Sunday Morning

There are dark mornings to be had in life. At times you wake up with a sense of bereftness that you can't quite explain. Why is it that one night you can go to sleep feeling pretty good and the next day wake up with a weight on your mind or a sense of lack or just a feeling of meaninglessness? Can it be as simple as a change in the weather? Or is it something more, like a subconcious realization achieved during sleep that is still wending its way to the surface? Does a change need to be made? If so, do you even have any idea what it may be?

This is one of those mornings in my life that so often used to come accompanied by rain on a Sunday morning in my childhood, when I would wake up in the home of a friend or cousin with whom I'd stayed the night and look out the window to see the gray skies and damp grass blown by a breeze that carried a sense of the depths of the forests that have been forsaken in modern times. On mornings like this there is a need for something unidentifiable, which leaves you searching in vain for answers, without even knowing if there are really questions or if the whole thing is just a temporary imbalance related to a lack of sleep or a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips way too late at night.

How much of a role does the physical play in moods and emotions? Clearly, quite a bit, but can this begin to compete with the power of the mind's unfulfilled desires and memories of better things that have long since passed? What does the human brain crave, or at least, what is being sought by that unique part of my own brain that is different from those of the rest of humanity, the part of the brain made of my own experiences and learning, the part that knows what is best for it but can't seem to communicate this information to the mind at large?

Perhaps as the day passes some piece of hidden knowledge will come to me and make more sense of the whole thing. More likely, I will go out and find some activity and the thought will slowly fade away as it is overtaken by the mental processes required for moving from point A to point B. Undoubtedly, when I go to sleep again tonight, it will be with a much more serene, postive and hopeful state of mind than that with which I awoke but...the questions will still be there, hunkered down, waiting for the low tide of Sunday morning to arrive so that they can once again swim to the surface and cast shadows of doubt upon the still waters of wakening thought.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of the best holidays of the year because during thanksgiving the only real responsibilities you have are to eat and drink as much food as humanly possible. After that you watch some football and then you eat a snack and just hang out. It is somewhat ironic that, on a day that was allegedly first celebrated by the Puritans, gorging and extended periods of sloth are the order of the day.

I used to have Thanksgiving with my family. It was a traditional extended family dinner not unlike the Norman Rockwell painting but in recent years my dinners have taken some serious downswings from time to time. The all time low that I can recall was spending the holiday alone in my hell-hole of an apartment in Brooklyn. The room itself was enough to bum anyone out. Picture a single exposed lightbulb, prison style, ugly brown painted wood floors and the usual metal cabinets that won't really close right. Anyway, I cooked an entire thanksgiving meal by myself and for myself, which consisted of the usual things but all cooked in the most appalling poverty method. I put so much effort into cooking my food that when I saw how it turned out I was kind of stunned. I bought some turkey breasts and cooked them in a toaster oven, which made them so unappealing that I couldn't really finish. The rest of the food was more or less the same. The meal was truly a mockery of what the feast was supposed to be. I ate the meal sitting on the corner of my bed watching TV. I felt heartsick and a little sick to my stomach.

In later years, I had a little better luck, though the theme of eating alone was a recurring one. Perhaps the best of these solitary thanksgivings was the one in which I decided to go out of the house to hunt down a good Thanksgiving meal. Finding little, I finally saw a poster in the window of a Thai restaurant for a Thai style thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, my only company was the guy at the next table, who spent the whole meal talking loudly into his cell phone, but on the positive side the meal cemented a long lasting love of Thai food, which has now become my favorite. So, I guess the key is that regardless of how fucked up your holidays are, you have to try to make something out of them and hope you get lucky.

Dominican Girl

Black wisps and tendrils
glisten with light summer sweat (sudor),
accenting the tight brown skin of her stomach
just above the low rise of denim.

The Free Market!

Watched the Republican Debate this evening. We were gonna try to write something clever about Republicans and their bankrupt ideology but couldn't come up with a better way to put the following on the internets: They don't know what the fuck a free market is - or if they do, they refuse to acknowledge the aspect of choice. Obviously, this Republican party (including Ron Paul) refuses to accept the idea that PEOPLE should be allowed to make their own decisions. Sexual orientation isn't an attitude and the length of a fence isn't a manifestation of a market decision. They refuse to lead. Will someone else?

The View From Your Law Firm: Quarantine Friday

(Left: The Ghost of Richard Nixon taunts the guys at Speaker Law, LLP)