i'm not cold

you are late to everything and so
you don't get to say anything
when winter is early.

it is not all you've made it out to be, anyway;
all that has changed is that if you want to go outside,
you will have to do it on purpose,
and the view from over here is that
you could use some purpose.
what did you do all summer,
with those aimless privileges, anyway?
i never saw you use them,
except once or twice to smoke a cigarette in peace;
if summer really is your favorite season,
wouldn't you be able to explain why?
let's not get into where were you in autumn.
inside that body of yours, probably,
doing god knows what
for not even he knows why--
who the hell did you think you were fooling
in indian summer,
barely holding on?
what did you think the warmth was doing for you?

dig out your jacket and your father's gloves.
you get an early winter,
but not as a punishment, nor even as a wake up call, not even for shock value--
it's being scored as a second chance.

it's a common misconception, not every snowflake is unique,
but most of them don't last that long, anyway,
in these mid-november flurries.

1 Nov 14

Halloween was won this year by the blond girl wearing a University of Michigan cheerleader outfit, except it had the word “sucks” written in cursive in the appropriate places, to express her displeasure with that academic institution. I didn’t like her handwriting. But the costume is not how she won. She won because she showed up to my old house, looked in at the party, and said, “I don’t know about any of these people, and I am leaving.” Then she left. I could have applauded. 

It was a stunning victory, a real triumph, because so many of us could have said the same thing, but none of us did. 

It’s not that I didn’t go for it. I had my best costume ever; what I did was I told people that this year I had my best costume ever and then I didn’t dress up at all. I went as “a disappointment.” I couldn’t decide whether to be self-satisfied or self-loathing about the whole thing; I guess I really was a disappointment. Every year I pick a dumb but kind of smart joke and tape it somewhere to my person, and I hope that people will think I am clever for it but understand when they do not. This year I didn’t even use a post-it. 

Halloween does not tend to be a favorite time of year. My mask has shifted over the years, I’ve gone from confused to contemptuous, from cynical to indifferent, from slut-shaming to slut-shaming-shaming to just plain ashamed, but the constant has been “kind of sad.” I’ve never known what to do with the lawns full of Solo cups and the yells in the street and silhouetted orange glow of the parties on Gunson. It isn’t my scene, and the way all this fun hangs in cold October air makes me sick. 

This year was better, or maybe it was worse. The party was at Hariet Brown, a place I used to call home but wisely weaseled my way out of this year. It’s a charming place, a dark red two story shithole with the bare minimum required for college student living, and from the right angle it looks like the cover of that American Football record and it feels like it, too. It has a two car garage that we use as a concert space and has been converted into memory, by way of globular mood lighting, hundreds of holdings of hands, and an out-of-tune piano in the corner. The number of people who truly matter to me who I haven’t seen in that garage during an emo set by too-loud assholes is not zero, but it’s probably less than I can count on my hands. Halloween was no different. 

I sat on the couch and I loudly made jokes that made one of the blond boys laugh and made the other feel stupid. This was a feeling worth shaking off; I wanted attention, and that’s not a good sign. An ex-girlfriend walked in, and we did a pain-free version of our ritual, this time with podcast recommendations. It’s always hard to know what to say with someone that you used to be intimate with but haven’t been for years. You want your “How are you?” to count as more than it ever does. You want it to count as a hug, kind of, although even if it were a hug, it wouldn’t be enough. The idea is something warm and encompassing and brief, but better than a hug. Anyway, I never have the words for it, but I was happy to see that she had gotten herself a dog, and I contented myself to casual betrayals that once we knew each other very well. The music started. 

The music was not the point. I walked inside, visited my old room, Andrew’s current room, which I was told was the VIP room, which turned out actually to be a place to hide from your feelings or at least from your friends’ feelings. There Andrew and Mike and Carly and my sister sat. Mike was drunk, and Carly was hungry, and we ditched the party for a minute and ended up at Woody’s. We discussed how good of a crew we were, we charged cell phones from a jangly pocket, we ordered too much hummus. I don’t know if you’re supposed to like the lighting at Woody’s, but I bet that you are. I don’t like it. We headed back, Andrew and I in a hurry. The show was over by then, but of course it lingered. Hariet loomed, well-guarded. 

It was a confusing crowd to take in. There were so many friendly faces, a few of whom even meant it. There were people I didn't know intermingling with people I didn't recognize. There were old exiles regaining their sea legs; familiar faces missing that shouldn't have been. This does something to a man's heart. It goes without saying that the Spice Girls were there. My crew went inside, but I stuck around in this crowd. I showed off my costume to preemptive groans, and took candy from my former friends. 

I was glad I stuck around: Faith’s mom got married and her joke about it was on point. It involved Ruffles. She had stopped by for a minute to see some but not all of us. We spent a few minutes talking about this; for once, I was listening well. I couldn’t avoid the strangeness of it, there was a time when this would have been an uninterrupted group of best friends, but now Faith and I are standing outside the shed while the girls inside avoid eye contact and the friend she’s with waits in line to pee. But I’m listening: Everything has gone to pieces, but Faith said that isn’t surprising. It’s senior year, everyone is anxious, and well, these things happen. This is undramatic and probably correct, but part of me still thinks there are a few particular king’s horses and men who I think are to blame for Humpty Dumpty’s state of disrepair. I suggested to Faith that she use a plotter printer to express her how over it she is, and this gets the laugh I was hoping for but that doesn’t necessarily mean I should have said it. Faith and Michael disappeared into the night, and I was thrust inside. 

I stand surveying the party from my favorite place in the world, the threshold of my old room. I wonder what it is about leaning against a door jamb that makes me feel so safe. I don’t think it’s earthquake-related. I think it’s the idea of being able to leave, or rather, of never quite entering in the first place. Out there in the open, one hundred percent in the room, people are dancing and it almost looks normal. But there’s something sadder in it than there normally is, and this time I know it’s not me. There are missing faces and there are strange divisions and everyone can see this, and you can hear it even in shouts to Avril Lavigne. I think we were all haunted by ghosts of Halloween past, by former friends or more to the point by former friendships. You don’t owe anything to anyone, but you owe something to friendship, I think idly. I don’t know if I mean that. 

I wrote a speech up in my head, enjoy a fantasy of shutting off the music and telling them all what I think. There are long-winded versions all the way down to haikus, but the gist of it, and the one I whispered in Andrew’s ear, is: “Remember that, at least sometimes, it is probably you in the wrong. Everyone has a moral code and no one lives up to it.” Then I would shut it off and leave. Instead I just stand there and frown, trying to figure out if it’s cowardice or just a healthy skepticism of my own damn self that’s keeping me from flipping the switch. There’s no rule that says it can’t be both. 

I stood there leaning for a while, playing around with this in my head, watching things take a mercifully typical descent into the absurd. I’m interrupted only by the drunk girl whose face I know. Conversation is never quite possible in these situations; I am so far from knowing what to say I enter fight, flight, or freeze. Andrew deals by insisting she is dressed as a basketball player. I smile at this but mostly freeze for a while and get pawed at a little, get the buttons of my shirt undone, and stare blankly. 12:36, I made it longer than normal. It’s the part of the night where the music becomes intolerable, even the stuff I like, and it is time for me to leave. 

I did not win Halloween. Right before she left, our hero the cheerleader pointed off in the distance and turned to me. “North!” she said, not asking so much as demanding. I complied with a nod and yep. Then she did the same for “South.” but more solemnly and, after a moment’s consideration, “East!” and “West!” We locked eyes and she laughed at whatever it was I said to her, but only as she walked away.

Questions I didn't text to my ex-girlfriend

and was right not to, but
that doesn't mean weren't worth asking like:
Big ones, like:
In your opinion, do men ever change?
(women, too, I guess, but that interests me less because
~~some things never change~~)
Is the world going to be there in the morning?
Is a good man really so hard to find?
(because I thought I had mine but
I'm not sure what he looks like.)
How have you been dealing?
Or practical ones, rapidfire, like:
Do you like what I have done with the place? or
Did you know that I broke the banker's lamp? or
Do you have any tips for y-chromosome maintenance? or
Do you know what I am supposed to do with all these shadows?
(because I have just been cramming them in my pants pockets but have heard
that off-site storage units can be affordable,)
Do you know of any that are reasonable?
Or the real little ones, like:
Why do I pretend that these moods started with you?
/////
Questions I didn't text to my ex-girlfriend,
I didn't have the heart to text them
so instead I put them on Wikipedia
using her log-in
and then flagged them
for review

6/19/2014

I am walking home through Central Park and I am doing so intentionally.  I am trying to savor, whatever that word means.  This is my final commute home, and I am trying to make it last.

The sky is salmon and with all the the violence that an upstream fish suggests, it is saturated and colorized and something has to give.  It should not surprise you that I am thinking of prologue, of delicate equilibriums and their inevitable destructions.  When I reach the Harlem Meer, when I climb those rocks overlooking the water, I get what I asked for, or at least what I predicted.  The salmon gives in and the rain begins, almost apologetic in its victory, large, atom bomb raindrops, sure, but only the minimum amount to get the job done.  It prevents further movement but it accepts your surrender.  I stand under an oak and I lay down my weapons.

And there it is, a moment worth savoring, whatever that word means.  I look to the north, to Lenox Avenue, to the intersection of Central Park North and Lenox and Saint Nicholas, I look to that beautiful triangle of four story brick buildings and absurd liquor store neon and crowds running in rain and walking under umbrellas and that sky, that salmon’s northern battle with rainclouds, and the shadows of the drops which are large enough to name and it is a moment, that’s what it is, it is a dimming worth memorializing in, it is an apocalypse, and it deserves to last forever.

It won’t, though.  Even now, describing it to you, I lose some of it.  And even if I remain here in reverence, it will end, the rainclouds will win or the salmon will, or night will overwhelm the both of them.  And even if I shut my eyes and imagine it forever, preserve it on my retinas for the rest of my days, I will still lose it, I will be distracted by other things or else I will die.  This scene does not last forever and neither do I.

This is growing sappy, it is growing literary, even.  “The natural progression of time is happening to me, and also to my parents, just like it has happened to everyone and their parents from the beginning of recorded history, but this time it’s different.” Mallory is right.  But maybe this is different, or at least it’s mine.  This is purchasing my 1999 Chevy in 2009, it’s not new, but it’s new to me.  So I stare at this sky and this scene at these people, and I know I cannot keep them, and I look into my empty palm where I expected to see a fistful of sand.

6/18/2014

what follows is a selection of my notes from a community board meeting i attended.  i swore a lot more than i remember.  i'm not going to write about the context for any of this, but if you want to know, hmu.  i left the board room at 11:15 after Helen mouthed "go home."

Sails through, for obvious reasons.  They’ve moved 17 times since 1626.  This is kind of L.O.L.  This is very L.O.L.  I’m opposed to patents, zoning.  Fuck.  It begins with Helen reluctantly taking a seat.  The school thinks it’s a p cool school.  Again, fuck quiet on Manhattan.  Outlaw private schools.  I hate the very concept of private schools.  I want to outlaw them.  The argument that it’s the top school in the country hold literally zero water with me.  I hate the wealthy.  So that sucks, go to public school in Flint.  Fuck the idea of sixth grade work ethics.  WAIT,THEY PLAY JAI ALAI?!  that is a scandal!  I absolutely 100% refuse to go to a private school.  You paid a ton of money!  privileged kids who don’t know they’re privileged.  that’s the ballgame, that’s the goddamned ballgame.  I hate private schools possible more than anything else.  We did all of that at my public goddamned school--and I was privileged!  I went to a fabulous school.  If you’re still saying “differently abled” like it’s 2002, I don’t give a shit about the rest of your thing.  Stop saying you’re going to be brief.  So go to a public school!  Go to a public school, don’t under any goddamned circumstances send your children to private schools.  Okay, you’re evil.  Why.  I think my poker face is no good.  So the thing is that the wealthy people think that they already compromised but they didn’t actually listen to a goddamned thing the neighbors said.  Damn, you don’t have to have the good guys win.

on the way home, i wrote this on the back of a receipt:

Anyone who makes a noise complaint will be deported to Davenport, Iowa.

6/17/2014

Taking an inventory of the missable things, the creaky mattress, its renegade springs.  I find myself looking up at now-familiar buildings and leering, I expect something from them but I don’t know what.  I learned where the light switch was but as Helen said sadly, I didn’t really need to.  Seven weeks is enough time realize where you’ve left, I’m not sure it’s enough time to figure out where you are.  You get glimpses, though.  You get eternities at Morningside Park and evenings in laundromats and compliments from that woman at the Speaker’s office.  I don’t know what to do with myself, there’s so much to miss, so many bytes to process.  You know how many times I have decided my future here?  Maybe in another seven weeks, I’ll know what I left.  It’s like moving, you cram it all in boxes, you sort through it later.  I’ll do that with my feelings.  So I am taking an inventory of the missable things.

6/16/2014

If my last name were Peters or Patterson or anything so pedestrian, it would have earned me an earful, but Fitzpatrick was a get out of jail free card that I quickly cashed.  A man called, hopping mad, upset by the fact of our answering machine and what it told him about the people behind it.  He explained to me all that was wrong with the modern world, with emails and voicemails and other instruments of confusion.  These are not conversations that often end.  Then he asked me my name.  “Sean Fitzpatrick, sir.”  This followed by the rarest of rarities in a conversation like this:  A bona fide pause, a break in the yelling for the processing of information.  “Oh,” came a different voice, “my name is Patrick.  That’s a fine name.”  Another pause, this one less rare, this one recovering from an interrupted train of thought.  I don’t mind if someone is angry by nature so long as they are easily distractible.  “Well, anyway, Mr. Patrick, I read in your newsletter that...”  If all Helen’s constituents were old Irish men, I think I could make a living doing this.

6/15/2014

Loris sits, a baseball cap backwards, a white v-neck smudged by the ashes of the cigarette he’s dangling in his unaccountably gloved right hand.  I am staring at him, but so are the rest of us.  We are all on the porch and he is in the path,and we are all facing him whether we choose to or not.  He meets our attention with confidence, with exactly the smile you would expect of a 21 year old French kid who has New York City under his thumb.  He is holding court, trying to prove that he is not high as fuck, a task made only slightly more difficult by the fact that he is high as fuck.  But due process must be followed:  “Ask me anything!” he demands through his grin.

Dennis does not deny that he is high as fuck.  He starts the prosecution:  “Who is your favorite footballer?”  He stares at Loris intently.  He is convinced this will be a stumper.

“Easy, it’s Evrà.”  Dennis shrinks.

“Really?   Evrà?”  This is Camelle.  He is asking because he cares about football, not to play the game.

“Yes, Evrà is good.”  With the gloved hand, he dismisses Camelle, dumps more ash on his t-shirt.  “Now let’s do capitals.  I am good at capitals.”

We cycle through the atlas and sure enough, Loris is good at capitals, but he loses the attention of the crowd.  This doesn’t bother him as he is genuinely caught up in an argument over Kuala Lumpur.  It’s not his crowd anyway.  We are gathered for a barbecue for Dennis’ birthday.  It is not Dennis’ birthday, though that only seems to bother Dennis.  For everyone else, it is a perfectly satisfactory explanation.  Dennis tries to explain to the new arrivals that it is not his birthday, but they wish him a happy one anyway, and he accepts his defeat.  After he has gone to lay down, they will sing “Happy Birthday” to him.  He will groan “thank you” from the third floor window.  

6/14/2014

okay first of all, she figured out a better way to do paragraph breaks than me and i've been doing this for six weeks.  here it is, a fantastic guest post by my sister Shannon

Sean asked me if I would do a guest post for this blog.  He said that he thought it would be a cool thing to do, but I think he was mostly just looking for a day off of writing.  Regardless of the reasoning, here I am, writing a blog entry.

While sitting next to a snoring stranger on a plane may seem less than the ideal situation for six in the morning, there was no place I would have rather been at that moment.  Looking out the window at the obviously tired and less than happy to have the morning shift American Airlines employees loading luggage onto planes with what seemed to be more force and less finesse, I was equally exhilarated and terrified about my trip to New York.  During the course of the flight while most other passengers where trying catch some sleep before arriving in the city that doesn’t do so, I found myself excitingly daydreaming about my weekend in this big, foreign city.  Of course I had an idea of what the city was and what I would do there, from my previous brief tenure there a few weeks before and images from 30 Rock, Seinfeld, and almost every romantic comedy I’d seen to fuel my imagination.  But mostly where I found my thoughts wandering to was the fact that I was traveling alone; to me that was what was most exciting and scary about this trip.  Now, when I say scary I don’t mean it in the sense of being scared of the plane crashing (I mean, I’m more likely to die on the car ride there, right?) or even getting mugged in Central Park (which I feel like is probably a pretty outdated sitcom trope by now) or just being afraid of traveling to the city of 8 million people without my parents to guide me around.  It was more terrifying to realize that I’m at the point in my life where I’m capable of traveling to the largest city in America on my own.  I did spend the majority of the weekend with my Midwestern New Yorker brother, showing me the best place to get a bagel and the best place to sit and eat said bagel.  But while he was at his work helping out citizens, being praised by his coworkers, and having his boss come up with lies about ways to keep him from leaving in a week, I was on my own to explore. It was weird being able to just go out by myself in a place so large and foreign to me that quite frankly I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it.  But I’m able to do so. I am able to wander around Central Park, getting slightly lost and passing the same saxophone player at least three times, alone (and eventually making it out to the right side, unfortunately without seeing “the dog,” much to Helen’s dismay).  I am able to weave my way through the bustling city sidewalks filled with more people than I’ve ever seen out and about in Plymouth or East Lansing without having the back my dad’s shirt to hang onto.  I am able to navigate the Manhattan subway system at three in the morning with a dying phone all by myself.  I guess it’s one of those things where I didn’t quite realize I was growing up until I was sitting on that subway train with four other strangers at three in the morning.

I could go on about my trip.  I could talk about walking around and talking in Prospect Park with Sean, eating a grilled cauliflower sandwich (which was a very big deal), the roars of excitement in Little Italy when their football team scored a goal, the incomprehensible number of cute dogs I saw.  It was only 2 days but felt like 5 (which probably was a result of not sleeping much, but the city supposedly never does so I figured why should I? (Sorry for making that reference twice in this post.)).  I guess I’ll end my little guest post by saying how lucky I am to have such an incredible older brother.  While I may have rolled my eyes quite a bit when this Michigan boy was telling me that oh, he knows what subway to take, he was just saying some other routes we could take because he knows those, too, I am so fortunate to have him in my life.  I may still be completely terrified that without my consent I am in fact growing up, having such an amazing older brother, as Sean is, to look up to makes it just that much less scary.  

6/13/2014

I am imparting important life lessons, like the right way to think of your college experience and the essential but underrated art of choosing the correct exit from a subway station.  There is something to this being an older brother thing, someone should write a book about how great big brother is.  Shannon got in this morning and it couldn’t be more fun.  It’s wonderful to have someone to show off the fact that, instead of knowing nothing about New York, I now know almost nothing.  It’s equally wonderful to have someone who calls you out on that:  “Oh, you’re such a New Yorker.”

When you get older everyone else gets older with you, even your younger sister.  Shannon ate a Cambodian grilled cauliflower sandwich, and she loved it, and this was big deal.  I’m not going to embarrass her (any further) by explaining why it’s a big deal, but trust me:  It was a big deal.  The fact is that younger iterations of her would have taken me up on my safety school offer of Pret A Manger, but no, onwards to Num Pang Sandwich we went.  

This is about more than adventurous taste buds.  It is the fact that everyone is constantly changing and shifting.  It is the fact that the contorted shape shifting I have felt within me, over these weeks and across these years--that reconfiguring dance we sometimes call “internal growth” or other smarmy things--this is happening to everyone.  And so it’s so easy to only know one single version of someone, out of the millions of possible permutations.  But isn’t it magnificent, this idea that with family, with friends, you might have a chance to change with them, or at least close enough to notice what’s going on?

6/12/2014

Here is how my day went:  I am eating a celebratory ice cream cone.  I’ll spin the yarn later, there’s a lot to say, really, about dashing across Broadway in pursuit of a rogue HDMI cable and accidental smoke signals to Helen and the feeling of being in front of 60 people stringing reasonably-articulate sentences together, of trying a potential Sean on for size in the realest way yet, I can’t wait to tell you all about it.  But I am afraid this ice cream cone and I have urgent business to attend to, so I’ll have to get back to you tomorrow.

6/11/2014

I took a different route to work, one determined less by adventurousness than by impatience:  The timing of the lights had me turn right prematurely, and into Morningside Heights I went.  The sky was gray, and it was held in suspension.  It seemed like it could remain forever, in that almost raining state, its neutral the sky's final resting point after several million years of meteorology, equilibrium finally reached.  I was greatly moved by this idea, embraced the ceaselessness.  Morningside Park seemed the perfect place to pass the impending eternity.  The scene was timeless:  The green of its oaks clashed somberly with the silver backdrop.  The steep slopes that ran down the center of the park, separating east from west, adorned with crumbling concrete stairs, they seemed a beautiful staging ground for some Sisyphean reality.  I poured my sunscreen down a storm drain and tore the skin off my umbrella.  I planted its skeleton like a Christmas tree, a monument to the simcolor sky.  I stood there for an eon, admiring my work, until gravity intervened.  The raindrops began to fall.  I wanted to be angry but I wasn't.  I recognized my eternity for what it was.  I have spent just enough time missing home that I can now imagine missing here.

6/10/2014

I didn’t leave the house.  I didn’t get dressed.  I didn’t eat lunch.  It is only a charitable definition that allows me to say I ate dinner.  I wore an RCAH t-shirt and I got to work.  

There is something wonderful and weighty about the type of focus that allows you to skip meals without noticing.  I was so lasered in on Google Docing and Powerpointing and Photoshopping and Illustrating that 11 in the morning turned into 10 in the evening without any intervening stops.  I don’t have much to say except that this feels good too, this feeling of having started the day with one objective in mind and, after an appropriate amount of foot dragging, having chipped away at it until it was done, finished, finito.  I made a map and I mapped a presentation and then I looked up at the clock and felt nothing.  This is a type of day that is hard to regret.

6/9/2014

The day ran like a repeat, but that’s not quite right, is it?  Rerun has certain connotations, it is the Home Improvement episode in which Tim Allen’s charm wore thin, and that’s not what today was.  What happened was that the moments became detached from their context, floated from one to next without any connecting flights.  It was raining and my shoes got soaked.  I wrote Anna some okay emails based on incomplete information.  The fog shrouded the buildings across the Onassis Reservoir as I cut through Central Park, wandering and almost sweating.  I purchased discount cereal from a minimally polite cashier.  These happened in no particular order, some of them are still happening, they all feel like they’re still happening.  Is it possible to feel nostalgia in real time?  This is a bold new experiment in taking yourself seriously:  Today felt like I was remembering it in real time.  And that’s not a rerun, that’s the clip show at the end of the sitcom.  You’ve seen these moments before but you don’t mind, and not because the hackneyed plot tieing the moments together is in any way compelling, but because you liked these moments the first time around and you’re going to miss them when they’re gone.  There has to be a limit to this, though.  I won’t spend too long telling you about listening to the Tigers game now, about passionate pleas of Metro Detroit Ford Dealers and the sticky sweetness of Jim Price giving ‘57 Chevrolets the they deserve.  You’ve heard that song before.  It’s a good one, though, turn it up.

6/8/2014

I fell asleep to the almost rhythm of an idling semi, dead tired and struggling to conceive of a proper configuration of blankets and pillows to meet the demands of a true summer temperature.  It didn’t matter, I was out like a light before I knew it, my comforter still unsure of its role in the whole mess.  I woke up the almost rhythm of many dribbled basketballs.  It was earlier than I thought it would be, but I didn’t feel tired.  That feeling is more significant than I often give it credit for--there is literally more today to live than I dared to expect. The organ from the church across the street, the clapping of hands, the beat of my heart--rhythm is finally achieved and I head off to live today.

6/7/2014

I shot north, and this was new.  Most Upper Manhattanites are convinced that they live in the threshold of civilization, that they have bravely made their home at the edge of a frontier but that you would be unwise to tread any further.  When we stayed with Ian’s brother, at 95th Street, he told us not to get in the 100s.  When I met my landlord, at 130th street, he warned against even 131.  I wonder if he realized his kingdom was included in most men’s no-man land.  Whatever their differences, there would have been unanimity in their pleas against crossing the Harlem River.  There is no Manhattanite definition of dangerous “up there” that lacks the Bronx.  But no matter:  With curiosity, youthful invincibility, and the promise of dinner, I shot north.

The borough makes no effort to welcome you.  After a brief and bewildering stop at my normal 2 3 station, brought to you by surprisingly strong force of habit, I took a D train uptown.  The car lacked a route map, and the next stops were announced quietly by a woman who sounded like she was trying unsuccessfully to avoid distraction.  The stations we stopped at were clean but bare, even of advertisements.  And they lacked the intricate mosaics that ordinarily announce destinations major and minor.  Even Yankee Stadium, even that home away from home for Ruth and DiMaggio and a whole host of heroes for children and their parents and their grandparents alike, even that shrine made its presence known only reluctantly, only through the reserved Helvetica of an ordinary subway sign.  At each station we shed a few more commuters without bothering to search for replacements.  I felt the starts of the extraordinarily hateable smugness so many travel writers describe, the thrill in going where others wouldn’t want to combined with the pride in being the kind who does, and I didn’t try too hard to suppress it.

We lurched into the Fordham Road station and then I too deserted.  I realized as I headed for the exit that I had no idea what was waiting for me aboveground.  New York is iconic but the the Bronx is not.  My image of Manhattan was high definition, Brooklyn, Queens, even Staten Island, a passable rendering, but I didn’t really have one of the Bronx.  It’s not like I’ve never heard of the place, I’m sure I’ve seen some ruin porn in some sociology text, I’ve read Underworld, etc., but nothing like an image had taken hold.  So the walk upstairs was thrilling.

What I saw was people, throngs of people, sidewalks packed with people.  People hawking mix CDs, homemade incense, all manner of kitsch and chaos, and their targets, people perusing the infinite merchandise of infinite stands, taking their sweet time to sort through the CDs and incense, and those they were all obstructing, the people weaving forward, stuttering sideways, pausing for a moment to burst through a hole in the linemen.  The jaywalking was fascinating.  It was clear immediately that the drivers and the pedestrians had reached an understanding:  The pedestrians clump together, aggressively begin their crossing before the light turns, in exchange the migration is finished in time for drivers to speed their way to a right hand turn.  If everyone went at their own pace, the whole thing would fall apart.  This many people requires a process.

I was awestruck, actually struck as someone ran into me.  The desolation of the subway had been a red herring.  I had taken the bait.  Ritchie tells me that Fordham Road is the Times Square of the Bronx, a special case, it’s not all like that, and sure.  But for a kid raised on the edges of Detroit, who didn’t realize such a conglomeration was possible absent a Detroit Lions football game, I could not help but be impressed.  I always am, every time the density is such that I cannot control the pace of my steps.  It took me a minute to notice the buildings, the four story triumphs of post-war construction and the gas stations and the Autozones.  There were almost no trees, most treeplots trodden and empty, the  remaining greenery’s patience visibly tested.  This too was otherworldly, at least after a month on Manhattan.  Carmen said he liked it because you can see the sky.  I did not have time to look for the sky.

The people dispersed and I regained my pace as I got to Fordham University.  Fordham almost looked like home.  It was lush, there were gorgeous oaks and rolling green lawns that went on forever.  There were the same kind of stately halls that every campus deserves, with the grandeur of arched doorways forgiving the A/C units sticking out of professorial offices.  But I had to squint between the iron bars to see this.  For Fordham is a padlocked college, a gated community of an educational establishment.  It is located in the Bronx but it makes it very clear that it is separate from it, just a single Bronx street to be braved to make it from the safe world of campus to the escape hatch of the subway.  

Past Fordham but before a reassuring street corner with multiple gas stations, I reached my destination, my reason for rejecting the sound advice of landlords and friends’ older brothers.  I got there early, or at least not late, which tends to score the same.  We met at Ritchie’s office, a spacious messy sort of place, still shockingly expensive to rent, but pleasant enough to see. He and I talked until Helen and Carmen and their daughter arrived, which meant I had the opportunity to try to sound smart while furiously scribbling mental notes as I listened to a man who actually is smart.  (We solved affordable housing, by the way, if anyone is interested.)

The group walked to Arthur Avenue, a street whose reputation I gather is supposed to precede itself but didn’t for me.  Now this was a place that felt familiar.  It felt like a scale I could appreciate, two story buildings with pastry shops and restaurants, an incredible diversity of Italian names adorning the signage.  The explorer in me turned down.  I did not have to grasp at the meaning of a stupidly-named sandwich at the Bronx Beer Hall.  I was reassured, not perplexed, by the standoffishness of the waitress at Palombo’s cannolis.  Carmen said the street reminded him of south Philadelphia, where he’s from.  I didn’t say it but it reminded me of Chicago, of Grand Rapids, of Plymouth, even, or of the main drags of the thousand interstate exit towns in which I’ve made meaning.  Wherever there are yuppies there exists the potential energy for a Bronx Beer Hall.  Wherever there are disillusioned teenagers there exists the potential energy for an indifferent waitstaff at a Palombo’s.  Wherever there are friends there are nights out converting those energies into motion.

Helen drove me home and in between missed turns I tried to communicate my experience, my sense of Manhattan as a limited infinity.  She agreed, but added something I’d missed:  The incredible distance from the rest of the city to Manhattan.  She told me about people living in the Bronx who have gone their whole life without ever visiting the island.  The reverse is true, too, Manhattanites who have never left it.  And my trip to the Bronx had been informed by that distance, by the thrill of warnings and the solemnity of crime rates and the mourning of poverty.  Manhattan is the quintessential American city and the Bronx is its discarded other.  So imagine my surprise that it was there, in the heart of the central Bronx, on the wrong side of that divide, that I felt Americana for the first time in months, that I felt closer not just to home, but to everywhere else.

6/6/2014

Laura believes in fate, and that is the takeaway.  We were sitting on a hill in Central Park, overlooking baseball diamonds and neon skyscrapers and a sky aglow azure, we were swapping biographies and Laura revealed that destiny had shaped her life.

I asked her why she became a lawyer and she looked at the ground and confirmed the translation.  “Fate?  Destiny?”  She hadn’t chosen to become a lawyer.  The law is not her, she insisted.  But the storyline was set.  She ended up in law school not because she was interested in law but because it was the only program available in the town her boyfriend lived in.  But this wasn’t about the decision, it wasn’t a decision at all.  None of it was.  “Whenever I have made important decisions, I have felt like I have not really been the one making them.”  

She kept going.  “I think it is more comfortable this way.  I know that things will happen the way they will happen.”  She said all this confidently.  She wasn’t putting an idea out there.  She wasn’t thinking out loud.  She was calmly reporting the way the world worked.  Then she stopped.  She looked up from the blades of grass she had piled and she looked right at me.  She asked me what my favorite sport was, other than baseball.

6/5/2014

1. Rain is halfheartedly falling but the depth of puddles prove that this indifference is recent.  I am not running late but I am not early.  I am not careful.  I soak my right shoe in standing water just before I duck down toward the 2 train.
2. The rain is coming down and so is Times Square.  Tourists with golf umbrellas avoid the rain but not another, and it is slow going as I weave my way up Broadway.  The sky is unforgiving or even sinister, and I am desperate to snake through scaffolding to find the Marriott of my dreams. I end up ten minutes late, on an escalator behind the person whose speech I have rushed to see.
3. I exit the Marriott alone and happy, pleased to have endured a mob of 1,500 well-dressed conference goers for as long as I did.  The rain has stopped but the sky has not forgotten.  The tourists are sheepish, holding gouged umbrellas.  The man in the Yankees Store is on his phone.  “Dealerships” plays in my ears as I take a rare seat on the 2.
4. I take a walk around the block to rescue my eyes from the fluorescence.  The sun is shining but the coolness of the rain has lingered.  It is humid in a sweet sort of way.  My eyes forgive me and I am cleared to return.
5. I leave for good and head north toward a fruit stand, red grapes the target.  The pound and a half in a crinkly gray plastic, I walk toward the 2 but think better of it.  The sun has settled down.  The cool humidity remains.  These nights are what walks are for.  I pass a puppy who is trying too hard and I take its example, turn around, cut toward the park.  I unsuccessfully meander, take the road more traveled, end up on the normal route home.

6/4/2014

Anna bought me dinner.   I spent the day copying and translating and the evening smiling at old women and distributing fliers, and so I did not pass up the opportunity for a hamburger.  Dinner is not exactly what it is called, a hamburger at 9:30pm, but she bought me it anyway, and I am grateful.

Anna revealed a little bit about her life to me.  She came to this line of work on accident--maybe it’s not too much to say she didn’t choose the job, the job chose her.  She wanted to be in films, to do credits, to act, maybe.  She studied in Paris.  It didn’t work out.  She ended up back in New York, worked at Lincoln Center, worked at a bigshot law firm.  Then her landlord decided she had to go.  She’s rent stabilized, see, so if her landlord could force her out, he could make thousands of dollars more a month on rent.  So he lied and he harassed her and he intimidated her and he took her to court.   He claimed she didn’t live there, that she was using it for illegal activity.  He hired a private eye to spy on her, to lie to her neighbors about her.  He thought he would win.  He didn’t, though.  Because he picked a fight with the wrong woman.  Anna got smart, realized the same he was trying to pull.  Read every piece of case law she could get her hands on, read every legal journal, talked to every advocate, picked up every trick in the book.  She took him to court--and she won, three times.  She kept the apartment, and all of her landlord’s money and skulduggery and high priced attorneys and political connections had been for naught.  But Anna wasn’t done.  Now that she knew the tricks of the trade, she kept going.  Volunteered for the Mayor, met Helen, ended up spending her days (and many of her nights) helping others get through what she went through, take control of their lives back, hold onto their homes.  She likes the job--it’s something new everyday.  She’s worried, though.  She doesn’t want to lose.  What if Ms. Flaherty, the accused hoarder--what if she loses her home?  Or Mr. Moscovitz and his sweet little daughters?  Anyway, what can you do.  You do your best.   A bit of her life is not exactly what it is called, the origin story of an incredibly dedicated and whipsmart public servant, but she told it to me anyway, and I am grateful.

6/3/2014

I guess a good thing about the cult of busyness is that you work yourself into sickness and New York has great paid sick leave, so you end up getting back the vacation days you didn't take.  Let me tell you this:  I don't care about how many hours you work, and if you say a shockingly large number, I will be unimpressed.  I will be concerned and worried for you, because I know for a fact that this is a destructive part of our culture.

I'm not saying this to complain about my lot.  I am enjoying all of this, of course, more than I have been able to adequately describe in these posts.  I was sitting in the Chambers of City Council and smirking, realizing that this is how I am spending my summer vacation.  It is magnificent, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, or, rather, anything short of a trip to west Africa.  But it also has an expiration date.  There is an end and it is near, and so long days don’t bother me one bit.  I also have almost literally zero obligations outside my job, or at least zero obligations in the tri-state area--I do not have to look in on family or hang out with friends or maintain any other sort of relationship.  I am in a uniquely good position to enjoy this strain.

But it is not hard for me to see how we are burning ourselves out, all of us who are involved in this cult of busyness.  These jobs don't end, that's the thing, and so even on this, the day of your daughter's wedding, you are checking your email, you are answering phone calls.  This isn't unique to city politics, of course.  It's not unique to New York.  In college we are constantly comparing calendars, we are so proud of our workloads and paper lengths and tiredness. Don't even talk to us until we've had our coffee.  I am a part of this.  I felt so good about the fact that I had worked 50 hours my first week here.  But that’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s fucked up because it’s not actual pride of results or if it’s because it’s self-indulgent and aggrandizing or if it’s because it devalues the aspects of a person’s life that are not on the clock, but I know it doesn’t make me feel good.  The cult of busyness doesn’t sit right with me, that’s all I know.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this.  Consider this post my way of sticking a pin this topic, to use a phrase I do not really understand but adore wholeheartedly.  I would strain and try to write more and more cogently about it, but instead I’m going to do this:  Tell you I’m tired, watch baseball on my phone and go to sleep.

6/2/2014

What to do with a day like today?  Obsess.  I obsess over heat that cannot be described as sweltering.  I ascribe agency to sweat and talk down to indecisive pores that cannot commit, every move toward the exits interrupted by breezes and shades and rotary fans.  I recoil at the painful insides of sunny automobiles, I obsess over them too.  I am obsessed with days like today, not the relieved excitement of the first hot spring day or the needy clinging of the early October indian summer, but days like today, those early days in June in which the permanence of summer arbitrarily asserts itself.  Days to be spent reading the high school books that still define your world, days to be spent kissing your girlfriend in the back of your car on the grounds of ski resort finally rendered irrelevant, days to be spent in line at Dairy Kings where the race-baiting dads of local beauty queens are making good but unspectacular business, days to be spent doing nothing, absolutely nothing, staring at ceilings and exchanging confused glances with air conditioners and cold showers and other not yet necessary companions.  The dog days are coming, they have sent in their RSVPs but they are not here yet. Obsess over these days of warning track because these days obsess over you, they do this on purpose.  So seduced by the almost cool of the open window, you fall asleep and bathe yourself in the stick succor of summer sweat, honest-to-goodness summer sweat soaking your winter blankets.  A threat finally realized, obsessively.

6/1/2014

I had to turn the page, I had to unfold the map, I had to hold the top button and the home button simultaneously for three seconds and soft-reset my head.  I could try to tell you why I had to do all of these things but I wouldn’t know how.  It’s a feeling, it’s not a thought, I wasn’t thinking bad thoughts, or even feeling bad feelings.  But I knew I had to leave.  Here’s what it is, maybe:  I felt raw.  I felt exposed.  Those aren’t exactly it, but this is:  Robert Penn Warren wrote that west is where you go when you get the letter saying flee, all is discovered.  Well, I needed to go west.  I needed to leave the place I was in my head.  

I didn’t know how to do it.  This happens a lot, I never know how to do it.  Sometimes taking a nap works, but sometimes taking a nap makes it worse.  I didn’t try taking a nap.  Sometimes reading a book works.  Reading the Kindle has yet to work.  I was unsatisfied with the books presented to me.  What usually works is a trip to the library, but West Circle Drive is a long way away.  Sometimes taking a walk works, but I think yesterday’s walk is what put me here, is what revealed too much.  My legs were tired anyway.  Central Park has yet to work.  I had to stay in my room and figure it out.  Sometimes music works.  This time music worked.

This is what I am actually doing when I am cancelling plans.  I am going west.  I feel lighter now.


http://f.cl.ly/items/1p1T0G373n2623343g0z/01%20Sister%20Mary_Welcome%20Home.mp3

5/31/2014

I was in the middle of Central Park, giving the place a proper wander, when the rain started.  At first, it was just teasing.  It was playful, baiting the tourists into pulling out oversized umbrellas before yielding to a patch of sun.  But eventually it got its point across, and I was drenched at the Central Park Zoo.

I had started, oddly enough, with plans.  I was going to get a haircut and head to a picnic with a couple of roommates.  But in a move that will surprise exactly none of you, I decided against all that, instead choosing to meander my way south, in the vague direction of a bookstore or maybe a theater.

I took a zig-zagged enough course through Central Park to defeat the grid system.  I took a lap around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir, I climbed up rocky hills, I cut down paths less travelled.  I contained myself within the limited infinity of the island Manhattan for a couple of hours without orientation.  For the first time since I’ve been here, I was actually lost, or at least misplaced.  I came out on 5th Avenue where I’d expected 59th Street, and I was pleased to discover my mistake.  

The rain started about halfway through the park, but a wonderful thing about rain is that it’s actually just water, and if you choose not to let it bother you then it won’t insist.  I found 59th Street and exited the park with a vague intention on the Empire State Building.  I let the sun dry my shirt and hair as I walked at a tourist’s pace--not that I had a choice, what with all the tourists.  

There is a Starbucks on 5th Avenue that has a department store inside of it, and that should be the other way around, but I promise it isn’t.  The Juicy Store was closed and this was disappointing to a number of people.  There were more people in line to go to Baby GAP than went to Andrew Jason’s high school.  Finally, I arrived:  The Empire State Building was hard to get a good luck at, but I was able to confirm that it is tall.  Men in bright vests halfheartedly hawked tickets to its top; I wholeheartedly refused them.  

I continued south, the sky now confidently sunny.  I passed a Shake Shack with a line longer than Baby GAP.  I passed the Flatiron Building, which was the shape of a triangular prism but produced no rainbow.  I reached the bookstore I’d had in mind, and it was okay, but I wasn’t in the mood to buy anything.  I am missing public libraries so desperately right now.  

I plotted a route to a sandwich place with a chicken tender and mozzarella monstrosity called a Dennis, but it was closed when I got there.  I wandered toward another couple of restaurants, but the Yelp pictures of Dennis had stolen my heart, and so I took an unnecessary number of trains home, toward a full refrigerator and a waiting bed.

5/30/2014

list of people i’ve met (partial)

• The woman who thanks me effusively for filling out her paperwork, thanks me to the point of tears.  She used to be--still is, in fact--a dancer, a performer, and she’s no good at paperwork and she’s just so thankful that someone like me--a left hander, no less! it seems to her a lot of people who have it all together are southpaws--that someone like me is there to talk to her.
• The man who says “oh, that’s interesting” after everything that is said in conversation, and then follows it up with, “oh, now that’s interesting” when the next thing is said, and you know what, he genuinely seems to mean it.  Everything is more interesting than the last thing.
• The woman who is an extraordinarily stressed government employee with bags under her eyes the size of Montana definitely runs the whole show and lets her, let’s be honest, pretty sexist and dismissive boss take the credit.  She would, if given the option, unquestionably murder someone for an opportunity to sleep for more than five consecutive hours.  (Note:  I have met several of these.)
• The man who ran that newsstand who could not for the life of him understand my Midwestern enunciation of “The Atlantic.”  Sorry, friend, I shouldn’t have let my t’s slip into d’s, that was my bad.
• The woman asking me for directions I almost know and I hope I didn’t send her to Queens on accident.  I think I sent this woman to Queens on accident.
• The man who bags your groceries for you at Pioneer who is frankly very good at his job and I don’t know if I am supposed to tip him but I say thank you very earnestly and he smiles at me, so I think I am not actively offensive.
• The man who coaches soccer and is very good at coaching soccer and is not shy about letting you know about it.  When you take the elevator to the fourteenth floors, he says, “Too bad it’s not fifteen.  That’s the number of championships I’ve won” and smiles like Joe Biden.  Then he asks if you can help him get an apartment.
• The woman who scooped my ice cream at this very hip coffee shop in Brooklyn who looked exactly like the kind of woman who would work at a very hip coffee shop in Brooklyn, and I’m fine with that, it’s good to know when things fit together.  Also the woman who sold books at that hip bookstore in Brooklyn, she made sense, too.
• The man who is the world’s saddest fruit vendor, so you have to buy three bananas from him for a dollar, and he greets this news with the world’s saddest smile.  The bananas are ok.
• I have not yet met Donald Trump or Regis Philbin, but I hear good things about them both.

5/29/2014

I was turning onto Lenox, staring at my phone, choosing which group of whiny midwesterners would fill my commute, and Abby Conklin popped a balloon.  “Sean!” she yelled, looking exactly shocked.  “What the hell!”  Her question went unanswered, she went to work and so did I, but the word “Facebook” was promised as we parted ways.

I was for some reason not surprised at all.  Abby was an RCAH student, a year ahead of me, who left MSU abruptly before the start of last fall, to pursue some sort of something I, to tell the complete truth, was never entirely clear on.  I knew she had ended up in New York, but to continue the streak of honesty, hadn’t given the idea of meeting her here even a single thought.  But for some reason when I took my headphones out at the sound of “Sean,” when I turned around and saw someone I had last seen more than a year ago--in Snyder Phillips Hall no less--I was unfazed.  It seemed perfectly ordinary to me that Abby Conklin was standing there.

Maybe this is why:  When an incredible coincidence comes to fruition, I am less impressed by the  astronomical odds than the overwhelming explanatory power of the law of large numbers.  Give anything unlikely thing enough chances and it becomes likely.  The fact that our meandering commuting patterns ended up crossing means that this first encounter was preceded by a month of near misses.

Maybe that’s not it at all:  After a month in which I had known not a soul,  seen not a friendly  face, heard not a “Sean!”, I was so ready to believe, uninterested in pinching myself or asking how.

5/28/2014

When someone finds out I’m from Michigan, I am greeted with one of two responses.

1.)  “Oh, how nice!  Be careful here in the city!”

2.)  “Oh.  How are things over there?”

If it’s 1.), which, I must admit, usually comes from old women, it’s an easy enough response.  “Thank you, I sure will try,” I say, smiling reassuringly as they smile reassuringly at me.  I am a Midwesterner who must be protected from the dangers of the big bad city, and I accept their patronizing warning without any reservation of irony.

If it’s 2.), it’s a lot less easy.  “Things are looking up,” I say, smiling unassuredly as they smile unassuredly at me.  The subtext here is that they know that Michigan has been in some trouble, and they’re pleased to know that I have escaped it.  I do not know what to do with this patronizing congratulations.

I went to New York University for a panel this afternoon, and in a way, I was home again.  It had all the beautiful trappings of an MSU panel--distinguished guests given little time to actually talk, a moderator offering partially accurate paraphrases of their responses, and a Q & A period in which the shitty handwriting of three or four old people is translated into a stultifyingly obvious question.  Yes, if it weren’t for the much nicer auditorium and competent graphic design, I could have been in good old East Lansing.

And one other difference:  The way they talked about Michigan.  Because boy, did we ever come up.  See, the panel was about affordable housing, which means it quickly became about urbanism, which means it quickly became about cities, which means it quickly became an opportunity to play Mad Libs about the urban crisis and the only correct fill-in-the-blanks are Detroit and Flint.  These are sophisticated, brilliant people, but they talked about Detroit like the only things they knew about it were gleaned from a ruin porn piece in the Atlantic five years ago.  They played compare and contrast between the problems that come from the embarrassment of riches New York faces and the simple embarrassment Detroit does.

And you know what, they weren’t wrong.  And you know what, I’m from Plymouth, and it’s not that different from the way we talk about Detroit out in white flight suburbia.  But I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that they spent so much time talking about the unique and singular challenges of Detroit that they hardly even mentioned The Bronx, another city reeling from white flight and redlining and disinvestment and a poverty rate north of thirty.

What it came down to was this:  They were taking a 30,000 feet view of my anthill on a driveway with broad sweeping terms in order to make a point, and they didn’t have to.  In order to navel gaze about urban despair, you don’t have to schlep all the way over into flyover country.  You just have to take a 2 train a few stops further uptown than you usually do when you go to Lincoln Center.

i'm not that happy with this one, although i had a couple of good sentences and i'm certain there's some there there