i'm reading an excellent book about eels (mostly anguilla anguilla, european eels), and last night's chapters burrowed into the mysterious longevity they experience (vs. enjoy) when they are taken from the wild and thus aren't prompted to transition from their third life stage of yellow eelhood, or adolescence, to the fourth and final life stage of silver eelhood, or sexual maturity, which is when they grow reproductive organs, their stomachs dissolve into their bodies, and they return to the sargasso sea to breed and die. there was in particular the story of a small swedish eel that a little boy caught and threw in a well in the 19th century that ended up living in twilight down there for what some claim was like 150 years. stories about this brantevik eel, called åle by humans and commemorated when he died in 2014, are often paired with anguilla anguilla stock photos captioned something like "this is not the eel we're talking about; this eel is alive." the very old eel never got very large, and his eyes got much bigger than yellow eels' eyes usually do. the eel book author presents the deathless nonsleep of åle the well-eel as something like a busted vampire's existence in an anne rice novel or only lovers left alive (a 2013 jim jarmusch movie about vampires starring tilda swinton ostensibly so far up my alley that it might straight-up be my alley that i somehow hated so much it's actually a little disturbing to think about it now). how bummed can an eel be, and how should our appreciation of how bummed an eel can be matter, if it matters at all? in my first 13 years, as a person who was at least in theory willing to eat fish, i am almost positive i never had eel - i've never had most seafood, actually - and i'm glad. in other news, did you know that the sargasso sea is just a seaweed-covered extra-mysterious patch of the atlantic ocean that's been squared off with currents? ("sargasso" comes from the seaweed, a brown algae called sargassum.)
on things that aren't pleasurable for me, we ended up at a matisyahu concert at brooklyn bowl last night. the initial plan as of early this week was to go bowling on the lower east side with friends, said friends discovered the concert at brooklyn bowl and suggested we bowl and see the show, and said friends then got sick and bowed out, leading us to realize beneath a giant dreidel-shaped disco ball that we didn't know as much about spiritual reggae-beatboxing as we probably should have before committing to the evening. it was the worst show i've attended since high school friends peer pressured me into seeing jars of clay at the orange county fair! but i survived, which is more than poor åle can say.
12.22.22 [on the D, 6, and L trains]
i had what i hope is a solid jolt of inspiration for rounding out holiday gifts for my little nephews. i always have a lot to unload when i see them, given that i consistently shit the bed on dispatching packages out to california in a timely-for-birthdays-and-holidays manner and only see them once or twice a year, but i always want to overcompensate for the unreliability and above all to make sure everyone feels i've thought of them as often as i've thought of their sibling. not always intuitive when their interests don't dovetail with mine - like, man is it easy to shop for a friend's kid who shares my feelings about bats. anyway, i am a monster, but i found a bunch of holographic animal portraits in chinatown, and i think T will appreciate the illusion of a wolf leaping into his bedroom. (this is a kid who asked his mother for a door for christmas a few years ago.)
i filed my last piece of the year last night and am on my way up to central park in search of owls. there's a northern saw-whet somewhere (that someone managed to photograph mid-pellet), and a great horned owl, and a barred - who won't dislodge barry (RIP) in my affections but might help me heal, or something. it'd be pretty great if i spotted some mushrooms as well, given how long it's been since i've made a meaningful fungal foray. the mighty patch of wine caps up at stuyvesant park that i picked this summer, DNA sequenced at the president of the mycological society's apartment, and presented at one of the society's weekly identification meetings with an explicit "i am interested in eating these. can any of you think of any reason why i shouldn't?" (A: dogs might have peed on them, but otherwise, no) before sautéeing is long-demolished, thanks to the ongoing climate-change resilience project fucking up our bank of the east river. this is all bill de blasio's fault, is what i'm saying. "he" texted me during primary season to ask for my support and i replied that i would sell my organs on the black market to fund his rivals. he dropped out of the congressional race soon afterward; you're welcome.
speaking of jokes i tell myself, a morning newsletter from the new york times last weekend solicited personal, offbeat year's-best nominations, and i got an email yesterday asking me to confirm my name and location for my submission. will the times shitpost to america's inboxes on my behalf this saturday? we'll see.
[...]
no owls - no owls that wanted to reveal themselves to me, anyway. in making my way up to the pinetum i wandered into belvedere castle, where a docent who happened to be a birdwatcher told me the barred owl was in the ramble for a few weeks before the great horned owl came and bullied it from its branch (and eventually decamped as well). i defaulted to meandering around the park in the rain as the light drained out of the clouds, which was as goddamn delightful as it was a decade ago when i would slip out of my midtown office on my lunch break to wallk out my feelings. no mushrooms, either, but i wasn't looking very hard. maybe a couple of ancient dryad's saddles 20 feet up a tree trunk? i could have pulled out my binoculars to be sure - yeah, i brought my fancy binoculars - but i am fundamentally a lazy person. i left the park via bethesda mall and a guy in the terrace arcade was playing "can't help falling in love" on his erhu in the gloaming. way to break my heart again (again), new york city.
i filed my last piece of the year last night and am on my way up to central park in search of owls. there's a northern saw-whet somewhere (that someone managed to photograph mid-pellet), and a great horned owl, and a barred - who won't dislodge barry (RIP) in my affections but might help me heal, or something. it'd be pretty great if i spotted some mushrooms as well, given how long it's been since i've made a meaningful fungal foray. the mighty patch of wine caps up at stuyvesant park that i picked this summer, DNA sequenced at the president of the mycological society's apartment, and presented at one of the society's weekly identification meetings with an explicit "i am interested in eating these. can any of you think of any reason why i shouldn't?" (A: dogs might have peed on them, but otherwise, no) before sautéeing is long-demolished, thanks to the ongoing climate-change resilience project fucking up our bank of the east river. this is all bill de blasio's fault, is what i'm saying. "he" texted me during primary season to ask for my support and i replied that i would sell my organs on the black market to fund his rivals. he dropped out of the congressional race soon afterward; you're welcome.
speaking of jokes i tell myself, a morning newsletter from the new york times last weekend solicited personal, offbeat year's-best nominations, and i got an email yesterday asking me to confirm my name and location for my submission. will the times shitpost to america's inboxes on my behalf this saturday? we'll see.
[...]
no owls - no owls that wanted to reveal themselves to me, anyway. in making my way up to the pinetum i wandered into belvedere castle, where a docent who happened to be a birdwatcher told me the barred owl was in the ramble for a few weeks before the great horned owl came and bullied it from its branch (and eventually decamped as well). i defaulted to meandering around the park in the rain as the light drained out of the clouds, which was as goddamn delightful as it was a decade ago when i would slip out of my midtown office on my lunch break to wallk out my feelings. no mushrooms, either, but i wasn't looking very hard. maybe a couple of ancient dryad's saddles 20 feet up a tree trunk? i could have pulled out my binoculars to be sure - yeah, i brought my fancy binoculars - but i am fundamentally a lazy person. i left the park via bethesda mall and a guy in the terrace arcade was playing "can't help falling in love" on his erhu in the gloaming. way to break my heart again (again), new york city.
12.17.22 [on the J train]
i remember my [abortion clinic escort] shift just before christmas last year as the coldest by far, and i have thus wildly overdressed in a sweater from the reykjavik red cross and some insulated stirrup pants(!) i bought for a press trip in the french alps long ago when the earth was flat. i had actually intended to ski on that trip, and after i mentioned as i got fitted for my equipment that i hadn't been on a slope since adolescence, someone showed up at my room with a supplemental insurance card. fair play, club med; fair play.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
12.16.22ii [on the F and L trains]
[a thing i'm trying. is carrying a journal on the subway the new longhand blogging? we'll see.]
i haven't seen footprints on the ceiling of a subway car in years, so i guess showtime and/or demonic possession is out of vogue. i haven't started wearing a mask again yet. do i really believe i'm not endangering anyone or have i lived long enough to become the villain? i was sure of the latter when i heard pixies' "gigantic" while returning a lamé-detailed blouse at the fifth avenue j.crew a week ago.
i read an excellent poem this morning (molly brodak's "in the morning, before anything bad happens") that i found both moving and inaccurate. brodak wrote of birds on the wing that couldn't believe their luck, but in all my years of wildlife rehab support at the bird hospital i never saw the birds we released (or any birds) look fortunate in the air. they looked focused. birds i've seen look like they can't believe their luck when they're swimming, even if they're sinking because they aren't yet waterproof.
when i dream of flying i don't feel fortunate, either. i feel like concentration is just barely keeping me aloft.
delibird, the seasonal pokemon, started spawning in the city this week. it took me a long time to realize its name referenced gifting and not bodegas; if i catch a shiny one i'll name it bodegavian anyway.
i haven't seen footprints on the ceiling of a subway car in years, so i guess showtime and/or demonic possession is out of vogue. i haven't started wearing a mask again yet. do i really believe i'm not endangering anyone or have i lived long enough to become the villain? i was sure of the latter when i heard pixies' "gigantic" while returning a lamé-detailed blouse at the fifth avenue j.crew a week ago.
i read an excellent poem this morning (molly brodak's "in the morning, before anything bad happens") that i found both moving and inaccurate. brodak wrote of birds on the wing that couldn't believe their luck, but in all my years of wildlife rehab support at the bird hospital i never saw the birds we released (or any birds) look fortunate in the air. they looked focused. birds i've seen look like they can't believe their luck when they're swimming, even if they're sinking because they aren't yet waterproof.
when i dream of flying i don't feel fortunate, either. i feel like concentration is just barely keeping me aloft.
delibird, the seasonal pokemon, started spawning in the city this week. it took me a long time to realize its name referenced gifting and not bodegas; if i catch a shiny one i'll name it bodegavian anyway.
12.16.22
joe forwarded me an article about the aquarium explosion in berlin this morning. we stayed at the hotel it flooded back in 2019, and had ill-advised cocktails under that dire cylinder, just before getting on a ship. do you think 1,500 fish in the road look the way you'd imagine they would? it's something you'd never forget. i wouldn't compare anything that happened to me to that much death in a very public way but in my heart i think of coming here to talk about what the last while has felt like and i think the fish are in the road, the fish are in the road. i can't imagine not coming here, but i don't always know what i'm ready to haul into the air.
we got really terrible news about steve this week; after some fairly extensive diagnostics, our vet thinks he has some kind of cancer in his large intestine and a rectal mass, probably a tumor, that she couldn't remove without a lot of risk and difficulty. he's lost a lot of weight and is essentially incontinent, but is also essentially himself, or at least what i understand his self to be, and so we did not take his doctor up on her offer to have the euthanasia discussion with us on tuesday. trying to decide how to show up most responsibly for a little nonverbal animal i both love dearly and don't want to anthropomorphize is my personal hell, as you probably know, and it is a hard time. i gave steve my toothbrush the other night, just let him purr and chew at the minty-ass bristles and god knows what fluoride does to a senior cat with likely terminal cancer. i turn my sweatshirts inside out before i put them in the hamper where he sleeps, both because i know they're going to end up smeared with blood and shit and because he loves the smell of deodorant, he loves all human smells, he's such a little roommate.
have i talked about how not drinking feels like not having any skin? i'm glad i stopped, it was indeed subtly and occasionally not so subtly desaturating my life, but oh how the fish are in the road. i've done so much work this year and am fiercely proud of what i'm finally getting to tackle in my professional writing, but i don't think i had any real idea of just how raw i would feel. or any idea at all, really. i wouldn't have told you i was partially numb, quite the opposite. i'm also fiercely proud of finally talking to a proper therapist, and finally talking to another proper therapist with joe; poor old doctor omnibus is a psychiatrist who wouldn't be expected to field my feelings even if he wasn't an old boot. though it is nice to be able to multitask, i miss being able to sleep.
we got really terrible news about steve this week; after some fairly extensive diagnostics, our vet thinks he has some kind of cancer in his large intestine and a rectal mass, probably a tumor, that she couldn't remove without a lot of risk and difficulty. he's lost a lot of weight and is essentially incontinent, but is also essentially himself, or at least what i understand his self to be, and so we did not take his doctor up on her offer to have the euthanasia discussion with us on tuesday. trying to decide how to show up most responsibly for a little nonverbal animal i both love dearly and don't want to anthropomorphize is my personal hell, as you probably know, and it is a hard time. i gave steve my toothbrush the other night, just let him purr and chew at the minty-ass bristles and god knows what fluoride does to a senior cat with likely terminal cancer. i turn my sweatshirts inside out before i put them in the hamper where he sleeps, both because i know they're going to end up smeared with blood and shit and because he loves the smell of deodorant, he loves all human smells, he's such a little roommate.
have i talked about how not drinking feels like not having any skin? i'm glad i stopped, it was indeed subtly and occasionally not so subtly desaturating my life, but oh how the fish are in the road. i've done so much work this year and am fiercely proud of what i'm finally getting to tackle in my professional writing, but i don't think i had any real idea of just how raw i would feel. or any idea at all, really. i wouldn't have told you i was partially numb, quite the opposite. i'm also fiercely proud of finally talking to a proper therapist, and finally talking to another proper therapist with joe; poor old doctor omnibus is a psychiatrist who wouldn't be expected to field my feelings even if he wasn't an old boot. though it is nice to be able to multitask, i miss being able to sleep.
10.10.22
i got up at a quarter after six on saturday morning to take a train out to queens and mill around on the sidewalk in a rainbow vest for an hour, at which point the escort leaders ruled that no abortion protesters were going to show up to harass clinic clients and we could all go home for the week. this is the future liberals want! i hopped back off the train just north of union square to exclaim over dahlias, shell out for a bunch of foraged maitakes, and hem and haw through a pile of decorative gourds, then walked home and wrote a shitload of letters to prospective texas voters.
i keep wanting to re-pitch a travel piece on iceland that i dangled in front of a new editor a few months ago, but we're leaving town at the end of the month and i haven't gotten blasé enough about writing for this particular outlet that i could have a piece for them pending while i'm abroad. i should plan what we're doing when we're to be abroad! i should plan.
i keep wanting to re-pitch a travel piece on iceland that i dangled in front of a new editor a few months ago, but we're leaving town at the end of the month and i haven't gotten blasé enough about writing for this particular outlet that i could have a piece for them pending while i'm abroad. i should plan what we're doing when we're to be abroad! i should plan.
04.02.22
for the last few months i've been a big, docile albatross tending a kinder egg instead of an eventual chick: all of the apartment improvements we summoned last year are beginning to arrive at last and i've made more to prepare for their settling, and the nest, she is feathered. i've painted the once-grey bedroom walls blush pink, logged hundreds of manhattan miles collecting and framing new-to-us art, ferried books and clothes to crosby street for donation, found and arranged for drapes' tailoring,* woven a cradle for the tradescantia i propagated and hung in the bathroom we reglazed and are outfitting with a new vanity and sink–and we haven't even had anyone over since the before times! but the cats love draping themselves over the new, fancy sectional's tufted humps, and i fantasize about pitching a home tour to the lifestyle blog i've been not-so-quietly charming with little comment-anecdotes for a year. i want so badly to have strangers tell me my adjectives are winning! and here my poor kidchamp was all along, the cobbler's barefoot child.**
this rejuvenation is absolutely runoff from the umpteen design pieces i've been churning out, and i'm alright with that. a lot of the day-to-day work has been pitched-to-me tours of designers' projects, and interviews aside, the features are rather like the essays i used to write for visual art classes? my mother taught me the rudiments of that analysis when i was in elementary school, and the albatross parts of my brain are very pleased with themselves when they egest bits on perspective and lines of beauty. also, let's be honest, i have excellent taste now. but it is time to swoop at new-to-me outlets, so i spent several hours the other night crafting a pitch based on something i remembered about beethoven from when my best friend and i had to dress up as historical characters in seventh grade. (i was cyrano de bergerac, but that won't come up in the essay, probably.) i'm also working on a really short piece about chopping up mice, so what i'm saying is i guess i could use some gobbet-luck, if you're interested in manifesting on someone else's behalf. this march was my busiest freelance month to date! put that in your crop and regurgitate it.
this rejuvenation is absolutely runoff from the umpteen design pieces i've been churning out, and i'm alright with that. a lot of the day-to-day work has been pitched-to-me tours of designers' projects, and interviews aside, the features are rather like the essays i used to write for visual art classes? my mother taught me the rudiments of that analysis when i was in elementary school, and the albatross parts of my brain are very pleased with themselves when they egest bits on perspective and lines of beauty. also, let's be honest, i have excellent taste now. but it is time to swoop at new-to-me outlets, so i spent several hours the other night crafting a pitch based on something i remembered about beethoven from when my best friend and i had to dress up as historical characters in seventh grade. (i was cyrano de bergerac, but that won't come up in the essay, probably.) i'm also working on a really short piece about chopping up mice, so what i'm saying is i guess i could use some gobbet-luck, if you're interested in manifesting on someone else's behalf. this march was my busiest freelance month to date! put that in your crop and regurgitate it.
*i walked uptown with a painted piece of cardboard to see if some velvet curtains i'd seen online would match the bedroom walls' updated color, and when i wandered through the clearance corner en route to fabrics i found four long panels of what i'd planned to eyeball at like 80% off (a return?)! i still haven't repaired the beautiful little sewing machine i don't know how to use, so i took the panels to the great guys at our local dry cleaner and everyone is happy.
**my mom was walking into a store last week and, in hauling the door open with the excessive force that characterizes women of our line, managed to very nearly rip off her big toenail. an urgent-care doctor made an incision to finish the job and stitched her up, and she now has the whole nail, which is a festive pedi-red she'd just painted herself. i can't wait to see what she makes with it! i also wish she would contact the store, as "this little piggy went to ulta" should really have earned her free makeup for life. this was her deep-fried mcdonald's lizard!
01.30.22
the guy tending the left half of the theater's bar hadn't seen drive my car yet, but he was very excited about seeing it: "i hadn't heard anything about it until like a day or two ago and suddenly everyone's talking about it. and it's three hours long!" dances with murakami, i said. the guy who sat down at my left had just gotten out of the early screening: "have you seen christopher nolan's tenet,* where half of the action goes forward and half of it goes backward? we're like that, meeting in the middle, with me just coming from the experience you're about to have. i won't say anything to spoil it for you, but i liked it."
i asked him if he'd read the short story the film is based on, or any murakami; he hadn't. "i hear murakami is like japan's philip roth** and john steinbeck and [some other dude i don't remember]," he said. i agreed that he was a beast. i had read a lot of murakami, i said, and i thought of him more like japan's jane austen: his stories combine and recombine constants in a way i found soothing to revisit. mysterious women, cats, whiskey, vinyl, jazz, pasta, disappearances, writers... he'd heard that this was the first murakami work that'd been made into a film, or maybe just that murakami was famously tricky to adapt. i thought that was exciting, i said, like how pynchon's, what was it, inherent vice was an unexpectedly killer movie (that can song!). "oh my god, PTA," and we just sat in the acronym for a minute until the carpet split at a previously-invisible seam and we plunged into the center of the earth, even though joe was sitting on the other side of me and probably only heard a third of the conversation.
i asked him if he'd read the short story the film is based on, or any murakami; he hadn't. "i hear murakami is like japan's philip roth** and john steinbeck and [some other dude i don't remember]," he said. i agreed that he was a beast. i had read a lot of murakami, i said, and i thought of him more like japan's jane austen: his stories combine and recombine constants in a way i found soothing to revisit. mysterious women, cats, whiskey, vinyl, jazz, pasta, disappearances, writers... he'd heard that this was the first murakami work that'd been made into a film, or maybe just that murakami was famously tricky to adapt. i thought that was exciting, i said, like how pynchon's, what was it, inherent vice was an unexpectedly killer movie (that can song!). "oh my god, PTA," and we just sat in the acronym for a minute until the carpet split at a previously-invisible seam and we plunged into the center of the earth, even though joe was sitting on the other side of me and probably only heard a third of the conversation.
*our friend lesley loves helen dewitt's the last samurai harder than most people love most things in this world and found tenet impenetrable. tenet daunts me.
**he was really into philip roth, "but not when the novel is really just him thinking about himself," which – i didn't follow up on that, but if i had been lewis carroll's caterpillar at that moment i would have exhaled a smoke ring in the shape of john updike and it would have galloped around the bar once and disappeared. i still miss smoking.
01.23.22
the spotify station(?) that had been serving up the monster hits of my junior high's harrowing dances, a coincidence i would have died before revealing to my beloved charity bookstore's dewy manager even though he probably guessed as much,* played boyz ii men's "end of the road," because of course it did, and i let a few tears leak out, quick, under my mask like it never happened. "you look like you know a lot about books," said a customer who wanted something she hadn't read in fantasy or horror, and i sent her home with lovely hardcover copies of toby barlow's sharp teeth and babayaga. they had crowned my beleaguered section at the front of the store, where misshelved YA novels and mass-market thrillers kept trailing in like fuckin kudzu, for two months. i took a last, long whiff of the basement, bought a signed first US edition of the satanic verses (john - best wishes for your retirement. write a book... salman r., may 89) that had kicked around the store for years, and took my leave a final time.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
*the welsh researchers who studied how masking affects facial attractiveness report that the effect isn't about occlusion, but i am unconvinced.
01.01.22
2022: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i realized i'd been wearing my underwear inside out.
i microwaved the last of the old coffee and started a new pot.
i misted some trailing plants on top of our new bookshelf.
i emailed a researcher for an article i'm filing next week.
i noticed a bleach(?) stain on the left arm of my sweatshirt.
i took photographs of: mylar 2 and 0 balloons in a tree, spent fireworks, and two plush snowmen taped to a different tree.
i showed up 15 minutes late to a zoom call with friends.
i ate two pieces of aged swiss cheese.
i bought a big brass spoon rest.
i realized i'd been wearing my underwear inside out.
i microwaved the last of the old coffee and started a new pot.
i misted some trailing plants on top of our new bookshelf.
i emailed a researcher for an article i'm filing next week.
i noticed a bleach(?) stain on the left arm of my sweatshirt.
i took photographs of: mylar 2 and 0 balloons in a tree, spent fireworks, and two plush snowmen taped to a different tree.
i showed up 15 minutes late to a zoom call with friends.
i ate two pieces of aged swiss cheese.
i bought a big brass spoon rest.
12.26.21
i decided to get tested for COVID at a mobile clinic on monday, though my peek-a-boo symptoms seemed to have more to do with generic winter-cold bullshit and being 43 than with a breakthrough infection. around ten in the morning i queued at the van on delancey street that's become a portable building and froze my ass for two and a half hours, along with a bunch of canadian teenagers who were sure their friends were sick, someone named alfonso whose results were handed to me along with my own, and someone smoking so, so much pot. i requested the rapid test and the PCR, and alfonso and i eventually got the all-clear. how about that! (i still haven't gotten the results of my PCR test.)
on christmas eve i woke up with phlegm and a sinus whatsit that burned off like marine haze over the course of the day, but as we were to head out to see licorice pizza at nitehawk before settling down for a long winter's nap, i took one of the at-home tests i almost accidentally snagged on wednesday en route to my bookstore shift.* it was so positive it was almost a little insulting: that pink line was downright lurid, like one of the savage primitive markings the cat is forever giving joe. (it's a lousy way to treat someone you like, steve!) i took a second test that was even more vivid than the first, our very last one indicated that joe was negative for the time being, and that was that. i got a gift-card refund from the movie theater, the bar we visited on wednesday told me they'd toss my FYI on their pile, an email to the bookstore's volunteer coordinator went unanswered. my debate with joe biden went ahead as planned, of course.
i had a quick and dirty stress-cry yesterday morning (or was it sometime on christmas eve?) about the idea of being trapped here while joe just ordered in wine and boozed through the boredom of quarantine, which is not something he would ever do but something he joked about when we'd talked about my getting tested last weekend. i do not find that funny at all, and he does not enjoy it when i joke about being a grown version of the kid with chickenpox who abruptly scores playdates with everyone in the neighborhood (did families in your town do this? did the ones in ours really do it?). i suppose we could have requested one of the hotel rooms the city is providing for people who need to isolate from their families, but the idea that joe could dodge exposure after having been holed up in this apartment with me is just laughable. god knows how long another PCR test for me would take, and i'm not interested in infecting a bunch of my neighbors while attempting to get one. we have a few weeks' worth of cat food, a respectable pile of clean underwear, one full carton of soymilk.
i used to open my eyes when i was lying on the ocean floor waiting for a wave to pass over me. the physical sensation itself is moderately uncomfortable, but the way i felt powerful and ever so subtly aquatic when i did it was addictive. science, diligence, and patience are a helluva cocktail.
on christmas eve i woke up with phlegm and a sinus whatsit that burned off like marine haze over the course of the day, but as we were to head out to see licorice pizza at nitehawk before settling down for a long winter's nap, i took one of the at-home tests i almost accidentally snagged on wednesday en route to my bookstore shift.* it was so positive it was almost a little insulting: that pink line was downright lurid, like one of the savage primitive markings the cat is forever giving joe. (it's a lousy way to treat someone you like, steve!) i took a second test that was even more vivid than the first, our very last one indicated that joe was negative for the time being, and that was that. i got a gift-card refund from the movie theater, the bar we visited on wednesday told me they'd toss my FYI on their pile, an email to the bookstore's volunteer coordinator went unanswered. my debate with joe biden went ahead as planned, of course.
i had a quick and dirty stress-cry yesterday morning (or was it sometime on christmas eve?) about the idea of being trapped here while joe just ordered in wine and boozed through the boredom of quarantine, which is not something he would ever do but something he joked about when we'd talked about my getting tested last weekend. i do not find that funny at all, and he does not enjoy it when i joke about being a grown version of the kid with chickenpox who abruptly scores playdates with everyone in the neighborhood (did families in your town do this? did the ones in ours really do it?). i suppose we could have requested one of the hotel rooms the city is providing for people who need to isolate from their families, but the idea that joe could dodge exposure after having been holed up in this apartment with me is just laughable. god knows how long another PCR test for me would take, and i'm not interested in infecting a bunch of my neighbors while attempting to get one. we have a few weeks' worth of cat food, a respectable pile of clean underwear, one full carton of soymilk.
i used to open my eyes when i was lying on the ocean floor waiting for a wave to pass over me. the physical sensation itself is moderately uncomfortable, but the way i felt powerful and ever so subtly aquatic when i did it was addictive. science, diligence, and patience are a helluva cocktail.
*a woman at the duane reade register beside me asked for them while i was buying the diet dr pepper i'd been craving ever since i saw a fake trump elector carrying one at the wisconsin state house on a cable news segment. i bought two (boxes of tests; just one soda, though knowing what i know now–).
12.19.21
the seraph painted in red on the scrim that came down between acts at last night's tosca really did look like the she-wolf created for agrippina, the last Big Art we saw before entering lockdown last year, but we would have been reminded of it anyway, of course. i can't help feeling that our deciding to return to the met for opera caused the weird, dark turn new york city has taken this week–that would be very operatic–but epidemics probably don't strike poses like that.
last week i saw and scoffed at a few tweets about how the city was starting to feel as it felt last march, which is ridiculous: sirens howled all night every night, refrigerated trucks accumulated in front of the hospitals, i remember using bleach on our floor at one point, being unable to smell it, and collapsing into tears, sure that i was going to die. people were exiting like tosca, just stepping into air.
the man sitting beside me in the family circle was one of those operagoers who peers like a sniper through his opera glasses and volleys big, hearty BRAVO!s over the balcony as he claps for arias, and i loved him. i was the blue-haired lady with a passing tickle in her throat who coughed once, twice through her mask into her velvet cloak, and i didn't think until i woke up this morning with joint pain, a headache, and a proper soreness in that throat that anything truly tragic had happened. by the time i'd learned that all of the testing sites in the neighborhood had maxed out for the day and that PCR test results are taking at least three and more like five days to come back, the combined effects of my morning coffee, ibuprofen, a brisk walk around the lower east side and watery sunshine had somehow addressed all of those things: why, even the plantar fasciitis i've had since halloween disappeared for a few hours! i extended the walk as long as i could, grateful for a little more time.
it does feel like borrowed time. i got a booster shot a month ago and am eight lives away from crying on my bleachy floor, but the thought of having sidelined everyone's nana via the opera was a dreadful one. my sister and her family canceled travel plans to see us after christmas; i brushed my cloak and folded it into deep storage again. as i was telling friends today, i'm reminded of swimming in the pacific when i was a little girl–of watching a massive wave crest far too close, knowing it's too late to dive through it, and holding my breath and flattening myself on the ocean floor. send a body head over heels just once and it falls in step with the tide forever.
last week i saw and scoffed at a few tweets about how the city was starting to feel as it felt last march, which is ridiculous: sirens howled all night every night, refrigerated trucks accumulated in front of the hospitals, i remember using bleach on our floor at one point, being unable to smell it, and collapsing into tears, sure that i was going to die. people were exiting like tosca, just stepping into air.
the man sitting beside me in the family circle was one of those operagoers who peers like a sniper through his opera glasses and volleys big, hearty BRAVO!s over the balcony as he claps for arias, and i loved him. i was the blue-haired lady with a passing tickle in her throat who coughed once, twice through her mask into her velvet cloak, and i didn't think until i woke up this morning with joint pain, a headache, and a proper soreness in that throat that anything truly tragic had happened. by the time i'd learned that all of the testing sites in the neighborhood had maxed out for the day and that PCR test results are taking at least three and more like five days to come back, the combined effects of my morning coffee, ibuprofen, a brisk walk around the lower east side and watery sunshine had somehow addressed all of those things: why, even the plantar fasciitis i've had since halloween disappeared for a few hours! i extended the walk as long as i could, grateful for a little more time.
it does feel like borrowed time. i got a booster shot a month ago and am eight lives away from crying on my bleachy floor, but the thought of having sidelined everyone's nana via the opera was a dreadful one. my sister and her family canceled travel plans to see us after christmas; i brushed my cloak and folded it into deep storage again. as i was telling friends today, i'm reminded of swimming in the pacific when i was a little girl–of watching a massive wave crest far too close, knowing it's too late to dive through it, and holding my breath and flattening myself on the ocean floor. send a body head over heels just once and it falls in step with the tide forever.
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