jolie laide

2011-11-26T21:44:00.002-05:00

I came back to New York to give thanks to those who taught me how to live in this city of memories, how to navigate in a landscape of loss and change. That was supposed to be my joy and it would have been enough by itself. Except I took a long walk through my old streets and fell into the beautiful both familiar and new.

The methadone clinic is still there but now also the third horseman of the gentrification apocalypse, a sushi bar. Two guys on the corner are going to war over a beer at 9AM on a Saturday while the morning runners all head towards or from the park. Peppermint balls from the bodega are up to ten cents a piece now, to compete with the store that sells charcuterie and fancy cheese. Across from the post office there's a bar that you could leave without something unpleasant lodged between your ribs.

It still feels like home. It must still be home.

2011-04-10T16:38:00.002-04:00

When the sun is higher in the sky, the yard I am working in will smell like old dog shit. I know this well before the eventuality and I am ready for it. I am doing volunteer work at a house that had been abandoned, a catastrophe of faulty decision-making. The neighbors, or at least the neighborhood dogs, have added to the insult.

When I left my husband this morning, he was sitting up in bed with a large cup of coffee, and a fleet of freckles on his arms. He is thinking about poetry. After my day of uncovering ossified logs of excreta, hauling broken concrete and pulling up weeds he will have become even more Irish. He will have had enough to drink to make him talk about poetry, exclaim his love for me abundantly, and sing without care to old songs on the radio.

When I go to work tomorrow, I will have no way to talk about this. With my dog shit and soggy husband I have drawn a circle around what I would call a lovely weekend. I have no way to translate that weekend, except here.

2011-01-10T20:36:00.002-05:00

Your ex-boyfriend has sent you an e-vite. It's for his comedy troupe. They are doing musical improv in some basement theater near NYU.

In the time it takes for the bus to cross the bridge, the last red tongue of the sun has slipped below the lip of the horizon. Out the opposite side windows the bay is grey and flat, a backdrop for the nodding middle-aged men snoozing their way home.

Your friends send you out of the bar to the snack shack to bring back a fleet of three dollar hot plate tacos. The punk rock girl behind the counter is so alluring, maybe because you are drunk and maybe because she controls access to the toaster oven. I so want to go back to the parts of my life that I loved, but I know it will not be the same. Different man, different taco.

2010-11-16T23:49:00.002-05:00

He is reading on the couch with his feet up. I am reading on a chair with a bowl of soup balanced on my knee. I seem to have landed at the house at the end of my commute and completely missed my home. I don't have much to give, but I would like to give something. I offer to darn the holes in his socks with the noodles from my soup. He declines.

2010-10-24T22:42:00.002-04:00

If you live in Haiti now you can shit your life out in a matter of hours. On the radio, an international relief doctor says this could be avoided simply. People just need to be cleaner, you know, the ones who have been living forgotten in tent cities for nearly a year now.

I normally go dormant on Saturdays, except for the ones where I am still working. And I am still working over the man who came to see me yesterday, unhappy about prior treatment. His story is far away behind his eyes but I can read it still. I would not have wanted to be left alone with him, not without seeing his VA files first.

A gap in the rain today allows me a trip to the grocery store. The parking lot is filled with napping carts and I navigate into a space between them. This store is down at the heels, nearly empty, as always. The lighting is harsh, the wheels are rusty, but I never feel judged here, never feel impatient. Also, the raspberries are three for one again this week.

2010-07-25T15:01:00.002-04:00

The phone rings, a little too late at night for politesse. And so the next day, I am driving north through this impossible, beautiful landscape, welcoming another soul to the Hotel California. There is something about this bluest of skies, this edge of a great continent, this air so sere you are no longer conscience of breathing, that unloosens people. I brought enough food for a few days, enough money for a few days, but I can't do much more than that.

Today the plants outside are making another small offering. The strawberries are coming out like debutantes, one at a time, dazzling and new. The runners are only a year old, so they are giving what they can. I am grateful for that, and for this hillside mooring in this strange place.

2010-07-13T01:13:00.002-04:00

I have been married for 15 months and there have been no funerals. There is a moment in every day when I am grateful for this, usually with my arm over his chest, feeling sleep pull him down in uneven jerks. Going 40 years without feeling love will lie on your bones like that.

I often find myself looking into the face of someone who has made the same mistakes as me, but has been made to pay for every single one. I hope they can feel me, behind my work-appropriate cardigan, my neat fingernails, my suburban lady car. I have built bridges over my steep ravines, but still those dark and slippery banks remain.

2010-06-27T18:17:00.002-04:00

This week I had to admit to a hole in my soul. I don't mind so much as I'm surprised by it. It woke me early every morning, fighting a rising sense of dread.

Also, this week the boy seems to have discovered art. I have been giving impromptu lecture-discussions every morning about whatever he has pulled out of a stack of art history books. It's completely exciting to exercise an old body of knowledge, to suddenly become relevant. It's also surprisingly exhausting.

Someone I know at a distance has spiraled all the way down to homelessness. That this person is my age, and has children too, makes it completely terrifying. It seems like something medication would help a lot, and would also be something that this person has self-mythologized beyond grasping.

I'd like to be more lyrical about everything. I'd like to stitch pieces together to make something beautiful. I think I'll start by making felt out of dryer lint, or making a skirt out of plastic bananas. That would be a start.

2010-06-13T13:23:00.002-04:00

We wake up to a Saturday with no espresso, so we go to the chain coffee joint by the highway. People here aren't better looking than anywhere else, they just seem unaware of their ugliness. The toddler ensconced in an enormous baby buggy and ignored. The lady who has taken all her style cues from Ali McGraw of 40 years ago walks out with three or four pastries and two coffees and by the way she waits, plucking at the clothes that hang from her bones, it looks like impending scarf-and-barf. Only one guy, wide as a door and shambling, seems to be at all comfortable.

I spent a bit of time yesterday remembering the lace of scars that used to cover my skin and the hatred and fear that put them there. They are all healed and gone now, and you would never know unless I told you. It's been a good ten years and I am grateful for the distance.

The lettuces and the herbs are growing nicely. There is even one strawberry reddening in its pot on the deck. This morning gave cool air and a lone woodpecker. I have one day to get ready for what the next five will bring and that will have to be enough.

2010-06-06T14:53:00.001-04:00

Sunday Secret: I knew he was faking it. One time, I noticed that the condom lying in the trash looked--empty. So I checked it, and every time after.

2010-05-27T00:17:00.003-04:00

It has taken us two days to make a set of keys that will unlock the mailbox that has the important documents in it in front of a house 34 miles away. Someone has a wife that requires legal notification, but she's somewhere in a barely developing country, and hasn't been seen for years. A set of numbers has damning consequences for a series of people and they all should have known better but they couldn't help themselves.

I am sitting at my computer looking at the San Mateo County Housing Department when all the hairs stand up on my arms. It's a primal response, not to the website, but the delayed response to what happened earlier. There was no time to feel the horror when the man with black hooks in his ceiling came into the office, he was posturing his demand for attention, and I met him in a room with observation windows for safety. The chip on his shoulder was as big as the bag of legal documents and "evidence" that I did not allow him to show me. He wanted a fight but he didn't get one.

That made me need to take a walk. And when I got back I took a call from a lost soul who had perfected the art of not getting what she wants. Native americans don't use central heating so why should she have to have her house kept up to building codes and she looks white but her grandmother is full blood. Her husband was a black panther and they used their house as a community resource and halfway house for drug addicts, one son was killed and another one DJs anti-violence parties and maybe you'd like to use him sometime. Her daughter has had her child taken away and her godson wants to come up from Fresno to live with them and he has two babies, a two year old and a one year old, but the roof on her house is just tarp in some places and no-one knows how to contact Extreme House Makeover. Who is she talking to again? She has short term memory loss.

I have a lot more than that. And much more day ahead of me. I'm sorry, I have to go.

2010-05-16T17:57:00.002-04:00

It's been a long trip and as soon as she sees me her eyes well up. I hug her, feel her brittle hair, smell the cigarette smoke on her skin. I've got good news for her, but it's the kind of news that will start her on another journey and it's scary and overwhelming.

She tells me her father was a taxi driver in the city for 40 years. He said if they ever got lost, they should head downhill. They would hit water soon enough, and if they couldn't find their way home from there, they deserved to stay lost. I know she has done a lot of hard things in her life, things with no endpoint, things with no clear reward, trying to deserve better than being lost.

What I am about to ask her to do will be the easiest hard thing of her life. But she won't know that until it is over and I get to hug her again.

2010-04-22T00:59:00.002-04:00

I am sitting in her living room on a low sprung couch. I've only met her once or twice and in any other social setting I would not know much about her. But I have read the files, ten years of them. They are thin on details and not well written, but I can see the thumbprints all over them. Of a man who does what he wants to, of a man who likes to dominate women, a bully, a user, a potential for violence like a thundercloud sweeping toward you.

I shift in my seat. In the cramped space between the coffee table and the couch edge I have to lean backwards to re-cross my legs. When I do, I am looking at the ceiling, at the hook there. It's not one of those little white hooks you use to hold the swag for a chandelier. It is substantial, black, iron. It is sunk deep into a beam, it is meant to hold weight. My mind is clouded with what that could be for and trying not to think of what it could be for. I feel cold.

When I leave I go up a quiet side street. I like this neighborhood, it reminds me of Brooklyn. 100 year old houses and lots of street life. With that you get some sketch, and why wouldn't you. The local "Japanese" joint only has sushi from Tuesday til Friday and the corner bar opens at 10AM for beer and sausages, but people still walk places and there is good coffee and good burritos and plenty of good, hardworking people.

I want to keep liking this area of the city. I hope that is what remains tomorrow.

2010-03-12T00:22:00.002-05:00

"Never cut a line you can untie," he tells me, stabbing his watery drink with a straw. That's the piece of longshoreman's wisdom he has for me. We have washed up in a dingy bar on the concrete shores of I-80. I talk too much, that's not unusual.

I stopped at a filling station to get gas before work. The pump top TV is blaring some kind of commercial, but the screen is blank, a reflective black eye. I can see myself in it--Hollywood-sized sunglasses, designer jeans, cashmere sweater, leaning against the silver foreign car. I don't want to believe what I look like.

After three weeks of rain it finally seems like spring. That's a season that passes here in a hot minute. If you aren't nimble about taking the chill wet and clench out of your shoulders it will have peeled out of the parking lot and headed for Oregon, leaving you with ten more months to contemplate brown flanked hills.

Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Kobo Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes" used to be important to me, and I am reminded that it could be time to circle back again.

2010-02-21T20:37:00.002-05:00

I'm sorry. You were expecting me to come home, and what you got was a ghost.

Trauma is a virus. And when we went to the crash site, it was spreading. People were trying to make sense of what they had seen, the horror they had witnessed and they kept repeating their stories, spreading it further and further.

An airplane crashed into an electrical tower and then smashed into the earth. We were there because we had eight families in the area, we wanted to see if there was any assistance we could provide. My colleagues probably thought the best thing they could do was listen, but I watched them get infected with the trauma until it was all I could do to get them out of there.

They will all do better with professional counseling, all of them. I will not talk about what I saw and what I heard because you do not deserve this illness, not even for a short amount of time.

2010-02-12T00:29:00.002-05:00

There is a damp spot on your shoulder. There is an overdraft on your checking account. She is standing in the loading dock smoking a cigarette and watching herself in a pocket mirror. A homeless guy is digging in the garbage for a cup to piss into. Buses are pulling out of the lot at 8th and Folsom, charging downtown in a roaring herd.

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't mean that much. We eat the doughnut and long for the hole.

2010-02-06T12:21:00.002-05:00

A bead of water rolls down the silver steel sink, drops to the black lip of the Insinkerator, and then out of sight. The refrigerator's exhaust fans kicks on. Coffee is cooling in the glass in my hands and I am working both ends of a conversation that has happened before and I suspect nothing very good will come from it.

In 15 minutes I will be at the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. A woman waiting there is wearing rubber boots that come up to her knees. She must be expecting something I don't know about.

2010-02-03T22:53:00.002-05:00

And just like that it's spring. It's stopped raining, the air is clear. One side of the block smells like wild onions, the other of fluffy vanilla narcissus. The neighbors have let their clover go wild and it's a tangle of acid green and furled flowers. One cherry tree can't wait to get on with it and it has blossomed already.

The boy wants to tell me about the oldest survivor of the Crimean War, a tortoise the British took into battle as a mascot. We had an entire evening's adventure around a doorknob. I think it left me more invigorated then did him, but perhaps he knows more now about the secret lives of things we touch every day but do not notice.

I think the faucet is next, and the woodland strawberries.

I'm not sure who to thank for this.

2010-01-31T19:44:00.004-05:00

We have a house for you. It's been completely renovated, everything is new. Twenty feet from the front door is the highway. Twenty feet from the back is the railroad tracks. This is where you will raise your children.

The cancer is gone. The months of radiation are over. The surgeries are over too, and you can live your life now. Both of your breasts are gone, flesh and muscle pared away all the way down to your ribcage.

You established your life in this country, started a family, a successful business. Now you can send for your mother, finally give her peace and comfort. A visit to the doctor says your father gave her a case of syphilis before he died over twenty years ago. Now you won't have much time with her at all.

2010-01-26T22:59:00.002-05:00

It's been raining for days and I can't get warm. I can't help but think about all the relationships that have ended in the workshop, me working the saw, him with stupid hands. A late night email from a man who thought I was unkind but now perhaps kind enough to give him what he wants. Someone who wants advice on antique doors but does not want to wander my neighborhood to find them.

Mostly, I'd rather be me than anyone else I know. But not tonight.

2010-01-14T23:08:00.003-05:00

We are sitting in the senior director's office and I can tell my young colleague is trying not to cry. She pulls her hair across her face, but I can see her ears starting to redden.

My day started with good news from a family I have been trying to guide, but soon enough my ears will be reddening too.

I work late and get off the bus in the dark. I am behind some kid with hipster hair and skinny jeans. He is wearing a black hoodie that says "Hell's KItchen NYC" on the back. I want to do something vicious to him.

12/30/09

2010-01-01T13:10:00.002-05:00

He called yesterday but I did not take the call.

He colored my dreams last night anyway, dreams where there was no sanctuary for me, a time where I lived no where and was not wanted by anyone.

Today he came into the office, his hands held together, like if he held his impending homelessness in front of him it would stay there. I took him into a conference room, sat next to him, touched his arm, and did what I could. Which I know is not enough.

On the bus ride home I could still smell all of the cigarettes he smoked to give him enough spine to talk to me. We pass a dead end street casually guarded by a man and a large fighting dog parked to discourage holiday shoppers and tourists from interfering in whatever business is being transacted down in the shadows of the winter twilight. In a garbage strewn service alley, someone is kneeling with their face to the wall. At the part of town where we dump our poor, the bus idles to stay on its schedule. We are waiting behind the drugstore while a sunburnt frayed specimen dances the edge off his meth fix.

I don't know how to make any of this matter as I am heading for home.

Commuting 12/29/09

2009-12-29T12:26:00.001-05:00

Before he could take my measure, he rolled down the window and started screaming at me. 15 seconds prior, he had rolled his car into the crosswalk, blocking my way across the street as I walked to the morning bus stop. He didn’t like that I told him to move it, that I punctured his sense of self, that I caught him doing wrong.

He called me a little bitch. I’m 5 foot 8 inches tall. I’m 43 years old. My parents gave me a name that could not be diminutized so that no one could ever make me feel small. He did it again. You little bitch. He’s right about the bitch part, because a bitch catches you vulnerable and lets you know it. A bitch looks at your anger and laughs at you. A bitch isn’t scared of you and will look you straight in the face.

Also, a bitch has better things to do than to bother much with you at all. Today there is fog rolling under the bridge, the bare boat masts are rocking in the harbor, flags are half mast along the pier. On the city streets I smile up at the sky. Here, it’s laced with wires for the trams, birds are wheeling and scavenging, and beyond all that is the pale lemon disc of winter sun.

I Wanted to Say Yes

2009-06-13T00:26:00.003-04:00

The doctor examining me asks if there has been a trauma to my eye. He is looking through my pupil, somewhere inside of my head. He sees damage. I'm not surprised.

2009-06-11T15:54:00.003-04:00

The street light filters through long curtains, making the room blue and black. He takes off his clothes. There is a large tattoo covering his lower back. "Use me like a toy," he says. Even though that had been my intention, I no longer want to.

2009-06-07T23:28:00.002-04:00

I have been thinking about how much I love the sound of the local woodpecker, working his way through the telephone pole up the hill.

I have been thinking about how hard this winter will be, waking up before dawn and without the spread of light from across the bay.

I have been thinking about one local idea of glamour, high heels with jeans and French manicures, like hooker-housewives from the 80's.

I have been thinking about my volunteer crew, how eagerly they tore in to their new case files, and how many of them left our last meeting with wet eyes.

I have been thinking about all the remains of past life, all the dormant art curled up in shreds of paper, as I edit down for the move to our next home.

I think a lot. I just don't write.

2009-04-29T11:17:00.003-04:00

There is a guy in the park across the street. He is wearing a black sweatshirt and he is running towards us. He is firing a gun.

The people who were standing next to me have thrown themselves to the ground. The people in front of me are standing as they were, waiting for the community event to start. I have dropped into a crouch and scuttled to put a stack of metal folding chairs between me and the intent to kill.

This is not a dream.

At the event, I am showing a family the house that will be theirs. It is still mostly concrete and studs, and together we are imaging the living room, the bedrooms, the sweep of the famous skyline beyond what will be windows, the view of the park across the street. She can hardly believe it, she still wears 20 years of hard labor as her skin. She turns to me and her eyes are wet. She asks me:

Is this a dream?

2009-04-12T22:24:00.003-04:00

I'm not done watching the sun go down from this particular spot in the world. But the man that owns the house is done, rolling up his family and his failures and heading back to Minnesota, and taking the lease with him.

On the car radio the woman says "I was acting as a bridge" and I come across the boy on his way home from school. He is walking up the hill, his hands full of wild onions.

Tomorrow, I will be married.

2009-03-21T21:14:00.002-04:00

I've lost my guidepost. My commute is 100 miles every day, done only with an eye towards getting there. Halfway through the highway miles just over the left lane marker there has been a dead animal. I've been watching it stiffen and flatten through days of rain, just a brief moment just before a rise. But now it's gone, and I miss it.

On Monday she came into work looking like the time my cat got out and and slept all night under a car in a rain storm. On Tuesday her eyes were rimmed with red. She's young enough and far enough from home that any number of things could be going on. I noticed, but said nothing. On Friday she tells me she needs time off. The symptoms are worse, she needs tests, it could be a brain tumor.

It's spring migration here. Last week it was monarch butterflies, this week swallows. There are calla lilies in the yard and the neighbors down the hill have early roses, but I keep thinking about the woman who sat next to me at a bar last night, with a surgically altered nose, dyed hair, and hands that were older than her face.

2009-02-08T21:55:00.002-05:00

This place will teach you everything you need to know about gray. Not the acidic gray of a Michigan winter. Not the narrowing gray of a Manhattan rain storm. This is expansive, widening, merging sky and water and rocky shoreline, blurring and fusing edges. It looks like the forgotten corner of a Whistler painting, the hazy images in a silvering mirror, a vista that lets you know you should be paying attention but does not care if you do.

That phone call wasn't returned. That email went dead in my in-box. It's because I don't know how to respond, don't know how to swim through my day and come out with any one piece that applies what I have learned with what I am seeing. People here will show their beautiful cloak, whirl around and let you get close to its dancing fringe, but will not let you touch it. I lose patience with the displays of grace or affluence or wellness or whatever currency is held inside the mouth set just so.

I miss my writing. I miss my own voice. Mostly I miss gathering stories instead of miles.

2009-01-29T11:09:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you get a second chance. Sometimes you get your first chance. Sometimes you get a chance you never thought you would have.

I was storming and grating in the bone-yard at the bottom of the hill, and if you were walking on the railroad tracks on the ridge, hopping from tie to tie in the only shoes you thought you deserved, I wouldn't have seen you.

The light is soft here today. It makes lace out of the bridge spanning the bay, blooms the calla lilies in the yard, dissolves edges. If that is the reward for making a woman out of the oubliette, I only want it by half.

2009-01-11T11:15:00.002-05:00

I'm leaving work on time, but already the horizon is pinking and the full moon is well up. On the sidewalk is a man in a waiting posture and he sees I've got a slew of hula hoops slung over my shoulder and waves his hand in a circular motion at me.

The highway on-ramp is slowed by an underpowered overburdened little pick up truck. Its suspension is roached out and it bellies and sways up the slope. A magic song comes on the radio and at the end of this week, finally, satisfaction and a quieting. and I am grateful to have had an enormously rich life. To have shown up for it fully present means I know about The Dog Suit and the Bicycle; Dr. Zaks Pyramid of Doughnuts; The Great Banana Experiment; What You Can See in the X-Ray of a Dog; The How to Curse in Hungarian Thanksgiving DInner. The sun is lowering behind the hills that ring the reservoir and now I'm on my way home.

2008-12-24T13:16:00.002-05:00

In the too-bright restaurant there is a Mexican variety show on the plasma TV. The devil and Gene Simmons are meeting in hell. It is at the end of a day with too many blank spots in it.

These days I find my joy with a pair of tweezers, allocate my patience with the same implement. The parking lot is the most beautiful place at work. The guys from the tool and dye makers across the way take their breaks under a makeshift tin pergola. The ladies who work at the bakery next door emerge from parked cars at the end of lunch as their boyfriends drive away. Sometimes it smells like croissants and I can sit alone on the bumpers in the tandem handicapped parking spaces that noone ever uses.

Someone on the radio is talking about the mechanics of acting. I could dearly use a lesson. I am not nearly as proficient as the people I see every day.

2008-12-10T23:55:00.002-05:00

I am driving an ungainly large car through suburban streets made strange by winter's early nightfall. I am looking for a floppy boy with dark hair. It is a small comfort that I am passing any number of them, just none the one I need to find right now, the one who has again gotten bored, or frustrated, or impatient, and caused himself to disappear. Back at home the smell of simmering green peppers and anger has made me lose my appetite. The heat comes on, and I start to sneeze. My eyes well up and I go to bed early listening to the local stumbling public radio station. If there has been an accord made in the house, I will not learn of it until morning.

2008-11-23T18:49:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was the last day. I expected any number of last-minuters, but there was really no way to prepare for the desperation, the hope, the faith that people are so willing to give me. The woman with the completely blank application and four foster children, the woman with four children and a husband doing a long stretch for possession, the woman with the disabled child and birth records wiped out in Katrina. And questions, hundreds of questions, piling up and swirling all over each other and I am spinning all over the room trying to give the right answer in the best way. There is a moment, as there always is, where I am so overwhelmed with gratitude, with the grace of others, that I cry.

So, here is the money shot: I have already marveled at the birth certificate. Here is Thailand, it is 1938, and the paper is rich and textured, the writing careful and beautiful. It is a time and a place where a birth is still honorable and notable. The certificate is untouched by its 70-year journey into my hands and we handle it so gently as we make the necessary copies. At the end of the process I shake their hands to thank them in a way that the translator by my side does not need to help me with. I shake the grandfathers hand, I shake the sons hand, I shake his wife's hand. When I reach out to the grandmother, she leans towards me. She is holding her infant grandchild in one arm, extending the other to me. As I grasp her hand, I am looking into the babys face, his enormous round eyes, a thick river of clear drool, the open mouth with two tiny teeth. And really, here is everything. I am looking at the reason for everything, right in its tiny wondering face. I don't think I got ten paces away before I felt my own face slip.

2008-11-12T23:36:00.002-05:00

Long after we have gotten up each day, I make the bed. After showers, the brushing of teeth, dressing, the eating of breakfast, I go upstairs, pull the sheets up, fold them back, ready them. When I slide my hands under the pillows to straighten them, they are still warm.

I keep running an image through my head. I went out to get a cheap burrito at lunchtime. At the edge of the Tenderloin, there are a lot of places to get cheap food, but I am only crossing the street. Waiting for the light, I can hear him before I see him, mostly lying on the sidewalk, partially leaning against the wall of the diner. He is howling a broken toothed duet with a passing streeter--Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. By the time I step out of the taqueria with my lunch he has fallen silent. A bundle of worn grimy clothes, one arm thrown up over his face. At the end of that arm is his hand, thick and red from the chill with spalling chelated nails, waving ever so slightly, like a lobster's claw at the bottom of a restaurant tank.

The burrito was good. Only one piece of gristle so tough I had to spit it out.

2008-11-06T11:39:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure how I got here. I mean, I do know exactly how, I was fully awake for all of it. And what I am doing is the most valuable thing I can do in this life. But it keeps bumping around in my head that I have made the transition from someone who makes art to someone who consumes it. It's not like I get to consume it very often, even, and when I do, it is not as enjoyed as when I make it myself.

I live in a place where human interaction doesn't really happen. Peoples cars interact with each other, peoples shiny happy interacts with each other. I work in a place where people think they are good because they do good. It's the laziest kind of self-satisfaction I have ever seen. I haven't met a real person yet, one that if I flipped them over wouldn't reveal their cardboard backing.

In my garden in Brooklyn the new vines have grown over up over the barbed wire. There is a new bakery opening up around the corner. I wonder what it will smell like in the room I used to sleep in, the room with red walls.

2008-10-17T00:59:00.002-04:00

I seem to be allergic to this state. Some of my skin has gone rubbery and hot, like an octopus tossed onto a bed of asphalt. For this, I am taking any number of pills each day. I smell like chemicals and lizards are licking the inside of my skull.

2008-10-11T23:09:00.002-04:00

It may be full of beauty here and the lovers walking together and the tourists with their cameras strapped would be proof that it's true but it's not my kind of beauty and I am left starving for something else. I am too tired to look for more and too full to receive it anyway and the people in front of me are telling me things I don't want to know.

The woman who sits in the ferry seat next to the slot for wheelchair access. She is making an ugly bet that no-one will need the space and she won't have to house her clutter of bags around her ankles. With her naked skin she would like you to think she is gorgeous naturally but I know each one of her eyelashes is fake and the spill of hair down her back is fake too.

This woman is wobbling across the trolley tracks risking her neck with virtiginously high heels. From behind that danger is eclipsed by the fountain of her hair, a stiff spread of radiated halo. I can smell it from 5 feet behind her. She has downgraded to the the $.99/can spray, economic downturn forcing her into Aqua Net territory.

In line at the 7-11 I watch the street worker nodding out standing up at the front of the cash register line. It's an amazing feat, baffling the Sikh guys behind the counter. I'm baffled too. I examine her careful get-up, the matching pink plastic sandals, belt, purse, her arms and legs bared by clothing way too stingy for an overcast day. I can't find the track marks, she has been doing this long enough to get clever but not long enough to get sloppy. It's a fine and awesome balance.

2008-10-05T23:45:00.002-04:00

It hasn't rained here in months. There is a summers worth of urination layered along the side of the building, rich, vile and potent. At the corner someone has vomited orange and chunky onto the crumbling edge of the faded movie palace. A few doorsteps down a streeter is listing slowly to the ground. He got the pick of the used men's clothes from his shelter this morning, a good pair of suit pants, a good pair of dress shoes. He has no socks and is talking into a cellphone which may or may not be a geniusly elaborate pantomime. I am waiting at the corner for the light to turn when an ambulance comes screaming the wrong way down Market Street. The subject of that attention is standing in front of my building, supported by two policemen and I am relieved that there is no blood, no yelling, and by the time I get a large half-caf coffee with skim milk from the open air stand, he has been bundled away. DIstance from parking garage to office: one block.

All Staff Retreat

2008-09-28T22:48:00.003-04:00

It's way past my bedtime and the poker game is still going on. The construction crew has drunk all my scotch. A jovial slab of pink-cheeked Ohio Irish has outbluffed a skillet-faced hatchet from Michigan. I am standing with a man from a farm in the southwest. He wonders how he got here. I know my route has had more turns than my grandmother's spinning wheel, but I know exactly where I am.

2008-09-16T00:17:00.003-04:00

This book is making me remember. About the man I used to date, who would crack my back by coming up behind me and squeezing me. Hard. So hard that once he burst blood vessels in my eye. About the time I got into the car with the man I was married to. There was a greasy film on the inside of the windshield. "Don't let your girlfriend smoke in the car anymore, okay?" I'm sure I could not keep the weariness out of my voice. About the men I was in love with previously, a bookend pair of blond, casual, wealthy, and insurance that we would always be playing out an F. Scott Fitzgerald of class desire with me in the soon-forgotten role of the girl who arrived at the party with the wrong shoes.

I bought the book today at the bookstore that always feels horribly barren, not much better than an airport magazine shop shoehorned between the coffee and tired pastry stand and the place that sells whatever-city-you-are-in sweatshirts and snowglobes for those who have just realized there might be value in leaving, even if value is only a 50/50 poly blend t-shirt in the size your child was the last time you thought you knew. Even if I didn't already know this bookstore is about shopping for a lifestyle, as opposed to looking for a treasured friend, that would have been borne out in the row of cash registers, a line of eight, with only one lonely skinny college boy, shuffling from foot to foot. Still, I have to work my way through a colon lined with specialty chocolates and pocket sized cat calendars to make my purchase. On my way out I can't help but notice the soaring syrupy string rendition of "Ave Maria" as I pass the Help Desk. It's prominently located and I have to give them props for understanding how helpless their customer base is. On cue, she walks up, 45 years of sun damage and so many varicose veins her skin looks like Silly Putty left on a cheese grater. With her white terry cloth sun visor acting as muse she demands, "Do you have any Rachel Ray cookbooks? On sale?"

I'll read for the rest of the night. Tomorrow, I start working again.

2008-09-10T14:14:00.002-04:00

I'm in the kitchen of a community room in yet another worn down neighborhood. It smells like all community room kitchens, like transit terminal grade disinfectant and elementary school grade bologna. I have the job offer tucked into my bag.

I haven't accepted the job yet, but by being here tonight, I have accepted a responsibility. This night is the first public meeting for trying to give away a public benefit to a population both bitten and hungry. I've been in this position before, and it's hard not to look like Marie Antoinette with a basket of petit fours.

Towards the end of the evening, I stand beyond the exit. I can see their faces as they leave the meeting. When I let them know I am a resource for them, they tell me the stories they need to say, don't want to say. The impending divorce. The financial mistakes. The illegal housing. One man lets me know he is a stranger to this country, and is afraid to live amongst people not his own. Him I cannot help. He will have to eat cake.

2008-09-02T19:52:00.002-04:00

There is a jam up at the off ramp and when I finally creep up past the blockage, it is two people pushing a car. The car is shiny new, too new to be broken down. The people are very young, young enough to play chicken with a gas gauge on the highway.

At the book store I am a training opportunity. It's the first back-to-school day in September, and three new empty-nesters stand behind the counter in their twin sets. This is clearly their first user experience with a cash register and as they bend their blondedness to the task, I'll bet none of them last past the shock of their first paycheck.

Another on-ramp and I am looking at a Montana license plate. Don't think I've ever seen one before. I would imagine that's because there are just not a lot of them, and this one is making up for it, jammed with images of mountains, the state bird, state flower, a tree. It's stuck to the bumper of a rusting honest pick up truck, and the way it hiccups up the grade I can tell it's a manual transmission.

The man at the loading bay at the Goodwill knows me now enough ask me why I am giving away such good stuff. I laugh and tell him that's what happens when you get married at 40--you have three of everything. It's the easiest way I can describe it, as I am not married. I'm not 40, either.

2008-08-29T18:07:00.003-04:00

Every day I set little secret goals for myself. I don't tell anyone what they are. Partly because they are boring as dirt, partly because if I don't get them accomplished I will feel incredibly inept. Weeks of getting settled in have turned into months, and it's not an unsubstantial task of sifting, melding, sorting, discarding, replacing. Watching people as they sit or sprawl or offload bags or pile papers, so I can set up systems that maintain some kind of order while accommodating how people move through space, what their natural order is.

I had a boyfriend once who was a son of wealth, wildly creatively talented, and disgustingly messy. One time, he called me "tidy" and even though he might have been admiring the difference in our operations, I felt slapped, like he had said I was small-minded or petty or stupid. It took me a very long time to realize that I set a neat daily framework not to ward off chaos, but to be able to let it strike as it would. Any number of unexpected things could happen in the exterior world, things delightful or distressing, and I would be able to accept or deflect them because uncertainty and crisis points were not coming from me. Example: if I get stuck in a subway tunnel until after the laundry store closes, it's ok, because either I didn't wait so long to take my laundry in that I am out of socks or because I picked a laundry place that is open early in the morning and it only takes 4 minutes to walk out and get my stuff in the a.m. That's a lot of thinking about a system for getting your clean underwear, but once it's done, you don't ever have to think about it again. In my world, that's what makes for artistic freedom.

Still, sometimes, I feel terribly bourgeoise with my little accomplishments: ordering a couch; getting all of the recycling and garbage from the last move picked up; taking a load of surplus to Goodwill; unpacking a box. I know that taking care in setting up this household will pay off in any number of ways once I start back to work, but right now it feels so small.

2008-08-27T22:36:00.004-04:00

This book is not doing it for me. Written 10 years after the last set of bank failures and housing slumps and 10 years before this round of same, I thought it might be either amusingly prescient or hilariously pious. Look, if this art history major knows where you, world macro economics guy, are going 15 pages before you get there, it's just a sad day. Or I'm a genius. OK, which I am, but I expect you to be geniuser.

I surely am putting all my mighty brain power to good use. Today, I was overwhelmingly frustrated at the princess parking brigade at the grocery store. I called someone a bitch out loud in the parking lot, not that she could hear me, hermetically sealed in her SUV. There were two parking spaces available but she had to wait for the one that would make sure she and her slumping spawn would be 8 feet closer to the store. One of the other Mercedes princesses got so upset at the hold up she actually honked her car horn. Same scene again at the donation bay at the Goodwill. I cannot figure out how these women get to be about the size, shape and flavor of a tongue depressor. They are so insubstantial they disappear when they turn sideways. Really, how do 2 dimensional people even get a drivers license?

So I need a new book. I've had half of my evening drink and put a Zyrtec on top of that and I am fuzzy at the edges. Life after 40 is a festival of awesomeness. Woozing over to the bookcase I think I have my antidote "Thinking Insects." Oh, that looks interesting. Except it's one of the man's geek books "Thinking in Sets." I guess I'll just sit here and suck on my brain for a while.

2008-08-23T18:04:00.002-04:00

I've got the attention span of a gnat on crack today. My face is cleaned but my teeth aren't. The dishes are half done, a box in the bedroom is half unpacked, half of a recycling project is completed. Maybe I should just unload something.

I have been thinking about Michael Allen's first day of high school as a freshman. I stole his lunch. Stealing is perhaps not the right term, as is connotes a sneakiness and a wrongness. I simply expropriated it, in front of his and my friends, by sliding it along the table where it was resting, and onto my lap. "Hey! That belongs to Mike the Indian Guy! You can't do that!" Sure I can. It's my first day at this school too, but I'm a junior. I'm a bigger, barelegged dirt girl coming off a six month stint in foster care. That ended when my mother called, crying, begging me back home, telling me she was on a new medication and that "it won't happen again."

When I look into Mike the Indian Guy's lunch bag and see his neatly wrapped sandwich, a little box labelled Dinosaur Egg, his special treat for his first big day at the big school, I know I have swiped the right lunch. His mother loves him. There will be more food for him when he gets home. His lunch will be packed for him again tomorrow, and the next day, and there probably won't even be any screaming involved. So I don't mind at all practicing my petty Marxism on him, everybody gets according to their need, and my need is greater.

I am thinking about this because I have been packing the boy's lunch for his first days at his new high school. I want to make sure he has enough to eat, that it's what he likes to eat, that it will take care of him without making him look over-protected, or attracting the attention of girls like I was. I don't want him to meet a girl like me. I don't want him to know about that kind of life, not yet, at least.

2008-08-17T13:55:00.002-04:00

It's dark out and I am watching the lights of the cars on the bridge. I am thinking about the times my father beat me. It was not often, but notable in the suddenness, the viciousness. The boy comes into the room, wobbling an arc on his way to the back balcony. I show him the fog pouring over the the shoulder of the mountain, how it moves in front of the full moon.

Today is the New York Times fall fashion magazine. There are 94 pages of ads before you even get to the index of articles. The regular Sunday Style section has pictures of handbags, and more handbags, and a article about a woman who is spending a year of her life trying to live by Oprah Winfrey's tenets. How to dress, how to resolve fights with her husband, what products to use to dye her hair. A photo accompanying the piece is a coffee mug with an Oprah quote on it "live your own dream."

I don't know how to sew these things together. I am not sure what is relevant . Here is classic beauty and contemporary blindness like two shades occluding each other. I don't know what to make of it.

2008-08-15T16:15:00.002-04:00

What I like about living on the side of a high hill is the community cooperation needed for anyone who lives here to get home. The road is snaky, with five blind curves between the bottom of the hill and our driveway, and in some places not much more than one lane wide. Or it could be as generous as a lane and a half, with little niches carved out of the hills flanks for additional parking. In most places there is no guardrail, so a miscalculation could send you tumbling down a steep slope into someone's yard, or more likely, into their hot tub and outdoor fireplace. So this means if you are coming up the hill and someone is coming down at the same time, you both have to figure out who is going to pull over onto the not-really-a-shoulder so one of you can creep by, or back up to the last little side niche you can remember passing. It's a small collaborative effort that I rather enjoy and appreciate the good-natured eye contact and hand wave that goes with it.

That makes the people who refuse to engage in this politesse stand out rather starkly. Occasionally someone will barrel past, forcing you to stop short or cut over hard. In my experience to date they have always been women. They drive cars that look like mine, slick, foreign made, silver (because white is too princessy, black is too mafia, and red is too LA). But they don't look like me. They are all pale-skinned, sheltered indoor creatures and blonded and sporting enormous glamour sunglasses. They look like those albino cave fish, driving blindly with huge blank eyes, unaware of their freakishness.

2008-08-12T21:17:00.002-04:00

This morning he pulls his arm over me and it is rough where he was a good father, fighting thorns to pull down more blackberries. I've left the door to the deck open all night and now fog is rolling over the eaves. The air is so chill I can feel the warmth rising from his arm. He smells good. I make a point to tell him this. In some ways, it's more important than telling him I love him.

The day is fading now and I would like to do something today other than spend money. So I rearrange garbage, compact recycling, boxes and wrappings from other days of spending money. I like to rustle around out in the carport at this time of day. This time of day my favorite neighbors come out, the deer that emerge to go up the slopes to forage, the buck that sits with his neck braced under his crown of antlers and works his cud with surety. I look down the side of the property line, the path they like to mosey up to the road. They are not there, but a new nest of beer cans is.

San Francisco, CA

2008-07-21T20:59:00.003-04:00

The public radio station here is not so good. There is the announcer with the right stentorian voice, but his ad-libbing is awful. The one with an interesting voice and nice personality who cannot read the news without copious flubs. And it will take some time before I get used to traffic reports done in hushed, serious NPR tones. Especially when traffic issues in Tinytown tend to be appropriately tiny--slowdowns caused by debris in the road, and I imagine all these we're-all-free-and-western drivers barreling around with unsecured loads in their pickups. I particularly like that the station will tell you what it is--traffic is slowing down near Vallejo due to plastic buckets in the road. Or lawn chairs. Or cabbages. Today it is stuffed monkeys.

Denver, Colorado

2008-07-14T21:26:00.002-04:00

I am wrestling two large cups of coffee into the elevator, sugar and spoons and other accoutrement threatening to spill out of my pockets at each step. He offers his assistance, but I eschew it, out of years of suspicious living, say I can handle it. "Like an 8 year old with chocolate milk!" he says, and his gentleness surprises me. I wish I had let him help.

Grand Junction, Colorado

2008-07-09T00:55:00.002-04:00

I am looking at a sliver of the Rocky Mountains. The view is notched between two tanker cars, across a field of railroad tracks. I am standing at the end of the platform. I had been walking alone, but here comes the circus now.

Carson City, Nevada

2008-07-07T23:05:00.001-04:00

It's high, dry and stony. People get used up fast here.

2008-06-09T23:52:00.000-04:00

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2008-06-09T20:36:00.004-04:00

at some point today i realize i am numb. it could be the spike in temperature. the bedroom, with it's evening sun, didn't cool down much at all. rolling through the night i wake to find our skin stuck together. i know he hates to be hot, so i'd like to move away. but i'm not sure if putting space between us would be absorbed into a vulnerable unconsciousness as abandonment, so i lay awake, breathing like a lizard, trying not to move. in the morning i feel like i am missing half my spine, like my legs are filled with pea gravel.

or it could be the time spent at the soul suck of the car dealership waiting room. mr oh so enlightened birkenstock is trying not to look at my tits because that would be un-zen of him. he is replaced by a pair of biddies, exchanging getting to know you stories, common interests beyond toyotas. marty used to be named martha, but then changed it, and added an e at the end for some reason linked to her chi and the universe really giving a damn about her.

or it could be the woman at the end of the weekly highway run. the one who wishes i didn't exist. if i could simply conveniently die, 30% of her problems would go away, at least. i'm not going to do that, however. i am going to stand here in line at the grocery store and watch the round retired lady watch each of her items all the way into the bag and quickly eagle-eye the read-out to make sure she doesn't go over $20 in charges, which she pays for with a clean, unfolded $100 bill.

2008-05-26T23:34:00.002-04:00

He is doing the Sunday night trip, taking the kids back to their mother. I am getting gas for his car, buying milk for tomorrow's coffee. Coming home, I am maneuvering around the garbage cans I have lined up at the curb, noticing the grape vines come down from the fence, reminded of the old mattress that need to be deaccessioned. I know my life has not really gotten this small, it's just that the battles don't feel so epic and uncertain. That's what I tell myself.

2008-05-16T00:38:00.002-04:00

I am putting stamps on envelopes at the dining room table when I feel sweat sliding down the back of my leg. I don't realize that I can look up the weather until it's 5pm already, and now only 99 degrees. He says it's not uncommon for writers to stop when they are happy. Happy is a state I can express, it is satisfaction that is more dangerous, more torpid. That, and getting entangled in the petty thievery of dignity, the daily jockeying for worth that seems to be an entire current or currency here. People who tell you everything they think of you, or that they refuse to think of you at all, in the way they park their car, the placement of their yoga mat in a crowded classroom, the position of their feet in the line at the gourmet food counter. It could make me mean and intolerant, and I know I have to keep reaching back to moments over the winter, when I felt gratitude and joy in the simple, relieving act of caring.

2008-05-13T23:38:00.002-04:00

A glass of port after dinner and a view, over the tiring rhododendron, of the lights coming out on the hills. In the morning I open the blinds in the bedroom and observe the neighbors pool and the growing moss on its bottom. On a day like today, that might be the most interesting thing I do and I might only realize that at 4.56, when the automated watering system for the yard turns on.

2008-05-07T22:15:00.002-04:00

Nearly every day I write little pieces in my head. But I don't get around to actually writing them down. So I feel like I am writing, even though it is clear to you I am not.

I am trying to get used to everything. Like getting used to being loved is not a huge job unto itself. I recall, and not infrequently, the looks on my girlfriends' faces once. I told them what my answer was when he says he loves me. It's an answer that makes perfect sense to me: thank you. They each cringed at me, 1, 2, 3, and apparently I am inept, although thankfulness seems a complete and sincere response. On second thought, I don't think getting used to being loved is a wise idea. I'd rather be grateful.

The orange and lemon and grapefruit trees in the yard seem to be taking a break from producing. Now it is burgeoning grapes and olives and lavender and shrub roses that are no good to bring indoors. On my walk to the post office today I am passing thickset thistles, wild poppies, free range anise, and things that resemble windflowers but so uniform and fuchsia they look like plastic decorations on a bicycle basket.

At the grocery store the check out boy speaks to me in spanish, like of course I will understand him, this was his country first, anyway. And I do, but only because I took a couple of years of it in college, when I finally dropped the fantasies of travel and rarefied study, stopped with the italian and french and german and russian, and realized that I valued more the chance to speak and understand people living around me.

This is not what I meant to write today. But it will have to do.

2008-04-29T18:05:00.002-04:00

if i didn't drive the truck out of brooklyn i'd be thinking about leaving brooklyn and i don't want to do that so i take the first leg of the trip. new jersey is as unhospitable as you'd think, with bone snapping pot holes and little zippy cars that show up in my slow lumbering arm pit and speed away before my irritation becomes actionable. the better part of pennsylvania is merely an exercise in will, trying to get far enough away so i can't cry and clutch apron strings. i don't get to enjoy that state as much as i usually do, with neat farms buttoned into old mountains, red barns with their protective symbols, the occasional shimmering river.

he sews up the remainder of pennsylvania, and takes the rest of the midwest with it. we pass the bones of what will be the recreational vehicle and motor home hall of fame, gasping at what that might be when fully arrayed, but no more so than the flyover labelled, without any other fanfare: fangboner road. thank you to the good people of davenport iowa for the only decent dinner of the trip, with both good meat and good vegetables. and thank you also to the cheery hotel clerk who when asked to name the quad cities says, davenport, bettendorf, rock island, moline, and east moline.

i'm on again in wyoming and an uneven spring is melting the snow in crenulated slags, like the uneven nacre inside of an oyster. it's well time to retire it, dirt crusted and jagged, and only made more apparent when we move into utah. this is so immediately mormon country even the snow appears to have been steam cleaned than placed carefully onto the mountains. they have even gotten god to stage the lighting so you will know he lives here, greatly, expansively, powerfully.

nevada is the inverse, ruggedly beautiful yes, but with a godless earthiness, a more emphatic "here i am, you deal with it" than the preening peaks of utah. i get us over the california line and it's time to let him take me home.

2008-04-29T00:29:00.003-04:00

he was a sheltered brain from inside the crime belt of detroit. i was at the hiring meeting and when i came to know him later i told him that mostly he was hired because they thought it was cool that he was black. he laughed and said if they were so stupid to give him a job for that reason, he was happy to take advantage of the situation.

his apartment was mostly furnished with sci-fi--books, comics, video tapes. i don't think he was emulating spockian detachment when he told me he didn't understand sex. had no interest in it. i thought about trying to introduce him to it, then realized that if it wasn't true, i wouldn't be doing him a favor, and if it were true, i'd just be violating him.

one day he stayed late after his shift, or maybe it was that he came in early. he had a little book of his drawings with him, like the notebooks 12 year old boys carry around with their smudgy penciled rocket cars, flames shooting out the back. he was designing his dream pod house of the future. he asked me what i wanted in the room he was making for me, and then i knew i had touched him in a way that mattered.

he moved west, hitching along with a guy we called andy boy from the boxes of broccoli delivered to the restaurants kitchen. andy boy was one of the cooks and he smoked a lot of dope and played drums and was in a band, or had friends who were in a band, or maybe just friends with a spare room, or something, somewhere in california. they gave me their address but the letter came back. for a long time i wondered where my friend was but when your name is dave taylor you can hide anywhere.

2008-04-20T21:53:00.001-04:00

Holy flying monkeys! It's actually a garden! Lillies, roses, hydrangea, a flowering dogwood. Almost like the garden guy read my mind. Plus trumpet vine and honeysuckle for hummingbirds. Yes, there are hummingbirds in Brooklyn. Not the suicide bombing squadroons like in Marin, but still. And ivies and daisies and coreopsis and things that turn the color of pomegranate in the fall and things with red berries for the winter and things that are always green and not ouch-poky.

I'm tired and wired and excited and filthy. Tomorrow is moving day.

2008-04-20T12:28:00.001-04:00

This is day four. No, I didn't forget. Day three I didn't get back until after dark. Day four is when my cel phone cam decided it didn't want to send pictures, and I got tired of trying.

2008-04-15T17:51:00.002-04:00

This is the garden, day two.

I have lived in six different places since I came to New York 16 years ago. That's a lot of disassembling and re-assembling. Tonight I am sleeping on a mattress on the floor for the first time in a very long time.

2008-04-14T16:26:00.002-04:00

This is supposed to be a garden by the end of the week. This is the end of day one.

I knew the moment I started packing was the moment I don't live here any more.

I had a new roof put on last week, an attempt at protection, the daily guardianship I can no longer provide.

2008-04-05T19:17:00.002-04:00

She never made me a promise she couldn't keep. When I first approached her, she lightly slapped me away, and knew that I didn't even know how generous that was. I learned how to watch and pay attention, see how she breathed and how she moved, and for that she rewarded me. She didn't mature me, but she showed me how to grow myself up.

And now I leave Brooklyn. The next weeks are all about getting ready. People say you can always come back, but I don't allow myself that luxury. We've all seen it. You'll go, and you'll stay gone. The gutters and the asphalt and the iron will all move past you, you'll forget where the F and the Q diverge, and you will visit only in movies, misnaming rivers and streetscapes. Yeah, I'll be one of those.

From early January 2008

2008-03-31T20:33:00.002-04:00

It's my first day. The offices are right on the edge of the Tenderloin. I park the car, walk down a block and turn the corner onto Market Street.

Even the poverty here is beautiful. The light is bright, but clear, not harsh, making everyone look like they are stepping into a Vanity Fair cover photo shoot. At 9am the subjects are the dejected--those staying in overnight shelters that require vacancy at 8am; those coming off an all night binge; those out trawling for a first necessary fix for the day.

I don't know yet who, if any, will become a part of my life or landscape over the next three months.

2008-03-10T01:34:00.002-04:00

It's a Sunday morning drive to another exurb to do some achingly American normal class thing and I would be irritated and sarcastic if it wasn't all so innocent. It's spring here, and the sere hills are green finally and wild mustard is blooming its riot and I am starting to cry because it is hitting me in full force now, that this will be mine, going forward. This will be what I know. This is not a bad thing, it is its own beauty, its own sweetness, but oh how different.

2008-02-28T15:17:00.002-05:00

You could say I'm a little overwhelmed. Or as I said to one of my colleagues here, "I'm surprised all the time." What is probably the most obvious surprise to me is how much brain space I need to process everything I see in a day and distill it down to one or three important bits. I want to be over my systemic shock, but I am not sure that I am, but anyway, here is something that has sat on my writing pad for six weeks:

This morning he says "I'm in love with you" and it's in the context of something else and the conversation spins off to a corner of the room and while he is looking into a box the words are still lying in my lap.

There is a difference between loving someone and being in love with them. I know this, and I know he loves me. He says it easily and often. And one could say that just the invitation to be here, never mind I am sitting in this new house, with my new car in the garage, that is the proof. But this man lets his responsibilities weigh on him considerably and I would not want to mistake what could be the gestures of accepted obligation for something much more precious. And even though I know I am on the bottom steps of this escalator myself, I don't think I have said that I am in love with him.

2008-01-07T12:56:00.000-05:00

I need a map. I need a lot of them. We are running out of the mountains in front of a snow storm. The clouds are gray and puffy, like the mourning doves trying to keep warm in the weak winter light, Lower East Side fire escape. Lowering in altitude my ears pop, the population sign reads out elevation 3,000 and I don't even know is that a mountain or a foothill or where I am, really, as the highway cuts away and little clusters of buildings nestle and cling. People are trying to tell me how to go, where to go and I can only prepare for this so much, then I want only a rough guide, a skeleton trail, a picked bone with just a whiff of information, I want to do this myself.

2007-12-31T13:22:00.001-05:00

“Do you have anything in a nutty brown ale?”
What a douche bag. He is talking to a waitress in an airport sports bar and he has droplets of whatever he was drinking last clinging to his supposed to make me look older beard. Later, when he starts making the inevitable cell phone calls, I will find out his name is Brandon. His parents destined him to be a douche bag.

I had a bloody mary for an appetizer, since it took a half hour for the hamburger I ordered to arrive. The second bloody mary was the third course, since it came after the entrée. The timing in this joint seems to be more than a bit off. It’s a sports bar in an airport, you douche bag, were you destined for that?

The first thing I said today was “I don’t think my boyfriend would like that.” It’s 8am and I have decided I want to make my last coffee at home. I go to get milk at the bodega on the corner, the one where the legless Yemeni kid scoots around on his knuckles, you can tell when he’s in residence, he leaves his wheelchair at the one step up outside. He’s not there this morning, but Cracky is. He turns from the counter when I come in, flicks his new lighter in my face and says “ I love you! I want to marry you!”
“I don’t think my boyfriend would like that”
“Fuck you boyfriend! He a pussy!”
“I don’t think he would like that either.”
Fucking good morning, don’t think you can fool me about where you live, you douche bag.

2007-12-29T14:48:00.001-05:00

2007-12-28T10:38:00.000-05:00

Getting dressed this morning feels like getting strapped for a gunfight. Maybe it's that the apartment is a little more barren with everything packed up, hard walls echo more, turning boot slap and buckle clink into hyperreal Western movie sound effects. Or maybe it's because I'm girding for a trip to the post office with the first box, to test how big an ass chewing some grumpy civil servant is going to give me for mishandling my choice of tape or cardboard or label or for even coming in in the first place. The escalator is out at the East Broadway station and six and a half flights of stairs later I would be happy to emerge, if the first thing I saw wasn't a poodle with a bottle of spring water in its mouth. Kinda makes me happy to get out of the Lower East Side for while.

2007-12-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

He gets on the train first, stands in front of an empty seat to hold it for her. When she sits and looks up at him, he pinches her cheek. He's getting off at the next stop, but she is riding further down the line. He kisses her good-bye, once, twice, a third time. I can see her face over his shoulder, the eyes wide and unblinking, then narrowing in annoyance by the final kiss. By the time he's moved to the exit door, she is already staring off, head forward, not following his movement, his leave-taking. I see his hand on the door and look for it. There is the ring, and one on her hand too. It's too late.

2007-12-21T20:44:00.001-05:00

Friday night of a four day weekend. Yellow flashing sign F train Culver local and I'm riding it to the end. None of these people will be with me when I get off. The man turning a greyed rubberband into a cat's cradle. The woman clutching an enormous coffee in one hand, chewing the nails of the other so ferociously entire fingers disappear into her mouth. The torpid security guard I recognize from dozens of shared benches at the downtown station.

We go above ground at the raised brutal pilings of the Gowanus Expressway, indifferent father to fuel oil depots and condemned coal processing lots. There's the lit sign of a gas station, ratty straggling holiday lights at the mouth of Red Hook, then the turn into the peeling rusty platform over the canal.

It will be a long ride but I need to see Coney Island one time this winter. Below freezing is no way to stand on winter still street corners, it's simply the only way, this evening. Cross six lanes of asphalt aginst the light and without even looking, there is no one here and I need the red neon burning cold like an Edward Hopper. I need the profound chill, the deep quiet, the living isolation, just this once this winter.

2007-12-19T20:38:00.001-05:00

I am waiting for the train at the Jay Street station and watching the man on the opposite platform. He is holding onto the steel upright like a man holding onto a ship's mast during a storm. He is listing and bending, heaving under gale force. I wonder how long this can go on, how long he can withstand whatever hurricane he is experiencing. When he tilts his head downward and vomits onto the tracks I am not at all surprised by the fact, just the timing.

(and now that my handsome genius of a boyfriend has gotten me an awesome hummy glow box of a Christmas present, I can add Velvet Verbosity to my "Who I'm Reading" list. Huzzah!)

2007-12-15T20:23:00.000-05:00

The Brooklyn is still better. Yes, the Golden Gate wins on approach. It is a seduction of classically Baroque persuasion, hint, tease, sudden surprise. Turn once and get a glimpse of the top of the towers, turn again, and more is revealed, another turn shows the flanks of the city rising across the bay, until finally you are on the bridge. But the bridge itself, the construction, is just a smaller version of the Verrazano-Narrows. And the Verrazano is longer, bigger, and it is blue. A blue that blurs water and sky, a blue that plays off the tiny lights necklacing its cables, a blue that makes you look for it hard off the south Brooklyn shore. But the Brooklyn Bridge is still best of all. Its approach is workaday, a 100 plus years of urban build up, a factual funneling of commerce to its endpoint. It wins in structure. It wins in closeness of steel slicing air, it wins in the soaring of solid stone arches, it wins in scale that is at once heroic and human. It wins because it never tried to be anything else but its own most excellent utility, its own best design, its own perpetuity. I can only hope to carry so much.

2007-11-21T11:49:00.000-05:00

Are we having a problem managing increased work load, sabbatical planning, holiday hoo-ha and loss of internet service? Yes, we are. I'm sorry. I started this as a kind of on-line portfolio and hate posting "what I'm up to" stuff, but didn't want you all to think I was fading away. Things will get more hectic before they better, that's for sure, so thank you for hanging in with me. And happy Whatever You Are Celebrating! No, really, I mean that.

2007-11-13T18:22:00.001-05:00

I leave for California at dusk on Thursday, the plane departing Kennedy just as the lights are picking themselves out against the thick air. We chase the setting sun west, slipping just a bit behind as the hours tick past, the light at the horizon of clouds compressing until it is only an orange line. That finally slips away over Colorado, and the horn of Utah is just inky night, undisturbed by the lights of domestication.

I look down into that blackness and wonder, if the plane went down in flames, how it would flash through the sky, if anyone would see, if rescue could happen in that remoteness. The man next to me is on his second huge foam cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee and it is working him, his leg is marching in place, his jaws ferociously masticating some poor piece of gum, rolling and pitching it like a bull tosses a rodeo rider. If the plane broke up, he would be the last person I see. In that moment, in the fading of my life, would I think he is the most beautiful, the most precious thing, would the imperfection of his humanity leave me awed and humbled? It might be easier if I could forgive him the grotesque, invasive sweet smell of the gum he is champing. I should probably work on that one first.

2007-11-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

I won't be teaching my class in strategic budgeting this winter. I'm handing it off to a friend, instead. I'm looking over the materials to send him, looking for a document on the time value of money. Time value of money. Which in itself is an interesting collection of words. Putting documents alphabetical order to help my search, I come across the follwoing list, which right now, I am liking rather a bit.

The answer
The camera
The final few weeks
The girl steps onto the train
The intersection of yearning and receiving is mapped to my shoulder blade
The name of your jesus
The place I drop off my laundry has been closed and locked tight
The toothbrush
The train station I exit to get to work is a deep one
The upswell of people boiling out of my subway station
The woman gets on the train and sits directly in front of me
The pancake hours

2007-11-06T18:40:00.001-05:00

On the platform and at first I am irritated at her attempts to be attractive. She is trying so hard, and is falling so short, it’s artless, painful. She has tried to tease her hair into a rock-n-roll bedhead of tumbled curls, but she’s got a thin ghostly penumbra instead. The spaghetti strapped Empire waisted dress just makes her look wide, the exposed flesh of her back a vast canvas. She is trying to get his attention, her mouth is moving, she touches his hip with a finger, but he stares over her head. She turns and walks out of his sight, to look down the track for the train, and his eyes don’t move, don’t follow her at all. I wish the train would come and take her away.

On another train a woman is traveling some kind of personal destruction cycle. She is biting an already well-bitten thumbnail. Then she moves on to each finger in turn, index, middle, ring, pinky, testing each with her teeth, probing, snipping, gnawing. Then the other hand. Then they both rest in her lap for a minute. Then she scratches her ear, or rubs her browbone with the back of her hand, or tucks a loose hair back, and the proximity of hands and face magnetically draw her into another round. I wonder what circle of hell this is and what is must feel like to be so gripped.

It’s Sunday morning all over, but this Sunday is the marathon. I can hear it three blocks away, a blasting live gospel group with a deep groove, devil bass line, glory, celebration, imminent downfall. Everybody is getting church today, and I am getting mine too, standing on a folding chair at the edge of the intersection. When they let the runners’ floodgates open, when they let the sluice of humanity flow down the street, I will wipe my eyes over and over again. All I can think is how beautiful, how flawed, how perfect they all are.

2007-11-01T15:55:00.000-04:00

My teeth are going to start hurting soon from smiling so much. There is a conga line of congratulations going out my office door. Today, I can finally make the official announcement: I have been awarded a sabbatical from my job. The reason for asking for this is very specific. I am spending three months in California, trying to find out if two people who are equally made of teeth and spine and guts and eyeballs and big thinky brains can stand to get closer than three time zones. Can, in fact, do more than that. Can make boats out of flowers, invent new landscapes, chart invisible rivers, and things I can't even imagine to begin to know. I am not so foolish as to not be frightened, but it is the kind of thrilling fear I think you would feel, about to step out of an airplane at 13,000 feet, and knowing your parachute is well packed.

2007-10-29T12:50:00.000-04:00

When I turn to look back again the glass is crazed with reflection, and all the people inside are obscured by bright sun, cloud speed, flashing cars. I don't mind missing that last last look because already I am feeling amputated, outside here in the concrete, I don't want to cry.

The wait for the train feels impossibly long and when I board I look down at the feet of the woman sitting across from me. In that moment they are the most beautiful thing in the world. Ropy, tired, slid back in cheap flip-flops, shuffling through Saturday afternoon discards of chip bags, cookie wrappers, paper cups.

It is the end of a week of seaming, of surging. I wouldn't trade it for these hours of loss, they are, in their own way, the best possible thing.

(more time lost in the DMZ that is tech support and I still don't have the ability to write from home. So I am cannibalizing myself. Apologies. And my thoughts to those of you in SoCal DMZ of your own.)

2007-10-24T15:11:00.000-04:00

The phone buzzes me at 2 am. It's trying to send me a message. I already have one this evening from the man I imagine in some loud dark place, his thumbs numb from the house's attempt to knock him down, it says, simply, "lots." I delete it to make room for whatever is coming through next.

Back in bed I am stroking the rump of this pillow, thinking it could almost be what I want, if it were bigger, if it breathed, if it had freckles, if there were a bone under this curve.

I saw that musician on the train again, the one with the broken teeth, the ruined voice, guitar strapped to his front, amp and car battery strapped to his back. He is playing the same way, a watery, warbling nod out, so slow you could drive a mule train through the space between each note, he's knock knock knockin on heaven's door. I am trying not to cry, I give him a dollar.

Sunday in the park we are lying on our backs in the grass, feeling the earth turn under a pair of Bloody Marys. The soccer players are kicking up a scrim of dust, picked out by the lowering sun. On the other side of the field the moon is coming up, facing off and beating the sun into retreat. That would mean it's fall, more than anything, and the chill coming down the hills says it's time to go home.

the smaller but perhaps most stubborn part of it

2007-10-22T15:44:00.000-04:00

she died in police custody at an airport holding facility. my initial instant reaction, is that the tox report will be the illumination. It is a family of high-powered, high-strung New Yorkers. It must have been hard to live with those demands, and I can imagine the round top of the prescription bottle looking like an escape hatch, sighing it open to that release.

the next day they admit she was heading into rehab. alone. they must have been so ashamed, so furious. she must have been so ashamed, so furious, her final flight across the concourse darting and weaving like a bird trapped indoors, until she is netted by security.

I wonder if her credit card receipts will show a final swill at an airport bar, an onlooker in the women's room will tell of a final gulping of obliteration with hands cupping water at the sink, holding room surveillance tapes reveal the animal need to escape so powerful as to dislocate one's own shoulder.

Here is money, and power, and position, and choice, and none of it used well. I think of the people I work for, who are broke, and invisible, and confused by a set of circumscriptions that were never meant to provide any comfort. I am not sure how to define tragedy.

2007-10-19T13:14:00.000-04:00

I brought home a centerpiece from the gala last night, and this morning, waiting for the espresso maker’s final belch and hiss of steam, I let my eyes go play over the flowers. It’s all in the red family, orchids, dahlias, ranunculus, tulips, cyclamen. The roses are velvet soft and matured and lushed open to the size of salad plates. There is a kind of recumbent lily I have never seen before, flushed with uppers, fiery red with a searing edge of yellow, the petals are peeled back like they are screaming speed itself. Combine that with a blissful full night’s sleep and a spine-bending latte, and this day is looking mighty promising.

Out of the subway you can feel the cold front moving in, the air whipping and cooling. I want to move down the sidewalk with a little dance in my step, eschew a fast plastic-wrapped croissant at Sammy’s for the fancy place, with the real, fresh pastry and an eye-popping coffee for later on. Waiting in line I eye flirt with a curly-headed little boy, who peek-a-boos me with his red fireman’s helmet. He coos, I dance, and I could do this all day if I didn’t have to beat the rain to my office. The girls behind the counter ring me up, and it’s time to go.

2007-10-18T13:53:00.000-04:00

My co-worker asks me if I want anything from the store. “Two hours of sleep, please.” I came home on Tuesday night to a notice taped to my front door. It was from DEP, letting me know they were turning off my water the next morning for repairs, and giving me dire warnings about what might happen if I didn’t turn off my water main, refill my boiler with cold water, flush my taps, etc. So I rolled and tossed all night, anticipating a 6AM call to my plumber, and wondering what would happen if I couldn’t get hold of him, and what might happen to my building’s plumbing, and how would I get the main turned back on, and where the hell is it anyway, and generally making myself miserable.

It wound up not being a big deal. Although I did have to go get a long-handled screw-driver to use as a cheater bar to turn the tired valve. Thank you to the guy who said “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I could lift the world” and thank you to my tired brain, even if I can’t remember his name, I remember the application.

Determined to sleep long and hard last night I went out and had three fancy martinis with dinner. I paid for two, the bartender slid me the third. That should have done the trick, or at least I was hoping it would, as this particular concoction was called “Esperanza,” but for the cab drivers arguing outside my window at 4.30AM, starting a set of pancake hours that lasted until I got up in disgust at 7.30.

Tonight is our annual gala, my opportunity to serve the wealthy and examine them up close. I kid you not, last year we auctioned off a diamond tiara. That had been owned by Adele Bloch-Bauer, yeah, you know her, that one, who commissioned her portrait by Klimt. Perhaps after working 14 or 15 hours straight I will sleep through the night.

All this to say, even though I have things to say, I’m not in lyrical mode.

47th Street, 6PM

2007-10-16T12:28:00.001-04:00

It’s closing time in the diamond district, the shop windows are in various stages of undress. Some are still seductively lit and fully stocked with pretty, some are stripped clean, leaving only their velvet beds behind, some are in the middle of their vanishing act, disembodied hands reaching around backer boards to pluck at the stars and put them away for the night. Mirroring the goods pooling in quiet vaults behind the storefronts, the diamond merchants are collecting out in the street.

In between nodes of idling armored trucks, a sidewalk vendor is trying to push the last of his stock. He is thin as a blade of grass as he leans over to rearrange his fruit. He is trying to sell the virtues of his wares to a trio of men in dark suits. “I’ve never been fat!” he exclaims, and I can see in his sunken chest and shabby clothes that is more out of poverty and necessity than anything else. “But you’ve always been ugly!” says one of the businessmen, and they laugh, impressed with themselves, the difference between their product and his. The vendor looks down and I look away, into the face of another diamond merchant, lounging in a doorway. He hisses something at me, the only word I understand is “nice.” I am not sure if he is offering something valuable to me, or offering to take something valuable from me. I want none of it, I keep heading towards the subway.

805 Michaels

2007-10-15T16:20:00.001-04:00

I’m back. I know I am back because they start road work at 7 am, enormous mechanical teeth tearing through Fulton Street, making my building, my bed, the skin between my hipbones vibrate. I know I am back because I am stepping over a smoldering cigarette butt rolling on the begummed sidewalk, inching down the subway platform from a man who, if he ever was adequately medicated, surely is not right now.

In my email box at work, there are things of greater and lesser importance. Deadlines are being changed, a new policy for housing homeless families, new zoning for providing services to the elderly. The New York City Department of Health wants me to know that in the most recent year with complete data, 805 Michaels were born.

They have not turned the heat on in my office yet, fall weather is corkscrewing its way in, going down and doubling back over and over, so I go for a walk at lunchtime to warm up. There is a long line at the bank and thin music scratching to cover that fact and I keep thinking about 805 Michaels and this city and its too-little, too-much, prickle-backed elbow-wrestling can have its 805 Michaels if I can stand near my one, even if it means I have to go all the way across the country to do it.

2007-10-10T17:23:00.001-04:00

I live alone. Several months ago I became aware of when in the day I spoke my first words out loud, to whom they were spoken. “Good morning!” to Mr. K, rolling up the security gates at the corner pharmacy. “Thank you,” to Sammy as he hands over the change from my croissant. Sometimes when I wake up, I will say a word into the still air, just to make sure that sweetness is the first thing in my mouth that day. One morning this week I said “I love you” and when I asked a friend what he had said, he replied “Cat puke” which, in my context, made me laugh until I snorted.

I am invited, again, to the Holocaust survivors’ for Thanksgiving. This is painfully sweet, since I am the one who first insisted on dropping this happy bomb on them, and I still do nearly all of the cooking, but their pride makes it have to be their offer to me. Thinking about it today on the train, what this gift means, I get the nearly subsuming desire to drop to my hands and knees, press my forehead to something, in supplication, in gratitude.

He said his corner of California is the most beautiful place on earth, but I think the inside of my head is. Last night’s rain swirl and headlights turned that man’s raincoat into a monk’s saffron robes. The harsh lighting on the bus took the woman walking down the aisle, turned a take-away dinner tin swathed in white plastic into a halo in her hand, held out like an offering. This morning I say his name so it will be the first, the magnet, the aggregator of what this day holds.

2007-10-09T12:10:00.000-04:00

It’s a day when I am going to be distracted anyway. There are guys hanging off a scaffold outside my office window all day. It’s 85 degrees and humid as a monkey’s armpit. At the end of the week I will again be chasing light to the west coast, beating a path to what comes next. And so I am very susceptible to Dr. S’ vision of knife-wielding doughnuts. Truly, the Disney track intruded all day with doughnuts behaving in unsusual ways. Doughnuts crouching behind dumpsters, waiting for a mark. Doughnuts tying off before their fix. Doughnuts with wings flying over the Lower East Side projects. Doughnuts exploding like fireworks in the night time sky. All with beatific blissful doughnutty smiles on their icing faces.

So I go to the gym after work, and my friend is late in meeting me. That’s OK, because now I can cartoon those doughnuts. I take out my drawing pad and am doodling all the things you would not want to see a doughnut wielding: a chain saw; a hypodermic needle; a switch blade; a hacksaw. Then I start in on the inappropriate doughnut behavior, hopped up doughnuts, menacing doughnuts. When my friend arrives she asks what I am doing and I start barking with laughter “I’m drawing doughnuts having sex!” Look at my pad, it’s true. An éclair is having it’s way with a cake doughnut, and they are both looking pretty happy.

Sugar Bomb

2007-10-05T13:42:00.001-04:00

It’s steamy enough out to be August again, sultry and wet. My computer is choking on some half-digested ort of information and needs to re-boot so I head out for a walk while it grinds. Landmines have been going off in my office all week and the staff have been diving to cover. They deserve a happy Friday sugar bomb, so I am going for doughnuts. Not your crappy Dunkin or box-o-Entenmann’s best if eaten by 2025, not your bullshit Sex-and-the-City cupcakanista so-over-it buttercream rosebuds. Nope, this is the good stuff, the cushy Cadillac blonde, the spiky high school tart who would never have looked at you, your older sister’s best friend’s ass wiggling to the Top 40 countdown as they sunbathe in the backyard. Yeah, that good, but totally attainable. I’ve got to let my hair down for this, let it ride over my shoulders, let the light hit me as I push it one step further and go for gritty, spine-popping, do-you-think-I’m-not-serious? coffee.

The street is blocked off so that’s the way I’m going, the flashing lights on the cruiser a beacon. People are hurrying down the street, and as I turn the corner I hear singing. In the space in the road between the Young Israel double crumbling tenements and the Bialystoker Home for the Aged a group of men are dancing, holding torahs to their chests, mazel tov, mazel tov is what I can hear, and I don’t know whether this is an annual take your torah to work day, or that thing they do when you move it from one place to another, or the happy hoo-hah that happens when you get a new one, but people are pulled up all over and watching, spilling out from stoops and bodegas and the illegal underground won-ton rolling outfits that reek of rotting cabbage.

Here comes Knobs, too, rolling a shopping cart down the sidewalk and we head-bob from across the wide avenue. He’s too busy to stop and so am I. We both have our missions to fulfill, but I know, and he knows too, that the next time we meet on this sidewalk, this everyone’s living room, this public church, this graving yard, I will give him a smile like a flash bomb and be so thrilled to do it.

2007-10-03T12:23:00.001-04:00

Her nose is a knobby fingerling potato, and her face is a repetition of that form, in the cheekbones, the chin, the browbone angling from her forehead. It’s a little repellant, but also fascinating, and I have to keep looking. The features outline hard or soften as she moves her head under the harsh subway fluorescents, each bone looks impossibly dimensional, 3 ½ D. I think she is beautiful, perhaps barely a little more beautiful than ugly, no, perhaps slightly more ugly than beautiful, as she turns her face and it is different by increments.

I wonder what it would be like to wake up with that face, to have it on the pillow beside you, to examine it in the early morning with the only movement her breathing. She is talking to her companion, and when she laughs, she throws her hand to her face. There is one tiny diamond set into a band on her finger, someone has already thought about what she is like.

I look at my own hand. The cuticle bitten to blood in absent-minded irritation, the ring I wear on my right hand. The ring has a name, given to it in a dream where someone pointed to it, asked “what is it called?” like it was important enough, precious enough, to have its own appellation like the Koh-i-noor or the Hope. I said, “Disappointment.”

2007-10-02T12:44:00.000-04:00

His daughter is singing to herself and swinging her feet in her stroller, in line next to me at the grocery store. He begs my indulgence for her, taking up a tiny bit of extra space, intruding. But she is completely charming, and I tell him so. Returning to our conversation this morning I am thinking, why doesn’t bacon have polka dots? And that sounds like the first line in a children’s book, but I haven’t thought of the next line, yet.

It’s back-to-school on the train. Half of everyone is cramming for their first class of the day, highlighters and fuzzy-edged paperbacks clutched close. The woman in front of me is reading Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” and “The Iliad” has been making quite a showing recently. I think the guy over there with shaggy hair falling into his eyes is reading Robert Heinlein by choice, but the young man who looks like he’d be more at home with El Diario is spending quality time with the Wall Street Journal and b-boy is chewing through the New York Times for his current affairs assignment.

I hit the office and it hits me back, loosening a tooth and making me lose the words I had organized in my head, shuffled together as an offering. He said he was not hip, and I wanted to say it’s not about being hip, it’s about being curious, but I did not figure that out until later. The watercolor illustration of a bear juggling fruit open on my dining table. The insistent vines shooting over my window bars, greening the light at the back window. The stunted strawberry plant that I continued to water all spring, all summer, that finally has sent forth a single blossom now in the cooling fading days. I need more time, I need more time, even though I only allowed myself to sleep last night when it hurt to keep my eyes open.

2007-10-01T13:13:00.000-04:00

He indicates that she should get on the train before him. It’s a courtly gesture, inspired, I’m sure, by her tiny cut off shorts baring the length of her smooth legs. I’m admiring her thighs too, it’s hard not to, when I notice that they run into calves that are several inches too short. It’s a feeling not unlike suddenly running off the road. You are going along there, and then suddenly, there is simply not enough to go on. Perhaps she has them so exposed to over-compensate, or to just put it out there and make you deal with it. That would be in keeping with her tattoo, a wristwatch of “Brooklyn” in gothic script.

That would be useful if you were drunk and needed to tell the cabdriver where to go. I can imagine thrusting it through the scratched plexi partition, a soundless demand to take me here. Otherwise, I would find it hard to forget, or at least, I don’t need to be reminded that I have already pledged my allegiance, found a home here in this raucous brawl of a place, when it still brawled and was raucous. I pledged my allegiance every time I wrote my name on a deed, first for a box of air, then finally for the actual soil, the hard-packed dirt at the cellar floor of my house. Pledged my allegiance every time I swept up after a Friday night that wanted more than it could contain without exploding into slash, glass, glassine envelopes. And every Saturday morning on the stoop with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, nodding at neighbors and the get-along of daylight activities.

I could get a tattoo of Brooklyn inked to my wrist, but perhaps better would be to my shoulder, so you can see it as you come up behind me, decide how you want to close that distance. Take that as a warning, a magnet, an advertisement, take it as you will. You deal with it.

2007-09-24T14:50:00.000-04:00

Only incremental change is sustainable, I am fond of saying.

I know in this city that kindness is all too often misconstrued as weakness, and still, I could be kinder.

So, I asked my laundry guy what his name is, finally, after how long? And I remember it. Kirk.

I am allowing quiet in my apartment in the evenings, just the rustling turn of the page, the hum of the refrigerator.

Even though this day, cool air, warm sun, feels like it will never end, soak it up on the top step of the stoop, even after the pigeons improve their aim.

Upon Considering Leaving Brooklyn

2007-09-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

It kept me up, a little, last night, that I failed again to tell you I love you, when of course I know it, I am wearing it all over. Not kept up in a bad way, just the fuzzy glow that comes from under the door as you are falling asleep.

I stop by Sammy's for coffee this morning, I am running late. They are still remodeling, the door is propped open. I tell him I like his new windows.

Repeated today the story of the woman we admitted into the shelter. Straight from the hospital, in the middle of the night, with two children. Pregnant with the third, he had beaten her into contractions.

Last night the turning light caught me in the intersection. Instead of standing dumbly in the painted crosswalk I went down the median, elevated with air shafts from the train. I let my hands wave over the dark traffic as music and cars made streams down Fourth Avenue.

I begin to think I know what I lose when I leave you. I begin to think I know what I gain when I leave you. Then I know, really, of course, I have no way of knowing.

2007-09-19T12:19:00.000-04:00

yeah, I know this thing is not loading right. Add that to no internet connection at home and there is just so much time I can steal from work to deal with this. Sorry, gang. I hope to get in working order soon, as fall is coming and it is gorgeous and I want to tell you about it.

2007-09-17T12:22:00.000-04:00

I was definitely not alone in the joys of bunnyness. The bunny manifesto may just become my new personal credo. What's not to like about fluffy goodness?

God bless the goofy genius who made a pair of electric-scooter bunny slippers.