it is snowing upside the windows in large curling drifts.

love and elation follow crisis and need. again and again.

the heart is a moebius strip.

This is what i did yesterday.

Work from 6-1. Lunch with L from 1-3. Scanned two dozen slides from my cross-country trip. Went out for Mexican food with K. Had a single solitary margarita. Got drunk. Went to a large Barnes & Noble, leafed through some magazines on creative writing (booo) photo editing and a collection of photographs from Life magazine. Went home to my temporary home. Watched four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. wrote this post:

“Reach out and touch someone”

there must be a better word for it. infatuation sounds so petty, wonder sounds so bland, everything being alight sounds so New Age i want to put on Yanni and aroma-euthanize myself.

but anytime everything’s on fire and you beg for someone to just acknowledge that it is so, and no one seems to have an inkling of what it is you’re on about or what you want from them (do i?), well apart from certain expletives born of frustration, that good old AT&T slogan comes to mind.

Then I went to bed.

How did any of that lead to me dreaming about a couple of quarreling lesbian train conductors who abandon me at the control post of a speeding train just when the tracks suddenly become so much entwined and diverging spaghetti? And when i finally take a wrong fork in the track and bring the train to a grinding halt, the chief lesbian conductor comes out and screams at me and then proceeds to make out with me, or rather, chew on my lower lip in a very unrelenting way.

How then did the dream segue into me being part of some extreme family gang lead by my father, with members ranging from my brother to other cousins, and us killing at least five people in gruesome ways and having the cops show up the second we do away with our last victim, in the filthy laundry room of our house which incidentally has an open screen door that the cops simply sidle up to as we go about our murderous business?

is it the tequila? or the salsa? a combination of both? the carrot cake i had yesterday afternoon?

Or was it all about, um… finality?

four weeks till i board a plane and return to Geneva.

it can’t be a literal return, i am not the same, i will be -must be- different there or it will be like i’d never left, a return as opposed to a move forward.

four weeks is such a short time that i am suddenly panicked, not by all i still wish to do or accomplish, panicked at the end of limbo, this suspended state of flux where all is up in the air, potential, possible, within reach. the fact that my grasp consistently exceeds my reach tells me my one great talent lies in being nowhere. minor accomplishments and minor setbacks.

chassez le naturel, il revient au galop goes the old adage. Fight your natural inclination, it will come charging back.

fine.

the attention span of a four year-old, interested in the chase, but not knowing what to do with the prey once it’s in my grasp.

*****

what i want to understand now is when everything is. today a sudden change in the weather and i find myself thinking of my visit with D in Birmingham, the first time i tasted salt and vinegar chips, the way the air smelled and the color of the light, and it is all right now, except i was nineteen, and it was eleven years ago.

now that i have so successfully taken down the support beams, taken everything apart, it all collapses in on itself, telescoping in random ways, then is now is later. and it all makes sense in a self-referencing way, if not held up to outside indicators of where it -where i- should be.

in the corner of the living room stands a steam radiator. the floorboards around it creak, but if you follow along the wall the third board is swollen with the heat and therefore silent. when i sit there immobile and put my ear to the wall, i hear her. and if not her then the potential of her. she will make a sound. and this constant suspense and validation is proof in small increments that the universe exists

like a boundary testing child, i prod and prod and prod and poke and pinch and pull and push and prod and prod till finally it falls apart, comes undone, unravels, snaps, keels over, crumbles, deflates, breaks, screams, gets up and leaves.

such is curiosity coupled with the fact that the observer influences the observed, that knowing excludes being, and vice versa. To understand a thing, to lay bare it’s inner workings, is to dispel whatever magic or appeal that thing may have.

but at least then you know.

am i sitting on the floor in an empty apartment watching tv in my hula-dancer motif orange boxer shorts after finishing a thing of hummus, a jar of olives, half a cucumber peeled with a steak knife, and two dozen teency weeency cherry tomatoes, washed down with a frozen chocolate-covered Entenmann donut? Is M back in Geneva while i stay on for a few weeks living with my cousin?

yes to both.

when desire and compulsion focus on the same object it renders the evitable in.

like water on ice
i watch everything recede
till the constant motion of this overcrowded
street settles into minor oscillation
no longer hurting and hurtling in jumps and
spurts but flowing
ever so slowly.

New York
Avon, CT
Niagara Falls, NY
Cleveland, OH
Chicago, IL
Sylvis, IL
Des Moines, IA
Omaha, NE
Alliance, NE
Hill City, SD
Buffalo, WY
Cody, WY
Yellowstone, WY
Grand Teton, WY
Jackson Hole, WY
Salt Lake City, UT
Glendale, UT
Las Vegas, NV
Los Angeles, CA
Malibu, CA
Santa Barbara, CA
San Luis Obispo, CA
Santa Cruz, CA
San Francisco, CA
New York
Geneva, Switzerland
New York
Bangkok, THAILAND
Ayuthya, T.
Pithsanulok, T.
Sukhothai, T.
Chiang Mai, T.
Chiang Khong, T.
Huai Xai, LAOS
Pakbeng, L.
Luang Prabang, L.
Hanoi, VIETNAM
Sapa, V.
Hanoi, V.
Halong Bay, V.
Hanoi, V.
Hoi An, V.
Saigon, V.
Chau Doc, V.
Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA
Siem Reap, C.
and another two weeks to go…

So this Sunday, we’re leaving for a wee little cross-country drive.

back on June 27th.

this is aproximately the planned route: here

though that doesn’t take into account possible changes related to two weeks of camping in rain and hail and, possibly, snow (-5 degrees Celsius in Yellowstone in the morning lately…)

we may very well end up in New Mexico before June 10th…

of course, seeing as how we have no real prior camping experience, we may very well end up ditching the tent and sleeping bags by June 1st and motelling it all the way…

anyway. see y’all in a bit.

My parents once owned a cat named Pomerantz, some time in the late sixties. I was reminded of this by a client walking in this morning and asking for someone with that name. The cat was mangy and had worms and died within three weeks of them rescuing him from the shelter. He was a large orange tabby. I’ve never actually seen pictures of him, but this is the way he was described to me. Or rather, I think this is the way he was described to me. It is possible that the name Pomerantz simply evoked in me the image of a large orange tabby cat. A childhood is a collage of pictures and stories and strange correlations, links that aren’t there, arrows drawn between this and that, conclusions arrived at and values established, a history constructed by way of accretion. Silty deposits, churned and stirred till solidified. Calcified walls easily pierced when tested for durability and a sound basis in fact. Did this person say that. Was this then. Did that happen. Was that really why. We had a striped orange couch, still now in my father’s apartment. It too looks like Pomerantz the cat, or rather he it. Alternating orange and tan, with fine persian green filigree.

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, as quoted in New York Vertical, by Horst Hamann)

There are no certainties, only the infinite preexisting variables that, as they enter your ever expanding sphere of awareness render the previous equation incomplete, erroneous or irrelevant, and in any case change the end result, so that there is no definitive right, wrong or moral answer to anything that will hold up to the test of time. How then to move forward from building block to building block with the foreknowledge that you will soon enough disregard all that came before?

My first stop was the restroom, in back. Waiting there was a man not dissimilar in physical appearance to a latter-day Burroughs. He was thin and his skin was taught and crusting in places. Several sores on his hands and lips and his yellow stare, as well as the way he kept twitching, added to the general sense that his business in there would be too long to make it worth my while to wait. I got on line instead and spent my five minute wait-time in the usual funk of despair that deciding what the best course of action re: ordering food would be. After dealing with the confused look of the woman who tried twice to hand me a dozen ketchups when all i wanted was one, I looked for a seat. Downstairs the air had been rebreathed so many times i felt faint and so returned to the front where someone had vacated a table in the interim. I ate and held my paperback open with one hand, which never fails to develop into a painful hand-cramp. On my left sat a couple of Asian women and it struck me again that in this city one can never take anyone’s origins or linguistic abilities for granted. I expected them to not speak a word of Enlish, as do most tourists circa Union Square at 3pm on a weekday, but they spoke perfect SoCal. In front of me was a young woman, in her twenties, eating, talking on the phone and rocking her large baby carriage back and forth. When she was not on the phone she alternated cooing at her baby and trying to coax it into drinking from its bottle. We got up to leave at the same time and i followed her to the wastebasket to dump my platter, and then to the door. The first of the two doors opened outwards so i akwardly tried holding the door open for her with one arm as she wrestled with the carriage. She didn’t thank me but instead kept talking to her baby, so i figured i’d let her struggle with the second door on her own. She swung the carriage around so as to be able to back out the door, and looking down at her baby, i discovered she had been talking to and trying to feed a large plastic doll.

an hour a day i glare at myself reflected in the subway glass. I am menacing, now sincere, now sly, now kind, i study myself intently and i know i see nothing.

i move like an imperiled dancer, smooth and flowing, yet my sense of balance flawed. I misjudge openings, forgetting to allow for limbs, shoulders; when calculating width, i omit to factor myself into the space i inhabit.

the man across from me sits calmly in a taut gray gabardine suit whispering to himself. After a time he closes his eyes and rocks his head back, a faint smile on his lips, tasting something of the divine.

the glass is tinted darker and so it is ghostly that i gaze, thinking penumbra suits contemplation, the eyes the only thing remaining unchanged.

wolves in sheep’s clothing,
people on the train,
everyone knows you’re not one of the pack.

dystopic

I wanted to do a lot more with this. I have about two pages of mixing notes and tracking ideas. There’s a middle section I wanted to put in. But it ended up sitting there untouched and calcifying for a few weeks, and now going back to it would be like rebreaking a limb that has set wrong. So here it is, as is.

There are laws that govern everything.

A watched pot never boils. Toast falls buttered side down.

There is Murphy’s law, though i have renounced my belief in it, because it is used as a blanket excuse and because it is in fact a restatement in layman’s terms of the second law of thermodynamics.

Stand on the edge of a precipice long enough and you will fall. A loose screw gets ever looser. Things crop up and occurences occur.

But there are other rules that one can only formulate through empirical observation. They are the Additional Laws.

a) when entering an unfamiliar restaurant and checking for any of those burning or frying smells that will render your clothes unwearable, said smell will only emanate from the kitchen halfway through your meal, when you can no longer escape.

b) when consulting the schedule for the shuttle train that will take you from Prospect Place to the Franklin Avenue or Botanic Gardens stop, it is irrelevant whether you leave home early or late as it will always go by just as you are approaching the station.

c.1) when shopping for clothes, the last shirt in the size and color you want will have a permanent stain and/or other defect.

c.2) said defect will be located in the center of the shirt.

d) no matter how long you wait or blow on a spoonful of tomato sauce before tasting it, you will scald your tongue in such a way that the enjoyment of the following meal will be greatly diminished.

e) no matter how carefully you turn over in bed, the amount of lower leg you uncover is inversely proportional to the temperature in your bedroom.

f) the laundromat god is equanimous in its exigencies. It will always demand the offering of one single sock. No more, no less.

g) if a bagel is served properly toasted it will contain too much cream cheese.

h) if a bagel is served with the proper amount of creem cheese, they will have omitted to toast it.

i.1) seek not to trim thy sideburns to an equal length. This is vanity and delusion. Anything under a full centimetre difference is acceptable.

i.2) try and you will end up with no sideburns at all.

j) the number of locks of untamable hair that spring up on your head is proportional to the importance of the event you are preparing for.

k) independently of the fullness of the flight, a colicky baby or hyperactive child will be seated directly in front/behind/or next to you.

l) one of your shoes will be laced too tight.

m) the degree of your sneezing fit and/or runny nose will be in inverse proportion to the number of tissues you have with you.

n) no matter how careful and deliberate your movements when going from a standing to a sitting position and vice-versa, your headphone cable will snag on some invisible part of your anatomy or clothing and tear the earbuds from your ears.

o) the proximity at which an attractive member of the opposite sex speaks to you is proportional to the quantity of garlic in your last meal.

and last but not least,

p) if totally alone on an elevator, the pungency of your fart will be proportional to the beauty, sophistication and delicate sense of smell of the people entering on the next floor.

They have installed a huge concave disc in front of Rockefeller Center. Though this was taken on the other side of it.

October 18th. The Theater at Madison Square Garden. Beck. Puppeteers on stage during the whole show pulling the strings of Beck and Co. puppets that were then projected on big screen in lieu of the usual posturing rock stars.

October 24th. The Met. Madame Butterfly. Bunraku puppeteers on stage during most of the opera.

Hmmm. I sense a theme developing.

Coming soon: Puppets In Government.

Oh, wait a minute…

I’ve started using google calendar. And it makes me wonder what is passing me by. In the demo pictures, people have all sorts of appointments and luncheons and dinner dates in yellow and green and orange, their days brimming with neatly sectioned timeslots of colorful activity.

I have two concerts in my calendar. One on the 18th of October, one on the somethingth of November. A few birthdays to remember. So i ask myself, is my life empty? Or turning that upside down, could it be more full? And really, is it just that i wish my days were sectioned into multitasking rainbows of streamlined time, more for the colors and the fun of juggling little appointment rectangles around the calendar than out of necessity?

I was tensed around my life like an octopus holding a heart dearly. Every tentacle petrified and numb from the strength of the squeeze. But as ties are severed or loosed i find myself in increments relaxed, floating, touching on things here and there but nothing that can’t be jettisoned at a moment’s notice and move on. And so also is it easier to be knocked from my rock, unanchored by any shock small or large that sends me reeling rudderless, waiting to wash up against a rock anew and slowly settle, till the next tide carries me or tears me away.

I see the gas dancing along the neon tube above the front desk. I feel the place in my little finger that is split, was bleeding an hour ago. I feel the pressure of the band aid. I like my navy blue short-sleeved shirt. I feel alright when i wear it. I like Exile on Main Street. I like the tempura udon that the Japanese place i cannot locate on a map for having only ordered delivery from delivers. It is comforting. I like the Ikea table and bed we assembled yesterday.

I approach assembling Ikea furniture with the same reverence once reserved for Lego. Back when it would be a whole afternoon thing, take no calls, don’t answer the door, kick my little brother out of the room.

First, prepare. Set the settings. Gather the tools. Clear the workspace, be it kitchen or bathroom or bedroom floor. Isolate yourself and meditate. Perhaps offer up a silent prayer that this will not be one of the 50% of Ikea pieces that come pre-damaged or defective. When anticipation is balanced by your sense of focus and readiness, kneel and open the box. Slowly, slowly, forcing yourself to slowness, find the instructions. Stop. Do not go straight to step one, do not collect 200 Kronor. Do not rush anything. Remember that screw you snapped, that board you cracked, that wood you scratched. Slowly. First, verify that all required pieces are present. Count screws and bolts and locate whatever symbiotic tool designed for one single specific screw or bolt comes with the piece. Vacuum out the holes left full of sawdust. Read the manual once through, visualizing the sequence of events. Now, at last, you are ready. In one fluid series of movements, assemble your Lego monorail or Mella table or Malm bed or Ramberg bedside thingy. Lose yourself in the alignment of the legs, the symmetry of screws, going from one to the next, tighten, adjust, tighten, adjust. Stand back and admire your handiwork. Bask in the glow of your new home, all bright white and dark wood. Is there such a thing as catalogue kitsch?

There is always a slight comedown when it is complete. A sadness at it being over so soon, an urge to go out and buy more bookshelves, more hampers, more lights and coatracks and shoeracks and that orange fuzzy thing you’re not sure is a carpet or a doily. Or maybe just move again so you can start over… Post assembly, animal triste.

is the recurring self-moralizing litany that repeats itself if i feel i’m losing my grip for lack of sleep, having moved house directly after getting off the plane from the funeral in Moline, Illinois; or having left my wallet on a train the day i got the news about Eddie; or if i feel worried about the future; or if i get a papercut.

There is much to be said in the wake (no pun intended) of last week’s event. I’ve scribbled a lot, and i’d like to put it up here, but …

and above is a prime example of the reprioritization (that word, though functional, definitely needs to go) that has occured. I wanted to say eventS, plural, but really, what qualifies as an event?

i could talk about the dual components of grief -loss and sadness- and the fact that horrid as it may seem, if you feel mainly the latter, and are faced with those suffering the former, you feel some strange form of exclusion and necessarily self-censoring envy.

i could talk about moving into an apartment on the second floor (i.e. the first floor for those of you on the old continent) with a direct view of the street and the debris strewn construction site directly beneath your living room window and sleeping with the bedroom door locked, though you know that statistics and awareness of your own paranoia dictate that you are safe.

I could talk about the fact that exhaustion apparently leads to dyslexia, loss of vocabulary, loss of spelling. I feel dumb.

I could talk about the fact that when i travelled to Moline, i was for the first time in my life afraid of flying. And read every safety instruction card in each of the tiny planes i took. And located the emergency exits, and made sure to know how to open them. And wandered around the terminal in Memphis like someone who’d never been on a plane, never been in an airport, and all the drawling ohsosweet ladies that tried to give me directions looked at me like some mildly helpless cretin.

But i won’t, because mentioning these things is not me whining or feeling sorry for myself. It is a cataloging of symptoms, the surface manifestations of what i am going through, not in any way related to or indicative of the actual emotional and intellectual process of adapting your worldview so as to allow for this new state of things. They are of not the slightest importance at all, simply because I’m alive, and so, before i segue into grandiosly simplistic statements on carping the diem i will end this nonpost, and return when i have valid -within the context of this blog- content to provide.

You keep thinking, should i remain thankful and optimistic, so as to not draw God’s attention, or will it only make my situation worse, because of the underlying hypocrisy, when really i feel great anger fear. I do feel it is unfair. I realise that to say something is unfair presupposes the existence of fairness, when no such thing has ever been hinted at or promised. The Lord works in mysterious ways, or it is all obscure inexplicable randomness, the outcome is identical. And my cousin Eddie is still dead, shot by burglars for no apparent reason save he woke up and confronted them. He was a year younger than me. Three weeks ago, my Uncle Marvin, not Eddie’s father, but my other uncle on my mother’s side, passed away. He was in his early sixties.

You keep forcing yourself to answer the phone, knowing that there is no reason for things to keep going this way, but feeling in your gut that hey, things are on a roll, why stop now. Who’s next?

You consider buying a house and stuffing all your relatives and loved ones inside and throwing away the key, just to make sure everyone is under control and out of harm’s way. You consider slipping away and retiring to some remote place, never caring for anyone again.

You try to act appropriately. You try to make the calls you need to make, but there are only so many you can handle in a day. After the second or third you say to yourself, tomorrow. The worst was telling my mother her brother’s youngest son had been killed. It wasn’t the news itself that hurt or frightened me, but knowing full well how my mother would react. I spent ten minutes just staring at the phone, her number already entered, finger hovering over the CALL button. She was at a Mexican restaurant with a friend, about to go see a movie. The worst was calling his oldest brother, not knowing in the slightest what to say, sitting by the phone planning a sentence, and when that failed, planning at least an opening series of words that in some compact way could possibly convey shock and sadness and comfort. The truth being that it is irrelevant what you say or how you say it, and to some it is imperative that you say something, and to others it is irrelevant that you ever call or send a card. And the truth is all the gestures and rituals and sentiment and cards and talking and thinking and thinking and thinking do not in any manner come close to adding up to anything that can bring the deceased closer to being undeceased. And still it seems important to be together and share and do what is required of you, or what you require of yourself, or what might be required, and generally try, though you can not ease his parent’s pain, you cannot help his girlfriend who was with him at the time.

You think to yourself inappropriate thoughts, what it might have felt like being shot, what she might have seen, what did she say to him, how it happened, where was that instant when the before became the after for ever and ever. How long before she can stop asking what would have been had she not woken him up to check.

You think there is no reason to have children, to emotionally invest in 27 years, when every year there is more there, and every year the person is more a part of you, when it is unbearable to lose a newborn, and then if an adult what? How exactly do you quantify loss. What is acceptable on a scale of death? A two, or a four point five? Because of course we’re all dying and pretty much past the point of considering anyone eternal and we understand this fact, but on our own terms. And those terms are specific to you of course. I find death acceptable in the old or the very ill, for obvious reasons. And i can also manage to somehow deal with death if it is accidental, when the person is perhaps grown, retired, a grandparent, a semi-full life behind them. But i can’t seem to accept death when it strikes like this, because, i suppose, it brings back to the fore the ideas vehiculated by every single e-mail you have received from the Dalaï Lama and his myriad chain e-mail senders, i.e. that every day could be your last, that every day could be your best friend’s last, and your significant other’s last, and your son’s or daughter’s or your brother’s or your coworker’s or and every time you set foot in the street you are augmenting the chances of not coming home, sitting on the subway, someone may detonate, stab you, you may trip and fall down stairs, scaffolding can fall and kill you, you can choke on a donut, you can forget to keep breathing in your sleep, you can contract a ridiculous disease from a poorly cooked burger, that guy that just coughed on you maybe gave you the flu and you will develop pneumonia and though you are healthy and young for no reason at all this time around your heart will simply stop. Or it will be a pleasant summer evening, you go to bed and at 2:45 am your girlfriend will see someone in the back of the apartment and wake you and you will go to check it out and you will be shot and you will die, leaving a mother, a father, two brothers, and so on and so forth and if applying the theory of six degrees everyone in the world to mourn you, and hopefully you are in a beautiful place of peace, and those left behind will simply live out their days with the equivalent of an arm or an eye or their heart missing, in a gap that may scar but will not, ever, be filled.

I only met Eddie six or seven times in my life. When we were kids in Florida, when i was twelve and went to visit his family in Pennsylvania, when my Grandmother died, when his older brother got married. But he was one of seven cousins, and so that’s one seventh gone then isn’t it?. The thing is there are constants in life. An order to the world. If you’re there and he’s always been there, then it stands to reason that he will be there as long as you, by your side be he near or far, because that is the lay of the land, the way things are, are supposed to be.

I am not a hateful person, i am not an angry person, i am not a cynical person, i am not an ungrateful person. I try to avoid slipping into the ease of flippant remarks and self-pity, and quixotic anger. There is no one out there, or there is someone out there, and either way the rules are clear and you try to be accepting of them.

And there is definitely no anger at the idiot who shot him, because he is the idiot product of an idiot society of idiot warmongers and NRA members and homophobes and xenophobes and blackhaters and jewhaters and whitehaters and fearful and unprincipled and beyond help or redemption, in hell from the start, and so what good will it do. An eye for an eye is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard of.

I don’t want that. I want them to be safely asleep while some poor idiots steal what little valuables they may have had in the apartment and slip out into the night. And then it would be ok to simply go on feeling blessed that no such thing has ever happened to me or mine, at least in the last sixty years, and therefore there would be much to be thankful for. But now it is otherwise and it is waiting, and waiting, guilty but knowing that with time, feeling that i have paid my penance, expressed my grief and given comfort where i felt it needed to be given, but then being infinitely practical and knowing that there is no filling that void, with comfort or otherwise, i will feel guilty but relieved that that is behind me now, because once the shock is passed, and the fear is under control, then it will be out of my hands, and once i’ve tried and seen there is nothing i can do, i can crawl back to the rock i live under and put my blinders back on, and forget temporarily that we are all dead, and the only thing unknown is the chronology of it all.

And every time i laugh i feel unduly privileged. And taste something sweet. And stare at M and she at me.

I love you Eddie.

Today at approximately 14h40, it is a year since my arrival here. Nothing has changed, everything has changed, etcaetera, woe unto mortals for whom time does not wait.

Surprisingly enough, i’m no fatter than when i left. Unsurprisingly enough, i’m still not on any definitive path to enlightenment and/or a career.

This year’s major event: developing sufficent facial hair for a modest moustache and chin thingy.

This year’s unmajor event: depending on whether you mean a small yet significant event, or an event so insignificant as to be the absolute antithesis to a major event, in which case i’m sure i can safely say that at some point it is likely i farted in my sleep, stepped on a crack in the sidewalk, walked in a puddle, missed my train, waited in line, stayed up passed my bedtime.

Years used to be counted not from January to December, but September to June. Henceforth the year begins on August 16th. Today is the first day of the second year a.e. (after expatriation). The end draws nigh. Repent and/or get shitfaced.

It is so cold in the office that, although the temperature outside is well into the 30s, i keep thinking it is mid-September. I keep smelling colored pencils and the fake leather cases we’d keep them in, along with colored felt-tip pens, a compass, a ruler, an eraser, a fountain pen and ink cartridges. I keep thinking about the naive motifs of the paper we’d use to cover our books. Green with abstract chickens. Blue with flowers. Sophistication started in 4th grade with semi-transparent plastic and colored lines. The all important hunt for this year’s agenda. Do i want the Snoopy agenda or the one with the rocket ships? How important is it that this one contains a world map and a list of capitals? Can I convince Mom to buy me the 30 pencil box of Caran d’Ache instead of the 12 pencil one? That smell, the combination of wood and color, will forever mean school is about to begin.

The subway is comforting. You’re somewhere, and then you’re nowhere going somewhere, suspended in destination or destiny suspended. Those brief inconsequential moments. And you are rocked to reverie or sleep by the beating of the tracks passing below. Light, no lights. Light, no lights. Shush now, go to sleep.

An umbilical experience of sorts. Reborn at Bryant Park or West 4.

There is of course the smell of cabbage and sauerkraut (which is cabbage²), people with warts and open sores, panhandlers, detuned musicians, subterranean permanent residents, rush hour, screamers, singers, open-mouthed gum chewers, the unbathed, the brutal, the selfish. Chivalry is often shoved aside by someone deathly intent on securing an already graciously offered seat.

There is the sticky car. There is the empty car. There is the car so crammed full of breathing sweating life that you must stand immobile, arms locked to your sides and holding your breath, for fear of contracting humanity. There is the car abandoned save for one occupant, so powerful in her stench a special task force is called in to evacuate her. There is the leaky car on rainy days, every seat covered in water, sloshing through the darkness. There is the sauna car, it’s AC on the blink. There is the car with the broken door, slamming like a shutter in a storm. There are the garbled indications of a PA with Tourette’s, telling you the csdraaa line is not running between brrrl and gaaaaaaa so please transfer to the fffsssm.

There is the line that runs express in Brooklyn and local in Manhattan. There is the line that runs local in Queens but express in Manhattan. The line that runs local between Brooklyn Bridge and Columbus Circle, but express between 72nd and 125th, then local again. There is the line that doesn’t run on weekends. There is probably a line that only runs on weekends. And above all there is the ghost line, a line that i have never actually seen running, the B. If you can attest to the B’s existence and the fact that it still runs, please send photos as I do not believe in it.

As seen on a billboard figuring prominently over Houston near 2nd Avenue (note the Katz’s sign right beneath it):

It is the most beautiful day of summer here, a kind sweet air blowing in through the open windows, the trees in the rear garden rustling, the ever present sounds of a young child and a barking dog, echoey, distant.

I want to be in Aix, I want to be in Camogli, I want to be in Thira, I want to be in Ronda, I want to be in Grindelwald. I want to exit the Trümmelbachfälle into the blinding afternoon sun.

What I am going to do is go learn six pages of dialogue from Mourning becomes Electra and do four washes at the laundromat on Wyckoff, then return here and try to write application letters and tweak our resumes for the 171st time hoping that at some point someone will have the courtesy to answer, if at least to expressly tell the applicant to fuck off as opposed to silently implying it, which is pretty much SOP here there and everywhere nowadays.

for comprehension purposes, i must specify that it is pronounced Howston, not Hewston.

Also, it is a very very hot day in nyc.

I have recently (yesterday) given myself a summer haircut (i.e buzzed it all off). Sun + 0.1cm of hair = bad news. So i set off to find a cap/hat/beret, anything really.

Over the course of fourteen blocks, and as many stores, i learned the following.

a. people believe it is their inalienable right to walk in a straight or sinusoidal line at full speed and never break and/or apologize for bowling you over, elbowing you in the face, walking on your foot, dripping ice-cream on you.

b. the crappier the cap/hat/beret and/or the more inane or obnoxious the sentiment expressed on it in bold letters, the more people are willing to pay for it. Because hey, who wouldn’t pay 36$ for an unmarked razor blade pre-aged cotton cap for a little punk credibility.

c. one store played the entire first album by the Darkness. One played all of Thriller. Most of them played Ump Ump Ump music or Sean Paul on repeat. All i know is that by the time i reached the H&M right below Houston two hours later i’d developed a vacant stare and had stopped saying excuse me or sorry when i ran into people.

luckily H&M had shitty cotton caps for 5.90, and all was well with the world.

Dexter Gordon - Our Man In Paris (1963)
great sax, no prises de tête (literally takings of head, i’m open to any suggestions as to a satisfactory english equivalent)

McCoy Tyner - The Real McCoy (1967)
post-Coltrane but still with Ron Carter (b) and Elvin Jones (dr), the original quartet’s rhythm section. Yay.

The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics (2006)
Because they kick ass and you haven’t heard anything that sounds like the Flaming Lips except the Flaming Lips. And give Wayne Coyne’s voice a chance, it grows on you. And the lyrics almost make sense this time (relatively speaking). Though Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a fabulous album in its blade runner absurdist kitsch way, and contains possibly the coolest titled song ever, Ego Tripping At The Gates of Hell, as well as this, i.e. a 2:57 minute climax in the middle of the album replete with mewling electro cat and crashing drums. Also Yoshimi is the perfect companion album to Beck’s Sea Change, because of the similar laid back drifty feel, and because they toured those albums together, and if you like Sea Change, which you should, because it is incredible, you might also like The Divine Comedy’s Regeneration, because both albums were produced by Nigel Godrich and sound like the stepchildren of Ok Computer, as far as sound and vibe, which goes to show you that Nigel Godrich is Radiohead’s fifth Beatle.

Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
Because. And also, if you listen to the guitar solo on Down By The River you’ll notice that the guitarist from the band Cake cribbed the sound and the notes and everything else he uses in all his songs from this one itsy bitsy quirky thirty year-old solo.

why so jealous
with all we have
the grass is always greener

turnstiles, racing
swimming the channel
with the lighthouse out

navigating under cover of cloud
spinning ourselves into a shroud
grasping beyond our reach

an empty axis
if we keep going

the big black hiatus in the sky

On Christopher Street, 55 Bar is a jazz/blues hangout. Except the people who hang out there are mostly Berklee (not Berkeley) graduates, and can count in 7/8 and 5/4 simultaneously, whilst rattling off the F# mixolydian mode.

I saw Wayne Krantz there tonight (and no, i’d never heard of him before today either…) and he was playing with a drummer named Cliff Almond and a bassist named James Genus. And it was a stark reminder that everything on the radio sucks and should be used for fruit juice and cereal commercials.

I guess you’d call it jazz fusion because the concept was jazz, take a simple theme, run through it once and then off everybody goes, except they were playing in the rock idiom. All i know is that though i could nod my head to the underlying beat, nobody including the totally amazing drummer actually played on the beat anytime during the hour-long performance. You oftentimes catch yourself smiling during such performances, simply because there is some form of inherent humor or irony in such total technical mastery, but also because there is an exhilaration in the tension created by three musicians pulling in often separate directions along the razor’s edge, when it would take only a split second of self-awareness on their parts, the slightest conscious thought, to send the whole elaborate yet spontaneous structure crashing down.

Recommended though not directly related album: Spectrum - Billy Cobham.

O plural night
landscape in beauty and waking
the moon on your skin
an olive branch, a feathered caress

we err on the side of pious
hoping for the best
all these unsettled laws we abide by

when lying in cool splendor i turn
facing now the west
see rising in a slow burn
that which we know best

it humbles me
your presence still
to ask is to dispell
inquire and be lost

take what fortune provides
let all else lie in dust

Let me ask all you smart folks out there a question.

I spent the day on Saturday in the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC, and came across the following:

Two pictures of a panel showing an article from the NY Times of 1935.

Note that “Mein Kampf” is erroneously translated as “My Camp”. My question is as follows: is the article doctored? When i was little and my mother told me about the Holocaust, and then i heard about Mein Kampf before having studied German, i made the same mistake as the author of the article. But this was many years after the war, and so contextually and by way of consonance my mistake is understandable. But why would an apparently serious journalist in 1935 translate it that way, when camps were not the first thing to spring to mind when discussing Hitler (boy, i can’t wait to see what kind of weirdos show up here once google crawls this post…) and it would have been logical to look up the proper translation of the word Kampf? Was the translation inserted by some careless intern when preparing the panel and no one noticed? And if not, how would you explain it?

It is six-thirty a.m. and the pair of boxers you hand-washed the night before are not dry. What to do? As you fret and pace, an idea suddenly forms, not out of nowhere, you know you’ve heard this somewhere though the source remains obscure. Microwave!

And it actually works, for the first three-minute express cycles you put them through. The water evaporates, they start smelling laundry fresh, like when they come out of the dryer.

Then they melt. Or rather, the elastic contained within the cotton melts. Or rather, goes up in smelly plasticky smoke. And you end up with burnt boxers that no longer have any structure, only surface. You can put them on, but they won’t stay on, they’ll tear right off.

Don’t try this at home kids.

It is now seven a.m. I’m open to suggestions. You have twenty minutes.

There are days like that.

You put both legs into the same pants leg, you feel the inexplicably horrid sensation of putting your left shoe on your right foot, everything is basswise and ackwards.

Everything is bullshit. Acting is bullshit. Music is bullshit. An itch you can’t scratch. There’s nothing left out there, everything sounds canned, an imitation of a pastiche of déjà-heard. Emotions are bullshit. Conditioned non-reflex channeled things you select and shape and align like logic. But there’s nothing there.

Jazz is a saving grace. It is filthy saturated complex thrown forward on the ledge of chaos.

Writing is bullshit. Big words and short sentences and still nowhere near reaching the itch, massaging the temple, unwinding the knot.

Harry or Gary Frankfurt, emeritus professor of philosophy at Yale or Harvard, wrote a book titled On Bullshit. How cool is that? So cool i even convinced WH to purchase a copy. But have i read it? No… It has sat there, being very cool, beside my bed for six months. I read the first two pages and it was all made clear. Harry or Gary and myself are in perfect agreement. Bullshit abounds. We are all full of it.

I am the perfect mean. I seek balance. In that, i approach near flatline. I am little victories and infinitesimal losses. I am calculated risk. I am anticipated success and preempted failure. I am not nothing, i am all things in small doses.

My sense of great depressing weakness and near addiction is exemplified not in ceding to the lure of coke or heroin but in walking into the Virgin Megastore at Union Square and emerging three and a half hours later with three cds, two dvds and a book. They had a massive sale, classic albums and films for 8$ a piece. I couldn’t resist. Still, had i been a true human i would have bought the eight cds i wittled down to three, the six films i wittled down to two. But trading Miles for Mingus, and Paris, Texas for Sex Lies and Videotape. Oh the pain…

I actually bought Anthony Kiedis’s’s’s biography (the apostrophes must end somewhere, but i’ve been feeling a tad OCDish of late). I thought it would be uninteresting and terribly written. But it is quite readable, and i am of course fascinated by the life of someone who actually just goes ahead making choices whatever they may be and no matter how questionable, being self-destructive, doing whatever seems like the thing to do next. Stringing the beads of his life together one after another. To those of us that spend hours, nay days, sitting on the floor, a knot in our stomachs, sorting beads by size, color, weight, potential meaning depending on the symbolism of juxtaposition, and then string them all at once, it is fascinating. Immediacy. Life. It happens to other people.

So this is how my day ended. After walking the streets aimlessly for most of the day, tearing at my clothes in grief over the radiohead debacle, i wandered back towards school for my 6pm class. As i sat down at the 3 Square Cafe right across from school I noticed a congregation of about 15 people and 4 security guards around the back entrance to Irving Plaza, a small rock venue. I figured they might be waiting for someone i liked, as i knew that Seu Jorge had played there recently as well as the Eagles of Death Metal (Josh Homme’s side project from QOTSA). I pulled out my camera and crossed the street just as a minivan pulled up. I came around the side of it and came face to face with Eddie Vedder, as he and the other four members of PJ leisurly poured out of the van. I shook his hand. I’ve spent the rest of the evening in a kind of daze. Funny how you think you’re above such things till out of nowhere you feel like a fourteen year-old.

Today was like not getting tickets to see the Doors and then running into the Rolling Stones at the supermarket. Possibly. It has been suggested I am totally incapable of formulating valid analogies.

And did i mention that there are about 4 bajillion (that’s four and lots of zeroes) sites out there selling 200 bajillion tickets to the shows for just a little under 500% of the original price? As Ticketmaster is the only official means of purchasing tickets and all tickets sold out in approximately 1 picosecond although Ticketmaster has all sorts of scrambled-text based safety measures to allegedly prevent automated scalpers from purchasing tickets, i ask thee, doth ticketmaster not verily deserve a speedy demise?

the bastards.

The dirty bastards. I’m not one for vulgarity, but any of the people who got tickets to the shows must SUCK THE COCK OF SATAN. There. That’s all I have to say about that.

Are playing Madison Square Garden in June. I know this because i have just received an e-mail from Ticketmaster. Having frantically clicked through to the site to purchase 11 tickets, all for myself, aaaaaallll for meeeee, most of my hair fell out upon discovering that they’d only be on sale at 10am today. I am leaving to class now (8am). I will be locked indoors till 1pm.

M must succeed in buying them for us. She must. She has already been instructed to summarily auction off my guitars and photographic equipment if need be. But what if there’s a power outage? What if Verizon decides to suck just at 10am, bringing our blazing 700k line down to 0.01k a second, rendering all forms of communication impossible? What if she tries the phone instead and it catches on fire, falls off its stand and lands in a plastic smoldering mass on both her cellphones (the Swiss and the US one). What if all our neighbours are out, or the stairs cave in and she can’t reach them in time? What if Homeland Security instructs Ticketmaster to only sell tickets to pre-screened individuals who pose no threat to Republicans or the United States? What then i ask you? What then?!!!!

These are very tense times.

this is via hendrix-cat

1. A track from your early childhood
That would be Sailing - Christopher Cross, or Abracadabra - Steve Miller Band or Man Eater - Hall & Oates, essentially all the mustachioed pink shirted stuff that was playing when i was four and living in Florida.

2. A track that you associate with your first love
Well, that would either be the tracks mentioned above, if you count Vicky S. as my first love. I was four, she was four, I told her i loved her, she ignored me, i was inconsolable for years. Or that would be the soundtrack to the Big Blue, when i was in seventh grade, because i’d just split up with A and my friend N said, oh no! whatever you do don’t listen to/watch the Big Blue now, it’s so romantic and sad, so i did of course. Or Sade’s Love Deluxe album, the soundtrack to my month with V. Or maybe I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston because i spent a year and a half with L when i was sixteen and that was our song (or would it be Love Me Tender - Elvis? no, wait, Dream a Little Dream of Me - the Mamas and Papas). Or would it be Perfect Blue Buildings - The Counting Crows, because that was the soundtrack to pining for R (before, during, and after (it’s complicated)). Or Chopin’s Nocturnes (the Daniel Barenboim version) that I and i listened to during our embarassingly platonic nine months (even more complicated)? No, no, let’s settle on what was spinning during the first weeks of M and i, Sheryl Crow’s EP for the Tomorrow Never Dies Soundtrack, because eight years and counting can’t be wrong.

3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip
CeeCee Rider - Ella Fitzgerald

4. A track that you like but wouldn’t want to be associated with in public
Anything off of the Entre Gris Clair et Gris Foncé album by Jean-Jacques Goldman

6. The track you have listened to most often
That’s like asking…um… I can’t find a proper analogy, but that’s just plain silly. Is this supposing i just started listening to music a year ago? Or that i still now repetitively listen to the same track that i would rewind and replay, rewind and replay, rewind and replay in high school?

7. A track that is your favourite instrumental
This would be from the non-jazz non-classical instrumental category, i take it? Either way, i’m realizing this whole meme is not about absolutes but making choices, since it’s absurd to think anyone beyond the age of 15 has only one answer to any of these questions. So let’s say my answer is either Born Under A Bad Sign off the posthumous Hendrix Blues album, or any of the pieces composed by Gabriel Yared for the English Patient soundtrack.

8. A track that represents one of your favourite bands
Lucky - Radiohead

9. A track which best represents yourself
Famous Blue Raincoat - Leonard Cohen

10. A track which reminds you of a special person
Country Feedback - REM

11. A track to which you can relax
the five tracks that make up Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

12. A track that stands for a really good time in your life
the five tracks that make up Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

13. A track that is currently your favourite
In A Sentimental Mood - Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

14. A track that you’d dedicate to your best friend
that’s tricky only because the specificity of bestfriendness and the importance of said qualification in my life has greatly faded over the last years. There are the four or five people who benefit from Permanent Friend Status, and then there are other friends. That being said, how about Barbecue à l’Elysée - Philippe Katerine, for S.

15. A track that you like especially for its lyrics
I guess i’ll have to go for funny, in that the question makes no sense unless you take it to mean a track where the music is not unpleasant but not the main attraction. How about Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart - Johnny Cash.

16. A track that no one likes but you
Am i being unpleasant in criticizing these questions? Helena, i know you just passed them along as is, and so it’s not your fault. And were it your fault that i’d forgive you anyway. But even unsuccessful albums sell a few thousand copies, even terrible movies can make a few million bucks. Hmm… I’ve just gone through my iTunes library, and i guess the only thing i could say that none of my friends share with me is my passion for Sade. I know that’s not a track, but i can’t find anything obscure enough that i don’t know at least one person who likes it, or would like it.

17. A track that you like that’s neither English nor German
It would be harder if you asked me for a track i like in German. Not because i have any particular aversion to German music, but because i can’t think of any specific song off the top of my head by Die Fantastischen Vier or Die Toten Hosen. Wait, i’ve got it: 99 Luftballons - Nena. But that doesn’t answer the question, does it? Let’s say Au Port - Camille.

18. The track that best lets you release tension
I Vant to Tortur Kittenz mit Scrudrivern - Vanderflucht Destroyers

19. A track you want to be played at your funeral
So What - Miles Davis

20. A track that you’d nominate for the “Best Track of All Time” category.
Definitely The Final Countdown - Europe

As you all know, SXSW is the annual conference where anybody who’s anybody in the blogging world gets together to discuss how cool blogging is, how cool they are, and how blogging could change the world if only the Powers That Be would let bloggers run things.

But do you know NXNE? The North by North East conference was held for the first time this year in NYC and drew a crowd of existential and neurotic bloggers from at least two cities. Panel discussions covered vast and important topics such as “is it ok to shower with my blog?”, “if my blog won’t make love to me, who will?”, and “if a blogger screams in cyberspace, will ridley scott make a movie about it?”.

The two keynote speakers this year were none other than the only attendees, the irreplaceable Waterhot, and Yours Truly. Below a picture taken at the afterparty, held in the middle of the street in Union Square (caps, hats, and quality beards provided to protect you or them) (Waterhot is the tall smart one).

The sun was out, the smog was minimal, and neither of them was in the throes of deep depression, so an exceptionally pleasant day was had by all.

It was great meeting you Tom, do come again.

Speech II, Joyce Sarandon, 2 hrs.

Like coming home, i finally know what i speak. People always ask me where i’m from because they can’t place the accent, and as it seemed to me that it was a rather flat, uninflected American, i always called it North Atlantic Neutral. But i know now that it is called GenAm, or General American. So if you want to know where i’m from, the closest you could get to approximating an answer based on my (non)accent would be, wherever the guy on the subway PA who says “stand clear of the closing doors please” is from. But the dialogue i’ve had here at least 70′000 times since arriving eight months ago unerringly goes like this:

“Where are you from?”

“Geneva, Switzerland.”

“But you don’t have an accent.”

“My parents grew up in the Bronx.”

This is always met with a confused stare, and then the following friendly remark: “I have a friend who travelled all around there and Denmark and Norway. How come you don’t have blond hair and blue eyes? “.

And the answer is: because there’s about a thousand miles from Geneva to Stockholm, åsshøl…

^{PS: i know, i know, the ø is from Danish, not Swedish, but i couldn’t resist.}

Movement, Michael Ryan, 2 hrs.

Sort of yoga/lamaze breathing/sensory awareness/cuddling for actors. The class was great.

That being said, we also got an amusing ten-minute speech concerning the bathing suit rule (no touching anywhere that would be under a bathing suit); the fact that men are pigs and women should always clearly set the boundaries as far as kissing and other intimate contact required by a scene; and above all, DON’T SLEEP WITH YOUR SCENE PARTNER. But if you do, be a mensch and invite them out on a date first.

M was obviously thrilled to hear about that. I am now this close to having to submit potential scenes and scene partners for her prior approval, as well as being forbidden from practicing anywhere outside of her line of sight, and she’s also considering imposing a 5pm curfew.

Ah, the ills of the oversexed art world.

Acting, George Loros, 4 hrs.

Nothing special to say. Nothing terrifying happened. Nobody was mean or scary. And therein lies the problem.

The teacher is an elder of the Method tribe. He is thorough and methodical and patient and kind, while maintaining an exterior semblance of gruffness and menace –the old (teddy)bear type– and i have the utmost repsect for him. But most of the people were between 18 and 20, and 70% of them were non-native English speakers, and to be honest, nothing happened during the class. If i were a seasoned actor, working through my own specific set of problems, in general or on a scene, then the class would be great. But i am not. So i’m transfering to another class. Of course, as there’s no way to audition classes beforehand, it’s all word-of-mouth and hearsay, so hopefully my next choice will not lead me from the frying pan into the fire (or rather from the fridge into the icebox?)

Acting, Lola Cohen, 4hrs.

The class is amazing, but i have such a hard time dealing with my total incompetence and general disorientation that when talking to people i mumble, generally apologizing in advance, and during an improvisation accidentally nearly put a girl through a -fake- wall on the side of the stage. True, my “need”, as they define the emotion you are instructed to act out silently, was “destroy”, but still…

Did i mention i’m scared of everyone?

And there’s a girl in the class that is also in the class i had yesterday that seems just a little irritated by my presence. Whether true or imagined, the ray-of-death stare she brings to bear on me completely freezes me up.

fuck. this is seriously like being handed a parachute and being told to jump. actually no, it’s like being handed an open and tangled parachute and being told to repack it because you need to jump in three minutes and if you don’t repack it first you’ll get it caught in the plane’s engine, and not just you but everyone else on board will die. or actually no, it’s like being handed a tangled and open parachute with a hole in it and a sewing kit and being summarily pushed out of the plane before getting a chance to thread the needle, and no one has taught you to sew anyway. Oooor, it might be like being set on fire in a room full of unlit fireworks and told to imagine yourself having a cool drink of iced-tea on a beach somewhere, and please, try and make so we can actually feel each individual grain of sand under your feet?

Or it’s day 2 out of 84 and what the hell was i expecting anyway, a walk in the park?

Acting for Film & TV, Pennie Dupont, 4hrs.

Obviously, one should start with Acting before moving to Acting for Film and TV, but hey, i didn’t devise this schedule. Acting 101 is on Tuesday.

About 12 people in the class. One is Stephen King but shorter and scarier, with piercing blue eyes that he tries to turn this way and that, but that look scary anyway. One is Anna Somethingwcsky from Poland. She’s apparently a star on Polish TV. One is Bob. I have high hopes for Bob because he is only the second “new guy” to walk into the room and i figure we’ll rapidly form some lasting bond. Unfortunately -and i don’t know how to say this nicely- Bob smells exactly like Gruyère. And he’s an angry 18 year old. This is not a good thing.

All the regulars do monologues they’ve prepared or scenes together, and then the teacher hands out copies of a short scene. The new people get a scene that’s a page long, of a detective talking into a camera while interviewing a witness. Over the course of the afternoon, i get to do the scene twice. The first time around i look like an anus with glasses. The second time around i am so tense that i invert the rythm of looking down reading the line looking up saying the line, so that i look down and read/say the line, and then look up with nothing to say. It feels like learning to swim the crawl, when you end up either out of breath after two strokes or inhaling a vast amount of water because you forget to raise your head. The teacher does note some progress however, as i’ve removed my glasses and succeeded in relaxing at least half my face, so that i only look like half an anus.

Tomorrow is another day.

I’ll be starting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute tomorrow. I’m proud of this fact, not for having been accepted -they pretty much take anyone who can pay, is willing to attend, and can write the 200 word essay they require- but because i first decided i wanted to go there during my third year of law school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon and da Vinci painted the Monal Lisa, sometime in 1999.

And seven years later here i am.

It’s a strange feeling to be doing exactly what you want. Like being told that your homework is to play video-games or your job is to play guitar, fulltime. I feel unjustifiably guilty. Crazy how conditioned we are. “If it’s not unpleasant it can’t be good for you / isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing” kind of thing. But i also feel incredibly elated. I’m afraid they might think i’m high because of the stupid glee i’m constantly emitting. It’s a novel experience feeling authorized to be excited about something. Sort of makes you wonder why you didn’t have the cojones to do something you felt genuinely excited about sooner. But i have no regrets. Whatever the convoluted paths i followed to get here, there, or wherever, it’s the trip that counts. And here i am.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh… is what you say when you have a guest arriving tomorrow and you leave work early to clean up and do a week’s worth of dishes and sweep the floor and wax the windows and polish the ceiling and…stuff, and you come home and first feel a jolt of pure fear as you see your door ajar, and then you walk in to find your furniture bunched up in the middle of the room and plaster and tools strewn all over the place and some guy simultaneously replastering parts of the ceiling and repainting parts of a wall and fixing something in the bathroom and powersawing through the floor in your bedroom for some obscure reason, and he is doing this under the supervision of your landlady (from hell) whom you’d expressly asked not to do this work today because you were expecting company, and she agreed and said the week after next, and she speaks fluent English and did not make any grunts or other international sounds of incomprehension, so you know this can only be to spite you.

As i sit in a foreign land, halfway across the globe from all those i know and love, i feel a new purer kind of loneliness. The silence that is absolute in the endless resonance of my voice, prattling on incessantly in my head to avoid at all costs that moment of quiet when i will look out from myself, and know that i am alone.

M is back home in Switzerland for a week, and at 11pm on a Saturday night there is no one here i know well enough that, should i wish to hear another human’s voice, not out of necessity or urgency but out of a simple need for companionship, i could turn to. It’s an interesting version of those few hours on a night flight crossing the Atlantic, when you are at thirty thousand feet and all are asleep, and you stare out on stars and clouds bathed in moonlight, and nothing outside that moment exists. Except this is unpleasant, whereas that is an agreeable suspension of consequence and responsibility.

As with all forms of anxiety, loneliness is an echo chamber with zero falloff. Call into the void and it will never subside, only answer itself exponentially, swelling to a roar that can only be silenced by speaking aloud. And yet to do so in the silence that surrounds you, with no one to answer, would be most frightening of all.

I’m not one for disclaimers, but as there are now a couple of you reading this, i no longer dare to simply write for myself without considerations of appropriate formulation in view of being understood. So the disclaimer goes as follows: the text below is me thinking aloud, is theoretical and abstract, is terribly open to criticism, in particular regarding the danger of ambiguously formulating questions without necessarily explaining what my personal views are, especially concerning a touchy subject such as this.

Questions.

How to consider events that are the absolute cause of your existence?

Not secondary events. Not events that lent to the possibility or probablility of your birth. Had these events not occured, you would not have either.

What to think of them then? Abstractly, it would seem logical or at least moral reasoning to say that, could you have avoided these events, you would gladly have accepted to not be. But one cannot consider things abstractly. One must look across the breadth and length of Time and ask what would otherwise have been.

I’m always wary of value attribution. What is good, what is bad. How many eggs needed to be broken to make the omelet that this new world, this “after” world, is? There was such a sea change, such a tectonic shifting. But is this better? What is a necessary evil?* Was the change needed?

How to not condone it in any way -of course not- but still ask if the world would necessarily be a better place had it not occured?

And again, if removed from the continuity of history and observed as a detached and independent event, yes, it should never have occured. And more than that, how could it have?

But how to completely deny the sequence of events that led to my birth?

What of it?

Anyone?

My maternal Grandfather was born in Poland. My Grandmother in Hungary. Their lives were not meant to intersect. They met in a concentration camp (”met” makes it sound so trivial, “hey, let’s meet in the concentration camp in an hour”, there’s no proper way to formulate it). After the war they moved to England and then the United States, where my father’s family lived, and so on, connect the dots, till me. This sequence of events would in no way have occured had the the second world war, at least certain aspects of it, not taken place.

I am therefore left with two possibilities. Either consider that all is absurd and that i should not seek a balanced equation justifiying that for this. Or bear a crushing mantle of responsibility requiring that i find some way of repaying the debt incurred for living when so many did not. Guilt left as the afterimage of something i did not witness firsthand, for not living a life (impossible of course) that would somehow justify what it cost for me to be.

*^{What is evil? If you consider this definition you will see that malicious is only the last word in a long list. When we use the adjective evil in regard to the acts of the national socialist party, do we understand it as evil meaning morally reprehensible and wrong, or actual malice, the sole intent being to cause pain, with n}