Whirlwind

“Oh shit, my coffee!” Followed a second later by a thump as the paper cup of Dunkin Donuts java, balanced and then forgotten on the BMW’s roof, toppled over in the slipstream and sent a brown cascade down the rear window. G. hit the brakes, and centrifugal force sent a wave of steaming coffee forward and through the open sunroof to rain down on yours truly. Laughing my head off. Nine on a cloudy morning, somewhere in Maryland, eighteen hours or so until Ben’s wedding – an event that ended up going off without a hitch, on a sun-dappled bluff on the Maryland shore. Everybody shrugged into tuxes, looking ready for a James Bond audition.

At a meditation party on the Upper West Side – a large ground-story room, white, bright with candles – the only sound coming from the garden on the other side of the open French doors, rain dripping from the trees – until the sound of humming starts up, twenty people in the lotus position trying to reach the frequency of the universe.

A. and I dancing across the red-girder tangle of the bridge at midnight, oil tankers slipping beneath in the dark, the J train rumbling by in a hurricane roar of light.

This is your life, and it’s ending one moment at a time.

Why I'd Work Well In A Carnival

By nine in the morning we had become a full-on traveling road-show: me, the photographer, the photographer’s assistant, the editorial assistant, our fashion director, the makeup artist, and two models all muscling a circus of wheeled trunks, dollies loaded with camera bags, equipment sacks, and notebooks from tailor to tailor. Speeding in cabs from the Upper East Side to Midtown and down, stopping for a cramped lunch at a greasy-spoon diner. Sweaty, aching, the chaos around the calm eye of whatever tailor posing for posterity with tape measure draped around his neck and a wristband loaded with pins around his right arm. Yeah, fashion spreads; no wonder everyone in that industry snorts nose-candy like no tomorrow – you need constant energy, or you feel like you’ll shrivel and die.

Four in the afternoon finds the Traveling Road-Show and its Equipment collectively sprawled on leather couches in an upscale lobby of a Chelsea apartment building, snapping gum and typing text messages and ogling passing super-models and generally being a larger-by-the-second irritant to the man behind the desk, until our next appointment called down to let us up into his apartment-backslash-workspace.

Going to Florence in a few weeks, for work. Returning to Florence, rather. Only with a shaved head and gainfully employed and a new tendency to spontaneously burst into dance whenever I hear The Arcade Fire’s ‘Black Mirror.’