Williams Water Wall

21 July 2009 - Houston, Texas. Willaims Waterwall

I've been in Houston for days and haven't seen many people or done many things. I'm not eating right, sleeping right or exercising...so I feel tired all the time and what little energy I have I've spent with family and a handful of friends (a/k/a three friends). It sucks not to have enough energy to see everyone, especially since I have no excuse to be tired. But alas, I am.

I'm staying in yet another warm and comfy guest bedroom, this time in a house of friend I met traveling in 2004. I wake up each morning to massive windows overlooking the Williams Tower & Water Wall. When I was an energy banker in Houston, Williams was one of my favorite clients and host to some extraordinarily fun (and productive, I promise) bank meetings that included two nights in resorts and golf for the golfers, spa treatments for the rest of us. In fact, the windbreaker the Millennium girls shared during breezy night watches on the Indian Ocean was a Williams jacket with bank meeting details embroidered subtly on the chest....the same jacket I was wearing when Sybaris sailed up to the coast of Lebanon that first time.

Lately I take pleasure in noticing the threads of my history that weave through the experiences, continents, and relationships and seem to get richer and more colourful as life goes on. Houston feels like the canvas on which everything is painted, so it's always nice to come home and examine the brush strokes up close.

One Guitar, No Vocals

3 July 2009 - Portland, Maine, USA.

It's been raining in Maine for like 21 days so I got to use my little red umbrella that I carried with me everyday for three years in London (but didn't need every day). Wandered around downtown Portland a bit and stumbled upon a 5-piece bluegrass band doing an acoustic jam session in a music store... [bxA]

...the town is splattered with posters for an upcoming Leo Kottke show, which reminds me of my whole life since he was a regular at Rockefeller's (where I worked for years in the 90s) and I listened to One Guitar, No Vocals regularly during my three months on sailboats this year. There's a song on that album called Snorkel, which reminds me of swimming all the way around North Button island in the Andamans.

...at Yes Books I stumbled across an old copy of "A Franz Kafka Miscellany" which didn't interest me until I found nestled in the pages a very yellowed news clipping headlined 'Kafka on Picasso' that went like this:

"He is a willful distortionist," I said.

"I do not think so," said Kafka. "He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes 'fast', like a watch - sometimes."

-from "Conversations with Kafka" by Gustav Ganouch