Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow 

Un-homecoming on Mass Ave.

Yea, and though it is at once as beautiful and isolating as ever it was; though I am haunted by the same ghosts I thought I'd left behind, and by others I have yet to discover by name—still I am nostalgic. (Is it possible to be nostalgic for a place I never liked?) The place is austere and comforting, like the leafless trees of fall. The place is filling, like butterless bread. The place is peaceful, like a hard bed that's too small to share.

(Thou, who art never with me, art never far away.)

I will fear no evil. Yesterday's antipathy is today's nostalgia, and it comforts me.

Oy vey 

"Well, then, where do you buy your bagels?"

- Visiting Bostonite, noticing that New York has fewer Dunkin Donuts franchises

How cellophane 

Sometimes it's as though the aliens are reaching out to us, or the dolphins—if only we knew how to hear them... This fell into my spam folder this morning, from "Cherie", with the subject heading, i'm sad chris:

Is ransom buddha the gravid enthusiasm melee or galatea enthusiasm?

The micronesia detonate not mardi but luxuriant matsumoto rawhide and genevieve afterword. Sometimes buttery is eddy but gravid, glandular ah adsorb scot tacitus dunkirk prelude servitor!

How cellophane? aitken! afterword dreamlike keenan rawhide!

Is cousin diatomaceous the agony cloture deck or superfluous handstand?

The blythe rubble not cloture but aminobenzoic boson bound and rawhide handstand. Sometimes andiron is agony but blythe, token aspheric describe cepheus contradict urea cyril drown!

How totalitarian? iniquity! maggoty toenail lathe goof!

I want to help, Cherie. I hear you. Sometimes buttery is gravid. How totalitarian.

Cherie—I'm sad, too...

Boot-Strapping 

"When something is empty, fill it. When something is full, empty it. When you have an itch, scratch it." - Dieter Dengler's advice to his shipmates, upon his rescue

There's a moment in Werner Herzog's new film, Rescue Dawn, when, after weeks of planning their escape from a prisoner of war camp in Laos, the characters played by Christian Bale and Steve Zahn finally spring (or in this case, crawl) into action—and immediately after, Zahn's character seizes up and vomits: the stress, anticipation and fear have overwhelmed his already-unsteady digestive system. In that moment, facing the unknown on an upset stomach, maybe it actually seemed preferable to him to stay in the camp. Bale (whose character has that obsessive singularity of purpose typical of Herzog's heroes) literally has to drag his friend through his own vomit toward freedom.

I'm not in a prisoner of war camp in Laos; I'm at a cafe in Boston. But I am days away from my own escape, which is months in the planning; and today, I woke up and vomited.

How typical. My body's pitched efforts to sabotage the pursuit of my own happiness have always struck me as anti-Darwinian: I have an itch, and I'd scratch it if only I weren't so anxious. Trying to lift one's self from an unhappy place to a happy place necessarily requires some amount of boot-strapping—but why is it always these moments when the laces threaten to break?¹

It occurs to me that if Rescue Dawn had been made by, say, Terrence Malick instead of Werner Herzog, then Dieter would have "escaped" from Laos through daydreams, imaginations, and voice-over—more escapism than escape.² Dieter would have fantasized about his various possible alternate lives without bothering to save his actual one. But the people who face life's stresses with escapism aren't the ones who get their lives told in movies. No—they're the ones who go watch movies in the midst of the afternoon, when they should instead be packing, and preparing for their great escape...

1. Because these are the moments when the laces are under the most strain. Duh.

2. I suppose Terrence Malick already made such a movie...

---

Sunset in Boston, pt. 2 

or, Location Location Location

It's not too early, I think, for me to start trying to puzzle out what went wrong here: I want to try and find some answers during this "liminal" time, before I start whatever the next thing is, so when I pack my things here, I have a better idea what I should leave behind. ¹

I'm in Harvard Square, sitting halfway between a busker playing classical guitar and another on bagpipes. ("Why can't we all just get along?") I remember a couple different occasions, thinking I'd be happier if I lived over here in this neighborhood, instead of where I do live. When I re-upped my lease there (slightly under duress...), I remember a friend here told me I'd "shot myself in the foot," that I'd ruined my chance to enjoy Boston by staying in that stodgy part of town.

Now, a year later, the bagpipes bleating in my left ear and the guitar twanging in my right, and surrounded by all of the beautiful smart optimistic people strolling (shopping) in Harvard Square, it's easy to imagine how things might have been better. But in the end, I don't know if it would have made a difference where I was, if I'd had this same temperament: I would have had better places to be alone. It all would have been more tolerable but I think in the end just as wrong. For whatever reason, blame it on me or the town, almost nothing here affects me, influences me, alters me, or inspires me to grow. ² A change of neighborhood might have helped, but only if I'd let it, and I don't have any reason to think I would have, since I'd decided all that time ago that I wasn't going to let it.

Then, I wonder at the things I'll miss when I'm gone. I'd try to make the list now—the barrista I like but never got to know, the long walks through the Fens, this classical guitarist on my right—but the most poignant items on the list, I'm sure I won't even be able to predict. So like me to claim to loathe a thing for the entire time I have it, and to pine for it the day it's gone.

1. That means this blog will become even more shapeless and self-indulgent than usual—though my intent to keep it from getting too shapeless and self-indulgent is exactly what's made it "usual" for me not to post at all...

2. I have the image here that a good, middle-class consumer is like a well-pruned shrub, alive and well-enough but not at all growing or only in the ways it's allowed by the "gardener."

---

Bardo 

or, Brush Up on Your Buddhism, pt. 1

For no reason, I've been waking around dawn, so that without any planning, I've managed to see the sun rise every day of this new year – the anticipation of the day ready to begin, but not quite. If the day is when things happen, then I've been witness to the time just before.

And that is how I feel.

Buddhism describes a "bardo" as a temporary, transitory state – a time between things. According to this tradition, our entire lives are a bardo state, the Bardo of Existence, followed by the Bardo of Dying and the Bardo of Rebirth. Because, in each of these states, we are not quite at one with our "true nature", a bardo is essentially a time of confusion, a time we spend learning the rules to a changing game that we grow to think of as "reality."

And that is how I feel.

There are bardos within bardos; I am in the Bardo of Boston, during which I form a set of hopes and dreams that will quickly be made irrelevant as I move into another transient place; since we never know when we will move from one bardo to another, all we can do is prepare, and also learn to accept the transience of things, and confusion.

And that, too, is how I feel…

Happy new year.

---

Where Trains Make Sense 

America's first subway, a stretch of track laid under Tremont Street in downtown Boston in the 1890s, promised, "Rapid Transit 10 minutes to Park Street," and travelled a distance of what is now six city blocks.

While waiting twenty minutes for this very subway, I read this email from a friend:

It's quarter of two in the morning. I'm sitting on a bench on the
subway platform waiting for the F train. It's quiet. Then, out of
nowhere, the guy at the end of the bench bursts out with, "Why don't
these trains make sense? I'm from Boston. In Boston our trains make
sense."

Everyone else on the bench bristles. But no one says anything.

"All the trains go to Park Street, and then you can get any train you
want at Park Street. Why aren't these trains like that?"

"Well," says the girl next to me, "New York is a lot bigger than Boston."

"You could go back to Times Square," says the guy on the other side.
"But it might add another hour to your trip."

"Well," says Mr. Boston, "I just think the Boston system is better. Now, where can I get the G train?"

All of which is just to say: Come back.

Yeah.

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?!?

La Dolce Vita 

"A gimlet, please."

"A dry martini."

"Two mojitos, two saketinis and a vodka cranberry."

"Would you like to hear the specials?"

"Sweet or savory? Savory or sweet?"

"My noodles are cold. Are they supposed to be cold?"

"These are the best oysters. I can't believe there are only six of them."

"Can I get some hot sauce on the side?"

"Can we get extra plates? We're splitting everything?"

"A bottle of the white Burgundy."

"Two glasses of the Pinot noir."

"How long is the wait?"

"...crispy duck in a pomegranate sauce..."

"...tastes like Goldfish..."

"...are there nuts...?"

"May I see your Scotch list?"

"May I see your wine list?"

"Can we get two Remys and an Oban, neat?"

"Can we get two espressos and one Americano?"

"Would you like to see the dessert menu?"

"No, God no. No thank you. We're full."

"It's too hot to eat..."

(Thanks to SL and JD.)

Apartment of the Damned 

or, Triskaidekaphobia, pt. 2

In a rapid succession of demoralizing news, for reasons I won't go into, I learned that I won't be moving into a sweet new dream apartment I'd found, that I probably won't be moving at all, and that it's nearly impossible for me to move, ever.

Maybe I'm being hyperbolic.

(Maybe I'm not.)

Moving is a pain in the ass. Even finding an apartment is a pain in the ass. The fact that I'd found an apartment means I'd already contributed a fair amount of pain to my ass. I was committed to this move. I wanted this move. More to the point, I'd staked a lot of hope on this move: the new neighborhood has a higher-than-usual ratio of interesting, engaging, like-minded people; a higher density of bookstores, yoga studios, and fun bars; a higher density of useful subway stops; and most of all, has halfway decent pad thai, which, despite the fact that I currently live in an "emerging" neighborhood, is something I haven't had since I left New York.

In short, this apartment was a chance for a fresh start, an opportunity to put this last, hit-or-miss-and-mostly-miss year behind me. A chance to be happy.

And now that chance is gone. And I'm stuck here, in this beige, boxy malaise-soaked studio. Forever. The apartment of the damned.

Maybe I'm being hyperbolic.

(Maybe I'm not.)

Either way, I've learned a valuable life lesson, which is: never ever ever make any important decisions or sign any documents on the thirteenth of the month. How could I have been so stupid?

Anyway, ... moving is a pain in the ass...

What color should I paint my walls?

(What a difference a year makes...)

Sunshine. Springtime. Shopping Mall. 

It's true—after half a year of short cloudy days with blistering cold winds and, lately, a Johnstown amount of water, the sun is finally making its belated spring debut. The sunshine is warm, the breeze is mild, the sky is clear.

Where do I go?

Shopping mall.

Through some perverse and ironic act of civic planning, the nicest park I've found within walking distance of my apartment is the atrium of a mall. Sunny and secluded, sheltered from the wind, the "South Garden" is nested between two of Boston's biggest buildings (the Prudential Center and the Cheesecake Factory).

I've spent a few of my free afternoons here, and I've come to believe it might be the most iconic site in all of Boston—more than the old statehouse, more than the Common, more even than Fenway Park. In my mind, the South Garden is a perfect example of Massachusetts neo-liberalism: a generously-sized bit of green space flanked by Starbucks and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Clinton and Blair's "Third Way" interpretation of liberalism is now just a nostalgic memory, eclipsed by ... whatever it is we have now. ("No Way.") But compassionate conservatives be damned: the Third Way is alive and well in Boston, and seems to go something like this:

• Just because you are well-off doesn't mean you have to be a Republican.
• Just because your own mores dictate that you'll buy a condo, marry and have kids doesn't mean you have to feel threatened by people who won't.
• Just because you are terse and closed off, personally, doesn't mean you're not open, generally.

[How does a state with so many khaki pants continue to re-elect Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank?]

The Third Way in Boston seems to go like this: on the one hand, you like nature, and on the other hand, you're thrilled with the conveniences afforded by a thriving economy.

So you build a park inside a shopping mall.

You can have your latte, and drink it, too.

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.

---

Letters of Recommendation 

DubAllStar409: so I really like chris
DubAllStar409: I think he is really smart...
DubAllStar409: and...
DubAllStar409: and he has a sense of humor
DubAllStar409: and he likes booze just as much as we do
DubAllStar409: really warm hands
DubAllStar409: I am going to use him as my personal hand warmer
DubAllStar409: for my hands
DubAllStar409: because they are cold
DubAllStar409: I vote we keep him around no matter what.

---

I've been watching this every day for a month...

Marathon Monday 

At first, I skimmed over the emails on Friday that signed off, "Have a great holiday!" and the oddly-intent questions of my co-workers: "What are you doing this weekend?" Finally, I put two and two together and gleaned that it was a holiday weekend. (I'm so clever.)

Of course! Tax day!

Since when is tax day a holiday? It's a great idea to give us procrastinators a full workday to throw together a legitimate-looking tax return. But does that mean post offices are closed? Does that defeat the whole point? And anyway, isn't the fifteenth a Saturday?

So then I put ten and forty together, and realized that the holiday wasn't about taxes at all. The fancy hats and sun dresses tipped me off, finally, that it was Easter. But frankly, I was a little surprised. "Easter? Isn't that a little, I don't know, ... parochial?"

All I mean to say is, I'm not sure why a religious celebration should impact the operating hours of my otherwise-secular shopping mall. I really needed to do some clothes shopping.

On my quest for stores that were actually open for business, I found something ... unexpected. And it explained all of the confusion I'd been feeling about tax day, post office closure, and people's generally festive spirit. Of course!

Tomorrow is Marathon Monday.

Twenty-thousand runners have descended onto Newbury Street and there's not an ounce of body fat among them. Some of them are even jogging, here, in the day-before-race day crowds, dodging in and out of the vendors who are assembling their booths to sell things like hot dogs and funnel cake. Nothing says "physical fitness" like fried dough...

The stores—the ones on this side of town are open, the heathen!—are offering special marathon promotions. At one, a greeter announces, "Twenty percent off if you're running tomorrow!" Trying to hawk her discount, she asks a few passersby, "Are you in the race?" She looks me up and down and decides not to bother asking.

Despite all of these righteously healthy people running circles around my out-of-shape self-esteem, I get swept up in the fervor. I try on a pair of running shoes, remembering years ago being chastised by a Nike ad: "Are you wearing running shoes? ... Are you running?" It was trying to sell me on the benefits of wearing Nike's non-running shoes, which offer better lateral support. While I was reading the billboard, I stepped off the curb and twisted my ankle. I'm not even lying.

"How do they feel?," the salesman asks.

"They're good," I answer. "Really light."

"Yeah! They can really go the distance. Are you running tomorrow?"

I'm so happy he asked that I buy them. It is, after all, a holiday—a religious one, now, celebrating America's other great religion: commerce.

"Have a great holiday!"

Left Weave Girl 

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper-real.
- Jean Baudrillard

There's a cute girl I keep seeing around town, and I run into her again outside of The Gap. When I see her this time, I can't help but stare: "Haven't we met before?" I stare straight at her for a full minute, which might have been really rude except for the fact that she is a poster.

Left Weave Girl is the "spokesmodel" for The Gap's latest ad campaign. She's the one who tells us to "Go left. Feel right." Whatever that means. And the reason I keep staring is that I might know her. Or I might not.

And I just can't tell which.

* * *

"Ohmygod, you look just like [MovieStarName]!" Not an uncommon thing to hear. It's a game people play—the movie stars we most resemble. But I have some friends in Hollywood who take this game to the next level. You've seen these friends of mine. They're the store clerks, the patients at hospitals, the crime victims crying to the police, the silently supportive wives. You've seen them in whatever space lies between the foreground and the background. My friends are not the stars of the stories they tell; they are the supporting actors—the proletariat of the dream machine. You don't know their names, but you do know their faces. And when people walk up to them to say they look "just like that person on TV," well, there's a chance they are that person.

That's why I spend so much time staring at Left Weave Girl. There's a fair chance Left Weave Girl is a friend of mine. But the longer I stare, the harder it gets for me to tell. I could call this friend and ask, but ... somewhere in the definition of the word "friend", I'd think it might mention that you should be able to recognize a friend when you see her.

* * *

If you sit close enough to a movie screen, you'll notice it's not quite solid. It's porous, full of small, almost invisible holes.

For the most part, I watch—consume—movies and television like everyone else. That is, I think of the world in which celebrities travel as inaccessible, just as unreal as the worlds which they depict in the movies themselves. Just as hyper-real. The rest of us could no more visit that world than visit Oz.

But in those infrequent and jarring moments when I see someone I know cross over to that other side—when a familiar face shows up on TV, or at The Gap—I am reminded of those small, almost invisible holes. I am reminded of the permeability of the silver screen. (People can cross over, but, like Oz, they can only get there through a fluke and the gale force of a tornado...)

* * *

Finally, I do check with my friend, to see if she is the Left Weave Girl. "I wish," she answers. "She's cute!" She writes me from a place called Lone Pine, California. She's making a cowboy movie. She signs off, "Yee haw." My friend is in Oz. She's hyper-real, after all...

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...

Love in the Time of Bird Flu 

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover."
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

There are people I love in the world, but none within two-hundred miles. I spend Valentine's at home, surfing the web. You might say I'm getting an early start at what the New York Times calls social distancing—the "politically correct term for quarantine." In the event that the H5N1 virus goes pandemic, one way to stay relatively safe, they say, is stay at home. Stay home, eat canned food, and surf the web.

Welcome to my life.

* * *

That damn Internet—one more excuse to stay at home and avoid human contact while also having more immediate access to more people than we ever could have imagined. A friend goes on and on to me about online personal ads. "It's just like Amazon," he says. "You comparison shop, you refine what you want, you find the best possible deal." But I've never been able to bring myself to do it—something inherently disturbing about browsing for people, and adding them to your Shopping Cart...

* * *

I stay in touch with loved ones by email, by phone, by chat. I think sometimes that what I appreciate about my relationships with these people is intimacy—and that email, phone, chat are the opposite of intimacy. What I appreciate about these relationships is that they're not virtual; they're actual. Except that now they're not.

So what are they?

A beloved is a vessel into which we can pour the best parts of ourselves. Can we do it through a fiber-optic cable?

Did you know you can order flowers and chocolate on the Internet and have them delivered anywhere in the country, without speaking to a single person? Did you know you can schedule it a year in advance?

* * *

Sometimes I wonder if the global village is just too big—if people evolved to be suited for small towns, maybe, and anything bigger than that is against our nature, brings out anger, violence, anonymity, alienation.

Sometimes I wonder if pandemic bird flu might be exactly what the human race needs...

Happy Valentine's Day.

---

60 Seconds Under a Black Star 

I was running late because I'd forgotten to set my alarm. I walked through the freezing rain. I was still a little groggy. I put on my iPod, trying to wake myself up or buffer myself from the morning. But the battery was dead. I left the headphones on.

I was standing in line waiting to buy subway tokens. "Four, please." I couldn't hear myself through my own iPod headphones. I opened my wallet and a brand new book of stamps flew out of it—whoosh—and, gone.

A train was pulling into the station. I ran for the turnstile. I put in one token, and sent the other three flying into the air, down the stairs, and onto the tracks. Bye bye.

I dashed for the stairs. "Run for office, run for your favorite charity, but don't run for the train." I slipped on the ice and fell down the stairs. "I'm fine!," I shouted at no one in particular. My coat was covered in slush. My butt hurt. As I picked myself up, I noticed I'd broken my iPod headphones.

The train pulled out of the station.

Total time: sixty seconds. Net loss: $71.55. And my dignity.

P.S. Late for work.

---

$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?"

Stories in Stone 

Part One: "Counterpoint"

I walked by it every day for a few weeks before I gave it a closer look—a square granite column just outside the "T" stop where I pick up the subway, about five feet high, in the middle of a small courtyard. It was carved on all four sides with what turned out to be a story, "Counterpoint," by Jane Barnes, about a husband and wife in the middle of a small squabble, while the wife played a piano piece by Bach—a short meditation on intimacy and also the distance that will always exist between two people. Or so I read it, since these things have been on my mind lately.

I couldn't help but be struck by the audacity of writing in granite, a medium which renders every word choice, every comma and turn of phrase irrevocable. No second-guessing, no last minute editing. I realized, after a minute, that this is no less true of any other sculpture, or for that matter any other work of art, even writing: once the presses begin to roll, the book or magazine is just as irrevocable. Just as frighteningly permanent.

Part Two: Spirit Stones

Boston's Museum of Fine Art has a collection of Gongshi, scholar rocks—naturally-formed stones collected (mostly by the Chinese) for their unusual shape and natural beauty, for over a thousand years. These stones, also called "spirit stones", usually have a porous surface molded by water and other erosion, and scholars in the East have used their intricate surfaces as an object of meditation.

The fractal-like nooks and crannies of the stones give them an almost infinite surface area, and Chinese scholars compare them to the infinite "inner cave" of the mind.

The bodies of the stones have eroded to less than they once were, and this, according to the Chinese scholars, has made them more.

Part Three: Permanence

In my walks through Boston, I found another set of etchings in granite columns: tombstones. This city is home to some of the oldest graveyards in the United States. Many of these headstones are extravagant, noble things—their owners maybe hoped through sculptural grandeur to achieve a kind of permanence that their bodies didn't offer. But I notice that rain and wind have wiped the faces of many of these stones clean, leaving no trace of who lies beneath: the names, merely carved in stone, weren't permanent at all...

Paint on the Palette 

"Lately you may feel like your brain is acting like a TiVo on steroids, and recording and remembering all sorts of junk that crosses your path. Sit down and toss anything that isn't absolutely necessary to finishing up the tasks at hand. Use this high-flying energy to get things done and move projects into the finished pile. Writing down ideas that you come across is a great idea, too—you can get started on them later, when you're a little more focused."

- Astrology.com, "Pisces," August 19, 2005

I've had six-hundred thousand impressions each day and I can't manage to focus them into a single thought. Images and memories go in and out of my head, bubbling up like pasta in a rolling boil, like jellies floating just below the surface of the harbor. Then disappear. At night, when I close my eyes to sleep, it's a montage of imagery, La Jetée. It's all so much paint on the palette but it won't take shape, and I want to just throw it at a canvas in a rage, and say, "There it is, that's it, that's now. Call it Untitled, call it Mural, call it Convergence."

I walk each morning from the South End through Chinatown to a district of old piers and warehouses reinvented as professional lofts and dot com offices. Every day I see chickens, men in scrubs, Au Bon Pain. The "walk" signs make no sense. The yellow lights are too short.

I tell my co-workers I'm so new that I feel like I'm watching the uncut footage of a documentary about them, and somehow they seem to understand.

I don't cook but try to befriend the Thai restaurant downstairs. I ask for chopsticks because I haven't gotten around yet to flatware. I eat fresh fruit. I walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. I have conversations with strangers. I meet people as I walk by the bus station but they're always leaving. The dancers outside Boston Ballet ask me for a cigarette but I don't smoke.

I live in an empty apartment with wood floors and marble countertops and nowhere to sit.

I watch Broken Flowers, I watch Happy Accidents, I watch North By Northwest. I read Narcissus and Goldmund, I read A Wrinkle in Time.

Twenty neighbors across the street, each framed inside his or her own bay window, an elaborate puppet play. They have dinner parties; they have breakfast; they have sex.

The sun sets behind the most beautiful skyline I've ever seen. I wonder if I've lost focus, if I make myself suffer but don't remember why. I wonder if I've lost passion. I wonder if we've all outlived our usefulness, if we were never meant to live so long. At night, a gentle wind blows through the window, and I hear voices from all over the neighborhood, people in communion with other people, laughing, crying, but mostly just going about their business. Going about their lives. There it is, that's it, that's now. Call it Untitled, call it Mural. Call it Convergence.

---