Oh, The Onion, you’re so funny.

How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son

*by DD, as part of our Living Room Studio series (upcoming on studiocrux.com)

Shameless plug: my friend J. recently put up a site of some of his photos, largely nature stuff. Check it out.

I feel like I’m in a vortex and kind of way behind on things and also surrounded by bubble wrap where everything looks a little fuzzy and I’m unable to move much. If that makes any sense.

Other than that, I am awed by the beauty of all these full trees that have turned completely bright yellow, and urban nature in general. Yesterday afternoon, passing from one MIT building to another, a large grey owl swooped down out of nowhere over my head and onto a tree branch. I got to watch it flap its wings slowly before it landed, and could almost feel the wind coming off its feathers. Perched high in the tree, I looked up at it, and it looked down at me, and I smiled, and we just stayed like that for a minute. And then I went inside because I had to. Autumn is flying but at least there are these perfect moments.

:: nunca seré un miserable, no. no lo lograras. y empezara…

While other people were helping translate a lot of my footage, I took a break from editing the epic Peru documentary, but now I’m back at it, importing transcriptions into FCP clip markers. I have yet to go through the additional footage from my Flip, the stuff I shot ostensibly ‘for fun,’ but here’s one: an HD still from the ocean view out my window in Lima, as reflected off P.’s bedroom window. I like it because it looks more like a memory than a physical location. I thought at some point the longing for this place would go away, but it hasn’t.

by J.L. Borges

We said goodbye on a corner in Once. From the other sidewalk I turned to look back; you too had turned, and you waved goodbye to me.

A river of vehicles and people were flowing between us. It was five o’clock on an ordinary afternoon. How was I to know that that river was Acheron the doleful, the insuperable?

We did not see each other again, and a year later you were dead.

And now I seek out that memory and look at it, and I think it was false, and that behind that trivial farewell was infinite separation.

Last night I stayed in after dinner and reread, in order to understand these things, the last teaching Plato put in his master’s mouth. I read that the soul may escape when the flesh dies.

And now I do not know whether the truth is in the ominous subsequent interpretation, or in the unsuspecting farewell.

For if souls do not die, it is right that we should not make much of saying goodbye.

To say goodbye to each other is to deny separation. It is like saying “today we play at separating, but we will see each other tomorrow.” Man invented farewells because he somehow knows he is immortal, even though he may seem gratuitous and ephemeral.

Sometime, Delia, we will take up again – beside what river? – this uncertain dialogue, and we will ask each other if ever, in a city lost on a plain, we were Borges and Delia.

I’m really hoping the Phillies stage a comeback tonight, but who knows. Been feeling out of sorts lately, as spacey as a mushy pumpkin, so I’ve been camping out in the living room as long as possible. Had to forgo some Halloween parties, but I did get to see some 10-year-old bumble bees, 3-year-old Spidermen and a bunch of teenagers wearing wigs and stuffing (my) candy into (their) backpacks. The leaves are a gorgeous collage of bright red and yellow all over the city, and last night we walked all around Beacon Hill, peering into the windows of brownstones a la 1998 and staring at the leather books, the oil paintings of white people, the velvet upholstery.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

{And havened in eternity, I know / My many precious losses burn and stay: / That forge, that night, that risen moon aglow.} #borges