Virul Infection/swollen Gland

If This World Was Made Out paper from the sun Could Easily burn it down


(To my friend Ioana Bohalteanu Caramiziu and her beautiful world)

Sometimes, when I’m alone, the strangest thing happens. When I look to a given point, doesn’t matter what or when, either in the street or indoor, I feel like I’m entering a totally different space and time, a totally different world, with beings totally different from you and me. When that happens I’m always conscious of everything around me, I never loose awareness of where I am. It’s only that in those moments I live, for a few seconds or minutes, in two separate and very distinct realities. It usually happens when I have the sun in front of me and its glare penetrates through my eyes directly into the inner part of my body. Even when it’s cold I can feel the warmth of that other place to which I travel.

Basically, it’s very much like this one. I can’t even tell why I feel time in there is not the same as the one in here, it’s just something I feel without being able to explain. But I do feel privileged to be able to visit that place every now and then, to make me remind, to make me feel more in touch with the human part of me, to make me dream and relax for a little while.

In there I never had the chance to speak with no one. I tried but never succeeded, even though it’s a world full of beautiful beings just like you and me, but different. They’re so ethereal and fragile, like butterflies in summer prairies, like they’re made out from paper tissues with all the colours available. Not at all like us, so strong, so tough, so everlasting and resilient.

Today I went there one more time, only if just for a few seconds. It was in the afternoon and I was in a coffee table in a square. The autumn sun was making damage to my eyes and the people were crowding the place, touching my arms and back and making me feel uncomfortable. I stared up, to the cloudless sky and to the sun, and suddenly I was taken again from here to that place. It was all very brief, but in front of me there was this woman, in red, so beautiful and delicate, made out from paper. In those few seconds I realised how I could crush her but never would. In those few seconds I realised how violent we are. In those few seconds I wanted to kiss her but never could. In those few seconds I realised how lonely we all are in this earth. In those few seconds I understood finally why they exist: to make us remind all we could be if we really tried.

(Photograph: Rézekne-Daugavpils trip, Latvia, September 29th, 2008 / Text: Tomar, Portugal, October 19th, 2008)

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How To Make 48v Adapter

Election Day


For about three minutes a plane flying very low, about ten feet from the surface of a calm ocean, defying him. This is the South Atlantic, that day is amazingly quiet, with only small white foam crests of ripples on the top ridiculous. Almost no one hears the sound of the engine of the aircraft.

A camera is positioned under the nose of the apparatus, recording images that will give those who come to feel himself in planar flyby, without any hint of earth. This is causing a desire to open our arms to fly, to soar without use of machinery. You hear a rhythmic, relaxing, hypnotic, which is feels go extinct. The guess of the approaching end of the song opens another door, now suggests a change: the closeness of the earth.

The song ended, and silence the camera slowly rises slightly, as the aircraft gained altitude. The late afternoon sun is on the right almost touching the horizon, and to broaden the field of view due to gain altitude quickly seen to be approaching a jetty baffles made of massive blocks of stone and then a large rusty freighter sunk in the bay on the starboard side. In a fast moving and need to get new aircraft altitude at precisely the moment that seems to clash with the same cargo. From above we can now watch dozens of freighters anchored in the bay. Luanda. Suddenly, as if the sunset had it repositioned on the horizon, now appears in front of a super close-up, blinding, annoying. Blurring up the colors on a canvas awash in a light that eliminates everything.

On a side street a man sleeps sitting on the floor, his back against a tire of a white Toyota covered with dry land. There is garbage strewn around the floor, bags blowing in the wind, the streets loose, dented cans that no longer roll over. There are water lines running from foul invisible places, and flies. It is not long the night will fall and the messengers of malaria and cholera. A camera travels hung from an invisible hand, almost at the floor, and rags notes dropped on pavements, stalls of fruit and vegetables dropped into the veins of the buildings, still fuming over a stove which is still a grid with four bananas to bake. Dogs lick wounds to the cool of the night approaches. The acacia leaves finally fall from their dust without fear of annoying.

night no longer heard the sound of the generators of electricity or the occasional bursts of AK. No sound of voices. It's Friday and did not smell the aromas of the party. The camera goes up, facing the ground, as if by a high hot air balloon. First see if the street after the block, then the neighborhood, and continues its upward movement to encompass the entire city. Something troubling is glued to the retina of the eye: there is no movement of cars on the streets. Again the camera down, and down, and go down to meet the level of the top floors of a building of 15, incomplete, dressed only of brick, cement, and meshes of bombings in recent elections. Dozens of colorful fabrics hanging from ropes, windows, wires stretched on balconies and railings instead of every year where children fall to their flight from baptism. By

seconds camera gives us a break, focusing clearly one of these windows of one of the top floors of a sad to building 15. Then move toward the open window, entering the house, exploring their intimacy poor. A couple and two children sleep together on the floor of a room on mats. Aside, the man of the house has his left arm over his wife. Children are thrown at random, one resting his head on the thigh of another, as if sleep had caught the middle of a joke. In one corner of the kitchen there is a plastic box full of beer cans full, warm. There are banking on okra, there jimboa there cassava, onions and tomatoes there. In a plastic bowl, tomorrow and covered with salt, half a dozen are ready to cacussos embers. The camera backs away slowly until out of the window where he entered. Slowly move away from the building, always with him at the center of the image.

This was just another trip. All residents are asleep, all life is exhausted in their lives, all the suffering has become in peace, today is election day.

(Photo: Luanda, Angola, August 2007 / Text: Coimbra, August and September 2008)

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Jc Penny Free Eyebrow Waxing

Ballerina


The first moment I saw you I must admit I didn't Gave you a second thought. Then, looking closer - watching you from a distant corner - some hand reached mine with a soft, warm, gentle touch. Who are you really? We’ll part in a few days, and so there’s no point in trying to get to know you better. I really don’t think I want to know about the things that make you smile, or laugh, or cry… I don’t want to know if you love rain or sunshine, or if you’ve ever dreamed about being a ballerina. Maybe you just love sunsets and take pleasure in walking up and down at the beach after dinner. Maybe you love to read and to wear those beautiful blue summer dresses with little white flowers on. Maybe you love the smell of book pages and close your eyes when you go to bed trying to imagine sceneries for the stories you’re reading, or how their characters look like. Maybe you love to walk amongst inhabitants of far away cities pretending you’re at home. Maybe you love to swim naked on deserted beaches, and sweet oranges when it’s really hot. Maybe you love to wake up hearing the birds outside your window and the smell of chocolate cakes baking in the evening. Maybe you love the electricity of Christmas and children, and horses, and fantasising about being a princess from a strange country. Maybe you love flying and the emotions of taking off, or maybe you love the smell of coffee by the morning, with toasts, and orange jam, and passion fruits… Maybe you just love to dream about love, and maybe you dream about being loved too. Maybe you even dream about me loving you, and maybe you would like it if I showed some interest in getting to know all this little things about you. Maybe I’m completely wrong, maybe I’m not, but I don’t really want to know anything more about you. I know enough: you caught me.

(Photograph: Paris, France, December of 2006 / Text: Tomar, Portugal, July 28th, 2008)

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Carbon Monoxide Detector Err

Landing Castaway


How I wish I could get it right this time. All my life I’ve been dreaming about that moment when I would be free of all constraints and could finally begin building that special world I’ve always saw whenever I went to bed and let my mind run free over all things, real and imaginary.

Like many people in this world I never really knew what a home is. At least not one like those we sometimes see in movies, read about in books, or even sees next door, which makes it more desirable because it is real and seems so easy to get. But, in a way, I had one.

Those minutes, or hours, between the moment I went to bed until sleep came and took my mind away from this world I really grew wings and took off. For many, many years, those moments, every night, were really when I was home. I just laid my head over my pillow, turned the lights off, and distinctly saw myself opening the front door of my house and dropping the door keys over a small black table right next to the door. Then, without turning the lights on, I used to see myself sitting on a couch, in the dark, facing the movement of the night garden behind the glass wall of the living room. Sometimes, of course, there were variations. Sometimes there was music. Sometimes I imagined it was winter and I would start a fire in the fireplace and just stood there staring at the flames and at the rain outside, feeling the warmth and hearing the small cracks of the wood. It even snowed, every now and then. Other times it was summer, and I went outside and just felt the tropical night warmth and humidity, and laid my body over the grass hearing the waves of the sea below and night insects going about their lives.

What kind of house was this imaginary house of mine, in a tropical place but where it snowed all the same? It was HOME. It was the place where I could always run to, no matter how bad things got. In there I knew I would be safe. In there I always felt joy and could find my peace of mind again and again, every nights, for many many years.

Sometimes I even took people there to share my home with me for some hours, for some days. Of course none of those people have recollections of those moments when they shared with me the most precious thing I could give them. It was all in my mind. That house, that peace, that fireplace, those tropical nights, the keys dropped on a black table behind the entrance door, the snow outside, all the joy I felt, the murmur of the sea down below calling for me nigh after night, the company I took there although mostly I enjoyed to be there by myself… It was all the fruit of my imagination. But although I knew that, for I am no schizophrenic, that was really the closest I ever got to home. I always knew it wasn’t real, but it was there, every nights, and it made feel good.

For years and years that place lifted me up. It gave me wings and had me regain my strength. I even remember, as a kid, of being sick and feverish and sleeping all day during many days, and feeling happy about that because it allowed me to be at home for a longer period.

Like I’ve said, I always knew it wasn’t real. But as long as it made me happy I didn’t mind. I was my secret place, my shelter, my dream, my home, my wish, and now I miss it.

I’m a grown man now, at least in the biological sense of the word, but every night when I go to bed I try to follow the road that would take me back to that place. But somehow, for a few years now, all I manage is to get lost along the way. I can’t return home anymore. I know it’s gone, even if its memory and all the pleasure I used to feel persists in my mind. I will never allow those moments to leave me. Although I no longer believe I will be home again, or that I will make that dream come true, I need those memories to feel human, joyful, and in peace. And so I thank my mind for all the tricks it played with me along the years, for even if I never really knew what happiness was at least I know what it is to feel joy. After all, that’s what life is all about.

(Photograph: Panguila, Angola, August of 2007 / Text: Coimbra, Portugal, May 24th 2008)

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