one thing today

 

  My friend Mark wrote me that he read a book that took place sometime in the 80s and in one dance scene - the gay crowd brought him back to the great stoned club scenes and discos and the unified organism of the music and the people.  It brought him to tears.  And I know exactly what he felt. You don’t often feel that you’re experiencing a benchmark lifetime moment/memory the moment when it happens - but once in a while, maybe every decade say - you do feel it fully, a jolt of eyes wide open. a night at 12 West -  a fab, giant dance carnival and the air was thick with heat and deep musky man smell and throbbing bass and I was with friends drinking beer and smoking and I felt that rare ping zing of recognition - something to do with a sense that it will never be better than this very instant and we won’t always be young and sexy in a club feeling and showing our moves and getting off with each other and the encircling  brotherhood. And I recall a favorite song b...

  My tv died. It had a good long life - thirteen years. way above the average run. I may just watch shows and news and movies on my computer. the first time I won't have a tv in my life. Life is so funny these days. things you never thought would be - be. and things you always took for granted as a given - just part of life - go - in a snap. 

 I feel overwhelmed by lose ends of late - taxes and loans and passports and tv and dishwasher repairs and other money stuff and feelings and ego.  one nice thing about moving past the not dark yet but getting there years and straight on thru to the long, long other side ... no more lose change or ends. 

  ... I deliberately pass this woman in the park about six times within an hour. She’s wearing earbuds and holds a very small baby in her arms and talks on the phone very loudly -  screaming and yelling and screeching every time I pass her, hands wild in the air. I watch her cross West Street. I will follow her to where this frightened baby lives who has been crying for the past hour thanks to her raging nannys shitty antics. I’ve taken a clear photograph of her and will mail it to some occupant who lives in the building she enters.  Ten minutes later I am on Charlton Street across from the still screaming on the phone creep. I stop a couple with their two kids coming out of the building she is standing in front of and ask them if they know her. They don’t.   I explain the situation and the mom   goes back into the building to ask someone if they know the woman. No. I tell them I’m gonna wait another fifteen minutes and see if she goes in somewhere.   She e...

  Remember, success is fleeting, while failure is perennial; our enduring, constant companion. Yesterday, Isabella and I went down to Hammersmith to give notice of our forthcoming marriage, a legal requirement, where we were separated and asked a series of questions to ensure that we actually knew each other and had, indeed, met before. Seated in a tiny, airless room, confronted by an earnest bureaucrat behind a glass partition, I was asked an easy question to kick things off: “What is your prospective wife’s date of birth?” I had no idea and replied, “I have three children, and I don’t know their dates of birth either.” Next, they asked, “What is her phone number?” Again, I shook my head in despair. Her email? Not a clue. They asked for her full name. I sighed, “I never asked.” Finally, they handed me a sheet of paper and a pen and asked me to sign the document. My head sank. “I’m paraplegic; I can’t use my hands.” The following day, recounting this tribulation to Carlo, it occurr...

Bella Freud has a great site on Youtube … Fashion Neurosis . she just interviewed the brilliant writer Hanif Kureshi. He had a tragedy a few years ago - he fainted and fell and has been paralyzed from the neck down ever since. He calls himself "a talking vegetable." They share an analyst. Hanif has seen him for 31 years. Bella - half that time. He calls his blog “a late stage flowering” that came out of his terrible occurrence. He says we are all moving toward one. It is our commonality, he says ... and his blog is a mission statement and a journal ... and that work allows him to hold onto his dignity.  

 

  I gave the family letters to my niece. She has them. I forgot that I gave them to her and then had a glimmer of that possibility. She read them and shared my big feelings about the times they evoke. They need a worthy  receptacle. I made them a collaged box.  We think that protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves.  Yet when we don't close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.                                                                                                   Pema Chodron

I am very sad at the moment. I can’t find dozens of letters my family sent to my sister who was living in Europe in the 60s. They were so sweet and telling … so many perspectives of shared life - from Jessie, 10, to my grandmother Justina and everyone in between. Ugh is all I can think. How did I lose them in the move? What to do when you lose something treasured - except feel the loss and use the opportunity to widen your compassion for others who have lost much more.

 

  ...  and me some Christmas morning in the 70s. People used to compliment her on her eyebrows .  Humans developed a smooth forehead with visible, hairy eyebrows capable of a wide range of movement. Eyebrows can express a wide range of subtle emotions – including recognition and sympathy.

 

I buy a bagel and ice coffee. I go across the street to the blooming park and I'm told there's no eating there. I sit down on the pie shaped space on 6th ave and Greenwich and a woman pulls out the other chair at my table and sits a few feet away.  I tell her she can share the table with me. She does and we talk about nyc and the library and montauk and this and that.  I go to the post office and the young woman who helps me makes sure I push all kinds of buttons to prove I'm not a terrorist sending lethal things and I tell her things have really changed since back in the day and she says really and I say oh yeah and we both agree that the only thing that stays the same are babies. She smiles big and displays her teeth with big gaps between them.  I cross the street and run into my handsome Russian dentist who does some tv acting and he doesn't know I know that back in his day he was a cage fighter. I saw him fight on Youtube. I love his coloring, all whites and grays a...

  ... was blue and orange tonight - a rare combo and one I never really think about and it makes me want to apply the colors in my in-progress painting of an exhausted father troubled in a jungle with his beautiful daughter at his side who wonders why her dads head is resting on a tree and why he is so weary and sad.

  I'm scared of my dishwasher. I've never had one before. Some people are afraid of fire. I've always been afraid of floods. I had an Oscar party and a friend ran it for me for the first time without any trouble. I tried to use it last night, followed the instructions - even the bit about running the hot water in the sink before I began - which I don't think we did when we ran it that first time. I added the detergent and started it up and this morning I opened up the washer and lo and behold - the plates and bowls look crustier than they did when I placed them in the machine. The detergent pod was on the floor of the dishwasher. Dish placement problems, something else? Time will tell. At least it didn't cause The Big Chelsea Flood of '25 I have inside my head.  lucky