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.'

The Book Party

I am at the Neue gallery in cocktail attire, hob-nobbing with the literary elite of the Upper East Side. Well, sort of. By hob-nobbing I mean sitting at a desk attempting to sell Gerald Stern's new book of essays, by “literary elite” I mean a very particular club of New York-based Jewish-American poets who were best known in the 1960s. Mr. Stern is throwing a launch party here at the gallery tonight. I have met the man already, in one of those totally cliché accidentally-meeting-a-famous-person gaffy exchanges; I was reading his book here at my little table and he, unrecognizable from the cover picture, snuck up behind me and asked 'how is it?' before introducing himself as 'Jerry.'

I've made friends with the catering team. They keep lingering by my area on the edge of the party just long enough for me to snatch a salmon pinwheel...or four. A Hector Elizondo-esque gallery manager circles, hawk-like, protective but somehow redundant. I keep thinking I'll see personalities I recognize – Joan Didion, perhaps? Woody Allen? – but typical to the restrictions of 'writer celebrity,' I can't pin a single face down. I may have read some of these people in English classes (it's actually becoming more likely that a lot of folks here helped publish people I read in English classes) but now these men – if these men are those men – walk with canes. They impudently wear their hats inside and bray their Brooklyn drawls out to this austere Austrian stronghold, defying an elitism they have always embodied for me.

For these men (and women, but fewer women) are writers, sitting on comfortable success and comparative acclaim...whoops, G. Stern has come my way to insist I'm sitting on his man purse. I am not. His friends nearby wink in a kind of apology, the matter is laughed off.

Hector Elizondo – his name is Tom in real life – asks if I've gotten a chance to see upstairs yet. I motion to the books, as if they need constant tending. H tells me there are three Klimt, when I get a chance. He seems proud.

I got this gig through my friend Darcy, who is one of those fabulous born and bred New Yorker types who calls me three or four times a year for some really excellent reason: dinner with her family at a LES inoteca, birthday trip to Mohonk Mountain, brother's film premiere launch party at Silvercup. Darce is in charge of The List, because a pushy woman noticed that she was dressed more “weather appropriate” than me and so oughta take the door. It's true, my feathers stick out: when people say cocktail attire I assume the bright lime Diane von Furstenberg wrap-dress from 2000 and my junior green Jackie O coat. D and me wink at one another across the marble lobby. Luckily I don't feel out of place because I wasn't really invited to this party; also, I am ridiculous.

Last week my mom saw Zadie Smith speak at Politics and Prose, and allegedly my favorite teach REMEMBERED me. Quote: “Of course I know Brittany, she's brilliant!” I am bragging this out to you now when clearly Zadie Smith is from England where brilliant doesn't always mean brilliant and of course if a mother asks if you remember her daughter in a book-signing line there is but one clear response, obvi...still. Still! Still, I think! Another sign, for those who mark their lives in signs: Monday I was at the Strand book-shopping with a buddy and a man, a stranger, actually did a double take and said, “I thought you WERE Zadie Smith!” This is a theatrical-seeming coincidence, no? She's not that well-known. Not everyone knows what she looks like. Buddy huffed the stranger's remark off as petty racism – which is what well-meaning caucasian friends sometimes do whenever a person of color is said to look like another person of color , teehee – but I dreamt big for a moment. Maybe I could be Zadie Smith. Maybe I am her. What if I just borrowed her vision one day and slipped into her life and fabulous headwear? Back at the party, I think I see Anne Meara! It is not Anne Meara after all.

People are spilling out of the gallery. The reading is over. This morning I went to brunch with a poet/librarian, and we spoke about the books on our nightstands and that harping rhetorical, “is it possible to really delve into/give your soul to two things at once? Let alone, like, four?” I thought about the renaissance people I know, the janes and jacks of many trades. I thought about discipline. I thought about choice. I thought about which way is “taking it easy on yourself,” vs. which way is “selling out.” I thought about the pragmatics of having only just enough time on the earth, and presumably just enough activity, energy, to squeeze into this big countdown.

This party is the Book World, or a country in it. This party is Eileen Fisher and chunky jewelry and booties and a few patent eccentrics. The reading at the gallery for two hundred of your nearest and dearest is a worthwhile success marker for many writers, maybe most. So dramatic hypothetical: were this the particular life the one I wanted, decided to pursue, I would inevitably find myself at more events like this. Down the road. As opposed to other kinds of parties, for there are as many kinds of parties as there are guests. This one is in a fancy gallery and it's clear we won't be staying too late or speaking too loud. In a very superficial and very reductive sense, in a certain equation of my future this party would be something I'd need to get used to, or become something I'd want.

I drink champagne.

The problem with the scary question (DEARGODWHATDOIDOWITHMYLIFE) when you have a lot of “options” (read:flights of fancy, ardent delusions, overconfidence, earnestness at least) is that there's no point. Asking the question itself is a means of dillydallying; in all the time I spend sighing to you about where will I go Rhett what will I do, I might have written a chapbook OR gone on thirty auditions. A lot of the jacks and janes I know – whose gumption I so admire – are fantastic, talented people, but a little too content with their crappy service jobs. Myself included. And I do believe the world is changing. The goals for the art-maker or the philosopher are no longer tied to money, if they ever were. But there is also such freedom and some romance in this. It seems we have borrowed more time with which to decide on or juggle various projects, and the stakes not being as dire as “make money with this!” WE are free to put our art on the back-burner, or perfect it over years, or tell people we're doing it when we're not howsoever we choose. No one is waiting. We are making no one wait. Yet I think there will come a point when you start dreaming of your own stuffy book party. I think it happened to the men of Gerald Stern's generation. I do not think it's the same as “selling out,” but by 'it' I mean lingering on but one bliss...if you are the kind of person who wants to move and shake. Strike that, reverse it: I do not quite believe that the answer to the scary question is as simple as “you can't do everything, pick one.” Quentin Tarantino is also a successful dude rancher, after all. But I do think some of our serious, semi-delusional energy might be thrown harder behind the things we want to achieve. Take yourself seriously. Do not talk about the work; do the work.

Hector, seeing me scribble, glances over at one point and asks me if I'm a writer. Usually I hem and haw at this question, or give people information they didn't ask for: I am a / and a / and a/, or trying to be. Today I say 'yes,' and while it clicks it also hurts – a selection is an edit after all – but Hector just smiles. He says, “well, you're in the right place.”

Hmm. Maybe I am. 

Kid Science

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of Infinite Jest and I can't do it, won't do it, because when I get to the end it will be over for real. And what then? Because that's all he wrote.

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of this Terra-turning book and I can't do it, won't do it, because after the fall where will all my smug subway not-quite-conversation-starters go? How will I tell the world at large that I talk the talk and walk the walk? Because it's about being lonely, and surely the people who've read this gospel understand all the weird facial machinations I'm making at all times, trying to divert attention quietly in a crowded room. Maybe.

Listlessly listening to a Laura Nyro record that the LP Man on Astor Place said I'd “really dig.” He was right. Plus it's raining in sporadic sheets in this here city of long islands, and the murk of it all lends itself to what is sic transit gloria here and now, that first a phrase I really just grasped the meaning of. The locomotive behind today's clacking language is I think I might want to be a writer, for real, for keeps. I also think that my life is presently like the elves going West in Lord of the Rings in that another lush summer (of long-form experiments in lifestyle) is coming to the end of its heyday. I am always talking and fretting and fuming about getting older and accepting subsequent personal responsibilities, but, like Liz Taylor liked to say, I think now might be the time for guts and guile. One of the times. Just something to draw attention to and name, like the autumn leaves in Central Park.

Like, I need to meet deadlines. Sure. Given. Like, the time has come the walrus said to know certain things for sure like, what kind of person you want to be around, like, how does your ideal morning feel, like, do you really like this thing you do, like, how MUCH? Like, what are you willing to work for? And do you know in your soul what work IS as opposed to ISN'T? And then I keep clutching at this: “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it,” (Hal Incandenza).

I think, and so do many other characters in Infinite Jest and presumably the author, that the “something pathetic about it,” is a de facto cop out. Cuz the thing is it does feel awfully pathetic to the boxed-up intellectual who fears small-talk to give it away in a mundane sense, I know for I have seen. It's the end of solipsism, really, it's a total admission that you are not self-sufficient in the universe nor interesting or central enough to affect change by Just Being You, You outside the Chess Club or college or organized sports-related fun. I have always understood you, lackluster non-joiner kids and tattooed hooligans who work in “freelance.” Yet we've all still got to DO something, regardless of how anathema we feel to the Grain. Which is to say, we all have to compromise. And some kinds of DOING and COMPROMISING and BEING IN THE WORLD seem more practically worthwhile than other kinds because certain cults seem to have bigger fanbases: e.g the nuclear family, the democracy, the church, THEATRE! Doing things means you believe in things. Believing in things means you're alive. When other people are following you or leaning on you it gets bigger, this world, it blows right up.

But the beast of burden for the brainiac is that this arrangement is fraught with visible insincerity and suspicious motive, because doesn't this math defy altruism, isn't it after all like what Tennessee Williams says (to debunk ALL your romantic notions): “using people is what we think of as love,” mustn't it be like that if we're only ever doing things to comfort ourselves, at the end of the day? (Exhale) Does this not make everything semi-vapid, semi-fake, and if so why live under such a tacit banner of mediocrity? Or at all? Is this what it is to look for happiness and if so why is this at all okay, much less the Holy Grail in America? Everything becomes but a prop under the cool light of realizing we move around because we find and fear deficiency. And suddenly everyone is an actor, and all the world's a stage, and your armchair philosophy with dubious quotations throughout is the mast on a ship heading anywhere but Pleasure Town because also hell is other people, according to Sartre.

But again, 4pm, here at the end of the day. At the end of the book. I will come back and confirm in twenty-five minutes, but I'm pretty sure that there are some rules, and these are not simply concessions or ways to Get (fleetingly) Happy with abandon and no insight. Maybe 'social contract' is a good term but actually not quite I think the rules are things you owe your brief time on the planet, the rules are actually how to get out of your own map and into the scary mystery of another person's. The rules, I'm finding, SEEM selfish and frighten the armchair philosopher and tattooed hooligan and Hal Incandenza but they aren't a cop-out, are in fact the opposite of a cop-out, are a cop-in, because you know while you're following them that they're pathetic, and to admit to having a flaw and wanting to change it is the bravest thing a person can do, right? Boston AA is corny, but it works. This is a better way to think, I think.

So some rules are: you have to pay the electric bill. You have to go out on blind dates sometimes, and sometimes you have to go to graduate school, and sometimes – the early twenties have become about discerning when, exactly – you have to let people kiss you on early AM corners and not start psychoanalyzing the gesture even before its over. And sometimes you have to stay at the party way too late or leave way too early (you have to go, either way) and sometimes you have to pick a fight, and sometimes you need to flee the state or get a tattoo or let someone hurt you. Sometimes you have to end phone calls and say no! with conviction and sometimes you have to tell lies to best friends and often you have to apologize, other times you have to say Yes! And a lot of these Sometimes' will stick and direct traffic in your autobiography, and how frightening to release into the knowledge that an idiot kid made a lot of the choices whose fruit will be bearing down on your shoulders at fifty and sixty years old, but following the rules is the only way. And not everyone can abide, and I constantly hope for the grace to neither begrudge or judge or occasionally envy these people. This is sink or swim country, and most of us are nowhere near Michael Phelps' but a hilarious universe throws us into the deep end nonetheless and there's nothing for it but to make some kind of attempt and there's no one to blame after a point, just a project, this is breathing, and finishing great books, and being brave. Breathing is pretty brave, you guys, if done with conviction.

Wind is still making music with the trees outside. Laura Nyro's clicked off. Later I'm going to the movies with a good good friend. Yesterday I sat in Union Square with another good good friend and ate dessert and talked about everything, and before that I went to rehearsal, and I talked to my Mom on the phone, and I kissed a person I liked in the very early AM and I worried a little about money and feeling foolish and I danced before that, a lot, to a favorite song, and I laughed until my stomach hurt and I ate an okay sandwich and I saw a great movie and I saw an old friend and--

I don't want a medal, exactly. I'm not sure I even want your full attention. But I do want something else entirely, a TBD kind of to-do, and the fire of this fuels me, always, even while I can't quite seem to hold on to it (It being FIRE and all) and have lost my ability to pronounce its name, while sometimes it has burned deep and other times it has cooled off to near-invisibility, while I've met such a precious, interesting few amount of people who seem to also be burning alive and care about feeding flame rather than putting it out, what I know for certain these days is that it's never going to stop being hungry. It's never going to go out.

What You DO

We're on a rock in Central Park and Dear One's telling me about a subway encounter. A livid woman chased her cheating boyfriend through inter-car doors on the Manhattan bridge. There was the quiet consensus from all early morning commuters aboard that comes when one person does something zany. Out of nowhere, the livid woman started wailing on a bystander teenage girl, calling her 'the other woman.' Dear One acted on a terrified impulse, she rushed to the girl's aid, the livid woman was restrained. The train stopped and caused a big delay. We're talking about people's reactions. We're defining heroes.

Apparently, no men came to the girl's aid while the woman was wailing on her. We think about this in the constellation of gender politics. Maybe lady-lady crime doesn't seem as dangerous to them, we think. But still.

A friend of ours weighs in, an older white buddy: he thinks he might have been afraid to intercede because of, he hates to say it, a kind of racial fear. The livid woman was Latina and the girl was black. But the girl wasn't even connected to the couple fighting, Dear One says. We decide this is a lame excuse but a good limit to recognize in yourself, maybe. But still.

A guy on the subway, a skater-dude type, groaned actively about the wait for the police. The girl seemed fine. She wasn't hurt. He had to get to work. We decide he's a class A dirtbag, after the fact.

We talk about times we've called the police when passing homeless people who seem ill on the street. I've done it twice, I say, and feel I am bragging a little. Both people woke up before help arrived. It's better to be safe than sorry. I do the breathing test, she says, I wait to see if they're okay. Or sometimes if I'm on my way somewhere I'll check for them coming back, if they're still there I'll do something.

We're still on the rock.

Dear One is still visibly shaken from the subway encounter three days ago. She makes a face at the basin below.

We get to talking about the future, how the artists we know are beginning to separate like wheat and chaff. Did you know so and so got a “real job.” We talk about compromises and how difficult it all is, how stupidly hard to schedule things and make rent, how for the time being we wouldn't trade it in. We talk about why we do it, if it's so hard. I forget, we were also talking about the annexation of Hawaii and some disturbing nineteenth century imperialist political rhetoric. I think everything you do, no matter what, you ought to be thinking of it as a gift, she says. She says the people looking to be famous, or leave a legacy or an imprint in a future disconnected to now, to another person that's for the wrong reasons, that impulse. So there is a right way and a wrong way, we dismally conclude. And some things are hard, but often these things are quite clear.

Going home, make certain mistakes: pass beggars, pout at suits, ignore questions. We've talked about the political system, too. How you are manipulated. How it is an engine. How the complicated part comes in when do-you-vote-for-Jill-Stein-and-sleep-tight or understand the pulse of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, sigh and pray in your little booth voting for Obama, deciding to believe in something, moving the world around in 'bigger pictures' when you yourself are oh-so-small. And give yourself points for voting, because that's much of it. /making the eye contact/ defending the victim, that's much of it.

It isn't enough, though. You, I, we must live with that.  

Where I Live

This morning I walked up Greenpoint Avenue and started introducing myself sheepishly to local business-owners: “Oh no, I'm just looking around. But I love your malt shop. I'm new to the neighborhood.” Most of the local business-owners were hefty-looking veteran types with trace Greek accents, psyche, most of the local business owners were Latina women in blue jeans, psyche, most of the local business owners were thin, bespectacled Korean women who reminded me – improbably – of one of my grandmothers. If you've never been farther into Queens than Astoria, I am here to remind you that if there is a New York melting pot, this might be the place. In Brooklyn, where I have witnessed a few cluttered kinds fighting for resources (this is called diversity) groups of people have seemed less integrated; in Crown Heights there are the entrenched Hasidim, the slightly less-entrenched Afro-Carribbeans, and the new-to-town biracial couples with their children in hemp sweaters. In Sunnyside everyone looks to have been here for years and years, seemingly un-ruffled by what is, to the rest of New York, a housing crisis. All of the 'r's I've heard roll off everyone's tongue the same way.

Which is almost to say, not at all.

When I told my friends I was moving to Queens, a lot of them had strong reactions: long, exasperated 'ugggggghs' were the norm. A dear one told me, “That's great for you, but if I wanted to live in the suburbs I wouldn't live in New York City.” I can't entirely defend this. There is an element of Sunnyside that is decidedly Mayberryan; now I live a block from a public library, and a post office, and many un-ironic diners and playgrounds and schools. There is air and space and generally un-interesting architecture. I can actually feel where this part of the borough stops being cool: riding the 7 train, I pass PS1 and the graffitied walls at Court Square and suddenly the wash of people getting on and off are second tier businessmen, are high school field-hockey players, are greengrocers (one assumes, with the reductive gaze of the starry-eyed transplant). And most of all, there are families: in sneakers and blue jeans, families going to church, families recognizing each other in the street, families running errands for the week. Not bars but pubs. Not cabs but buses. Still I will maintain that this is New York, it is obviously New York, it is only New York. It feels suburban out here in that it's a place where people live who work somewhere else, but people in Queens have chosen to be here, and nothing about it feels anecdotal or aspiring to Manhattan. Lugging groceries back to my apartment, I thought, “I live in a neighborhood now.” I can imagine sticking around.

For the record, my rent is something like $850.00 a month.

II.

I went to the Whitney museum this Thursday, with the same dear one who disdains the whole concept of the suburbs. This was both of our (only) day's off in weeks, and it was designed to be lovely, and I rode the 7 to the 6 and bought bagels and muffins and coffee, and we ate breakfast on a high ledge looking out over Madison Avenue. We talked about art and boys and politics and a little below our ledge we watched unhurried women in David Yurman jewelry walk in and out of Carolina Herrerra. We watched packs of pedigreed dogs vying for sidewalk space, some wearing sweaters. Old men with caps and papers and coffees and elbow patches. Many subtle spins on the navy blue business suit. Gold-braided doormen! People with the best haircuts getting in and out of town cars! Then, on the ledge, we two, munching, wearing battered Tom's shoes, clutching disintegrating tote bags. My friend had cause to interrupt our conversation and say, “I actually feel like a tourist here.”

The Upper East Side is just where you left it, Pierpont Morgan. There are brownstones and sandstones and limestones in the east eighties with Juliet balconies that do actively take my breath away, that fill me with the most peculiar kind of lust. Leaves fall on cobblestones outside the park. I remember visiting New York before I lived here and tooling around the Upper East Side with my family, playing the 'pick your dream house' game on each street. I “remember” the Upper East Side from a fair amount of Woody Allen movies, and from Sex and the City, and if I am honest the Upper East Side is a lot of what I was dreaming of when I picked New York for keeps. “How New York,” people say here. “This is New York!” people say here. This is a part of the vision, the postcard. It is not where I live.

After we walk into and out of Central Park (and past the Plaza hotel...) I have the weirdest little flicker of mania. Dear One and I are strolling down Lexington, passing stores with haute couture children's clothing, and I see a pastry shop. She tugs on my arm, but before I fully realize what I'm doing I go in and purchase three very posh desserts at the St. Ambreuse cafe. A beautiful woman in a deeply fashionable print dress sells these desserts to me, and as she's ringing up the tartelets (there were no prices in the case) and wrapping them up for me (in sheafs and sheafs of paper and stickers) she says something cute like “just the other day, I went home with a whole cake, these are un-resistable.” And I think, someone has to be having a joke somewhere, right? When my eyebrows flinch up to see the purchase total appear on the register, when I try to imagine this 95 pound woman eating even a bite of cake, anywhere, ever? And I get so sad for a second. I think about all the things I may never get to have. I start to feel stupid and incredibly guilty about feeling sad. There is an article in The New Yorker this week about Sudan. A lot of people move through their lives without unchecked hope, and a great deal of them can't even visit the best-looking part of an American metropolis. So deal, Britt, go home to your outer borough.

For the record, the desserts came to something like $35.00. For three.

III.

I'm reading E.L Doctorow's Ragtime, which is a smashing love letter to the American mythos. I say mythos because Doctorow bleeds fiction and fact by putting characters like Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit and JP Morgan side by side with anonymous creations like a family made of Mother, Father and Mother's Brother. I also say mythos because Ragtime reads like a history book while telling big, sweet stories about The Dream: people pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or try to), people confront their prejudices. A lot of the book's about New York, in one way or another. I'm also about to start making a play about America, a rambling folk musical kind of to-do, and have been asked as a part of this process to start pinpointing My America, not yours but MINE.

So in the aftermath of the Roosevelts' and the Wild West and the Empire State Building and Marilyn Monroe and Broadway's Golden Age and Lewis and Clarke and the Civil War, even Woody Allen, the meat of it, history, the fun parts, I am really trying to think about My America, what it is in My America. This is not the same as what's in the newspaper this morning, or even what's in my diary on September 11, 2001. Really thinking about My America has got me dancing between the odd not-quite-nostalgia I chased all the way to the Big City (the Fosse, the Rent, the Carrie Bradshaw, the Upper East Side, all the pertinent fictions) and the day-to-day gristle of what it feels like to actually occupy this place. Modern New York hipster-culture is preoccupied with the past, with the idea of the thing, this we know: vintage clothes, toys, ideas are the coolest kind. And I am an actor. I followed a very particular, well-tested recipe when coming to audition for New York University all by lonesome, with a guitar case full of clothes, in April 2008. Still, I am surprised by how hard it is getting to face that my life does not always measure up to the life I feel I aimed for and engineered, in moving here. I go to the Whitney with a friend I love, I have the most wonderful days, no cause for complaint. Still, it is about money. I cannot afford fancy dessert. I am also not famous yet. My America is married to Me because the country's whole premise is a storybook template for the life I'm seeking. I am testing a hypothesis every day I live in New York. I am paying for it.

Beyond the cold glory of the upper eighties, where I was not welcomed, I turned around and looked for My America in the places where I actually hang out. I was surprised by the elegance and dignity of my new neighbors in Queens, who seem at my first glance to be content outside scrutiny, electing to make homes and lifestyles away from the Manhattan that everyone everywhere else I know is actively trying to get to. And – joke part two – the people in my part of Queens are physically quite close to the Empire State Building and the Great White Way and even the Whitney Museum, they are a Reality next door to the Myth. People in families, who one assumes have sacrificed something at some point, have decided to make homes in Queens. Some water separates them from someone's idea of a glittery paradise. I wonder, the longer I stay here, which myth is shed first.

We are lucky, lucky, lucky.

creeps in this petty pace

 I picked a hard and interesting place to live, and so did everyone else here. Maybe that means we're all hard and interesting. It's already hard and interesting to be human; hard and interesting to go it alone (we're all kind of alone), hard and interesting to be with others.

Maybe you've had this day: Facebook wants my cryptic alt-rock lyrics status updates, and I need things like gummy beard and vodka-soda, and I hate everyone, and I have to walk forty blocks alone and listen to LCD Soundsystem and weep, and when I get home I shall cut my hair, or pierce my ear, that is if I don't get a tattoo before I get home, and no one understands me but you James Mercer, but you, David Foster Wallace. I'm simultaneously enraged and comforted by the bajillion other people riding MY same train home sitting with MY same look on their faces, but none of them will strike up a conversation and change MY life. All while reason, while temperate superego are trying to count the many blessings and remind me of last Wednesday, when it was magic, last Wednesday, the TV movie version of life, when there was brief nameless love I haven't paid for yet and good company and good ideas and sweet, sticky, sexy summer heat. Did I realize it then? How perfect it was? How silly, how temporary and predictable it is today? How it will hurt again. When it rains, it pours. When it rains, everything is still stupid, just advanced stupid, Stupid 201.

In MOODS it is hard to see the ground or the sky. In MOODS it is hard to be selfless and make considered, reasonable decisions. Yet these MOODS! Thank God for them! When I get home on This Day I'll write it all down, I'll call my mom, and still is the persisting wish (probably the most insane part of it all, given...well, given everything) -- someone tomorrow will care even more. It's just around the river bend, or avenue, or month. And pain and magic will collect and from these will emerge fantastic art and I will be praised and adored and important and famous forever and ever, you're not bipolar! Only an eternal optimist! That last seat on the subway is for you, now claim your reward! Someday you will even make the time to make this art, surely. But wait, my cat distracts me, distracted by her shadow.

I haven't found a moral yet. No, I guess the moral is perspective. But it's not that simple. I don't even think it's an English word yet; I like to toss around 'ennui.' I'm already excited to read this when I'm forty, look back and laugh at or pity or believe in this baby who's all about the 'yet.' Sooo, when you've had or have This Day, maybe you'll watch Garden State. Or read something I've already read in a park. And even if I don't talk to you there, hear it now, okay? I'm in it, in it silly, in it right there with you. Now say the same.

It should end here, but there's more-more-alizing to be found: my suggestion is find somebody to text you 'You're great!' (I'll do it) or 'Take a deep breath, remember you're amazing!' or 'Summer called/23 called/it gets better,' (And worse) and I get it! I get the maddening corniness of one day at a time, it is one of those true things too banal to even bandy about. But I gettttt it. Scarlet O'Hara. Alcoholics Anonymous. Rent. Because do you guys realize what's in just twenty-four hours? Too much! Just too too much! Hahaha!