was the neighborhood guy who masked his mini-pinscher prescient? i hear that two cats have contracted coronavirus, though the news, thank goodness, seems to be that they will recover and that they won't pass their setbacks to their humans.
we persist. i've been seized with a wild urge to chain-smoke, à la every fictional world-wearied beat cop confronted with the eleventh-hour, extra-grisly case that will end up defining her or his career, and have spit on that impulse by reactivating my long-dormant pokémon go account (abandoned in the summer of '16 when i realized that i'd gone three weeks without talking to my mother).* i sure hope that pokémon go isn't a villainous, terrible app; it pings my interests in animal husbandry, hoarding, quantified physical activity, vexing the neighbors' kids, and so much more.**
that's self-care in these parts, then: weekly grocery runs for the neighbors, daily walks with joe, near-constant local-tween-owning. i've been quilting and watching my brilliant friend. getting into fistfights with bus stops is totally normal.
*on my first post-pokémon walk i stumbled upon A LIVE EEL IN THE STREET sine-waving on land like a regular old black snake that couldn't breathe; i did my damndest to catch and return it to its grand street live-seafood tupperware tub and have a new appreciation for that whole slippery-as-an-eel thing. i saw said eel en route to my local bank branch, where i was to explain that someone had accidentally deposited a random $18,000 into my checking account (true story, i was mixed up with another, fancier contractor); when i arrived my hands were eel-slimy and bowery-grimy, so i wiped them on the carpet before i approached the teller. "oh hi," [spreads mysterious goop on the floor] "i have a lot of money that isn't mine."
**on this afternoon's walk, pokémon go taught me that charlie parker lived on avenue b; while tech will unquestionably be one of the deaths of us, i will take that factoid with me to hell.
04.18.20
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
black leopard, red wolf (book). the last four fantasy novels i've read have all begun with some variation on "those who appear in this account" lists of dramatis personae. that could seem cute or superfluous, as the maps that frequently accompany them often are (the maps in this book, speaking of, are pretty unnecessary), but without a robust character list black leopard, red wolf would be confusing as hell. in fact, it is confusing as hell even when you can flip back to the beginning to remind yourself that the ipundulu is a vampire lightning bird and that sasabonsam (who drinks blood, except when he doesn't) is the winged brother of asanbosam (who eats flesh), and so on. it is also exhausting, as the very stories-within-stories structure and super-intricate world-building that have inspired comparisons to tolkien's middle earth, george r.r. martin's lands of ice and fire, and, like, hieronymus bosch make it extremely slow going. the comparison to george r.r. martin is an important one, for marlon james is equally fixated on sexual violence; it's been a long time since i've read something even more rape-y than a game of thrones, &c. james uses it to make important points about everything from power and exploitation to trauma and identity, and i can appreciate that, but it's rough going. that said, james blends african mythological and storytelling traditions with magical realism and surrealism to create something both ancient and new. i have absolutely no idea if it would appeal to the majority of fantasy readers, but i know i'm going to head back and read james's a brief history of seven killings, and i'll read the sequel to black leopard, red wolf when he writes it. i'm budgeting a month for it, though.
the invisible man (film). if you're the sort of person who worries that seeing too many trailers for thrillers will ruin them for you, i have bad news and good news about the invisible man. bad: as a reboot of one of universal's classic monster movies (along with dracula, frankenstein, the mummy, and so on, although most of the reboots were scrapped after the mummy tanked), its premise and basic structure aren't much of a secret even if you didn't see a bunch of previews for it on cable television this month (though this version centers the victim, elisabeth moss, rather than her tormentor*). good: even if you have been marinating in those previews, at least two of the scenes in them—including one so striking that it's featured as a still in the majority of the movie reviews i've seen—aren't in the movie at all! put that in your juul and smoke it! the invisible man was written and directed by leigh whannell (who also wrote saw**), a detail that could have squelched my interest in the movie if i'd known it ahead of time. i did not know it ahead of time, however, and i am glad that i carried on with our friday-night plan of overpaying for a home-premiering new movie and watching it from our sofas as though we were at our beloved nitehawk cinema in williamsburg. we had to make our own snacks, which was unfortunate, but we could get up to pee whenever we wanted without missing anything (the invisible man is, oddly, more than two hours long), which was pretty great. anyway, it was entertaining, especially if you get a kick out of bad things happening to tech zillionaires.
black leopard, red wolf (book). the last four fantasy novels i've read have all begun with some variation on "those who appear in this account" lists of dramatis personae. that could seem cute or superfluous, as the maps that frequently accompany them often are (the maps in this book, speaking of, are pretty unnecessary), but without a robust character list black leopard, red wolf would be confusing as hell. in fact, it is confusing as hell even when you can flip back to the beginning to remind yourself that the ipundulu is a vampire lightning bird and that sasabonsam (who drinks blood, except when he doesn't) is the winged brother of asanbosam (who eats flesh), and so on. it is also exhausting, as the very stories-within-stories structure and super-intricate world-building that have inspired comparisons to tolkien's middle earth, george r.r. martin's lands of ice and fire, and, like, hieronymus bosch make it extremely slow going. the comparison to george r.r. martin is an important one, for marlon james is equally fixated on sexual violence; it's been a long time since i've read something even more rape-y than a game of thrones, &c. james uses it to make important points about everything from power and exploitation to trauma and identity, and i can appreciate that, but it's rough going. that said, james blends african mythological and storytelling traditions with magical realism and surrealism to create something both ancient and new. i have absolutely no idea if it would appeal to the majority of fantasy readers, but i know i'm going to head back and read james's a brief history of seven killings, and i'll read the sequel to black leopard, red wolf when he writes it. i'm budgeting a month for it, though.
the invisible man (film). if you're the sort of person who worries that seeing too many trailers for thrillers will ruin them for you, i have bad news and good news about the invisible man. bad: as a reboot of one of universal's classic monster movies (along with dracula, frankenstein, the mummy, and so on, although most of the reboots were scrapped after the mummy tanked), its premise and basic structure aren't much of a secret even if you didn't see a bunch of previews for it on cable television this month (though this version centers the victim, elisabeth moss, rather than her tormentor*). good: even if you have been marinating in those previews, at least two of the scenes in them—including one so striking that it's featured as a still in the majority of the movie reviews i've seen—aren't in the movie at all! put that in your juul and smoke it! the invisible man was written and directed by leigh whannell (who also wrote saw**), a detail that could have squelched my interest in the movie if i'd known it ahead of time. i did not know it ahead of time, however, and i am glad that i carried on with our friday-night plan of overpaying for a home-premiering new movie and watching it from our sofas as though we were at our beloved nitehawk cinema in williamsburg. we had to make our own snacks, which was unfortunate, but we could get up to pee whenever we wanted without missing anything (the invisible man is, oddly, more than two hours long), which was pretty great. anyway, it was entertaining, especially if you get a kick out of bad things happening to tech zillionaires.
*fun fact: a tormentor is also "a fixed curtain or flat on each side of a theater stage that prevents the audience from seeing into the wings." related: teasers. quarantrivia!
**i couldn't sleep the other night and a twitter thread about cary elwes sent me down an internet rabbit hole that involved reading plot summaries of all of the saw movies. it was a dark time.
04.14.20
the dirty dozen {twelve pandemic encounters}
01 a masked guy holding a mini-pinscher wearing its own shot-glass-sized little feed-bag mask
02 a dude scalping hand soap and toilet paper directly in front of our grocery store, which might have stocked both of those things at that point ("hey lady, a dollar a roll!")
03 four four-packs of breakstone's salted butter speared on a wrought-iron fence
04 an angry and barefaced guy who leaned in to cough on and scream at us
05 a canada goose standing one-legged and asleep on the sand just north of south street seaport
06 a crowd of hasidic teens on electric skateboards, skeptical
07 a pile of one-free-per-customer egg-shaped soap trios at trader joe's
08 our neighbor J, god has granted him a good life and he is prepared to let the chips fall where they may
09 innumerable shitstains on citibikes
10 jumpy, poorly-laminated drugstore staffers
11 ATVs popping wheelies on the FDR
12 The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
01 a masked guy holding a mini-pinscher wearing its own shot-glass-sized little feed-bag mask
02 a dude scalping hand soap and toilet paper directly in front of our grocery store, which might have stocked both of those things at that point ("hey lady, a dollar a roll!")
03 four four-packs of breakstone's salted butter speared on a wrought-iron fence
04 an angry and barefaced guy who leaned in to cough on and scream at us
05 a canada goose standing one-legged and asleep on the sand just north of south street seaport
06 a crowd of hasidic teens on electric skateboards, skeptical
07 a pile of one-free-per-customer egg-shaped soap trios at trader joe's
08 our neighbor J, god has granted him a good life and he is prepared to let the chips fall where they may
09 innumerable shitstains on citibikes
10 jumpy, poorly-laminated drugstore staffers
11 ATVs popping wheelies on the FDR
12 The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
04.10.20
it's been an angry week, or an angry second half of the week. i tell myself that i've been unflappable for most of the past couple of months, but the truth is that i'm usually unflappable until i'm abruptly and notably flapped, and it's shitty. i have been fixating on friends and acquaintances who have left new york city to hole up in other places; while i joke about sanctimony as if it's something i don't return to all the time, i am so very sanctimonious. how dare they cart their germs out of town and risk overburdening underequipped regional care centers because staying in new york makes them itchy? i'm the hypocrite out here rocking a month-old n95 (and cotton masks) and making additional trips to the grocery store and pharmacy for compromised neighbors who could in theory be coached through trying to join the order-in sweepstakes with delivery services that appear to pay their employees fairly (stereotypical senior-senior-citizen computer literacy issues aside), but.
i called my mom this afternoon, as it's her birthday, and she told me that her hairdresser, R, had come over to cut my stepdad's hair; he's going to be coming back to cut her hair soon. i told her they and R were being reckless; i noted that if R truly had good protective gear, then it was his responsibility to donate it to his local hospital; i gave fair warning that i was going to narc on her to my sisters and make them call and pressure her, too. then i texted mom and stepdad after the call to say, with love, that if they went through with mom's appointment i would name and shame R online and make sure that he went out of business.
joe said that that was way too much; he noted that i have been in a freaky mental place of late. i suspect that i should limit myself to, like, making cheesy jokes about design for work projects until someone has a plausible idea of what's happening next and my interior landscape is closer to the great plains, would you just look at that unwrinkled grosgrain road.
i wake up half a dozen times a night mumbling apologies for things i did in my dreams. i pinch an earlobe, cross my eyes, and consider the idea that if you aren't yourself in a catastrophe then you didn't really survive, did you.
i called my mom this afternoon, as it's her birthday, and she told me that her hairdresser, R, had come over to cut my stepdad's hair; he's going to be coming back to cut her hair soon. i told her they and R were being reckless; i noted that if R truly had good protective gear, then it was his responsibility to donate it to his local hospital; i gave fair warning that i was going to narc on her to my sisters and make them call and pressure her, too. then i texted mom and stepdad after the call to say, with love, that if they went through with mom's appointment i would name and shame R online and make sure that he went out of business.
joe said that that was way too much; he noted that i have been in a freaky mental place of late. i suspect that i should limit myself to, like, making cheesy jokes about design for work projects until someone has a plausible idea of what's happening next and my interior landscape is closer to the great plains, would you just look at that unwrinkled grosgrain road.
i wake up half a dozen times a night mumbling apologies for things i did in my dreams. i pinch an earlobe, cross my eyes, and consider the idea that if you aren't yourself in a catastrophe then you didn't really survive, did you.
04.09.20
i woke up at seven this morning and saw that L had just liked one of my instagram posts. i met her when her husband, a guy i've known since we were twelve, was on one of my trail relay teams a few years ago, and i will never forget how tenderly she smoothed sunblock across his scalp and cheeks every few hours (his little brother died of skin cancer in his teens). L had a baby girl a few weeks ago, and i don't know if her doctors allowed anyone into the room for her birth. L works for amazon.
E texted a few days ago to say that while we'd planned another video call for this weekend and she very much wants to be in touch, stress is even worse for her after that kind of contact because she associates it with crisis. she doesn't think she'll always feel like this, maybe in a few months—
our E abroad is vague about his training, but he seems to be a reservist. he was surprised when we said that we wouldn't necessarily fly across the country to our parents if we found out the virus had hospitalized one of them; i explained that there was a strong likelihood that we wouldn't be permitted to see them. E was asked to volunteer for early service and declined; he would want to take care of his parents if they fell ill. later he said he'd read that COVID-19 deaths felt like drowning. he is waiting.
E texted a few days ago to say that while we'd planned another video call for this weekend and she very much wants to be in touch, stress is even worse for her after that kind of contact because she associates it with crisis. she doesn't think she'll always feel like this, maybe in a few months—
our E abroad is vague about his training, but he seems to be a reservist. he was surprised when we said that we wouldn't necessarily fly across the country to our parents if we found out the virus had hospitalized one of them; i explained that there was a strong likelihood that we wouldn't be permitted to see them. E was asked to volunteer for early service and declined; he would want to take care of his parents if they fell ill. later he said he'd read that COVID-19 deaths felt like drowning. he is waiting.
04.05.20
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
bored to death (series). it's entirely possible that i would have been immune to bored to death's charms if i'd seen it when it first aired on hbo a decade ago; it's very wes-anderson-meets-michael-chabon brooklyn-precious, and with the exception of kristen wiig, its female cast doesn't get much in the way of open road. because we're seeing it after i saw ted danson through four seasons of the good place—i really loved the good place—and while the good, the bad, and the brooklyn of this city is largely off-limits to us, i find myself getting misty over, like, scenes at veselka and old town.* creator/writer/nude-cameo jonathan ames distills something very specific about book and magazine publishing at the beginning of this decade, and while i didn't actually live in greenpoint or park slope in those years, i spent rather a lot of time there; i'd say he's gotten them right, too. also, why haven't we been to brighton beach? why haven't we gone to spa castle? mistakes were made in The Time Before. also also, i think i might be putting together some sort of ted danson retrospective over here. anyway, bored to death: the stoner-noir rejoinder to sex and the city i didn't know i needed, even though that ubiquitous pop-fictional-character personality quiz told me i was an 80% match with carrie motherfucking bradshaw.
game night (film). i see movies at weird film festivals, on international flights, and at, like, dine-in theaters in brooklyn, so i was ignorant of game night's existence until my cousin dan recommended it in our neverending twitter direct-message thread; he said it was one of the best comedies of the decade and as he is a comedian, i decided to listen to him. readers, it is an extremely enjoyable movie! from where i'm sitting it's superior to knives out (another quirky-mysterious semi-thriller i considered pretty cheesy, as daniel craig did not work at all for me; please don't tell the dine-in theaters that or they might not let us come back), in fact. casting directors, please hire rachel mcadams and jesse plemons (especially jesse plemons) for all the comic things.
temporary (book). i'm tempted to call temporary the best book i've read this year so far, but i've had the good fortune to read several boss books over the past few months; let's say it's top three for sure. the very last emily books title and hilary leichter's first novel (expanded from a short story published in n+1 in 2012), temporary follows an unnamed female narrator ostensibly in search of "the steadiness," or an end to the increasingly-absurd fill-in work she's been doing since she was a little girl (when she was hired to open and close each of the doors in an empty house at fixed intervals). she is a human barnacle, and a pirate, and a sort-of-host for the cremains of a captain of industry; she sounds a bit like a lewis carroll character, a kelly link character, a helen oyeyemi character (link and oyeyemi both praised the book, unsurprisingly). it's bone-dry, poignant, and very, very funny, and i think about it a lot as i run errands for my shut-in neighbors for free, shoulder to shoulder with the gig workers running errands for a different set of shut-ins, for lousy pay. C told me today that she drove up to tompkins square park and bought some pastries at the farmers' market "because it was outside;" she also told me that she sings a short song to daffodils blooming in the park across the street from our apartments each morning. i have mostly lost the ability to judge anyone for anything, though i remain dead certain that the adults biking recreationally on city sidewalks are domestic terrorists.
bored to death (series). it's entirely possible that i would have been immune to bored to death's charms if i'd seen it when it first aired on hbo a decade ago; it's very wes-anderson-meets-michael-chabon brooklyn-precious, and with the exception of kristen wiig, its female cast doesn't get much in the way of open road. because we're seeing it after i saw ted danson through four seasons of the good place—i really loved the good place—and while the good, the bad, and the brooklyn of this city is largely off-limits to us, i find myself getting misty over, like, scenes at veselka and old town.* creator/writer/nude-cameo jonathan ames distills something very specific about book and magazine publishing at the beginning of this decade, and while i didn't actually live in greenpoint or park slope in those years, i spent rather a lot of time there; i'd say he's gotten them right, too. also, why haven't we been to brighton beach? why haven't we gone to spa castle? mistakes were made in The Time Before. also also, i think i might be putting together some sort of ted danson retrospective over here. anyway, bored to death: the stoner-noir rejoinder to sex and the city i didn't know i needed, even though that ubiquitous pop-fictional-character personality quiz told me i was an 80% match with carrie motherfucking bradshaw.
game night (film). i see movies at weird film festivals, on international flights, and at, like, dine-in theaters in brooklyn, so i was ignorant of game night's existence until my cousin dan recommended it in our neverending twitter direct-message thread; he said it was one of the best comedies of the decade and as he is a comedian, i decided to listen to him. readers, it is an extremely enjoyable movie! from where i'm sitting it's superior to knives out (another quirky-mysterious semi-thriller i considered pretty cheesy, as daniel craig did not work at all for me; please don't tell the dine-in theaters that or they might not let us come back), in fact. casting directors, please hire rachel mcadams and jesse plemons (especially jesse plemons) for all the comic things.
temporary (book). i'm tempted to call temporary the best book i've read this year so far, but i've had the good fortune to read several boss books over the past few months; let's say it's top three for sure. the very last emily books title and hilary leichter's first novel (expanded from a short story published in n+1 in 2012), temporary follows an unnamed female narrator ostensibly in search of "the steadiness," or an end to the increasingly-absurd fill-in work she's been doing since she was a little girl (when she was hired to open and close each of the doors in an empty house at fixed intervals). she is a human barnacle, and a pirate, and a sort-of-host for the cremains of a captain of industry; she sounds a bit like a lewis carroll character, a kelly link character, a helen oyeyemi character (link and oyeyemi both praised the book, unsurprisingly). it's bone-dry, poignant, and very, very funny, and i think about it a lot as i run errands for my shut-in neighbors for free, shoulder to shoulder with the gig workers running errands for a different set of shut-ins, for lousy pay. C told me today that she drove up to tompkins square park and bought some pastries at the farmers' market "because it was outside;" she also told me that she sings a short song to daffodils blooming in the park across the street from our apartments each morning. i have mostly lost the ability to judge anyone for anything, though i remain dead certain that the adults biking recreationally on city sidewalks are domestic terrorists.
*neither of which is in brooklyn, ironically.
04.04.20
"survival is insufficient," a line i've always associated with emily st. john mandel's wonderful station eleven (and a line my first manager at ye olde charity bookshop had tattooed on his arm) first popped up in a star trek: voyager episode; thank you, seven of nine. in other news, does it surprise me that emily st. john mandel kinda looks like canadian, literary imperator furiosa these days? it does not.
i lost my sense of smell abruptly and kind of dramatically yesterday morning, and i did not keep my cool about it. steve puked on our floor, so i swooped in to comfort him, mop up his yodels, and disinfect our terrible parquet with the lemony, aggressively bleachy bottle of disinfectant i bought a couple of weeks ago. couldn't smell any of it, which made me cry a little. i told the neighbors i didn't think i could shop for them in the afternoon after all, but that mysterious anosmia seems to have blossomed into today's generic seasonal allergies. this evening i informed joe in the gentlest possible terms that i couldn't listen to any more lyle lovett, and when he switched the record out for let's dance and stevie ray vaughan's boss guitar galloped in with "modern love" matty dashed into the room, leapt on the coffee table, and farted directly into my san judas tadeo prayer candle. bowie is affecting! my senses registered all of that, for better or for worse, so i now feel much better about going to the grocery store and pharmacy.
i lost my sense of smell abruptly and kind of dramatically yesterday morning, and i did not keep my cool about it. steve puked on our floor, so i swooped in to comfort him, mop up his yodels, and disinfect our terrible parquet with the lemony, aggressively bleachy bottle of disinfectant i bought a couple of weeks ago. couldn't smell any of it, which made me cry a little. i told the neighbors i didn't think i could shop for them in the afternoon after all, but that mysterious anosmia seems to have blossomed into today's generic seasonal allergies. this evening i informed joe in the gentlest possible terms that i couldn't listen to any more lyle lovett, and when he switched the record out for let's dance and stevie ray vaughan's boss guitar galloped in with "modern love" matty dashed into the room, leapt on the coffee table, and farted directly into my san judas tadeo prayer candle. bowie is affecting! my senses registered all of that, for better or for worse, so i now feel much better about going to the grocery store and pharmacy.
03.31.20
in the hours in which i don't sleep i have started thinking about doctor omnibus, the octogenarian navy vet who was my psychiatrist for a decade or so. he was fond of saying that none of the things that mattered to me would feel important when i was eighty; he also said "tell me how you want to feel and we will make you feel that way" rather a lot, because he was a psychiatrist and not a psychologist or a psychotherapist. from where i sit, psychiatrists are master aeronauts: theirs is to stoke lanterns and fling ballast rather than to sit through gastrointestinal soliloquies about my social anxiety. we parted ways a year ago, but that is a story for another time.
he told me when i first met him that he had parented his daughter...eccentrically, and that they were no longer in touch. he told me a few sessions later that his only vacation spot is a dead forest on the oregon coast, and the fact that his happy place is an offshore stick garden of ghost trees has always been one of my favorite things about him.
so: doc om is estranged from his progeny and while it's silly to imagine that one knows anything about one's former caregivers' lives, i feel pretty sure that he's alone somewhere. does he have an apartment near his apartment-office on central park south? is he now on an air mattress next to the DSMs and pirated comics he warned me again and again that i was never to touch?
radical empathy's a helluva drug. i'm still worrying about my janky homemade mask's potential repercussions for the elderly folks receiving groceries from me across the street, but i'm also re-gnawing local calamity hangnails: who's checking on joan didion? this time, the first time: who's checking on doctor omnibus?
in the best of all possible worlds, he realized that he needed to get the fuck out of new york city a month ago. he made a terrible phone call and is now desperate to escape grandchildren he didn't know he had. he's ditched his old-man moccasins and the tide is pushing sand up under his yellow nails. i would check on you at your office number, doctor omnibus, and i know that you would think less of me if i reached you.
he told me when i first met him that he had parented his daughter...eccentrically, and that they were no longer in touch. he told me a few sessions later that his only vacation spot is a dead forest on the oregon coast, and the fact that his happy place is an offshore stick garden of ghost trees has always been one of my favorite things about him.
so: doc om is estranged from his progeny and while it's silly to imagine that one knows anything about one's former caregivers' lives, i feel pretty sure that he's alone somewhere. does he have an apartment near his apartment-office on central park south? is he now on an air mattress next to the DSMs and pirated comics he warned me again and again that i was never to touch?
radical empathy's a helluva drug. i'm still worrying about my janky homemade mask's potential repercussions for the elderly folks receiving groceries from me across the street, but i'm also re-gnawing local calamity hangnails: who's checking on joan didion? this time, the first time: who's checking on doctor omnibus?
in the best of all possible worlds, he realized that he needed to get the fuck out of new york city a month ago. he made a terrible phone call and is now desperate to escape grandchildren he didn't know he had. he's ditched his old-man moccasins and the tide is pushing sand up under his yellow nails. i would check on you at your office number, doctor omnibus, and i know that you would think less of me if i reached you.
03.28.20
it's pissing rain, as the missus would say, but i hollered from the balcony tonight for #ClapBecauseWeCare (and felt like a real fool for getting rid of the vuvuzela i brought home from my sister's wedding years ago). traffic whooshing down the drive along the river made it difficult to hear folks who were more than a building or two away, but it felt good. last night someone cranked "new york, new york" out the window as i was walking home from the store and i cried into my n95 mask.
if i had the mask thing to do over again (we found a three-pack in the bug-out bag my stepfather gifted us for christmas a few years ago; "i want you to live!"), i'd have sent ours to a local hospital. we've known for about a week that coronavirus is in our building, but i worry more for our elderly and immunocompromised neighbors than i do for us; as far as i know, we're youngish, healthyish. we cracked into them, though, and have been wearing them on grocery and pharmacy runs, along with some gloves i bought ages ago when our hands still felt things and we were dicing a lot of habanero peppers. C, a retired teacher two floors down from us who gave me a key to her apartment and occasionally asks me to collect her mail when she travels, asked for farmer cheese, wheat bread that's 70 calories a slice (remember when bread was a thing you could buy?), and three cans of pineapple chunks in juice; i am dying to know if she's making sandwiches down there, but i couldn't bring myself to ask. a friend of mine in ohio says her husband used to pick up food for seniors and once shopped for wonder bread, jalapenos, and head cheese.
i gave my name to a social worker who's arranging deliveries for isolated households and got hooked up with F, whose husband answered the door in a three-piece suit when i came by to pick up their credit card the other day. they are extremely interested in chocolate-covered macaroons from trader joe's,* and the day after my first delivery, F texted to ask if i could pick up the four packs (she wanted 10, but the manager could only promise four) set aside for her. when i brought them up to the door, her husband insisted i take one for myself, and i didn't think quickly enough to say that, oh, i was allergic to coconut or something. "but i know how much you love them," i said, "and the manager said he could only give you four." this was clearly not a detail F had shared with him, and i watched him panic and then double down on his offer. i thanked him profusely and darted back to the door to take one as F began to billow like a storm cloud behind him. i really hope i didn't just end a 48-year marriage by accepting cookies.
G, one building over, asked for lots of singles: one potato, one sweet potato, one piece of salmon "for cooking." what does a good piece of salmon look like? i was reminded of working the sandwich counter at the stanford coffeehouse and trying to figure out which deli meats were which. coworkers were of no help; all of us were vegetarians. i don't know if G lives by herself; there were two names on her door's nameplate, but no one ever updates those, and most of my neighbors are very, very old (my social-worker contact reps our local NORC, or "naturally-occurring retirement community"). i didn't want to give her a potentially-pestilent note from our apartment, so i just wrote "for G from lauren" and drew a bunch of hearts on her shopping bag.
if i had the mask thing to do over again (we found a three-pack in the bug-out bag my stepfather gifted us for christmas a few years ago; "i want you to live!"), i'd have sent ours to a local hospital. we've known for about a week that coronavirus is in our building, but i worry more for our elderly and immunocompromised neighbors than i do for us; as far as i know, we're youngish, healthyish. we cracked into them, though, and have been wearing them on grocery and pharmacy runs, along with some gloves i bought ages ago when our hands still felt things and we were dicing a lot of habanero peppers. C, a retired teacher two floors down from us who gave me a key to her apartment and occasionally asks me to collect her mail when she travels, asked for farmer cheese, wheat bread that's 70 calories a slice (remember when bread was a thing you could buy?), and three cans of pineapple chunks in juice; i am dying to know if she's making sandwiches down there, but i couldn't bring myself to ask. a friend of mine in ohio says her husband used to pick up food for seniors and once shopped for wonder bread, jalapenos, and head cheese.
i gave my name to a social worker who's arranging deliveries for isolated households and got hooked up with F, whose husband answered the door in a three-piece suit when i came by to pick up their credit card the other day. they are extremely interested in chocolate-covered macaroons from trader joe's,* and the day after my first delivery, F texted to ask if i could pick up the four packs (she wanted 10, but the manager could only promise four) set aside for her. when i brought them up to the door, her husband insisted i take one for myself, and i didn't think quickly enough to say that, oh, i was allergic to coconut or something. "but i know how much you love them," i said, "and the manager said he could only give you four." this was clearly not a detail F had shared with him, and i watched him panic and then double down on his offer. i thanked him profusely and darted back to the door to take one as F began to billow like a storm cloud behind him. i really hope i didn't just end a 48-year marriage by accepting cookies.
G, one building over, asked for lots of singles: one potato, one sweet potato, one piece of salmon "for cooking." what does a good piece of salmon look like? i was reminded of working the sandwich counter at the stanford coffeehouse and trying to figure out which deli meats were which. coworkers were of no help; all of us were vegetarians. i don't know if G lives by herself; there were two names on her door's nameplate, but no one ever updates those, and most of my neighbors are very, very old (my social-worker contact reps our local NORC, or "naturally-occurring retirement community"). i didn't want to give her a potentially-pestilent note from our apartment, so i just wrote "for G from lauren" and drew a bunch of hearts on her shopping bag.
*F mentioned on the phone that she was disappointed that she wouldn't be seeing her children and grandchildren for passover, and i can only conclude that she and her husband have some kind of cool hand luke macaroon plan for weathering the pandemic.
03.27.20
the dirty dozen-ish {excerpts from yelp reviews of times square}
01 Smell the smells - like nothing else I can describe - a mish mash of hot dogs, fries, donuts, smoke, coffee, nuts, traffic smog. I said to my husband 'wow the smell is so, so, so" and he interrupted me and replied "that is the New York smell!"
02 We arrived 6am to be in the front row next to the MTV building. We shook hands with everyone from Carson Daly to Rudy Giuliani, from Jessica Simpson to N'Sync. Across the street at a Planet Hollywood event some months later, we met P Diddy, N'Sync (again), Sly Stallone, Sandra Bullock, and others. My enduring memory is that I was taller than Stallone and he had a river-full of cologne on. Good times.
03 Spiderman will cook you dinner on the right street corner if you find him. It's true! There is a guy in a spider man costume that has a sheesh cart! It's pretty awesome to watch.
04 And who regulates how many Elmo's are permitted to be circulating ? And how can those Nepalese woolen hat places afford their rent on such a huge space ?
05 But watch out for the ones dressed up as characters; ie elmos, Batman's, hulks, and especially the Minnie mouses, THEY ARE RELENTLESS and they will straight bombard you in a mob like demeanor . Karate chop for Minnie Bro.
06 I'm not fond of cats, but the show is great!
07 There was also a big police presence in every corner around Times Square with automatic weapons out and ready to use. So I felt very safe around Times Square.
08 Times Square and its table were also home to my worst NYC experience, where an angry woman flat out stole my friend's chair for no other reason than to spite us.
09 I came once when I was 17/18 and got burped on (I say "on" because the lady was really close to me and I felt her burp vibration on my skin) by a beggar.
10 Stay away from the Disney store unless you plan to go in it.
11 Does anyone even know the words to Auld Lang Syne? My Grandma and Grandpa sure did.
12 I take away one star because of the FACT that there were con artists on the sidewalk.
13 Don't even get me started on the subliminal messages.
14 Pricey, but what else do you make money for, right?
15 [O]n any given Saturday night you will see hordes of shit faced drunks stumbling around the area looking for either sex or a subway.
01 Smell the smells - like nothing else I can describe - a mish mash of hot dogs, fries, donuts, smoke, coffee, nuts, traffic smog. I said to my husband 'wow the smell is so, so, so" and he interrupted me and replied "that is the New York smell!"
02 We arrived 6am to be in the front row next to the MTV building. We shook hands with everyone from Carson Daly to Rudy Giuliani, from Jessica Simpson to N'Sync. Across the street at a Planet Hollywood event some months later, we met P Diddy, N'Sync (again), Sly Stallone, Sandra Bullock, and others. My enduring memory is that I was taller than Stallone and he had a river-full of cologne on. Good times.
03 Spiderman will cook you dinner on the right street corner if you find him. It's true! There is a guy in a spider man costume that has a sheesh cart! It's pretty awesome to watch.
04 And who regulates how many Elmo's are permitted to be circulating ? And how can those Nepalese woolen hat places afford their rent on such a huge space ?
05 But watch out for the ones dressed up as characters; ie elmos, Batman's, hulks, and especially the Minnie mouses, THEY ARE RELENTLESS and they will straight bombard you in a mob like demeanor . Karate chop for Minnie Bro.
06 I'm not fond of cats, but the show is great!
07 There was also a big police presence in every corner around Times Square with automatic weapons out and ready to use. So I felt very safe around Times Square.
08 Times Square and its table were also home to my worst NYC experience, where an angry woman flat out stole my friend's chair for no other reason than to spite us.
09 I came once when I was 17/18 and got burped on (I say "on" because the lady was really close to me and I felt her burp vibration on my skin) by a beggar.
10 Stay away from the Disney store unless you plan to go in it.
11 Does anyone even know the words to Auld Lang Syne? My Grandma and Grandpa sure did.
12 I take away one star because of the FACT that there were con artists on the sidewalk.
13 Don't even get me started on the subliminal messages.
14 Pricey, but what else do you make money for, right?
15 [O]n any given Saturday night you will see hordes of shit faced drunks stumbling around the area looking for either sex or a subway.
03.20.20
i found some songbird shit on our stump/table on the balcony this afternoon! this is a huge deal: we're up on the eighteenth floor, and we're lucky to see an occasional gull wheeling by on its way across the river, like, once a fortnight. pigeons like to roost and even nest on our neighbors' air conditioning units just a floor or two down, but not ours, never ours.* why they will not let us love them is beyond me. but: a pea-sized clump of healthy songbird shit (nice hue and consistency, buddy)! some little fella made it all the way to our place and took some time for reflection! it was, in all seriousness, thrilling—even when i spaced out and plunked my glass down on top of it, then carried it inside and to our coffee table. passerine traveler, i salute you.
i haven't been up to the bird hospital for—checking my volunteer login calendar—two months, and only twice this year. i was traveling in january and february and scrambling to file articles before and after each of those trips; i then got a tattoo at the end of february and felt i should take a week or two to myself before splashing it with bleach and, you know, songbird shit. i'd get messages from the volunteer coordinator (for the first time since i started working there!) saying that they had so very many interns that, for a couple of weeks, they didn't need any more hands on deck. then the city started taking coronavirus seriously.
as of last week, the word was that two volunteers could share the basement space with staffers at a time, and the hospital was eager for those volunteers (and the interns were long gone). i am not worried about what would/will happen to me, but i am very concerned about my many elderly neighbors, so i was trying to game out a way to commute a hundred blocks uptown without taking public transportation. a citibike halfway, then a couple of miles each way on foot? all of it on foot? i could do that, joe and i have walked the length of the island several times, but i'd have been tired-ish by the time i got to the upper west side, and it's both intensely physical and very delicate work. you can't do injections or tube-feed babies when you're wobbly. then we got a note from our building saying that several of our neighbors have tested positive, and that we should spend as little time as possible in the hallways and elevators. i'm already buying groceries for one of our friends downstairs, and i decided that i couldn't justify being a potential vector. i don't know how new city policies are going to apply to the hospital now that most of new york is shut down. i realize that worrying about baby birds at a time like this probably makes me a monster. it has been so long since i've been able to take care of them.
we are about as comfortable as two people can be in a pandemic: two adults who've been together for donkey's years, two dependents we outweigh quite handily that are satisfied with meat-paste and Warm Objects That Hold Still, one job with benefits that can't disappear and another that is flexible enough to carry on plausibly for now. three of our parents seem to be behaving sensibly, and the other seems at least sort of susceptible to peer pressure from me, my sisters, and my stepsister. i am keenly aware of the privilege dripping from every bit of that.
i still think, every now and again, about the website reviewer who called me trite and insular back in 2001(-2?) when my posts about 9/11 didn't acknowledge world events to her satisfaction. nothing about what i do here has ever been a particularly snappy rejoinder to that; all four of you know that this is something else.
our friend TJ is/was the house DJ for the red sox, the pats, and the bruins, jobs he began to cobble together after years of writing the sox to say "here i am!" in what i imagine was a very frank black voice. in this new world of ours, he's started streaming uncertain times, a radio show he started last week and is now helming from 10-noon(ish) ET so far on weekdays. he has always been very gracious about my distant exhortations to play bowie at fenway, and he played "peace, love and understanding" after we talked about it online a few days ago, and i cried. have we talked about competence porn here? TJ's show is competence porn.
here's a song for les and / here's a song for les and ray.
i haven't been up to the bird hospital for—checking my volunteer login calendar—two months, and only twice this year. i was traveling in january and february and scrambling to file articles before and after each of those trips; i then got a tattoo at the end of february and felt i should take a week or two to myself before splashing it with bleach and, you know, songbird shit. i'd get messages from the volunteer coordinator (for the first time since i started working there!) saying that they had so very many interns that, for a couple of weeks, they didn't need any more hands on deck. then the city started taking coronavirus seriously.
as of last week, the word was that two volunteers could share the basement space with staffers at a time, and the hospital was eager for those volunteers (and the interns were long gone). i am not worried about what would/will happen to me, but i am very concerned about my many elderly neighbors, so i was trying to game out a way to commute a hundred blocks uptown without taking public transportation. a citibike halfway, then a couple of miles each way on foot? all of it on foot? i could do that, joe and i have walked the length of the island several times, but i'd have been tired-ish by the time i got to the upper west side, and it's both intensely physical and very delicate work. you can't do injections or tube-feed babies when you're wobbly. then we got a note from our building saying that several of our neighbors have tested positive, and that we should spend as little time as possible in the hallways and elevators. i'm already buying groceries for one of our friends downstairs, and i decided that i couldn't justify being a potential vector. i don't know how new city policies are going to apply to the hospital now that most of new york is shut down. i realize that worrying about baby birds at a time like this probably makes me a monster. it has been so long since i've been able to take care of them.
we are about as comfortable as two people can be in a pandemic: two adults who've been together for donkey's years, two dependents we outweigh quite handily that are satisfied with meat-paste and Warm Objects That Hold Still, one job with benefits that can't disappear and another that is flexible enough to carry on plausibly for now. three of our parents seem to be behaving sensibly, and the other seems at least sort of susceptible to peer pressure from me, my sisters, and my stepsister. i am keenly aware of the privilege dripping from every bit of that.
i still think, every now and again, about the website reviewer who called me trite and insular back in 2001(-2?) when my posts about 9/11 didn't acknowledge world events to her satisfaction. nothing about what i do here has ever been a particularly snappy rejoinder to that; all four of you know that this is something else.
our friend TJ is/was the house DJ for the red sox, the pats, and the bruins, jobs he began to cobble together after years of writing the sox to say "here i am!" in what i imagine was a very frank black voice. in this new world of ours, he's started streaming uncertain times, a radio show he started last week and is now helming from 10-noon(ish) ET so far on weekdays. he has always been very gracious about my distant exhortations to play bowie at fenway, and he played "peace, love and understanding" after we talked about it online a few days ago, and i cried. have we talked about competence porn here? TJ's show is competence porn.
here's a song for les and / here's a song for les and ray.
*neighbors two floors down have gone so far as to hang a plastic owl from their kitchen window to try to keep the pigeons away. i don't know if it's working, but it's an utterly delightful silhouette to see when i look out and down from our kitchen window.
02.27.20
so i was watching an *exquisitely* bad supernatural romance last night, and the hero—a very good actor, and the sort of person you'd really dig in to believe if the lines he was delivering were plausible at all—announced in a super-flat voice that he was madly in love, after, oh, three weeks and for the first time in like 1,500 years with the heroine. "same," she more or less said as one would announce that they'd been tagged in an instagram photo of someone's cocktail. this has probably obvious to everyone but me for a very long time, but i feel like i just understood that fictional characters make super-explicit romantic declarations because writers and directors are either not talented enough or too lazy to show them acting on affection for one another the way actual humans do. so people feel less-than when their own lovers don't show up with TO ME YOU ARE PERFECT signs when actually-actually a move like that is just a big failure of art to imitate life. just me? okay. i'm going to keep watching the show, though.
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