I never was a listmaker until my brother told me he was a listmaker

sagaponack, another family's, ny



This is the first year I've spent in New York City without a south facing window. It's taking a toll on me, or it might be that all of the plants died. Maybe it's that the nights have grown taller than their parents (the days) and now the nights bend and loom over all of us nightly when we take our seats in the pews at church.


Perhaps it is that we use coasters now. Possibly it is that I need an electric sunlight box. I can see myself sitting & warming my head in front of it in the dark (but not curtained) room while it's daytime outside.

Yes! Or
Could it be that I decided to stay and (therefore) need to leave? Maybe. Maybe it is that I have sweaty palms and need a way to type that isn't so hot. Perchance it's that I haven't been taking my multivitamin, which doesn't have enough calcium or iron for vegans anyway, and makes my piss the color of a.) highlighter fluid or b.) cheap white wine by the name of Wally's Hut. I could posit relatively reasonably that it's the decline of my eyesight into complete and total oil painting oblivion and my residual former grade-school mortification coming into full bloom (again, like a pushy garage amaryllis or some shit) from the mere thought of wearing my magnifying glasses on my face and in public, therefore preventing me from reading anything  (or even seeing anything particularly well)  in the sunlight ever again, because in this city you can never be outside and alone, you have to pick one.

For all one knows it's that we forgot to pay the laughing gas bill and the landlord shut it off,  or that there's a television in our apartment now that is mostly black-screened and frightening, or that it lately has been making that noise that the obelisk made in 2001 A Space Odyssey but our cat can't hear it, or that we have a coffee table and I'm often concerned about it, concerned about its well-being, not concerned that we have one.

Conceivably it is the giant wooden sailing-ships arrival of spell check, and nootropics, and digital point and shoot cameras, and digital watches, and protein bars, and cliffnotes, and energy drinks, and anything that makes people like me feel bitter for making things easy that shouldn't be easy because it makes people who can do hard things less special, or maybe it's the shame I feel when I misplace the I and the E except after C and take a sip of my red bull and look over at the VCR clock instead of my wristwatch and realize that it's been saying 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00 --- 12:00.



But the fact of the matter is, my cat keeps taking off his collar and hiding it (congratulations cat), the neighbors haven't knocked on the walls in a while, it was warm enough to let the breeze on your arms today, it's 4:24 pm which is a good time and I need a haircut which means I'm still alive. Dinner's tonight. Dinner's every night. And I've got a long long line of dinners stretching out forever into the vanishing point until I won't need dinners anymore.