I Propose A Toast -

knees, mine / central park NY 8.09



Here I am finding myself wishing I’d have made something
and not wanting to make something. This happens to you too, right,
When Son House presents the Pony Blues,
When you hear the insects recently born in your alley,
new empowered party crowds arms bared
legs allowed by the new air’s slow
warmth, when radiostation is being created
somewhere close to you and you know
(because you and radio both agree,
you say Yes, exactly, to it)
and who could know about how here feels if they weren’t here now.
Radio and I should talk.
Someone tell them to say their phone number slower between songs,
like they would if they were expecting someone
to actually call.
There are more electronics home than people right now. When did it become like this?
To Do:
Sleep again
Wake again
Close the windows
Ask the city politely to stop pressuring me to participate
Participate
Pick up laundry.
My spicy breath feels seasonally inappropriate now. I must add
to my list,
Eat a cucumber.
And,
Buy a box of Sun, like the one Cara sleeps with, on like the day, plug
for indoor use only.
Set it on a timer to give the real Sun
a good example. Good examples always help
like the answers in the back of an algebra textbook help lazy students.
I ate the apples you left here last month.
They were gritty and old like the city and fermented like you.
Gritty and old like you too come to think of it.
You too had the chance at those new seeds but I ate them and have shitted
them out generously to this city’s soil,
made previously only of dead squirrels motor oil and newspapers,
now made also of cucumbers, this afternoon’s tacos
and the appleseed’s future apple-trees that should rightfully be growing from
your dead posthumous humus-dirt chest
sprouting in the center of your fertile pickled heart.

To Spring---

summerhot madness

this summer's tomatoes on the fire escape august 2009



went over to cara's new apartment last night, she's got exposed brick walls and a back porch with broken down chairs. i read a psychological study years ago that stated a high correlation between cityfolks with exposed brick in their apartments and overall feelings of contentedness. but correlation aint causation.

still, though, she's got a back porch with a sky in it, places for us to all sun our bones when this place starts to thaw (and it will)

after dinner we all started watching music videos with high school party scenes, feeling happy and like we had a past, and eventually we came upon will smith and dj jazzy jeff's "summertime"

that song makes me want to wear belly shirts and hang out on stoops and on cara's new back porch with the BBQ going all smoky and arnold palmer in my glass.

i'm realizing a function of my switching from digital to film: all my summer photos are coming back now, and i can't write about anything recent anymore. i look through my boxes and get pictures of tomatoes and tan faces and beaches.

so let me tell you a little something about my winter

it's cold, it's good, it's a little nervous. someone said the theme of this year should be decadence and i agree. i want to sit with all of you in warm rooms and revel in it. drink hot drinks out of nice glasses and wear impractically fuzzy socks that you can't even put shoes over, that's what i want.

i like winter best, i'm a winter creature, i like wearing more clothes and i hate sweat. i like seeing my breath. wearing big coats makes me feel tough and eastern european, i like to think of everything in cyrillic and all us humans just crazy enough to brave it these few months. i like how awake the cold makes me feel. i like how the city smells clean this once each year. i like the dry sidewalks like we're in the tundra, in a cold desert where everything just rattles and everything is hard surfaces. cities are meant for the winter and so am I.

i even like when the cold drives people inside, like any other condition new yorkers can't handle, like any time before 8 am. the streets get desolate like morning and walking around in my two pairs of pants and hood and black jacket, boots and flannel, long johns and blanket, i'm alright.

three cheers for winter shivers &
three chills for winter cheers

new york heat wave classic

elise & annalise, august in manhattan @ otto's shrunken head




there is a unique understanding of the word
HEATWAVE

living in an old old northeast city
with stoops and fire hydrants instead of air conditioning like those fancy midcountry desert cities prepared for this sort of thing

and all you can eat is drink

i feel like smiling at everybody out of our common experience
still hits me as special these pavement weeks nearing 100F
still makes me feel special
and reminds me where i live
as i sweat it all away

YES

self @ moonrise madaket MA 7/09





I am in love with my EveryDay
And it is all the romance i will
ever
need

cornbread, collard greens

tompkins square park, manhattan. 4.17.2009.




i'd forgotten how easy it is to walk when the wind doesn't hurt you. last night the breeze was warm. warm- i went for hours and blocks and miles. i need new city summer sneakers. young soles that aren't scared of these new night walks.

as time passes it's harder to break my time up into swallowable pieces. i can't tell if that will make adulthood faster or slower than the last 7,000 halcyon days. my future years endlessly fall ahead of me like a bad painting with no vanishing point.

it is warm. my legs are brown. i am getting nothing done.

elise goes to ohio, or, do You believe in God? Really

a story about ohio with hardly any words at all















































































































































































































































































































































8:17 pm. 3/16/09 rose's roof still. during house meeting. oberlin, OH.


this is a town you're not meant to spend your life in. you start here, and you might end here, but you're supposed to escape sometime in the middle; “the ones who are still here are quietly thought of as...those who failed to take flight-”
it smells like woodsmoke and late summer. turn of the season birds, turn of the season late afternoon light. we've gotten evening back from the clutches of winter and its 4 p.m. darkness. it is eight at night and the sky still has a little fight left in it. birds do. I do. and wow, I do- it must be the quiet. even though this is a new place it's set in a shell of the familiar. it is beautiful and exciting, in a comfortable way. like a dad getting a nice new armchair, secretly for sleep.

I could learn to love myself here, it would be so much easier.

There's a political map in pastel colors in my head and it won't get out. I'm on a pushpin in Ohio. landlocked in the gentle middle. the edges got so roughed up, of the US of A- rockies and appalachians and all that mess and here ohio is like the few good pieces of bread in the middle of the crushed loaf. the sidewalk in front of the tank is a perfect intentional curve. there's nothing for it to avoid like in the northeast. the streets make sense even though this isn't a city. there are rules to the numbers of houses. there's a theatre for three dollars.

it makes me wonder what I did by moving to The Place during those years where it's still alright to make excuses, still alright to live in the places people shouldn't spend their whole lives in. I gave something up and gained something and i'll probably live not quite as long. i'd never sleep here, i'd just walk the streets because my head wouldn't have used up all of its tolerance for noise, and light, and navigation.

what did I do

i'm looking down at a little town that looks like a flat benign hometown. full of kids I would have loved to know in grade school. people are passing by in their cars just bassing. it vibrates out and up to me like jam'n 94.5 FM did to me all those years back, when God did I have to search for people to love. thank God I learned that love has nothing to do with anything I thought it did. I remember all I wanted when I was a freshman and a sweet 14 was a boy with a car to drive me around in, listening to the radio and spending time at the Gulf station and on 495. the loveliness of that situation would have filled in the holes where the loveliness in him should have been, I told myself without knowing I was telling myself. I fell in love with ugly boys thank God. the sparks. the special I found in the sea of hometown doldrums.

here almost fooled me. I would have loved this. everyone dresses in my favorite colors. no one washes their hair. and i'm sure that there's a particularly special population-
but i'm so glad I learned to love the ugly ones, the unsavvy because they have been the only ones i've ever loved.






7:27 pm 4/9/2009. Manhattan, the apartment.

i learned a lot of things in ohio. i learned that i like quiet. that i enjoy cooking food to feed twenty or more. that some people find me handsome. that some find me pretty.

that comfort isn't as hard to come by as i once thought,

that i love my small-town memories for a reason,

that i can write when i'm content too, that i shouldn't panic, that i'm not behind. that i wasn't making it up in my head that new yorkers were kind of mean. that there are some sweet, sweet people on this rock of ours.

i was reminded of a lot of things as well. like how much i miss rose, and how much i miss the smell of dirt, and being outside, alone.

every day, even if i'm sad, i wake up feeling luckier, luckier luckier luckier- my summer life is taking shape, i have a place to live, i have a place to work, and both are beautiful beyond measure. i have a quiet roof, outside, a place to be alone. i have fire escape room for a garden. i have windows with sun, and real, old wooden floors. there are no right angles in the entire apartment. i have a job with no dress code, an incredible salary, free vegan food, no air conditioning, and with a built-in reason to smile at everyone i see.



i think that rose may have packed some ohio in with my dirty clothes. and i suitcased them back to the city and washed them with everything. and now ohio is everywhere, even rubbing off on my tomorrows and next years.

so thank you.