'Till I Am

I won’t have the coronavirus until I get the coronavirus
I will be young until I am no longer young. Then I will be something else
I will be poor until I have money. And then I’ll have money
I will be happy until I am not
I will be sad until I am not
I will be anxious
I will always be anxious.
I will always be just a little bit anxious
I will always be just a little bit scared
I will be here
‘Till I am here
‘Till I am here
‘Till I am here.

Life Is Not An Argument To Be Won

I am tired of arguing with you. I don’t know why we keep having this argument. I don’t want to keep having this argument but we can’t seem to get away. We keep coming back to it with the same ferocity we had the first time we came to blows. (Linguistic, auditory blows - I’ve never hit anyone!)

We run around each other in circles and we draw our battle lines. You stand there and I’ll stand here. And we may trade places occasionally but we will never admit that we were wrong. And we will never admit that we have changed, either. Because being wrong is bad. And change is a sign of weakness.

We listen to each other but only as a means to craft our next barrage. I don’t actually want to take in what you’re saying. I want to win. And I’m worried that if I hear what you are saying deep down in my soul it will get inside of me. I’ll be infected then. I’ll have to go to the hospital. And the hospitals are full of people dying.

A ship is coming up from Virginia as we speak to help with this, but it won’t actually be of much use. It is a band-aid on a lost limb. It’s presence doesn’t even make me feel better.

One day that ship will leave. It won’t leave because we’re cured. It will leave because there will be others who need it more.

Why does everything now become about this? I am tired of talking about it. Tired of thinking about it. But what else did we think about? What was life like in the before? That seems like a lifetime ago.

How will life have changed in two weeks from now? We won’t be at peak yet.

Is this helping you feel better?

You speak emphatically because you are worried that I will do something stupid. I am alone now and it seems that people who are alone have the most time to be idiotic. And I assure you that I won’t but I only really believe part of that assurance. I’m scared of myself because I’ve never been here before. Life is always new but this really feels like a new version of life. And also what will life be like after? No one seems to know.

I try not to imagine the hell-scape that is New York Presbyterian or Bellvue or Lenox Hill or Mount Sainai. Doctors and nurses and other hospital staff trying desperately to save people they know may not be saved. In the past couple week we’ve learned what ventilators are or at least we know now that they are worth their weight in gold. When I think of a ventilator I still think of the area in front of a car’s engine. The mouth part in movies with talking cars. I know that that’s wrong but I’m not sure I want to know what the right answer is.

I watched all of the clips that were on Youtube for the movie World Trade Center starring Nicholas Cage last night. The one where he’s a firefighter and then gets trapped under a bunch of rubble and then gets found in the end. Maggie Gyllenhaal is also in it. I think she plays Nicholas Cage’s wife. I don’t know why I decided to do it but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. It felt like it fit. People keep on comparing what is happening right now to 9/11. Or World War II. My eighth grade history teacher would have called it a “watershed event.” “Watershed events” are fine to read about but aren’t really all that fun to live through.

We argue about whether or not I should come home. I tell you that I should stay here and that self-isolating only works if you actually do it. I’ve been here for two weeks. I can’t wait to see what the next two weeks brings. You want me to come down to Maryland because you are worried about me. Because I once made a comment to you that I think that the rate of suicide will increase with social distancing. I think I’m right but what you don’t understand is that I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about someone else.

I look out my window and I can’t see the Manhattan skyline. It’s raining. For once the weather is playing along.

Staring Down Darkness Into Light

It feels like it’s pitch black darkness but we know that we are not in pitch black darkness yet. We may think that this is what pitch black darkness feels like. It’s not. We may even hold our hand out in front of our face and wiggle our fingers. “Look! I can’t see them moving! There’s no light in here!” And we might be right. We may not be able to see our fingers move but there can be less light. And in the coming days, weeks and possibly months, there will be less light. A lot less light. We will look back on days like today and marvel at how small our pupils were and how easy it was to see.

When I let my guard down I like to play a game with myself that I always win. In the game I look back at the timeline of my life that got me to here and I selectively pick out good points. I don’t think I’m the only person that does this. These good points can take on many forms. We all have different ones. Here are a few of mine: a sunset basketball game in a city you’re about to move away from; a balcony dinner with friends in Berlin at the end of one of the longest days of the year; a first kiss; a parting hug; watching the sunrise on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after working through the night to strike the last musical of my high school career.
I play this game and I torture myself. I pick out these moments and then I go a little further back. I push a little harder. I go back a few days. Or even a few hours and I look at that Scott Goodin and I feel jealousy and hatred and pity. I am jealous of that Scott Goodin because he is about to experience something that will define his life and that he will also remember for the rest of it. I hate that Scott Goodin because I would love to experience what he is about to experience. And I pity him because he is so hopelessly unaware of the riches that are about to come his direction. Because that Scott Goodin is much like the Scott Goodin that is writing this: he is scared; he is anxious; he believes that everything good that could happen to him has already done so and so he looks to a colorless future and despairs.

Clearly the threat that this flavor of darkness, COVID-19, poses a massive threat to both us as individuals and our society. I do not wish to diminish that nor do I wish to tell anyone who has already or is going to lose their job or a loved one that they should try and find the silver lining in their situation by learning a life lesson. Sometimes there is no silver lining to be found and sometimes there is nothing to learn.

But one day we will come out of the darkness. Or at the very least we will start to see again. (Most of us, we are told.) And unless the experience does the unthinkable and completely overhauls the way that I think, I am pretty sure that I will flash to mid-March 2020 Scott Goodin and I will feel many conflicting things. I will pity him because, while he might rightfully expect despair, suffering, and pain he will not be ready for their specific flavor, duration or intensity. I will be jealous of him because, while he might expect some sort of personal growth or revelation (he’s read enough self-help books after all) as a result of the all of the darkness, he cannot see how he will actually grow or know what may be revealed to him. And I will hate him because there are things about his safe, opulent, comfortable world that will change and will never be the same again.

On the day that (most of us) emerge from this darkness, we will know the outcome. We will know the extent of economic suffering. We will know the body count. I may have lost my job. I may have lost people that I love. And eventually knowing these things will feel like reading a movie’s plot summary on its Wikipedia page. Suffering will be reduced to statistics and deaths will be tabulated for the history books. I hope that this will be historic because I hope that it will never happen again.

What I am trying to say is that this moment matters so let us try and be here for it. Let us turn off the music and listen to how quiet it is outside. And when cabin fever sets in, let us notice how claustrophobic we feel. And while outside, let us notice how the empty basketball courts, swing sets and jungle gyms give us a sense of unease. Of disease. Let us notice that even as spring, traditionally the season of rebirth, comes upon us, it feels more like we are actually preparing to die. And let us die before we die. Let us use this opportunity to learn to pay less attention to our egos and more attention to the things that actually matter.

And if it turns out that there is something to learn, maybe one day we will look and we will see through the darkness and we will feel love.

Big Bang

The world ends
This is bad poetry
You’re hopelessly self conscious
You think the world has begun again
And then it ends again
constant cycle
Over and over
But with each wash it fades a little
It becomes a little more clean
Clumsy analogies and mixed metaphors
But what can you do?
And are you doing enough?
What do you want to do?
You want them back. All of them
But that’s not an option because they don’t want to come back
They are happier where they are
So you sit and you wait
And you mourn
And time passes slowly but there’s also not much time left
Your world keeps ending and beginning again
And again
Cacophonous big bangs. And silent ones too
Your laundry is clean now. It’s been folded. It’s ready for pick up
You feel no more again
You feel like yourself again.

Berlin, PA

Scott Goodin in front of a sign in 2018. Photograph by Douglas Goodin.

No one expected that the Coronavirus scare of 2020 would be a boon for Berlin, PA. Now it seems almost silly. One looks at Berlin and sees the towering landscape of its downtown, it’s financial district, it’s arts district, the uptown where all the yuppies moved when they got older and wanted to get dogs and lofts. One forgets what Berlin looked like in the late months of 2019 - a backwater inhabited by few and traveled through by few more but generally forgotten. It’s main attraction - the Milksquirts sign announcing ones entrance - was of minor interest to travelers who occasionally would pose for an ironic picture (as Scott Goodin did in August of 2018, pictured above). The fact that the name of their town was amusing was not lost on most Berliners - when and if they stopped to think about it (most did not) - but they themselves were not amused by the gawkers that would pull off to the side of the road near Tempson’s Farm and photograph themselves in front of the sign and cause all sorts of problems on what was otherwise a peaceful and serene stretch of highway.

Of course all of this began to change in early March of 2020 when wealthy people who lived in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC began looking for a less densely populated place to live. The idea was that the dense city centers and crowded, close-quartered public transit systems of the aforementioned cities were hotbeds for viral spread, and that if one possessed the means to get away from such a situation, one should.

It would be naive to suggest that Berlin’s name did not have something to do with its appeal. Brooklyn hipsters got a certain thrill from telling their parents and friends that they were moving to Berlin, “no but not that Berlin, lolololol.” And like many towns starting down the barrel of early financial booms, the residents of Berlin welcomed the new visitors who wanted to buy up unused land and frequent local businesses such as the gas station and the grocery store.

It was when the first coffee shop opened up that Earl Tempson first got worried. “I make my coffee and if I’m gonna go out and get coffee somewhere I go to the gas station since Tammy always has a pot of half and half sitting on a hot plate over there. I don’t need any of this fancy fuckin’ coffee. No thank you!” And then, as longtime residents of any gentrified area know, once you get coffee shops then you get vegan bakeries and Soul Cycle. (There are now several Soul Cycles in Berlin!)

And people have written so much about gentrification and about rich people moving and populating new territory that is there really anything more to say on the matter? Of course there is because of course this had the added wrinkle of being the result of a virus that had taken the entire country - no, the entire planet - by storm. Coronavirus was all the rage in March of 2020 and it would continue to be the rage for quite a while longer. Many people would die, including some of those who are close to you and you remember being afraid of that even then.

But you also remember it not really feeling real. And you would wonder if it similarly did not really feel real being on an airplane who has lost engine power and is plummeting to its demise. Or you would wonder what the first US casualty of Coronavirus thought right before they lost consciousness and eventually died. Were they bummed that they were the first to die or did they consider it an honor? Or were they just thinking about all of the things that they had yet to do in their lives? Or were they wondering if they left the burners on the stove on?

Nobody likes to think about death even though we practice it every night. That’s an old cliche, but it was on the minds of newly settled Berliners as they looked around at the rural surroundings and proclaimed “We live here now!” A new batch of wealthy settlers out to tame the land and make it their own.

And of course Coronavirus eventually passed and people moved on and become frightened of something else. I remember comforting people who thought there would be no other pandemics: “Don’t worry! There will be other diseases that sweep across the earth uncontrolled. More people will die. There’s still lots to be afraid of.”

Being afraid is comfortable. Especially when you live in Berlin, PA.

@Corporate_Bar_And_Grill

My friend Terry is an alcoholic and has struggled with alcoholism for years. A few years ago I ran across him at a Ravens game and he seemed okay. Not perfect. But who’s perfect? I don’t know any self described alcoholic who is ever doing amazing, but Terry was doing okay. He told me so. He was buying a hot dog with mustard and relish and he had his five year old son with him. His son’s name is Andrew. As I left to go back to my seat he asked Andrew to “quiet down. Let daddy pay for the hot dogs and then we can go back to our seats. Andrew? Andrew, watermelon. Watermelon, Andrew. Andrew, remember what we talked about when me or mommy would say ‘watermelon?’ Andrew? Remember, Andrew? Andrew, remember what ‘watermelon’ means? Andrew!”

And here’s something that’s true:

Everybody is successful goes out at the end of the day and gets fucked up at a bar because it’s the only way that humans have of decompressing and unwinding after a long day of work. Sure, there might be other ways, but bars are great! They stimulate the economy and they keep fast food chains like Checkers in business.

“You don’t go out to bars? What do you mean you don’t go out to bars? You must be weak? Why don’t you go out to bars, man? Are you saying that you’re fucking weak?!?!”

After all (we all know this) bars are the way that business gets done in this fascinating, fast paced modern age we live in. After all they seem to be the only time we can slow down enough to talk to each other and to really listen. (When was the last time that you really fucking listened?)

Bar culture: like it or hate it, it’s here to stay.

After all, bars are how we communicate. Sorry but there’s no going back. (You’re stuck here.)

And what are you, some kind of fucking luddite? (What’s wrong with you?)

“I can’t wait to make bar culture a thing here.”

“I can’t wait to figure out what drink I’m going to drink. And then once I’ve had enough of that drink, I can’t wait to figure out another drink to drink.

“I’m fucking PUMPED!”

“I’m fucking PUMPED (!!!) to see how fucked up I get.”

And the bar business is a fast paced business. It’s a discrete business. It’s a sleek business. Bars are good for business and business is good for bars. And thanks to this (and thankfully) the bar business is booming.

“Transparency!” “Wellbeing!” “Longevity!” “Love!” All in bars! Get to the fucking bars! (What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?)

And so you sit down with your boss and you tell him that this whole “bar culture” thing does not work for you. It doesn’t work for several of your coworkers either, though you’re the only one who is brave enough to stand up and say anything and, you know, good for you. You feel good about yourself for a moment before continuing. You tell your boss that you worked for several years to get to where you are now, a healthy place, a healthier place, and that you can try sipping on seltzer with lime but that that doesn’t seem like a long term solution. And at some point you are going to want to try what else is on tap and you are going to want to get fucked up because the temptation will be too high (you substitute the word “drunk” for “fucked up” because this is a work place) and you are one day going to get so drunk that you pass out and you lose memories. You used to pass out and lose memories but you don’t so much any more but if you start drinking again you will lose memories again. And you’ll spiral down. And you are scared where that will leave because it has lead to dark holes in the past. And you’d like to stay out of those holes. Because those holes only lead one place.

Your boss nods. It seems like she understands. “Stick with seltzer and lime as long as you can. (I know you need this job because you need healthcare because your mental health is poor.)”

My friend Terry threw himself off the roof of M&T Bank Stadium. He (his body) landed in the adjacent parking lot. Nobody knows how he got in there. And nobody knows where he got the Coors Light tallboy that was clutched in his right hand. (M&T has an exclusive deal with the Anheuser-Busch corporation. (Did he sneak it in? How did he do that? How dare he?)) It’s a tragedy and he was mourned by a few people at an Episcopal church someplace in pig town. I couldn’t go. I was too hung over.

Business bar culture: love it or hate it, you actually have to love it, because it’s how business gets done.

"You Can't Not Have Hope, Right?"

“You can’t not have hope, right?” This is what my mother said to me last Sunday as we wandered down Grand Street in Williamsburg. I had just told her that a major factor in my plan not to have children was that I believed that my generation was the last generation to have any sort of standard of living and that the saps who found themselves born after myself and my peers were, to put it bluntly, fucked. I told her that I believed that we had passed the point of no return as far as the climate crises goes long ago, and that scientists were now lying to us about being able to turn it around in order to try and slow the inevitable. I told her that maybe the time had come to cut our losses, live our individual lives as well as we can for as many years as we can, and then simultaneously starve to death from food shortages, drown in the rising oceans which will flood Grand Street in Williamsburg, and choke to death on the increasingly toxic, increasingly warm air. Then we are planted and then we are star dust. Earth will still rotate around the sun until it is engulfed by the sun and the grand “human experiment” will be over. And maybe it wasn’t a failure, but I don’t think that anyone can conclusively say that any of this was a success.

I told her all of this and she told me that, back in the 60s, her friend Dianne said that she wasn’t going to have kids either. Dianne was pretty sure that the world would one day become a nuclear wasteland and so why bring new life into a world teetering on the verge of total suffering and pain.

Dianne has kids now. I don’t know how many and I haven’t had a chance to reach out and get her thinking. I might have kids too, one day.

“I just think you have to have hope, you know?” I don’t disagree with this sentiment but where do hope and faith end? At what point do we favor abject realism? At what point to we give up and accept our fate?

Consider the death row inmate who has appealed for clemency from the governor. The governor denies such clemency and the inmate’s fate is sealed. At midnight, they will die. There is no hope. But does the inmate still have hope? Thankfully many of those who are on death row have severe mental health problems and so, as a blood-thirsty, watchful public, we don’t have to worry about what is going on inside of their heads because they are “fucking cray.” But what if a well adjusted (maybe actually innocent) person was facing down their imminent demise? Part of being well adjusted seems to mean believing in a brighter future so does the inmate focus on a future where they are eventually, posthumously exonerated, and their family is no longer also punished for their (maybe only perceived) wrong doings? Does an atheist suddenly start believing in an after life? Does hope survive?

And if the ICBMs were launched and nuclear fall out overtook our planet would the surviving well adjusted amongst us hope that somewhere, probably deep down in a bunker, scientists were busy working on a solution to the horrifying and painful prospect of radiation poisoning? The scientists aren’t working on a cure. They’ve built a shrine underground and are praying to God for their salvation in the next life. Oh, my well adjusted friends, there is no-one left to save you.

I recently spent about two hours listening to my friend talk about her breakup. Her breakup was new and shiny and still oozing puss. And I sympathized because I am a human and I have feelings. I tried to be supportive and to listen to her pain but I also wanted her to know that I thought he was a piece of shit and that I was glad that she was rid of him. “It’s good because now you can move on,” I wanted to say. I didn’t because you don’t say that kind of thing to someone who is hopeless and miserable. Because their hopelessness helps them move on. “Swim down in order to swim up / Go to the bottom to know the depths of your despair.” She has so many other options out there that will hopefully work better for her so it’s pointless to stay with what’s not working.

I might believe in alternate universes and alternate timelines and if I believed in one I might believe that there was a copy of our planet out there somewhere, with a walkable Grand Street in Williamsburg. And if that copy existed and we had a way to get to it I might say that we should go. Our climate scientists might lay down their arms and focus all of their efforts in constructing a bridge to another dimension. We might, as a culture, actually be able to abandon hope and come to terms with their being no saving any of us.
And if I met you at a bar in Bushwick or Berlin I might tell you this: “We’re all doomed / What we don’t know is how or when / So drink and I’ll tell you I love you / ‘Cause tonight might be our last.”

Hair Expressions

I don’t really give a fuck about how I look because I was raised as a man and well the prevailing wisdom for centuries (and still maybe now) is that men should not give a fuck about how they look. Buzz cuts. Polo shirts. Pants that zip off at the knee and become shorts and also have lots of pockets to put things in.

Up until very recently I used to have long hair. I’d had long hair for a long time. In middle school, believing (probably rightfully so) that a barber shop in Rockville, Maryland might not know what do with a 13-year-old boy who had hair down to the middle of his back that he both refused to take care of and also get cut, my mother would take me to her hairstylist. I forget their name of her hairstylist. I forget the name of the hair salon but for the sake of this story let us give it a silly name like Hair Expressions. Her name wasn’t Dianne, but for the sake of this story let’s call her Dianne.

I would dread having to go and get Dianne to cut my hair because I was already sensitive about my masculinity (or lack there of) and sitting in a waiting area as the luxurious scents of hair care products traditionally marketed towards women wafting towards me did not help.

Most of the time I would prefer not to think about my hair. It would get caught in things, and then would get ripped away from my scalp. I can’t say that it was the only reason that girls wouldn’t talk to me (I would also routinely forget to wear deodorant) but I’m sure that it did not help. My therapist believes that it was my way of taking myself out of the game entirely, so that I could instead exist entirely in the etherial space inside of my thoughts and I am mostly inclined to agree with him.

The first stop at the salon was to get my hair washed. Dianne would not wash my hair because this sort of thing was beneath Dianne. She would come over and greet my mother and me and then introduce us to the woman whose charge it would be to struggle through the tangles and knots and do much of the physical labor while reaping a minimum of the financial reward. (My mom would hand be two dollars to tip her after all was said and done.) Once that was completed and the back of my neck ached from prolonged exposure to the porcelain sink I had been leaning against, I would be lead over to Dianne’s chair where she would proceed to brush my hair and begin the process of cutting out the matted sections (there were always a couple) so that I could be presentable again. Of course I also resisted any sort of shaping or product or anything to make my hair look what the industry calls “healthy” so Dianne’s battle was uphill and futile. And I would finish what felt like a five hour ordeal with my hair blown out and 75 dollars paid, sucking on a jolly rancher hoping that it could be another several months before I would be sitting in the waiting room of Hair Expressions again.

I got a hair cut yesterday. I’m now 28 years old and live in a part of Brooklyn known for its pretentious beer selection and racist landlords. I don’t know how I feel about the haircut because I never know how I feel about change. No. I know how I feel about the haircut because it’s how I feel about every haircut. I don’t like the haircut but I will live with it. And the next time that I go into the barbershop on Bedford Ave that I go to because to find another place would be too emotionally taxing I will ask for the very same thing. And they will give me what I asked for and I will again become unhappy. I will become unhappiness and will live with that for a while until I forget that I didn’t like the way that my head looks and just grow used to it.

Because my entire life has been structured so that I can get used to my unhappiness and discomfort, convince myself that I am wrong in feeling the way that I do, and then eventually detach to the point that I forget that I was unhappy in the first place. Because I am a child of children of the mid 1950s and was told that my feelings mattered and were worth it, but somehow interpreted that to mean that the only way I had to judge my self worth was by objectively looking at my output and asking others what they think of me. And when I am too shy to ask, I read minds, and I tell myself that I know what others are thinking about me because they must be thinking of me constantly.

Maybe I should stop cutting my hair and let it grow out and get matted. Because this whole being alive thing is exhausting!

Isabel

My daughter Isabel hates stories. Perhaps what she really hates is story structure. I think what I’m trying to say for her is that what she really hates is George Lucas and therefore Joseph Campbell and therefore Aristotle. I’d invite her to elaborate on this herself but she has made it very clear that she has no interest in reading my writing or contributing to my blog.

My daughter Isabel hates stories because they are not like real life.

My daughter Isabel hates stories because “they are lies.”

She believes that stories don’t actually happen. She believes that stories are a kind of mental junk food that make us feel more at peace with our lives passing us by. She believes that as long as we continue to perpetuate the myth of the story structure that we will never truly be present enough to live our own lives. She believes that we will always be looking towards a future that will be our story and at the same time will never actually materialize. She believes that Hollywood and airport romance novels have ruined the modern relationship. She’s also eight years old.

My daughter Isabel doesn’t see herself ever getting married, or being in a committed relationship. If any other eight year old said this I would inaudibly tell them to give it time. But I believe her because I believe that she sees the world in a way that nobody I have ever met has seen it. I think that she might be The Messiah. I also think that she might kill herself before she turns 30.

I want to tell her to not think so dualistically but then I wonder what telling her that might take away from society because I also think that our greatest thinkers have been dualists. Perhaps she needs to be a sacrifice so that cold, hard evidence will continue to have a place at the table in a world that seems more and more dominated by belief and the aim of immediate, temporary peace at the cost of everything else. I want to tell her that love wins but I don’t know that she would believe me.

“Believe me. I’m your father,” I’d say. But I’d see skepticism in her eyes and then there would be no turning back. So instead I say nothing.

She got into an argument with her teacher, Ms. Long, the other day and I got to be the one that stood in the middle. It was an argument about the idea of schooling. Isabel pointed out that she had signed no contract and entered willingly into no deal wherein she agreed to have the next 12 years of her life structured by what other beings thought of her.

“I think we live in American,” she said. “And in America, freedom is key. I was not consulted on the seven hours of school and then four to five hours of post school work I would be required to do. And then also work on the weekends. And I know that my protests and pointless. I know that you sit there and you see me, eight years old, and you think that what I am doing is adorable. ‘Just wait,’ you say. But I’m tired of waiting and also there’s a whole lot more waiting left to be done in my life. And then what? I’ll graduate from college and I’ll have to get a job and then that job will dictate my life. And then I’ll decide that I’m actually undecided about whether or not I want to have children, but my window of opportunity will be rapidly closing, and so I’ll have a few just in case, and then will mostly not regret it. And then I’ll get old and I will start to fall apart and then I will die.

“I guess what I’m asking is what’s the point of any of it?”

I’ve talked to my daughter about suicide. She’s a moderate fan of Hunter S. Thompson. I’ve told her that all of the evidence seems to indicate that most people kill themselves on a whim. That it seems that having something like a firearm present in ones home makes it much more likely that that is how one dies. I told her that that is the reason that I don’t own a gun. I can’t trust that I won’t wake up in the middle of the night and think that the most logical thing to do would be to clinch my teeth around the barrel and pull the trigger. It’s the same reason that I don’t go up to the ledges of high buildings. I’m always this close to throwing myself off.

I also told her that there are probably a small percentage of people out there for who ending their lives was probably the right decision although we’re never going to actually know.

It turns out that the part of stories that my daughter Isabel hates the most are endings because life has only one ending to it. And even then it is only an ending of our ego as we know it. We are burned into ash our we dissolve into soil. We go from being one thing to something else. We don’t know what we are and yet we cling to what we know. A story ends and yet the characters get up the next day because they have to. Because the alternative is so conclusive and finite that none of us want to actually think about it with regards to ourselves or any of our loved ones.

I don’t want to think about Isabel dying so I’ll write a story about a 16 year old boy named Joshua who stood on the roof of Carnegie Mellon University’s drama building one night in the summer of 2009 and wondered what the last thing he would feel might be. I write stories to keep the real world at arms length so that when I finally die I will wonder what life was like among the living.

Yesterday This

Baltimore. 2006.

I try to imagine what this year must have been like for your family. I can’t. I can’t imagine what this year has been like. Even when I try and force myself to get there I shut down. I go into recovery mode. For a second I no longer exist. Then I reboot and I forget that you’re gone. I go to the grocery store. I pay my rent. I keep on living my life and I assume that one day we’ll get lunch again.

Because I can’t deal with my life so I choose to ignore it, knowing that eventually it will go away. I am reminded of this truth every time I get my federal tax refund. The soft monetary cushion that also serves as a gentle reminder that one day none of this will matter and then gently asks the question: “So does any of this matter now?”

Your leaving was inconvenient, and at times I resented you for it, because it threatened to get in the way of plans that I had for my life. I didn’t let it. In the end, I won. I have worked too hard to forget how to feel sad to start feeling sad now.

They held a memorial service for you that I didn’t go to. Actually, it was just a gathering at your parents house. I told myself that eventually there would be a memorial service and that I would then inconvenience myself and go to that. But I’m secretly glad that there never was one because I didn’t want to take the four hour bus ride. Because I didn’t want to feel sad.

If I believe that death is the end, and that it’s truly something to mourn, but I don’t feel like mourning, than who I am doing the mourning for? I miss you. I love you. These are crystal clear facts. I should also be mournful. But for some reason I’m not. The best argument seems to be that I am mourning for your living family. I can’t imagine what every single day of continued existence must be like for them but I can imagine that it might be helpful to see other people feel sad because in doing so they will know that you touched a whole lot of people’s lives and that somehow that will be comforting. Will that be comforting? I assume so but I don’t know so.

I wished you happy birthday on Instagram today. Is that a correct way of mourning? I keep going back to check how many likes its getting. And each time it gets a like I feel better. And then I feel worse. Once again I feel like I am making you being gone about me still being here.

I don’t know any of the details of how you left. I have some theories extended from that last lunch that we had together. I want to know more but now it feels like it is too late to ask. Not that details matter. Details won’t make you come back. I don’t have any right to know which hospital you were rushed to or who found you or who you were with or what you were doing. We all like to create stories so that then we have reasons. But there’s probably no reason that you’re not here. You used to be and now you just aren’t.

Is there meaning to any of this or are we all just floating around until we aren’t?

When I force myself to think about it I choose to believe that there is because believing that there isn’t is too empty and painful. Because the way that I am actually mourning you is by remembering you. Your dark moments. The day I betrayed you and you quit the band. Your incredible, blinding, gorgeous, effervescent light. You were everyone’s friend and I genuinely thought you’d be governor one day.

All of these are tired tropes and cliches spoken about every dead person and so, in this age that drinks profundity like coffee, I’m not sure I should tell anyone. I should probably keep this to myself. My memories of you. (If you’re reading this, I caved. I’m going to cave.)

I won tickets to Beetlejuice: The Musical on the night that you died. The refrain of the opening number is “Welcome to a show about death.” I invited a friend that I hadn’t seen in a long time. The kind of friendship that you keep hoping will become greater. You fan the flame, but it turns out there’s just no more wood to ignite. You were my best friend many years ago. I can remember fanning those very same flames, even as I convinced myself that you weren’t actually slipping away. And when enough people have slipped away from you its hard to have hope that things will get better.

I have no plans to leave but sometimes it’s hard not to try and make them. I love you. And I think because of you I will be okay.

Gazette: "Local Nursing Home Resident Attacks Volunteer"

Let’s be honest - The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility smelled bad. Everyone knew it yet to admit to its foul odor meant coming to terms with the sad inevitability that most in its care and on its staff chose to ignore during their (for some) waking, (for some) caffeinated hours: you only leave in a body bag. Thankfully, due to advances over the past hundreds of thousands of years in the human olfactory system, this was a smell that most of Lenwood’s residents quickly got used to. It would hit them again if they left to go spend the night in one of their child’s spare bedrooms or in the hospital bed of a lover, but for the most part, the aroma folded itself in with the air that they breathed, each breath more and more difficult, the darkness of the world slowly closing in around them. Occasionally a resident would get so tired of this recognizable jolt of the aforementioned inevitable, that he or she or they would stop leaving entirely, preferring to keep up the delusion that one day, probably in spring time, they would hop out of their hospital bed and bound of out the place. Of course they never said that this was the reason they no longer wanted to leave. Instead, they would telephone their children and shout into the receiver that they were “just too tired,” or that they “had a lot going on here” and why didn’t their children just come visit them? And so of course their children would come, and breath in through their noses for most of their visits and then remember their parents fondly whenever they smelled the combinations of decay and disinfectant long after their parents were no longer under The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility’s charge.

This bit of writing is not directly about the way that the inside of “The Facility” smells but rather about a news article published in the local Gazette a few years ago. In only a few paragraphs, said article described how the local police had been called one Thursday afternoon after a facility resident, Marc Huffman, attacked a volunteer, Stacey Ringwald, with his walker and reportedly told her that he wanted to murder her, although Mr. Huffman vehemently denied this later. At the time it was an article of little consequence. Most people who even bothered to read it chuckled to themselves and then moved on with the rest of their day: “I mean, have you ever heard of a nursing home patient being arrested and thrown in jail? Absurd! But I guess this is Trump’s America, after all.” It was a blip on page ten of a local rag that has no unsubscribe option.

Marc had only been a resident of “The Facility” for about a week and a half when Stacey Ringwald came on her monthly afternoon visit. She was there to instruct the residents on the practice of meditation. (Here, our lawyers inform us that we must note that Ms. Ringwald was not affiliated with any of the major meditation institutions or teachers and had seemingly picked up the little that she knew about the practice from the regrettably popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Furthermore, the board of directors for The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility would also like it to be noted that they were unaware of her lack of qualifications at the time, and that, “for various reasons,” Ms. Ringwald is no longer permitted on the premises.) Marc knew she was coming, and had had several enthusiastic staff members ask him if he wanted to sign up, to which his response was adamant and unwavering: “Fuck no!” It is policy at “The Facility” to not force any residents to take part in any of the enrichment programing. However, staff have also been known to gently coax residents who spend most of the day in their rooms and who seem to have a hard time socializing.

None of the presently living residents or staff that was at that afternoons meditation instruction remember Marc being there. Nor is his name listed on the official list of attendees that “The Facility” provided to the police. As far as anyone can remember, between the hours for 2-4pm on Thursday, January 23rd, Marc sat quietly in his room, mostly staring out the window. This was typical Marc Huffman behavior, and so no one thought anything of it.

At around 3:50, the class was finishing its final meditation. Everyone’s eyes were closed, and they were generally attempting to not have any thoughts and of course were wildly unsuccessful in this endeavor. Long time resident Patricia Goodman remembers actually sort of being successful in clearing her mind, until she was jolted back to reality by the sound of plastic coated metal rods connecting with hair and skull, and then the sound of a body falling out of a chair and hitting the linoleum floor. Patricia remembers opening her eyes to see Marc, wielding a folded up walker, and repeatedly bashing it against the motionless body of Stacey Ringwald, yelling “Fuck you and your fucking meditation! I’m going to fucking kill you, bitch! Time to fucking die!” Marc, being a feeble old man, was quickly subdued by orderlies, and soon arrested. Stacey was rushed to the local hospital and treated for a possible concussion and minor cuts and bruises.

Later, when questioned by detectives at the local jail, Marc denied beating Stacey with the walker and went so far as to state that he never even left his room.

One detective turned to the other and shook her head: “These fucking old people are goddamn crazy. Oh well.” The next Monday, Marc appeared in front of a judge and was formally charged with attempted first degree murder. He vowed to fight it, but died before the trial could take place, maintaining his innocence up until the day that his heart quite literally exploded.

At his hastily thrown together funeral, his estranged son Geoffrey got up to Eulogize his father:

“Dad was not a good man. I think he tried to be. I think he wanted to be. But he wasn’t. I remember him taking me to Little League games as a child and bragging to the other parents about how well his meditation practice was going.

“‘I’m meditating fucking twice a day for twenty minutes for twenty fucking years,’ he’d tell them. ‘Fucking changed my goddamn life.’ I don’t know that it really did though. I think he wanted it to. Hell, he wanted it to change not just his life, but him. I don’t think it did any of those things for him. He started out life as Marc Huffman, and that unfortunately never really changed.”

Someone coughed in the gathered crowd.

“I have no doubt that my dad attacked that poor woman and that he had every intention of killing her. She was the living embodiment of something that he thought he had wasted his life on. And while I of course do not condone any of his actions, I can imagine his anger. I think that maybe you can, too!

“Imagine devoting forty minutes a day to something every day for ten years. I did the math. That’s almost two hundred and three days. More than half a year. So yeah. I get the anger and I get the rage. I only wonder why he kept at it so long. Probably because one day he hoped it would start to work.”

Marc Huffman is buried in a cemetery as is Patricia Goodman. Stacey Ringwald is a VP at Amazon. Life has a tendency to work out sometimes.

Night In Heaven

I was with him last night and I don’t understand what happened. Of course my first inclination is that he is gay but in denial. Not that that’s a bad thing. It is, however, a waste of my time. It’s 2020 and we live in New York City. Well he lives in Queens. I live in Brooklyn. Point is it’s okay to be gay. This isn’t Lawton, Oklahoma and it’s not 1957. I wish that I could have shook him and said “Just figure out who you actually are, god damn it!”
Of course he claimed that he was just tired. I offered him sex twice! I said it out loud: “We can have sex if you want.” Both times: “No. I’m tired. Sorry. I think I’m good.” Like what the fuck is that?

I half expected to never hear from him after he walked me down to my Uber Pool the next morning. I had suggested that we get brunch - the appropriate, if not obligatory thing to do after a night of mild to moderate love making - but again got a: “No, I’m kinda tired. I think I’m good,” so I put my clothes on and pulled out my phone. The Uber Pool arrived and we kissed (both brief and rather dry) and I rode off into the blinding late May sunlight. That was Saturday.

Sunday evening, he texted me asking if I wanted to go to the Jim Henson exhibit the next weekend and I almost threw my phone across my shared workspace in frustration. It took me three hours to text him back. Luckily I had a wedding to go to so I instead recommended that we get dinner Friday night. He texted back “Sounds great!” Maybe he had just been tired. I’ve been there where I haven’t been in the mood. But most of the times I just go through the motions although I do recognize that it might be different for men. Like a lot of the time they are the ones doing more of the work.

A few of my friends were meeting in a bar to celebrate my friend John’s birthday and so I invited him to come along. I thought it would be fun!

Text message: “Hey, so sorry to do this but like I’m trying to be more honest about the things that make me uncomfortable and give me anxiety and I get uncomfortable and anxious around people that I do not know or like when they are in large groups of people that I do not know. So I think I’m going to have to pass. Sorry!”
Fine. Whatever. Anxiety sucks and I get that but also like what the fuck! So I suggested that we could maybe get dinner before. And then I could go to John’s birthday party. He said that sounded good and also said that I had come to Queens so much and that he would be happy to go to Brooklyn instead. So I recommended a spot (Sage, on Graham) and he texted “Great!”

I’m telling you this because I can’t tell him. Because I need to tell somebody my side of the story. Because I know that he’s out there wondering why things did not work out. And I guess my answer to that is that sometimes things don’t work out. And that if it feels like work on the ninth date (it did!) then there’s something wrong. Because I have spent enough time around my parents to know that it will reach a point where it will all feel like work, but it shouldn’t nine dates in.

We had one terrible date. We’ve texted a little bit since then. I think that’s going to be it. And it is.

At The Twinbrook Unitarian Universalist Society

She knew that she wasn’t allowed to openly get mad at Mason, the music director. It wouldn’t look good. Part of being a Unitarian Universalist minister, after all, was learning how to stifle your actual emotions and present a calm and even presence at all times. She was pretty sure this is also what her therapist had to do during the sessions they had together each Tuesday night. She had thought about asking her therapist about this but had concluded that it would take away some of the mystery and perhaps the mystery was one of the reasons that therapy worked. Although therapy had also stopped working recently and so she had taken to dropping an extra dose of CBD oil onto her tongue every Sunday morning right before heading out into the sanctuary. CBD oil wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be, she thought, but it did seem to make dealing with all the petty nonsensical emotional baggage that her congregants brought with them easier to deal with and forget. Most people just want to be listened to and most people don’t get listened to all that often. Most people don’t even get pretended to be listened to, and so she had settled on that, nodding and furrowing her brow and then saying something randomly encouraging or sympathetic after it seemed like they had finished talking. This method worked most of the time and it allowed her to keep her attention focused on the whereabouts of Mason. On the rare occasion that she picked the wrong response (i.e. condolences at the birth of a newborn) it did not seem to matter all that much for Unitarian Universalists are a self-centered group and most of the time aren’t really listening to what anyone else has to say anyway.

Mason Lieberman was a graduate of The Julliard School of Music and when the congregation had hired him many had been impressed and many thought it was too good to be true and perhaps the latter had been right. He played the piano like he was putting up dry wall and his right hand just was not what it should have been for someone who claimed to have graduated in “Piano Performance.” Every Sunday Mason had a habit of choosing the most asinine hymns from Singing The Living Tradition and would often rewrite lyrics he thought were “clunky” and then distribute them on mimeographed paper seemingly at random throughout the pews. He wore the same shiny black suit every Sunday and every Sunday it seemed to get shinier. He would keep the choir till one or two in the morning during rehearsals and so many had quit and only a few who otherwise generally struggled with boundary issues remained. He refused to wear deodorant and use mouth wash. He was a pescatarian.

All of these things would have been fine or at least manageable. She had dealt with some weird fucking people before. It was his love of musical rounds that she found truly obnoxious and this was the reason she was planning his untimely and “accidental” death.

He loved rounds and rounds are generally horrible. Everyone knows this. It is a fact that is undisputed. Many a scholarly article has been done on the subject. And yet Mason, in his ineffable obnoxiousness had taken to inserting at least one and often times two into each service. If you, dear reader, have had the misfortune of being a part of a round, then you have experienced the stern directions that are given before you start. The group is split up into sections, the seconds are assigned parts, and you are generally told how many times you are going to repeat the thing before you are allowed to sit down. Mason did none of this, and would just launch into a round and the rule-following Unitarian Universalists would follow suit and the proud would continue until it would fall apart due to sheer exhaustion. It was awful and made services drag on to the hour and forty five minute mark when they were supposed to clock out at a cool fifty five.

Much like the supreme court, UU music director seems to be an almost-life long appointment, although with music directors there is no mechanism for impeachment in place so she had decided that she would kill him but in a way that would be slow and would leave her in the clear. The idea of leading his memorial service was the one thing that kept her going and as time went on and Mason still showed up breathing and smelling bad the fantasy grew so much so that it began to not even matter that he was Jewish, and therefore would likely be mourned in a different house of worship if he was to be mourned at all. But in the middle of the night, when she would wake up and be honest with herself, she knew she was not a murderer. She also knew there was no God out there testing her. This was just random chance and it was her lot in life.

The next Sunday, Joseph Weller, 78, was rushed to the hospital after a 12 minute long version of “How Could Anyone Every Tell You.” After 14 hours of trying to save his life, doctors at Montgomery Hospital pronounced him dead. Lung failure.

Unitarian Universalists are a rhythmically challenged, opinionated lot, who know how to suffer so well that it sometimes actually kills them which makes the ones that are still living just a little bit jealous.

Queens, Early Morning: “Quiet”

I remember him as vividly as I can - a white haired, white man with a belly I suspected was the result of too many Doritos. He swayed slightly as he walked and when he talked it sounded like he was wearing braces. I kept glancing at his teeth. It took me two hours to figure out that there was no corrective orthodontic device in his mouth, it was just the unfortunate way that his teeth sounded.

I met him in the kind of New York back alley that has been recreated on many studio lots in Hollywood and Vancouver. It was nighttime and I was a little bit drunk and a little bit high. I was taking a short cut in my walk home between two buildings that, had I been sober, I likely would have opted to walk the long way around. It was 1:30 in the morning and a perfect storm of limited overnight bus service in Queens and Uber/Lyft surge pricing coupled with my crossfaded decision making meant that this back alley was my best and only option.

“I might die tonight,” I remember saying as I started down the alley. “Whatever. So it goes.”

Right at the point where I began to wonder if I could actually see anything anymore or if my mind was just making things up because it thought that I should be able to see things, a soft voice came out of the darkness.

“Hey. I wouldn’t go any further,” it said. I didn’t recognize this voice so I did not listen to it. Back when I lived in Iowa I might have. You respect strangers in Iowa. It’s why too many people are kidnapped. I’d been in New York City for five years at this point. I didn’t trust anybody. “I’m serious. Don’t go any further. Stay where you are. I’ll come to you. Really. Trust me.”

Shapes began forming in my vision from total darkness into near darkness and I could suddenly see Jay Pritcher, white man with white hair, sitting on a milk crate, holding his right hand in his left. It looked like his right hand was bleeding although I couldn’t smell any blood.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“You’ve gotta be more careful,” he said. “Someone like you should be more careful. Someone like you shouldn’t be walking down alley’s like this. The kind of person that hangs out in dark alleys like this in the middle of night is the kind of person that should be avoided. At all costs.”

“A kind of person like you,” I said.

“No. Not like me. I’m fine. You can trust me.” He held out his hand. “Jay Pritcher. Nice to meet you.”

“But you just said…” I shook it but intentionally did not offer my name.

“It’s fine,” said Jay. “Don’t worry about it. I’m, like, normal. You know?”

“But like what were you doing down here?”

“Like I said don’t worry about it. I don’t want to tell you what I was doing here in the dark and I didn’t have time come up with a good excuse because I honestly didn’t expect anyone to be coming down this alleyway this late at night. I mean what kind of person goes down a dark alleyway at 1:45 in the morning?”

“It’s actually 1:30,” I said.

“No. It’s 1:45.” I pulled out my phone. He was right. I put my phone back in my pocket keenly aware that he had seen what kind of phone it was. It was an iPhone 5S. Perhaps this man, this Jay Pritcher, was smarter than I had initially given him credit for. But also he had been sitting by himself in a pitch black alley in the middle of the night. I’m a progressive person. I give money to the homeless people that come through on the subway as long as they are nice about it. The key is to hold your breath from the moment they are right in front of you until when they are like 5 feet past you. It’s the only way to avoid breathing in homeless person smell. But I also think that they should just pull up their bootstraps and get a job.

“So, uh, I’m gonna go,” I said, backing away. I would find another way home and hope that this clearly homeless man who called himself Jay Pitcher did not follow me.

“Wait,” he said.

“What,” I said.

“So like I can’t tell you what I’m actually doing here - it’s something pretty friggin cool, though! - but I need you to stay here for just a little bit,” Jay said. “So, uh, you know. Just like trust me. Nothing bad is going to happen. I know how weird that sounds”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” I said. I am an American! I thought. “And I am going home,” I said.

“No no no no no no! PleasepleasepleasepleasePLEASE!” Jay whimpered. “Just stay. Please. Really. It’s awesome! It’s gonna be soooo cool. Trust me.”

“Tell me what it is and maybe I’ll stay,” I said. This night could not get any weirder, and I could still taste fuzz in my mouth.

“Ughhh. I told you. I can’t! But it’s gonna be, like, really cool,” he said. “Like, you’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Goodnight.” I briskly walked back out of the alley, my eyes adjusting to the blinding yellow haze of the street light.

“WAIT!” I heard footsteps gallop up behind me and I turned around to see Jay Pitcher, a stocky white haired man who looked like he had never seen sunlight, doubled over in front of me, wheezing. “Just…hold on…woah…Did you see that?…Did you see what I just…I ran like a fucking mile or something…Incredible!”

“It was like 50 feet. I’m going home.”

“Nah. That’s not true…It was longer than that. Has to have been. Look at that. That’s a long fucking way.”

“What do you want, Jay?” He did not immediately answer. As far as I know it’s not possible for a human being to drown in oxygen, and Jay Pritcher was about to make history.“Goodnight, Jay.” I started walking down the street.

“Dirk!” he yelled. “You’ve got a family, right? Your daughters, Lexi and Blevin.”

“Blevin?”

“Shit. No, you’re right. It’s not right.” I turned around. Jay was rummaging around in his pockets. “Shit. Where did I put it? It’s here somewhere.” He pulled out a loose scrap of paper. “Matilda. Lexi and Matilda.”

“You leave me the fuck alone!” I bellowed, probably waking up the entire neighborhood, but I did not care. It’s one thing to harass strangers in dark alleyways in the middle of the night. It’s quite another to talk about my children. They’re my fucking children and you don’t get to talk about them. Nobody does. “I’ll call the cops. I swear.” I pulled out my cellphone. “I’ll do it the fuck right now I don’t even give a shit. They’ll take you in. You’ll never see daylight again.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but it felt good saying it.

“I’ve never seen daylight anyways, Mr. Mingus,” he said, silhouetted by the streetlamp, his voice echoing off of the closed steel grates of the bodegas and shops that lined the street. “And you can go. I wish that you wouldn’t. But you can go.”

“You better not fucking follow me.”

“I won’t.”

“And stay away from my fucking kids.”

“I will,” he said. “Make the next year and a half count, Dirk. Have a good one.”

He turned away from me, heading back into the alleyway. What was that supposed to mean?

“What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, Jay! Is that a fucking threat man? Are you threatening me?”

“No,” said Jay, turning around. “The plane crash. Flight 7932. You’ve got about a year and a half. I’m sure you’re living every day to the fullest. You don’t need me to tell you that you’re going to die soon.”

“What the FUCK are you talking about, you fucking psycho!” I spat.

“Oh wait.” If it was possible, Jay turned even whiter. “Oh fuck. Oh shit. Oh fuck. You don’t know. Um…You know what, dude? Never mind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Am I gonna die in a year and half. Wait. What’s the number of the flight?”

“I dunno,” said Jay. “Goodnight. Sorry about that.”

“What’s the fucking number of the flight that is gonna crash and that I’m gonna die on?” I screamed. A dog began barking in the distance.

“I can’t say. You’re not supposed to know.” I grabbed Jay by the lapels of his coat and lifted him off the ground.

“I’m just a crazy bum. A wild and wacky homeless man living in an alley way in Queens. You’re not gonna listen to me! I’m insane! What do I know? I don’t fucking know what I’m talking about!”

“What if you do, though,” I said. “What was that fucking number.”

“Like I said,” he said, “I’m fucking nuts. I’m insane. Don’t listen to me.” He let go of him and he crumpled to the ground. He looked up at me and for the first time I realized that I could smell him.

“Spare some change, sir?” he said, his voice suddenly higher. I took out my wallet, grabbed a five dollar bill and dropped it on the ground. He looked at it, but didn’t pick it up.

“This fucking city,” I said, turning one last time to walk away.

“God bless you, sir,” he called out from behind me. I heard the scampering of feet and jingling of some bottles. I did not turn around again but I’m pretty sure that if I had I would have seen the beam of an empty streetlight, slowly and silently getting ready for the summer sun to rise.

Some Bar Off The Fulton Stop 2

The hand of an unknown individual. Taken around sunset on 12/31/16.

I’m worried about my friend because it seems like he’s going through a lot. And the last time I saw him he seemed to be kind of depressed. It was at a bar - where else do you socialize? - and he didn’t really say anything all night. He sat at the table and nodded along to my other friends’ stories but it seemed like he had nothing really to contribute, which is not like him. He used to be impossible to shut up!

Last New Years Eve he posted on Twitter: “2019 is going to be the year of change and self improvement #Blessed!"

He stopped smoking cigarettes in May but went out into the cold because his friend Max wanted to smoke, and I followed them. Normally I would have tried to get him on his own to ask such a sensitive question, but Max is kind of a piece of shit anyway, so I just blurted it out: “You okay, man?”

“Yeah! I’m great. What do you mean?”

Choose your words carefully. “You seem kind of quiet. Not your normal self. Just wondering if everything is okay.”

“Everything’s great! Couldn’t be better honestly.”

“She giving you a hard time, kid?” said Max, shitty, true to form. “You don’t smoke. What’re you even doing out here?”

“He doesn’t smoke either,” I said.

“Yeah, but I asked him to come out here,” said Max. “Didn’t ask you.”

“You seem weird,” I said, ignoring Max. I had been drinking so I was about to be honest: “You’ve seemed weird for a while. Seriously, what’s wrong?"

“Nothing!” he said. “Meet you inside, Max.”

“Well done,” said Max, clapping slowly.

“I had to say something,” I said. Along with being a shitty person, Max was also an idiot so I didn’t expect him to understand. “He is being weird, though, right?”

“Oh for sure,” said Max. "But you can’t tell him that.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, I can’t tell him that either. He’s on a journey. Maybe he’ll get where he’s going. Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe he’ll come some other place. The point is I don’t think that any of us can really do anything about it. Other than sit back and watch and see what happens.”

“‘Asshole," I said.

“You know I’m right, though,” said Max as the door swung shut on the cold air and his cigarette smoke.

I decided to play it cool the rest of the night. I drank heavily and sang and danced whenever a song that I liked came over the bar’s PA. I like a lot of songs so I was soon hoarse. And he didn’t do anything. He just sat there, sipping on what I hoped was a gin and tonic or a vodka soda (something other than a seltzer with lime), and stared blankly at all of us, as if he had been sent here to study us and was coming to some staggering conclusions.

At 11:45 he got up and said he was leaving. He didn’t come and tell me. He didn’t come and tell anyone. He ran into Max as Max was coming back from the bathroom. I saw him mouth ‘Hey man, it was real, have a good night.’ They hugged. He put on his coat, and headed to the door. The bars windows had frosted up. Someone had written ‘poop’ on one of them. I got up and, more nimbly than I ought to have given the innumerable whiskey sodas I had downed, followed him outside.

“Hey,” I said. “Aren’t you gonna say goodbye.”

“Where’s your coat?” he said.

“I’m not the one going home,” I said.

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

“Why, though?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you going home?”

“Do you need an answer, Sam? I’m tired.”

I shivered. “Why, though?”

“Look, Sam, I’m sorry that you don’t feel like we’re as close as we used to be.” Had I actually said that? Jesus Christ! “Really, I am. It’s been eating me up all night. Like, it’s all that I can fucking think about.”

“Did I say that?” I said.

“You did. And maybe you’re not wrong. But like I guess that’s life or whatever. I’m not going to stay the same just because you want me to.”

“Why not?” I pulled on the lapels of his coat. An invitation to comfort me.

“Stop. You’re drunk and you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You’re drunk!”

“I’m not. Actually fairly sober. Goodnight, Samantha.”

I watched him walk away knowing that I would not feel the full brunt of this rejection until tomorrow morning, or tomorrow afternoon, or whenever the hang over wore off. I would dance and drink and dance and drink and then the bar would miraculously close and I would go home and fall into bed and the sheets would be cold.

I dunno. I’ve always hated New Years Eve. Why should this one be any different?

Two Straight Men

Two straight men at a 2016 rally for Bernie Sanders in Union Square.

Two straight men got together and sat in a room and told each other that they were cool they were with gay people.

“I have lots of gay friends,” one of them said. “Lesbians too.”

“Me too,” said the other one. “I’ve even been to a few gay bars.”

“Me too,” said straight man number 1. “When I was living in Frankfurt, I went to them all the time. They’re great.”

“Wow, that’s a trip,” said the other straight man.

“Yeah. It was,” said the other one.

It was nice and the two straight men felt progressive as hell.

“This girl that I’m dating, you know, she’s really cute, and she has a lot of a gay guy friends, which, you know, tripped me out at first because I was like ‘Why is she hanging out with all these guys’ and then, you know, I understood, ‘cause, like, they all have boyfriends or whatever.”

“Yeah, I’ve been there man.”

“But also, like, it would have been fine if they hadn’t been gay.”

“Of course!”

“Like I’m friends with lots of women who are straight and, you know, we’re just like friends, or whatever.”

“Of course! Me too.”

“We don’t want to have sex.”

The two men made plans to hang out and do things together, but always made sure to keep space. Not get too close. They talked about their jobs and about their families and about the women that they were having sex with. They drank whiskey and beer and wine and traded THC vape pens. They had a favorite bar they would go to on Sunday night to mourn the passing of the weekend and they would buy shots for Stephen, the bartender. Stephen hated these two straight men. Every Sunday night he would go home and vomit and drink coconut water. He would take his son, Derek to school, and be hung over, and worry that he was not a good father. The customer is always right.

Both straight men voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and considered not voting at all in the 2016 general. That night, they reassured each other that they had voted, although they both also doubt the other’s voting record to this day. They have both donated to the Sanders 2020 campaign.

Both men have watched what is arguably too much pornography and it has affected them. When they fall asleep at night they dream of large breasts and shaved vaginas. They dream of young women “discovering” that they are actually lesbians during a college pillow fight. They dream of penises. Neither one wants to talk about this with his therapist that his parents pay for though there have been ample opportunities to do so. They have run out of things to talk to their therapists about and mostly just sit there in silence.

They both listen to late 90s rock when they jog.

They both drink too much but are unsure of how else to go about socializing.

“How was your night?” one of the straight men asked.

“Fine,” said the other straight one. It had actually been great. He had gone to a bar that he enjoyed and met a man. He had gone home with that man. They had sex and then cuddled as the cold December morning light peeked under the bedroom curtains. They had sex again. They got brunch. He Ubered home. He was never going to talk about this with anyone because that would make it real. But he also couldn’t wait to masturbate. “How was yours?”

“It was good,” said the first one. “Went to Barcade with my buddy. Then we went to Rocka Rolla. Then we went to Union Pool. Then Skinny D. I’m hurting now.”

“Stay strong, brother,” said number 2.

“I will.”

“We’re running low on toilet paper. We should put together an Amazon order soon.”

“Sounds good.”

“Well, enjoy.”

The two straight went back to their bedrooms. They shut their doors.

They turned up their TVS. They sobbed.

At A Diner In Duluth

My father was a paleontologist whom I never saw. He never meant to be a father and so who could really blame him for being bad at it. This is what he told me in one of the few lunches we shared of the decade. It was at a 24-hour diner in Duluth, and it was cold outside.

“I’m sorry that I never call,” he said. “I’m busy doing paleontology and I know you’ve got your own stuff going on and that you’re an adult now. I never meant to be a father and so who can really blame me.”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

“And in any case,” he continued, “I know that you really thrive off of routine and being able to predict what the future holds. I know what a terrible strain this must be for you, me showing up out of the blue and forcing you to have lunch with me at this diner. I promise that it won’t happen again.”

“No,” I said. “It’s really good to see you. I wish that I could see you more often.”

“You’re just saying that,” he said. “You don’t actually mean it.”

I meant it but it seemed pointless to try and explain. He wouldn’t listen anyway. But he’s a good man.

I used to make up stories for my friends when I was younger. I would say that my father was a tyrant. I would tell them that he would routinely tell me that I was a waste of time and a disappointment. They would wince and nod and quickly change the subject and I would imagine and world in which this was actually true. In reality I didn’t know my father, and so I didn’t know if he was a tyrant or not.

“I don’t think I know who you are,” I said, in between gulps of coffee that were too hot. I had to do something with my hands. Raising the rim of the cup to my lips and burning my tongue was my only option.

“That’s a healthy perspective,” he said. “You don’t know who I am because we haven’t spent enough time together. I wish that I could tell you that that was going to change but it’s not. I’m just not that kind of guy. I’m a free spirit. You understand.”

I have a hard time relating to people that I know I am never going to see again. I don’t say “Thank you” to flight attendants after a flight because I rarely fly and I know that there are lots of flight attendants traversing the skies. I’m never going to see them again. Saying “Thank you” would seem disingenuous and it’s important to me that I be genuine. Or as genuine as possible. However, sitting there in that diner across from my dad, I had so many questions. I didn’t know where to begin so I picked one at random:

“When you go to a movie what kind of concession is your favorite?” I asked.

“Let’s not talk,” he said. “Let’s just sit here and enjoy this moment.”

“Okay,” I said, disappointed. I had really wanted to know. You can learn a lot about a person from what kind of candy or popcorn they would choose.

“You were a mistake,” he said, after a few minutes of us looking past one another. I was staring at the rotating pie and cake display case, trying not to cry. I don’t know what he was looking at. I thought about turning around but didn’t because I didn’t want him to wonder.

“You already said that,” I said.

“No I didn’t,” he said. “But I’m saying it now.”

There was a pause.

“But…” I said.

“That’s it,” he said. “I just wanted you to know.”

My father has retired from paleontology but is still a busy man. I don’t know exactly what it is that he does with his time but I can imagine that he is off doing great things. Otherwise he’d be here with me.

A few years after that lunch at that diner in Duluth he called me to tell me that my mother had passed away.

“I know,” I said. “I was with her in the hospital. She asked where you were. I told her that I didn’t know. She sighed and said that it didn’t matter. Then she died.”

“She’s right,” he said.

“You’re an asshole,” I said.

“I know you’re being emotional right now because your mother is dead,” he said. “But you’re right, too.” I hung up the phone. He tried calling back. I let it go to voicemail. He left a three second voice mail which was just the sound of him struggling to hang the phone up. I haven’t heard from him since. He didn’t call again and he doesn’t text.

I’m having a hard time now that both of my parents are gone. I no longer know what I am supposed to do. I no longer know who I am supposed to impress.

And It Was Good

Humans.

And in the end the only requirement given to the humans was to exist. They would have to exist no matter what until they could find a way to not exist any longer. This seemed like a lot and it was. After all, who wants an eternity of waking up, eating, masturbating and then sleeping? After a while it gets stale and your trash can is filled to the brim with containers from something the humans called Seamless and used tissues.

And yet there was nothing the humans could do to reverse course or to go back to the way that things were. Sure, some humans got tired of the wake up/eat/masturbate/sleep cycle and called it quits, but they were replaced by ten more humans because this is the way that it was set up. While one of those humans might see through the veil and observe the futility of their existence, the other nine would find something they called religion in words like “God” or “capitalism” or “achievement” or “power” or “money” and live out their normal and expected life cycles.

And the situation seemed dire and irreversible but then one of the humans discovered something they called “oil,” which was in the ground of the planet, and they decided to burn the oil. Burning the oil made the air around them hard to breathe, and so some of the humans were allowed to give up, and so they did, and it was good. And the other humans saw this and were jealous and thought that maybe if they could burn even more of the oil then it would make the air even harder to breathe. So they burned more of the oil and it made the air really hard to breath and also caused pain to a part of the human that was called “lungs” and the humans were excited and they leaped and jumped for joy and clutched at their lungs and coughed.

And pretty soon they had burned so much oil that the temperature of the plant began to rise and the humans knew immediately what this meant that they danced in the streets and threw parties and played music and had sex with one another. “Hooray,” all the humans said when they realized what they had done. “This will end the hideous lives we have of waking up and then eating and then masturbating and then sleeping. We have done it!” They all shook hands with one another and then they had more sex with one another and it was good.

And things were going well but then some other humans who lived in a country called The Entertainment Industry found out about the oil and the air and the rising temperature of the planet. These humans really liked to masturbate and so they were pissed and they began to yell at the humans who were burning the oil and it became a whole fucking thing. Luckily a lot of the oil had been burned and the humans had long since stayed up past midnight on a machine they called “The Doomsday Clock” and this meant that there was nothing that the humans who lived in The Entertainment Industry could do except to yell a whole bunch. They did yell a whole bunch but they eventually died out when they used up all the oxygen that The Entertainment Industry had. And it was good and the rest of the humans again jumped for joy.

And things progressed nicely for the humans and the temperature of the planet continued to rise which meant that more humans were allowed to prematurely give up on the wake up/eat/masturbate/sleep cycle in site-specific events that the humans called “genocide,” “flooding,” “food-shortages,” “terrorism,” “war,” and others. One day there were only a few humans left on the planet, and they wheezed their way through their cycles, clutching at their lungs, and they were jealous of those who had already been allowed to give up and they had dreams of what giving up would be like.

And then one day a woman human named Megan was the last of the humans stuck in the cycle and in one more day she would also be permitted to give up. She knew it was good but then she had a thought that maybe it wasn’t. Maybe all this had been a terrible mistake and maybe the wake up/eat/masturbate/sleep cycle that her parents had taught her was evil was actually good. Maybe her parents were wrong. Megan was concerned because she was questioning her previously held beliefs, which for humans was a painful, often times deadly, affliction and so with one final breath she cried out “And God Bless America!” and then she lay down and gave up. All was quiet. And all was good.

And the planet just sort of sat there, going about its business, until it was engulfed by the closest star.

And that’s all the information that we have. It’s insignificant.

Cars

I want to buy a car. I don’t need a car. I live in Brooklyn. I have no place to put a car but I want to buy a car because buying a car feels like the next step in becoming an adult and I am deeply in need of next steps.

I go home at Thanksgiving and I feel like a kid again and so I need to buy a car because kids don’t have cars of their own. (Older) kids drive their parents’ cars at the end of their time being kids, but kids don’t have car insurance. I want to have car insurance and I want to worry about alternate side parking and whether or not it is a holiday. I want to get tickets in the mail for running red lights and I want to get tickets in person for endangering the lives of pedestrians by turning through an occupied crosswalk.

I am a single person and have been a single person for most of my life which means that I have largely missed out on the whole adult thing of being in a relationship. I have lived with people but have never lived with a person who I have shared a bed with and so I am looking forward to owing a car. I want to be able to talk to my coworkers about how I have to drive out to Hempstead this weekend to get my snow tires put on before the weather gets too bad. I want to “have a guy” at a local repair shop that I go to whenever I need to get my car tested for emissions standards (or whatever it’s called). I want to have a way to get to Storm King because I’ve never been to Storm King.

A few years ago I was drinking with a friend of mine (Friend 1) at a dive bar off of the Jefferson L stop (you know the one). We were drinking like there was no tomorrow because at the rate we were drinking there would be no tomorrow. Friend 2 had spent all day on the set of a television show for a prominent streaming service (you know the one) and was not there for most of the imbibing session but had texted us hours ago saying he was “on the way.”

“Where the fuck is (Friend 2),” I said to Friend 1 on more than one occasion, shouting over Johnny Cash playing on the bar’s Spotify. Eventually Friend 2 texted: “Outside.” I generally consider myself to be a funny person, and I will even attempt to be fun if I’ve had several glasses of rail whiskey, and so rather than getting into the front seat of Friend 2’s car, I went around to the front and banged on the hood of his car. “WOOOOOO!”

“Scott, what the fuck are you doing?!” said Friend 2. “Get in the car. Seriously.” Friend 1 was laughing.

“Yeah, Scott,” I said to myself. “You are fucking funny. And fun”

I eventually did get in and a few blocks later got to understand what being fun and funny gets you: red and blue lights lit up in the rear view mirror and each of us had to take in that we were being pulled over. “You fucking serious?” said Friend 2. “God damn it.”

The police officer got out of his car and slowly sauntered towards us. Gotta love the NYPD and their stellar bedside manner (but also all three of us were white). “License and registration, please.” Friend 2 pulled out his license and got the registration from the glove compartment. “You been drinking tonight?”

“No,” said Friend 2.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” said Friend 2.

“You don’t need to use that tone with me, sir. I was just asking if you had been drinking.”

“Well, I haven’t,” said Friend 2.

“What were you doing out in front of a bar?”

“Picking up my friends. They’ve been drinking,” said Friend 2.

“Are you sure?”

“Am I sure about what?” said Friend 2.

“I’m asking the questions here, sir. Where are you headed.”

“My apartment,” said Friend 2.

“And where is that?”

“Bushwick,” said Friend 2.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! I think that I know where I live!” said Friend 2.

“You sure that you weren’t drinking?”

“Look, I’m being a good person,” said Friend 2. “I was being a good person. I just picked up my friends at a bar. That’s a good thing to do. I haven’t had a drop. If you wanna breathalyze me then go ahead.”

“Look, sir. I’ll decide what I’m gonna do here.” (Long pause.) “You’re free to go.”

“Thank you officer! Have a good night!” I said.

I want to buy a car so that I can pick my friends up at shitty bars in Bushwick and drive them home. I want to buy a car so that I can get harassed by the NYPD for having a car. I want to buy a car so that my friends will buy me a 6-pack of Lagunitas after I get harassed by the NYPD because one of them pounded on the roof of my car after coming out of a dive bar off of the Jefferson L stop.

I want to buy a car because I want to feel good about myself. Nothing else had made me feel good about myself. So maybe that will. I hope that that will because I’m 28 now and can’t think of anything else.

There's A Fire In Brooklyn

My mind plays tricks on me and I don’t know how to stop it. No, not the kinds of tricks that make me see things. At least not things in the present tense.

Yesterday afternoon I was hung out with a dear friend of mine in Brooklyn Bridge Park. We discussed a wide array of topics and it was a genuinely enjoyable experience. I was having a good time, but then came the helicopters and with them confirmation of abject misery. Of course, anyone that has visited Brooklyn Bridge Park will agree that its noisy, and most of its noise comes from a near constant overhead barrage of “thwap thwap thwap” of whirring helicopter blades. I would hypothesize that these mosquito-like machines serve a variety of different functions to the daily life of the tri-state area: wealthy wall street investors on their way to Laguardia or JFK; tourists intent upon taking in the sights of the city; the Coast Guard looking for the odd yacht in distress; the local (and perhaps national, if things get really bad) news rushing to the scene of a five alarm fire on (name of street redacted) in Brooklyn. My mind went immediately to this last option because my mind plays tricks on me and wants me to be miserable.

I was off yesterday and so I had risen late because I am (thankfully) finding it more and more enjoyable to sleep in. Maybe not “sleep,” but rather lay in bed and listen to WNYC on my iPhone 5S. (I have a radio but listening to the radio over the internet seems easier.) It was therefore close to 11:30am when I finally found my way to my desk. I was going to write morning pages (thanks, Julia Cameron) and thought it might be nice to light the scented candle that I had purchased one malaise-filled Sunday afternoon at the Target in downtown Brooklyn. I lit it. I wrote. It was pleasant, if not a little bit sickly scented. It began to get warm in my apartment, and so I took off my Patagonia jacket. I finished the pages and took a shower. I left my apartment at around 1:30pm and texted my friend that I was sorry but I was running late. It was raining and I did not have an umbrella.

I got to the restaurant and the thought hit me in the face and it would not go away and I could not stop thinking about it no matter how sure I was it wasn’t true: did I blow out the candle?

“Seriously, did I? I think I did. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did. It got warmer in the apartment and the smell was overwhelming, so I blew it out. But maybe I only took off my Patagonia jacket. Maybe I didn’t blow it out. I would have noticed it when I drew the curtains in my bedroom right before leaving. I would have noticed that little flicker of light and I would have blown it out. I would have done that. I’m not an idiot. This is just your anxiety talking, Scott. Giving in to your anxiety will only make the thoughts worse the next time around. There will be a next time around. Remember that day that you spent watching the news at work. It had rained the night before. You left your window open. The water seeped in and when you woke up to your soaked, heavy shades pulling your curtain rod down, none of the lights in your apartment would come on. You apologized to your sleepy roommate and said that you would fix the problem when you came back home.

“You watched the news intently all day, sure, after the next commercial break, they would pop back in to tell you about a five-alarm fire in Bushwick. All day, nothing. Maybe there were bigger news stories overshadowing your burned out home. On the way home you looked out the window of the M for the plume of smoke. Maybe the FDNY had already put it out. If there was no fire anymore, there’d of course be no more smoke. You rounded the corner of Irving Ave to see your apartment building still standing. You flipped the circuit breaker and the lights came back on. You celebrated with a Heineken from the local bodega. You don’t really like Heineken but it hit the spot.

“That’s what this is. All is well. You. Are. Fine.”

I wanted to be present and be with my friend, but I could not focus because the moment I finally got my mind off of the image of the candle, and on to other things, the fucking candle would be back again, its flames licking my bedroom wall, and again I would become lost in sirens and smoke and the urgent text from my landlord’s daughter telling me that the building was on fire and that the fire started in my apartment. In my bedroom. “The fucking lease says no candles!” It would be millions of dollars in damages when I was ultimately found to be at fault. My life would be over. Done. Might as well give up now.

Finding oneself trapped in an anxiety spiral is painful enough without when you are by yourself. It is ten times more painful when you are with someone. I like to believe (my therapist reminds me that I am often wrong) that I know what people are thinking, and I could see the thoughts clear as day in my friend’s mind: “Why is Scott acting so weird? What’s wrong? He must just be weird. I don’t want to hang out with him anymore. I’m going to find a way to nicely leave.” I know that these thoughts (like the towering inferno that was my apartment building) are wrong but anxiety has a way of breeding anxiety and once I get going I find it nearly impossible to stop. I did think about telling my friend what was going on in my head, but that would have lead to her either imploring me to just stop thinking about it (Therapist: “You think too much, Scott!”) or to cut our hang out short and to let me go back to my apartment to make sure. I didn’t tell her. I continued hanging out. But I still feel bad. I feel like I let her down.

I did feel better eventually but that was only after I walked around the corner of (name of street redacted) and (name of street redacted) and saw my apartment building very much intact and very much not on fire. Even then I was not completely satisfied, As I walked in through the front door, I told myself that I smelled smoke. I could hear water running somewhere. Maybe someone was taking a shower but perhaps the sprinklers on my floor were going off. Maybe the candle had just now burned long enough to reach my curtains. Maybe when I got to the very next landing I would encounter a cascade of water and then, finally, my life would be over.

That’s it. I like the smell of the scented candle that I bought at Target. I’m going to light it again. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure and blow it out.