We all have dreams. Its how we search for what we want to achieve.

I thought my dreams were real and all that mattered. That’s why I came to NY.

But it’s hard and it gets harder to stay focused and not lose sight of what it is that we want to achieve. Debts take over your mind and what might have been becomes an obsession as does the "why did I do that?"

I’m looking for a job. I need work , any type of work will do. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by the size of our debts and by the amounts of people who depend on us for something. Or so we think. But people move on when they know there’s not much there,

That’s why I’m writing now. In the hopes that I could sell what I put on paper and maybe move closer towards the ultimate goal. Does this qualify as whoring myself or actually doing something to survive?

How much are words and thoughts worth if anything? Can I actually feed myself with an idea?

You tell me what I need to know so I can better understand what I’m going through. I live in NYC, I live in Washington DC, I live in Santo Domingo. I’ve been to Luxembourg City and Esch Alzette, Paris and Lille, Madrid and Varna and Sofia and Malta, and Holland, I’ve been to New Jersey and Cabarete , Philadelphia and Baltimore, Santiago and San Juan, Moca and La vega, Punta Rucia and Barahona and La Romana and Higuey and Samana and Sabana De la Mar, Port au Prince, and Jimani, San Jose de Ocoa, …. So what.. it doesn’t change who I am, or what I owe or what I have… It just conditions my soul with its beauty or its ugly head.

Where do I take it from there? What do I take from each one? Maybe if we concentrate on living simply and as austerely as possible we wouldn’t run into so much trouble in life. But that’s the problem. We want it all, now, right away, yesterday. That’s why we start to drown and get desperate. That’s why the emptiness takes over our souls and we forget our dreams, and get lost in liquor and sitcoms and parties… we fuck absentmindedly, barely getting erections, women fake orgasm and barely lubricate. Everyone is numb with debt. Problems. Nuisances. Distractions. Nobody seems to be moving in the direction they want to. Even those who seem to have all the little things are unsatisfied with what they have. What could I possibly want apart from peace of mind?

I know this… I want the bare essentials, the bare necessities.. There’s so much we can do without… but we have to work hard at controlling our impulses, our urges to get the latest this or the latest that.

Money = hours of our lives that we spend working … and those who have a lot of money have usually stockpiled the hours of work of others.

It’s a crazy notion, but we sell a part of our day so that we can live the other part as we choose. But it doesn’t always work out that way and we wind up becoming our jobs.

I can’t say that I’m crazy about the way things work in the real world, but that’s the way they are. There’s no way around it. You can’t really do much to change it.

I’m pissed off, that much I can say. I’m pissed off for not having the guts to stand up for my dream, for not having the guts to do what it takes, for not caring, or for caring too much for things that don’t really matter. I’m pissed off at myself and I’m pissed off at the world, cause It’s made things so strange and so difficult, and I’ve let things become strange and difficult.

We’ve had chances. Opportunity has knocked favorably our way, but we haven’t known how to answer its call.

We often wonder if it will come again and waste so much time waiting, that when it actually comes, we miss its call.

So what will we do? Where will we go? Who will we follow? When will we fold?

I look out the window of the amtrak train that races towards Washington dc. I love dc, I love the monuments and the faux Parisian feel.. but I don’t really know the city. Not the way I know NY and I don’t really know NY, Although I have a strange love affair with it.

I Love 57th St. That is a beautiful street. I love how it feels. I could walk it east to west and west to east, From the Hudson to the East River. It’s just a wonderful street. A street where you’ll be walking and you could by chance have seen Andy Warhol or Michael Caine or simply a bum begging for change at the corner of Tiffany’s at around 10:30 P.M. It’s all part of the city, and I belong to that NY. It belongs to me too.

You see NY and you think, "I can overcome anything here If I am willing to work hard, If I’m willing to make things happen" I’m willing. I want to. I can.

Fears must be overcome, temptations must be swatted aside. We can handle many things. We can take on hypocrisy and mediocrity and rise up to the challenge of facing the stakes.

We can be one with our inner being. we can speak to ourselves in reassurance.

I am not a fool. I am not a gold digger. I’m not a fatalist. I am not nihilistic.

"Care to join me for a drink" Pour the wine my friend, just let it flow, wonderful red wine, giver of life, giver of power, wonderful red, red wine.

Wine of life, wine of love, wine of power. We want to taste them all.

We can have them all. We don’t need them. We just want them.

Jump aside, take a sip, and stare at yourself in the mirror. You will become one with your being, one with your shadow, one with your soul and an enemy of your past.

You blame your past for everything.

You think of reviews and interviews and you give yourself 4 stars, or two thumbs up, or you send your self to the firing squad and you take a bullet for your inhumanity.

We get psychoanalyzed, and hypnotized by wide eyes of despair and then we fall into the trap. We are victims of our own foolishness. We are our worst enemy. We defeat ourselves before we start to run. We vacate our mind of all pleasant thought and fill it up with bullshit. We stare into deep space, stare far, far away… and we find nothing. We are trying to forget the fight, the struggle , but if faces us every morning.

There’s no center to this. There’s no out clause. It’s just the way it is.

It could be better.

It could be the way you idealized it when you would stare out the window in fifth grade instead of a train’s window. How you thought you could change the world, make a difference, be the top of the list in anything.

Where does it all go wrong? When do we lose the faith?

Why do I feel so hollow and shallow?

Is it my fault that I am mediocre? Probably. Do I choose to be mediocre? Probably. Could I do better if I actually wanted to? Probably. I want to do better, I can do better, I will do better.

Those are the words you should be saying to yourself as you wait at the drive through window of a taco bell while you fumble with the car radio and tune in to some mindless talk show arguing the latest condition of our defense situation or the latest super jock to get gazillions for his wonderful speed and grace on a field of dreams, and you wish, just once, that you knew what the fuck you really want to do with your life.

Do any of us really know the answer to that question? How many of us actually do what we want with our lives? We set out on a path and then things just start to unfold before us, and sometimes we are so not prepared that it just sucks. We are losers before the starting gun is fired.

We never see the finish line.

We are not trendsetters, or go-getters, we are get in betweens or in the way of, and we become second rate nobodies vying for small wages to subsidize the hopes of our siblings or children, and salvage what we can of our family name.

We are all fuck-ups. There’s no way around that. There’s nothing better to do than just sit and wait for something to happen and you know nothing will.

The illusion is held tightly, we fake ourselves out. We know nothing will happen. The illusion must be up-held.

Victims of reality, that’s what we are. Victims of our super duper bullshit existence. Why not end it all? Well, then you’d never know, would you, if you could have made it. So much beauty about us, so much ugliness too. So much passion and violence, and so much nothingness. How can all this exist at the same time? How can we champion causes we don’t believe in, like ourselves?

I don’t believe in myself because I think it’s selfish and self centered to do so, yet we have to believe in ourselves in order to take the necessary steps towards achieving anything.

If not, how else can we manage to stay complete. I get on a subway train in NY and feel the rumble, see the stares, flash the glare and bait the snare.

Listen to the rhythm of the cars, feel the gentle rattle of the steel. Sudden shocks, sudden screech, sudden stop.

Bare it all, let it out. Its cathartic. It’s shameful. We want to forget but we can’t let go. How original can I be in this mess of multimedia hype. How influenced are my thoguhts by what I see, hear or do?

I’m not a blank slate, don’t know that I ever was.

I’m not programmed either but I find myself mumbling mindless gibberish I’ve picked up watching television, too much television. Or reading to many crappy novels that have nothing to offer to my mere existence except cheap entertainment and sometimes not even that.

How much entertainment do we need in this society?

That’s all we’re based on. Cheap, entertaining distractions.

Everything is a distraction. From church to fried chicken.

How much of anything that we do is absolutely essential to our existence?

I don’t have a formula. All I know is that we’ve lost our way. Somehow, our bearings are misleading us. Our compass is all wrong, maybe morally, definitely in ideas.

So watch out world. Cause we are all of course. That’s bad.

I believe I’m lost. I’ve been lost for a while now. Hand me a rope and pull me back in cause I don’t know where the tides are taking me. I have no escape hatch, I have no emergency parachute. If I fall, it’ ll be one hard fall.

Nothing can change any of that. There’s no way to escape the sensation of not knowing which way to go or which road to take.

Get it together man, you know you have a lot to offer the world.

What will the world give you in return? A chance to rumble and ramble freely throughout its sphere of influence.

The world all over. My world.

My world is different from your world. My world are my needs and wants, my desires and fears, my rules and my inhibitions.

I make my world. I decide what I will obey in my world, I decide which course to take in my world.

I Have to accept that. I own my destiny. I am where I am cause my decisions in life have put me there. It’s not all beyond my influence. A little bit, yes, perhaps, but I have the last say in what I do, no one else.

So ultimately, the decision to do anything falls on my shoulders.

Do I want to sell coconuts for a living like that little old lady in Moca? That’s what she did to move her family forward, willing to do anything that seemed like honest work.

Why do we depend so much on honesty? Not everyone is honest, we are fooled everyday by friends, relatives and strangers who at first glance seem honest and sincere about anything they want to do and anything they want to do for you. You tell me what honesty is. I don’t know. I don’t know how much is too honest or how much is too little.

I don’t know if am honest or just pretend to be.

How can you tell?

Aren’t we our worst enemy?

Is it any wonder that there are so many drugs, legal and illegal, out there. From alcohol to pain killers. Food. Lots of sugar.

Yeah, we want to be numb. We don’t want to be aware of our shitty existence,

we don’t want to deal with all the crap. We don’t need that. What the fuck for??

I have my uptown memories. Distant memories of childhood in uptown manhattan. Of subway tunnels, and cold winter nights, of long walks and big dreams. That first kiss, that first cigarette drag and all the stupid shit that you do when you’re young and you think you’re gonna live forever.

Yeah, I remember the beer, some girls, the concerts, the books, the friends, the peers and adults, and the weirdness of it all. The drugs were always there, to be touched by some and ignored by others. I Chose to drink. May be for fear of becoming a slave to anything.

Memories of school and high school and getting beat up and being embarrased by my friends. Music. Guitars. Noise.