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essays | places


Poland

from the east to the west

 

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   time in motion

  

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   It was a virgin year. January 1st, again. Calendar reset. Day one, but we should call it day zero and just count 364 days from there. Day zero is an absolute, lovely, fully unknown and fully evolved chaos that can only devolve and dissolve from there. We best make it our circus before it gets away from us! Day zero is the early pureness before we shame another year with our cardinal sin: D-I-R-E-C-T-I-O-N>. They all raved about the date and threw their arms around it giggling, but only I knew the day. Zero. Hard zero. And while they were awfully certain about when and where and why and what they were, they knew exactly as little as I did, or the trees, or the stone. The day knew some things because it was made of time and time has been all over space.

 

I had crossed into day zero in Amsterdam before crawling into an airworthy metal cylinder that carried me to Warsaw by virtue of intelligent magic. There, the spirit of Christmas was still very much alive – seven days and two thousand years after the lie, or after the baby messiah was born to a very surprised virgin – until further notice. Fairies everywhere. Warm windows, sleepy cobblestone, sugar. It was all just one long layover, like a dream between dreams. And whooooshhh I was in Kazakhstan.

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a glimpse

People watching street musicians in Warsaw, Poland

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   the circus is us

The year's first dinner, at last.

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Warsaw / Poland · 2018   dine fine

 

 

 

 

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places / stories

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Warsaw / War Saw

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Warsaw / Poland · 2018   square scales

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   glass shell

Hardrock Cafe Warsaw, Poland

You could tell by Warsaw’s architecture that the country had been married to the East for some time before remarrying the West. The wrinkled eastern first had surrendered its chokehold, emasculated by too much masculinity and softened by western creams and lotions. And not given completely to any one doctrine or ideal, the city’s collective Weltschmerz seemed mild.

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   East & West

Pedestrian zone in Warsaw, Poland

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   wrapped in black

 

 

 

 

Measured accurately from the top of the bell tower, everybody was the exact size of ants (can’t make that up) and behaved much in the same way, all falling into their directives gladly and with a fever. My camera, yawning with the aperture wide open, registered the moving dots as fine lines and curves – graphs of functions that depicted the vigor of life’s vagabonding. I ordered Borscht from the far-left bar stool of a restaurant that was packed front to back, in the grasping hope of eating a memory. But it was watery and not as full-bodied as the first time.

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Warsaw / Poland · 2018   antsy

 

Warsaw / Poland · 2018   gold bars

 

 

 

 

I left to come back.




 

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elsewhere

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