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Preface

Ever feel like you've been carrying around a ton of emotions, experiences, ideas, concerns, memes, thought streams, subjects, faces, problems, solutions, rhymes, scenes, colors, cities, dreams and screams? You know, like you're just about due for a giant mind-dump but have been stuck-up, holding it in for the right moment instead as life takes you by the hand to another land, another grand day-bleeding-into-night. And when that right moment comes you find yourself semi-censoring yourself because you want to walk that fine line of decorum/honesty, interest/discretion, human decency and mystique, all-too elusive in a brave new world where over-sharing is the norm and under-thinking its side-kick? Well I'm goin' for the jugular and it might just end up being an E-book. Are those hot right now? Because although I spend a fair amount of time on the inter webs, that browsing is limited to the sphere of a few blogs, Facebook, Instagram and that good ol' Google Reader feed I'm getting ready to say goodbye to. Thank God for Lena Dunham, that episode of 'Girls' which kindly informed me that E-books might actually be "a thing". But that show is semi-fictional so I can't be entirely sure. There's that fine line again.

Yea, well here it is.

Or maybe here it isn't.

Here goes something. Will I press 'Publish?' That's for the end to tell. Today, well today it's Monday, May 13, 2013. 12:12 AM, Hamburg Germany. Will I run down a dream shared by countless and inked by few like Hunter S. Thompson -- that off-the-rails blabber mouth -- or perhaps that Kerouac fellow, too lost and found for our (and by 'our' I mean all aspiring gypsy-writers) own good? Or will my pages be marred by modern ephemera, serving only to betray my timeless messages with artifacts which date me and my wanderings, belie in neon lights the true grit still at the bottom of my suit case? This is where the beloved reader, you, my dear counterpart, come in. I have faith in you, in your poetic heart to take these words and allow them entree in that land which knows not the bounds of judgement and instead hears the meaning behind the mayhem. This is my hand, outstretched in black-and-white words on a page, outstretched in a human effort to connect to that longing laying dormant in everyman's heart, to lay bare my own longing as it took shape in flight, en route to God knows where...

Since 2003

Been on the road since 2003, or so it feels. Ok, not actually that long. But that's when I left home. And wouldn't you know it, that's when the road really starts. Ask any travelin man-boy or rarin' teenage girl ready-for-the-world when things got real and they might just tell ya -- "The day I left home". In some cases, these tumbleweeds may not even have a say in the matter. Home leaves them. Home ain't never held them, for they were born in a world free of warm blankets and careful curfews, watchful eyes and doors and curtains. But there I was, tumbled out of my parent's cozy suburban home on a peaceful tree-lined street which also happened to be named after a tree. Sycamore. Sycamore Ave. Sycamores, as luck would have it, aren't so good at hiding their growth. They're an open-book kinda tree. Which is slightly, sadly, ironic since there's always a chance a beloved tree will one day take shape as a book. But the thing with Sycamores is that they shows scars of brown and grayish bark, scabby and molten from a pushy, stretchy growth more readily than other trees. That's due to their rigid exteriors, forced open by an inside that just can't bear containment.

So there I was, all metaphorically scabby and broken, looking for a new home as I raced my way optimistically and with visions of fashionable soirees into the arms of a city half-way around the world. Seems I'd held this city, that dear and lighted city of Paris, in some part of me as already a local, for when I arrived I immediately made contact with a real, no holds barred Parisian. Yes, ladies and gentleman of the jury, this first encounter of mine was one in which I was brusquely and blurrily molested for the 1.5 seconds it took for me, a native Queens girl, to shout expletives in English at 7am in the 13th arrondissement whilst angrily and, if I shall admit, fearfully, pushing a drunken offender off of me. It didn't help that across the street from the block-style 60's youth residence, the one established "to help build a Europe that would be open to the rest of the world, to combat racism and to foster cultural exchanges among young people around the world" was an asylum for recovering addicts and the mentally unstable. Looking back, I probably had thoughts of psychosis myself as the months wore on in this new city, far, far away from home; broke as I had become under the weight of movable feasts and the lack of funds.

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