How to Know a New Country

• In this new place (or this very very old place, that is only new to you) hotel doormen say “Welcome home, love!” and customs officers ask with interest about your acting career before bidding you “Cheers!” Now we all know what they say about the skewed gaze of the first impression – plus, a friend will remind you later that it's not just a little insulting to think of the once greatest civilization as “quaint” – yet. YET! Across the pond, it seems that daily life is conducted with a reverence for politic and tradition. A conspicuous weight is placed on accommodating the other. And as a result it strikes you, traveler, that it's possible for faith to come as first instinct, instead of suspicion. This message is reinforced at the U.S Border Patrol, where an officer takes off his glasses to peer down his nose at you when your smile is a tad too eager.
  
  
• In this new place (or this place you've heard a lot of good rumors about and spent but a layover in once, years ago) you must parse out what is true in fiction. People have always described this enigmatic country to you in technicolor, in iambic pentameter, in melodic hook. From this you figured the place was flawless, dainty, full of sweet nothings and little cakes...and mostly you figured this country looked and felt the same to every visitor on some subterranean human level. You figured that here you would always know just what to say and how to be. You figured you would see it in the sun; you figured it would be so. You figured you would follow the same template of all of those poets through all of that history and reap the same reward from this place and then have the same trouble explaining it well, when people asked how it was here and what you've been doing. And if you didn't quite belong in this strange new country, you would know immediately and find your exit with grace. You would find some way to avoid all of the prickles on all of the trees there. And you wouldn't fear those alleys and dark corners you didn't recognize. You'd announce your presence to locals from the hilltops, instead of being a furtive tourist, hiding away your maps. You'd be so fearless. 

But like all good things, the new world is not at all what you expected. Because it turns out that no one anywhere has ever experienced what you're experiencing now, and so the new country is not a 'country' at all but just a few dozen remarkable pages in a little girl's diary. You deduce this because what you've been doing on your trip is not quite in line with sonnets or sitcoms: it's not birds lilting in trees, this terror on top of comfort on top of glee. No one else has ever slow-danced in a living room to Thelonius Monk in afternoon light. No one else has ever walked in silence for eight blocks and almost died, felt like dying, from the floundering feeling in not knowing quite how to apologize, or for what. No one else has a series of Photobooth pictures that maddeningly capture all of your feelings and thoughts in four monochromatic frames. No one's ever been as impressed by anything anyone else has said at an art museum, and no one's ever slept and not slept like this, and no one's ever been this tethered and this free. And no, you cannot explain it perfectly. You cannot explain it at all. But drunk on your uniqueness, the perfect prescience of your own thoughts, you make plans to move ahead on your trek with the deep faith of England's tourism engine. Because you believe that the world should be a considerate place and oh, you want to have faith. You want to go everywhere. You want to tumble forward like a falling tree. Yettttttt, because you are you you cannot quite keep from making these lists and petitions, attempting to suss out the science behind whatever comet this is come stumping across your transom. You mind your borders like a good American. And heck, not entirely without cause! There have been recent tragic events, after all. 

• In this new place (though really it is the same place as usual, except everyone is suddenly wearing shorts and the occasional tree makes its presence known), you own time and all of the sunny days. You own Lou Reed and Bedford Avenue at dusk, you own your fire escape, you own your body and your voice and your magnniiifffffffficent thoughts and there are days within days where the world seems to electrify with possibility and and other days where you delight in and spin around in the smallest almost-pragmatism: buying flowers (like Mrs. Dalloway!), putting these in jars. And on sunny days, it is easiest to read your book in the park and let all the good luck shine into you, it is easiest to thank whatever force is responsible, it is easiest to believe in anything, the rightness and sincerity of your whole present life. And it seems that on sunny days, above all, you must write your adventures down. Because you will want them in bottles someday. 

STUMP NOVEL

Come on, Pilgrim. If you set word count requirements and meet them don't you know a Greek chorus will rain blessings down on all of your job applications? And I say Greek chorus, I mean like modern-day Greek soccer players. Their chins like planks of wood – as irrefutable, as able to hold weight, corners implied. And this chorus will wear loin cloths so you will be able to imagine what Rodin and Michelangelo make a tad too plain: I'm talking bratwurst, tennis ball containers...

Look homeward, angel. Listen to the radio: it's When Yer Twenty-Two. Go and look up the words; it could be absolutely nothing but proof of God:

stuck in the perpetual motion (okay!)

dying against the machine (well I actually follow my bliss, so...)

the whole thing leaves you a nothing instead of a these (that can't be right, Lyricsfreak...)

the sun is black and the black halos fly (lost. Lost, lost lost)

The sound is so cute when you're twenty-two. When you're twenty-two.

Take a while. Think you get it. Get it, get up, get another Maker's Mark. It's 1:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, from here on in I shoot without a script.

The Project feels like it's disintegrating sometimes. Going back and reading The Project elicits mostly this face (Imagine a really embarrassed smirk) – it's your own cloying voice, so wound in on itself that it can't fly. It's your so-called “self-awareness,” which stymies in its way. It's Lena Dunham and all the other innovators making diary theatre and thinly-veiled confessions oh-so-trendy, oh-so-GROUNDBREAKING. It's too easy, what you reach for. You know who it's not? George Saunders. Riddle me this.

So maybe the trouble is to do with your brain. You ought to expand your brain. You should go to all of the museums and download all of the podcasts. You should read all of the newspapers, ponder world events at length, research those threads of history that articles imply. You know what you should do is practice guitar. You should read comic books and watch documentaries and try on different eccentric catsuits. Call these Von Trier-ian imposed limits: maybe in this skin, I'll get this character. I'll know this new thing about time and space and being a person in the world. You should listen to all of the music and read all of the fiction from the era you sometimes feel you ought to have been born into (magic): it's 1983 in here now! That makes you thirtysomething! Congrats, thirtysomething! The best part of being thirtysomething is being smug. You've kind of done it all, and you know that this trainwreck ends and apologizes and from its wiser ashes grow...

Can't even TRICK myself...Is it that yer twenty-two and trying The Project at all? A lot of things are de facto and inevitable: ignorance, ego, rashness, certain words and phrases, their overuse, self-pity, ampersands...

Other laurels include familiar phrases like 'harping coda.' So harping coda, go:

It's hard out here for a pimp.

Okay, go some more. To a secondary location! To the boy's house! To Girl's Night! To the comedy club and the movies! Go to places where you can sit down, at least, because you actually are a little bit of an old woman. Go like a metaphor. Go like a concept. Go fishing. Go away.

Philosophers are content with endings like this. So are people fooled by soundtracks. Don't you get the joke???

I laughed like I did, but between you me and the lamppost: Nosireeba. 

Icarus Tries Westville

At St. Dymphna's on Sunday night the aspiring Wayne Coyne in the corner was hunched over a book that I figured from the fatness was House of Leaves. We became insta-friends when the aspiring Wayne Coyne (briefly henceforth, TAWC) slammed his book down in front of me and said, “Did you know Pepe II of Ancient Egypt had such a crippling fear of flies that he used to cover his surrounding slaves with honey? So they wouldn't bite him? It's sort of hilarious. I mean it's very upsetting, but also hilarious.”

“More flies with honey,” I said, being cool. (I am so cool, everyone.)

“You look kind of Egyptian to me. Are you a time traveler from Ancient Egypt?”

Soon it's Dennis Cooper and Chuck Palahniuk and Henry Miller (of course. Of COURSE), and somewhere even farther down this timeline TAWC morphs into a person with a good Christian name. Only his friends call him 'Spud.' And now we're talking about Dune. And did I know that The Cars and Weezer had the same producer for their first record, which goes a way to explain something don't I think? And while we're on the subject, do we think it's called flanorexia if you only eat flan?

I meet some more people, many named Dave. There are Too Many Daves. There is a bucket of KFC and shortly after this there is last call. Exceptions to the Dave grain include Photographer Alex and Jedediah, who is our bloodstream – Jedediah “has connections” at every bar I've ever heard of. And aren't we all going to Sway after this? Oh, it's only the best after-after hours club in the West Village. And for reasons cousins with those three Delirium Tremens I did not pay for, I am suddenly shifting into a cab with all of my new friends. A stunning Japanese girl who speaks in sotto is my only cohort in chromosome repping, and I think as we cut West: I really don't do things like this very often.

So Sway is a sweatbox. Sway is a lawless den of sin. Sway is 1983. Jedediah introduces me to everyone. The bartender's name is Dave (!). The deejay is less a deejay than the person at the party who happened to put on the whole of The Queen is Dead. Sway is a certain kind of man who will never make it easy for anyone. Terrible improv partners, sway:

“I'm Brittany.”

“I'm grave.”

“Come again?”

(Could be a cricket)

“So what do you do...George?”

“I'm a musician.” (In a seemingly blow off gesture, G[?] pulls out an iPhone and heads to youtube. After a beat:) “I bartend here sometimes.”

“Oh cool! What kind of musician?”

“I play everything. I have a drum machine.”

“So you're kind of a one man band, huh?”

“No.”

(Could be 40,000 crickets)

(G[?] suddenly leans over after a pause so long that I supposed it could only be the curdling death of this intro gone south... G [?] presents an unloaded youtube video)

“This is me.”

“Looks like it's not loading.”

“You want a drink?”

“Thanks! Whiskey something?”

G [?] vanishes into the the ether. I glimpse him later not-quite-murmuring to an aspiring Courtney Love.

Other friends are disappearing and reappearing, like buoys in storms. Spud is allegedly off somewhere with the beautiful Japanese girl. He loves her, I can see it. A guy named Malik is passing out clove cigarettes. Jedediah wants to know how am I supposed to dance with my coat still on. I want to know how am I supposed to dance to Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. I find Photographer Alex in a corner wedge booth with a view.

“Welcome to the AV club,” he says.

Now these are actually the perks of being a wallflower: Photographer Alex and I talk about Deep Space Nine and Israel. We belt all of the words to Heroes when it comes on and boogie without standing up. Some parts of “Brooklyn” are okay, you know. You can really find your people here. With allies like Photographer Alex even the most uninformed ruminations on the debt crisis, the silliest hats – they become bearable. Become humorous. Become real.

And at 5:30 or so as the bouncers make their final sweep, just the original crowd is left. We have lain claim to the back bench. When porters walk our way, we hold our ground: Just say you're with J.

But just like I knew when and why to come here, I know when and why to leave. I stand. They kiss me on the cheek, they give me their business cards, they beg me to stay. “Tomorrow is such and such a raid on Lit lounge. So and so works there. Come.” Come is command. And maybe I will, maybe I won't (I probably won't) but in any case the sun's coming up lickety-split in the East now. In my cab, I head East. East to the river and no friggin regrets.

Sometimes in New York it feels like there's a mystery set of other people always off having the kind of adventures you assumed you'd be beating off with a stick when you moved here. They say anything can happen in this town, but it turns out anything is very rarely magic. Yet look! My fraidy-cat fontanelle is closing up! There is a pretty ridiculous movie called We Bought a Zoo existing on clearance rack DVD somewhere, there's a quote from this movie that here applies: “[To do anything] All it really takes is fifteen seconds of crucial courage. Fifteen seconds of being brave.” Less, if you think about it. It only takes a heartbeat to say 'yes.'