Leaving the big apple

New York City, NY, USA

I embarked on this trip with my closest co-conspirator in crime, the one who sees me from the other side of the mirror, mon amoreux: Virgile, a voyager, a didgeridoo player, a truly daring creative spirit close to my heart, and everything else beautiful that escapes the imprisonment of a lover's words. Together, Virgile and I completed other voyages in the past, and at that point in time, we were ready to start a new one.

However, at that precise juncture, our relationship could be characterized by reciprocal though sometimes cataclysmic attempts to communicate. Between having natural traits and flaws, exercising natural talents and curses, organically living out the two extremes, and being in love, the latter state of affairs refracts the self's double-edged mirror image: love gives birth to a living creature beyond our limited imaginations. To navigate the world in love possesses the dual potential for self-disorientation or transcendent self-understanding.

[[[[               All of our misunderstandings determining 

a spinning wheel of self-skeptical questions: 

C'est à           moi               qu'tu parles? 

    Are you talking about              me?                                        

C'est à                          moi                  qu'tu parles?          

ARE YOU TALKIN' TO                  ME      ?              ]]]]  

Before we left on our third voyage together, we unknowingly dived into some mini-adventures.

We entered the Freedom Tunnel under Riverside Park, next to the Hudson River.

Intermittently abandoned or occupied during the portal's existence, this once heroin shantytown and homeless underground during the 1990's (featured in documentary Dark Days) is now effectively a guarded private property of Amtrak Railroad and, in the same passage, a concrete cavehole of graffiti wall art running more than 30 blocks long.

 It is not legal to enter. You should not go. You will enter a forbidden dreamscape inaccessible to the world, where if your presence were ever discovered, you will have loss the virtual game. I did not win this round of hide and seek.

[Here, standing, reading The Mind in the Cave: 

Consciousness and the Origins of Art 

why did our earlier human ancestors stand and stay in the cave to make art?

an anatomical body. in the dark. biopsychochemineuro senses hallucinate. 

ancients hallucinate, bodies, biology, being transcended in . I 

ART   POWER  AM HALLUCINATING          spiritual realm accessed in the mind

made are the art the         silhouette clouds of gods, goddesses, horses, and bulls

this is a tunnel, this is a cave, this is a hole, this is a portal, this is 

[YOU ARE NOT FREE. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. HE IS PISTELOADED, YOU?]

where I was when

I entered [METAPHOR SPEAKING] what would be a long dark channel and chapter of this travel] 

After that episode, we devoted more time to the remedy of relaxation in a city of constant vertical shifting and horizontal shuffling. Dizzying at worst and gut-kicking nauseous at best, our days vomited spirals of accumulated agitation and its antidote in the antipodes of love and urban parks. 

From: Marcus Garvey Park, Prospect Park, Morningside Park, Central Park. 

Lounging on rocks. Climbing up hills. Watching turtles tan under sun. 50 blocks run. Memorial Day picnics. Drum circles. Breathing class on the Meadow. Around us everything is alive. 

This is part of the illusion, bite into the Big Apple. 

Thus, after finishing four years of college in Uptown New York City, we departed together to Stockholm, Sweden on airplane tickets bought 6 months in advance costing 200 euros each. As one driver once said, "Moi,  je voyage pour le  prix. [Me, I travel for the price.]" But at what costs? At what costs will you invest in the risks? says the devil of capitalism on your shoulder.