Living With Boxes (Three Metaphors)

I. (It's Not The) End of the World

[Invitation for a party that never happened]

"A long time ago, when we were young and naive and the winking lights of Bushwick Avenue filled our sight long after the bodegas were closed, this is how we viewed our (then-new) neighborhood. The walls of our building were unfinished and the nearest movie store didn't even carry Herzog's Nosferatu. Looking back, I wonder at how we survived those first harrowing weeks. But survive we did. One could even say (thought the evidence is dubious) that, for a time, we thrived. Alas, we thrive no longer. So we move on, inevitably dispersing the empire eastward. And in our process of ceasing to thrive we learned that, in fact, this not The End of the World."

II. Packing

I found a place a few stops further on the subway, on the border between Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and Ridgewood, in Queens. I packed my books in liquor boxes. That looks like a very sharp metaphor, so I will leave it alone for the moment, to avoid injuring myself.
During a recent trip out of town I met a dog with the singular name of Arrow. Her singularity increased in my view when I found she was named after the dog Arrow in the movie The Point. The movie tells a bedtime story about a town where everyone is born with a point--literally--on their head. When a boy without a point is born in the town, he is banished (along with the faithful Arrow) to the wastes of the Pointless Forest, and told not to return until he has one.

Anyone who has seen The Point knows its story balances on the idea that one man's Pointless Forest is another man's Ridgewood, Queens. I thought about that, and packed my books into liquor boxes.

III. Arrival

For the past year, a page ripped from a German magazine hung above my desk. It says "Andreus Leikaufs Bilder handeln nich vom Boxen und vom Jazz auch nicht." I don't know what this means. Above the text is an image of a green and black painting of a desk. Inscribed in the middle of the desk are the words "NOW WORK!" When I took the page down from the wall I found a cockroach had made its home on the wall behind it.