The Man in the Ghillie Suit 

There was a story in the news recently: a man had started dressing in one of those big, bushy "ghillie" camouflage suits and standing near the side of the road: he wanted people to think they were seeing a Bigfoot.

But the cars drove by without noticing him. (The suit was designed for camouflage, after all.) The man realized he'd have to get bolder. He decided to wait alongside forest roads at night, and when a car approached, he'd wander into the road.

First time he tried it, the car hit and killed him.

The people in the car didn't even see him till it was too late.

(The suit was designed for camouflage, after all.)

This happened toward the end of the summer, which means he'll almost certainly be nominated for a Darwin Award during this calendar year.

What was he thinking?

Why did he do it?

Most people imagine hoaxers must be vain: they're looking for a chance to get in the news, feel smarter than the people they've duped, have a laugh.

But I like to think this man wanted to inject our lives with something a little more interesting, a little less banal, a little more mythic, than what our daily American lives have to offer. I like to think he was trying to do us a favor, using our curiosity about Sasquatch to break our monotony, to make us ponder, briefly, something fantastic.

Thank you.¹

 

1. This is what I want to do, too. 

Outage 

The power's been out on my block for about an hour now. I knew immediately when it happened, even though it's daytime and there weren't any lights turned on in the house, because of an ominous pop from somewhere down the road, followed by an uncanny quiet, as all of the house's little motors and fans came to a sudden stop. These things are like a kind of heartbeat, a kind of breathing, and when they stopped, it was as if the air in the house hung suddenly still where it was: no pulse.

It hasn't occurred to me to call the electric company, because I assume someone else on the block will have done it by now—but then I wonder, how long would we all sit here in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for the others to call? How much direct inconvenience would I need before I reported the situation to the someone who might be able to resolve it? And, is this what it was like in Nazi Germany—a community of otherwise good people, sitting in the dark, lighting candles, writing in their journals about what's wrong with the world, and doing nothing?

The Ionizer 

There's dirt everywhere in this house, on every countertop, every swatch of upholstery, and every inch of floor, a thick grit of it that feels, under foot, like powdered cement and sand. We've become that house, those people, who let the housekeeping get ahead of them till it's overwhelming. We sweep often, mop almost as much, but the surface area of our floor seems as big as Iowa, and it's already started collecting a new layer of dust before we've finished sweeping up the earlier layer. It's too much.

I start dreaming of a machine, the sort of machine that a craftier man might invent, in long nights, after work, in his garage: a kind of ionizer that would work, maybe like Air Hockey, to keep the dirt from ever settling: a gravity defiance device. It would repel dirt altogether, pushing it away, like mosquitoes from citronella or like a reverse electromagnet, always humming, always working.

I imagine this device, left running at all hours, defending us from the accumulation of dust, so all the offending particles would pile up instead at the perimeter of the device's range, forming a small then larger bump ringing the house, then a mound, then a bulwark or balustrade that would grow, month after month, into an actual fortification, piling high as my waist, high as my shoulders, too high now to see past; and eventually, after passage of enough time, we'd become that house, those people, pristine, dirt-free, surrounded by a wall, no one ever going in or going out, like all the other houses and people.

Blue Moon 

She'd been sad and it was hard to say why, and she couldn't or wouldn't snap out of it. Her birthday was coming. "How are you?" I'd ask. "I'm OK" she'd say.

I booked us a trip to the ocean. Get away from it all. Set our eyes on new sights. Etc. We drove an hour on the freeway with the windows rolled down, because her air conditioner wasn't working, and the wind crashed in the whole time, so we didn't speak a word. Sometimes we'd hold hands on the stick shift. Then, toward the end of the trip, we came down over the mountains and into the sea air, and everything cooled off and slowed down, and I thought to myself, "It worked," because it felt like we really had escaped.

At the campground, a park ranger told us to pick our favorite spot. We drove a slow loop, past a pack of shirtless predator boys, and found a quiet shrubby spot at the end. "Fifty five," we reported back to the ranger. "It's her birthday," I added.

We set up our tent and built a fire while the sun set, and we each found ourselves a big rock and dragged it across the beach to use as a seat, and watched the moon rise over the ocean. It was almost as bright as daytime.

The waves crashed into the shore and lulled us, not into sleep but into calm, at least. We didn't speak, but just listened to the waves, over and over: "Shhhh. Shhhh."

Then she stood up and dashed into the ocean, plunging in up to her waist, clenching her body against the cold with each incoming swell.

"How are you?" I called out.

"I'm OK."

That night, we fell asleep quickly, without touching, each of us breathing into our own corner of the tent.

When I woke, I was alone. There was a pile of her clothes laid along her bedding, laid down like a long skin that had been shed off her, plush and wrinkled, strewn and warm, empty.

"Where are you?" I shouted as I walked down the beach. The gulls, picking through the rocks, scattered at my voice.

Down the road, the pack of boys were breaking down their camp.

Back at camp, I toed the crumbling charcoal logs left over from last night's fire. They were still warm. The moon still sat low on the morning horizon, and the tide was pulling out, leaving a wake of shells and seaweed.

"I'm here," she said, walking up from behind me, wrapping me in her arms. "I'm OK."

I’m pretty sure I’ll never write a story ever again 

I’m pretty sure I’ll never write a story ever again. I’m too old, too tired, my heart’s too empty, my head’s too full, my pens are too dry, my paper is too thin, too thick, too yellow, too cluttered, my imagination too calcified, there are too many distractions, too many concerns on my time, too much on my mind, too many bills to pay, too many errands to run, too many emails to answer, my head hurts, my eyes hurt, I didn’t get enough sleep, I need to floss my teeth, I need to vacuum the floor, I’m hungry, I’m out of ideas, I’ll never write a story again.

I get like this sometimes.

OK, to be honest, I get like this a lot. I get like some version of this just about every day. Right now, for instance: I have no idea what sentence to type after this one. The rest of the page is just gaping white, and frankly it’s kind of terrifying to imagine filling it, and I think I might just go eat breakfast instead.

So, for me and I guess for many people, this is normal: I am absolutely convinced that I will never write again, and then I do, and that assuages me for a little while, but it does nothing to ease my fear the next time I get that same feeling.

Starting tomorrow, I’m pledged to write thirty stories in the next thirty days, even though today I’m pretty certainly convinced I’ll never write another story again. Thank god for deadlines, right? Today I’m trying to stack the odds in my favor: I have a few new pens and a fresh pack of legal pads, and I’m excited to tear through the shrink wrap like it’s a little Christmas. (This helps me, too, sometimes: rituals, gifts to myself, reminders that this whole endeavor, pledging to write and then writing, is a gift to myself, etc.)

But here’s something else — and this isn’t a story, exactly, but more like a little anecdote. Not too long ago, I was in a mood very much like this one: a mood of being completely out, totally empty. I do what I often do in moments of doubt, which is, I run: my girlfriend and I threw some gear in a car and took a more or less unplanned trip to Sequoia National Park. We camped there for a few days of mountain air and lots of quiet, a DIY writing retreat. She worked diligently and productively each day, while I used the peace and quiet to fixate on the idea that I would never write a story again, getting angrier and more frustrated with myself. Then, a funny thing happened: I got bored. I stopped hating myself for not writing; I even stopped trying to write. I went for long walks in these mountains, around these ancient trees, surrounded by things that were much bigger, older, and more important than I was or would ever be; and this was humbling, first in a sort of bad way, and then in a really invigorating way: it felt good, I realized, to be a small part of such a big thing. (Life?)

After exhausting myself in the woods, I came back to camp. I was too tired to chop wood or do camp things, so I read a book. I read a book, and I loved it, loved so much about it — all its wild ideas and turns of phrases, all of its energy and generosity; I loved the people in this book, who were vivid and clear and fun and exacerbating and strange; and the book, just like the trees and the mountains, humbled me, and made me feel like a small part of a much larger tradition, and it felt to me much better this way — to be a small part of a big thing, rather than a big part of a small thing — and, having realized this: I started to write.

Eternal Recurrence 

The other day we were hiking at Eaton Canyon, where the desert trees have hunkered down for a long dry season, and I was thinking about eternal recurrence. I know that's a ridiculous thing to say, except I also think all of us probably think about eternal recurrence to some degree or another when we go hiking in nature, and that's why we go hiking in nature, partly—to escape for a little bit from the measly perspective offered by our once-only lifespan and to help us feel connected to the bigger things.

We walked over a streambed of parched rocks where, a month ago, there'd been water almost up to our knee; and this was enough to get me thinking: where does the water go? And where does it go, after that? And then again where? (My line of questions is as sophisticated as any two-year-old's, though only on my best days.)

If every drop of water on this earth stays on this earth, then it's like we live inside a fishbowl, and this water is the same water my parents drank as children, and their parents; it's the same water that swallowed the Titanic, that flooded Johnstown; the same water walked by Jesus, parted by Moses; the same water carried into the caves of Lascaux and mixed with pigments to make the oldest art we know; the same water where dinosaurs swam, where the heat from the Sun sparked the very first life on Earth, during the fiery heat before Earth had earth.

Later, the dog bounds up ahead to run with another dog, instant happy friends; and then we pass through a small clearing where a burned-out stump of tree tells the quiet history of a years-ago fire. There's a monarch butterfly, which we're told come, every last one of them, all the way from that single spot in Mexico—but this one arrives at us today tireless with cheerful flickering wings, flapping and unflappable.

The trail is footprints on top of footprints on top of footprints. One set leaves a pattern in the dirt shaped like a heart, and we follow this trail of hearts, one after the other. We look at every person on the trail: are you the heart-maker? And would you know it if you were? Because who among us knows the shape of their own footprints?

At the end of the trail, there's a waterfall, spilling from some overhead rocks, and before that, from who-knows-where. The water hits the ground and patters in a dance, and the people who collect underneath do the same. Then the water roils downstream and disappears, we don't know where.

But it will be back, this water. It always is.

When we return to the parking lot, a policeman stops us to ask if we've seen anything, and we're not sure how to answer: we've seen so many things. But while we were hiking, a man parked his car and then used it as the place from which to leave this earth. He shot himself in it and he died.

No, Officer. We didn't see a thing.

When the water spills away, where does it go? And will we recognize it again, when it comes back to us? Will it recognize itself? 

Swastikas in the Window 

While walking the dog today, I found a house decorated with swastikas. I saw them from half a block away, painted onto the window fixtures.

"That's brave," I said to my dog, who wagged his tail in agreement.

Big black angular spiders: four legs spinning webs of connotation across each window.

A few steps closer and I saw, in addition to the swastikas, a few Buddha sculptures and paintings on the wall. This wasn't a bad taste Nazi shrine; it was a bad taste Buddhist shrine, and its designers had either been ignorant of how people would react or had decided to fly their swastikas in the face of it.

The dog and I wanted to know more.

As we approached the house, the dog and I started imagining secret KKK gatherings at buildings disguised as Buddhist temples, decorated with iconography of peace and love on the outside, and on the inside spreading poison and hate and fear.

Then the dog and I started to imagine that these angry men from the KKK (in our minds, they were always men, married to submissive women)—these men, after weeks of sitting inside their counterfeit Buddhist temple but staring into the genuine countenance of the very real Buddha statues—some of these men start to feel a stirring within themselves, a growing awareness that there might be another way, other than hate. The dog and I imagine that for some of these angry fearful men, the facade of Buddhism is cracking their foundation of hate.

These men meet in secret one night, after their hate meeting. They want to try meditation. They don't know what to do, but they sit in quiet and in the loudness of their own thoughts, till without warning, one of them exhales and starts to sob. It shakes his body, an almost-seizure of so much trapped feeling finally breaking free. Another man reaches a hand to his shoulder to console him, and the sob spreads to this man, too, like contagion, so within a minute, every one of them is either crying or choking it back.

"This is what meditation is?" they laugh, later.

Before long, the KKK chapter disbands, like the way a family drifts apart after the death of a patriarch: its patriarch was hate, and it got sick with the cancer of compassion, and it never recovered. The men who'd tried to learn meditation stayed at it, some of them: having felt a sprout of goodness, they wanted it to grow. But they were still afraid, still convinced they didn't know enough, and eventually that group split up, too, each going his own way.

As the dog and I approached the house, we wondered how long before a co-opted image could be washed clean and reclaimed by its original meaning, and we think how meaning is a palimpsest, layer upon layer, growing thicker, burying its own histories, but there's never any going back, to more innocent times, or any other kind either.

Work 

Sometimes when I think about how I'm drifting apart from all my friends, I realize that I was never really that close to my friends. We had time together, spent at bars or baseball games or movies or work—mostly work, because work allowed us to feel like we had a common purpose. It was good to rally around more than just ourselves.

I like these people, my friends, with or without work. But without work, what is there to talk about? We pass the time talking about whatever else we have in common, which it turns out is mostly our mutual admiration, and yesterday.

When I'm feeling lonely, sometimes I think the solution is to do more work.

Sigh 

At the end of a vacation in the mountains, you return home: your water bottle is collapsed from the change in air pressure, and when you open it, it lets out a sad sigh.

You know how it feels.

Dog Poop 

It's dark black and still warm, but firm: it holds together well when you pick it up. I know because I pick it up, often, with little orange baggies that make it look like hazmat, which it sort of is.

*     *     *

One is a little spry dog, part spaniel. When she cocks her head to the side, she looks smarter and more curious than she actually is. She seems confused about her own dogness. She pulls on the leash tirelessly, chasing invisible smells. She likes to lead.

*     *     *

The flies swarm the poop from the moment it hits the ground. Where do they come from? Fat black flies with red eyes. Sometimes I catch them in the plastic bag. It's a hot day.

*     *     *

The second dog is an old limping dog, part lab, with a lump coming out of her belly like a sidecar. She moves with what appears to be dignity, though in fact it's slowness induced by advanced arthritis. When this rickety dog poops, she can't stay squatted for very long, so she stands up and begins a wander, dropping lumps of turd every foot or so till she's finished.

*     *     *

Sometimes, especially at night, especially on a rainy night, sometimes, not too often, I won't pick up the poop. I lean over with the orange plastic bag in my hand and maybe even pick up a leaf, but not the poop. Under cover of dark and rain, I leave the poop behind, sometimes.

*     *     *

Walking the two dogs: the young one tugging forward, the old one dragging behind, me in the middle, a leash in each hand, getting pulled apart slightly, like Jesus.

*     *     *

The houses all have fences and the fences all have signs: "Beware of Dog." Behind each fence there's an angry dog barking. I imagine inside each house there's an angry owner.

*     *     *

The dogs won't stop sniffing at a patch of grass. It's dog poop. Someone left it behind—maybe someone walking their dog at night, in the rain. Sometimes I don't notice and I step in it. Sometimes one of the dogs will eat it and foul her breath for the rest of the day. Sometimes I stoop over and catch it into one of my plastic orange bags, and throw it in the trash.  

Mixed-Media Autobiography 

or, Little Yellow Envelope, pt. 2

In the top left drawer of the things I keep, there's a little yellow envelope, and it moves with me from city to city to city. It's full of old photos and notes, relics of questionably overrated sentimental value.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, its contents1: maybe forty photos of maybe twenty people, and maybe ten of those photos are of me2. Maybe ten postcards, of which five or six are inscribed (sent to me) and the others unused (purchased by me). A few scraps of paper—scribbled notes, a page from a tear-off calendar, a Simpsons horoscope. A black feather. A gray rock.

Each of these objects is the surviving symbol of some story from my past, such that I've assumed that this envelope is my mixed-media autobiography.

I don't look in the envelope much: I've come to take its value for granted. But recently, I had reason to spill its contents out onto my bed and flip through it all, looking for something (a clue, probably—always a clue: some indication from the past as to why the present is the way it is, etc.). I was surprised by what I found inside.

This wasn't my autobiography.

("This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.")

("You are not your fucking khakis.")

This was a photo collection of people—of, let's face it, kids—from a long time ago, mostly playing at being grown-ups, testing it out; looking beautiful and fresh-skinned and so milk-fed on optimism that their own character—their own unique signs of hardness and how they would overcome their own unique difficulties—hadn't yet shown through the baby fat.

And by "they," mostly I mean "me."

Then, sorting through this splay of pictures—beautiful young women and the notes they'd written to me, notes which said or at least implied that they loved me, once—and I realize with terrible disappointment that maybe this is why I keep this envelope: hard evidence of having been loved—kept as proof of one thing that can't be proven by objects, can't be proven by them any more than it can be fixed in time—love, frozen like in a photo and then stuffed into a dingy envelope—love, which can't live inside an envelope any more than a plant or a child or my own self could live in there—love, which we might sometimes seek out there, or, after a moment of wisdom or wounding, in there, but almost never looking for it where it might actually be found, which is: right here.

And I see now: I don't need this little yellow envelope anymore. It's not even mine.

---

1. Also detailed, with different intent, here.

2. There are actually surprisingly few surviving photos of me, in no small part because, when I was a teenager, I exacted a purge on my parents' photo collections, destroying every unflattering- (and fat!-) looking photo of myself. It was an almost totalitarian act of image control, such that my mother actually stowed the surviving photos into hiding till a more temperate time.

Sunday Drive 

The sun is high and hot and it hasn't rained in weeks. The air is full of pollen that's almost willful in its atmospheric meandering. It's Sunday or maybe Monday or Tuesday. It doesn't matter what day.

You're driving. The sun lingered so long on the vinyl steering wheel that it's hot to touch, so you steer with your fingertips and hope some relief will arrive through the wind in the window.

It's a section of town like so many sections of town—a Mexican section, a poor section, teeming with life like you never see in the white neighborhoods with their lawns, so it makes you wonder if Mexican people are just teeming with more life than white people, or if wealth is a kind of stifling, or if the fervor of the people in the poor parts of town always comes from desperation. You stop at a traffic light and hear music coming from a storefront church. "Iglesia del Dios," the sign says, and you have enough Spanish to wonder if there are other kinds of churches than the ones of God. Next to the church is a carnicero, and a musty meat smell wafts thickly to you where you sit. For some reason, you think of a deli you used to visit with your mother when you were a kid, where thick slabs of salty meat hung by strings from the ceiling, and the salamis were indistinguishable from the pepperonis, and you wonder now in retrospect if that isn't always the way of things, a confusing of crucial distinctions and trivial ones.

The traffic light changes and you crawl your car through the crowd of bodies that inches along the crosswalk. A man walks beside your car, inches from the window, and you nod at him, to be polite. But he doesn't nod back.

You push free of the crowd, and now around the bend, your car is pointed straight toward the sun. Everything's backlit in a beautiful blinding flare, and again you see the pollen hanging in the air like lazy will-o'-the-wisps, silhouetted, slow motion, frozen.

There's a thump under your car and you know you've hit something: it rattles around in the wheel well before jerking itself free. In the rearview mirror, you see what looks like a small sun dress discarded in the street. A few blocks later you realize the dress wasn't empty. The next three traffic lights all say "No turns," and by the fourth light, you notice you don't feel a thing. You're not frightened or urgent or panicked or angry. It's like you weren't there. You don't know what happened, and even if you knew, it's too late to undo whatever's done.

The music on the radio changes. You're already in a nicer part of town, where trees alongside the road cool the air, and ahead of you, it's one green light after another, far as you can see, all the way to the horizon. So you drive.

Reconstruction of the Fables 

A Side

If you're of a certain age, then you maybe noticed the anniversary this week of Kurt Cobain's death. You may have put on an old Nirvana record, or thought about where you were, what car you were driving, that summer that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was playing on every radio station, nonstop.

If you did this, you were probably thinking of "Back Then" and comparing it, at least a little bit, to "Now."

Music, we all know, can induce a kind of time travel; and some music in particular—music that gets at you when you're still young and permeable—it gets in your bloodstream and it never leaves. It becomes somehow a part of you, so it's not even relevant to ask if this music is "good" or "bad"; and when you hear it, it's like a kind of regression hypnosis that carries you back to a more hopeful, more formative, more perfect time.

Another Side

R.E.M. released their third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in 1985, when I was in ninth grade, and I swallowed it whole. I freebased that record and it went straight into my bloodstream. I don't know if it's good or bad.

R.E.M. hadn't quite become rock stars yet: lead singer Michael Stipe was still mumbling incoherent lyrics and dropping acid; Peter Buck only knew a couple chords; but the sound on this record was thick and lush and humid and magical, like the Deep South it invoked in its title. I remember feeling paralyzed by the opening guitar in the album's first track (appropriately named "Feeling Gravity's Pull"), looking for layers of hidden meaning in the quiet guitar intro of "Life and How to Live It," and just riding this whole record like it was a wave carrying me to a place I'd always belonged, but never known existed.

Playing this album earlier today, beginning to end, I disappeared: I time-traveled, replaced for an hour by the strange, inquisitive, awkward boy that I was back then.

"Back then," it turns out, isn't so different from "Now"....

Backpacking to Nowhere 

or, Emergency Preparedness, pt. 2

Maybe it's because I'm back in California, or maybe because of the recent Japanese quake and tsunami, or maybe because there are only a countable number of months between now and the end of that Mayan calendar—or maybe it's because it's the job of all news media to incite me into a mad panic—but I have been completely distractedly preoccupied with a sense of impending disaster. Everywhere I go now, I wonder: what if the earthquake hits now? I drive on freeways and wonder if the road will continue to hold up underneath me; I look out at the distant Los Angeles skyline and wonder if I'll see it sway and break. The rumbles of passing planes or trucks sound, to me, tectonic. I'm having trouble sleeping.

The feeling reminds me of those months after September 11: it's a Chicken Little "sky-is-falling" feeling. The sense back then was that planes might crash and buildings might fall on a scale we hadn't previously imagined; and now it's a looming awareness that the earth might shake harder and the waves might roll higher; but the general form of the feeling is this: there is a certain amount of stability which I am used to being able to take for granted, and now I can't; and it turns out maybe I need to be able to assume a certain amount of stability if I want to sleep or plan for my future or function in the world in any sort of way.

But the most confusing thing about this feeling is that, since I can't persuade myself that disaster won't come—I can't rationally explain that there won't be an earthquake, etc.—instead I start to believe the only relief will be when the earthquake does come. When the disaster strikes, then the tension that's been building up in me will be relieved, just like the tension building up in the tectonic plates will be relieved. The changes this disaster will bring will be unpredictable and maybe catastrophic, but at least they'll be here, now, instead of looming in the unseeable future, and transformed from vague fear into solvable problems. Disaster offers, if nothing else, relief from ambiguous worry, and finally a clarity of focus: can I survive? Can I help my friends and loved ones to survive?¹

How calming the arrival of actual disaster will be.

Till then, the best I can do is fill this backpack with emergency supplies: water, nonperishable food, flashlight, batteries, cellphone charger… The list goes on. I'm packing for a trip I hope never to take, a trip to nowhere in particular, itinerary unknown.²

---

1. The funniest joke I've heard recently was a friend telling me she'd put together an earthquake safety kit: "It's a month's supply of wine and chocolate." Then I realized she wasn't joking.

2. Contingency plans, like insurance and aesthetic minimalism, are a luxury of the bourgeoisie.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 

And just like that, nuclear fear is back in vogue.

You wouldn't think it was the sort of thing that would be prone to fashion, but I think it's true that nuclear fear hasn't been much on people's minds. Not like back when. I remember as a kid being pretty certain that nuclear death was imminent: I knew about ducking under the desk, about iodine pills. My demise from thermonuclear heat or from radiation poisoning felt like a foregone conclusion. And it wasn't just me. Sometimes my friends and I would lie on our backs, look up at the clouds, and fantasize about our future nuclear death.

Maybe this was because we grew up next to a nuclear power plant, and those clouds were spewing directly out of the cooling towers.

My childhood home was within siren distance of the Limerick Nuclear Generating Station, the only power plant to share the design of the much better-known Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, site of the worst nuclear accident in United States history. Limerick's two cooling towers and their two plumes of vapor were a fixture of our childhood landscape: they rose up out of the surrounding farmland to make up the entirety of our skyline. They helped us, in disoriented moments, to discern east from west; the clouds told us which way the wind was blowing; and on a dark night, the looming towers would blot out two hyperbolic patches of stars from the sky. They stood 200 meters high and cast a shadow over my entire adolescence.

Once a month, the sirens would rip through our community, a test of the emergency response system, which also served to remind us of our fear, in case it had faded. (It never really faded.) The sirens were mounted on the tops of telephone poles and radio towers, and they revolved to push their alarm as far as possible in all directions, so that from a stationary point on the ground, the sound seemed to warble, closer and then farther away. We'd stop whatever we were doing, look around: was this a drill? Was there really an accident? Since the grownups kept going about their business, oblivious to the alarm just like they'd been oblivious to our playground squealing, we got back to it. When we were older, we learned these drills happened at consistent times—Mondays, 3pm—so when the sirens went off we'd check a clock, and as long as it was mid- to late-afternoon, we'd just go about our business. But also always wondering: what if it were a real accident? What if an accident happened on a Monday at 3pm?

I never actually learned what to do in the event of a real accident, or how we were supposed to react if we heard those sirens on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, or in the middle of the night. (I doubted anyone would hear them at all in the middle of the night.) I seem to remember we were supposed to drive to the mall—and since that was what we wanted to do most the time, anyway, I learned not to worry as much about our impending nuclear disaster. The regular repetition of that revolving siren, and its complete and total lack of impact on our daily routines, convinced me that there was no real danger; and in my mind, the appropriate response to nuclear disaster became: shop at the mall.

I moved away, far from the long shadow of the Limerick Generating Station, and I mostly forgot about nuclear fear. But I think the fear would have faded on its own, even if I'd stayed. You can't be scared all the time. As a kid you can, maybe. But we're adults now, and we don't have time for that sort of thing.

A Pacific Gyre 

MP3 audio track

All these days of not writing. It makes me wonder what's going on—what's wrong. But it doesn't make me wonder enough to write about it. "It's just a phase," friends tell me. But the only way you can say with any assurance that something is "just a phase" is after it's over, and you've moved into a new phase. If it's never over, then it's not a phase at all. It's the new you.

Or, if it is a phase, it's the last phase. 

So, this  "phase": sleeping late, cooking, eating, napping, watering the garden, weeding the garden, showering, shopping, hiking, dreaming, and not writing.

[What we spend our time doing is more indicative of what we want than what we spend our time dreaming.]

I've heard that sometimes a plastic Coke bottle will find its way to the ocean, and the currents carry it away, so it starts in, say, San Francisco, and gets carried down the coast below Mexico and then all the way across the Pacific, bobbing around in the Philippines, and then swept into another current out to the Indian Ocean, before eventually washing up on shore in, say, Madagascar, where the letters of the label, written in English, would be impossible to read even if they weren't sun-bleached and salt-stained from the long journey, because the bottle had arrived in a foreign land after a great adventure. But then another bottle, drifting out to sea from the exact same spot, will get stuck in a dead zone between currents and never go any farther, but just bob up and down while the world spins underneath it; and other trash begins to gather nearby, and stay there, gradually building a whole continent of floating plastics, unwanted, ungrounded, without direction, and powerless ever to move out of that single spot.

Happy Valentine's Day 

The woman at the store said, "Did you wish your mother a happy Valentine's Day?" I said, "Is that something I should do on Valentine's Day?" She said, "Don't you love your mother?" I said, "Yeah I love my mother."

New #2 

Or, Lantern Festival

Toward the end of December, a friend and I were talking about the best ways to ring in the New Year, and we decided to burn up our old journals. It would be rich with symbolism and pretty to look at.

As homemade rituals go, it wasn't half bad.

[When you consider it one of your hobbies to reject as many assumptions as possible, or at least to call them into question, then holidays—rites of meaning based mostly on habituated, antiquated, but comforting tradition—can be kind of a bummer. The old rites fail to provide comfort as soon as you acknowledge them as silly and arbitrary; any new rite you invent is even more likely to be silly and arbitrary; and anymore, for me, the most comforting thing to do on a holiday is to stay at home and ignore it....]

Trouble was, my friend and I were both house-sitting around New Year. That meant we didn't have many old journals. We also had a cautious reluctance to start a big fire in someone else's house: of all the possible ways to begin the New Year, burning down a friend's home had to be one of the less auspicious.

So imagine my joyful surprise when I arrived at my Brooklyn apartment and discovered about twenty old hand-scribbled notebooks, on Chinese New Year.

Happy Lantern Festival, everyone....

My Kingdom for a Grow Lamp 

So the weirdest thing happened and I'm going to try to explain it to you. I woke up. No, let me start over. Last night I set my alarm for 6am, which because I lead a charmed life is unusually early for me; and whenever I have to wake up unusually early I tend not to sleep at all probably out of fear I'll oversleep. Undersleeping circumvents the oversleeping problem, except now and then when I'll finally drift off just a little before the alarm is set to go off and out of exhaustion I'll sleep through it.

[I made a New Years resolution to use fewer superfluous commas but I worry now it's making this harder to read. If you agree, then let me know, and I'll upload a revision that's restocked full of all the optional/excluded commas and we can pretend this experiment never happened. Now that I think about it, maybe that was last year's resolution. Where was I?]

I wake up before the alarm and I look at my watch and it's five minutes before 3am, and in that half-awake 3am "hypnagogic" state, I think "FML"—not a phrase I use in my waking life, but apparently my subconscious is fond of it. My subconscious says it "eff em ell" instead of pronouncing the unabbreviated words, and my conscious brain voices a little disappointment: "Really? 'FML'? So common." The conscious mind is so judgmental. After that, my conscious brain and my subconscious brain and I all roll over and try to go back to sleep. Five minutes later my alarm starts screaming at me and I look at it and sure enough, it's 6am; and I start to think "eff em ell" but by now my conscious brain is stirring and sort of censors my "eff em ell" sentiment and replaces it with "Where am I?!?" Outside the window there's snow everywhere and I think, "Oh, I'm in Canada; no, I'm in Florida; no." I'm confused. I'm actually in my old Brooklyn apartment with a watch still set to California time and so disoriented that I can't tell Canada from Florida; and it's dark and I'm tired and overnight a few more inches of snow had piled onto the already 19 (disputed) inches that were already on the ground. And I trek out into it for the work-related adventure that has brought me back to this city in the first place, a couple days ago.

Now it's 4:30pm (neé 1:30pm PST) and my body isn't quite sure how to proceed with what's left of the day. It's times like this I think, "My kingdom for a grow lamp," because I assume they cure all kinds of tiredness. I'm not sure why I assume this, except that it's so rare one sees a tired-looking plant. Then I remember ALL fluorescent bulbs act as grow lamps (did you know this?) and I don't find fluorescent lighting to be very relaxing much at all. I don't have much of a kingdom anyway, so I don't mind the universe rejecting my kingdom/grow lamp barter.

[Some things which for me result in invariable headaches: too little caffeine, any amount of bleu cheese, more than a glass of heavy-bodied red wine, some soy sauces, an excessive amount of caffeine, and not enough sleep. Where was I?]

Holding Pattern 

Dude next to me on the plane has more little bags and baskets and kits and accessories than the parents traveling with children. I offer to hold his juice while he stows his things.

He sits and finishes the juice. Then he unwraps a breakfast burrito, a big one, thicker than my arm, and eats it pretty much relentlessly. As soon as he finishes, he crumbles the wrapper and tucks it back into the bag. He pulls out a granola bar. By this time he finishes, they've come through the cabin with snacks, and he picks up a coffee, another juice, a water, and a bag of cookies. When this is finished, he reaches into his bag and pulls out a pound cake. A pound cake. A pound cake. He does not eat the whole pound cake; but he does eat half of the pound cake.

We've been in the air three hours and he hasn't stopped eating.

He's not a big man.

I feel like people must have felt when they saw that Japanese hot dog eater the first time: awed, and frightened.

I learned the other day the stomach has a capacity about 30 oz, and four times that will rupture it. I suddenly wonder what this rupture looks like to an outsider. I wonder what it will smell like. I wonder if there's a point at which my vague concern for this adjacent stranger will cause me to cross the bounds of politeness and ask him, "What the fuck? Are you OK?", and I realize there probably isn't.

The Man-Meter-Maid 

A man from parking enforcement (can't call him a "meter maid") is cruising up and down the street, a slow circle looking for prey. He pulls in behind a parked car, and the driver of that car steps out.

"This is a no parking zone," says the man-meter-maid.

"I just need to run in there to pick something up. Okay if I leave my car here for just five minutes?"

"Alright," answers the man-meter-maid.

The driver runs into the store, and the man-meter-maid writes him a parking ticket.

The Santoku 

There's a knife I want.

For some reason, I've got it in my head that I "need" this knife. I don't know where these compulsive "needs" come from, exactly, but I'm sure you know the kind: the compulsion fixates on an object that you hadn't even thought of a week ago, and now you can't imagine how you'll live another week if you don't acquire the thing.

This knife is a "santoku," a Japanese-style kitchen knife, smaller and thinner than a chef's knife. The steel is fantastically hard and fantastically sharp. I want this knife so badly I had an actual literal dream about buying it.

[Again: I want this knife so badly, I had a dream about shopping. When I fall asleep and my subconscious runs wild, I dream about buying kitchen supplies.]

Santoku knives have become popular over recent years, so it's worth pointing out that I don't want just any santoku knife. I want a very particular santoku knife, hollow ground with powdered steel that looks like marbled paper, no doubt one of the strongest, sharpest, best constructed knives on the market today—but the real reason that I "need" this particular knife is because it's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.

So the dilemma here, as almost always, is, "How should we assign value to things?"—because on the one hand, the value of a knife is nothing but its ability to cut; and on the other hand, I've been looking at various santoku knives for the past two weeks, trying to distract myself from the perfect (and expensive) knife of my dreams. The other santoku knives are wholly adequate—they certainly can cut—but I won't buy them, because if I do, then every time I use the knife, I'll be disappointed, thinking of the more perfect knife that I don't have. If I cut myself with some lesser substitute knife, then I'll fault the knife; and if I cut myself with my beautiful, perfect knife, it'll confirm to me that I made the right decision, because I'll have cut myself with the sharpest, strongest, most beautiful work of art I could find.

What is "art", and what is its value? And how much is reasonable to pay for something I perceive as "perfect"?

Given a choice (this knife or that knife), really I choose the one and also I choose not  the other: I will carry around an image of the thing I didn't pick, just as long as I will carry around the thing I actually did pick. Every time we are faced with a choice, we wind up choosing both: we live with the one, in this place we call reality, and we live with the other, still, in our imagination....

But for the Grace of God 

On the day that Glenn Beck and his horde of infantile angry white men converged by the Lincoln Memorial to "restore the honor" of America, I was carrying a woman with a broken hip into a friend's car. She'd been evicted from the hospital earlier in the week, after her Medicare coverage ran out: they gave her a walker, put her in a cab, paid the fare, and sent her back to the third story apartment she shares with her very-literally-deranged daughter. When she got out of the car, someone stole her walker, and she waited at the curb until some guys who lived in her apartment building carried her up the three flights of stairs and set her down on her olive green sofa, where she stayed till we heard from her a few days later because she was hungry. It had taken her this long to get the phone from her daughter, who shouted in the background of the phone call, "Don't talk to them about how I treat you!"

So we went over with some groceries, and in the end, decided to carry her out and return her to the hospital.

The feeling of a 72-year-old, 87-pound woman clinging to my neck and crying in pain is outside my normal range of experience and I won't forget it any time soon. While I carried her, I worried I'd drop her, of course; but I also worried that from her pain she'd vomit on my new shirt. The thoughts that pop into one's head are sometimes an unpleasant surprise.

"Thank you," she said.

"You don't have to thank me."

This isn't a story about me or any good deed of mine: I was, in this, just an orderly, and an accidental one who just happened to be nearby. My friends are saints: they stock her fridge, and they decided to cover the cost of re-admitting the woman to the hospital. (In the end, this wound up being a daily copay, only: the woman was thrown out, broken hip and all, because she couldn't pay $100 a day...)

After we got the woman into the car, my friend drove off to the hospital, and I—still with the old woman's smell on me—walked off through Hollywood. Very few people walk in Hollywood: sometimes it feels like I and homeless people are the only ones who walk in Hollywood. I walked by a man with no shirt and a white, chest-length beard. His hands looked like they'd been tarred. He curled one of them into a fist and he shook it weakly at the sky. His lips moved but he didn't make any sound.

This, at the corner of Selma and Ivar, the spot where tomorrow morning there will be a luxe farmer's market selling handmade soaps and organic produce, but where today a man with tarry hands lives out of a shopping cart and curses God, and a woman with a broken hip pisses in her sofa for days because she can't cover a $100 copay; and I just broke, right there, shaking, with the disparity of so much privilege—a Siddhartha moment: the suffering of people is so real sometimes it pervades right through all the creature comforts we erect to shield ourselves from it. "You don't have to thank me," I'd told her, not to be polite, but because the world owes her some kindness. This same day that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin marched on Washington to "restore traditional values" to America—the traditional values that led to slavery and segregation, the values that led to rail barons and child labor, the values that espouse neglect of the disenfranchised, abandonment of the helpless, enrichment of the coddled—values that in wiser times of history are, once adopted by the state, called fascism; and any society that willfully chooses not to take care of its own doesn't deserve to be called a society at all.

The Secret Museum 

or, Small Wonders from the American Collection

While walking through the hodgepodge and (to my taste) pretty unremarkable fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum ("American Art": side-by-side exhibitions of furniture, commissioned portraits, Abstract-Expressionist painting, bejeweled flatware, and a few sculptures of bronze, marble and wood—though separate sculptures, and not all those materials within a single sculpture1), this happened:

A couple approached, then unlocked, then opened a small knobless door situated discretely between two (boring) paintings—"Mrs. Sylvester Gardiner, née Abigail Pickman, formerly Mrs. William Epps," (1772) by John Singleton Copley2 on the left, and "George Washington," (1776) by Charles Wilson Peale3, on the right. This door was so unassuming that if I'd noticed it before4, I'd have taken it for a service closet.

Inside—I only saw it for a few seconds—was a small black pedestal, maybe waist-high, with a glass case on top and a single spotlight shining down upon it; and inside the case, centered within the spotlight, a small, abstract bundle of sculpted glass: fragile rays shooting out from a center and then ending in a hundred tiny droplets, so it looked maybe like a representation of pollen, or a snowflake, or, judging by the cascade of light that radiated off it, maybe a will'o'the'wisp, or a model of something powerful and subatomic. It was the most delicate, beautiful thing I've seen in this museum.

The couple took a quick photo, then closed and locked the door. A security guard pushed at it, to confirm that it was locked5 6, and then, their attention gone, it faded unremarkably back into the wall: it all but disappeared.

Then I noticed these secret closets are all over the museum.

And because mystery is more wondrous to me than answers, I never asked what or how or why.

---

1. The Brooklyn Museum's American collection is a sloppy survey of American art history which resembles your grandparents' attic, if your grandparents were friends of art collectors, but not collectors themselves, except accidentally, e.g., as the recipients of gifts. The following examples are all currently on display in the four smallish rooms that make up the American collection, arranged in such a way as to cause maximum confusion and frisson among museum patrons:

a. Emblems of the Civil War, 1888, Alexander Pope.
b. Giraffe Head, 1850-1900, maker unknown.
c. Green Yellow and Orange, 1960, Georgia O'Keeffe.
d. Chest of drawers, circa 1690, maker unknown. etc.
e. Water jar, 1700-1750, Unknown Zuni artist.
f. New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 2, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.
g. etc.

2. One inscrutable puzzle of mimesis is how the bearer of such a storied epithet could be rendered so inert in portraiture; but such was the style of the day.

3. Not the Gilbert Stuart portrait that we remember so fondly from elementary school, nor quite the other Peale portrait which graced our middle school, but this graceful albeit thin-headed one.

4. I hadn't.

5. As did I, once the guard stepped away.

6. It was.

Inner monologue of a Lakers fan 

I'm so happy now.

I'm so happy now, I'm screaming uncontrollably.

I'm so filled with joy that I'm hugging a stranger.

I feel so vindicated, I'm tearing off my own shirt.

I'm so exalted, I want to punch a woman in the face.

My life is so complete, I'm throwing a brick into a crowd of people.

I'm so happy now, I'm turning this car over and lighting it on fire.

I want to rape you all.

We won.

The world is so good.

My Movie Pitch 

"Here's my movie pitch. Wanna hear it?

"There's this guy—this young, bright, hopeful guy. Like Orlando Bloom coulda played him a couple years ago, before he got old. But not Shia LaBeouf. Smarter than Shia LaBeouf.

"This guy, he gets outta college, he gets a job, everything's going pretty good, and then ... he starts feeling like he's losing himself, you know? Losing track of his dreams. So he says, "Fuck you, job! I quit! I'm gonna chase my dreams!"

"But it's too late, see? Because he's already forgotten them. So he just stumbles around all the time, trying to remember what he wanted.

"It's sort of Reality Bites meets Memento meets The Road."

The Lomo American Dream 

A Walk on Hollywood Boulevard

Like so many before, you've come to Hollywood in search of the American Dream. It's the only place to look, really. Hard-working families in Cleveland, hopeful artists in Tulsa, military brats in El Paso, school teachers in Sarasota all have some chance of happiness where they stand; but if you really want to shine, you have to chase the sun. Chase Apollo's chariot as far west as you can go, and if you're one of the lucky few, you might actually catch it.

The city is ugly. Hollywood is the first, best proof that "All that glitters is not gold." (Sometimes it's just the reflection off a tarnished fender on the car ahead of you in the traffic jam.) The sun does that: turned up to full strength, as it is here (it goes to eleven!), it reveals things differently, for better and for worse. The same way that direct sun hastens the aging of paper or paint, it hastens the aging of everything. Arriving in Hollywood during the bright of day is like arriving at at bar after last call, as the bartender throws on the lights and reveals everything in a way it was never meant to be seen. Some things are better off in the dim.

Hollywood is one of those things. Seen from afar, on television, on Oscar night, it's the very definition of glamour. But to walk, as tourists walk, along Hollywood Boulevard from Vine to La Brea, is a disorienting experience, because there is no glamour—only storefront after storefront of cheap souvenirs, t-shirts, plastic Oscars, keychains, fast food, tawdry nylon lingerie. (Hollywood as it's depicted on Oscar Night is as temporary and contrived as the overpriced hairdos and costumes that the starlets wear; as temporary and contrived as the movies that they've arrived to celebrate. And why wouldn't it be? The event is a celebration of illusion. Once the camera crews and cinematographers leave, everything returns to its natural lomography.)

Still, people come, partly because the image-makers who control our access to the American Dream are so good at what they do, and partly because there is simply nowhere else to go. When you arrive in Hollywood, you're drawn like a moth to the spotlights that they point at the sky (as if each and every night is a gala event), and you arrive at the source, Hollywood and Vine—to find nothing: an unused subway stop, a small dive bar, and a restaurant known for its chicken and waffles. But like Dorothy landed in Oz, you recover from your disorientation to make out the trail of stars set into the sidewalk: they are  fantastical breadcrumbs of hope, commemorating so many who have chased their dream and achieved it—so you follow them, and hardly notice that, for all of the names on all of these stars on this sidewalk, you've barely heard of any of them. Time has erased them as surely as it erases everyone.

As you work your way west, the metaphors become unbearably obvious: the Hollywood Wax Museum defies you to tells the difference between its wax visages and the real stars: it suggests, though probably by accident, not that the wax sculptures are lifelike, but rather that the celebrities never were. "Look at these waxy corpses, and see the resemblance to the beauty you've grown up to revere!" There is a sheen coming off the fake skin. All that glitters is not gold.

Across the street, the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum offers a similar message: you pay an exorbitant admission fee to gain access to an underwhelming collection of exhibits—mostly plastic placards and animatronics that have long since failed; and in the end, you're forced to conclude, "No, I don't believe it"—but not for the reasons Ripley had intended.

Finally, at Hollywood and Highland, you arrive at the site of the Academy Awards, and a mock red carpet, set into the sidewalk, beckons you. You follow it into an enormous structure that looks equal parts Egyptian and Nazi: there are statues and flags and ascendant columns everywhere. Here, under these lights and in the cool California breeze, you feel you've finally arrived: you inhale deeply to get your first real taste of the American Dream; then your eyes adjust to the spotlights, and you make out the signs: Sephora. American Apparel. Lucky Brand Jeans. You followed the Yellow Brick Road, and it led you to a shopping mall.

The Travelers' Guide to Scatology 

Few issues are more serious to a traveler than pooing.

For those of us who have settled into a happy biological routine (TMI: for me, it's 7:45am every day, on the button), travel can be very upsetting, physically and emotionally. Despite the clockwork precision of our bodies, we'll inevitably find ourselves in unexpected situations...

Part One: Air Travel

This week, at 7:45am, I was in an airport security line, row upon row of winding stanchions holding roughly fifty people ahead of me and fifty behind: I was carefully herded by bored armed guards eager for any signs of (um) irregular behavior. I'd have to be very careful about making any sudden (um) movements or getting out of line.

For better or worse, though, nature never called. 7:45 came and went without incident, sparing me the awkwardness of dashing for a men's room and the associated health risks of sitting on a "Who knows where it's been?" toilet seat.

But not having to "go" at 7:45am also meant that I didn't "go" at 7:45am, a natural occurrence that I perceived as ominous in the way that one might perceive the Sun's failure to rise as ominous: a sign that something is wrong, and quite possibly on an apocalyptic scale.

Travel: the bestranged hours of waking and sleeping, so much unusual eating, the unpredictable stressors of departures and arrivals, all seem uniquely suited for digestive disruption. When you're traveling, no matter how "regular" you think you are, all bets are off.

It was in this state that I boarded a crowded airplane for six hours, and took my place at the window seat. I know it's imprudent to put these words in the same sentence, but sitting on that plane, I was a time bomb waiting to explode.

I'm a stress eater. Not too long after takeoff, I started grazing steadily on the food I'd stowed aboard—"chipmunk food," because it travels pretty well: fruit, nuts, sunflower seeds. High fiber food. The flight attendants, meanwhile, eager to please but with so few actual options at their disposal, came by every couple minutes to top up a bottomless cup of coffee.

If I was a time bomb, then these things were the timers and detonators, the fuses and blasting caps; and we were set to go off.

*     *     *

"Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. You are free to move about the cabin." Thus began the mass exodus of three-hundred coach passengers toward the two restrooms at the rear of the plane. The migration was so sudden and so complete that I don't doubt the pilot felt a sudden jerk on the control stick, from the abrupt shift of weight. It was rush hour at Grand Central; it was bumper-to-bumper on the 405. We were queued up and going nowhere, at five hundred miles per hour.

*     *     *

Airplane lavatories remind me of my first New York apartment, with the square footage and obtuse angles. You forget how much innovation there is still in plumbing design, till you remember the ingenious toilet-makers who squeeze a mostly-functional toilet and a Barbie-sized sink into a room only slightly larger than my ass.

*     *     *

If you've ever been splashed by the backdraft off the airplane toilet's high-powered flush, you never look at the color blue quite the same ever again.

*     *     *

Angling to sit on the toilet, you're grateful you didn't quit that Vinyasa Flow class series. It's overpriced. but now suddenly worth every penny, because you'll need all of that strength and flexibility just to stand up.

Haha. Ass-ana. Get it?

*     *     *

Too late, you realize everyone who had been ahead of you in line had been a woman; and women have a different relationship with toilet paper than men; and used up all of it.

*     *     *

The flush of an airline toilet is a great exhale, a momentarily-deafening sound that would seem to indicate something hydraulic. It is the same sound that movies use to indicate all of the air being sucked out of the cabin, as when a bullet shatters an airplane window. And thank God, because the air inside this little cubbyhole commode is something you definitely want sucked out of the cabin.

*     *     *

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're beginning our final descent. Please return to your seats. Thank you for flying with us, and we hope you enjoyed your flight."

You Are What You Eat 

I'm in my parents' home. We're cooking a holiday dinner made up of some version of the foods I ate growing up, which no longer have anything to do with the foods I eat today. "You are what you eat," they say, and I wonder if that means I have nothing in common with the boy I once was, who grew up here eating pasta and roast chicken and canned vegetables. "You are what you eat," and now I eat self-righteous, prissy foods, and I don't know how to talk to the people from my home town, except about the weird things I eat.

For instance, right now I'm drinking a gluten-free beer. There's some school of nutritious thinking that says people, and in particular people of European descent, aren't all that well equipped to digest the proteins in wheat. For 100,000 years, we didn't eat wheat, and then for 3,000 years we did, and now we put wheat in everything. But our bodies are still essentially the bodies of the foraging cavemen from 100,000 years ago, so eating all of this wheat causes ... problems. To get around these problems, I've stopped eating wheat—a primary ingredient in beer. So, if I want to "grab a beer," it now has to be a gluten-free one.

"What are you drinking?"

"Ah, it's a.... It's called a 'Redbridge'...." (I'd just as soon not admit I'm drinking a special-needs beverage, so I refer to it by name—but answering like that feels disingenuous, like telling someone you went to school in "Boston" to avoid saying "Harvard.")

"Never heard of it. Any good?"

"It's alright...."

This is why my conversations never seem to go anywhere.

"Never heard of it."

"Yeah, well.... It's alright."

"You're not from around here."

That was quick. Every conversation I ever have arrives at this point sooner or later, but this was faster than usual.

The confusing thing is, I actually am from around here.

"No, I'm not from around here."

It's nice, around here. It's very pleasant—trees and rivers and rolling hills and deer. I like visiting. But it's never quite been for me.

"So, where you from?"

He's hit on the crux of it now. Nowhere's ever quite been for me.

I tell him the name of some city where I used to live, and we talk about it for a while. Yes, it's nice there. Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of that sports team. No, I missed that game.

"Take care," he says as I leave.

"I'll see you," I answer in reply. But I won't see him. Even in the incidental conversation, I get it wrong.

That Kind of Crazy Afternoon 

The summer has been really lousy. It's rained a thousand days in a row. Some people got really excited about the weather this summer, because it never really got too hot. That killed me. People got excited because they never had to use their air conditioners, but they couldn't go outside, either, because it rained like a monsoon every single day, I swear to God it did, so no one really got to enjoy their summer, but at least they didn't have to use their air conditioner.

One thing about me is, I sweat a lot. Summer comes and I start sweating and then I don't stop till October. And what's funny is, it doesn't matter whether it's eighty-five degrees or ninety-five degrees, I sweat just the same. I wear an extra t-shirt to mop up all the sweat, and then I use a handkerchief to mop it out of my eyes, and then I have to change shirts a few times a day, too. Like that tennis player who no one can remember his name, even though he was really good. He was going to be a tennis star except he sweat so much he'd get dehydrated. It got so he started covering his body in talcum powder, to stop the sweating, but it wasn't enough, he'd still get dehydrated and cramp up, and eventually he had to retire, even though he was good enough to beat just about anybody. Sometimes I wonder if I have a medical condition like that. I've been using my air conditioner all summer, just to stop my sweating, and I'll probably use it till October.

But this week wasn't like that. After a million days of rain in a row, this week the sun came out and there was this cool breeze and it was really nice, for a change. Everyone and their uncle came out of their apartment then, you can bet they did, to go outside in the beautiful weather. Everyone called up their boyfriend and their girlfriend to go for a walk, and even the people who didn't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they called up someone nice too, because just about everyone outside was holding hands with someone. That's what kind of nice day it was—the kind of day you want to be holding hands with someone, even if that someone isn't really your boyfriend or girlfriend, just so you can pretend for a little while, to make the day even nicer.

That's the kind of day it was yesterday, and I went up to Central Park so I could enjoy it. Maybe if you haven't lived in New York, then I should explain how there's just so much of it, block after block of streets and sidewalks, and more streets and more sidewalks. Boy, is it big. Sometimes it can be a little disorienting, even if you've lived here a long time, because everything is on this grid of streets and sidewalks for what feels like a hundred miles in every direction. Every corner there's the exact same stuff—a deli, and a little diner, and maybe a restaurant. I mean, some of them are nice and some of them are lousy, but after a few blocks, they all look the same. Then there are high buildings everywhere, so you can't always see landmarks, unless you recognize that particular deli or that particular diner, which sometimes you do, but just as often, you don't. That's why it's so important for people to get out of the city. Sometimes it just repeats itself too much and it's exhausting.

I think that's why people go to Central Park. It is literally a breath of fresh air. People always say "It was a breath of fresh air," and I puke when I hear it, but in this case, it's literally true. It is a big breath of fresh air. And it's so goddamn big. This park is bigger than some cities. That's not even an exaggeration. Central Park is bigger than the whole city of Boston. I'll admit, it's pretty nice to be able to get out of the goddamn stinking subway crammed full of all those people and then be in a whole city-sized park full of fresh air.

Except, today I got out of the subway and I couldn't move, there were so many goddamn people. I just wanted to go down to the lake and watch the rowboats and the ducks, but I couldn't really even do it, because there were so many people. It killed me, because here was all of this nature and supposed peace and quiet, but instead everyone crowded around this one phony bastard doing magic tricks and telling jokes into a PA system. Some of the tricks were pretty good, and he was athletic, too. I mean, at one point, he completely jumped right over this little girl, and she didn't even know he was going to do it. That was pretty impressive. But this just isn't the venue for that sort of thing, that's all.

I tried to climb through to the rowboats but I couldn't on account of all the people and the way they parked their baby strollers side by side across the entire sidewalk. Anyway, by then, I didn't really want to see the rowboats anymore. I just wanted some peace and quiet and to enjoy the goddamn day. And would you believe it, as soon as I got out of earshot of that magician, didn't I find another crowd of people around another guy with another PA system? Maybe that's what people like to see on a beautiful summer day—some phony bastard talking into a microphone, instead of lakes and trees and instead of relaxing. I guess they think it makes them urbane.

I was in one of those moods where I didn't want to be around people, so I made my way toward the zoo. I thought it would be nice to see the gorillas because at least the gorillas seem to enjoy some peace and quiet. I heard a story once about how a mountain gorilla in a zoo found an abandoned kitten and adopted it, and when the zookeepers tried to take the kitten from the gorilla, she protected it and wouldn't let them get anywhere near it. She just cradled it like a little football and kept walking away from the zookeepers and took care of it like it was her own baby. And then the zookeepers, who are supposed to love animals, they took the kitten away from the gorilla, and she bawled her big black eyes out, and they gave that kitten to a goddamn pound. Hypocrites.

There was never a point where I wasn't surrounded by crowds, and where I couldn't hear some moron on a PA system. It was kind of funny in a way. The trouble was, I couldn't concentrate too hot with all these people around, and then a funny thing happened: I was having trouble breathing. I really was. I thought I might puke, so I went looking for a bathroom, but there was a line full of people and baby strollers, and I decided to just sit down. I really wanted some water, but the water from the fountain was so warm and bad and the goddamn zoo wanted four bucks for a bottle. So I sat down at a table in the cafe, and I was near the gorillas, but I never did see any, not a single goddamn one.

Life Raft 

I remember, as a kid, I'd sometimes lie on my bed and pretend it was a life raft in the middle of a stormy ocean. Underneath me were miles of cold water and monsters, but I'd batten down on my raft and I'd be safe, alone and insulated: the ocean that surrounded me and threatened me was also a moat that protected me from intrusion.

I realize now, holed up in my bedroom all alone and surrounded by a turbulent city, I'm still doing the same thing: gazing out my window like the porthole on a sea vessel, far from shore, far from anyone: alone and sometimes lonely, but safer for it. Drifting.

Shiva the Destroyer 

(This piece appears in issue 29 of In Between Altered States.)

Manners 

The bartender asked me what I wanted to drink, but I told her I didn't want anything. I was tired.

She came back a minute later with a half pint of whiskey and sat it down next to me. "On the house," she said.

I drank it. It would have been rude not to.

Houseplants 

I bought houseplants.

I've never been especially good at decorating (though I prefer to say "I'm minimalist"), so I take comfort in the easy style and color choices that come from buying plants—the green leaves, the terra cotta pots. Plants require a kind of mindless nurturing and I appreciate that.

I bought a small tree that it turns out is called a "money tree," and it supposedly brings financial good fortune, but so far, I'm not sure. It sits in my bedroom window, where it seems slightly conflicted, leaning toward the sunlight, leaning away from the cold, though they come from the same direction. It thrives quietly: it doesn't grow much in height but gets more robust in volume—as if it's getting richer.

Encouraged by this success, I bought a palm tree, which stands in the opposite corner of the room. It fills out that entire part of the room, and in return, it asks for little: it seems happy with its small share of light and its too occasional watering, and I worry about it only because it seems to collect such thick layers of dust that I actually dust off its leaves every now and then, so it won't suffocate.

Struck by the easy passivity of my two trees, I invested in a new set of plants—practical edible herbs: basil, sage, thyme, oregano. They are smaller than the trees, and more rambunctious. They are children. They always want something: they want to be told stories, they want me to play games. Sometimes they tell me I've given them too much water, sometimes not enough. They are inconsistent.

I went traveling for a few days, and, as if to punish me for leaving, some of the plants died. A plant dying is not like an animal dying, because when an animal dies, it is markedly different than it was when it was alive: a fish floats; a rabbit gets cold and stiff; a dog's tail stops wagging, and it stops greeting you at the door when you come home.

A plant is more private in death: it might appear to be dead but still contain life hidden somewhere under the soil, so that through water and penitence, it might be revived. Or alternately, you might continue to pour water into its barren pot for weeks before finally conceding that the plant has left you forever.

Lately I've noticed that some of my plants have taken on new character—a white sort of fuzz on the underside of some leaves—and when I touch them, the fuzz comes to life, scampering and then taking to the air: a small swarm of tiny white flies is eating more of the basil than I am. I spray at them with soapy water, as I'm instructed to do, because the aphids (as they're called) can't stand the taste of soap; and it drives them airborne.

Now they're flying around my room, homeless and confused, so the air is filled with skittish white flecks of half-brained dust—and I realize that, having desired to decorate my life with other life, and having brought it into my home, I've gotten more than I bargained for...

A Look in the Mirror, Pt. 2 

or, A Girl Needs a Gun These Days on Account of All the Rattlesnakes

I don't think I'm one of those people who doesn't know himself. But sometimes I catch myself doing things that would be perfectly reasonable to do—if I were someone else. If only.

But, as me, they're ridiculous.

Like the other night, I did two loads of laundry at the laundromat, and paid $4.50 in quarters. I waited two hours and I read a magazine and two short stories.

I have a washer and dryer at home.

Weird, right? Not for other people, people of different circumstance. For them, a trip to the laundromat would be perfectly reasonable. The right thing to do. But for me: weird choice.

Or like kissing that girl, tonight.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd even recognize myself, if I walked by me on the street. I figure I probably would; I just wouldn't like myself very much.

Exhuming Melissa 

Exhuming Melissa, who buried me first, years ago. Hers were the last eyes I let see through me, before I covered myself in cold soil and packed it hard. When blood still flowed through my veins, gave me color, gave me life, when I was young: the blood belonged to her.

She walks back to me wearing pointed black boots, circa 1890—older than people. "Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?" But from the knees up, she's all color and life, carpet bags and hair like the changing leaves on the cedar by my bedroom window. She looks young and lost, without spells, and I'm safe, and she's powerless. She finds my arm and we kiss. I try to remember: does she taste the way she tasted before I learned to kiss lips I didn't love? It's Wednesday.

The next afternoon she's sick and sleeping like a chestnut, warm and brown and dimpled, protected by a shell and by the absence of guilt. She wakes and we talk, about words and toes and pomegranates and the ocean, about three chords and lonely clouds, and the light of the sun on the leaves of the trees. We talk about loves lost and about tomorrow, and today, and we think of yesterday without speaking. She's beautiful and I'm proud to be near her. I have some inkling already that I'm done for. I've learned nothing.

"I can be hurt by you." I gave her that, years ago, never asked for it back, and have never given it to anyone again. She used it, never wanted to. The hand she lays on my chest is quivering. Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?

I show her my favorite places, my secrets. I'm afraid they might be irreplaceable, I might be running out, I might be offering them too freely. I realize no one else wants them. I realize the attic is empty and strewn with webs. I give her my secrets and my places. We sneak up stairways to ring old copper bells and announce, "We are here."

Find solace somewhere else. She runs down the beach without looking back, splashing salt water cold onto her legs, and she gets smaller, and smaller. I look the other way, toward the setting sun. The ocean says, over and over, "Triste. Triste."

At night, in bed, wrapped in the sweat of the sheets, breathing, I tell her she is still the true love of my life. She says she's sorry, she never thought of me that way—suddenly, like a knife, but a sharp one: it cuts without hurting. I bleed, but I don't so much mind.

I sleep dreaming of people I've hurt. I'm truly sorry but it doesn't seem to do any good. I am not enough—not strong enough to hold anything together, not fast enough to run away. Good, if it happens, happens over too much time.My failure weighs heavy; I sleep poorly.

"I hate you, I wish you were gone already, I wish you'd never come," kissing her and holding her by the hair, not knowing if our lives move in lines or in circles, or in inches, or in years.

And no end, no end, just a strand of hair on the pillow and a pair of orphaned sandals, left like broken swans, or like footprints, saying "This is where I've been. This is what I leave behind."

(Originally published 1998.)

Cold Moon 

or, Kiss Me While You Can

I hear that my lips are shrinking, and not just my lips, but lips everywhere, worldwide, getting smaller by the day. With each passing day, the lips' fleshy plumpness is sucked out of them, slowly absorbed into the rest of the body: no longer so expansive or optimistic, our aging flesh is reduced to eating itself, and it makes us less kissable, bit by bit.

A friend stands with me while we look at the full moon, enormous on the horizon. "It's closer tonight," I tell her. "Something about the orbit. I read it on the Internet. It's as close to us now as it ever gets."

"The moon is drifting away," she answers. "More than an inch each year, it's falling away. It's getting away. Everything is slowing down."

I notice her lips seem smaller than they used to, and I decide not to kiss her, but keep looking at the moon instead.

On the Farm 

I had a really vivid dream that we were on the farm. Everything was cold and crisp and quiet and kind and beautiful. We were walking through the woods, and came to a field with a herd of deer, and we stood there, really quietly, till eventually, they ignored us and wandered around us and surrounded us. There were so many of them that we were scared, if they panicked, they might actually trample us, but it was worth it, just to be surrounded by all those deer. It was that same sort of feeling as walking out onto a frozen pond, and hearing the ice beneath you creak: you're pretty sure you're safe, but you're not totally sure. We stood there quietly, without speaking, just shivering, as the deer brushed by, grazing on the grass.

(Sometimes I wish I remembered my dreams a little less well, or that my real life was as interesting to me as my dream life...)

You Say Tomato, I Say Euthanasia 

In my dream, I walked into the drug store seeking Chloraseptic^®, the noxious-tasting throat spray that temporarily numbs your mouth, making it possible to swallow when strep throat or other illness makes swallowing otherwise too painful.

The problem was, in my dream, I couldn't remember that it was called Chloraseptic, so instead, I kept asking the pharmacist for "Euthanasia."

"Excuse me—where do you keep the Euthanasia?"

One after the other, each drug store turned me away: "We don't sell that here!"

Lucky for me, New York City has a Duane Reade on every corner. Finally, a chemist of dubious ethics heard my request, invited me in hushed tones into his office, and sold me a bottle of Euthanasia^®.

(Coincidentally, it came in a clear plastic spray bottle full of cherry-red liquid, with instructions to "spray liberally 2-3 times in to the back of the throat.")

I thanked him, took it home, struggled with the plastic child-proof (and always somewhat adult-proof) safety seal, and sprayed into my mouth—five or six times, because who ever follows the instructions on their medication?

The pain did leave my throat, as I'd hoped, but it was only as the edges blurred at the outside of my vision that I realized my mistake: "Oh! I meant to ask for Chloraseptic!"

And then I fell into a deep dreamless sleep (which was, really, all I'd wanted...)

Sunset 

All that's left now is whatever comes next.

Cassandras in unexpected places  

Walking down the street and lost in my thoughts, thoughts about staplers and taxi cabs, about tuna salad and untied shoes, about the brown puddles and the jackhammers, and how you never see the sunset from midtown Manhattan,

A woman,

A toothless ashy supine jabbering woman on a pile of sweatpants on the sidewalk, a forgotten woman I almost stepped on, said:

"You have a knife in your bag."

I looked at her, and I looked at her again,
because I did have a knife in my bag.

"And a roll of quarters
And too much chewing gum,
And a book you'll never read.
A bag of all the wrong things."

At least that's what I heard her say.

Stupid crazy people.

Some days I hate this town.

Hanging by a Thread 

or, The Parable of the Pants

A few years ago, toward the end of a troubled love affair, I went clothes shopping, and bought a pair of pants I still have to this day. I bought them because she would like them, though I wasn't aware of this motivation at the time. I wasn't trying to impress her with the pants, exactly. Rather, the pants were a manifestation of a taste that she and I shared: I liked the pants, I knew she would probably like the pants, and therefore the pants would confirm the reasons she and I were close: they were emblematic of the like-minded judgment that brought us together in the first place.

I knew all of this at the time without actually knowing it—I couldn't have articulated why I bought the pants; I only knew that I was shopping with an anxious desperation, fueled by my fear that my love affair was over, and at a not-quite conscious level, I hoped the pants would save me.

I was hanging by a proverbial thread.

She never saw the pants—she broke up with me over voicemail—and the pants became emblematic of something else: lost opportunity, failure, dashed hope. From that day on, the pants never did fit quite right: I tried to get used to them, tried wearing them with different clothes, tried to alter myself to better fit into them, and only occasionally considered the appropriateness of trying to alter myself to fit the pants, instead of the other way around.

The Good Samaritan of Smith Street 

It was all just a big misunderstanding. It was a whole set of misunderstandings, in rapid succession.

I boarded a Brooklyn-bound F train in SoHo. It was a beautiful weekend afternoon, and the subway car was full of (more than usual) happy couples and their children. So many children. So many children, in fact, that my first impulse was to change to another car.

But the bell dinged, the door closed, and that settled it: I was staying with the kids. The kids and, at the far end of the train, a banjo player.

Goodie.

A little girl waved, and then spit up.

I waved back.

Her mother beamed at me, I suppose to thank me for helping to teach her daughter that the world is full of friendly people and not misanthropes. That old tale.

Squeals erupted from my left: a small gaggle of toddlers were falling and drooling on each other, dancing to the music of the banjo player, who was making his way toward my end of the train. The banjo player was plucking away, and the kids were having a literal hoot. They were having a literal hootenanny. So I did what any childless adult would do in this situation: I turned on my iPod. This situation is exactly why God invented the iPod: to keep your children and your banjo out of my world.

One square-dancing toddler got tangled up in my headphone cable, yanking it from my ear; and as I reached down to untangle it, the train slammed on its brakes. The child flew through the air, toward one of the subway poles (and certain death, or at least pain and a lot of crying)—and through no fault of my own, I caught this child. I guess I saved its life. Its mother thanked me, and a few of the other mothers did, too.

I was just trying to untangle my headphones.

The child (who now owed its life to me) sat down beside me, but I wasn't having any of that—this tot looked a little soggy in the diaper. I stood up and—wouldn't you know it?—an old woman with a walker boarded the train, and thanked me for giving up my seat.

"No problem," I told her, since it had been an accident. A few of the mothers beamed at my generosity, at my act of kindness, and this time, some of the fathers beamed, too.

I was getting a bit of a reputation on this train.

That's when a man handed me five dollars.

"Huh?"

He pointed to the banjo player, then exited the train. I understood that this man had wanted to give $5 to the banjo player, but couldn't get through the wall of children without missing his stop—so he entrusted his $5 to me, the most reputable citizen on the F line. He wanted me to complete the transaction.

Of course I thought of keeping the $5. But the banjo player's shoes were in tatters, and he had actual duct tape on his instrument, and if I'd kept the $5, I'd have felt so guilty that I'd have spent $40 on whiskey, to salve my guilt—so, in the end, it was a losing investment. It was simpler just to give the $5 to the banjo player, and I did.

And he dropped it. It fell on the floor of the subway car, and the toddlers clambered for it, drawing everyone's attention to me, the donor, the Good Samaritan of Smith Street: everyone saw "my" $5 donation to this banjo player whose music I was trying to drown out with my iPod.

I could hardly bear all of the good will that I was engendering, so I got off the train one stop early. As I did, I ran into a man who asked, "Spare change?"

"As a matter of fact..." throwing him a couple of quarters and imagining the car full of beaming parents admiring me as the train pulled away.

Fire Drill 

or, These Are My Hands, Pt. 2

Why do these things always happen to me?

I'm in my kitchen and my hand is on fire.

All things considered, I could be much worse off. For instance, all my fingers are still attached to my flaming hand. Many victims of many kitchen accidents are not so lucky. So, on the plus side, at least I'm not trying to staunch a flow of blood while I pack my own severed fingers into the ice of my freezer, only to discover (sure enough) I forgot to refill the ice tray.

At least that's not happening.

I'm not choking, or poisoned, or having an allergic reaction that would require me to shoot adrenaline into my own heart. So there's that. No, the only real problem I have to contend with is the fact that my hand is on fire.

Seen with a little perspective, this isn't such a big deal.

Seen with a little perspective,1 you'd also see that it's not just my hand, but the small baking sheet that the hand is holding, too. It's a 13x9" baking sheet full of grease, and when I pulled it from the broiler, it was on fire; and since I pulled it from the fire with my hand, now my hand is on fire, too.

Since I pulled it from the fire using a heat-resistant oven mitt, technically only my oven mitt (and the baking sheet) are on fire, and not the hand itself. Not yet, anyway. It's a crucial distinction, but one that's hard to make with the eyes alone: visually, I look down the length of my arm, and sure enough, to all appearances, my hand is engulfed in flames.

Which is unusual, to say the least. (And that's a good thing.)2

It doesn't hurt, yet, but it is getting kind of hot. And since the tray in my hand is full of flaming liquid, I'm not immediately clear what sort of options I have at my disposal. So I hold it and watch it burn for a few moments, and think, and hope that in the meanwhile maybe it will burn itself out (though I know even while I'm thinking this that I won't actually be so lucky).

The flames burn, and I think: I wish I had marshmallows.

The flames burn, and I think: this proves it for sure, our smoke alarms really don't work. I should check the batteries.

The flames burn, and I think: I hope no one sees this. It's kind of embarrassing.

Somehow, with almost too much calm—almost psychotically-detached calm—I begin using my good hand (the one that's not on fire) to rearrange the appliances and clutter on the counter. Toaster goes here, check. Coffee grinder goes here, check. Non-flammable pot holder goes here, check.

Finally I clear enough space to put down the 13x9" fireball I've been holding, at which point I calmly remove my flaming glove, stamp out the fire, and then, to soothe my mild burn, reach into the freezer to grab a few ice cubes. But there aren't any ice cubes: I've left the ice tray empty again. Sure enough...

---

1. If you could see past the flames, which are about twelve inches high...

2. But not that unusual...

In Extremis 

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sometimes I wish that I had a terminal disease. I wish that I were sick and dying. I wish this because if I were sick and dying, people would like me more. They'd have to like me. They'd visit. They'd bring me flowers, and books to read, and prepared food, like potato salad, and I wouldn't be able to eat the food they brought, on account of my terminal illness; but I would say, "Thank you. It's the thought that counts." And I'd mean it, because the thought really is more valuable than the potato salad.

I wish that I were sick and dying because it would be the ultimate excuse for everything—for sleeping late, for going to bed early, for daydreaming, for doing so little with my time. I wish I had a terminal illness because it would forgive all my shortcomings, excuse all my failings. If I handled my illness with grace, then people would say, "He is so brave. He is so heroic," and if I handled it badly or selfishly, then people would understand: "Oh —he's in a lot of pain."

If I'm not dying, then what excuse do I have?

At the end, people would come to my bedside. They would say things about how I had affected their lives. They would forget any wrong I'd ever done them, and would remember me clearly as being someone better than I ever was. People don't speak ill of the dead:

Once I'm dead, I'm perfect.

Unrecycling 

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I am deeply concerned about fossil fuel consumption and the resulting effects on the global climate—but not enough to do very much about it. (Said Michael Pollan in a recent article in the New York Times: "I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came ... during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our light bulbs.")

So I'll admit that I felt a touch of self-righteousness—certainly more self-righteousness than I deserved—when I schlepped all of those bags of carefully-sorted recyclables down to the curb last night. At one level, I suppose, I should have felt ashamed at my ability to generate so much trash; but on the other hand, I was so proud that I'd taken the trouble to designate it as reusable trash. (That is, I was proud of the fact that I remembered to put it in a separate bag and carry it downstairs on Wednesday instead of Sunday. Go me.)

I was confused, then, when I came home and found one of my bags of bundled newspaper leaning against my front door. "Hmmm." I stared at it for a full minute. "What does this signify...?"

No obvious answer came.

I carried it back upstairs and dropped it in my living room.

The trash collectors of New York City are as finicky as a chef picking over the morning's produce. Trash bags will be left on the curb because they contain a single (recyclable) Coke can or water bottle, or, more often, for reasons unknown. I gazed at my bag of newspaper, trying to imagine what offense it had committed—why it had been deemed unworthy. The other bags were collected without ceremony, but this one—this one otherwise-unremarkable bag was found somehow lacking. Why? What commentary was being made on my recycling ways?

Some mysteries will never be solved.

I dropped it in an opaque Hefty bag and took it downstairs again, this time depositing in the trash. There is a regular pickup on Sunday: they'll take my non-biodegradable bag to a landfill without further incident.

I want to do what's right, I really do. If only I knew how...

These Are My Hands 

There's a fire in my kitchen. This is a thing that happens sometimes. There are several pots on several burners and something somewhere has overflowed, and instead of simply making a mess, it has made a fire.

I might put out the fire with a towel, but I can't find one, and instead I try to dampen the flames with my bare hands, by pressing them against the hot metal burners. This is an ill-advised solution to the problem. In my own defense, I never decided to put out the fire with my hands. It just sort of happened.

Kind of like that unplanned phone call I just made. Sometimes it's like someone else grabs the steering wheel and drives into oncoming traffic. "I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

My hands have a mind of their own. My hands have Tourette's. My hands are always having an out-of-body experience, doing things I neither plan nor condone. One of these days, I'm sure, my hands will up and slap you. They'll sit down at a keyboard and plunk out a Tom Clancey novel. They'll goose someone on the subway. They'll drive the car off the road.

"I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

What scares me most is that I don't know whether or not that's true. It kind of was me. I don't know which is more me—the hands when I control them, or the hands when they control me. Which is more me—the one putting out the fires, or the one starting them?

Measure Twice, Cut (at) Once 

Manhattan's a tough town, miserly with its second chances, and dating is no exception. With so many eligible singles (and by "eligible," I mean self-possessed, self-sufficient, and usually self-absorbed), there's no reason to settle for anything less than perfect.

Which is why I don't think it's unreasonable that I'm breaking up with you because you drink riesling. Riesling is a god-awful wine and I can't possibly be involved with anyone who thinks otherwise. It speaks badly of your judgment, more generally, and I won't risk having my future children inherit such terrible taste.

* * *

Hi! I just wanted to call, and say I had a great time last night, and I don't think we should ever do it again. Why? What do you mean, why? I'm sorry, I assumed you felt the same way. Remember when I was talking about that Terrence Malick film, and you thought I meant that movie with Meg Ryan? Sure, that Meg Ryan movie was an adaptation. No, it was an adaptation of Wim Wenders, not Terrence Malick. See? This proves my point exactly. Anyway, thanks for a fun night.

* * *

God, this is so graceless of me. I mean, I really wanted to wait till the entrées arrived, at least. But you were eating so slowly... I don't think we should see each other anymore. This isn't working out. I mean, we should have known, right?—I wanted a booth, you wanted a table. Ha ha. "Let's call the whole thing off."

I just wish you'd told me you had a double chin; it could have saved us both the trip. Can you please stop making that annoying sound when you cry? Here's some cash for the bill; I think if I leave now, I can make it home before Lost.

Are you going to eat that calamari? Mind if I get it wrapped up, to go?

Precious Time  

I get it in my head that I need a watch.

I'm not sure where that idea comes from: I don't need a watch. How could I need a watch? No one needs a watch. There's a clock on my phone, a clock on my computer, a clock on the wall; clocks on the TV, on the microwave, on the coffee maker; clocks on the bell towers, on the subways cars, on the billboards. Everywhere I go, someone or something is telling me what time it is.

And most hours of most days, I don't particularly care what time it is.

So if I need a watch, that's not the reason.

But I can't get it out of my head: I need a watch.

* * *

The last watch I owned was a Mickey Mouse watch given to me by my parents when I was in six years old—a timepiece whose accuracy was only slightly compromised by the big, puffy, three-fingered gloves of the watch hands. My parents wisely understood that I was in first grade now; I had responsibilities; and that meant I needed to know what time it was. Bells rang, students shuffled through the halls, and for the first time in my life, I had appointments to keep: I was on someone else's schedule.

The watch, then, marked my rite of passage from childhood's boundless play time, to at least a miniaturized version of adulthood, the constraints of which were bound to force me onto someone else's schedule.

At some point, I lost the watch, and that was that.

I never was very good at keeping to other people's schedules.

* * *

They say time is money¹, and as I browse the expensive Swiss timepieces under this glass counter, I couldn't agree more: time, at least in this store, is a lot of money.

My desire for a watch comes and goes, but seems to return whenever I want a badge of adulthood. It's more of an amulet, then, than a timepiece—adornment to announce to the world, first of all, that I am a responsible adult who needs to keep precise track of time (in the case of this particular chronograph watch, precise to the tenth of a second); and secondly, that I am capable of arranging my finances in such a way that the purchase of a piece of finely-crafted Swiss jewelry is a completely reasonable, and not frivolous, expense (which is untrue).²

Adulthood: the paradox that if we work hard, we can reward ourselves with expensive things, like a nice watch: we work more in order to pay for it, and have less time, while wearing a water-resistant quartz timepiece on which to watch time tick away.^3,4

---

1. Certainly, those of us ever lucky enough to have an excess of one almost certainly have precious little of the other.

2. A few months ago, my life was full of too much adulthood, so I quit my job and adorned myself like a child.

3. Not unlike spending good money on an expensive trash can.

4. And again, the need to remind myself that simply not shopping, or not working, does not in and of itself constitute a critique of Late-Stage Capitalism.

Intro to Philosophy 

or, How Looking for Belief Can Lead to Believing Nothing

My life has been a series of apostasies, and I blame this on Norman Kretzmann.

Against the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I entered college as a philosophy major. My last year of high school had been a strange and spacious one: since I'd completed most of my requirements the year before, I took it upon myself to spend my senior year doing whatever I wanted, despite the diligent efforts of hall monitors and truancy officers. I was delinquent, but in the best possible way: if I skipped class, it was usually to work on a film I was shooting through most of that year, a sort of thesis project that (in my mind) gave me carte blanche to wander the halls, as long as I carried a camera. If I wasn't working on the film, then I was reading a book I'd stolen from an English teacher the year before, by Will Durant, called The Story of Philosophy.

People have romantic notions about philosophy, and the purpose of this book was to shatter all of those notions. People imagine the study of philosophy to be a lot of cloudy, heady and generalized musing about the meaning of life. But Durant's book was dry, dense, and merciless. He didn't care what you thought about the meaning of life. He cared only to explain the rigors of Spinoza and Schopenhauer—this, to high school students who would laugh at the word "monad" because it rhymes with "gonad."

Somehow, I found purchase there, in that book: I was unprepared for the mathematical precision that the discipline of philosophy required, but I did love the questions, and I would skim the dense passages over and over until I could understand them in their cloudy, heady, generalized forms: I loved philosophy in spite of itself.

I wound up at a college with a world-class philosophy department, and quickly discovered it was one of the easiest majors, requiring only thirty-two credits—just one class per semester. Since I'd just spent a year cultivating a love of free time and a disdain for requirements, it seemed a perfect match, and I declared my major immediately.

My first class: Philosophy of Religion, with Norman Kretzmann.

Kretzmann was famous in esoteric circles, but his celebrity (like that of most of my professors) was lost on me. Instead, I was excited by the subject matter. Young philosophers want to know, "How should we live?"—and it seemed to me that any discussion of religion would have to address this cloudy, heady, general question.

Instead, what happened, more of less, was this:

Kretzmann wrote two or three sentences on the blackboard, and amended the wording of them until the class could agree that they were true. Once he'd established these initial statements, he'd add to them, line by line, allowing us to argue at any point until we all agreed with what was written—so that the truth of each statement was airtight. Methodically, for an hour and a half, Kretzmann constructed a logical proof, and at the very end of class, exactly on cue, he'd arrive at the proof's conclusion.

On Tuesdays, he proved that God existed.

On Thursdays, he proved that God did not exist.

And it went back and forth like that for the entire semester.

I can't remember if the class ended on a Tuesday or a Thursday, or if, in the end, Kretzmann ever tipped his hand to reveal what he himself believed to be true. Belief, in the end, had nothing to do with it. Those sixteen weeks shattered all belief, and that must have been his intention: those proofs proved that you could prove anything. We were theists and atheists on alternate days, and after that, nihilists forever.

Tastes Like Chicken 

A few weeks before Christmas, I was in a Le Creuset outlet store, browsing colorful, overpriced, cast-iron cookware, trying to come up with gift ideas for people who already had plenty of colorful, overpriced cast-iron. The bubbly saleswoman, trained to deal with dilemmas such as mine, jumped in: "Do they have one of THESE?"

She held up a foot-high ceramic dunce hat.

I had to concede that no, my friends did not have one of those. Nor, I insisted, did they need one, even after I learned that I was looking at a tagine—a traditional North African pot designed to cook stews (also called tagines), to trap in moisture, and make meat so succulent that it almost literally melts off the bone. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was an impractical, gimmicky gift, hard to store, entirely the brainchild of some marketing department that had decided that this year, the tagine would be the "It" stew pot. It was a stupid, foolish, overpriced cast-iron gift, and I'd be a dunce to buy it.

"It's perfect. I'll take it. Why don't you throw in the cookbook, too?"

My friends haven't used their new gift yet. But I have. Tonight, for the third time in three weeks, I am cooking a tagine in a tagine.

* * *

I was a vegetarian for most of my twenties, and to this day, I have a preference for meat that tastes like tofu. There are a few reasons for this, but ethics really isn't one of them. All other things being equal, I suppose it is ethically best if we don't slaughter animals for food—but when are all things ever equal? Good meat, cooked the right way, is and probably always will be more satisfying than the best soy substitute.

("Mmmm, bacon.")

I'm a lazy eater. I don't really like food I have to chew, and I like it less and less as I have to work more and more, to shell it, de-bone it, or otherwise render it consumable. For all that trouble, I'd rather just have a Boca Burger. I don't mind cooking for hours, and I don't mind any of the aforementioned steps when I have to do them to prepare food; but by the time it arrives at the table, I'd just as soon not have to rend it. I like my food pre-rent.

* * *

Chicken, at least as we've come to know it in the post-Eighties world, can certainly be made chewable and innocuous: those little cubes of white meat that show up in salads and burritos are as tofu-like as one could ever hope (though partly because they're pumped full of water and then bleached). "Tastes like chicken" is generally how we describe food that has no taste.

But chicken is also the only food that I'll avoid for fear that it will taste too "chickeny"—that is, less like First World chicken and more like Third World chicken. I prefer my chicken to taste like nothing rather than taste like chicken.

Which brings me back to the tagine, the stew pot that cooks meat till it almost literally melts off the bone. The tagine, my new favorite pot, because I'm using it to discover wonderful recipes in which chicken tastes like cinnamon, tastes like coriander, tastes like olives, tastes like lemon, and most of all, tastes nothing like chicken.

More, from the "I Hate Chicken" series:
Chickens, pt. 1
Chickens, pt. 2
Chicken Soup

Another Fool on the Internet 

That Guy 

When I wake up, I can't tell what's going on. It's dark and there's sharp thudding. After a few seconds, the morning snaps into better focus and I understand: it's that guy. That insomniac road crew guy who runs the jack-hammer. He's at it again.

As I sit up in bed, I feel vaguely like Roy Scheider, who, having vanquished the giant predatory shark in Jaws and then again in Jaws 2, sees his family flee from Hawaii to Florida, only to have the shark follow them, in Jaws 3-D, looking for revenge.

* * *

We first met in upstate New York: I lived in a sleepy college town, in one of those broken-down, overpopulated old clapboard houses that make up these towns—the kind where the walls are all crooked and the doors never quite line up, and rooms seem to have been haphazardly appended to the original structure till you can't tell what the original structure was, rooms just slapped on here and there so that the building resembles a hamster's Habitrail—even before one considers the rat's-nest decor of piled laundry and food containers that are the closest thing the house has to insulation. You know—one of those houses?

We lived a little ways off the road, but they were doing some work on a water line or sewer line or something, and that's how I met that guy.

That guy, that orange-vested guy with bulging triceps and a penchant for early rising, was an up-and-comer: he had everything it took to be a very successful jack-hammerer. And he knew it. Every morning he'd be up and coming right outside our window, hammering away into our driveway, into what felt like the foundation of the house, into what felt like my molars and my cranium, at 7am. 7am! No regard was given to the fact that we we'd been up all night working studying drinking and playing guitar. 7am, on the button, every morning. This guy was a German train. This guy was the Cal Ripkin of jack-hammerers.

The resulting lack of sleep led to more than half of the house coming down with mono.¹

There was no evidence to support the obvious theory—that guy enjoyed waking us each morning from our privileged (and often hung-over) sleep.

* * *

I didn't see that guy again for a few years: we drifted apart and went our separate ways, and I kind of forgot about him. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in L.A., but I couldn't be sure, because the steep angle of the sun threw the shadow of the hard hat across his face, and all I saw for sure were his white teeth shining out from his gleaming sadistic 7am smile.

* * *

It's only natural, I guess, that we each wound up in Boston: it's an obvious destination for private contractors and for over-educated liberal arts grads. The entire city of Boston is always under construction, constantly.² Road crews are easier to find than T stops, and at least as prevalent as Dunkin Donuts.³

[Construction is the status quo in Boston, along with its evil twin, destruction. Put aside the exceptional example of the Big Dig and consider instead the thousands of smaller-scale fiascos: i.e., the entire time I was in Boston (so, two years) saw work on the Congress Street Bridge, a major passage across the Boston Channel into South Boston. Work started before I arrived and it goes on to this day. Construction in Boston is so common that you might never twice take the same route from one place to another: like the Hogwarts staircase, the road itself will bend and twist and reshape itself over time.]

That guy found me a week after I renewed my lease in Boston's South End. I had plenty of misgivings about signing on to another year of that apartment (in particular) and another year of Boston (in general), but I made some peace with these misgivings, and decided it was for the best that I stay. I inked the new lease and settled in for another year.

The wrecking ball showed up the following week, there to tear down the adjacent building and replace it a new set of luxury condos. Yes—wrecking ball. Since we'd first met in that sleepy college town, that guy had diversified: he was now adept in many new tools of noise and destruction, including (but not limited to) the pile driver, the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and even explosives.

The amount of time it takes, apparently, to level an old building, clear the rubble, and then build, from the ground up, a new set of luxury condos is exactly one year—exactly the duration of the lease I'd just signed. They were just installing the windows when I drove my U-haul out of town.

I hope that guy forgives me for not saying goodbye.

* * *

From the window of my Brooklyn apartment, I can make him out, in his too-familiar hard hat and orange vest. He's surrounded by an army of rubber construction cones and he's blissfully jack-hammering away. Sitting there on the curb, off to one side, there's a coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Even from this distance, through the light rain and through the cement dust that rises up around him, through the shadow that the sun casts off of his hard hat, I can see his bright teeth smiling, as he hammers his way back into my day.

1. Or maybe it was all the kissing.

2. Given the number of liberal arts grads, it's probably under constant deconstruction as well.

3. It's completely possible the prevalence of Dunkin Donuts in Boston is a direct result of the prevalence of road crews, because you will never see one without the other.

My Bad Taste 

Part One: Trooper

I grew up in a town called Trooper, served by the post office of a larger, neighboring town called Norristown. But these are both ugly names, so as I was growing up, whenever I wrote out my address, I listed the small town next to us in the other direction, Audubon, because I found it more aesthetically pleasing. I don't know if my edit frustrated the postman, or if it ever caused me to lose mail—and I never cared, because it still seemed better to lose mail than to have to write words like "Trooper" or "Norristown" on an envelope.

That is the kind of person you're dealing with.

I never wanted to be associated with a place that had such bad sense to name towns Trooper or Norristown, or a place whose idea of a good painter was John James Audubon. Such a place is not a place with good taste, and I've always hated that about it. You could say that by making this little edit on my outgoing envelopes, I was trying to leave my home town long before I actually packed my bags and actually left.

But you can't change where you're from.

This weekend I'm on my way back to Norristown. I'm looking at a SEPTA train full of people with bad taste, and maybe for the first time in my life, I'm realizing I'm one of them. I'm realizing part of me never actually left.

Part Two: Music History

The first record I ever bought, at age ten, was "I Love Rock'n'Roll", by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. It was a single, and I also had to buy a yellow plastic "spider" to put in the center of the record, so it would play on my dad's stereo.

The first album I ever bought was a mix cassette of 80s singles, the kind they advertise on TV as being "Not available in stores," though somehow I bought it at K-Mart. The album opened with "Don't You Want Me Baby" by The Human League, and included tracks by Foreigner and Huey Lewis and News. ¹

The first important album I ever bought was Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil, important because I bought it on account of our seventh grade class president liking it: I bought it to feel cool. The album looked Satanic and I felt I should listen to it in secret, without my parents learning of it—so in a sense, this was the beginning of my adolescence. ²

By the end of eighth grade, in some (very small) circles I was considered an arbiter of good taste, because of my extensive knowledge of the classic and pop rock canons. Within the first few notes, I could reliably "Name That Tune" from among a vast set of music by Bad Company, Bryan Adams, and Bon Jovi. ³ From this mostly useless skill I took great pride, and used every chance I had to show off, in public, just what a geek I was.

This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

Part Three: Snobbish Monsters

At some point in the midst of overpriced private education, I realized that what I was buying was a chance at better taste. ⁴ I surrounded myself with aesthetes and snobs, and to help fit in, I made the required changes to my music collection (and everything else).

Only in retrospect did I notice we are all in the midst of the same transition, trying to emulate one another while trying to change ourselves: none of us realized that the benchmark was moving.

Only in retrospect did I see that our parents had wanted us to have more opportunities than they did, and better ones—and in offering us those opportunities they wound up creating snobbish monsters in place of their children, snobbish monsters who would go on to make them feel bad about their own taste, and then try and parse the entire experience into an essay or a blog entry while playing the music of their childhood in a playlist that might or might not be ironic, might or might not be "good"—and the snobbish monster can't even tell anymore what is good, and what isn't...

1. I still like many of the songs from this album and I still listen to some of them.

2. I still like the title song from this album and I still listen to it.

3. I can honestly say I don't like most of these songs now, and with very rare exception, i.e., "Living on a Prayer," I do not listen to them. But I'm listening to "Living on a Prayer" right now.

4. Since I went to college to study aesthetics, I have to assume I was aware of all of this even at time.

Emergency Preparedness 

MP3 audio track

I hear the chirp from a policeman's walkie talkie outside my window, and see a small group of them (gaggle? pack?) standing next to my apartment. And a fire truck. I can't tell what's going on and I wonder if I should be prepared to evacuate—which right now I'm not, because I'm sitting here in a towel and nothing else. I've been sitting here in this towel since I got out of the shower a half-hour ago; and I was in the shower at least a half-hour (so warm!)—which makes me realize that when the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.

It all reminds me of the time I was evacuated from my apartment, after the building sort of exploded.

I woke that morning to an enormous thud that shook the walls of the Lido Apartments, where I lived at the time. The Lido was a relic from old Hollywood, a once-glamorous hotel turned into a five-story brick slum with aspirations to gentrify. Typical rising and falling of Hollywood dreams. ¹

On this morning something shook the building hard. This by itself wasn't too unusual, it being earthquake country; but this was a different kind of shake—not the slow, growling rumble of an earthquake; more like someone had driven a truck straight into the building. A big truck.

I poked my head out my window to see what was going on, and saw everyone else in my neighborhood doing the same—a hundred sleepy faces dangling outside a hundred windows. I thought of Whac-a-Mole. Then I remember thinking something bad was happening, something possibly disastrous or epic. ² I remember thinking I should throw some clothes on and leave the building.

Instead, seeing nothing, I decided to go back to bed.

[When the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.]

The firemen banging on the door shouted, We needed to get out "NOW NOW NOW." But I couldn't get out, because there were four of them standing in the doorway, and they were the biggest, widest, thickest people I've ever seen. So instead I grabbed some essentials—my laptop, some chewing gum—and waited for them to disperse.

Out on the street, the longest line of fire trucks ever assembled stretched from horizon to horizon (or at least up Wilcox to Cahuenga, and down to Hollywood Boulevard). Helicopters swarmed the sky, and police held curious passersby behind yellow "Do Not Cross" tape. I strolled through it casually, weirdly unbothered, almost dissociated. I declined a TV interview and instead made a beeline for Mann's Chinese Theatre. I watched Blade II (which really was bad, a disaster of epic proportions), and wondered, every now and then, if I'd have an apartment when the movie was over, and if I should have brought, I don't know, a change of underwear or at least a jacket.

I learned the full story when I got out of the theatre: a few people had seen my building on the morning news ³ and called to see if I was OK, and I pieced together the details from their string of voicemail messages. An underground had fire spread to a natural gas line, causing a muffled explosion that blew off the manhole covers all around my block: this was the initial thud. But it turned out that my building also sat on top of a major intersection of gas mains, and if the fire had spread, it'd have blown that entire part of the neighborhood sky high. Boulevard of broken dreams.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Maybe take short showers and don't sit around in your wet towel too long. Or maybe just that some people never learn.

1. The Lido was best known as the location for the lobby shots of the Eagles "Hotel California." My own favorite thing about the Lido, apart from its location and dirt-cheap rent, was the view it afforded to the luxury condos across the parking lot. Forty-eight windows shaped like wide-screen TVs faced toward my apartment, like forty-eight channels of television, and without fail, two or three of them featured women taking their clothes off and dancing. No one ever believes me about the dancing, but it's true. This was, after all, Los Angeles.

2. I can't remember for sure whether this was just before, or just after, September 11. I'm going to say it was just after, because that makes a better story. And maybe accurate.

3. Who in L.A. watches the morning news? Or any news?

Astrological Ashram 

I spend the morning reading blogs much better than mine—a consequence of reconnecting with some old writer-friends (all presumably out of work at the moment, with nothing to do, then, but blog...)—and a mixed consequence, because, well, yes, my morning reading is much improved, but also, Why can't I write like that?

Then I retreat into astrology sites for another two hours. Sure they're silly, but I find them comforting because they answer my prior question: I can't write like that because I'm cosmologically predisposed to be exactly what I am (which is, and I quote: "Escapist and idealistic. Secretive and vague. Weak-willed and easily led.") Thanks for that. What a relief.

I hide in these sites and take comfort from their pre-canned answers: They get me. And when's the last time anybody got me?

(Careful, it's a trick question—because the elephant in the astrological house is why I've been hiding, and what I'm retreating from—a subject I've avoided with aplomb these last few weeks, despite recently posting so. many. words. )

* * *

"As the last sign of the zodiac, you are in conflict with yourself, as your symbol suggests--two fish locked in tension, forever pulling each other in opposite directions. This can represent the personality tied to the soul, and indeed one seems to be swallowing the other. Your motto is either serve, or suffer. And if you lean more toward the spiritual side, your rewards are huge, for you are the most sensitive and psychic sign in the horoscope."

* * *

[Her hair is everywhere. I keep finding it. I'm a clean person—I sweep, I mop, I do laundry. But the hair persists. I can't get rid of it. The other night I woke up and found myself literally tangled up in it, like it's some living creature from an over-sentimental B-horror movie, a metaphor brought to life. The irony being she hasn't been here in weeks; she was barely here at all.

Her hair, on the other hand, won't leave. It has a will of its own.

I have to give serious consideration to whether I'm hallucinating. I don't think I am. But you never do....]

* * *

Last evasion for the morning: I disappear an hour into a book of poetry. (Oh so Piscean!) I'm amazed every time how, while reading, I can feel my spirit soar—but, to where? I put the book down only to find I've simply smacked against the ceiling. I'm right back where I started, or maybe worse, since it's already afternoon. "If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles."

It's time to get on with my day. Consolation, if it's anywhere, is somewhere outside of this astrological ashram. The psychics take one last parting shot, as I eat lunch, via a fortune cookie: "Your dearest wish will come true."

Sure. Sure it will. If only I can figure out what it is.

Inverse Spring Cleaning 

My parents came up this weekend. A three-hour drive up, a ninety-minute brunch, and then a three-hour drive back.

They're the sweetest people in the world.

I don't know for sure, but I think their biggest reason for coming up was because they had my winter coat. They knew winter was coming, and they didn't want me to get cold. That's right: I use them as a storage depot, and in return, they treat me like an object of affection and care. (They didn't even think I'd be here—they thought I was still in Paris—but wanted to make sure I had my winter coat when I got back.)

Have I mentioned they're the sweetest people in the world?

The coat came in the biggest duffel bag ever made, Hagrid's duffel bag, and it was full to bursting with all my winter things—sweaters, wool socks, flannel sheets, the aforementioned coat. From the look of the contents of this bag, you'd think I lived in a cabin in Saskatoon.

There was no way that such an influx of cotton and wool was not going to affect the status quo of my closet. So, since their visit, I've been engaged in inverse spring cleaning—the removal, washing, re-folding, re-sorting, and replacing of every single thing I own. Bushels of laundry. I've found a tee-shirt from high school, a camisole that belonged to my college girlfriend (before I knew the word "camisole"), clothes that have shrunken irreparably (or maybe it's not that the clothes have gotten smaller...)

Spring cleaning: it's not just for spring anymore. Going through one's entire wardrobe has to be the most clarifying feeling in the world: the enema of the closet. There should be a word for that. There probably is.

Caution Curves 

There must be a word for that sudden, inexplicable urge to drive your car into a telephone pole. You know the urge I mean. (I hope it's not just me...): you're driving on a perfectly safe stretch of road, having a completely unremarkable, maybe even happy day—till a little devil on your shoulder tells you to flick the wheel hard to the left, into oncoming traffic, a telephone pole or off a cliff.

You don't do it, of course. There's a half-second pause between the thought popping into your head, and your acting on that impulse—and that's enough time for you to realize it'd be a really stupid idea. It's enough time to stop yourself.

Usually.

Hopefully.

Even if you do manage to stop yourself (and if you're reading this, I assume that you've always managed to stop yourself), still there's a subsequent adrenaline rush, when you realize how thin the line is between an idea and an action; between thinking of driving off the cliff, and driving off the cliff; between a blissful, unremarkable day on a country road, and a life-altering collision of your own making.

* * *

Mothers, lock up your daughters, and drivers, lock up your cars: the devil on my shoulder is loud and insistent, and lately, in many aspects of my life, I'm pulling the wheel hard to the left. I'm making irrevocable and maybe irrational decisions.

Why? I'm not sure I could say. The road was too straight, too smooth. It was too easy to see where it was going. It wasn't going anywhere.

Or, ...

The devil made me do it.

* * *

There's another, similar siren call I've always found hard to resist—the call of mountain roads. Too many nights I've hurtled a car recklessly up and down the hairpins of Mulholland Drive, defying gravity to pull me off. I'd drive so hard it'd make me sweat, knowing anything—a bump in the road, gravel, a deer, (a pedestrian) could be the difference between living and dying.

What I've never been able to explain: it's not a death wish that drives me to be so reckless. It is absolutely not a wish to die.

It's a wish to live. A wish to be alive and to feel it.

There must be a word for that.

My Friend Tom 

Today I had a long meeting with my friend Tom. I first saw him from across a courtyard, and though he looked more or less same as always, for some reason I didn't recognize him. I'm forced to consider it's less because of changes that have taken place with Tom than the ones that have taken place inside me.

[Among the rules of the ocean: you can't swim against a riptide, and you can't position yourself inside a sea change. When everything's moving, it's hard to judge where you are. Focus on far-away points and try to triangulate...]

I like Tom, and just seeing him made it a better day than it would have been otherwise. Tom's one of my favorites.

* * *

After the meeting, I got back to Brooklyn but wasn't ready to go home. I took a detour to Boerum Hill, to a bar I keep meaning to check out. I had four drinks and paid for two: safe to say, it's my new favorite bar. The bartender, a friendly stocky quirky fellow, felt like long-lost kin. We argued with some people at the far end of the bar about socialism. He kept my bowl of peanuts full. His name was Tom. When I said "Goodbye," he replied, "See you soon."

Yes, you will.

* * *

The last stop on my way home was impulsive: I stopped at a local convenience store to buy a plant. I'm sure this had as much to do with those four whiskeys as with my own persistent sentimentality about flora. On my way out of the store, I walked by the ever-present homeless man who has claimed full squatter's rights on this stretch of pavement. I see this man every recent day of my life, but I've never spoken with him, and he's never asked me for anything. He is a panhandler of the most unobtrusive kind. And probably for that exact reason, I walked back to him and gave him the contents of my wallet.

He laughed. "I don't ask people for money, so when they give it to me, I know it's because they want to. " I talked to him for the next twenty minutes. I might have set out just to assuage my bourgeois guilt, but instead I made a friend.

His name's Tom.

End of an Era 

Or, Why I Should Mind My Own Beeswax

I swore to lay off the blog till something changed. No point in rehashing the same sad story over and over and over and over and... Well, my friends: the time has come. Something momentous is going on, and tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday. And I'll tell you why.

But first—Hi. How've you been? (Hey, it's not a rhetorical question: go ahead and leave a "comment." ) Does the Summer of '07 find you looking happily upon your life? Do you feel wiser and more comfortable in your own skin, even if that skin doesn't look as young as it used to? Does the cool of the breeze that rustles the trees rustle you too?

[Bear with me: I'm still working out the kinks in my atrophied blog-muscles.]

So, on to my big news. It'd be safe to say I've been in a bit of a rut these past few weeks months years. So many symptoms I could describe, but I'll pick out this one: the gray t-shirts. Every day for two years, I've worn jeans and a gray t-shirt. Actually, that's not quite true: I have, every now and then, swapped in a different shirt, though it's more out of necessity than fashion statement: my stock of gray tees has limits; and even on these days, I pick a shirt that's a deep enough blue that from the distance or at twilight, I'm sure it'd pass for gray.

This morning I hauled a 40-pound laundry bag of jeans and gray tees down to the laundromat, and dropped in so many quarters I thought I might hit a jackpot. And I did, in a manner of speaking. Because in (at least) one of those pair of jeans was a stick of lip balm, which heated in the dryer and melted all over my entire blue-and-gray wardrobe.

The result was, I'm sure you can imagine, greasy, sticky, and kind of sweet smelling.

Safe to say, I won't be wearing a gray shirt tomorrow. End of an era. But what should I wear...?

Fables of the Deconstruction 

When I was younger, I used to drink to feel free—to shuck off my gentler shell in favor of a purer, simpler exuberance, to wander and dance, break things and howl at the moon. I used to drink because, in a way, the alcohol-induced haze offered me its own sort of clarity.

Now I drink to feel younger.

I notice this in the middle of a late-night download from iTunes, where I spent another $30 downloading music by mediocre bands of yesteryear. With my judgment worn down by the alcohol, I flail around trying to communicate my affection for these badly-aged bands: my iTunes downloads are the yuppie equivalent of drunk-dialing.

("Friends don't let friends drink and download.")

What am I going to do with these fifty songs by The Alarm and Guadalcanal Diary?

* * *

Dan Kois on Slate.com recently stirred up the twenty-year old question, "Who Was the Best Band of the 80s?" He describes the decade as a fierce battle between two forces, diametrically opposed: "Among certain floppy-haired music nerds in that era, you were either an R.E.M. person or a U2 person," and you knew which sort of person you were by how strongly you related to the bands' very different front men—the audacious, anthem-belting Bono, or the mumbly, reclusive and introspective Michael Stipe. These were the two demigod heroes of the "war"—a boastful Hector and a battle-reluctant Achilles.

It's probably easy to guess where I put my loyalties. But I've wondered lately, while trying to pull some meaning out of the indecipherable lyrics of R.E.M.'s Murmur: what is the long-term effect of choosing a childhood hero who shuns the spotlight—who writes lyrics he himself doesn't understand because he likes the way they "feel", who used the opportunity of his first appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman" to hide from the camera and avoid saying anything to the talk show host at all?

Maybe this idolatry wasn't setting me up to succeed. Maybe I could have found better pastimes than trying to draw meaning from lyrical nuggets like "Diminish, a carnival of sorts, chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel" or "Step up the sky is open-armed. When the light is mine, I felt gravity pull .... " With this as a formative influence, is it any wonder I spend all of my time by myself and find other people hard to understand?

* * *

One of my college roommates was from Athens, Georgia. Imagine the Koran is my favorite book and it turns out my roommate is from Mecca—that's what it was like, being a fan of Southern post-punk jangle pop and suddenly sharing record collections with someone from Athens. It's impossible for me to hear this music and not conflate it with youth, drunken disorderly optimism, and all of the things that made life then seem better than now (though my roommate's persistent loyalty to jam-band Widespread Panic made him, in the end, a disappointment...).

Which brings me back to my drunken downloads. If U2 and R.E.M. spent the 80s vying for the title of "Greatest Band of the 80s" among rock nerds, then you could consider The Alarm and Guadalcanal Diary their flyweight or farm-league divisions: the former, Welsh rockers with a sound not unlike early U2, belted out anthems without Bono's overt politics or love of the blues; the latter, from an Atlanta suburb, proved they could jangle with the best of them on their debut album, Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man—but spent the remainder of their short career living out that prophetic title, unable to escape the (apt) comparisons to R.E.M.

These are things I haven't thought about in fifteen years. Not while sober, anyway. Yet, invariable, when I raise a few too many drinks and the alcohol starts smudging my short-term memory, these farther-off memories come back, vivid as ever. If our music collections make up the soundtrack of our lives, then mine keeps getting stuck in a rehash of the first act. It's a Cameron Crowe movie, full of sincere intent and not very much actual action, at times too sentimental and at other times too clever for its own good. But it's a really good soundtrack....

Dressing Up 

or, Every Day is a Costume Party

I have this pair of pants.

"Slacks," but I've always hated that word. This pair of pants is brown and unpleated and made of a sturdy fabric. They fit great. They have a nifty little pocket-inside-a-pocket which happens to fit my cellphone exactly and keeps it from getting scratched.

Nifty.

I like this pair of pants.

But I don't wear these pants. I wear jeans. But I don't wear pants. "Slacks." Except I hate that word.

* * *

At some point I felt the need to clarify with my co-worker: "It's not one gray t-shirt that I wear over and over and over. It's several gray t-shirts. It is many." Many gray t-shirts which are exactly the same. I bought two, at first, and then bought five more just like the first two.

In my closet there is a neatly-folded pile of gray t-shirts and each morning I reach in and take the top one from the pile. So I don't have to think about it.

That's the way I am.

This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

* * *

I have two belts, identical except for the fact that one is black and one is brown. Sometimes I wear a belt and sometimes I don't. There's no pattern to it. There's no predicting.

I always always match my belt to my shoes. Brown to brown, black to black.

It does not matter whether or not I wear a belt because I don't tuck my shirt in, ever. My gray shirt. So no one can see whether I'm wearing a belt or not.

Still I always always match my belt to my shoes. Brown to brown, black to black.

This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

* * *

Today I wore my brown pants. I pulled a white Oxford from the back of my closet and tucked it into my brown pants. I put on black shoes and then my black belt.

Crazy. I looked in the mirror at my tucked-in Oxford shirt and that's what I thought: "Crazy."

(This is the kind of person you're dealing with.)

Then I took it off and put on my gray shirt and went to work.

Happy Halloween.

Back to School 

I am a grumpy old man.

I twisted my ankle jogging across the street today, with a pop so loud people turned and stared. I looked around for a pothole or cobblestone to scapegoat, but there was nothing, and I had to shoulder the blame all by myself. I simply failed to put one foot in front of the other.

I'd spent the better part of the previous evening sitting on my ass, in front of a computer—which is how I spent the better part of the afternoon, and the morning, and the entire three days before. My body was so ill-prepared for the simple act of crossing the street that when I turned my ankle this morning, I pulled muscles in my back.

None of this would have bothered me much at all, except I did it in full view of a pack of back-to-school college girls, and then had to limp straight through the whole bunch of them.

Damn my old bones.

* * *

All over town, the streets are suddenly crowded. The T sags on its hydraulics trying to support the weight of all the new people. In less than a week, the city's population has bulged by an extra third: it's a city that hibernates in the summer and in winter comes to life. Suddenly the humidity's gone and the streets are overflowing with young, hopeful, clean-skinned golden boys and girls.

Welcome back to school.

They are a breed apart. Their eyes are bright and their hair is well-conditioned. They recognize each other in the bars, on the train. They hug.

They are the world. They are the children.

I resent them, yes, because I'm a grumpy old man, but not only. I resent them, too, because they're coddled with so many advantages, because they think they're fully-formed, rollerblading through their life under the mistaken impression that their life now bears semblance to real life. I resent them, then, for having all of the things that I had once. I resent them for not being wise. I resent them for being young.

Oh. So I guess it is only because I'm a grumpy old man.

B2 or Not B2, that is the question. 

When I first moved to Boston, I stayed in a condo with a roof deck that gave me a striking view of the city skyline, and in particular, the city's tallest building, the John Hancock Tower. This sleek, almost crystal-looking building is so narrow, compared to its height, that from some angles it appears almost two-dimensional.

Having just moved from New York, the main thing I would think about, when looking at the building from this angle, was that if an an airplane were to fly into it, it might punch straight through and come out the other side.

And I still think that, whenever I see the building (which is often, since it is, after all, the tallest building in Boston).

It just so happened that I was walking directly underneath this building on the eve of a, well, ominous day.¹ The building was famous, when first built, for swaying in the wind in such unexpected ways that the 11-foot high floor-to-ceiling windows were prone to dropping off the frame onto the street below—so walking beneath it can be mildly nerve-wracking, if one is prone to worrying about these sorts of things.

These were the two things on my mind—crashing airplanes and falling glass—while I walked by the John Hancock Tower that morning.

Then I heard the roar of a jet plane.

This was not just any airplane. This was, simply, the loudest jet roar I have ever heard, and it was getting closer. This was all of my imaginings, all of America's post-9/11 nightmare, come true. On the five-year anniversary of that event, a low-flying jet plane was inbound on Boston's tallest building.

I'm not sure what there is to do, in this sort of moment (is this a sort of moment?), so I did what anyone would have done, what a caveman would have done:

I cringed in fear and looked to the sky.

You're reading this, and I'm writing it, and both of us know full-well by now that an airplane did not fly into the John Hancock Tower that morning. But what I saw, when I looked up, was only slightly less awe-inspiring.

The city of Boston was being buzzed by a B2 bomber.

* * *

The B2 bomber is the most expensive airplane ever built, so expensive that it is worth three times its weight in gold, so expensive that there are only twenty-one B2 bombers in the world. They are strange, alien-looking aircraft, and because of this, you've probably seen pictures of them—and because of their scarcity, you probably haven't seen a real one.

They are enormous and loud² and, if I hadn't known of their existence, I'd probably have thought they'd been built by an extraterrestrial culture. But apart from the "shock and awe" it inspired, I was frightened for another reason:

If there are only twenty-one B2 bombers in the world, and if we are currently fighting not one but two wars ... what could possibly be going on in this part of the world, that they need a B2 bomber in New England?

I realize there are logical explanations (the most likely being routine maintenance: after all, we are fighting not one but two wars...). But none of the scenarios I could invent answered why this plane needed to make such a low flyby in a major metropolitan area. For safety reasons, they try to avoid flying over populated areas; and for fuel economy, they tend to fly high, where there is less drag because the air is thinner. If there actually were a terrorist hijacking of a commercial airplane, then fighter jets might be deployed to shoot that commercial plane down ... but what good would a bomber do?

Since I hadn't heard any news that we're carpet-bombing Canada (despite those lumber trade disputes), I came to this (cynical) conclusion—that the flyby was done specifically to frighten the people of Boston, to remind us that we are not safe, to induce us to pull the Republican lever at the polls in November.

Shock and awe indeed.

---

1. If I were at all superstitious, I'd pick eleven as my lucky number, not just because it's the other half of winning at craps, but more because my past few years have an uncanny number of synchronicities associated with that number. So it's only with a mild sense of irony that I think of the eleventh of any month as somehow ominous, and the eleventh of September, well, for obvious reasons, slightly more ominous than the other ... eleven months.

2. "Stealth" bomber?!?

Nail-Biting / Thumb-Sucking 

"I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore." - Dorothy Parker

I've always bitten my nails but this is another thing entirely. I'm completely out of control. I'm biting the nails and skin and I think maybe the bone. I couldn't tell you why, any more than I could tell you why I was so tired all day yesterday, then had so much trouble sleeping: through the whole night, I kept hearing the sound of my phone chirping from voicemail, even though no one was calling me and it was turned off. And the following day, without even thinking, I bit my nails till they bled. I forced myself to stop. (It looks unprofessional to have bleeding fingers sticking from my mouth, and anyway, it makes it hard to type.) And a minute later, without thinking or even realizing it was happening, my fingers were in my mouth again, and I was gnawing away.

My mind, it seems, has a mind of its own.

* * *

I was a thumb-sucker. I haven't read the parenting books so I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but I know I did it for a long time, and I know it made me feel really good. Relaxed. And apart from the increased chance of buck teeth, I never really did see a downside to the habit. It embarrassed my parents, I think, maybe in the same way that a dog owner gets embarrassed when the dog hops on the sofa or jams its nose in someone's crotch: it doesn't hurt anyone, but it doesn't reflect very well on the owner, either.

I don't remember quitting the habit: I honestly think I woke up one day and just decided to stop. Same with nail-biting, a few years back: one day, I just realized I was done with it, didn't need to do it anymore. And just as suddenly and unconsciously started up again without noticing, around the time I moved to Boston.

* * *

"I don't do anything," I complain. "I used to do things but now I don't do a single thing. I just sit around and bite my nails. Why is that?"

"Anxiety?" My friend shrugs. "Hunger?"

Onychophagia. That's the fancy name for nail-biting. It's put in the same general family as "skin picking" (which sounds a whole lot scarier to me, but obviously I'm biased...). It can be taken as a symptom of a mental or emotional disorder, or alternately, intellectualism.

Thumb-sucking, too, is sometimes understood as a manifestation of a Freudian oral fixation, which, "in adulthood can develop into pessimism, envy, suspicion and sarcasm." Spanish soccer player Luis Javier García Sanz is a thumb-sucker. So is the lead singer of The Corrs.

Sometimes, very rarely, in moments of severe stress or sadness, I'll put my thumb in my mouth. It doesn't actually make me feel good, like it used to. But it does almost evoke a memory of what good used to feel like.

Sometimes that's enough.

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2 

I can't remember.

What was I watching when your careworn face showed up on screen?—reminding me, first of all, that you existed (I just hadn't thought about you in a while...), and then, only a moment later, reminding me that you didn't. You didn't exist anymore.

I really can't remember what I was watching.

Fact is, I've seen you a dozen times on TV, and it's never made an impression on me. Your craggy voice is what strikes people, and your tiny body, and sometimes they get a lucky hint of your intensity: more intensity per pound than anyone I've met.

But to people who know you, these things are already familiar, and the feeling from seeing you onscreen isn't much different than seeing you anywhere else. "I ran into Pamela the other night," I'll find myself saying to some mutual friend. "Where?", they might ask. And then I realize: Freaks and Geeks. A TV show.

* * *

That's where it was—Freaks and Geeks. I remember now. You growled something funny in that voice we used to call "emphysemic" (till we discovered this was actually true). And then you were gone.

And then I realized, you were gone.

I also have trouble remembering where I was when I learned this fact. Far away, that much is certain: I left you as suddenly and certainly as I left all of you, that whole crew. I learned it by telephone, from the woman who introduced us. I can't remember if we talked, or if it was a voicemail. I recall being shocked, though I don't know if that's a fair word: you sometimes seemed so frail that I wondered if you were dying from the moment I met you.

[They say we're all dying from the moment we're born, but you somehow turned this on its head: living right up until the moment of death.]

* * *

"How old are you, Pamela?", we'd ask now and then. We had an idea that you'd been around forever, that you were maybe a beauty from the silent film era; the math didn't work, but still it made sense, because you behaved as though you'd been there since the Beginning. The beginning of something, anyway.

You'd cackle at the question, that signature laugh: "Even the coroner won't know how old I am," you'd say, "on the day I die."

You were wrong about that. That's the day I learned—on the day that it no longer mattered.

Maybe it never mattered.

[I think I wanted an answer because I needed to know how fragile you were, how brittle. I wanted to know how hard to squeeze when I hugged you. Your refusal to answer was your way of saying you weren't brittle at all. Maybe it's also the reason you never told us you were dying. Maybe you thought that if you told us, we wouldn't hug so tightly anymore.]

* * *

I was in the northern part of California, you know, when they buried you in the southern part. Closer than I'd been, but still not close enough. I wanted to be there. I doubt you'd have cared; you never thought much of ceremony. I expected, as always, you'd stand and watch from the wings, halfway heckling, but also mouthing our lines as we spoke them: your silent support.

I wanted to be there and I wanted to bury you with a bottle of cheap red wine, and my love.

I'm glad to see you show up on my television screen now and then, answering a door, peering into a crystal ball, pulling on a cigarette—typecast somewhere between mystic and sight-gag. You'll say something in your husky voice, you'll laugh your signature laugh, and you'll be gone. And later, I'll think, "I ran into Pamela the other night.

"It was good seeing her."

Triskaidekaphobia 

I'd like to make a confession. (As if the nearly-three-hundred prior blog entries posted here aren't all confessions, each and every one...)

I've never posted on the 13th day of a month. Don't take my word for it: go back to the archive, check it out for yourself.

The otherwise rational and irreverent Urban Sherpa is triskaidekaphobic.

But I'm working to put a bunch of bad habits behind me, and I figured this would be a simple place to start.

Now, on to the harder ones...

Squishy Jeans 

Outside the window of my apartment, there's a flat roof where I can see the water gather when it rains. A glance at the roof is more reliable than a glance at the Weather Channel, because I can see how much rain has accumulated and how hard it's coming down. For a good gauge of wind speed, I have to look a little past the building, to the street below: I get a sense of the wind by how many umbrellas have been turned inside out.

I remember, when I lived in Los Angeles, the jokes about so-called weather men who went onto the nightly news to make their "forecast": "Sunny. Clear. Low in the mid-sixties." Every single day. For this they went to meteorology school?

Weather has been just about as consistent in Boston for the past two months as in L.A. Weekdays: sunny and clear. Weekends: cloudy, rain. To be fair, there is some variety in the rain: sometimes drizzle, sometimes torrent. Mostly just plain rain. After so many days of it, you'd think we'd have developed a more sophisticated vocabulary, like the Inuits and snow. So far, no one has been that clever. Blame it on cabin fever: it's hard to be clever when you've been breathing the same recycled air in your studio apartment, when you haven't seen sun in a month. (If I don't get a plant in here, I'm sure to run out of oxygen any day now...)

I decide to go out. (Not to buy a plant. Just, you know, to go out.) The weather this afternoon is especially nasty: the wind rips through my umbrella in the first minute. Oh well. Never liked that umbrella much anyway. Besides, the rain on my face is refreshing. (The rain on my glasses is not refreshing, is actually kind of blinding, and almost causes a little problem at the intersection of Columbus and Mass. Ave...)

I'm amazed how many people are out on the streets, each one with a battered, mangled umbrella and a look of nostalgic wonder in their eyes: "Oh, this is what outside is like!"

"It never rains but it pours..." When the weather takes a turn for the worse, we run for a covered veranda and huddle together, the most basic of all human connections: strangers seeking shelter from the storm. Everyone is soaked, and (maybe I'm imagining) everyone is smiling. We're a bunch of seafarers, we are. Old salts. Batten down the hatches, matey. My jeans are cold and wet and sticking to my legs, making it impossible to move. It's wet and windy and it's outside and it's wonderful. Outside is wonderful.

Rilke for Retards 

She was in my "cohort" (though it was art school and we didn't call it that), and because of it we knew each other well, knew each other's secrets. We thought of sleeping together and never did, and because that's a distinction that doesn't always get made in art school—the distance between thinking and doing is shorter there than elsewhere, even generally—our making that distinction made our friendship stronger.

We both spent our mid-twenties writing memoirs, before realizing that we weren't old enough, famous enough, or interesting enough for memoirs.

"You're Douglas Coupland on lithium," I told her once.

"You're Rilke for Retards," she shot back.

Some things never change.

* * *

From the Gospel According to Rilke:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

Also:

I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands.

Also:

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

Some things never change.

* * *

The dean of our graduate program left us a strange legacy: he was famous, first of all, for a book he wrote in the early eighties which changed the way people thought of his field; and then secondly for going crazy soon thereafter. Legend has it that he tried to commit suicide by stepping out the window of a building, only to crash into an Oscar Meyer Weiner parade float that was passing underneath. When he came to, he was in a mental ward, arranging words in sentences as if they were Scrabble tiles.

Which is an interesting qualification for the head of a writing program.

Eventually, he arranged the tiles back into a shape that was more or less presentable, and arrived at his self-described simple life: "I like to read. I like to write. I like to drink." I've taken this as the paradigm of "peace of mind" ever since. It might be the most valuable thing I learned from him—a concrete definition of peace of mind.

Within a year of graduating, three members of the cohort had seen the inside of psychiatric hospitals and one attempted suicide...

* * *

From the Gospel According to Rilke:

Then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what through the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt—his heart;
debated and passed their judgment:
that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communion.)

* * *

"Cohort" originally referred to a band of soldiers numbering 600, but in modern usage, it can refer even to a single person: "She is my cohort," meaning, presumably, we have a lot in common; we have been through something together, something difficult, something not unlike a war.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Some things never change.

---

Little Yellow Envelope 

I had a fantasy that by moving to Boston, to a place I had nothing and knew no one, I'd have some peace and quiet, and in the quiet, I'd be able to figure things out. Maybe I have figured a few things out; but mostly the quiet has come from having no one in particular to talk to, and the peace has been disturbed by being always lost and uneasy. "Which way to Brighton?"

Sometimes I think that the other people in my life offer me a kind of mirror—through them I can see a reflection of myself; through their reactions, I get some understanding of who I actually am. And without them I get confused…

* * *

I keep a little yellow envelope, full to bursting with the small set of photos, postcards and memorabilia I've decided to keep. I don't keep things. I blame it on the frequent moves, but I don't know if that's the real reason: I write a journal on a cheap legal pad; I write in it nearly every day; and when I fill up the pad, I throw it out. It's served its purpose. It's printed ephemera. I take another pad from the 10-pack and start again.

My yellow envelope is the arbitrary pile of the relics I've decided to keep.

Sometimes I think if I look at these pictures and postcards, I'll see my past in a new light and learn something new about myself. But the wisdom in this envelope is oracular, and the answers don't come easy. One scrap says, "Life was simpler in America. (Our life.)" Another says, "Chris's Life" and then offers a short list of alternate possibilities:

• balloon animals
• merchant
• kayak instructor / outdoorsman
• masseuse
• ghost writer / political speech writer

Yet another: "How to Fend Off an Alligator." (Tap or punch the alligator on the snout or behind the ears to make it back away.) Another: "I hope that everything that was broken last year gets fixed this year." (It didn't.)

There's a long black feather in the envelope.

There's a stone, wrapped in a piece of paper that says nothing.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

* * *

This weekend I saw the woman who gave me the stone. We strolled through the refurbished tenements of New York's Lower East Side. ("Early morning traffic is audible, as is the cry fishmongers.") The buildings, we noticed, had layers and layers of old secrets—here the exposed bricks showed the outline of another, older building long ago torn down; here there'd been a fire. My friend talked to me about palimpsests—old reused parchments which, after time, begin to show all of their collected layers. Their rich secrets are only known after the passage of time. Words accumulate; no erasure is complete; and in the end, there are layers upon layers of sense.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

---

A Better Mousetrap 

The first time it was the sound.

It was just after I'd moved into the apartment, and the place was piled with broken-down cardboard, crumpled newspaper, a few old take-out containers, and a giant ball of used packing tape, which I kicked around the apartment like a soccer ball until I almost put it through a window, and decided shattered glass would make a bad first impression on the landlord.

It was getting dark (I still didn't have any lights in the place) and it had been a long day, so I decided I'd gather all of the loose trash into a big garbage bag, and call it a night.

But I had trouble sleeping, and every little sound seemed enormous—the squeak of my Aerobed, the rustling of the plastic as my tape ball settled in the trash bag.

Wait a minute. That squeak didn't come from the Aerobed. And the trash isn't "settling."

When I clicked on the flashlight, my suspicions were confirmed. I wasn't alone. I had a mouse.

* * *

My lease specifically refers to me as the "sole tenant", and states that I shall not have pets without the lessor's written consent, which I didn't have. By any definition, then, this mouse was an intruder. A stow-away. An interloper. And this is America. What do we do with intruders in America?

We shoot them.

* * *

Maybe because I'm some crunchy granola hippy or maybe because I'm a big wuss, I couldn't bring myself to set a mousetrap. Instead, I did what any geek would do: I threw technology at the problem. The Pest-a-cator sends ultrasonic pulses through the electrical wires of the apartment, and the sound is so painful to mice, it drives them away—which might be bad for my neighbors, but was exactly what I needed.

Apart from that reassuring red flashing light, it's impossible to tell if the Pest-a-cator is doing anything. It's really a philosophical quandary: the presence of mouse proves the Pest-a-cator is not working. The absence of mouse proves nothing, except that you aren't seeing a mouse.

Not seeing a mouse was exactly what I wanted, so, ontology aside, I was happy with the results of the Pest-a-cator. That is, until the night I got that itch on my foot.

Wait a minute. That's not an itch. That's a mouse crawling over me.

This is war.

* * *

I saw the mouse again a few days later. I'd just picked up some vegetables from the store and I left the bag on the floor of my kitchen. I think I was trying to draw the little guy out.

And draw him out I did.

"HEY!," I roared in my biggest voice. I was a jittery elephant, hoping that my nearly two-hundred pounds of (faux) confidence might scare him off forever. Just to make my point, I hurled a pot at him. I missed—dented the pot and smashed my vegetables—but I think I got his attention.

Then I tried to reason with him: "There's nothing for you here. The food is locked away in plastic. The apartment is pristine. You won't even find any cheese here: I'm allergic.

"And what about that horrible ultrasonic screeching noise? Isn't it driving you crazy?" The red light was still flashing reassuringly.

"I don't want to kill you," I pleaded. "I really don't."

I really didn't. I really didn't want to wake up in the middle of the night to the CRACK of a sprung mousetrap. I didn't want to find his dismembered or writhing body. I also didn't want to lay down a glue trap, and hear him squealing through the night, trying to decide whether or not to rip off his own foot. I didn't want to lay down poison and have the smell of mouse rot coming out of my walls.

"So why don't you just go bother someone else, OK?"

OK?

That was three days ago, and I haven't seen him. I know, logically, this doesn't mean that my little chat with the mouse did any good. But I do know I haven't seen the mouse. And not seeing the mouse is exactly what I want.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the— 

(or, What Doesn't Kill You Makes Your Limp Stronger)

Technically, my birthday had already been over for a few hours when I stepped into the busy street without looking and got hit by the cargo van. Still, during the brief time between when it smacked into me and when I smacked into the ground—that is, during the brief time that I was airborne—I remember thinking that there is a certain poetry to getting run over on your birthday. "Thirty-five," I mused, "That's a sufficient number of years..." (I also remember thinking things that were less poetic, like, "I hope this doesn't break my iPod.")

None of this is historically unprecedented: when my father was a boy, he became famous in his home town by stepping out in front of a dump truck. He also flew through the air, and wound up spending a significant part of his childhood in and out of casts and leg braces. He made it into all the local papers (and in a way, that is how my parents first met...).

No such celebrity for me. Though the sound of the van hitting my body seemed significant at the time (like the sound of crushing a six-foot soda can, like the sound of metal burping), and though I found myself a bit farther down the block than where I'd stepped off the curb, I somehow managed to get away without a scratch. (Well, one scratch.) I expected the driver to be furious—he had every right to be, since I'd walked out in front of him. So when I hit the ground, my first impulse was to apologize. "Sorry to get all up in your grill"...

How many near-death experiences does it take to add up to a whole-death experience? Because, for a youngish middle-class white guy, I wonder if I've had maybe more than my fair share... (Then again, there's something not quite right about the term "near death"—it's a linguistic fallacy along the lines of "near-pregnant": you are or you aren't, and proximity doesn't have much to do with it...)

The fact is, when I was half this age, I was sure I wouldn't live to be this age. And when the end comes, it probably comes with all the advance warning of a speeding cargo van crashing into the left side of your body. Thirty-five is a sufficient number of years. But I'll take more. And today, I'm glad to have them...

Breakfast of Champions 

When I was in my early twenties, there was a while I ate breakfast cereal, almost exclusively—a lot of different kinds, but mostly Raisin Bran, Grape Nuts, and some other nasty-healthy cereal I can't even remember. I would eat the cereal at all hours, often dry, going through two or more boxes of the stuff a day. If fiber is the indigestible part of a plant (it is), then I was on a diet of mostly indigestible food.

Eventually, I started to rediscover the other food groups. But I'm still sentimental about cereal, and I still eat an unnatural amount of the stuff.

* * *

One unexpected perk of my move to Boston is Trader Joe's, grocery store of the gods, which they have all over southern California, and nowhere else I've ever lived. At Trader Joe's, hippies in Hawaiian shirts serve up bags of bulk cashews, slices of soy cheddar, jugs of cheap wine, and ... the best damn granola this side of anywhere.

You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about those Vanilla Almond Clusters. Oh, yeah.

* * *

The checkout girl stops swiping barcodes and looks me in the eye. "Four boxes, huh?"

Uh huh.

"You must really like this stuff."

Have I mentioned?, I have a way with checkout girls...

"I'll have to try it sometime..."

* * *

My breakfast table bliss comes to a sudden end when, halfway through my second bowl, I look at the side of the box:

"250 calories per serving."

Hmm, that's not so bad...

"Servings per container: about 8."

Eight?!? I glance at the stack of empty cereal boxes piling up in my kitchen. Three, more like. There can't be more than three bowls of cereal in those boxes. I bust out my calculator (it's still too early in the morning for math) and figure out that my "servings" are coming in at 666 calories per bowl.

I'm on my second bowl.

It's not even 8am.

* * *

"It's one of the great principles—no, more than principles, canons—of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University. "It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself. Vice gets punished, and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things, you get sick. If not, you get healthy."

* * *

One thing about being a "stress eater"—there's no great pressure to behave rationally when it comes to food. As long as it feels good. (As long as it feels good, before the indigestion...) And that's as close as I'll get to an explanation for why I've started adding chocolate chips to my breakfast cereal. 80 calories per serving. Trader Joe's sells 'em, cheap...

The Simple Life 

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

How was your week?

Spinning Wheels 

or, How to Go Eighteen Miles Without Leaving Your Seat

On my walk home each day, I pass by a pet store where I can see, through the window, a hamster in a tank with one of those hamster wheels.

Then, a few blocks later, I pass by a YMCA, where I can see, through the window, the post-work crowd churning away on elliptical machines.

There's something profoundly depressing to me about this. Two hundred years ago, we'd have worked the farm all day and made ourselves rugged and hearty as a side effect of our necessary labor; but we've advanced past that, and now sit at our desks all day and then contrive to exercise.

Something about it is just too mechanized to be comforting: it reminds me of the foie gras ducks and their feeding tubes...

* * *

My roommate last year bought a treadmill. It was a singularly ugly piece of furniture, and its size wasn't trivial inside our New York apartment. Every once in a while, I'd hear the thumping sound of an unbalanced washing machine, and then, half an hour later, she'd emerge from her room red and sweaty, smiling from an endorphin high. And though I looked on that treadmill with so much haughty scorn, I realize now, in retrospect, I was jealous. While the rest of us hunkered through the winter with cabin fever, praying for sunlight and a day above freezing, she was jogging. Without even stepping outside.

There's just no substitute for the runner's high.

* * *

My exercise bike came in the mail last week. It came from China and in about twenty pieces, with no assembly instructions. It weighed seventy-five pounds and cost as much to ship as the bike itself was worth. Carrying it up the stairs was a workout unto itself.

It, too, is a singularly ugly piece of furniture.

I love it. Of the four days since I put it together, I've used it four days. According to the odometer, I've gone eighteen miles. But here I am, in the same room where I started, watching the snow fall through an early sunset...

The Year of Living Quietly 

I forgot New Year's Eve. I'm not really sure how it happened: I was busy the whole day (I'd even written the date a few times...); I wasn't feeling so well, and when I told a friend I was thinking of staying in and calling it an early night, she double-checked: "Are you sure?" By the time I realized my mistake, it seemed too late to make plans. I'd thought New Year's Eve was tomorrow!

Ah, well. I shouldn't act so surprised. After all, the same thing happened last year...

How do I let these things happen?

If how one rings in the New Year is a harbinger for the next twelve months, then I'm in for another year like this one—which was, in retrospect, a quiet one. Unlike other years, this one included no fistfights, no car accidents, no unscheduled trips to the hospital, no awards shows, no marathons, no unauthorized seizures of my bank account, no unrequited loved.

I spent my New Year's Eve in repose, reflecting on the year that was. I have a horrible memory for details, but this didn't matter, because every few days throughout the year I've been posting some record of what's been going on my head. That's right: I spent my New Year's Eve reading my own blog. I did searches on keywords, trying to figure out if there were themes or threads, trying to get some accounting of what kind of year I'd had. I don't know if I found any. It's been, well, ... it's been a whole year...

I've culled the year's entries here: my year of living quietly.

Happy New Year.

Days of Moving Slowly 

We were glued to the TV late on Thursday night, because all three of us had places to be early the next morning. "They won't strike," one of us said. "They never actually strike."

They, in this case, was Transit Workers Union, who were threatening to shut down New York City's public transportation if the city couldn't meet them halfway on a new contract agreement. This backroom poker match happens every few years and always has the same result: a heroic late-night resolution to the impasse, with train service continuing uninterrupted the next morning. And sure enough, they didn't strike on Friday, though all day and through the weekend, the trains moved with almost sympathetic slowness.

Maybe I was remembering badly. Maybe the trains were always this slow.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a the last and final stop. Please exit the train." People on the car looked confused. "I thought this was an express...?" I shrugged. Maybe this is how you strike, without striking....

On Sunday, there was a rat in my subway car. I'm sure it was a coincidence. Disgruntled subway workers wouldn't stoop so low. Would they? The rat ran up and down the car in a panic, sending the passengers squealing, swatting with shopping bags, standing on their seats. Finally, somehow, the rat found a way out of the car, and things quieted down again. "Well," chuckled a man in a suit, "that broke up the day."

By Tuesday, there really was a strike, and no good way into or out of Manhattan. I had to get back to Boston. "You could walk to the train station," a friend suggested. "But it's seven miles. It's fifteen minutes just to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. And it's 28 degrees." Finally, I convinced a car service to drive me, what turned out to be a two-hour ride. The driver was furious. "In my country—it's a democracy, you know, but a dictatorship—this would never happen. They'd all go to jail. They're ruining Christmas." Then: "When is Christmas?"

Even Amtrak seems slow. Standstill outside Stamford. Sympathetic slowness? And people seem reluctant to say goodbye: they hug on the platform—nothing unusual about that—but they cling to their hugs just a little bit longer. "I love you," they say. "I'll talk to you tonight." They hug one more time. "I love you," they say. "I'll see you soon." Whenever that is....

Hotels (part one) 

Lobbies: the privacy of public spaces (and vice versa)

Back when I was a wee slip of a lad (26?), I spent a lot of time lounging in the lobbies of luxury hotels. I discovered at some point that, no matter how poor you are, no matter how grungy your clothes or how bad your haircut, if you walk into a hotel as if you belong there, no one will ask questions. The coffee is expensive but the service is great. (This was Los Angeles, and I took some comfort knowing I could pass myself off as a hotshot rockstar or film director who the so-last-week hotel staff hadn't yet discovered. "Don't you know," I practiced, "who I am?")

I ate complimentary baguettes from the Mondrian, read free New York Times from the Hotel Bel Air, dipped in the jacuzzi at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, and (maybe best of all),was delivered a never-ending bowl of gourmet olives at the Chateau Marmont. It's possible I spent more time in the garden/lobby of the Chateau Marmont than then-resident Winona Ryder did.

But my point in being there had no more to do with these free perks than it did with the chance to mingle with the rich and famous. I spent time in these hotel lobbies because they were bigger and nicer than my own living room—and because I could enjoy all of the benefits of privacy while also soaking in the random element of public spaces. Hotel lobbies are a DMZ between the public and private spheres.

I forgot all about this until I moved to Boston: for some reason, the urge never struck me in New York (though my living rooms in New York were smaller than in Los Angeles, and the hotels just as nice). Only recently, while exploring this new city, have I rediscovered the guilty pleasure of bilking off hotels. Maybe I feel a kind of kindred spirit in the transients and wayfarers who pass through these places. After all, the only real difference between these spaces and other cafés is that hotels, by definition, are no one's "neighborhood" café: hotels trade cozy familiarity for near-absolute anonymity. The staff is impeccably friendly and has no reason to learn your name.

So imagine my surprise when, on my second visit to Boston's Marriott in Copley Place, the concierge gave me a familiar nod.

I left right away.

* * *

When I first got to town, a few months ago, I leafed through Boston magazine's "Best of Boston" list and discovered that a few of their top-rated bars are in hotels. That's odd, I thought: Who goes to hotel bars, except for jet-lagged travelers trying to turn back their body-clock with alcohol? One of these, Cuffs (in the Jury Hotel Boston) was called one of the best Irish pubs in Boston—a bold claim, I thought, in a city with enough Irish heritage to call a sports team "Celtics." My image of an Irish pub is cozy, quiet and neighborly, with hundred-year-old fixtures and maybe some board games behind the bar—and this is exactly the opposite of what I'd expect from a hotel bar.

So I had to check it out.

En route, I noticed something else about Boston's luxury hotels: many of them connect directly to shopping malls. It's possible to wind one's way from the South End straight through to the Boyleston Street shopping district—nearly two miles—by bobbing and weaving through a series of two hotels and two malls, without stepping a foot out of doors. From the Westin lobby, Christmas shoppers file onto the escalator like products on an assembly line. (The consumers themselves are, in a way, manufactured goods....) But they aren't hotel guests; they're locals, cutting through the hotel lobby as a shortcut. ("Our motto of the day," a woman says to her son, "is 'Shop till we drop'," and the boy nods solemnly.)

And when I arrive at the hotel/pub, it's crowded with big men gathered around a few television sets to watch a football game. (And I don't mean "football" in the Irish sense: there's a collective groan when New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady throws his second interception of the quarter...). I try to find someone who is obviously a hotel guest, and not a Bostonite on a break from shopping. But I soon learn the distinction is impossible to make. "Jimmy," someone shouts across the bar. "Drink up. I just booked us a suite: we're crashing here tonight."

I guess I'm not the only one playing tourist in my hometown...

$1.84 

A small duffel bag of dirty laundry and a dollar and eighty-four cents in my pocket. Dirty jeans and a cheap, ratty sweater that I picked up ... was it really that many years ago? Haven't shaved, haven't washed my hair. I am the caricature of a college student, but ten years too old.

In a word, pathetic.

"Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Great to see you!" I hug them, then, without missing a beat, "Can I borrow money for the train ride home?"

If there's a flicker of disappointment in their eyes, or sadness, or resentment, I don't see it. If they share my feeling that I am ridiculous, that I'm getting just a little too old for this, well, they don't show it. Either they are the most generous people in the world, or its finest actors. Or maybe both.

* * *

A long-lost friend, one of my favorite people in the world, calls and leaves a voicemail, the first time I've heard from her in years. "Hey, I miss you. I moved to [this city]. I quit [that job]. I'm starting work on [this thing]." Then, having worked through the requisite small talk: "Can you build a website for me?"

These calls aren't uncommon. Sometimes I wonder, if I were a plumber, would my friends want me to unclog their toilet for them? If I were a housekeeper, would they ask me to come over and vacuum their home, gratis? Maybe they would. The fact is, it's not a fair question for me to ask, because I like building websites. I really do. And I also like helping my friends.

But what I try to explain, when I phone-tag her back, is that I've just started a new job that will keep me quite busy building a whole lot of websites, for forty-five or fifty hours a week; and meanwhile, I don't really have anything else going on in my life. I try to explain that what I really need right now, most of all, is to spend the free time I have doing anything but building websites: exploring my new city, getting to know some people, starting this new chapter of my life. I give her the names of a few people who might be better able to help her, and tell her I'm looking forward to catching up with her.

When she calls back—again, a voicemail—she says she understands: "I'll call those other people, since it sounds like now you're focused on just making money."

Among the many reasons I find this message so upsetting: does she really think, if I were so purely focused on making money, I'd be this terribly bad at it?

* * *

"Sure, the market's soft right now. Sure, there are thirty other places on the market in your price range. But at that price, the people who would actually be interested in your place will never even look at it. They'll assume it's a hovel; they'll never even walk through the door. What you need to do is raise the price by ten or twenty grand."

I find myself in the ironic position of giving financial advice. Because I know so much about real estate.

"Raise it by twenty just to get them to take the place seriously. Just to get them to walk through the door. Then, if they decide it's too high, you can lower your asking price by ten without even thinking about it. And if they want to haggle and take you down by fifteen grand, it's still more than you're even asking now. You'll walk with half a million dollars, and they'll feel like they're getting a bargain."

"Wow, maybe you should hawk my place. Maybe I should give you the ten percent broker fee, instead of my useless real estate agent."

For the quickest second, I indulge the fantasy of what it would be like to have that $50,000. My fantasy doesn't include yachts, big screen TVs, or luxurious vacations—just the peace and quiet of a financial security I've never known. Just confidence, and a good night's sleep. "That's nice of you," I say. And then: "Can I borrow $10 for lunch?"

On the Road 

or, Outside It's America

It's like a dream. There's some kind of country music coming from the car stereo and no traffic on the road. The windshield wipers keep slow time, the car's own heartbeat, while the dotted white lines running the center of I-95 flicker by in a rapid staccato—the road spools out like film, and it all reaffirms the sense that I am the star of my very own road trip movie. A full tank of gas and an atlas that points to anywhere. "Take me away," I say to the car. "Take me anywhere."

Exit for point south. Exit for shore points. Last exit before toll.

Each road trip reminds me of the others—this jaunt from Boston to Pennsylvania reminds me of that midnight drive drive Chicago to St. Louis, the slow saunter through rainy Arkansas and Texas panhandle; reminds me of the cool crisp air in Flagstaff during that morning dash across northern Arizona; reminds me of Montana, reminds me Big Sur, reminds me of.... It's as if it's all one big continuous road trip, driving in circles, always moving, always leaving somewhere, always going somewhere else. Digesting America. And taking short rest stops—three months, two years—to go through the motions that other people think of as life.

The road is life.

Scenic overlook ahead. Caution curves. No rest for 57 miles.

Connecticut welcomes you. New York welcomes you. Pennsylvania welcomes you.

America welcomes you.

The gas station attendant asks, "Where you headed?" The gas station attendant asks, "Where you coming from?" The gas station attendant wipes the windshield, checks the oil, checks the tires. "Good luck." "Drive safe." "Have a nice trip."

More road between here and there. The leaves are changing. I remember this place. Have I been here before?

"A little lucky; a little unlucky; a little better."

Last exit before toll.

Thanks for visiting. Please come again.

---

Noodles 

Right now I'm heating up water for Nissin Cup Noodles, the 99¢ meal in a cup you find at every convenience store, the accouterment of the depleted savings account, the ultimate icon of the lonely and slightly inept bachelor.

I haven't had one of these things since college. My parents would pack boxes with 4 or 5 of them, and pay more to ship them to me than the lot of them were worth —a fiscal decision I've never understood, though one which fairly pales next to my own decision to go to that college in the first place. In retrospect, I think it's possible the noodles were a coded message: Get used to being a poor person.

I'm not sure what possessed me to buy them. I guess I was a little sick at the time, and sought panacea in all things resembling soup. Blame it on the bad judgment induced by the head cold—I don't know which part of the Cup Noodles I thought would be healthy, the MSG or the dehydrated shrimp (which always remind me so much of sea monkeys)?

I'm a snob, I've never suggested otherwise. I mean, come on—instant noodles? Me? I have Wüsthof knives!

I'm sipping it now, and—what do you know?—it's pretty good. Go figure.

Chickens, pt. 2 

or, Why Cliches Will Kill You, and the Jeffrey Dahmer Stew Contest

I was out of coat hangers. Two months ago I had a closet full and I decided to leave them behind when I moved; I didn't need them, I reasoned, because I've never moved anywhere that didn't have a bunch of them in a closet when I got there; and anyway, it seemed like good "moving karma" to leave them behind—a token gift from the old tenant to the new one, passed anonymously through the otherwise empty closet. One man's detritus is another man's gold.

Hangers are funny: while in their natural habitat (uh, the closet), they take up no actual space, or rather they take up negative space—they save space, by providing efficient storage for otherwise bulky clothes. But try packing hangers in advance of a move, and find that they fill whole boxes. They won't fold or compress; you can't squish them; and finally, they force the inevitable mover's calculus: are they worth even what they would cost to ship?

Thus, hangers are the perfect symbol for the waste inherent in a move. While packing, hangers are garbage (and the worst kind, because of how quickly they fill a trash bag). While unpacking, they're invaluable—you can't unpack your clothes without them. And I'm surprised, every single time, by how much hangers cost to buy.

[I want very much to invent a hanger dehydrator to reduce the things to powder, and then, at the other end, to reconstitute, just add water.]

Long story short, I moved into my new apartment without possession of a single hanger, completely dependent on the generosity or laziness of the previous tenant, and hopeful that his or her sense of "moving karma" bore some resemblance to mine. And sure enough, the closet was full of them.

* * *

All that preamble is just to forestall my describing what I found in the freezer.

Though I've grown accustomed to finding a closet full of hangers, it never crossed my mind that there'd be anything left behind in any other part of the apartment, and when I opened the freezer door, I think I actually jumped, I was so startled. It's not even to say the contents of the freezer were so shocking—I hadn't looked at them yet. I was startled that there was anything.

Well, you know what they say—"Beggars can't be choosers", "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", and "One man's detritus is another man's gold."

In this case, the gold included four frozen burritos, more chipped beef than I'd know what to do with (any chipped beef is more than I know what to do with...), a gallon-sized Ziploc bag with a few solid, hard-to-describe objects, and a Rubbermaid container of some fair-colored stew-looking thing. Hmmm.

What would you do, if you found a freezer full of food?

I tried to imagine all the disgusting or even toxic things someone could do, while I munched on one of the burritos. (You know what they say—"There's nothing to fear but fear itself", "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger", "It's so hard to find a good burrito in Boston"...) And that's when I noticed that the Ziploc bag contained a severed chicken head.

Chicken head.

That Rubbermaid container of frozen stew is still in there. I'm not sure where or when or how to dispose of it, or if I want my fingerprints on it when I do. Who knows what's in there... Even Jeffrey Dahmer must have left an apartment or two in his day; I wonder how good he was about cleaning his freezer, or what his sense of "moving karma" was?

What do you think it is? Send guesses and the best answer will receive the stew in the mail. Please also send chipped beef recipes.

Chickens 

The weather in Boston has been beautiful, the subway in Boston has been slow, and the conjunction of those two facts has meant that I walk each day to work, a half-hour bob-and-weave from the South End to a district called Fort Point, where I imagine there once might have been a fort, but now only old warehouses and tenements turned into dot-com offices and Dunkin Donuts.

Every day, I wind up walking a slightly different route through Boston's Chinatown, and so it was that I wound up on a crowded sidewalk on Kneeland Street. Ahead of me a man was unloading milk crates from a truck and stacking them along the sidewalk in two long rows; they were stacked about six feet high and went on for about fifteen feet. There were two separate stacks of them, with a narrow sort of chute down the middle, and the pedestrians on the street were all funneling down this shoot. Am I describing this clearly?, because I feel like maybe I'm not. Like this:

But deeper, half a block deep. And full of live chickens.

I still have nightmares about the smell of them. (When's the last time you had a nightmare about a smell?) I can't get it out of my head that their fear of dying must have amplified the already noxious smell of live chicken. I walked that same route the next day, and though the chickens were gone, the smell hung there, the ghosts of so much poultry. I think the smell of it might have permanently stained my clothes, or at least my psyche. I haven't walked that stretch of Kneeland since.

* * *

Some would say it's a good thing to see the chickens. There's an inherent dishonesty, after all, in how we as a society march so many of them to the slaughter while being anesthetized from the whole process: the chicken I eat is boneless, skinless, and bears more resemblance to tofu than to the farm animal I imagined while singing "Old MacDonald." I'm innocent, your Honor; I've never killed a chicken in my life. In fact, I've stopped ordering chicken from restaurants that serve dark meat, on the grounds that it tastes "too chickeny." I walked out of a restaurant once because they had literally dozens of chicken breasts on their grill, and I found the sight and smell of it to be all too shocking. I was just too shocked to see all that chicken, though the restaurant was called El Pollo Loco, or KooKooRoo, or something like that. Shocking!

* * *

I had an aunt who wouldn't eat chicken, or even eggs. No one knew why, but the family legend had it that, when she was young, it was her job to slaughter the chickens for the family, pluck them, whatever it is one does in transforming them from barnyard animal to family dinner. She ate a lot of ham, so I guess she never had to kill a ham.

Another friend grew chickens. Grew, is that the word? He lived in a city, but he got it in his head that his life would be better with chickens. He hatched them in an incubator; he was there when they were born, so they "imprinted" on him and thought he was their mommy. When he came home from work, they would hop on his head, to say hi. One by one the coyotes got them, tore them apart in their cages, except for one last rooster, a giant, well-fed thing. This rooster crowed at all hours, made sounds like it was suffering horribly, and before long, his neighbors made sounds like they were suffering horribly, and my friend decided it was best if he donated his beloved rooster to a nearby farm. The first day at the farm, this big corn-fed cock bullied all the other roosters—ruled the roost, is the expression. The other roosters, none too pleased and I guess better communicators than we give credit, ganged up on the big bird, cornered him, and pecked his eyes out.

* * *

I've been sick this week, and when sickness comes, so too the chickens: I've had chicken soup and chicken-flavored udon and green curry chicken, all out of a (superstitious?) belief that the chickens will make me better. So much voodoo.

* * *

Photos from the land of voodoo: in New Orleans, people are desperate and shooting at each other. I hide from the news, duck into a movie theatre, watch The Constant Gardener, which isn't news but is certainly another testament to how people can be horrible to people. Neither is the movie about chickens, though it is a movie about the Third World, and chickens tend to feature prominently in movies about the Third World. (I don't know if this is true of the Third World itself, since any knowledge I have of it comes from movies...) In this movie, no chickens are killed, just Africans, and two white people, and that's what all the fuss was about, so that other white people could stay comfortable and well-fed.

I think it's true, of course it is, that it's dishonest to eat chickens without giving thought to the process that killed them. But another thought occurs to me, too—that we don't want everyone slaughtering their own chickens. We don't want everyone so well acquainted with how to use a machete or an axe to drain the life out of another creature—because how far removed is that from the ability to commit atrocities upon one another?

P.S. I read the other day that scientists are able to grow beef in a petri dish. It comes out in thin sheets, like a Fruit Roll-Up, and can be custom-engineered to include more vitamins and less harmful fat. Generally, the press seemed to spin this as mildly gross (headlines like "Home, Home on the Strange")—but then, slaugherhouses really are mildly gross, too. You know what they say: "One man's meat is another man's poison"....

---

Home / Away From Home 

I had an apartment in Hollywood a while back and I lived there for many happy years. Though it wasn't gigantic, or overly luxurious, and though it was in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood, still, in many ways, it was a dream apartment for me: two rooms with hardwood floors and exposed brick, decorated with minimalist care. Sometimes, to this day, I get confused and think I still live there. I imagine I'll park my car around back, key in, water a few plants, and slide right back in to my old life.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that when I got off the bus in New York City this weekend, after a few short weeks in Boston, the experience felt less like the weekend getaway it was, and more like a homecoming from a long, tiring business trip. I walked down these streets with more familiarity even than I had a month ago. I took advantage of every shortcut. I stood by the third door of the third car of the 2 train to arrive exactly at my exit. I chatted with my hair stylist and said I'd see her in six weeks, though it was a bald-faced lie. I walked a mile out of my way just to shop at "my" drug store.

But really, I wasn't even there. I floated down the street and peered into café windows, but the people inside couldn't see me. I drifted through walls, blew gently in the wind, passed over the East River, invisible. I was a ghost, looking on at a city that no longer was, a city that existed only in the purgatory of my memory, and I haunted its streets, not yet ready to move on. I wanted to go home but I had none. I wanted to rest. I wanted to rest in peace.

---

Stinks 

My apartment smells. I remember this as I walk though the door after a grueling weekend in Boston. It doesn't smell bad, exactly; it's hard to say what it smells like; but nonetheless, there it is, every time I walk through the door—a certain undeniable something, hanging in the air. Really, to be honest, my apartment doesn't smell like anything at all, except, well, my apartment. That's what it is: every time I come home, I'm forced to face the fact that it's the same old apartment. It's the constancy of it that puts me off. Call it the smell of stagnation.

In other words, after a weekend panicking about the prospect of change, now I'm sickened by the idea that things might stay the same. Cripes. There's no pleasing me, is there?

I realize all this with a sigh and concede it just doesn't matter where I live. "Everywhere you go, there you are," right?—so it just doesn't matter where I go. All this untoward angst about "Should I go here? Should I go there?" is downright silly, because it just doesn't matter.

And this is when I really start to worry, because—shouldn't it? I mean, why bother investing so much energy into my life if I'm willing to toss out just about anything? That's messed up, right? Some things should be fixed. Some things should be non-negotiable.

I remember, when I was in acting school, I went through a rare but apparently not-unprecedented identity crisis, set off by (of all things) speech class. We were studying dialects, just another in a series of tricks to transform ourselves into other people. I had a decent ear for dialects, and I picked up a few quickly and easily. That's when it dawned on me: if I can change the way I talk, and change the way I walk, and change what I wear and how I behave , then ... who am I?

Another teacher eventually pointed out that though there's such a thing as healthy skepticism, there's also such a thing as unhealthy skepticism, and I probably had the latter.

I'm inclined to think he was probably right. And that stinks.

---

Stranger Than Fiction 

MP3 audio track

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."

This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.

"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"

"I'll have what he's having."

* * *

PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

Movie stars in public. What a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:

Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.

Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?

* * *

I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.

Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."

Thanks.

* * *

Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."

He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.

Scream 

There's a lot to be happy about here in New York: spring has come and reinvigorated the city with generous doses of warmth and vitamin D. The magnolia in my backyard is in full bloom, and the mosquitoes aren't. The "new" Mets are winning. On the whole, spirits have been nearly unsinkable.

Nearly. But spring cleaning is bound to stir up the skeletons in the closet. Mine came in the form of a letter that's been sitting on my desk untouched, because I was scared to open it:

Dear [UrbanSherpa]:

Due to your failure to honor your obligation, the entire unpaid balance of x has become due and payable. If you wish to avoid further collection procedures, you may remit the entire balance of x, made payable to our client, etc.

(where the exact amount of x is not particularly important to the story, so long as one knows that x is more than I can pay, and also more or less the value of a three-bedroom house...)

Maybe an explanation is in order: A dozen years ago, in the blooming optimism of youth, I signed my name to a bungalow-sized pile of promissory notes with the best intentions of becoming rich, successful and, some day, debt-free. But life is full of twists and turns, and though mine's been mostly interesting, it hasn't always been ... lucrative.

The debt, on the other hand, has done pretty well for itself over the last decade. It has grown from an impressively daunting number to an inconceivable one, a number so large my head fills with white noise when I think about it, and sometimes I get actual hives. The interest on the debt grows faster than I can pay it down—so I don't bother. Interest grows like cancer on one's hopes and dreams, rotting them from the inside: Debt, it turns out, is an underachiever's dream—a near-permanent excuse not to succeed. No point in getting a better-paying job, in buying property, saving or investing; it would all be seized by a long line of creditors anyway. Better to own nothing, to stay poor, to pay for everything in cash and not call any attention.

Live with that for a dozen years: you'd bite your nails, too.

Federally guaranteed student loans "help millions of Americans achieve their dream of a higher education", but they have an interesting side effect—they can render the "American Dream" an impossibility. Those lucky enough to graduate into good-paying jobs can face their ten-plus years of indentured servitude and buy their freedom. But others (like me) get caught in a building avalanche of interest, so that by the time we can make moderate payments, these payments are no longer adequate to reduce the principal of the debt. Bankruptcy offers no protection on student loans and isn't even an option; and, because the loans are federally guaranteed, Congress allows collectors to garnish wages so severely that the wage is no longer enough to pay for rent and food.

The options, once one reaches this point, are frighteningly few: stay off of payrolls—escape wage-garnishing by taking only freelance work; own no assets except clothes and the barest work-related necessities; ignore all creditors in hopes they'll give up; leave the country and start over, in a place where U.S. civil court has no jurisdiction—set off like a 17th century Pilgrim in search of a land of opportunity. Pursue the American Dream ... elsewhere.

Are they any I'm forgetting? Because I'd love to hear about them.

Please Play Again 

My name is Chris DeWan, and I have a gambling problem.

I've never really been in a casino, don't go to horse races, and scorn scratch-off lotteries. I don't have much use for dog-fighting, I walk right by the OTB storefronts, and I'm not much for cards. What gets me are the 20oz. bottles with bright yellow caps and the label that says, "1 in 3 Wins a FREE Song on iTunes." Pepsi has launched a promotion, and it's going to be the end of me.

You see, I haven't been as lucky as 1 in 3: since the Pepsi promotion started, I've had thirty bottles of the stuff, and won seven free songs. (That's not counting the winning cap I found in the trash—a sure sign, I thought, that my luck was about to turn around.)

Each day, the man in the convenience store looks at me with his sad eyes. He's seen my kind before. He knows that if I draw a losing bottle, there's a decent chance I'll turn right around and buy another, before I've even left the store. One in three wins a free song. One in three. And when I win, the bottle nearly pays for itself.

You have to spend money to make money.

You have to play to win.

I don't even like Pepsi. Not one bit.

Today, I lost twice in a row. I stared at the two yellow caps sitting next to one another on my desk, sitting next to the two useless bottles of cola. "Please play again," they said.

One in three is a winner. The next bottle is a sure thing. "Please play again," they say.

You know I will.

Complete lyrics to Kenny Roger's "The Gambler"

"The Bankruptcy Bill: a Tutorial in Greed" by Robert Scheer describes a different kind of loan shark, and the new bankruptcy bill that holds, folds, and walks away on the American middle class.

---

Sainthood 

My friend started seeing a therapist because she's too nice. She feels she spends too much energy trying to be "nice" to everyone, trying to get everyone to like her, at the expense of her own opinions and desires. In her first session, she went on and on describing this to the therapist, and at the end, he said, "You've gone a half-hour over, so I'm going to charge you $210 instead of the $140 we agreed upon." And she said, "Well, thanks for giving me the extra time" and wrote him a check. When he asked her why she'd let him get away with something like that, she replied "I wanted you to like me." He said, "Good. That'll be $140."

* * *

Bush was on the TV talking about Terri Schiavo, probably righteously, but I couldn't tell for sure because I was at a bar, and the sound was down. The guy next to me looked at the President in obvious disgust, then stood up and announced, "A born-again-Christian is just a lapsed atheist." Then he spat—actually spat—and walked out the door.

* * *

On the subway the other day, an old woman got on the train, and I stood up to offer my seat. But she rolled her eyes and looked at me like I was a total fool. The train was empty. There were a dozen empty seats.

* * *

Saint Catherine of Sienna was canonized because, in 1373, she was visited by a vision of Christ. Catherine had been nursing an older member of her order, Andrea, a woman who had persecuted Catherine for years before coming down with breast cancer. Catherine devoted herself fully to the care of her enemy, and finally, in a gesture of humility and devotion, drank a bowl filled with the old nun's pus. The infectious soup gave her a fever, visions, and finally, sainthood.

My point is that maybe that's not a good thing.

Chemical Imbalance 

I. Testosterone

I hadn't seen my sister in three months and the first words out of her mouth: "Are you going bald?"

Well, I hadn't thought so....

II. Serotonin

The wrapper says "Servings per bar: 2 ^2/3." The wrapper says "Calories per serving: 210." The wrapper is empty.

Though I'd like to believe otherwise, chocolate is not a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor....

III. Adrenocorticotropic Hormone

After three months of sticking this thing in my nose and squirting, I finally read the label on this pharmaceutical I was prescribed. Corticosteroids, it turns out, are potent enough steroids to have gotten some European cyclists in trouble.

Probably won't keep me out of major league baseball....

For Crying Out Loud 

I'm on my way to work, right?, minding my own business. I get in the elevator; there's a woman already in there. I press the button for the twenty-fourth floor. The door closes, and, as it does, this woman starts sobbing. She leans her head against the metal wall of the elevator and just wails. She heaves. She's crying, hard.

Twenty-four floors.

Me and her.

Feels like six hours.

I watch her for a while, as the floors tick off, 16 ... 17 ... 18. I watch her, this brazen trumpeter of human emotion. I don't offer her any comfort or kind words. I don't even offer a hanky. Instead, I wonder if she has a blog...

It's hard, in a place like New York, not to notice the disintegrating line between the private and public spheres. There's not enough room for privacy. In the restaurant, at the table next to you (six inches away), a couple argues about whether or not to have a baby. On the train, a man opens his his mail to discover he's being sued by collection agents, and you discover it, too. Out on the street, a loud cellphone talker announces, "I didn't mean to cheat on her. It just happened!" In the absence of privacy, people seem to compensate by assuming the whole world is private.

And this was before blogs. Blogs: what funny things are you. Remember the quaint little diaries that girls kept in junior high, the ones with the locks? (At least on TV.) It was scandalous—scandalous!—to read someone's diary. Now it's scandalous if their blog gets less than a hundred hits a day. Who would have dreamt there'd be so much comfort in the airing of dirty laundry?

But sniffing it! That's even more startling. Who reads these things? What perverse thrills do these Peeping Toms get out of peeking into our lives?

And, is it really voyeurism if we choose to leave our curtains open?

I remember hearing once that a New York City man had been charged with indecent exposure for walking around naked inside his own apartment. The prosecution maintained that, with his neighbors in such close proximity, the man should be held responsible for the effect of his actions—for example, the trauma caused to his neighbors from over-exposure to his big hairy belly.

I might take that as cause to wonder what kind of responsibility I have toward my readers. I might, but I won't: I'm more curious about that girl on the elevator. I wonder what she was crying about. I wonder how long till I'll be able to get the image (or the sound) out of my head. I wonder if I can get her charged with indecent exposure, and hold her liable for the upset she's caused me. You think there's money in that?

Those Were the Days (Ode to Hunter?) 

Fuck all. Hunter Thompson is dead and I'm wasted. What's the point of a whiskey that costs 60 euro a bottle, if you drink the whole liter in one sitting? It's been too long since I've been raw; it's made my blog boring; it's made me boring. Fuck all. Fuck all.

There was a summer once where I drank a fifth of bourbon every day while my girlfriend left suicide notes on my voicemail and I woke each day at 2pm. Those were the days. I remember my parents picked me up at the end of that summer and, beholding their wasted progeny, they were like, (denial), You want to go on vacation? We went to Canada and saw some islands; they were lovely. I want to live there some day. Maybe tomorrow.

That same summer I was sleeping with the daughter of the Gund Empire. She was stuffed animal royalty. She taught me how to crush a Gund bear's nose. I remember if I did six shots of Jack Daniels uninterrupted, drunk hit me like a freight train. It was like, I think I'm about to get ... drunk.... There was a rule, "Don't sleep with the high school girls," and I was the first to break it, and probably the second, and maybe the third.

What's the word for "No redeeming social value"?

Those were the days.

There was a party at some fraternity or another (Greek to me...), got busted, and I wound locked in the basement with one other guy and a couple cases of beer, trying desperately to make all the evidence disappear. What could we do...? I remember waking up with ... I think her name was Stephanie. After all these years, I'm still fuzzy on the details. Bit what a rack!

By the way, Marla, I'm sorry. I really am. I still think about your steel-blue eyes. You're wonderful and you deserved better. Peg meant nothing to me.

Oh, and Peg, I'm sorry, truly. Marla meant nothing to me.

There was another time, years later, no wiser and just as drunk, I wound up in Mexico with Spanish-speaking Sandra (sort for "Alesandra"!). While she was driving, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, a squad of gauchos dressed in t-shirts and AK-47s asked us where we were headed. To this day, I don't know if they were police, or military, or terrorists, or drug lords; and I'm not sure why I'm still alive. Thank God for Alesandra.

Tonight, I'm listening to an old Cure album, Boys Don't Cry. When I was in college, I would play this CD in the moments before I climbed out my fourth story window, to crawl along the six-inch ledge all the way around the building, hoping something exciting would happen— something exciting, like gravity.

Those were the days.

Angela, if you're out there, and reading this, call me — 917.686.1564. Not you; the other Angela...

I'm a bastard.

Love you. Call me.

The Physics of Dirty Dishes 

"You're the cleanest person I know," she says, as I wipe down the counter and wash the last of the dishes, and it's impossible for me not to wonder—How skanky and stinky are her other friends? If I'm so neat, how come I spend every single Saturday morning digging out from a week's worth of accumulated laundry, crusted cereal bowls, coffee cups, and used chopsticks?

Simple answer: entropy. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is commonly understood as "disorder," the idea that things fall apart—an idea almost too commonsensical to pass for science, easy to understand while dirty dishes piles up and nearly every gadget I own gives up its ghost over a single week. (Damn lithium-ion batteries!) After three months of doctor visits for a chronic respiratory infection, I finally suggest to my physician, "Maybe I'm not sick; maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe it's entropy."

Things certainly do fall apart, don't they?

As science terms go, "disorder" is a bit vague. More strictly, the second law of thermodynamics states that "Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from a concentrated place to a diffused place." The "concentrated" heat of a cast-iron skillet will tend to diffuse off the hot skillet into the air, until everything settles at room temperature. (In fact, that's why there is such a thing as room temperature—because all of the concentrated heats have tended to diffuse.)

In case the connection between this and my pile of dirty dishes is not clear, suffice to say the energy it takes to wash the skillet tends to diffuse as the week goes on, so the skillet tends to sit in my sink, unwashed. And it's not just me and my skillet, either. My toilet is running, my iPod battery won't hold a charge; the only thing that seems to hold its concentrated energy is the infection in my chest, and I can chalk that up to entropy in my immune system...

Despite all these previous paragraphs, I don't really care much about entropy as it applies to my dirty dishes; but I do wonder about it in relation to some of the other "concentrations" in my life that seem to be getting more diffused, i.e., life ambitions. In place of romantic passions and dreams, I'm surprisingly content with a job that's adequate, a girlfriend I adore, family and friends, and a blog; I've traded skillet-hot youth for a room-temperature adulthood.

My science friends hate it when I dabble in their field and misrepresent what they do for the sake of a metaphor. I say misrepresent, because current thinking on "entropy" tries to explain how nature tends toward orderly systems, not away from them. But in relation to my metaphor, that seems right: my "youth," for all of its energy, was erratic, diffused and over-romanticized; my "adulthood," tepid, is less effortful, more focused, more "concentrated." Thank God for the adequate job, the beloved girlfriend, the family and friends. Thank God I've been able to exorcise the Maxwell's demon that made me so unstable. Thank God for dirty dishes.

---

Like Coffee with Your Cream? 

It's Thursday and it's my third time to Starbucks in a week. I'm not the kind of person who goes to Starbucks. I'm not. And yet, I am, because here I am at Starbucks for the third time in a week.

Just to be clear, I am also not the kind of person who thinks that each Starbucks is a colonial outpost for a vast evil empire, that they propagate a conspiracy of over-caffeinated Illuminati, that they are the official coffee sponsor of the World Bank, or that they roast their beans in Hell.

I do think that Starbucks is a particularly ubiquitous example of how capitalism works in a so-called "free market" economy—which is to say, it is an example of how things are not fair, and often not even kind, in this world. (A pound of Starbucks' "Guatemala Antigua" coffee costs $10.15, which, coincidentally or not, is the average weekly income there.)

I can't deny that I find this disturbing. But I'm also not ready to blame Starbucks exclusively for the unfairness of the world, not without also implicating The Gap, Nike, all of the banks, and, in fact, all corporations—any company that exists to make money. Though unfairness keeps me from enjoying Starbucks coffee, it doesn't strictly keep me from buying or drinking it.

What puts me off Starbucks is this: through sheer marketing muscle (read: $$$), they have convinced the world that they are a good product rather than a mediocre one. They have, through conscious misrepresentation, actually altered our tastes, and given us an appetite for things we never wanted. They have lied to us, and made us like it.

Let me put this another way: Why is it impossible to get a small drink at Starbucks?

Before Starbucks, there was a general understanding between retailers and consumers that drinks tend to come in three sizes, and these three sizes could be fairly represented as "Small", "Medium" and "Large." Since the three sizes are relative to one another, the actual capacity of any particular cup (8oz or 44oz) can't alter the reality that, as long as there are three cups of three different sizes, there will always always be a Small, a Medium, and a Large. This fact is as fundamental as Goldilocks and The Three Bears.

At Starbucks, there is a lexicon that is now familiar to all of America, though it should be held up as alien and strange. There is no small; small is "Tall." Medium is "Grande." In no dictionary should these sets of words be held up as equal, yet every morning, across this country and the world, people violate their own common sense to speak and think in the way that Starbucks has taught them.

Well, it's just coffee, really. What's the harm? It's not as though the same marketing muscle has changed the way people think about other things—about "weapons of mass destruction" or "enemy combatants" or "freedom" or "torture" or "family values" or "liberals" or "no child left behind." Or "free market."

Then we'd need to worry, wouldn't we?

Would you like one lump, or two?

Embrace the Kafka 

Some mysteries will never be solved.

They say people are creatures of habit, and I am no exception. I have a favorite mailbox, at the northwest corner of 34th Street and 7th Avenue. It's conveniently located at the top of the stairs as I get off the subway, and it gets emptied several times a day. Sometimes I drop mail there and discover that it's been delivered to its destination that same day. My mailbox is big and it's blue and I find its big blueness reassuring, as if the rivets that anchor it to the ground also anchor me: every time I drop a letter in this mailbox, I feel connected to the vast, powerful permanence that is the United States of America. (Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating clearly hasn't watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, the premise of which is that a lone mail carrier is able to bring order back to his anarchic, post-apocalyptic country.) Say what you will about the United States Post Office: grumble about your mail carrier, long lines, or the economic inefficiencies of state-sponsored monopoly. I find it to be the most reliable and least nefarious manifestation of federal government that there is, and it makes me proud to be an American.

Maybe this preamble will begin to explain the shock—no, let's call it distress—I felt when I came out of the subway the other day and found my mailbox was missing. I looked to the spot where it had been, immovable, the day before, and there was no trace of it, just a little dent in the snow. I had a letter that needed mailing and I didn't know what to do; I walked back and forth, envelope in hand, in stupefied disbelief, while people passed by as if nothing catastrophic had happened.

How could a mailbox be missing? There must be some mistake.

Calm down. Take a breath. There's another mailbox at 36th and 8th. At least I hope there is. I hope to Christ there is.

I grabbed a mail carrier who was passed by. "Excuse me," I said, trying to slow my breathing. "What happened to the mailbox?" He looked back quizzically, and I had to consider the possibility that he wasn't yet aware of the crisis at hand. "The mailbox," I explained. "It's missing."

Oh, I'm sorry. Was I screeching?

What is it about the Post Office that taps so deeply into my bureaucratic paranoia? My grandfather worked at a post office, a big urban sorting center, and I still shiver remembering his tales of the vast underground network of sorters and filers, of conveyer belts and mail sacks, an entire underground city, layer upon layer of unfathomable bureaucracy. When a system grows large enough, it takes on uncomfortable resemblance to an organism: it grows desires, appetites, even sicknesses. My grandfather joked that people had gotten lost forever inside his sorting building, but I never thought it was very funny.

Why did I care about a missing mailbox? Even the reasonable explanations weren't reassuring: as when anything unusual happens in New York City, I blamed it on terrorists. "Al Qaeda took my mailbox!" "Full of anthrax and in CDC custody!" "Dirty bomb!!!"

But this fear was followed almost immediately by another, deeper one. If the Postal Service persists in the face of rain or sleet or snow or dark of night, then what worse catastrophe could have befallen my unmovable mailbox? The mailbox is representative of a law and order that I have been able to take for granted as fundamental, impervious to attack and immune to entropy—until now.

Sure, the lid was a little creaky and it didn't always close. It's completely possible that my mailbox was in for a repair, or had been retired after years of dependable service. But even this didn't offer me much solace. I thought of the de-commissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, only a few blocks away—a giant steel symbol of aging, rusting empire—and wondered, is my mailbox another, smaller one?

It's all so strange, as if I awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, and found myself transformed...

La Conspiración 

The following correspondence started after a brief visit to Chipotle.com, the website for the McDonalds-owned Mexican grill. Frequent patronage led the two correspondents to notice an almost self-consciously eclectic mix of music, and subtle music industry advertising in the food wrappers.

S: The guacamole—in addition to be fresh and chock full of avocados—is, apparently, "sexy."

C: Website's kinda uppity for a burrito place. "Learn"? "Play"?

S: They're so uppity that I couldn't get the site to run at all at home with dial-up. But what do you expect from a place that has band names on the burrito wrappers?

C: I'm not sure why, when you pointed this out the first time, it didn't strike terror into my heart: it should, and it does.

S: I'm not sure if terror is the right emotion to be having regarding burritos, actually, no matter how they're wrapped.

C: Whatever burrito-fear I had I put to rest a long time ago. (Most of that had to do with sour cream…) What scares me, in no particular order: marketing, cross-marketing, the music industry, and McDonalds. If someone told me that there was, I don't know, a microchip in every Chipotle burrito, and the microchip played subliminal music from inside my body until its battery died, and this music made me more likely to buy a CD by G Love and Special Sauce [on the Chipotle wrapper], I have to say, I wouldn't immediately doubt it. All of which makes my sour cream fear sort of naïve in comparison. Chipotle has never done anything wrong that I know of. That's what scares me.

S: Why exactly didn't you sleep well last night? Drugs? Seems awfully hard on Chipotle. And we both eat a ton of Chipotle… but I have not felt compelled to run out and buy a CD of G Love and Special Sauce. Anyway, doesn't your blog direct people to buy music from iTunes?

C: Interesting parallel to draw, since I am not a multinational corporation wielding billions of exploitive dollars and peddling influence over the masses.... They don't dictate what we should and shouldn't like; they just narrow the entire palate of choices. (Corollary: in a society where government is implicit with media, where every news item or political decision could mean the gain or loss of millions of dollars for the very people creating or reporting the news, is there news at all—or just ads? And if the powers that be get to dictate what we think of them through the media, then is it really honest even to call it a democracy?)
Speaking of blogs, I might rip off this whole Chipotle thread and post it before the night is out. I meant to write more than I did this weekend, and the stuff I did put up steered the page dangerously toward "confessional." I'm also planning another solution to the music thing—links to streaming versions of the songs, preferably without the option of buying them. And I'm going to aim for one song per blog entry, so it really is like a soundtrack. I'm sure my reader base of you, Sheila, and those two people in Houston will really appreciate the extra work.

S: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to equate you with the McDonald's corporation. Nor do I think there's anything morally wrong with your music links. If you can still get this upset about cross-marketing and news-as-advertising—and find a way to articulate that—then it is still a democracy. A threatened one, maybe, but there it is.

C: Getting upset isn't the same as having the power to do something about it…

S: It's a start. (I was having a dilemma just now, because what I really wanted to say was that if you had a burrito, you might feel better.)

C: Why is it so hard to have a burrito with a clear conscience? Thank Christ I can avoid the whole quandary by eating your butternut squash soup with croutons.

[Ed: S makes a kick-ass butternut squash soup. Chipotle makes a pretty mean burrito. And the McDonalds Corporation makes a ton of cash.]

Related links: How many calories in a Chipotle burrito?

What a View 

Yesterday a man jumped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, fell eighty stories to a sixth-floor landing, and died instantly. His name and motives are unknown. Police say he was about thirty years old, that he vaulted the ten-foot fence, and that the entire act was caught on the building's security cameras. The tragedy of the facts in this story are matched only by the tragedy of the facts that are not known.

"Why" is the question that casts the thickest shadow over suicide, followed perhaps by "how" — the head-scratching just barely precedes the rubber-necking. Why? Why why why why why? So many scenarios present themselves (a holiday weekend, for God's sake), but part of the chill it strikes in me comes from the fact that I'll never know. I'll never know whether it was planned and laborious (did he draw out the moment with a "walking meditation," up the 1860 stairs?), or an impulsive sprint? (How does one "vault" a 10-foot fence?, is one obvious question.) Did he give any consideration to the passersby on the street below; did he aim for the sixth-floor landing? Had he spoken to the tourists on the elevator, made eye contact with any children as he tipped over the top of the fence? Had he done research? Did he know that at least thirty others made the same jump before him? Did he plan a last meal? Had he taken out his trash, fed his pets, made any last phone calls? Was there an audience for his act, or an intended one? Did he want someone to feel very bad? Or was there no one?

The moment he let go of the fence, did he regret it? In the seconds that followed? How many seconds were there? How many thoughts does one have in those seconds?

Did he call anyone's name?

Was he crying?

It was a perfect, clear autumn day. From that height, he would have been able to see all ends of this enormous city, and still he decided there was nothing for him. He must have stopped to look, his last view of anything in this world. What did he see? God, what a view!

[Addendum]

P.S. Remembering David Okrent

While I'm going on about the morbid... I remember years ago reading a story in the Boston Globe: the body of a Harvard student was found one cold winter morning, dead from a single stab wound to the neck, on Revere Beach, miles from where he lived in Cambridge. No one was clear on what he'd been doing out there, or whether the death was a suicide or homicide.

The most striking detail about the story was buried a few paragraphs down: his parents learned of their son's death while eating breakfast in their Evanston, Illinois home — not from the police or the university, but from an agency asking if they would like to donate their son's organs. "He's a big boy," the father replied. "Why don't you ask him yourself?" The caller, realizing the parents hadn't been notified, hung up. The father spent the rest of the morning trying to reach his son on the phone , only reaching his answering machine, with an ever-longer beep.

As time went by, more facts came out in the case: the boy had a history of depression, and the knife found near the body was his own. But he had also just enthusiastically changed majors, citing better future job placement as a reason. There was evidence that pointed to suicide and evidence that seemed to cancel it out, and the police report, finally, was inconclusive. At the center of this sad story's grisly details, the most disturbing aspect of it is how much will never ever be known....