To No One, For You Two

Today is a melancholy day, but I refuse to link to the action. Tragedies make me want to hide in notebooks. I remember sitting in a food-filled room after the funeral in my youth, how awful the light was in there. Sometimes you just want to cry in a corner...of the internet.

The other day I learned that a girl I used to jokingly refer to as my “nemesis” in college had committed suicide. I had not seen this woman for many years, and we had never been close. A few days before this day, a friend remarked that there was something perhaps-dangerously disingenuous about our social media culture's casual relationship to tragedy. How the Facebook feeds, the Twitter statuses, all those RIPs shouted into the void, how they had a suspect genesis – for what's our goal, when we express vague condolences on the internet? When our profiles are so closely linked to our own cosmic cries for attention, a dark soul has to wonder if all the public well-wishing isn't utterly empty, more concerned with the author than any alleged recipient. An optimistic girl on my Facebook feed is out to quell the cynics: she tells her followers, “posting about Robin Williams['] passing doesn't mean any of us are looking for 'likes' or 'attention,' so shut your bitter, wannabe nonconformist mouths.” Well said, Brittany. (Her name is Brittany, too.) Sometimes we say things just because we feel them; sometimes we feel things just to feel.

Yet here I am, on a curious pulpit for rumination, here on this blog that no one checks anymore. I am also here because today I was supposed to write a dozen things – most of them ostensibly for money or at least attention, because nowadays I am a freelance writer and so everything I write is suddenly of merit. Every idea I have nowadays seems necessarily linked to a finished project, for one thing – which means every idea I have is linked to the notion of scrutiny. This is primarily a problem because I am not so good at finishing projects. But here are some things I really love: being complimented, being paid, being right, being thought wise. Now that my writing (and the swells of commenters on said writing) can sate some of these desires, I'm addicted to the end goal. It's been harder to rationalize winding rafts of un-researched pop-philosophy because people don't read those, and nobody pays me to write them.*

So I was feeling listless about this art life, as per usual. Then a good one died, and this made me think some more about myself because my relationship to the world is insufficiently developed. Let me also catch this before it drifts too far away: listening to Gene Clark's No Other, a bit of lyric: “Words can be empty or filled with sound.” I will cut the crap and attempt to fill the words with sound. And so what if no one is here to hear! The point is to remember that an audience is not always the point.

*

This already feels forced. All I'm able to remember about my classmate is how she was beautiful, and very talented, and such things already indicate a tragic heroine. But it's true: a lot of people liked her. A lot of people thought her very special. I did, if I am being honest. This woman had a light so affecting that I was insanely jealous of everything she did during our first few years of concurrent education, even though we didn't take a class together or ever hang out during this time. Jealousy is such an ugly feeling, it feels odd to admit out loud. Ha – 'out loud.' Here we go again.

Like Robin Williams, little bright star suffered from mental illness, as I understand it – but I will walk away from comparing what I don't understand, in this moment. If the warring factions of Facebookers with divergent opinions on how-to-handle-public-deaths agree on anything, it's the injustice and universality of mental illness. Today is a good day to scribble down hotline information, or reach out for a friend. In this instance, death masquerades as some helpful unifier. That is, if anyone really reaches, or really calls.

This girl didn't have a Facebook for many years, which these days feels like something that is worth note. Her pictures, the shape of her face, her smile – these images were erased for me a long time ago. I hadn't seen her since I'd last actually seen her, in the flesh. If she had changed much in the past four years, I would not know. I will never know. As a result, the void she has left remains quiet, unheralded in this garish world wide web.

*

Naturally, when you occupy a larger spot of the public's imagination, more people have more opinions about what to do with you when you're gone. What I'm most mystified by in the whole celebrity-death concept on a large scale and Robin Williams' recent death on a smaller scale, is the section of the population who seem determined to assert just how much they didn't care about the deceased. Sure, there's something level-headed and briefly refreshing about people who are honest – I'm talking about statuses like, “Remember I didn't know him personally, and neither did you.” But as opposed to the other Brittany, who tells us she is basking in her lonely feelings just to bask, I wonder about the naysayers' goal. What do they hope to accomplish in pointing out the obvious? For it is pointing out the obvious: few of us “really knew” Robin Williams. Then again, few of us “really knew” my college classmate. There are of course varying depths of grief, but I really want to know: why point any of that out, at a time like this? What's the harm in letting people be in their own pain, or even in their showcase of affected or exaggerated pain? Why is privately experienced emotion seen as the more noble, the more genuine? It's as if in opening our feelings to public scrutiny, they become part of a 'trend.' They are no longer merely ours, in some way.

I wrote a few paragraphs above, 'certain kinds of internet condolences seem more concerned with the author than the recipient.' But isn't this always the case, with any condolence? The recipient will never receive the condolence, is the thing. Maybe that's what makes the whole enterprise so hollow.

*

Yet were it not for the internet, there are so many deaths we wouldn't know about. Here is an argument for the realists: what about all the celebrity deaths or friends of distant friends' deaths that occur on the daily, which we would otherwise know nothing about until some later college reunion or the Oscars 'In Memoriam' montage or never? I wonder if the instant way we receive our information now has a relationship to the grief it produces; if timely access to a tragedy enables us to experience sorrow at some increased rate. There is the shock-factor, when you learn something immediately: you find out, and if it is Facebook, soon everyone has found out. You are presumably all in your own rooms at the exact same moment, finding out, then being surprised, then flocking to video montages of the deceased as one huge virtual unit. I remember attempting to buy a vinyl pressing of Thriller the day Michael Jackson died; I remember the object's price increasing exponentially every time I refreshed the page. A community can whip itself into a frenzy far more efficiently than an individual.

And here is an argument for the people who like to feel things-then tell other people what they've felt: there is so much to feel! You will always have your Tweets cut out for you. Your heart should bleed, always, if you refresh your page with regularity.

*

Things we can widely agree on: It is good not to be a jerk. It is good to have feelings. It is sometimes good to interrogate these feelings, and where they come from.

Would it be different, the patch in my heart where my classmate used to be, if I were able to be saturated in memories of her at this moment? If she had Facebook, perhaps a flood of remembered days and nights, the shape of her face, would rush to the surface and coax more from me. But then, what is 'more?' All I have now is that time we rehearsed a scene in a dorm basement, when there must have been some laughter. Those two different times when we went out for the same part and she totally got it. Various hallway brush-ins, seemingly heartfelt compliments exchanged. If I had been a better person, it's not impossible that we could have been friends. (The macabre, recalibrating thoughts of a left-behind.)

And would it be different, the patch in my heart where Robin Williams used to be, if I wasn't presently inundated with Netflix suggestions of his best work, with lengthy eulogies from friends and columnists, with montages and images galore? I have to imagine that it would be. While I do not think my vague sadness would go quietly into that good night, I'd be thinking only of my memories: of Mrs. Doubtfire. Of a certain seemingly coke-addled Today Show interview. As is, I am thinking of a filmography. A canon. Art objects and experiences that do not feel personal to me, but make up the blurry picture of many peoples' memories. I suppose this kind of public grieving is like any funeral, where everyone in a waiting queue can speak their piece. Without her own public funeral, perhaps my classmate will fade into the small burning star of everyone's private moments with her. We will paint no unifying mural, we will mythologize not one vaguely outlined idea of a sketch of a lady but dozens and dozens of fractal limbs. The eulogies of distant acquaintances will go unheard, and none will be the wiser.

Except maybe the distant acquaintances.

*

It doesn't really matter, of course. What I think. I want the people who got closest to “knowing” the deceased parties to feel minimal pain. I want them surrounded by other loved ones and all small solaces. That's another thing: funerals and condolences are for the survivors, don't forget.

One thing people have been writing on the public walls, to Robin Williams, is “thank you.” “Thank you, you made me want to be an actor/comedian/pirate captain.” Thank you seems appropriate in a way that RIP doesn't, quite. Thank you connotes attention paid to time lived, deeds done, thoughts affected. It seems more personal, somehow; and personal is the nature of grief. I say thank you to the girl I used to know, not for something so overt as “making me want to be a better actor, and for putting good work into the world” because this doesn't ring entirely true, but fuck it as it's just between us? For fanning a flame. For light, your own. I did not know you well, but I am sorry you're not in the world anymore.

*

Finally – and this is important, directed to the hotline posters – there is the weight of depression on both these individuals. Depression is a thing endured so privately, to see its effects made public has always been taboo. The solidarity in the all-of-us-posting-together approach seems especially attractive here. Everyone who suffers emotional pain that renders them unable to see light should be granted light, as much as possible, so at the very least they have a place they feel they can speak, if they want to. But this line of thinking is also broad rhetoric, the kind of thing individuals in pain can't easily metabolize. Perhaps it resolves like so: though we necessarily suffer alone, there must be something in knowing that we all suffer. Though we cannot ever get close enough to another human being, there is something in trying. And frankly? Loud as we shout, there seems to be little catharsis in any of it – for whether to Facebook or nowhere, we are still shouting for the benefit of hearing ourselves out loud. And whether rendered as shout or whisper, that goal is always, always the same: it is attempting to fill a silence.

*Then again – why are these “rafts” (WC) of pop-philosophy so very un-researched, so very winding? One wonders if the author should rethink everything she's ever done.  

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.'

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.