Summer is road construction season and all over the city streets are being gouged into ragged trenches by day. At night the holes are covered by huge steel plates so traffic can resume and the plates have burned onto their surfaces their company name, cauterized by arc welding into wormy ropy letters.

Near my house the plates say "Amor Co." of which I like the idea, a company whose business is producing love, as though that were even possible and I am amused at how far steel plates are from even being a start to that endeavor. At sunset the fading sun picks the letters out brilliantly and they glow silver against the tarred filthy surface and I would like to take a picture but that would mean standing in the middle of Fulton Street at the tail end of rush hour, squatting, standing, stretching, working the angles for the shot and that is probably not going to happen.

Near my gym the plates say simply "Halcyon" and I love this, of course, and wish for the strength to pick the plates up and find underneath exactly what the promise is, as I do read that as a promise if not iron-clad, then steel-clad for sure. I did try to shoot this, craning through an overcast day for the light to materialize the image, traffic burping past my legs, gravel splatter, but finally failure.

The past few days have left me with an accretion of phrases I am not sure how to digest.

The phrase in the picture I came across on a walk in Brooklyn. I keep waiting for the fade to black, the Ad Council logo, the public service announcement: this message brought to you by....who?

On the train a girl is wearing one of those charity bracelets, a takoff of "Live Strong." This one says "Think Autism" and I want to laugh like crazy at just how, well, wrong, that seems.

Another girl on the train is in full hood style bling of cheap flimsy chains, big earrings. A huge nameplate necklace and I am squinting at its florid script. "Panty Raiders" I just don't get it.

The boy on the train in front of me in hip hop regalia. He is wearing a long shirt and to emphasize the hem falling below his rump, there is elaborate gothic script along the bottom. The font is so embellished I can't make it out. I think I can read it, but it can't possibly say what I think it does, but I hope it does, because that would be awesome: Eat Vegetables.

Jabber jabber jabber, my friend and I are on the train and I notice the woman across the aisle looking at me and she has a pad, like the pad I carry with me, and her pen is moving across the page. I think she is drawing me. I have seen this before on the trains, a furtive artist stealing glances and stealing images, quickly before the subject catches on or moves. I think it is invasive, rude somehow, even though I know that I observe and document too. Maybe it is the particular parsing of ones physicality that seems unfairly brutal to me. I wonder if, like some artists, she will give me the sketch when she is done, a sort of payment for unwitting modeling services.

She looks at me again, flips a page and I see that she is not drawing, she is writing, quickly, voluminously. Now I am really curious. My friend and I are having an old argument, one we have had so many times, and I was irritated and bored, edging on nasty and dismissive. I look at people on the subway every day, and now I wonder how I look to her, I think it won't be very nice at all.

My friend gets off at his stop, and without our conversation to distract me now I am thinking about the writer across the aisle. Do I dare to break the anonymity, the unwritten social contract, the peculiar rules of operation of this city? There are business cards in my purse. I take one out, write on the back a directive, an urgency: send me what you are writing. I put it back in my bag, on the top, ready. Do I dare? At my stop, I flip it into her lap, and slip out the doors as they are closing. Now we see what happens.

I saw him again on the train. The boy with the improbably, oddly, beautiful face. There are many people between us and he is tall, so his face seems to hover over all like an awkward angel.

Again his eyes are closed and I can indulge in looking at him, the impossible lushness of his eyelashes, his eyelids slightly lavendared by the blood beating beneath his thin skin, his wide mouth traveling from one side of his face to the other.

Absorbing his planes and angles I get an enormous rush of desire for possession. I want to keep that face. I wonder if, armed with a real camera, I would ask to shoot him, right there, as he is, eyes closed, sealed tight and so lovely.

I have been kicking my own ass, quite literally. There are bruises all up and down the back of my left thigh. I know where they come from, they come from my own sneakers.

Five days a week I carry my sneakers with me wherever I go, because my day will end with a run. My shoulder bag is not big enough for all my running gear, so I tie the laces together and hang my sneakers off the back strap of the bag. They dangle there, swinging back and forth, whacking me on the back of the leg.

I didn’t really notice this until this week. In the subway station I have a funk groove with full horn section blaring in my ears and I am stalking down the long platform like a sleek caged zoo animal. All my muscles feel strong, elongated, and I am thrilled with sensation of physical competence, elegance. And I am probably too conceited, wearing my sneakers on the outside of my bag like a proud badge of athleticism, slinking around like god’s own wonderful creation, and I realize that whack whack whack on my leg as I groove actually, really, hurts. Kinda a lot. Later I look, and for sure, I have days’ worth of round bruises from the toes of the shoes kicking my dumb, prideful ass.

My training runs are incredibly intense for this month, and after finishing, I barely have two brain cells to rub together, never mind words, and so the paucity of posting here. I won’t bore with all the numbers, ratios, extrapolations, pacing, but so far, it is going very well. I kick (my own) ass!

I promised an update on the photography project I was asked to do, documenting the graffiti of what I think of as the Subject Bar.

I visited the Subject Bar for the first time over the weekend. There had been an incident the night before, an unruly customer, an ejection, broken glass. The door was being repaired while I was there, so I climbed through an open window to enter.

As I feared, it is quite dark, and so I am going to have to use auxiliary light and fake my own aesthetic, which comes mostly by trying to negotiate the circumstances of available light. Weird, to be asked to imitate one’s self.

With the fine ground powder of glass on the floor, the sleepy start of a bar’s day, the inky interior, the Subject Bar owner is abashed and wants me to come back when there are patrons, life, activity. I am not there to shoot patrons, but what the place looks like with it’s eyes half-closed, when it is quiet and perhaps dreaming.

I go back again tonight, there may be something else here.

More dissolving bicycle.

Another crowded train. I feel his breath on my bare arm, a startling intimacy and I turn my head towards him. He is close enough so I can see the minute hand on his watch, the tiny blond hairs in his eyebrow, the glow of his wedding band. He is golden all over, skin, ring, hair, and unaware of me, our proximity, as he concentrates on an Arabic text.

Twice each week I pass through Little Korea. It doesn’t really register. I know something about China, something about Japan, but Korean culture is opaque to me. So I go past Korean video stores with pictures of unfamiliar movie stars, restaurants with pictures of unknown foods, the Jumbotron with its silent strange advertising, beauty salons offering unfathomable treatments (We give now French!) and all of it is merely on my periphery, nearly invisible.

This week’s trip, the subway is uneventful, so I am a little startled to pop out of the subway to great welling of applause. The plaza in front of the Jumbotron is filled with cheering Koreans wearing red...its the World Cup and Korea is about to take the field, huge shots of the team fill the screen and people on the streets of New York are yelling and clapping. It’s infectious, bunches of Anglos have stopped to watch and I stop too, and suddenly this whole population I have been by-passing becomes visible, vibrant, joyful.

I think about dissolving bicycles.

The place I drop off my laundry has been closed and locked tight. I first noticed this over the weekend when I went to pick up my laundry and found, instead of its usual 24-hour bustle, only a blank rolled-down gate. With no note, no signs of activity, I assumed the worst: one of the cranky crusty ladies had died.

Today, hopeful and desperate for clean clothes, I go by again, and to my great relief, they are open. They are renovating and with the power turned off, the ladies have congregated on the sidewalk. It is all rather festive, chairs out front facing the busy street, grandchildren darting about, no work to be done, just customers like me, “picking up” and they softly hassle and hector me the way they do.

The head of the hen squad leads me inside to find my laundry bag and searching around the darkened interior we chat about the events of the past few days. She is happy to have had a few days off, as her daughter was graduating.

“She been teaching for ten year. Now they want her to be Principal,” she says and she sounds like a version of home to me, North Carolina rural poor.

“You must be so proud!” I say with my mouth full of good teeth, my clean diction.

“This the big one. The Master degree. She call me and told me, ‘Mommy, I got it!’”

“Did you cry?” and I put my finger to the corner of my eye, trace the trail of an invisible tear down my face.

A moment like a held breath, as we look at each other, and both our eyes start to well up. The moment exhales, we gain our composure, we continue on.

A busy street corner Saturday night. This skell is taking advantage of the warm weather, the teeming revelers, by standing at the door of the ATM lobby. He holds the door open, and gosh, I really hate this. For his courtesy, for a mealy mouthed “God bless you” I am supposed to be guilted into giving him money. I did not sign this social contract, and I won’t, either.

I go through the door, but tell him thank you. He importunes me on my way out and I hold my face neutral. It occurs to me that he has probably never used an ATM, knows only that now I have money in my pockets, does not know that I only have $20s, one of which I am most certainly not going to give him. When he gets nothing from me as I exit, the humble, cheerful guise drops away and he snarls “Fuck you!” at my back.

I walk a few doors down, buy flowers for my friend’s birthday. It is that act of grace that I am choosing to spend my resources on, not some random street case. I walk back past him and he has forgotten me already, I am nothing but a mark for his hustle existence, clear enough when he sees the bouquet and says “Hey, are those for me?”

A few steps past him, it registers. I turn back, pluck a flower from the bunch and hand it to him. No words, and I am on my way.

Arranged Marriage
I am puttering around being all nervous. I am nervous enough about marathon training--I keep having morbid fantasies that my hip explodes and with its force I am sent flying through the plate glass gym windows like a helpless rag.

But this nervousness is about selling my little house. I put so much into renovating it, and I swear I am still carrying six pounds of it in my lungs. When she got a top billing on Brownstoner I held my breath against nasty comments. I was counting up how many "first dates" she had. And how many "second dates."

And I realized that if I put this in the context of dating, with all the obstacles, unmet expectations, misalignments and jockeying for position, yeah, of course I am going to be in agony over it.

But then a suitor broke away from the pack. She got asked to meet the parents. And the bride price was settled upon. And now she is engaged. To a doctor, no less! I kvell!

Henry Street, LES 6/6/06

I am really happy about this shot, so I thought I would post it even though I have nothing to say. Then I realized I do have some, uh, well, interesting news and engendered by snaps like this one. I got asked to shoot an East Village dive bar's rather famously nasty and grafittied bathrooms--a sort of portraiture as it were--for display at said bar.

Apparently my work was thought of while the bathrooms were getting their demi-annual hosing down. Well, it's nice to know my aesthetic is so closely aligned with human waste. I'll try to live up to the challenge. Stay tuned for more!

Some Tin Pan Alley lyricist, vintage New York urbanity and elegant cynicism said words that sound like an oak paneled room, a brilliantined head thrown back, cigarette smoke as punctuate in two forceful steams from the nostrils: unrequited love is a bore.

The Lower East Side smells like it has for a hundred years: rust, blood, garbage, fish, human waste. I map my walk every day to avoid thick green-gray puddles festering and stinking against sunken curbstones.

I lean back against a fence and watch the red storefront, red curtains pulled back on a red room and the jazz that leaks its way to me, the insistent driving hands of the drummer, the sax and its player bending and bobbing, a timeless scene.

Me, love, filth, music, the messy wonder of existence -- it is all as it ever has been.

Art School Confidential
I did my short stint in art school, and who didn’t? It was a decent school, founded by the American magical realist Alexander Hogue, but smothered by being in Oklahoma and its ability to draw professors and serious art students.

There were only two students in the school that I would consider had any artistic integrity. Me, of course, and one boy. The boy came from a family he loved and was so well loved by, that he still lived at home, despite abundant cheap housing. His father headed the most prosperous graphic design firm in town, and so the boy’s studies of art were clearly well supported, not only by money but by approval. He had had as many art classes as he wanted before college and it showed, what he could produce technically, with such ease, jaw-dropped me. His works were competent, sophisticated, and I always looked forward to and was envious of what he would show at crits.

In contrast, I had been discharged from my family years prior. I taught myself to draw. I worked nights to scrape together my existence, falling asleep in the hallways with such profundity and clear under-nourishment my professors suspected a drug addiction. There was no support for me, even the professors who talked about my presumed heroin habit did nothing. Crits were a hell of boredom, no praise or even substantive comments for me, uninspired student works punctuated only by the boy’s work, the boy who, in his secure and sucessful orbit, doesn't have to be interested in me and my work.

The annual student art show was selected by an imported, important New York curator. And yes, it had all the breathless expectation you could imagine. The night of the opening they unveil, and everyone finds out at one time what works were chosen, and you dash from wall to wall, looking for who got, who didn’t get, which of yours, or more likely, none of yours. The works are chosen blindly, so there is no favoritism, only the curator’s judgement and I am stunned to discover that fully 10% of the entire show is mine.

I could just about piss myself at the awards ceremony that night. I am finally going to get notice, an accolade for my portfolio, some much needed cash. I am breathless as they make the announcements. One after another, by Department fiat, they go to others, and I understand that is politics, payback, pettiness. Finally, the one, Outstanding Whatever, made solely by the Chairman and surely I will receive it, having more pieces in the show than any other student, including the MFA candidates.

It goes to the boy.

I used to have dreams that he deigned to make love to me. But before he would give me the admittance to his world, the intimacy I desired more than the act of love, I had to submit to being examined closely, every inch of my skin under a magnifying glass, looking for flaws in a humiliating drawn out process, the imminent specter of rejection hanging close throughout, and possibly even pre-determined, this exercise being gleeful sadism on his part, simply because he can and my desire is so overweening, inappropriate, vulnerable.

Today, I cannot even remember his name or even his face.

It’s hot out, humid. But that is not why my hands are damp. It’s because I am nervous.

Email communication is not working, and I must get this done, now. So it is the old-fashioned way, the physical, visceral way--paper, envelope, stamp. I look at the address, my scrawly handwriting, the first pen I could find, purple ink, embarrassingly girly.

The envelope contains a single piece of paper, hastily signed but long considered. It feels so light, but it is so heavy, containing the focus of an urgent charging passion. No wonder just holding it in my hands makes me sweat.

What I ask for with this missive, this single act, is a chance. A chance to have my desire, my commitment, my physical integrity challenged, ruthlessly examined and possibly destroyed.

New York City Marathon. November 5, 2006.

Countdown to this day

Five
Albums I am trying to get through and incise into my head:
Ornette Coleman: This is our Music
New Pornographers: Electric Version
Liz Phair: Whip Smart
Lucinda Williams: Happy Woman Blues
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium

Four
Shots of espresso this morning, sipping in bed. With ice, milk, almond syrup. I realize that this cannot continue. Recently I was out of milk at home and so went to the office uncaffeinated. With my boss out and me at the department’s helm and therefore generally frantic, I went to the office pantry and made myself a quart, yes, a quart, of regular coffee. I need an intervention.

Three
New ripening strawberries on the front stoop. I neglected my French fraises des bois to death earlier this spring. I could hear them mewling and whining, begging me to water them, bring them softly from their cold-storage slumber. But I was too preoccupied. And so now I have Swiss alpine strawberries instead, aspiring on my high stoop which I hope is altitudinous enough for them. I will perhaps know by this weekend, when I anticipate my first taste.

Two
At the inner corner of each eye, the beginning of the tender purple marks of sleep deprivation. This has been two months in the making, and I was wondering when it would happen. I have traded eight hours of sleep for five, quite on accident, or at least certainly not on purpose, my brain, my physical being, like a pair of kittens in a sack, rolling, tumbling, playing, sometimes to my delight, sometimes to my irritation, but always too early in the morning.

One
Dead car battery. Again! Which means one parking ticket today. Again! But why have a car in the city? Because this week I took the top down and drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, under its arches, sparkling water, brilliant sun, warm air. Be jealous. Or at least envious. Or ask me for a ride. I can't say no if you ask for one.