These Photos Will Stun Your Heart

I think I've possibly sent you to this site before, but if I haven't, now is the time to look.

I am privileged to know Ron from many, many years ago. While we haven't seen each other in 15 years, we reconnected a couple years ago and have had an honest, connected correspondence. What beauty he finds...what images he makes. Enjoy as I do.

Also, there is a plant-eating black cat in my house for a few weeks. He has seven toes on each front paw. I am too wary to count the back ones, so I leave you with this impressive number. I hear Hemingway's cat colony consists of freaks like these. To this day.

Under the Harvest Gibbous Moon, Or, Beer

After a couple days on Block Island, I started saying things like, “A few days ago when we were here…”

Yeah.

I stayed with the Welder in his family house, which was built in either the 1880s or 1890s. No one got rid of any of the original furniture over the years, which has left each room elegant and sparse, with dark wood lines, moldings and iron. And ghosts. (I just made that up. Maybe.)

Enter.
This is a photo of a wooden doorknob, etched with rings along its loop. Scattered throughout the house are old glass bottles and century-old spools for sewing. In a closet with excess antiques I found a small pewter arm.

Here is a photo of the bedroom I slept in. On the wall is a photo of the same room, dated 1902. Everything—everything—is exactly the same now as it was then. (Minus the sleeping man with the crazy eyes; his fast-talkin’ father; his serene blond mother and for now, for these few days, the girl reporter who has landed here from outer space. Or Brooklyn.)


Said Man With the Crazy Eyes can be seen here. (Kinda. That would be the tip of his hair somewhere there.)


That was the wrought-iron bed frame. Elegant. Spindly.

Mellow in the layers of lush flora as I did. (Or do the best you can while staring at it on this screen.)


In other news, I watched a man eat barbeque by bending over a display counter at his own store and shoving his face in all its saucy brown slime. Then he sampled my pasta. By bending over and shoving his face in it. The end product of this orgiastic demonstration was a nearly bare animal rib sticking out of a fleshy watermelon slice like the most disgusting erection ever raised.

Aside, my editor just said to me: “I could drown in the details of my existence. Just drown in them.”

“Good luck with your craziness!” I shouted to her as she left. “Night!”

This Guy Was Waiting for the G, We Were on the F

[Words to return soon.]

They Were Waiting for the F at West 4th

I Think He Might Have Had Ties to the Mob, Once

Today I had lunch at a decent but overpriced Italian joint in the suburbs of New Jersey with my father, his overloud girlfriend and her large-sized relatives. (One wore suspenders beneath his baldpate; another was glittering in gold.)

I met a couple of them first by the bathroom. When I returned to the long table, my father told me they had remarked to him that he has a very charming daughter. I said under my breath to him, “That’s because they don’t know me yet.”

And then we laughed and laughed, me and my dad. Because my father is that father. The guy who cuts corners on his taxes and made everything happen for me somehow, some way, the one who developed a temper he never really lost, even while remaining a gentle person. His sense of humor is bawdy and unruly and he has passed it down to me, I realized as I said: “They don’t know me yet.”

For this, I am deeply, deeply grateful, if forever confused by what it all means. I can laugh at myself because of his love. I can laugh with him, because I love him.

Happy Father’s Day.

Jawbones and Assholes

“Yeah, that’s just not going to happen.”

I turned around on the bus, stunned, just after I tried to move my seat back only to have it kicked upright. Chguck.

“There’s no way you’re putting your seat back,” the man said to me. “My legs are just too long. No.”

If I have ever been “agape” I was agape then. I burst out laughing. The man in the seat next to me was aghast.

I said (still laughing), “I’m just going to put it back a little bit, all right?” as if I were speaking to a retarded child. Or a deaf puppy with three legs. “Actually, why don’t you and I just switch seats?” I offered, smiling like a deranged lunatic.

“Oh, sure! That would be fine!” the man replied with the air of a crazed moron.

We switched seats. I ended up crammed next to a window next to a man with body odor. The man now in front of me instead of behind me sat ramrod straight the entire trip. I had a fancy amount of leg room.

Here’s the view out the window though, New York to western Jersey:


Not bad. Note the movement wave in the lamp pole and sunlight.

Today I saw the excavated bones of a mule buried under my father’s house. He had not buried it (no, my father never killed a mule, as far as I know, although his father was in the cavalry)–his house was built maybe 50 years ago on the bank of the Delaware River, when mules were used to drag coal barges downstream. Somebody gave this mule a decent burial instead of letting it rot aboveground, it seems. It’s been found since my father is in the process of having his house raised 1.5 feet above the waterline of the largest local flood, which was in 1955 when the river made a record flood level of 38.85 feet. There have been three major floods in the past couple years, during which my father’s tile floors were ruined and this mule quietly stirred in its muddy home.

Here is another picture, this one of the mule's jawbone.


I have to go be in New Jersey now.

My Roach Lives in an Aluminum Lunar Landscape

“…Monosodium glutamate…which destroys brain cells…”

Whoosh, I tune in to the hawker on the train going on in his monotone for some paper he’s holding called “The Golden Ankh.” Whoosh, I tune out.

Today I reached for the tube of aluminum foil in my kitchen. I opened the lid and a roach stared at me from the silver foil. “You live there?” I thought. “It’s so barren and silver. Christ.”

Whoosh, I tune in.

“…We teach Egyptian martial arts…”

Whoosh, out.

Radiolab did a show on memory and erasing it today. They talked about how amnesiacs have the purest memories when they finally remember. That two people who spend 20 years together each recalling their beautiful first kiss will each have corrupted that memory so deeply they are remembering two entirely different kisses. Add to that the difference in the initial sense of the experience, and what the hell are any of us doing trying to connect to each other anyway?

Ten minutes ago, I took these pictures on West 34th Street. I cannot understand why this ancient cop car was aboard a flatbed truck, but I’m super happy it was.




Whoosh, I tune in.

Brutal, With a Decent Forehand

I took this image last night in a loft in the part of Brooklyn where Jewish men wear tall black hats and stand on street corners davvening into their cell phones.

It contains a reflection of a man playing Ping-Pong while standing on the table, the reflection of a short film playing on a movie screen and the actual view of the warehouse-heavy skyline and water below. Somewhere in the background the actor in the film was stripped of his peyes and also standing on the Ping-Pong table. I do not know what those mysterious blue droplets are.

Earlier in the evening, one of the men now standing on the table turned to me and said: “You know, there are things I don’t like about you.”

S U B W A Y

So I’ve been walking into this particular subway station* for seven years now and I only recently looked up and really noticed this sign. Now I love it. Especially the side of it all eaten away, seeping orange light.


- One Side -


- The Other Side -

______

*For history’s sake, I can tell you that the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) line was extended to this stop on June 22, 1915. I can’t tell you, unfortunately, when exactly this sign dates from.

He Then Asked If She's More of a "Barney's Girl"

In the middle of a bout of insomnia last night my phone rang. It was a friend I don’t think I have a name here for yet. Let’s go with Firebrand. So Firebrand calls to tell me she is being pretty much stalked by a man who is wearing a lot of jewelry because his mother got him into astrology…what? She then shares with me a recent proposal she got from another online dater:

“He wrote and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch in a closet at Lord & Taylor.”

Needless to say, I didn’t fall asleep for a while after that.

Ducklings-on-the-Hudson, 3:58 p.m.

Please Forgive This Metaphor

Past 30, I feel like I have begun to seep through the edges of me like pancake batter. It's as if there are all these little tiny round pancakes forming off the main one, what my dad and I called "satellites" when I was a kid, and they are there to be picked off and eaten, which is utterly unsettling, although tasty for somebody.

This sense of expansion is enlivening and terrifying. It makes me want to crawl away and become a small dot the size of a pencil point.

But I guess the alternative would be to pour the batter into a mold, and, well, that's just not going to happen.

Forthwith, May We Slap Her?

I officially degrade my blog right. this. second.

Because I am going to comment on this Paris Hilton debacle. (Oh, i feel dirty. I have defiled myself...fear not, self, I will loofah it away later.)

What I want to point out is the hysterical nature of the proceedings, namely of Ms. Hilton and her Hiltonian family, namely Kathy, the materfamilias.

The whole thing is very Jane Austen on crack. Witness the drama, as recorded in this AP article:

"Back before [Judge] Sauer on Friday, Hilton's entire body trembled as the final pitch was made for her further incarceration. She clutched a ball of tissue, and tears ran down her face.

Seconds later, the judge announced his decision: 'The defendant is remanded to county jail to serve the remainder of her 45-day sentence. This order is forthwith.'

Hilton screamed.

Eight deputies immediately ordered all spectators out of the courtroom. Hilton's mother, Kathy, threw her arms around her husband, Rick, and sobbed uncontrollably.

Deputies escorted Hilton out of the room, holding each of her arms as she looked back."

Boofuckinghoo.
No, wait. I'm sorry.
I meant: Boomotherfuckinghoo.

Tribeca, 9:18 a.m.

The air is brisk and I am on the block of the Tribeca Film Festival, looking up at what I think is the most fantastic antenna in all of Gotham City.


I can almost see the lightening bolt of its invisible transmission. It reminds me of this:


Beep-beep-a-beep-beep. Beep...

PowerHood Girls

So The Brooklyn Paper has a story today called “Tween bandits terrorize shoppers in P’Heights.” Apparently, “In at least three instances over the past two months, a group of adolescents headed by one or two young girls has approached pedestrians and either hit them over the head with a blunt object or pointed what looked to be a toy gun in their direction.”

But really, here is the shining gem of the story:

A “third assault occurred about two months ago to a man named Raymond Alberts and his wife as they were walking along St. Marks Place between Classon and Grand avenues.

“ ‘As we were walking, we saw a kid hiding behind a Dumpster,’ Alberts told The Paper. ‘My wife says, “He’s got a gun.” ’

“Alberts, 56, estimated the kid was between 13 and 17 years old. He was accompanied by an “overweight boy” of about the same age.

“ ‘I turn around, and he points the silver gun at me … We kept on walking … He was just smiling.’

“Alberts promptly reported the incident to the cops, who sent out an officer to investigate.

“ ‘He comes back and says it was a toy gun, and he said it wasn’t a boy, it was an ugly girl,’ said Alberts.”

So, like, here’s the recap, from McBickle, your trusty reporterpreteur:

Man gets conked on the head by a boy who is somewhere between 2 and 50 years old. Said boy is accompanied by Fat Kid. They turn piece-of-shit plastic gun on the guy, whose wife is, like, blind and dumb enough to mistake it for an actual gun. Guy reports it to cops. Turns out the kid is an ugly girl. Like, ugly enough to look like a boy.

Score?

Ugly Tween Girls with Fat Friends: 1
Stupid Middle-Aged Married Couple: 0

These Came in Sprinkles Over the Transom

Simon Romero has a stunning story in today’s Times about a Colombian FARC captive named Clara Rojas who apparently has a 3-year-old child with her in the jungle. The boy’s name is Emmanuel. Rojas was a vice-presidential aspirant when she was kidnapped in 2002. This is from the story:

“Emmanuel’s existence was first reported to an unsettled public last year. But revelations in recent weeks, including his name, obtained from an emaciated police officer who spent 17 days in the wilderness after escaping from a guerrilla encampment in southern Colombia, have shaken a country hardened by a seemingly interminable war in which kidnapping has been polished into an effective weapon.

“ ‘Clara suffered so much,’ said Jhon Frank Pinchao, the policeman who fled from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel group, after eight years in captivity, in an emotional news conference here in mid-May. ‘I could hear her asking to see her son.’

“Mr. Pinchao, who said he once held Emmanuel in his arms, offered a few other details about the boy. He said the boy was healthy and was raised as ‘an Indian boy is treated.’ Two men kidnapped by the FARC, with the surnames Buitrago and Moreno, stitched clothes for Emmanuel by hand, as did the guerrillas, Mr. Pinchao said.”

I do not know if I can imagine what that means: “as ‘an Indian boy is treated.’ ” Romero goes on to quote a novelist. Here is that quote:

“ ‘If Emmanuel dies,’ Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s most prominent novelists, wrote in an essay, the country is in deep trouble. ‘If Emmanuel doesn’t start school and doesn’t grow healthy and strong, we will be the most savage country on earth, the dirtiest, the worst.’ ”

~

I want to write about the traveling TB patient, because it has kept me riveted in its twisty morality-play way, but this damn newspaper is on deadline tonight. But read John Schwartz’s bang-up account in the NYT. I also want to tell you about the tiny plastic penises on the plates at the table next to mine last night in a restaurant. (We were there for a bachelorette party; apparently the women next to us were there for a different, lame-ass bachelorette party where it was clearly specified on the invitation that white jeans must be worn with heels and blown-out hair. Miami freaks.) I also want to tell you about seeing one of my first great loves after 10 years yesterday, and about his beautiful little girl who sang “Happy Birthday” on his voice mail. (“Daddy!” she squealed. My hand flew to my mouth as my eyes popped with thrill and awe.) And I would tell you about a phone call I received on a cross-town bus that made me happy. But fukkit. I have to work. So I leave you with this parting gift: An assessment of Rudy Giuliani from Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone:

“Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a ‘stuck pig,’ and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers.”

!

Exclamatory and Emphatic!

Last night my trusty fellow reporters and editors gathered at our usual dart-playing, lesbian-welcoming, kinda-married-couple-bartenders* watering hole to say goodbye to one of our own (again). (Wait, not dead, just leaving work.)

We arrive.

There are hoards of people. And not just any people, LITERARY BLOGGERS. There is a convention. Read: black nerd glasses, pretty short dresses or just-tight-enough T-shirts to cause a gathering of newspaper people to take interest. They had name tags.

"Bloggers!" I shouted a lot. And then I would approach them in groups with the plan our newspaper cabal had devised: We shall throw it down with you. Take your pick: A Spell-Off, an AP-Style-Off or a We-Have-a-Deadline-Off. Ladies' choice...

(A We-Have-a-Deadline-Off. Hahaha.)

(Wouldja look at the Old Media Lady/Sorta Blogger dissing other bloggers? No, don't look, it's way too meta.)

Back to work! New York City's newspapers must be produced so that bloggers can feel superior and so can we! Meta!

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*Once I asked the woman bartender of her and the man bartender: "Are you two married?"
"Kinda," she said.