escribblings

Nov 11 is an important day for me. 11/11/11 was the day when we officially launched the Teespring company. 

I see those 6 ones as two pairs of 3. Each three is split into three ones. 

Numerology, I know, but stay with me. The smoke stacks of the Point St. power plant reflect into the chilly waters of the Providence river by its mouth at Fox Point. 

What I love about maps is that if you zoom out far enough you can zoom back in anywhere.

Sitting on the 72nd st. entrance to Central Park watching the pedicab drivers pick targets for their peddling. Groups of two or more including at least one woman are prime. Extra attention given if the women are older, or larger, or if there’s a kid. It’s $4.99 per minute to ride around the park. A tri-generational squad of Argentinian women acquiesce after some cross-linguistic squabbling.

When we launched the company on 11/11/11 we didn’t know how big things were going to get, or how messy or how sometimes bad. In fact that was before I had even met L yet.

Ok, that’s a lie, I had met L, sold her an eighth and rolled on the grass in her laughter yoga class before either of us graduated. And I had met her too. 

11/11/11 was after a summer when I had been working myself into a sad desperate Providence fall - the first I’d had out of love in some time. Kind of like me now, single in autumn for the first time in a long time. 

I was coming off a bender that involved late nights coding, getting high in a house with 5 other guys, methylone salt baths. 

Erin says I need to read poetry to be a good poet. Sigh. I never read enough. I do love reading - absorbing an author’s style and substance to gluttony to vomit out my own glewpy essential take. But I just don't do it very much.

I watched a play last night about Walt Whitman. My father loves Walt Whitman. He gave me a copy of Leaves of Grass. The play shows you how Song of Myself has a lot of moving parts. Under your boot soles. Trippers and askers surround me. As good belongs to you. 

Sticking with me? 

The company I launched on 11/11/11 would go on to achieve a valuation of close to one billion dollars. We would have 500 employees, raise and spend tens of millions. 

Capitalismy lust. I wanted become someone worth loving and someone interesting. Money was a path to that.

I’m no longer among the most successful people I know. There was a moment though. There was a moment when I thought I would near own the world.

I spent this last week holed up with a boy-haired mistress: lip trembling between her sex teeth, fastened to the crystal vortex of narrow Ukrainian eyes in shades of blue grey green. 

I’m trying to do something intentionally kind every day. Because a woman who handed me a pair of handcrafted pipe cleaner bunny ears in Hell’s Kitchen told me that was what she expected in return for the adornment. One act of intentional kindness, every day, for a year. I believe that was on October 9th. 

I breathed a sigh of relief when she said it could be to myself, that it could be as simple as a smile, that it could be being easy on myself for forgetting to do a kind thing some days. 

Still I worried. Thinking about anything every day for a year. Is that a lot? How many thoughts in a day? How many days in a life? It's actually stressing me out right now. 

Shoes walk past me on the chilly entrance to Strawberry Fields and someone says, “he was shot outside of that building” pointing to the Dakota.

Last night my heart thumped as my phone rang over and over and over again at 5:25am. “No Caller ID”. Finally I nervously accepted the call. A voice on the other end said “I’m looking for five six zero seven nine two imma kill you you b**** ass n***** six zero eight.”