There are gray haired women who in the doorways who gossip. Lamps spill amber onto the street. A truck pushes on into the morning. Generations die uncommitted on the train.

The batting lashes and frigid secretaries. There are mug faces and bulbous lips. Hair twisted and tortured unnaturally. The broken vision of an Aztec queen. The King’s straight black hair. A women wearing time. Bad branches of the family tree. The sad strongman. The pitiful princess who has been ripped off all her life. The Boss’s favorite boy. The brides and virgins with glasses. The tight metal lurching girl. Her boyfriend sick with fear from what his mother might say about the unborn child.

The stumped trunk woman in the wheelchair begging with a close friend. The drunk conductor with gloves. The bald artist with half a hand. The screaming confused children in baskets with wheels. The Saturday night hipsters who live with their mothers.

The Polish extortionist and burglar. The giggling Spanish girls with wide teethy mouths and precise bangs. The Chinese man with an empty bucket. The two black kids with torn paper suitcases. The lonely man drawing circuits from a book called “110 IC Timing Device Projects”.

The regal girl with a sack over her shoulder. Her face is every queen on a deck of cards. She is mesmerized by her own reflection in the door. Engaged with no one else.

The exhausted girl with the week’s food and frustrations dazed into her single beautiful world. To think she could have gotten away with it. To think she could have run from this lonely place. To think she could have made the mistake more than once. To fix herself. To find herself in the clouds.

X.F. Pine

5-21

I am lying beside PW in a hotel room bed where I  read a book and watch television simultaneously. I look to tell PW she is beautiful. A group of elegantly dressed ladies appear on television dancing. Their dresses are classical and shimmery. An announcer mentions that they are “voguing” as I notice that they all have tails like animals. PW makes a comment to herself about her bra. She says it’s far too tight. She knows this will excite me.

The bicycle has incredible torque in its gears which make the ascent of hills very easy and its speed impressively fast. I am traveling so fast in fact that I am losing consciousness as I travel down a giant hill. There is no air, or I have been mistakenly drugged. As I see the bottom of the hill my vision becomes blocked. I am unsure if I have shut my eyes. I can only see shadows of trees on the inside of my eyelids. The afternoon summer sunlight is orange and warm. I feel my sense of balance wavering as the speed increases until I blackout.

The department store intercom is telling a story as the elderly sex therapist shuffles in a slow circle. The story is about the ways a man shows his love for a woman. It says that when a man walks astray, he can hold his woman’s hand and lead her or he can forget his love and walk away until he returns, thinking of her all the time.

5-23

All my friends and I are in the back of a pick-up truck where we are instructed to take the first part of the test. We do not know how many parts of the test there are. As the truck drives down a street we are supposed to record everything that passes by our view. Every garbage can, every doorway, every light in every window. The town is a sleepy one, and it is in the after-hours. I find considerable anxiety in writing down what I see because I cannot concentrate. My friends find it easy. My jottings are barely coherent to me, let alone the instructor, who was once a terrible science teacher of mine. After just one pass down the street, we are supposed to have a complete description. I look at my piece of paper to find it blank. I know I am going to fail.

5-26

Connecting the two rooms is a hallway where a tremendous brown horse runs back and forth uncontrollably. It is the largest animal I have ever seen and I am trapped in the hallway with it.

5-30

I am considering a sculpture of the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Hell with a jealous husband. We examine the small model of Satan and the underside of the platform in which it is half submerged. We try to figure the logic involved, after Satan consumes someone.

6-3

A group of us are in a house with white walls. KKR directs us to paintings in the back which are representations of cartoons. As we look at the large black and white paintings, we discover that the Mob is killing all the witnesses involved, and that each one of us must go our separate ways, or risk torture and capture.

I begin my life on the run alone and still free. After disembarking on a trail in the woods, I come upon a split level house high in the hills. Within the cellar of the house is an incredible assortment of caves, and hiding places. The cellar was molded out of blue molten rock formations. Unfortunately for me, the owners of the house have cemented up all the openings. Local teen-age kids, full of rebellion and destructive angst, have spray painted the cement with swears. I know the teen-agers are wise and right somehow. I decide to break out and climb out of the cellar window to get outside, but I am unable to fit through the white window frame, I break it off as I go through.

Outside on the patio, there is a vicious light colored watchdog waiting to attack me. It approaches snarling, and before it bites I throw the old window frame into it’s mouth, and it becomes distracted long enough so that I might escape. However, also on the patio, is the owner of the dog, and the sheriff caretaker of the house. He can only yell, “Mr.” in a sly condescending voice, before I am gone from the scene.

Hours pass and I have dozens of other adventures all ending in escape. I finally end up jumping off a cliff to see if I can land in evergreen treetops.

Years later I am standing outside of myself in a bachelor pad where my cohorts and I listen to various jazz albums. The good old jazz albums with the colorful covers, and the scratchy vinyl sounds. We discuss meanings, and interpretations from our past. We look at the covers as we listen to the selections.

This site is all about collisions of one kind or another. I felt a need to post these as we live in a time where technology is in full collision with the natural world. I am reminded that these documents could never have been done at any other time in history.

This is from the BBC show Animal Camera. Beautiful Golden Eagle:

The Peregrine Falcon & Gos Hawk flies through the Woods:

What a Lion sees at Night:

History of the Crittercam. Great underwater compilation of Seals. Sharks and Whales. Underwater there is no way to transmit a signal, so they have to record it and eject it to the surface for recovery:

A tree Kangaroo from New Guinea with cool claws:

Finally, a great found photo story with a sea turtle. A camera washed up on a beach in Key West, Florida after being lost six months before in Aruba. This was on it.

Within the freight elevator, the old Mr. Pointe spends a day’s eternity. Through the wire mesh at the bottom of the shaft a maintenance man hovers over a dark wheel. Spinning ratchets and dull greased pulleys. In Mr. Pointe’s cab are the necessary items of faith. There are old Christmas lights tangled and burned beyond repair. A toy mouse with a rusty grin is affixed to a switchbox. The cab’s color is sky blue, lit by a single raw bulb. Outside the cage the subsequent dark shafts appear endless. Mt. Pointe has no teeth. His neck seems to have been broken once. There is a religious calendar with a painting of wise men in a desert. There are certain exact dates circled in red meticulously. A plastic rose is woven through the links of the mesh. A ripped picture of a beautiful young woman by the sea is taped to a small panel. The girl is photogenic but very shy. Long dark hair covers her eyes. A brown newspaper clipping without a headline flips down only secured by a piece of tape at the bottom now. The words are faded and gone. The story was about Mr. Pointe’s friends from long ago who won all that money. Mr. Pointe believes in luck. A buzzer blares from the top of the shaft and Mr. Pointe secures the stretching cab gate and bolts it down. As the ascent begins, Mr. Pointe yells to the floors above. He complains about their lateness. A camera blinks a blue eye from the far corner of the cab. It’s cool lens is docile and thoughtless, as the cab ascends up through the abysmal space.

X. F. Pine