Trolley trembles, hand shakes, pen jumps and dances. Cacophonous silences and the crowds of meditative solitude permeate through. Two opposites joining each other at the most extreme ends. The cold seeping in. Snowless roads with sodium yellow streetlamps and crisp, clear echoes of my own footsteps sounding on asphalt roads. In my subway everybody seems to be sullen, staring at the ground and their feet with resigned hopelessness. In my subway everybody is bundled up in individually packed sardine cans.

Remote unfamiliarity radiates strange warmth; a meditation through social loneliness. Circles of involvement and spheres of existence get smaller on rainy winter days. Other people are hell only when interaction is needed.

The floor tiles are dotted with cigarette butts and gum spots, long since blackened and flattened to the ground by thousands of feet gone by, and I wonder-- how many feet have passed by? How many people? If I took a picture of this subway station every single day and bound it into a thick hardcover flipbook, what would there be other than compressed banality and trite human insignificance? Things like that stare me in the face until I have to look away from sheer blind disgust.

I have had photos long since developing in my mind, of the small things and the insignificant. Sometimes, I think, sometimes we pride ourselves too much in feeling the emptiness within and the smallness, the transience of life and the despair. the smaller things flit by like telegraph poles from a moving car, the tiniest fragments that are great simply because they are short-lived, flares of emotion, simmering thoughts that lie behind closed lips. To see the forest, sometimes you need to feel the veins of tree branches, I think.

We run on sidewalks and through crowds, he and I, and we see nothing but the bright white headlights of cars and the gray-toned faces of people rushing by. For a moment, we are colorblind. We are cold but running, and other people flock by and we hear disjointed snatches of conversation, but I talked to him and we run so how have you and our breaths are trailing puffs in the night air the thing about music is and we both laugh.

short snippets from an english spark plug

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