Everyone just went about their business and the man continued to read his flaming paper, though by now it was just a mass of smoldering black embers burning in his hands. I couldn’t understand… I looked out the window then back to the man in front of me. The newspaper was nothing but grey ashes […]
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“It’s raining again today,” someone said. Raining, I thought. Yeh. Raining. Right. Raining P’s a Q’s all over the world. Cats & Dogs. Cadillacs and Spaghetti Westerns. Whatever… Actually, it wasn’t at all the kind of day you’d expect any talk of rain… It must’ve been over a hundred degrees in Downtown Los Angeles, and if it […]
read moreby Jonathan Shaw One day he decided that the room was too much for him to take anymore. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on his part; he just woke up that morning (afternoon really) and scanned the bile-colored peeling green walls and something quite apart from his rational mind said “Enough.” A half an […]
read moreRio De Janeiro, 1973 As if on cue, a loud discussion broke out among the guys playing cards at the table off to the back as one guy with an enormous gut protruding from a frayed open shirt produced an enormous butcher knife and began waving it around drunkenly. The two armed guys who’d been […]
read moreRio De Janeiro, 1973. I suddenly felt myself becoming perceptive to the unseen wave lengths around me, like a baby cockroach testing its antenna. It wasn’t a sense of immediate danger or even subtle menace that struck me, so much as a sense of a new kind of awareness that had suddenly sprung up inside […]
read moreRio De Janeiro, 1973. I stood watching it cross the straight little bridge high up in the air and clatter off rhythmically around a corner up a windy street into the hills and on the other side, disappearing behind an ancient faded yellow building that emerged through a jungle of banana trees and billowing clotheslines. […]
read moreRio De Janeiro, 1973. Losing all track of time in my aimless wandering, I soon found myself on a series of winding labyrinthine narrow streets in picturesque Bohemian-looking quarter, bordered on one side by the looming shadows of imposing 1930’s style office buildings. A real old-time flavor… businesslike efficient shoeshine stands, snack bars with a […]
read moreRio De janeiro, 1973. At once I was at home here, somehow and without knowing why or even wanting to stop and contemplate the strange feeling I just knew that there was an inner sense of peace and belonging in my step that strange, quasi-mystical culture shock that I’d felt before, first stepping on that […]
read moreRio De Janeiro, 1973 Not knowing or really caring where I was, or having the slightest idea where to go, I simply chose a direction and started walking, instinctively choosing the shady side of the street, slowing down briefly here and there to glance in a shop window. One place in particular that caught my […]
read moreVeracruz, Mexico. 1974. Her mom had basically told her to bring home the bacon or not come home at all. And for a while she didn’t. She ran the streets and did what she wanted in a spell of adolescent rebellion, turning tricks for food and shelter and spending the rest on drugs, mostly pot […]
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