Instead Of Funny

Around two today I walked out into the rain for another cup of coffee. The drops had just begun to spatter across the city, pushed by a herky-jerk wind, and even though it was cold, the air had that scent of new rain on dusty concrete, a sensation I count among the most pleasant confirmations that I am still alive. The beautiful girl up in the Mud truck on Cooper Square didn't hear my order the first time I shouted it over the Led Zepplin song sandblasting its way into the eardrums of passersby. It was windy out too, as I said, and the rain was finding its way into the hole cut in the side of the truck. I worried about the electric space heater I saw in the back, and about what would happen to the graceful coffee girl if it got wet. She had arched her body out of the way of the raindrops so that just her face was in danger of becoming wet. Maybe this awkward angle and the wet wind that inspired it explain why she didn't hear me, or maybe it was because my voice faltered when I ordered the two small coffees with milk, one for me and one for my friend back in the office. I become shy when this pale-faced girl or the dark haired one look down at me from their perches in the truck, all business, wanting to know what I want and wanting to know it fast, and my voice sometimes betrays me, losing consonants in my throat, shifting pitch unnecessarily mid-word. And I get the feeling that anything that slows the pace is, if not exactly the enemy, an obstacle on the quest toward proper coffee distribution. But today, when she asked me to repeat my order, she smiled for a moment and offered a benevolent pause before turning back to her frantic pouring and passing. I paid, stuffed a dollar in the tip mug, making a point to meet her eye--she said Hey, thanks!--and then turned to head back down Lafayette. Above and beyond me the stone and iron edifices, many of them once the homes of the richest New York families, cascaded off toward the darkening sky, tumbling into one another in that ballet of geometry that you can only ever see when you manage to forget that it is always all around you here.

Against Dreams

No push-ups today. My left wrist is still janky from my skateboard accident.

I considered another title, “Done Fucking Around,” for this first-in-far-too-long post. The phrase is, in my most perfect vision of what this world could be, the label that would best apply to myself. “Oh, did you hear about Natonymous? No? It’s huge. Apparently, he’s done fucking around. Yeah, I know. Look out world, right?” These are the sorts of things I imagine people saying about me once the label applied. Such fantasies, I think, betray their inherent solipsism. And the problem with self-regard is its tendency to distract us from what’s off in the periphery. You know, like the rest of the world and junk. Or, to consider the specifics of this particular brand of narcissistic projection—wishing for a different kind of self—it obscures one’s sense of the here and now in favor of reverie over what might become. My overpowering desire to be done fucking around (for the record, I see no end in sight), has nothing, really, to do with what a cessation to the around-fucking would actually entail; keeping a schedule; refusing opportunities to indulge; casting aside those paralyzingly comfortable feelings of not-quite-readiness; engaging in activities according to ratios described by previously agreed upon priorities; passively accepting whatever experience flutters in the window, let’s say, a bit less frequently. Instead, such a desire—a yearning to be done fucking around, rather than simply fucking around on substantially fewer occasions—has everything do with avoiding exactly the entailments (← Is that a word? It should be.) that might make the desire a reality. In other words, in my innermost self, I know I have every intention of continuing to fuck a dizzy array of circles and figure eights around the important matters some other part of me think I should see to. I wish that I were different, but not enough to make it so. (Please refer to this entire paragraph for confirmation of this final statement.)

I wanted to spend the lion’s share of this post complaining about the widespread use of the word dream to mean aspiration, ideal, or longed-for scenario, using last night’s broadcast of the Oscars as a good example of how stupid-making this word has become. And I should probably admit that I really didn’t like the movie, Once, when I saw it in the theater—it went down about as well as a can of condensed milk would have done. But I did like it when those two played their song. And I thought then, and remembered thinking back when I wandered out of the theater and into the wind last fall or whenever it was, that that Chezch girl was by far the best thing about the whole deal. So I was bummed when she didn’t get to declare her thanks before the go-away music swelled, and I was pumped when Jon Stewart dumped whatever bit he’d planned in favor of bringing her back out to say her piece. And then my stomach sort of turned when she said, something along the lines of what the commencement speaker always says just before the kids treat their hats like Frisbees: follow you dreams. She used the word hope a few times too, and she basically used the old, “I’m the exception that proves the rule” logic that says, sure, it’s super hard to get here, and really very few of us do, but the fact that I’m here, which, by the way, is only remarkable because of how unlikely the event is, shows you that it and therefore anything are possible, so go ahead and have your own dreams because, and here’s where logic makes a chasm-spanning leap, they’ll definitely come true.

Fuck off, Marketa, you know? How about a simple, “I can’t believe it. This is what I hoped would happen, and I’m so, so happy it did, and I can’t help but think of all the people who are just as deserving as I am. I truly do wish they could feel what I do right now. By the way, we’re all going to die, and sometimes things just don’t work out, both facts that make this moment of triumph that much sweeter. Good night, everybody!”

Besides, every dream I’ve ever had has been a mess of images and feelings, a vertiginous journey through disconnected surprises. Occasionally, I’ve awakened laughing out loud, so clear was it that my unconscious mind was simply fucking with me.

There’s more to it, of course, but I’ve already wasted time on this stuff and now I’ve got to get back to work.

Anyway, I’m trying to do this again, post stuff here. We’ll see, I guess