Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and both of us turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur-trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - wait a minute . He went in an antiques store and came out and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a joke or story river stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We both bled when it shattered carrying it up the mar...
... LIFE. It grew into a very sad day this day … began with my computer failing me and calls and calls to Apple and Spectrum and texts and e mails and incorrect passwords and low batteries, recorded voices and stupid stress inducing muzak and erasing everything on my machine and reinstalling and promises bout retrieval and on and on and I lose everything at first except fotos… documents folder is empty ... including my plays and seventeen years of journal ... twelve hundred pages and it feels at first like my memory was erased and then I thought about this year and people losing their lives, and homes and livelihoods and minds, loved ones and so many things more ... and it grabbed hold of me and made me contemplate tonglen. Compassion and empathy. Turn things round. Utilize adversity. Yes, that's the way too proceed but still blue and feeling stupid for not having been more taking care and I go to genius bar at Apple and say to a long haired smart guy with good teeth ... I'...
Ti me was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. -Sebastian Barry
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