For the Death of Dustin Essary

Coming Soon

Excerpt:
There’s a picture I found of New York City, marking the last boring page someone read of Sixteen Hands by Homer Croy and then abandoned in a New Jersey thrift store. It was a standard size black and white taken from the vantage point of someone either approaching or departing by way of the Staten Island Ferry, and oddly enough marked on the back with not only the year and date, but the exact time the picture was taken. March 22nd 1964, 3:47PM. So for this reason I remember this photo more because of what I had thought of when I saw it, rather than anything specific to the image itself. And my thoughts first drifted to the year it was taken which was one year before I was born, which was just two years before they had even broke ground on the World Trade Center Towers which accounted for their absence, but still welled up in me a sense of both deadened anger and sadness being aware of the eventual outcome. But these thoughts flashed and disappeared quickly as the specific time of the photo overcame my imagination. Of which I thought to myself of the strangeness of this; at that exact time, 3:47PM on March 22nd 1964, what hidden realities were captured forever within this image? What suspended human animation still existed there? That at that exact moment, what was actually taking place in those buildings and in the streets below and in the minds of the people invested there? Who was dreaming or crying or lying to themselves, or afraid to admit a certain truth about bout their lives, or of their love for someone else, or of the emptiness inside, or even the happiness they felt. Or the clinically depressed; those hidden deep within the mind’s eye, behind a story they constructed without even the luxury of knowing what was wrong, or of the eventual cure that might have saved them. Or the phone that was ringing or the person that was yelling or the rats hunkered down in the garbage on the streets below, or the birds that were hiding together high above it all, nested in a fire escape happily out of reach. Or the useless passive ones with all their hidden made up stories and unsettled debts and ridiculous dreams and inglorious ideas and useless schemes that remain still hidden behind a sad fake and deliberate smile, easily spotted by a bum sprawled out in the ferry terminal who could see right through it all. Or the good people mixed in with their honest heartfelt ambition, still failing, but then believing they succeeded from the ridiculous idea that it all happened for a reason. Or those who might have lost a father or a son or sister or a mother or a friend or even the one they might have loved the most. And take a picture of any city from a distance and you’ll capture forever within it this same essence; behind the original focal point, are all the hidden lyres upon layers of unfathomable richness and denseness of living energy still held in place. And this is what Dustin represents to me now, a still framed visceral moment suspended in my mind of something I can sense much more than I could ever possibly comprehend. A verse once written or a photo once taken, or a life once lived now a reflection of my mortality. February 24th 2011, – 1:22AM