This is how I think. I guess. D:

Reading an old Spanish short story, I came across a phrase which approximated with "streets running with gold." I immediately thought of Winnie the Pooh.

I don't like real honey, but I like the honey Pooh likes. It makes me think of liquid gold. It doesn't ooze so much as slowly puddle and lazily drip from your fingers. It's a warm yellow, which gold really isn't, but it should be. It must taste like mango nectar and lemon sorbet and sweet milk that comes in yellow cartons.

There is a city in Spain called Granada, which means "pomegranate." Pomegranates are permanently linked to this image I have of Persephone, wife of Hades, who has long dark hair and white skin and a sharp chin but the pink cheeks and kind smile of her mother Demeter. When I think of Granada, I think of the underworld. But nowadays when I think of Lord Pluto's kingdom, I think of Granada at night, or at least Granada they way I think it should look, as I have never been there. Granada is mostly how I imagine Europe in general: old ornate buildings with columns and statues, cobble stone streets, well dressed people in dark coats wondering about without much of a rush to get anyone, save one woman with her head down, carefully sculpted curls hiding her face as she dodges around pairs of leisurely chatting men. But a little bit of the city has come to be more like the Spain I know, a Spain which might not be anything like Granada: palm trees and vibrant green birds, fountains bubbling from the middle of chaotic traffic circles, school children huddled on a corner. And all at night and tinged blue, as the Underworld should be.

When I think of New York, a city I've actually visited, I don't think of the normal sites. The first thought isn't a thought at all, but rather a twitch of the nose as I remember the smell of too many people, too many cars, steam drifting up from the subway and something sweet and rotting. Then comes the slap of sunlight and noise as you rise out of the depths of the subway– you're here, you're in Manhattan, no one cares, they just walk by and the day is bright. Then the heat on the sides of the tracks of the subway, someone's sad violin notes drifting down for the stairs, and it's so hot that you're sweating and there's nowhere to sit. And then up again, standing at the to of dirty stairs in a restaurant. The sign promises there's a bathroom down there, but it's dark and the walls are scuffed and there's a mop, and you feel terribly unwelcomed to someone else's basement.

And when I think of these things, I think I should write them down, but then I think of writing artistically, which is different from normal writing. Normal writing is sitting at a desk with a computer, squinting at a thesaurus and googling pictures. Writing artistically is standing in front of a toilet, a glass bottle in each hand and more on the floor around you, making prison wine. From one bottle you pour cigarette smoke, from another vodka, another gasoline. Or maybe you try a sweeter recipe, with vanilla and soapy bath water and mist over mossy rocks. I imagine myself pouring random amounts into this think-basin, clunky headphone over my ears and twisting my hips to an old hip hop song, and then later I will come back with a pitcher and pour my fermented wine onto a blank page.