Israfel Sivad's Blog, page 10

My Grandmother Always Told Me My Aura Was Indigo

Last week, a friend of Cora’s read our auras for us from the backseat of Cora’s car. She told Cora hers was deep red. Mine was emerald green. “I just see people as colors,” Cora’s friend told us. As a child, my grandmother always told me my aura was indigo. The last time a psychic tried to see it, she’d told me it was non-existent, black. At that point in time, I was practically on the streets in Brooklyn, high as the stratosphere most days and blacked out like a winter sky most nights. At Co...

As the City Lights Burned the Nighttime Sky Bright

I stabilized while smoking cigarettes on the porch of a halfway house in October, 2009. I knew I had a job. I was laying brick patios for $8.50 an hour, but I was supposed to be teaching an “Intro to Critical Thinking” course at a small college in Northern New Jersey. Somehow, the school year had already started, and I was still in Richmond, Virginia. I’d been through all this before, but this was the worst it had ever been.

My nights were spent sleepless on top of my bed sheets in my single...

The Values I Embrace Today

Yesterday was Easter, and since Cora’s still at that festival in the California desert, I went over alone to a friend’s place for brunch. Luc was there, too. It’s his old apartment, the last one he lived in before moving out to Anacostia. He didn’t bring Leah, his most recent love interest, though. He still thinks their burgeoning relationship is a bit too fresh to subject her to his friends. After we ate, Luc and I were sitting at a table Luc made by hand when he first moved into that place...

Why I Didn’t Get a PhD…

Figuring out why I didn’t get a PhD, why I’m not a philosophy professor today instead of a copywriter, is an intricate problem. To tell the truth, I don’t even think I can give you a decent approximation of the reason. It’s much like when my dad was alive, if you’d asked him to tell you why he left my mom… But I know when I first started thinking my graduate school career may be coming to an end.

I’d been waiting nearly two weeks to hear back from my department. At this particular school, in...

Work or Riot?

“So what you’re telling me, Gabriel, is you’re an artist in your mid-thirties with two master’s degrees, and you don’t make enough money to live on. Now, how does that make you any different from anybody else up there in your neighborhood?”

I was on the phone with James back in Richmond, and from the depths of my loft at the corner of Broadway and Union in Brooklyn, I had to concede his point. James was going through a rough patch back then. He’d been setting some of my poetry to music recent...

What They Call “Normcore” These Days

Luc and I are sitting out on the balcony at work again. The air is full with spring’s tranquil sensation. The day’s overcast but warm. It smells of future rain. Luc’s been telling me more about Leah, the organic hipster girl he met on OkCupid. I’m sure she wouldn’t describe herself that way either. She’s Jewish, never been married and 33, “Which is a little old for me,” Luc jokes, “But we had a great first date. We were supposed to go for a walk over to this garden a friend of hers runs. So I...

1.4

Luc and I are sitting out on the balcony at work again. The air is full with spring’s tranquil sensation. The day’s overcast but warm. It smells of future rain. Luc’s been telling me more about Leah, the organic hipster girl he met on OkCupid. I’m sure she wouldn’t describe herself that way either. She’s Jewish, never been married and 33, “Which is a little old for me,” Luc jokes, “But we had a great first date. We were supposed to go for a walk over to this garden a friend of hers runs. So I...

I’ve Been Living Like This Too Long

Right now, I work as a copywriter in the marketing department of a financial newsletter. Luc’s one of our designers. I don’t know how this happened. That’s what I want to figure out.

I left Brooklyn the last time in April 2012 to move back in with my mom and step-dad in Richmond, Virginia. I was 35 years old, out of money and unemployed. Yet again, I had absolutely no idea what was happening in my life. I’d just completed my second master’s degree, this time in philosophy, and I’d been applyi...

1.3

Right now, I work as a copywriter in the marketing department of a financial newsletter. Luc’s one of our designers. I don’t know how this happened. That’s what I want to figure out.

I left Brooklyn the last time in April 2012 to move back in with my mom and step-dad in Richmond, Virginia. I was 35 years old, out of money and unemployed. Yet again, I had absolutely no idea what was happening in my life. I’d just completed my second master’s degree, this time in philosophy, and I’d been applyi...

Confessions of a Reluctant Hipster

By the time I got to work, this smoldering idea had burst into a full-fledged flame. The whole train ride in – rumbling beneath DC’s monuments, staring through the window at the Pentagon, out past National Airport – it scorched my mind, licked my soul and kindled deep inside my guts. I couldn’t settle into my chair, much less focus on the computer screen’s emptiness before me. There was a marketing message I was to write, but the blank page would have to wait. I emailed Luc on the 4th floor t...