Three Decades At Veselka's

At this restaurant I wrote a huge book of miserable poetry, sat at a rickety old table with a milkshake and begged the ex-girlfriend of the artist I was crazy for to explain to me the secret of loving him, stared at the mural artist for decades wondering when he was going to put me in his pictures, and spent years at 3am in the morning staring into coffee and tea cups wondering if art and love was worth it because it all hurt too damn much.

But now billions of minutes later, here a new year, a different medium, an unfolding life that says yes art and love are still worth the effort I invite Joel to try the borscht I needed to eat before I performed, and so I ate that borscht for 10 years, night after night after night.

Joel, in turn shows me new pictures of his new love and the places they visited I have only seen on TV and we machine-gun rapid ideas and concepts and feedback and then even more ideas. We both have our cameras out and snap furiously at each other. And thirty years later love and art are still on the table.