May 2012
62 posts
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Day 30
Imagine being farsighted. Imagine everything at hand, distorted; imagine the future, in focus. Just image that. Just imagine how much better everything would be.
April 2012
38 posts
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Day 29
I wonder sometimes, about memory, about that time we were playing Good Guys And Monsters in the Big Yard, me and Joey and Nora and Henry and everyone, and we saw that couple having sex, at least that’s what Marissa said they were doing (you must understand, in the Big Yard, in the corner, beyond the fence, there was this little space that faced the back of a brownstone, this little empty space in...
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Day 27
Higgledy piggledy, Pedagogue Socrates, Method of questioning: Pose, then disprove. Th’other Greek thinker taught Peripatetically, Lessons and lectures thought up on the move.
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Day 26
“The city’s just so big”, he said suddenly, and I laughed, thinking how small it’s always seemed to me. But still we sat down together, and we talked about theater, and hummus, and the future, and “an endemic sense of not belonging”. And then we hugged, and said our until next times, which I think will be probably in a week or so, at the cathedral just around the corner.
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Day 24
Another day, Leo, when there’s more time, I’ll sit down with Ermine Lady and ask her, as you asked me, “why” that other Leo “angled her torso to her right, when she wants to look left.” In the meantime, I’ll just appreciate your letters, and their drafts, and I hope you know that even if you didn’t like it much, the “hundred-handed...
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Day 23
Oodelee doodelee, Sheriff of Nottingham, Miserly tyrant, he Taxed us galore; Robin Hood challenged the Totalitarian: Stole from the rich and gave Back to the poor.
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Day 22
It’s time to put you away, tattoo, the way a friend of mine advised me once. “Find something you like”, he said, “something that means something personal, and that you like the look of, and then put it in a drawer for a while.” Don’t look at it, he said. Don’t think about it, don’t check up on it, don’t anything to it. “If it’s something you want on your body forever, you’ll still like it when you...
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Day 20
You have to get back on the horse. Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing happens, we started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on: these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror. Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not...
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Day 19
Let’s free write. Let’s negotiate a new mortgage. Let’s learn new words and use them in old sentences. Let’s join a circus, or a caravan, let’s ride in palanquins and use esoteric names for types of horses, like destrier or courser. Let’s make our lives more like the young-adult fiction we read. Let’s jump. Let’s learn all about how hospitals operate from TV shows. Let’s hug it out. Let’s scream...
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Day 18
It’s been one of those days where there hasn’t been time for anything, not for reading, or eating healthy, or replying to all those emails, one of those three-borough days, constant subway sounds, shutter and clack, shutter and clack, no respite, but, somehow, great reward.
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Day 16
I hope some day to be as facile with the florid speech and written patterns of that great iambic hero, famous for his fluent tongue and greater wit. Until that day arrives I’ll muddle on, among the lesser men who hope one day to be poets.
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Day 15
But no— the moment you find
that you’re already halfway through,
you don’t remember how you got this far,
pages are smudged and dog-eared, the book’s spine
already broken— travesty.
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Day 14
Love is just like the moment when you realize, suddenly, you’re already halfway through that new book.
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Day 13
Every night, aglow with my laptop, I make an indelible mark on my anonymity. I careen and skim and shudder through the invisible web Gaiman named, and prove that I exist, marginally, electronically, byte by accruing byte. I wonder if there was ever a time I could have signed some kind of DNT, a Do Not Trace, some legal document that would have headed off my existence at the pass. Condemned me to a...
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Day 11
And there, in the midst of it all, St John the Divine, an island cathedral clutching at grandeur and for a wonder managing to hold on.
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Day 10
I wrote another poem once about The Great Wave off Kanagawa, you know the one. Great big wave on the left, tiny boats of fishermen on the right, often forgotten, in shadow, nameless and huddled. The poem was about the men and how brave they were, brave for facing the wave, brave for sitting for the artist. Looking back on it now, the poem should have been about the wave, how terrible and still it...
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I am more than OK with the fact that there's a... →
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Day 8
Evening
The word is “evening” for a reason. The soft and steady bluescale gradient of afternoon slipping into dusk, it’s a decline, a leveling out, it’s an effortless kind of pain, like a quiet admission of guilt, or a goodbye, like the way you left, and have continued to leave, and all of a sudden the sky is an ocean, deep, and dark, and empty.
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Day 7
Seder
It was a “radical act of empathy,” yes, just as the new Haggadah said, the four of us sitting around and talking about theater and drinking the Kosher wine. But it was also a radical act of memory, of telling old stories and not flinching from the truth. And it was a radical act of loss, of setting down an extra glass for Leo, who died one year ago, and, as always, it was a radical act of...
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Day 6
walking in new york is
music, it’s living, it’s jazz,
it’s a muted trumpet singing
like in old documentaries
and black-and-white pictures.
or sometimes it’s drums,
subway clatter and pitch,
talking rhythms, urban
slaps of concrete and steel.
the best is the park,
there’s vocals and guitar,
it’s folk rock, it’s everyone
with their headphones on,...
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Finally, a definitive test to prove that I went to... →
I think people like Chloe, Chris, and Libby will especially like this.
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Day 4
When I say “Kent State,” you see her, kneeling, wailing. Click. When I say “Tiananmen Square,”
you see a line of tanks. Click. “V-J Day” summons that famous kiss. Click. “Einstein’s tongue.” Click.
What is there now? What’s happened since “Moon Landing” (click)? Where is the camera still
for “Iraq,” or “Housing Crisis”? You’d think, or hope, that no visual legacy meant no major...
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Day 3
Last night, on the subway, I watched a pair of girls with matching books on their laps. One was reading to the other, in a voice that betrayed a remarkable unfamiliarity with the written word. It was that sing-song-y, faltering, unfocused cadence of an illiterate voice. A voice that has no interest in reading a long passage, in a longer essay, in an thick and impenetrable appendix, about “the...
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Day 2
when all the sordid kings and queens have gone abed to sleep, when maids and serving boys have prayed the lord their souls to keep
perhaps there is one man – a prince who does not slumber, no, alone, he stares into the night and listens to the snow
standing there, sincere and small, his window all a-frost, perhaps he gives a quiet sigh and thinks on what he’s lost
‘til heavy lids, and heavy heart...
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Day 1
It’s one of those days When there’s nothing on the books - Time to get to work.
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posting erryday
Last month, I succeeded in my rarely-mentioned but oft-thought-on goal of posting more times per month than there are days in said month. I’m not sure exactly what about this goal appealed to me - maybe just the idea that it means I found some strange form of consistency in my blogging (if posting strange links, Instagram photos, and long posts about Pokemon is what passes today for...
