morning musings

i find myself anticipating the alarm, waking minutes before it begins to ring, but only minutes. i really enjoy waking up in my studio room, perhaps because of the quality of its light before 8am and the simplicity of its clean white walls and soft/hard blue/gray linoleum floor and the promise of walking across that great expanse of harder, colder floor- with its bizarre screens and sculpted heads and empty frames (and filled) and tables filled with tools and the great high and beamy barn roof with light pouring in- to the kitchen for some instant coffee and a few minutes, before the rest of the barn begins to stir, on the computer with its big old clickclackety keyboard, obnoxiously backlit by a window into the trees. that is where i find myself now.
i had no dreams last night that i can recall, but i woke up looking at melissa and thought i should a word or twenty about her for those of you who don't know. melissa and i met the summer of 2005 in good old praha, we were suitemates, both photographers, and shared a class with annette fournet. we have done and seen many things together, melissa and i. we have walked singing at dawn down the danube, and stayed out all night at on the suburban hills of prague, finding at first light a hedgehog-a symbol of good luck in czech republic- and falling asleep next to him on a traffic island to wake up without him, covered in dew. we have lived on bread and nutella and becherovka and kinder eggs and dirtied our chucks at a queers concert and lost friends in the middle of the night on a train through slovakia and visited the ateliers of countless phenomenal czech artistes and acted the part of bohemians in bohemia and kicked up the cobblestones together. all this some years ago. i once washed my hair with her special redhead shampoo and that is when i first got the idea to become one myself. there is music and art that to me means only melissa, because she introduced me to it or we saw it together for the first time. now, we find ourselves some years older and both living in new york, but i can very vividly remember when in the summer of 2006 i came home from my second summer in prague she and i and jeff and sean had a little reunion in new york and i brought back this crazy dream of a workshop in finland. it was late and we were staying in astoria and walking along the streets of williamsburg (before she knew she would live in astoria or i knew i would live in williamsburg) when we excitedly hatched the plan that yes indeed, we would go to finland! and while it didn't happen the following summer...look where we are now. hold fast to dreams, for they will come true if you want them badly enough.