and up the interstate, it appears in the distance that some alien craft has landed and some War of the Worlds-type fantasy is taking place. And then you get closer and realize it’s just some weird egg. I remember my parents taking me here for fireworks as a child, and the awe that it inspired then, grandiose explosions taking place overhead. And now I just come to see it symbolically, with more or less explosiveness and awe.