Priorities

Aha! So I get a call from La Bella a Bologna (aka Vice), who attempts to coach me on the buying of cheeses. Some friends are coming by later for wine and cheese (or, as Mrs. Buttles kindly offered: Whine and Cheez). So Vice, in her infinite cheese wisdom, recommends Murray’s Cheese Shop, and their aged gouda and aged goat cheeses.

“Yeah, gimme a slice of that aged gouda,” I tell the Murray’s counter guy, replete with satisfaction that I am significantly New Yorkerish in my deli-counter demands.

He gives me a slice of nutty, nearly butterscotchy aged gouda, and I give Counter Guy a thumb’s up.

He slices, he wraps, and I am suddenly saddled with a $9 chunk of cheese. Okay. Regardless, I need a couple more. We go for aged goat, on Vice’s recommendation. Mild, pleasantly white. Oh, that’s a $7 slice, thanks. Well, Counter Guy, got anything on the lower end to round out my party cheeses? Counter Guy kindly offers a $9.99/lb asiago, which I tell him to cut heftily for me.

The we do olives. A mix.
Crackers. Two kinds.
We browse, wondering how much food we have really gathered at Murray’s in comparison to how many friends will actually be eating between wine swilling.

It’s a $35 dilemma.

I leave Murray’s. I wander past an ice cream store, and choose to heed a once-a-year craving for a cone. Straciatella, please, I tell Ice Cream Guy, only to look up at the board to see that my cone will cost me $3.50.

I pay.
It’s very good actually, with a nearly alcoholic taste of vanilla and slices of chocolate scattered throughout. I sublimate the pain of paying that much for ice cream.

With Murray’s bag in one hand and cone in the other, I pass again on the way home the kid who asked if I had a minute for gay and lesbian rights. The first time I’d passed him I had shaken my head no and offered two thumbs up. On the way back, I realized I had no reason not to ask him what he was looking to talk to people about.

“I blew you off before, I’m sorry,” I told the kid.

He was shilling for the HRC. Interesting stuff, but when he pulled out his clipboard that had the little check boxes for cash donations, I held up my ice cream cone and said, “I have no job and this ice cream cone just cost me $3.50.”

He nodded, sagely, and gave me a sticker.

A Breath of Optimism for a Change

Too lazy to deal with HTML, I offer this Slate piece, by Katrina refugee Blake Bailey:

http://www.slate.com/id/2126756/?nav=tap3

This is what I wanted you all to read:

"One is succored by the kindness of strangers. When I first arrived in Norman, I took my car to a repair shop to have the AC fixed; after considering the matter for two or three hours, the manager told me that the AC was broken in every conceivable way that AC can break and that to repair it would cost roughly the blue-book value of my car (a 1998 Suzuki Esteem). I decided to cut my losses. The woman who wrote up the invoice for all that expensive labor—a dead ringer for the woman in American Gothic—noticed my Louisiana license plate and wondered if I was from New Orleans. I said I was and added something to the effect that I had miles to go before I sleep, albeit in a very warm car, ha ha. The woman stopped writing and gave me a rock-faced look—deploring my stupid joke, I thought, but not at all: "No charge," she said, and firmly shook her head when I fumbled for my wallet. The next day I got a haircut and the same thing happened. It's almost worth losing your house to be reminded, again and again, that people are really nice when given half a chance."

Oh God, I Need a Job

I find it hard to believe that my entire day so far has revolved around moving my car. There is a funny little motor dance we in Brooklyn do each week. Cars need to be moved by 11, and stay away for street cleaning until 2. Hence everyone double parks on the opposite side of the street…and waits. The gendarmes, for whatever reason choose to overlook this obviously illegal parking fiasco and by 1:45, there is a mad dash to slip cars back to the other side of the street. People wait, watching for cops, and finally lock up around 1:55, safe in the knowledge that they have another week of ticket-free parking.

It. Is time. To sell. The fucking car.

Under the Klieg Lights

Last night the sky at Coney Island was lit up by lights from the Cyclone and those at Keyspan Park. The White Stripes played a fantastic show—Jack’s voice was intense and full. When the stadium lights occasionally came up, everyone was bathed in yellow/green jaundice tones and their lips looked purple. The crowd was all 20-somethings, and sometimes all 30-somethings—basically, everyone there was a version of someone I’ve seen before, including myself and the two people with me.

Port-O-Potties are nothing more than unflushable, third-world pits. Then again, we didn’t have to actually see each other pissing. So doors perhaps divide the first- from the third-world.

Outdoor concerts have always been strangely existential experiences for me. When a few stars eke out their light despite the city glare, thousands of people bopping around, some trying to be cool, dance right, sounds pumping from speakers, I wonder where I stand in it all.

Usually, when I get to that moment of thought, my body has stopped dancing and I am not aware any longer of the throngs of concertgoers shifting around me. Maybe it’s an existential experience because of, not in spite of, all the people and noise. Then a sense of elation usually oozes through me—the world, the world is an amazing experience—only to shift quickly to a sense of misery, of feeling lost and sad, probably because of, not in spite of, all the humanity and sound.

I look to my companions, see their eyes on the stage upfront, and I wonder if I am the only one who feels so much conflict in such a huge crowd.

Anyway, I was impressed that the beer bottles were made of plastic.

Taking on the Challengers of the “Packalope”

I can’t handle this on “The Daily Show” at 1 a.m. Seriously, I can’t stop laughing. Rob Corddry is interviewing a guy who puts antlers on his head and calls himself the “Packalope.” You know, Green Bay Packers…antelope…don’t make me say any more.

There’s apparently been some trouble with the Department of Homeland Security and the guy’s headgear, i.e. his antlers. Corddry looks in the face of some government dude and says that really, how can they ban the packalope if they’re not going to go after other troublemakers, like, say, the UNICORN.

As he says that word in the devil’s voice, Corddry leans forward and THROWS GLITTER in the government guy’s face.

What most of us wouldn’t do to THROW GLITTER in anyone's face, let alone a member of the Department of Homeland Security…

A goodnight to all. May you dream of pachydermalopacorns.

I'm Dreaming of Being Awake

The other day, I heard a snippet of a phrase uttered by Philip Gourevitch (yes, the new editor of the Paris Review) on the Leonard Lopate Show (on WNYC).

Gourevitch was referring to an interview with Salman Rushdie that was already in the works when he took over the Review, and was talking about how that interview was an excellent transitory point between the old mag and the new incarnation, because Rushdie’s work combines “imaginative writing and real-world events.”

For some reason this phrase struck me as really important. I wandered in the desert of writing from nothing (i.e. my head) for many years before I wandered into the real-life world of journalism with all the confidence of a songbird in a vacuum. Now that I seem to be on a “hiatus” (HIATUS: read: not doing so much), I am drawn to the whirligig that is imaginative writing that takes on real-world events. (See entry on Fawcett story for a good example of the kind of writing I’m talking about.)

A real-world event feels like an anchor.
Imagination on top of that makes me want to giggle.
This seems a happy marriage.

So maybe one of these days soon you really will hear that your trusty McBickle has finally completed her creative non-fiction book proposal…and sold it.

Wouldn’t that be so imaginative yet such a real-world event?
It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I Drink A Lot of Water

Today is the sort of day for gouging out one’s own eyes.
Up since 6 a.m., my eyes have a veneer of thin sandpaper in them. Maybe if I rub them enough, I will soon see more clearly.

Why does pain produce clarity?

(I promise to return to your regularly scheduled, more rigorously scholastic blogging when my own narcissism takes a pee break. That should be any minute now…)

Blogging Nowhere - Pre-Apologies Here

Trying to blog = trying to write. Blogging. Writing. Whhhh. Just got back from a sweaty stint making copies in an un-air-conditioned copy shop. Sweaty. Copies. Clips. Made copies of my clips. Clips = things I’ve published. Copy shop = making copies for potential employers. Making copies for potential employers = sweating.

Sweating = cooling.
Cooling = relaxing.
Living = oddities.
Trying to blog with no subject in hand = masturbatory thinking.
Coming up with no subject = lack of climax.
Continuing to write = frustrating.

Earthen Berms and the Terrain of the Laptop

The night is growing late, and those with no curfews can’t sleep.

(By “curfews” I mean “reasons to get up early.”)

Finished reading the New Yorker’s piece this week by David Grann, in which he recounts retracing the journey of British Col. Percy Fawcett. In1925, Fawcett set out into the Amazon to search for the rumored ancient “City of Z.” He, his son Jack, and Jack’s friend Raleigh were never heard from again.

Neither were the 100 or so people who set out in various expeditions to locate the lost explorers.

It’s all a fascinating saga, worth the read. But what I wanted to remark upon here was the bit about an archaeologist Grann met during his journey in Brazil. The archaeologist takes the reporter on a tour of a settlement he has unearthed from 1200 A.D. Three circular indentations in the earth indicate a series of moats inscribed by the city’s dwellers. Streets were perpendicular marvels. Shards of pottery indicate great human settlements and culture. Etc., etc.

What really amazes me, however, is the actual tedium that produced such a lavish written experience. I took a course in college on archaeology, thinking, of course, that it would be fucking fascinating. Instead, I found myself as bored with the techniques of the science as I did with the drone of the boring, boring professor’s voice. (Yes, maybe the two were linked.) You know, the mapping of small bumps in the land, which may or may not indicate some kind of previous human existence there. But this story made me realize that while I will probably never have the patience to do such monotonous and careful work, I should thank some Andean god or goddess that there are people on the planet who are willing to imagine so grandly—be grateful that there are people who can see a lump in the ground and conjure up an entire city…

It’s the very stuff that makes me feel confident again that I have chosen to write. It helps me remember that there is possibly value in borrowing the dreams of others and passing them along.

What the Unworking Life Is Like

I wake from nightmares that involve a series of elevators that I need to take to the 200th floor in order to take care of a small girl who has been left alone for the night with her frighteningly macho sexpot father. Mayhem ensues. Elevators refuse to cooperate.

I move my car from one side of the street to the other.
I’ll need to do that again in a couple of hours.

I do one fact-check of one sidebar for one popular magazine.

I watch “The Surreal Life.”

I do battle over email with friends.

I contemplate again that my neighbor may, in fact, be a drug dealer.

I remember that last night I found out that my former employer has managed to purchase a contaminated office building for their new offices. Like, Toxic Waste Site-contaminated.

I laugh a lot, again.

To Wake, Perchance to Dream

Last night, my sister had a rooftop party at her West Village apartment. From there, we could all see up close the projected lights meant to symbolize the Trade Center. My brother-in-law had gone to that roof four years ago at the instruction of my father, who had been driving by on his way to work and saw the hole in the north tower. “Go to your roof. Something is going on,” my father told him. He got up there just in time to have the second plane roar over his head and crash directly in front of him.

Four years ago today began the pain that is indescribable for me and so many others. Finally, I heard the name of one of my friends who died read at the service this morning—I’m surprised it still hurts.

~

The waking life moves on. And I truly think to keep it going, the dreamers need to do their magic: Make it something worthwhile, an experience where pain is a value because it is unavoidable.

I would like to figure out how to be one of them.

“Meetings with Remarkable Trees”

It’s been the kind of night-into-day that one does not like to remember. The high point was listening to an angel singing, the low, staring at a depressing movie at 4:30 a.m. with the sound off while scrawling notes to myself in the dark.

The evening has rounded it all off nicely, with a viewing of a BBC show called “Meetings with Remarkable Trees.” The title alone should win awards.

The “Handkerchief Tree” somewhere near Belfast was the focus of the love-song in this episode. A gardener with a long, white beard spoke of his romantic love, this tree, and its four-day bloom period in May that brings all the Irish ladies to gather beneath its branches, chattering away about the “latest bargains” they got that day while admiring the white, handkerchief-like leaves that blossom during these few days a year.

At night, the moonlight illuminates the wide sheaths, hopefully attracting bugs to their cores, where flower are hidden. On a moonless night, it seems there is no luck for the Handkerchief Tree. I guess I can hope that those four blooming days a year are during a full period of the moon.

One would not wish to show all one’s glory only to be under-illuminated, attracting too few bugs.

That's Right, Get Off Your Asses

Read here for a fine mouthful from New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin. He went off on the feds in a radio interview. For example:

NAGIN: I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."