Dancing the Tandava
Pier A in Frank Sinatra Park on the Hoboken waterfront has been a pungent part of my life over the past year. Stumbling upon it for the first time I felt like it was a place I’d already known for quite some time. In a relatively short period of time it has been the stage for some very important acts.
Today around 3pm I was walking about it, enjoying the fresh and sunny weather of the day. During this walk about I’d decided that I wanted to sit in the middle of this diamond shaped layout near the gazebo that points to New York City. The last time I’d done such a thing is when I had taken my most recent profile photo, smoking a clove. So before I sat down I was off to go get myself a pack of Djarum blacks.
On my way I get a phone call from Lisa about how she learned that our friend Mike had recently had a brain aneurysm, had brain surgery and currently resides in an ICU. While sad this news wasn’t a terrible shock to the system. Mike has and does drink entirely too much booze, is known for eating, on a regular basis, ungodly amounts of the type of food that is terrible for a person to eat on a regular basis, and smokes, easily, two packs a day of American Spirits cigarettes.
Naturally my impulse to purchase my pack of cloves was shattered.
Naturally, it was replaced with the need to get myself a pack of American Spirits.
Along with spending $3 on lottery tickets.
Pack of cigarettes in hand I walk through a small grove of ginko trees whose leaves have turned yellow and have begun to form little yellow carpets on the ground to sit in the diamond that points to New York City, a diamond that also seems to precisely point north, south, east and west. I sit and stare at Manhattan (one of the M’s?), smoke my cigarette after making a lucky cigarette in the pack, think about Mike recovering from brain surgery, think about Mislaw recovering from brain surgery…
Seagulls fly about
I look around me and notice three seagulls at various edges of the diamond standing about and a fourth one sitting, very calmly, just a few feet behind me and to my left. Looking straight in front of me at Manhattan, directly in my line of sight, I can see the Moon (M?) quite clearly over the city.
Still smoking I notice the little image printed on the cigarette; a native American style image of a bird. I think about my two winged tattoos.
The time is 3:33.
I cast my spells and make my wishes.
Wizards and priests have always held my fascination.
Smoked down till the wings on the cigarette have gone I put out the remnants in the center of the tile directly in front of me, one tile closer to New York City.
iPod in hand shuffle chooses for me Matthew Good’s Indestructible to play for me.
I walk close to the water along the path that leads between the two buildings in Hoboken with pyramids atop them, Indestructible playing in my ears, my perspective wobbling for the third or fourth time within that past hour or so.
My feet lead me to the corner of 3rd street where there’s a restaurant named Trinity. I walk to River street and hang a right to notice a big fucking sign that reads 333 River street, the address of a rather snazzy looking apartment building, at least I think it’s an apartment building.
All the while, and all the time since then feeling a sort of knock at the door in my head and then thinking that it’s not a knock at the door so much as overhearing a dance take place, a dance whose sounds are becoming louder and clearer all the time. Shiva dancing the Tandava in rhythm to my heartbeat, the dance steps that make all the hearts beat.