01.31.18

And what a vertigo she must have created for the trapped and the crippled who saw her escaping. This stocky dove, this fist with wings, tamping down the contaminated air in her ascent, pushing away all that was lost and clearing a space for all that is home. A pigeon in the air, lifting out of the trench, is a gray flag of possibility, a final opportunity for the doomed to pull their heads up. A pigeon in war is a chance to keep imagining.

Then a shell exploded underneath her, killing five men and sending the shocked bird to the ground. And that descent is the last recorded remembrance of the 77th's last pigeon by any lasting member of the Lost Battalion. Perhaps they all turned away because they couldn't stand to watch further, and this is why no 77th saw the moment when she relaunched her body—one eye just gone and one leg hanging by a tendon, tin tube still affixed. Nobody saw her wobble in the air toward Mobile Message Unit #9, twenty-five miles southwest, picking up speed as she flew. And since nobody saw her, no 77th doughboy could possibly imagine what was going to happen next.

(from "war pigs," in elena passarello's fucking extraordinary animals strike curious poses)
true story. cher ami's message:

WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALELL 276.4. OUR AR ILLERY I S DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

cher ami delivered a total of 12 messages in the american sector at verdun during world war one.

01.11.18

our old friend austin, a fellow member of joe's darts team when we lived in hell's kitchen long ago and the earth was flat, spent a not-insignificant portion of the fall on jeopardy! (and being televised for being on jeopardy! in his inimitable way), and i decided to troll him for mispronouncing "sherbet" and missing a question by making and instagramming a cocktail, as one does. that left me with a surprisingly large tub of cheap rainbow sherbet, which hunched in the freezer for a month or two until i decided i needed to start eating a spoonful of it once each day for the rest of my life, or something.

if you'd asked me about my associations with sherbet prior to that first day, i'd have told you that i used to order a scoop of coffee ice cream topped with a scoop of rainbow sherbet every now and again as a child, because the combination was surprisingly good and because i enjoy making people uncomfortable with seemingly-gross orders (see also: steamed orange juice at starbucks). after that first spoonful i can tell you that it actually plucks me out of adulthood in new york city, whirls me across the country and three decades, and deposits me at the dining room table at my grandparents' condominium in los angeles, where my grandmother's mysterious cold lunches always, always ended with a plateful of puddling rainbow sherbet. served with forks, maybe? i could be conflating that part with when we euthanized our three-legged cat in 2009 and were so distraught that we ended up at a shitty pub near lincoln center—if you ever find yourself in the position of having to kill someone you love, be sure that the next place you go is somewhere you'll never need to go again—where i ate cinnamon ice cream with a fork. i'm not sure.

my grandmother spent formative years in new york city, remains obsessed with new york city, and in moving here in my mid-twenties i had something in common with her for what i think was/is the first time in our lives. most of what i say is clearly of no interest to her—i say that without resentment, as i imagine certain kinds of grandchildren are uninteresting to certain kinds of grandparents—but she loves hearing and talking about the city, and i have sent her postcards and letters full of cartographic pornography over the years. block by block, the theaters and libraries we visit, the landmarks we pass (she lives, somehow, for news of grant's tomb), the coordinates of our various offices. i sometimes wish we could talk about the undiscovered country between our new york cities, what it was like for her to leave her young family as a middle-aged woman and to come back to it as her ex- and future husband's date to their daughter's wedding (for example), but we were never and will never be close enough for that. all she will say, what she says constantly now that she is in her upper nineties, is that she didn't want to have any more children.

she's also moving to the memory ward at her nursing home; sometimes she believes she's on a ship, and sometimes she sees her long-grown sons asleep in her room. i haven't sent her any of my city in a while, and it's likely that she wouldn't recognize it if i did. i don't believe anything i needed to tell or hear from her, or that she needed to tell or hear from me, has gone unsaid, but i find myself barefoot in the kitchen with this freezer-burned sherbet and wonder who we might have been, had we been other people.

01.08.18

i woke up with the wisps of an imagined former office in my head. this is a regular thing: once every few months i dream up a version of the publishing world in which i return, usually as a freelancer, to my old magazine. the genial but distant boss who never followed up on raises for me was still there. my third editor in chief, the one who came in as a steely-eyed executive editor who bullied me into semi-factual cover lines and was pared away when corporate decisions maimed several of the women's-title mastheads this past fall—like polar bears that eat only seal blubber when food is plentiful—was still there. it's always at least a bit awkward; while i'm back in these scenarios, i'm always still formerly laid off. awakening, i'm never sorry that my job melted from beneath me, but my subconscious imagines rejection anyway. it loves to gnaw on old rejections.

i was never entirely sure if the way i handled my research department squared with the way other chiefs handled theirs, since i had exactly one senior editor walk me through my entry-level job and i spent my entire career rising through the same book. i saw other chiefs' guidelines, attended a few seminars with folks from other publishers, and sat through several of our in-house legal team's presentations on fact checking, but—especially as the team turned over and the women i'd known as a newbie dematerialized—i began to suspect that some, maybe many of the rules i'd inherited from my mentor were arbitrary. was it possible that we only needed to save physical files for three years' worth of issues because the sleek bank of file cabinets between editorial and the ad sales team...could fit physical files for three years' worth of issues? we used each manila folder twice; when i'd remove and discard the oldest files to make room for the ones i'd just created, i'd turn each one inside out, sharpie through the article title and date on the other side of the tab, and use it again. i still remember the pang i felt when my mentor's handwriting disappeared from the cabinet completely, when each folder was me and me, again.

i realized this morning that it's been more than three years since i packed up my cubicle and hit the pavement; even if some of the stories i'd assigned out for checking were bumped to future issues, there's a good chance that i've worked my way out of the cabinet as well. that i am a little sorry about, if we're being honest. my handwriting is probably as stylized as it is because i care more about being seen than i care, most of the time, to admit.

01.02.18

2018: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

i asked the maintenance office to unclog our tub.
i ate a bunch of peanuts and threw the shells on the floor.
i packed some chocolate babka for my brother-in-law to take uptown.
i woke up, set my alarm to go off an hour later, and went back to sleep.
i threw away joe's socks.
i ran the dishwasher.
i watered our cacti.
i filed a story.