07.27.06

In Rodin's garden underneath a canopy of leaves from trees I once more cannot name, one of the sculptures has been removed from its perch, presumably to be touched up, polished, refreshed and renewed. It's my first full morning in Paris after a late night arrival and a good few crepes, and I hop up on the perch, a rectangular stone slab, and assume a pose. Nothing gaudy or flashy, just placing my arms slightly akimbo and leaning my head a bit. I look at the other statues and wonder what it feels liek for them, to stand where they do through rain and sleet and hail and thunder and war. I wonder how they - collections of vibrating molecules jus like you and I - perceive the flow of time. I try it out for a few minutes, this statue thing, and now one person that walks by gives me the look I'm waiting for.

I get one of two looks - the look that says I'm crazy or the look that says I'm defiling some sacred stone. No one looks at me knowingly, with a wink that says Yes! Precisely! We're all of us works of art, admission price bedamned. Good show, old chap! Its funny how we always want pictures of ourselves with pieces of art, but first ensure no one else will be in the picture. For a moment, it was ours! All ours! Look! There we are with it! We create our own little version of the world at large for ourselves.

I always say I couldn't get along with 99 percent of people. I can deal with them, sure, but we wouldn't get along. I think that's how it is for most people, anyway. I call it the bell curve of perception. YOu stand at the peak of said curve and you see the world the way you see it. Stretching out on either side, theworld falls away, slowly at first and then further and further down down down and away it goes. You find kinship with those closest to you upon the hill, but only really understand the world in your own particular manner and only forge the strongest connections with a scant few.

But 99 percent of people. It ocurs to me that that leaves one percent of the human population. 65000000 people. PEssimistically I could say that I must be overestimating how many I could get along with. But optimistically I could say that the world is rife with the possibilities of meaningful connection, and that the odds are good that magical things could happen any moment. THis trip I'm on has me leaning towards the optimistic side of things.

Electrons detach from their nuclei and float into unchartered orbits. Gravity and momentum pull them this way and that as they look for home and along the way they find others of their ilk, stray lightning bolts in the endless meadows of the world, and clash together for moments to explore one another. THey crack the sky open and meet at the samepoint on the surface of the earth, exchanging ideas and breathing air together, experiencing silence together. Eventually they go their separate ways, each headed slowly home having grown older. 6 and a half million people travelling alone and looking for their own private version of the same thing, themselves.

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French waiters are funny. They're either young and energetic - tip-hunters - or else they're old and just as crusty as their clientele. When I say young and old I don't necessrily mean ge as a number either, with some of them it's just a mindset. THe old ones crack me up. They're fierce - to them no issue is more serious than the art of food service - not nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic, or fresh bombings in the Middle East couldn't elicit a slightly arched eyebrow from them so much as a soiled salad fork could.

One of my favorite Parisian pastimes is to make eye contact with a waiter serving the outdoor section of a cafe and to smile quite exaggeratedly at him as I walk by. The look of alarm that crosses their faces is priceless. I like especially to do this to the waiters at Le Select and the Dome, places so stale they make moldy bread look like vine-ripe tomatoes. At La Cupole, on the other hand, I leave the waitrs be. The air of pretention there is still fresh enough that the waiters don't look so much like misplaced penguins. Even the rainbow faced old ladies that sit inside the air conditioned salle seem a thousand years younger than the Methuselah mamas at Le Select.

Tonight I'm at Les philosophes and Ive eaten my best meal in recent months. Pate de fois gras, cuisse de canard, a half a carafe of red wine, and a coffee. As I write this a fly falls on to my table and writhes around. Upon further inspection, it only has one wing. I don't want to watch it writher, so I euthanize it. So strange, life. SOme choices are so easy to make and some tear at your heart like vultures pecking liver and all are parts of the same chain. No, not a chain. Like TOm RObbins says, "Life is more a meadow than a highway."