LITERACY.

(click to enlarge)

The Bell Jar was one of those books you should have read in high school, but didn’t. I sure didn’t. It was only last summer that I bought a dog-eared copy in northern Ontario, and completed it in two days; shifting between my sun bleached dock and uneven decking.

That august, my favourite passage of hers, was this -

- Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

She decribes the city, the same way I would describe the Rockies at night, as having - doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.

Two summers ago, I drove across the country in that cracked-windshield-no-brake-pads-beast featured on his forearm. The first night was spent sandwiched between sleeping transport trucks on the side of the winding highway, somewhere between Sicamous and Golden, British Columbia. We drank wine out of water bottles. Ate nachos & salsa in a cooking pot. Wrapped in sleeping bags on the hood of the car. Dwarfed by silhouetted mountains.

That night, my favourite observation of his, was this -

- The sky looks like an old t-shirt under a black light.

(Thanks to the ever-talented Liz at Passage Tattoos, co-designer & executer, as well as my buddy Tristan for letting me exploit his unfinished work. yay!)