This is a document of time and space.

I have joined the league of bad boys this time. I have never known anyone good. Or anyone perfect. Ever.

Paris is asleep and bibleblack.

Some of them have slept on the floor of my Paris loft. I step over them.

This. Is. The studio I live in where I do my work. My painting. My photography. My video projects.

This, too, is a place they come to do these things.

To have a voice. In many ways, I am my studio. I am my work.

We are usually the voiceless. The inarticulate. You don't really hear from us too often.

We are the bad seeds.

It rained last night and the sidewalks are wet with a shadow's shimmering. The light quivers and soon the sun will make her brief appearance.

From the loft's large panel of windows le Panthéon looms with a gloomy mood that speaks to time and the Rive Gauche. It is, after all, a tomb. Voltair and Dumas are buried there. As are other French writers of the necropolis.

Every single time I look at that place I am reminded that one's time is now.

The Boulevard Saint Germain, rue de Pontaise, rue Lagrange, rue du Cardinal lemaine, rues de Chantiers, and the Jardin des Plantes all help to form a labyrinthine maze of narrow streets and alleys and spectacular if small secrets of seclusion. A place to sit under a tree. A bed of flowers. A patch of perfect grass from which one can soak the sun.

All private. A place of refuge scattered here and there.

You would never find me. I came here to not be found. I have been absorbed by time.

The neighborhood is old yet its heart is young. Schools are everywhere. Young people are everywhere.

It's quite odd that Americans (since I am one) don't get me but the French get me. They especially get my need for privacy and anonymity.

I have been called many things in print. Usually. The devil.

I am Aramis.

Let me tell you a little about him. Dumas made him a musketeer yet Aramis was also a conflicted priest.

Americans do not remember that he had a first name. Rene.

What Aramis held firmly to was friendship.

He was also a man of many names.

My studio is a mess. Even after it's been picked up it's usually a mess of paints and stray canvases and laundry I have not done.

I do not cook.

The brasseries of the 5th arrondissement treat my dog like a queen. An assessment she agrees with. Americans do not take their dogs out to eat. I do.

There are too many Americans out on the streets. There should be a law. Only a few Americans at a time allowed out.

That does not mean moi.

I lie. I never tell anyone where I'm from. I am a mystery.

I have sunglasses, too.

Someone needs to clean up this studio. There's so much going on here. I have to frequently go to the roof to paint.

Tonight is sketch night.

A hush falls when le nude walks across the room.

Such courage. Such bravery. Such a lover who would fill your bed tonight.

Such beauty. Such Art.

To touch. To represent. To symbolize. To live with.

A ruthless, horrible beauty.

As is the awe we breathe like dust.

I have been up all night again in the dark room developing photographs. I wonder if there will even be a future. Maybe. Maybe not.

Some nights bands arrive and the night is loud.

For the next hour Paris will be as quiet as a crypt.

I have this secret.

Some of the boys who work on their Art here are the literally disposable.

Bad boys. We arrive here from places where there is no Art and never will be.

With bad things in bad blood on bad days of moving shadows.

We are a virus eating ourselves alive from the inside out.

I do not know much. There are many, many things I just don't know, and some of them are things I do not want to know.

I know this: here comes the sun.