> some favorite books

'wind-up bird chronicles', h. murakami
'for whom the bell tolls', hemingway
'white noise', d. delillo
'tao te ching', lao tzu
'neuromancer', w. gibson
'the seven mysteries of life,' g. murchie
'no logo,' n. klein
'vegetarian cooking for everyone,' d. madison (do cookbooks count?)

> places

-sitting in an airplane over an ocean.
-the cemetary at koya-san at dusk (a tremendously alive place, considering).
-my parents' old cabin in the wintertime
-the north shore of lake superior in minnesota, anywhere between two
harbors and canada.
-the mountains just north of kyoto. and kyoto, for that matter.
-this secret beach just north of san francisco where kristen took me.
-i realize i have just written "north" three times in the last three sentences.

> streets in NY

-wyeth st. (brooklyn)
-east 7th st.
-avenue b
-crosby st.
-essex st.
-mott st.

> memories from childhood

-walking down to the grocery store w/ my mom to buy the kind of ginger
snaps that came in a brown paper bag.
-waiting for a friend to come over, when fifteen minutes felt like two hours.
-riding my bike all around sand coulee (this five-mile-in-diameter,
bowl-shaped depression that was filled with yep, sand, and a pine tree
forest and hills and a creek. to get to it, you had to ride through
wheat fields, a treebreak that was filled with weird rusting farm
implements, and an ancient cemetary, full of unmarked graves, for a
mental institution.)
-believing my dad when i asked him what those noise-reducing fences
along the side of the highway were built out of. he told me,
mysteriously, "the stuff of the universe." it blew my four-year-old
brain that they could pack stars and planets and comets and quasars in
between those planks of wood.
-snow days.