The Flatlands

Journal #31
Tuesday, July 3, 2007

11:03—On a Q-Train heading to WSQ—
Have to scrape together the Ditmas rent somehow...
All the brouhaha with the band is meaningless because my hearing is worse than ever—I’m totally toxified* and weakened and my ears are ringing all the time. Impossible! Not an option! Academic! End of problem!

2:09—WSQ—beautiful day in a dream—soon to be nothing but a lost page in a barbaric book.
Lives squandered and turned to paper. I now realize that the toxins have seeped into my dreams and then overflowed onto these ghostly pages...
*Poison-Fueled Literature, Vol. I

Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Fourth of July!
11:42—I quit the environs of Ditmas in a shroud of toxic fumes and walked along a certain version of Ditmas Avenue on the way to the F-Train on MacDonald Avenue.

Ditmas Avenue (between certain streets) possesses a sadness and weariness—I don’t feel that I am fully here—that I pass through (tenuously) a very late and debased version of the avenue—the absurd feeling that my version could never measure up to previous versions—that the heyday of the avenue existed a long time ago—or may never have existed... the streets are fluid and elastic and strewn with psychic debris...
 

MacDonald Avenue Station—
The elevated platform gives a view of a limitless Brooklyn—I lose myself—as the Flatlands of Old Brooklyn stretch off to the industrial horizon in an atomized haze...