Critical Observations

(Nu Couché)

In bed early last night, reading, writing emails. I hadn't felt very well from the late afternoon onwards. I thought that I had a stomach virus, had been warned that there was one going around. I dropped the boy off at his mom's house so that I could drive into the city early for work. She told me intestinal horror tales of locals that had been vomiting with diarrhea for days now. Not vomiting diarrhea, but vomiting and diarrhea. 

I went home convinced that I would be calling in sick to work today. 

But no, I awoke before my alarm and now I lie here in bed, reading emails, writing again. Waiting for my alarm to go off so that I can make my coffee and take a shower, then the drive into the city to work through the day. I will bring a change of clothes with me, just in case. It has been far too long since I've spent a night in the city. There are perhaps adventures to be had there. The likelihood is greater than what Sonoma offers. It has been a couple years since I have been to the SF Moma. Maybe an afternoon after work spent there is what is needed. 

Something to clear the heart of its echoes.

The painting above sold yesterday for $170.4 million. A staggering sum of money. It was bought by a former taxi driver who has since become an art collector, a man described by Bloomberg Business as "China's gaudiest billionaire." Well, there was the income from driving a taxi, then there was the stock trading, then the real estate and the pharmaceutical investments. Nothing quite screams like investing in art. While such a purchase titillates some it offers a spectrum of indignation for many. 

During a recent conversation in NYC I was chatting on the train to New Rochelle with a friend of a friend. He was relaying that pound for pound and foot by foot art is the most expensive real estate on the planet. He is in the business of underwriting insurance for art works. He confessed that he was not much of an art lover when he was younger, his wife was, but that he has had to learn much since. 

I asked him what he thought of insuring Basquiat's works and he rolled his eyes and chuckled. There is much fraud and few agreed-upon pedigrees when it comes to his work. The FBI considers Basquiat frauds to be nearly unstoppable as so few valid records exist. He was a notoriously prodigious painter and imitation of his works is so easy. The buying public has been less than discerning when it comes to the desire to own one, or many. That is, at least what the FBI found in their pursuit of art crime, a perfect storm of fraud. It is what is known as a victim rich environment, or perhaps a rich victim environment. Some pieces continue to climb in price while many others either stagnate or drop, or plummet upon discovery as a fake. 

But don't worry much, he's putting out new works every day now. I had read a piece not long ago about this. It was my opportunity to appear versed on the world of insuring art.

A few days ago I picked up a book by Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, and flipped through it a bit. A book perhaps worth re-reading. It saddens me that the social or more specialized critics that I have enjoyed reading in my life most have all passed away now; Robert Hughes, Jacques Barzun, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Lenny Bruce, maybe even Norman Mailer, etc. It is a sign of my age more than a comment upon the waning world. I can't think of a single living critic whose books I regularly read now. Perhaps Lawrence Osborne would be one, I guess, though I have lately enjoyed his novels, mostly. He would not be considered a critic by many, I would assume. He is more of a memoirist whose works offer critical observations. 

Critical observations, yes, that is what has been plaguing me. One does not escape them by making them.

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Resolution of conflict; compromise; absolution again

Self-reflection - most suffer too little or too much of it, at all times, save perhaps the moments of love, of open affection. The others are always somehow "doing it wrong." Startlingly, only the other half of the other can see it. Who else can possibly better help the object of your attention and affection other than you, so ideally suited for the job at hand? Or, so it must seem in this climate of perpetual therapy, and the building need for it. Relationships tend to pit ideas and abilities of self against one another, whether likable, lovable, or not. 

If you are of that temperament such that you must test yourself against others then you are always in trouble. Nothing quite defines a person like the challenges they offer. 

Asking somebody to accept you the way that you are, for the sake of the phrase, is quaint at best. Monstrous, at its recurring worst.

To lack forgiveness, in yourself or for another, only accelerates the rate at which two mirrors advance aggressively towards themselves, resulting not quite in a clean infinity loop, but an enormous sense of distorted feedback either way. Two funhouse mirrors discussing oddness of proportion. 

Then, there is denial, the killer of reflections, the painting-over-of, with an increasingly refined secret agenda.

I write these words with no malice or derision, though with much tender consideration. Had I written them any place other than here then some, or one, might just see it as an honest admission.

About whom, we'll never agree.

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Live at the Witch Trials

I await for the gym to open. Soon. I keep telling myself that I have recreated the habit of working out, but I know that it takes longer than a single week. Healthy habits tend to form more quickly than the non-healthy ones, though I'm not taking any chances. I'm going to try to go to the gym every day for two weeks and hope for the best after that, with a goal of five times a week. That is the regimen that is most likely to deliver happiness to my heart.

It is written in the tissue, announced by the beating. 

I have nothing to report on. I was at home and in bed sleeping early, perhaps before 8pm. I had stopped by the local pizza place and bought lasagna takeout. Then, there was the intention to watch something off of the computer in bed. I awoke around 11:30 pm and the computer was still there, but I had no memory of having watched anything. The lasagna was, of course, long gone.

The most exciting thing that I have planned today is to choose which album I'm going to listen to while at the gym. Yesterday was The Fall's "This Nation's Saving Grace." Today, maybe "Live at the Witch Trials" or some early Pere Ubu or Public Image Ltd. Post-punk works well for this purpose. Something to agitate me towards a state of excitation and exhaustion. Something to help the flow of blood through my heart. Something.

Maybe some Howlin' Wolf. 

 

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Ovulation Rising

The constituent parts of my body have voted almost unanimously against my return to the gym. Every region is sore, every motion a reminder. The eccrine sweat glands seem to be finally pushing out something that is closer to water, at least, less viscous than what was coming out a few days ago, which was a syrupy oozing of toxins. This must be a good thing.

Enough about me. Getting older is disgusting. I see it happening in others and it is no more attractive on them than it is in the mirror. In fact, it's usually much worse, so I know that somewhere deep in my heart I'm a fucking vain liar. I just keep telling myself that it's not all that bad, but I'm almost 50 now. The ride is two-third's over, if I'm lucky.

What next? 

I think I'm ready to have another child. I've been thinking about it lately. Once you have one, you know how to do that and you know that you can do it well, then it's not twice as much work to have another, I don't think. 

I haven't done any of the required research on this yet. None.

Perhaps I need to put a little more thought into this new initiative. The idea is a new one. The results of a sudden decision are much more lasting than is the idea.

I know that infants are like kid catnip for women, but things became much easier for me after the boy was about two years old. Maybe I should stop by Pet's Lifeline Animal Shelter first. A new pet might cure me of these silly notions.

Rhys' buddy spent the night over at my place the other night and watching how much fun he had because his little buddy was there seemed to flip a switch inside of me. I don't want my three year old to act like an adult, like me. I just want him to be a kid. That's all that I want to be also, a kid like him. 

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The other sort

(Billy Fox)

Well, the studies are in, and the results are what we suspected them to be: kids that are raised in religious homes are horrible little fucking monsters; cruel miniature rapists and animal abusers, to the very last one of them, especially the white ones. Though, that is perhaps me daring to read intelligently into the study, just a touch. I am seasoned with a dash of liberal guilt, you know.... Who really knows. What we do know is that religion has proven itself yet again to be a poison enema. A funnel for all things vile and wicked, where they coagulate to find their sick, murky, scabbing center.

Neither liberalism nor religion have stellar track when records compared to Facebook. 

I don't mind being the annoying atheist, at least not in here where we're all alone. I really don't. No one is being forced to read past this next punctuation point. <<< That one. I wouldn't say that atheism is exactly my cause, but I do think that religion is very dangerous and far from "basically good" as so many claim. Okay, agnosticism is my real jor para la vida, my joie de vivre, though the religious do irk and ideologically persecute me. There is something wrong with all of them, and yet I like that Christians are forced to admit this basic fact. It excites me, this aspect of their spiritual flaw. So, I can't fully ever let them go, heathen me.


National Geographic as all of us have known it is over, done. It was purchased by 21st Century Foxhole. Many people do not know that a fox's testicles remain inside the body even after they descend as part of the maturation process that we call puberty in human males. So, cunning is only one of their curious attributes. They are meant to have a lifespan of approximately five years, which is another interesting anomaly of the decision to use this symbol while avoiding its symbolism. The fox's reputation - stretching back well past Aesop the slave's fables - is mainly for their famed ability to evade hunters. As impervious to bullets as their namesake is to fact, it would seem.

Well, none of you come here to hear me pop off about conservatism in America and the death of every dream ever.

Some nights, when I can't sleep, I count furry Mexicans jumping over the imaginary, unbuilt wall. It is a lullaby to my mind in the way that macing hippies must be to the other sort.

Always, there is the other sort, as if only there for fun.

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"… all my favorite places, my city had been pulled down…

… I was stunned and amazed, my childhood memories…."

… and then there were the rains

There had been rain after a long period of none. For two days it had fallen lightly, consistently. First softening the earth, then leaving the earth saturated at the surface. There were no small floods, no sudden runoff as there can be when a downpour arrives after months of none. The ground seemed to receive what there was. Then the rains were gone.

It seems to be the season for it, though we have been trudging through a drought. One feels a shortage more and differently when cradled in an agricultural valley, one notices the rain when it arrives. There is that sense in the air and in people, the breath of relief, the subtle messaging that things are going to be okay, or getting better at the least.

Next arrives the seasonal depression, the winter mistral. The heater in my apartment has been turning on and off for two days. The temperature has dropped past the agreed upon threshold. The click of it has informed me of the changes arriving. My body jumps in response. My body jumps at the sound of this machine in the closet. It has come to life. This life.

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"… to you it's Thanksgiving, to me it's Thursday"

I went back to the gym yesterday after many lost months; cardio and some circuit weights. Forty-seven minutes, to match my newly acquired age. I pushed, but I did not suffer much for the pushing. 

I awoke tender in the morning.

I was searching for the elusive eye of the liger, like Rocky's lazy one. Some do not know or care that the left side of his face is melting because of an accident at birth, a simple mistake which left him partially paralyzed. But he overcame all of those obstacles and found a way to be sued by his maids and the hotels that he is a patron of for having a runaway feces obsession.

Crazy ol' Sly…. The hired help will always try to get your money when your middle name is Garbanzo.

I intend to go to the gym again today after work. I am desperate to rekindle my former habits, and dispense of my present ones. Though, after a conversation with CS this morning I think that I will focus more on cardio than I had been. I am getting to the age where I can start to hurt myself my trying to maintain the weights as I have in the past. I am trying to learn from his mistakes, since he patently refuses to learn from mine.

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For Whom the Clock Ticks

An extra hour of sleep for whom? The return of the clock's far left digit to its rightful position on the microwave only provides an extra hour of sleep for those who can do so. I awoke at Zero O'Clock, as is my yearly custom. My body's timepiece is tethered to th' inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb… My sleep patterns are of a deeply menstrual nature. I awake with one extra hour of moody misery, responding first and sometimes only to the name Venus Bloatpipe… At least that is the case when Daylight Savings falls the morning after the Halloween pill.

The evening went off as one might expect. There is a surplus of candy in the house. I hid it last night when we arrived and the boy has not yet asked for it. I do not suspect that it has escaped his mind in any permanent or meaningful way.

Nope, correct that. He just spoke with Mom on Facetime and she reminded him of the prodigious haul from last night's spooking, the sugar booty. We'll be feasting on processed sugars soon enough.

It is a treat to watch kids be kids on a night like that. Nothing lasts, but much of it recurs. Some happiness seems to be associated with accepting part of that and then avoiding the other. Sort of.

After doing our fair share of begging from door to door we were on the drive home when we saw a ghost carnival at a local church. The excited boy only had to request once and I was parking the car. We must have been on the guest list. Within minutes of being there we had won a raffle and the boy had mastered the bouncy-slide castle.

The kid was in Bat Heaven, and I was not far behind:

The boy's best friend, Jordan, had a pretty grand old time also… He was buzzin':

The youth even managed a costume change:

As did the boy's dad:

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Luck favors the propertied

I'm not even sure I know what Halloween is. I know it's my favorite holiday (Is it even a holiday?). It's the most honest day of the year. It's part of why people got to Burning Man. I'm sure of it. When the boy asked me to explain Burning Man to him he excitedly pleaded with me to let him go, and perhaps I will take him one year, but the idea of me getting dressed up in costumes was an enduring and exciting one for him.

I'll do that again tonight. He has enjoyed having all the scarves and beads out around the apartment. Tonight, I will put on some stockings and super-hero short-shorts with my Himalayan jacket and silk blouse. I found my white wig from a few year's back, so that'll keep me warm. Not sure how late I'll be out with a three year old, but you never know. It is best to be prepared.

Being back at home is somehow centering this time. I suppose that I have begun to settle in here. The management for the apartment complex will probably trick me into signing another year's lease. Moving here was probably a mistake for reasons I've already gone into, but moving away is an enormous undertaking, and one that will negatively impact the boy. Or, that is my assumption, anyway. I see why people buy homes. It must feel nice to always know where your problems are.

Mostly, I look at the accumulation of nonsense around me and do not wish to move it all again. Each time that I am tasked with moving then parts of me disappear. 

The boy just asked me how it can possibly be Halloween when it's light outside. I told him that it'll be darker tonight when we go trick-or-treating. 

The boy said, Daddy, the sun has made a mistake today.

It sure has, it wouldn't be the first time, either.

The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted 

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

- Wallace Stevens

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Happy Birthday Dear Daddy

Finally, home again. I arrived in Sonoma late last night, awoke early to work all day then went to dinner with what once was my family, what would have been, were it not for the succession of disasters. We sat and talked mostly of things that concerned the boy, meetings with his teachers on Monday. It was both strange and quite natural. I could imagine few other ways for it to be, though once I could never imagine it being as it is now. We have so little interest in each other's lives beyond the perfunctoriness of parenting.

This is not to say that we carry out our parenting with the minimum of effort, but rather we seek little counsel with one another concerning its perpetual unfolding. We relay humorous stories and anecdotes meant to suggest behavioral developments, and then some genuine concerns here and there.

They sang me a version of the Happy Birthday song that was unrecognizable in melody, tempo, key, and orchestrated vocal timing, though it was nonetheless charming, touching. My son helped me blow out the lone candle that lit the Tahitian vanilla bean gelato. He then helped me to eat it all up with a spoon, claiming that he loves ice cream even more than I. A fatuous claim if ever there was one.

On the drive home with the boy I wondered aloud about things.


Love is improbable, if not impossible, almost always deeply problematic. It is its own paradox, expecting time to function in a way that it can not, will not, for very long. It asks of each moment to lie, to show mercy, and to look the other way, all at once.

And yet magically sometimes it does.

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… the body sways

how crazed, this heart, other

the mind, deserving of pity, 

so much 

wantful, the body

sways

how does it all

in this city, or any

yet another stay

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The remnants of Patricia

Jesus, I fucked up. 

I did not anticipate residual hurricane rain on my day wandering around NYC. Now, I sit in Starbucks looking at my options, none of which seem very appealing, most of which involve me doing things I don't want to do with expensive camera gear and a work computer strapped mainly unprotected to my back. After having left NYC I never thought that I would relish having a car, but I wish I had one now, and I'm not quite sure why, nor what I would do with it. I just don't want to feel like a beaten water rat wandering the gutters of this city.

When I first moved to NYC I was told by a small handful of people that it takes living here about seven years before you become a "real" New Yorker. I reminded one of my friends of that claim this morning and he had no memory of it, though we both agreed that it sounded about right. Few San Franciscans make such claims and the term "San Franner" does not have the same connotative ring to it, nor does "Franciscan" though I wish desperately that it did, if only for the common Catholic perversions. The old vanguard there in SF is a curmudgeonly lot. The world is changing around them with a greater and more definitive swiftness, and few take those changes as improvements. New York has a way of saying, "Fuck your idea of New York..." as the starting point of negotiations.

My NY is gone and perhaps only I care. The friends with whom I normally stay have moved elsewhere, as have several others, and I now sit in this coffee factory using their free wi-fi, plotting my avoidance of the inevitable downpour. I stepped out of my comfort zone in one way, so part of me embraced it in another.

To wit, I had breakfast the The Coffee Shop in Union Square this morning. The man that does the hiring of the waitresses there has a distinct "type" which seems to exist just beyond the erotic border, though noticing it somehow seems equal to it, or perhaps that is the very intention of it. One gets the impression he gives explicit instruction on how his waitresses are meant to present themselves.

It's a good thing that CS cancelled his trip here, because he would be watching me drink his whiskey in his hotel room right now otherwise, a thing that he has done in the past with intermittent success. 

Well, I suppose I could shit myself and wait for them to kick me out of here. That option is still and always available to me. It seems a popular one and they have braced themselves for it.

I am semi-exhausted and trying desperately to keep a lunch date with Wonder Woman. Balthazar, Soho.

I want a taxi that anticipates my needs, ignoring the needs of all others. I want a city that bows to my whims, though not too much. I want to be wowed by it. I want to have some awe for it. I suppose that wealth confers those things to some degree, education or knowledge in others, aesthetic sensibilities in yet others.

Where does one accrue such things, in such a place, trapped soon in the rain.

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Chased by imaginings

To have sleep issues at home is one set of struggles, to have them elsewhere is just the same. Why does it somehow feel so much worse. I am sitting up, wide awake at my friend's house, reading articles about seaweed that has been found that tastes like fried bacon, or so goes the claim. I will go into the city today and make a waking adventure of it. Having only slept a couple of hours I have no idea what sort it will be. We shall see, I suppose. I am meeting a woman for lunch. I have been practicing conversations in my mind. Normally, that puts me right to sleep... I don't understand it.

I have dinner plans later on, and then will pray to the wooden idols and river icons for solid sleep sometime tomorrow night. Thursday is an all-day work day, then the long flight home, then work again, then the Halloween weekend with the boy. What a mess. I am tempted to call everything off and find a welcome couch somewhere and a dark shirt to cover my eyes. Domestic cats really do have it made. 

Well, there is still an hour before my alarm will go off to alert me to the remainder of the day. 

I should toss around a bit in semi-lucid anticipation of its arrival.

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At least my heart's in the wrong place

The World Series starts tonight, of course. I will meet a friend after work at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, the back bar where he has friends that tend bar. From there we will take the train to New Rochelle where we will settle in to the living room to watch The Mets take game one, in Kansas City. Steaks were mentioned, perhaps whiskey. 

I like the Royals but I want to be able to rub it in the faces of all those dismissive Giants haters from last year that they're not as good as many have claimed, nor is their bench as deep as was previously claimed. A Mets victory would accomplish that modest task. Also, it's NY… What hapless rube would ever get behind Missouri in a time such as this…?

Neither team has won The Series since the mid 80's. That makes for great sports arguments for men my age and above.

That is my sport's update. I'm still a sucker for post-season baseball. For me, it's like The World Cup without all of the fun online racism.

Tonight, Facebook will be like playing a text-based video game. A giant first-person-shooter POV.

I'm not a gamer. I probably shouldn't throw their terms around. I run the risk of further confusing my readers. 

If the Mets don't win then I'll return to San Francisco on Thursday night.

I give my word.

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"Nihilism is best done by professionals"

Ugh. Why do I keep doing work vacations in NYC? I've been here almost a week and have few experiences to show for the time spent. I suppose things could be worse. I could be sitting in my apartment in Sonoma, working. 

Last night's birthday dinner was festive and fun. There was only one person missing. We had great Greek meat and sauce offerings with white and red wine and when the bill came nobody winced. I highly recommend the place, Kiki's.

Afterwards, we went to a local, familiar bar that had some insane drink special, shots of liquor with PBRs for $3. I had two and was complete.

All in all, it was uneventful. Groups of two waiting in line for the bathrooms. 

I went back to my friend's house and wrote an email that I had hoped would somehow make things better, though I do not know what could be improved now. Most of all there is someone that I did not wish to feel unloved by me. It took me a few pages to say something like that. I think that's what I said.

Now, I sit and wait to pack my bags up once again and head off to Brooklyn for another dinner in another apartment. Then, upstate tomorrow for another dinner and the first game of the World Series.

Wednesday, that will be my last real day to do as I please. I have taken the day off from work, had hoped to spend it with the missing dinner attendee. It does not look as if that will happen now. We've verified with one another that preventative plans were made in the interim. 

That's how it happens, what was once available time becomes time in which plans were made. The conversations that each might have hoped for drift up and away into the great never unhappened.

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The OK-47

00101111. An ugly number if ever there was one. XLVII. It'll be six years before I hit another prime, if I'm lucky. I have always been in fear of dying on a natural prime. It seems a jinxed thing to do, having only one and your own age as divisors… and 47 is also the very unlucky 13th supersingular prime. So, there is that.

It is the number of degrees which separate the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

I have completed my Mesopotamian Mars journey through the stars now. The planet has returned to its same position among the stars as it was when I was born, and has re-assumed the same relationship to the Sun and the Earth, for those who have any interest in such things, or apply special meaning to them once they do develop such an interest. Scorpio Iscariot, etc.

The above passages highlight the dangers of the internet, and wikipedia in particular.

I awoke late to the peace that is Woodstock. I will go on a hike this morning with the kids and the dog and my friends. It has been pleasant to awake here at the house with them. There is much to be said for it and I don't do enough of it. We will have a slow day, then a drive back into the chaos of NYC, a birthday dinner at a Greek place. I am looking forward to it, though a part of me always does not. For all of the partying that I have done in life I still become uneasy among groups of people, even friends.  It is the sense of a storm passing through.  I do not crave calm, but neither do I do well in the winds. 

I took a few pictures of the kids yesterday:

Ah, nostalgia… the unsilent nuisance.

For more sentimental remembrance, here I was on my lucky 35th birthday in Brooklyn:

The camera blinked, we were at midtown:

(Historical photos courtesy of the CS NYC foundation)

Things change.

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Early Onset Forgetfulness

(Penny)

Arrived in Tribeca uneventfully. It never feels as if there is enough time to spend with each person. I left the Upper East Side yesterday before being able to properly say goodbye to my friend. I had hoped to sit and have a beer and chat with him before darting to the southern heart of the city, and now off to Woodstock where we are meant to relax. 

We return tomorrow for my birthday dinner where my friends will sit together and eat Greek cuisine and hopefully not tell comically shameful stories of my past. There are so many from the present that I prefer not to encourage too much indulging in the fertile layers of past ignominy.

I lapsed into a brief explanation of who was at Burning Man this year to the friend that I was there camping with, reminding myself and him how quickly and without incident the mind becomes something laughable, something aged without improvement, more like a bottle of wine left open to the air than one that was well cared for. Aging is like drinking vinegar, then being told that it is something else and not being sure if you're being lied to or not. 

What happened to the man who had once been young….

I awoke late, having slept in the kid's bed in a back room where light does not dictate the body's patterns nearly as much, already missing somebody to care about. 

Missing is not quite caring for, just as love is not loving. Part of what the heart wants most is the warm embrace of a familiar voice on the other end, the sound of being loved. 

Without that, well, the World Series does start on Tuesday night. 

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Celebration, etc.

Well, only one night in the Upper East Side. Tonight, I head to Tribeca, Woodstock tomorrow. There is a birthday dinner on Sunday night back here in the city. 

I am trying to work today but am distracted, bothered, having to force myself to ignore my own inner voice. Things change. I feel as if I've had the wind knocked out of me, again. This time by choice. The reason that I came to NYC has collapsed at the center. Hurtful words were exchanged, by what seemed like necessity, some critical impulse that haunts certain people. When it can not prevent happiness it makes sure to arrive quickly and do whatever damage can be done. 

The few apologies there were between us have now evaporated. Whatever it was we had hoped to prove, well, I suppose we did.

Part of me just wishes to go home. The feeling of being remote is unsettling. 

No. Nothing lasts, things change, so why whine about it.

Cato texted and asked me about the location of a birthday party, my 40th, we had here in the East Village. It is hard to believe that it was seven years ago now. Rachel and I were not talking, or that phase had just begun. It was over between us, or so I had thought. I remember telling her that I did not want her there. You know, the type thing you go out of your way to tell a person you loved. We were married six months later.

Things change.

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"People tell me it's a sin…"

Nothing lasts. 

The New York that I was familiar with is already gone forever, though its replacement does include some marginal improvements. I won't have time to enjoy many of those additions, this being a work vacation. I was able to go the The Met yesterday and had lunch in the back cafe, which was nice. I broke my glasses on the rooftop when I leaned in to give the woman I was with a kiss. I heard the "click" sound which turned out to be more of a snap.

Pure grace, none of which escaped my date. She is beautiful and tender and I have many feelings for her, some of which do not appear to have a chance of lasting much longer. The shape of our relationship is changing underneath us. We each seem to understand different causes for it. It saddens me deeply, and for now, beyond any words that I might offer. 

We sat briefly on the steps and listened to an opera singer where there are famously favorable acoustics. It was delightful, and the singer had tremendous range and control. A New York moment if ever there was one. Though I detest such provincial descriptions, there are some experiences that qualify as uniquely NYC.

The Oak Bar is closed and only opens now for special events, a thing for which we did not qualify. The Boat House was charming, though I should really stop visiting the same places over and over each time I return to visit. I am missing the point a bit, and am always in danger of over-romanticizing, which invariably leads to disappointment.

I shifted secret locations from Bushwick to the Upper East Side today. I sit now at the house of a couple who are good friends to the underground cause. True comrades. Their dog, a familiar basset hound, is offering me all the love that I currently need. A genuine charmer. They once had two, but sadly one of them passed away, so I am giving double attention to the survivor, Penny.

Tonight, we will watch football. Seahawks and 49ers. I like both teams but must cheer for the 49ers publicly. In truth, I only ever hope for a good game and only care about which team wins towards the end of the season or in the final game, the Super One. 

I'm not much of a fan of American football, though I am forced to hold those thoughts privately. People already have reason enough to mistrust me. After all, I write almost daily and publicly, which is a way of practicing how to openly lie about the truth.

I wish there were words or some action that would change things. If only wishing were the magical incantation that it feels that it is and must always be. 

If only. If only. If only.

Being John Cusack

Very little time to write today. I stayed up much later than normal last night watching Being John Malkovich with a friend. I gravitate towards films that deal with the subject of persona, and the sources from where it is derived. It had been a while since I had seen the film and I excitedly picked up on, and then insisted on commenting upon, several new lines. I'm certain I was being tedious. 

It's part of my persona.

New York City awaits. We will go to breakfast at The Coffee Shop in Union Square, then we're off to the museums uptown and perhaps a walk through Central Park. There is a cafe on the backside of The Met where the western wall that faces the park is angled glass from floor to ceiling, letting in generous portions of the day, usually for good rather than for overcast ill. 

It allows a view of the park where an ancient Egyptian obelisk, colloquially known as Cleopatra's Needle, stands. If my memory holds it is three thousand years old or more. A stone phallus from the past to help you enjoy your tuna salad.

We will take some lunch there, sipping white wine and suffering my opinions on art. 

I wish to stay in bed longer, to enjoy the best part of having a day off: lying still and relishing the feeling that nothing at all that must be done. Hearing only the voice inside one's own mind that tussle with the unfamiliar sense of freedom to do only as one wishes.

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