4.27.2020

Before 2017 I had not much exposure to the rapper Future. In February of that year he released two albums within two weeks. I listened to them both repeatedly. Future seemed to be reaching the height of his popularity. I even used him as a topic in flirtation with a coworker. Then a close friend who tweeted a then recent Future line died from drugs. The flirtation with my coworker became starkly unsuccessful and awkward. A year later, things were back at an okay level. For about the fourth or fifth time in my life I picked up running regularly again. I lived close to Maria Hernandez Park and Future's newest project Beast Mode 2 became a fitting soundtrack to match my medium effort runs to the park and back. More importantly the energy fit my running style, slow and brooding often painful on joints. Skip ahead almost two years, I'm living in a different apartment. On March 25th I'm told to stay home from work indefinitely until management declares it safe to return. The frequency of my runs increased. After each run my synthetic clothes return to an exponentially stinking unwashed heap on the radiator in my bedroom, as every other day I burn through Lil Uzi Vert's two new projects, running the perimeter of upper Manhattan's northern-most waterfront. Then on April 15th I'm bird watching at a meadow and three eagles arrive screeching in an enormous cottonwood tree. One of them devours a fish. Scales and guts fall on the dead leaves below. I sneak through the poison ivy for a close-up. The same day, a mixtape Future released in 2016, Purple Reign, was released for the first time on Apple Music's platform. I add the mixtape to my library and the songs Purple Reign and Perkys Calling to a playlist and listen to them on occasion. But these two songs I had heard once or twice in the past. They have stars next to them in the app. I remember speeding through the center of the Adirondack forest in a friend's BMW on our way to a trail-head in the High Peaks. Hearing Future rap that late summer day seemed as dark and sweetly alluring as the impenetrable spruce and fir lining the snaky bends of unpaved road. Presently, the stay at home order slowly wears the exciting energy of Uzi's new projects thin. Waiting patiently at the top of my recently-added library is the entire mixtape Purple Reign.

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4/24/2020: I went to CTown around 11:30am. I was listening to the Brian Lehrer Show on Powerbeats. I spent around 58 dollars on baking ingredients, pasta and mushrooms. An author tells Brian Shakespeare wrote two plays during a cushy plague quarantine. In the current economy artists have it hard. No pressure. As soon as I began loading the basket onto the conveyor belt, I realized I forgot vanilla for the cookies. There's a line outside. Too late to go back. I walk next-door to Duane Reade and pick up things like hair conditioner and ramen noodles. On my third lap through the "food" aisle I find a tiny broken box inside of which was a small plastic bottle of vanilla. I think it cost over 6 dollars. When I got home I unloaded everything. I pulled up the BLS segments I missed earlier in the morning. It was the ask the mayor segment. Someone called in and asked him to rethink suspension of the teenager summer employment program. Made coffee and worked out in my living room. Squats under a thick black resistance band. Backward lunges off a yoga block. Pendulum leg swings kick off the yoga block. A bunch of squats and planks. I was sweating all over the mat. As part rest I practiced flipping up into a handstand. I did this about three or four times. When I felt I had worked out enough I put a tab of LSD on my tongue, around 2:08 pm. A few more sets of crunches on a yoga ball, one more handstand. As I waited for the shower water to warm I put on Purple Reign through a bluetooth Bose speaker. I started cleaning the toilet and sink. Yesterday I had to use scissors to cut off most of my beard and hair all over the place, stuck in the grout and around the sink fixture. When I'm out of the shower I drop my running clothes in the tub and soak them along with Gain detergent. The LSD has been in me 1hr. The Northern Cardinals chirping in the courtyard sound like delivery bike alarms. It's enjoyably confusing. Waves of exhaustion and delirium for me to sit on the couch briefly. An hour ago I was working out. Standing upside down against the wall. I really can’t follow Future’s raps. The dissociation asks swiftly and new associations pile up. There’s a sense they’re seeping in somehow. I drain the tub and soak the clothes in clean water twice, squeezing each item until the soap bubbles diminish. I start on some dishes in the kitchen sink. Vicious cycles soaking hands, drying, moisturizing, they are mad wrinkled. 3:22 full absorbed in LSD fueled bathroom disinfection to Purple Reign. How many other trippy jogger types have been here, watching days of dirt and perspiration swirl down the drain in a brown hallucinatory vortex? The trip wasn’t very visual yet though. Every little detail about the bathroom or the kitchen or the living room begins unlocking preconceived notions of the outside world. I was unable to keep up]. The water is unbelievably brown, I thought. That came out of my body or off the ground into my clothes? The brightness of the living room is blurry, hazy. My synthetic shorts, pull-over and quick dry shirt drip dry on a rack in the tub now. It's not hazy in there, like the living room. The bathroom window glass is frosted. Rick Ross is in there, the bathroom talking about the 12th grade. I love the way your ass looks reflecting in my Lysol shining floors. Rick Ross doesn't say that. [Here I mistake Future’s voice on the track Never Forget for Rick Ross’s]. I wipe behind the toilet with one of those Swiffer Sweeper Wet things. Wish I had a girl to clean floors for. The bright green balsam fir incense box in the corner looks like my phone with new message notifications. Frasier kept Future out of Seattle? I’m having trouble keeping up with my own thoughts. My phone case looks pale green, not black. If anyone is showing the long strange years it’s the weather-worn grumpy cat who's been soaked by street rains and dried on many a radiator in his day, their day. Once the radiator melted the plastic furs a little. What messages did the poets have when they weren’t needed to carry stories over the mountains anymore? Chemicals smell good when you’re cleaning. What happens when the chemicals run out? What other solutions do we have? VInegar? DIY home detergents? There's two cardinals in the courtyard courting. When is the termite hatch? WHen am I just goint o research the termite hatch for myself?i gotta spend more time in the ktichen,,,., 4:03pm. Purple reign 3rd time? I gotta psend more time in the kitchen. Tonight i’m going to recreate the reese’s chips ahoy but vegan but not vegan. Not quite vegan vegan. This would be vegan with better recipes. Also t;his would vegan vut with bernie as president. Make it easier for yourslf in the future. Just make the ice now. In a time lapse of building front doors for every address in ny you'll see a blur of the disenfranchised. What’s this postal worker in the rainy courtyard through on the phone right now. He’s got his molded sun helmet on. I need to sit on the couch again. 36 year-old strong man. Two hours of chores about to break me? Stop before you do anything? Do the plants have enough water? You just refilled the ice trays. Back to the kitchen. Rinse the mouse turds out of the dish drain. The weathering of the 1920 bricks of the building is in higher contrast? Is the black on the cement window sills from carbon pollution or fire damage? ARe there cats in the windows or just curtains blowing back and forth? The tan bricks can be sunny or deep and sad from moment to moment. Scrubbing grease out of a pan or wiping I should say, about to start the Purple Reign for the 4th time? Filomena. Thinking about the people I saw at the store today. THe people I see more frequently than I realize. I can’t run from them anymore. What am I doing every day with my life? What am I working towards? Am I goign to actually bake later? I feeling smaller and more matrix-y. Am I just waiting to go back to work as an old normal? YOu told yourself abut the ICE and you failed. Water is on the floor but it doesn’t matter. Do we need more bird eyes to witness this stuff? How many cardinals are nesting in the courtyard. I just saw at least a small family. They cool with the House sparrow dudes? Is it harder for them each year to bring it home to the courtyard because they’re getting squeezed somewhere else. It’s going to be a sunny day? How do you take advantage of that? I’m dripping on them now, how do they like it though? The cardinals' lives are dependent on this… my life is too. Is this what Future’s going on about? [In Inside the Mattress Future says “came from the trenches and turned into art”]. All the bad he had to do to make it out of the streets. The story of it all in the courtyard. Purple reign on repeat we still are making up the internet for people. Would I have been about to arrive at the same conclusion looking out the window into the courtyard, without depending on CTown, without the drugs? It’s stressful. The grey sky makes all kinds of shades in the courtyard. The bricks have the sunny warmth from brighter days baked in. I really bought 80 clean ounces of aunt jemima self-rising flour. My coworker is in labor today. Run Up. can you imagine being in labor to this song. The spring metaphor is ripe. I’m purple reign no one cares how high you are get your ass to the kitchen sink. David, Diane, Peter and Judy the four pillars or knowledge. Logic, philospy art, science? Where are we in the metaphor? The [mixtape] is over. Press play on Alright. What would DJ esco fucking do? Go outisde? Finish tthe dishe and start dinner? More drugs? I have to breathe in that spring day. Reign never stops though. 5:38p Introduced marijuana. [C]an I succefffly get mysefl to the lookout and back befreo the sun goes down? So much citrus was about to go to waste and I saved it from itself. Think about all those clouwn ass characters you can save from themselvesThere’s a lot these silly nuggets out here looking sad in their skin. In this half ass spring day. SOme of them might hav to go. Up to the freezer. I will have to lock them up with that ice. Sad really. Dying in their own skin. [citrus] Who fucked up their skin? THe packaging? Why does it need that packaging? Life is definitely in the fast lane, cross-eyed. Skateboards. Where will I be when the tower of babel finally falls? What kind of story teller am I then? The pressure to love is massaged into the bread of that npr shit man! Each leg futher in the trip unravels the trash on NPR. true saturation to the message! People even participate in that crap! Birding. Science. Exercise. Art. What am I usspoed to be doing? Theyre paying me. [I'm] Recieveing a paycheck to stay home? How long am I just more [pulp] in the gears? Am i just the graffitti washing back you can kind of see it if you unfocused your eyes 5:51 i’ve never stoped listengint ot purple reign. Did my feiends arleady fall into this trap. One rap album over and over for days on end while the drugs and gas in the car lasts you…. Until finally at the end of you in the shell of a house withn broken banjos [hanging on the walls] and Run Up mixing up in the wreckage of it. Where the fuck is Rocco?>? You gotta eat it up and grieve with it. In every meal. I finally learned my lesson with the icy or the ice just froze on me, not spilling when the freezer door opens. I have to learn movre about these cardinals that live in the courtyard. When is that termite hatch info coming? Ij ust pressed enter like, “ok, send.” But nothing happened. Did they put the bricks in the courtyard like that purpsoefly so it looks sunny when it’s not? Are we sad for a dishwasher? iS the courtyard built like this so the pople always in the kitchens in the 1920s didn’t kill themselves. JUst want to dance and wash and press send. Mikes on and I’m not listening.. THe first real decision of the day. 6:01pm do I break from routine? Mayb e colve’s still just listening to that purple reign… he’s teh painful lesson. I smell the beef cooking through the walls of the other kitchn. I need to leave again for the day. Almost an hour left of daylight in another day gone. 6:08 perupe reighn still on repeate. No Francesa. I can play him later. Will i be beyond fro another night of the cheers? Am I part of the problem or the solution. We need a pause of this shit. As purple reign repeates again we’re getting ready for the night. Another day with the new reality. Let it sink in. no day will ever be the same as his same old day. I listened to a recording from four years ago repeatedly for three hours to come up with that last line. See what us artists are worth. We are essential look at us we are essential too! When business and storytelling rose out fo the ashes I was born the water is filtered i have to rinse my arms of the dried citrus. How many more nice womens lives do we choose to ruin as part of business as usual who are the women in my life i need to continue protecting what;s the result of the disastrous spring of pandemic to actually come out on the other side of this the person you need when you need someone. WOuld they rather me do somethig else? I’ll find out at some point i’m sure. Wasn’t prepared for the for whom do you break quarantine for question to so heavily interesect with my family heritige today but thatnks acid trip in the pandemic NO pete actually found a document ath said he knows where in italy his grandfather signed his paper of Catazana. [my dad texts me pictures of a US Military document from 1919 found among my grandmother’s old belonging]. That seemd to make a lot of sense in my mind. Immediately is that who I want to be? Old people from m past? Just the immediate thoughts for an old paper i’m glad exists. A peace of the spice that made it from the one old italian fruit into the post pandemic new normal. SHould I go outside and enjoy the drugs or stay in and just outlast this and the cheers at 77:39 tgeb wgat tune will it be when you get back and you’ll have more you can type about. My dad wanted to be free. He wanted to stay out west forever. SOmetihng told him to turn back? Was it the Reign? Preparting to go outside there’s no other way to do it with weed and the medicine bottle like is so fitting for the neighborhood. Why did my earbuds cut out? Why do we need the drugs to see clearly what's in front of us all day long. Transferred Purple Reign into my bluetooth earbuds successfully. I’m back from the walk. iT’s 8:51. I have to remember what conor said to me on the fphone as we were walking along there. WHen I left for the park around 6:20 or something Purple Reign was playing in my earbuds and I had my face covered and ears covered. Something made me press pause on the music but it seemed at the time the bluetooth lost connnection. I think I had to say excuse me to someone in the courtyard or at the laundromat street corner. Somewhere on Seaman or Beak street I started thinking are my headphones broken. But before that I was thinking we are really going to have to rely on the essential workers who are the oppressed people for our economy to start again can they hold this all up until their demands are met. But then I was thinking my bluetooth was messed up and I wasn’t going to be able to focus and fix it. So I’m really just ready to cross Payson and be inside the wooded park. Kind of as a surprise to me Siri says, “Conor says, Thanks BB.” I have my earbuds set up to read text messages to me as they are received by my phone. I’m not sure why this is or how to turn it off. It’s something the bluetooth earbuds do. Hearing conors message read to me made me smile though. He heard about that guy who was trying to get rich off everyone who thought they needed to buy silver. And there's people int he hospital who are turningup the 5G to control the human population stuff. Then the sky was very beatiful. THe leaves werew all wet and the south ridge had dozens of sparrows going in song. Then the cheers and stuff around 7pm rising up into the woods. THe whole beautiful sunset thing and after that the owl overhead in the pitch black branches. [It rained most of the day and I wasn’t expecting any of the sky to be visible.] As I walk north on the ridge the cliffside on the opposite shore of the river appears through the tree spaces. I walk to the meadow overlook. The sky above the palisade cliffs and the river below are a matchig shade of pink-grey. Just above the cliffs the clouds stop at a perfectly straight hard grey ceiling. In a space between the cliff top trees and the cloud edge the sun burns behind wisps of deep orange that looks like boiling or flames inside a furnace glass. Looking north up the river the entire long thin block of cliffs looks like it’s floating in the sky. To the north, beyond the abrupt end of the miles long cliff block in the north that ends the cliff the pink and pale blue sky joins in an illusion to turn the body of water into a sky world. Even when the sun was gone the light refused to leave the upper atmosphere and an orange slit persisted in the deepening shade of the forest. The tree tops had green blue highlights and then the night sky came alive with a few planets and its usual urban light pollution. I stop to wait for the highway swooshing to fall flat. In a brief moment of silence an owl whinnies out of the bushes and becomes a small shadow in a vine drooping over my head darker than all the black branches surrounding the oval form. A complete absence of light. I walk south on the ridge and notice a small light glowing inside an old foundation rock wall in the woods. And then the light inside the cave was glowing. I walk out of the clove to the east ridge. As I approach the ridge crest bright lights of upper manhattan and the bronx glow like the dazzling metropolises they are not. I am eye level with cozy family living rooms filled with white eople of all ages 6 stories above payson ave. Can I end up baking these cookies>? Jit was the mission of the entire day. It’s going to be pleasant weather tomorrow. How do we avoid contributing to the crowds? 9:12pm I’m home. Purple Reign falling again. DJ ESco beckons me. A few more of those sad citrus boys’re still out all night. Who are the kids who hang out on the benches as it gets dark? Who was the guy who was kind of following me from Beak to Seaman. I just made the creamiest looking guacamole. And tried to bake vegan chocolate chip cookies. The cookies came out so bad. 11:26pm. Listening to Dear April and Cayendo now. My legs are becoming extremely sore. 12:33 I can almost relax and maybe sleep. My legs are so heavy and warm. The apartment is too warm. Turn down the dam heat, man. I was lying there in bed thinking about the width of the paths in the park and how clean they keep them. They shovel the dirt off the paths. A city law ensuring access for disabled? When does the outdoors become the new classroom? How long will it take to walk the entire public school population two by two through the urban wild forest? THe Henry Hudson Bridge needs to come down reroute the highway. In bed. Read a little of I Love Dick. Ate ramens around 1am. Still awake after 2pm, watching King of the Hill.