Brian's Buttkicking Webjournal

You have to like each other... then you neck. This can go on for years.

2009-02-23T04:23:38Z

I suppose it's time again.

COOKIE TALLY!

1 Apr 2007: I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. (Every Day You Play, by Pablo Neruda. Letzler got it.)
12 Apr 2007: It rained all night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July. (The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Nobody got it.)
27 Apr 2007: Help! Help! I'm being repressed! (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Little Emily.)
21 June 2007: I didn't realize babies come with hats. (Toby on "The West Wing." Letzler.)
7 Aug 2007: In '69 I was 21 and I called the road my own-I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on. (Running on Empty, by Jackson Browne. Keenan.)
8 Aug 2007: This is my corn. You people are guests in my corn. (Field of Dreams. Becca got it.)
14 Sept 2007: I am drowning, there is no sign of land; you are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand. (No Children, by the Mountain Goats. Nobody.)
20 Nov 2007: Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society — the social ramble ain't restful. (Satchel Paige. Nobody got it.)
28 Nov 2007: Someone is coming up. Someone serious. (Leon. Keenan got it.)
1 Dec 2007: I don't discriminate. I regulate every shade of the ass. (I'm Not a Player, by Big Punisher. Nobody.)
28 Dec 2007: I'm a county lineman, on a highline;so will be my grandson- there are powerlines, in our bloodlines. (Here I dreamt I was an architect, by the Decemberists. Nobody got it.)
13 Jan 2008: You wear nothing, but you wear it so well. (Crash, by Dave Matthews. Letzler)
13 Feb 2008: And although it seems heaven-sent, we ain't ready to see a black president. (Tupac, "Changes, " nobody got it.)
16 July 2008: Kiss my ass, I bought a boat, and I'm going out to sea. (Lyle Lovett, If I had a boat, Jane with an H got it.)
16 Aug 2008: Make way for ducklings, motherfucker. (In which I blatantly baited Dave Letzler by using the name of an old Williams College trivia competition, but he didn't take the bait.)
17 Aug 2008: You're an abacus, and my heart was counting on us. (Barenaked Ladies, Adrift. Little Emily got it.)
24 Nov 2008: We're hanging on the shadow of your family tree, your haunted heart and me. (TV on the Radio- "Family Tree." Nobody.)
25 Dec 2008: Following the wrong god home, we may miss our star. (A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford. Nobody.)
6 Jan 2009: There is no reason for this, just a starved dog's logic about bones. (Margaret Atwood, nobody.)
12 Jan 2009: That's the plan: rule the world, you and me, any day. (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Shockingly, nobody.)
16 Jan 2009: I am haunted by waters. (The book A River Runs Through It. Nobody.)
20 Jan 2009: The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. (Abraham Lincoln. Nobody.)
18 Feb 2009: It all began with a god named Thor; there were vikings, and boats, and plans for a furniture store. ("Ikea," by Jonathan Coulton. Jane with an H got it.)
21 Feb 2009: Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes. (Fortunate Son, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Letzler.)
22 Feb 2009: You have to like each other... then you neck. This can go on for *years.* (Rob Reiner's explanation of dating in Sleepless in Seattle. Kate got it.)

CURRENT TALLY:

Dave Letzler: 23
Kate: 13
Becca: 13
Little Emily: 9.5
Anna: 8
Caitlin: 6
My Dad: 4
Armando: 3
Skinny Eddie: 3
Claudia: 2.5
Veronica: 2
Clare: 2
Deena: 2
Tim: 2
Vivian: 2
Jamie: 2
Jess: 2
Eliza: 2
Saaxton: 2
Keenan: 2
Jane with an H: 2
Andrew: 1
Eskimo Claire: 1
Frank: 1
Taylor: 1
Megan: 1
Brian_Berlin: 1
Minha: 1
Trisha: 0

Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes.

2009-02-22T04:55:08Z

I have achieved one of my ten life-long dreams this evening:

I won one of those big carnival-style stuffed animals, for a girl.

I'm totally stoked.

(Four down, six to go.)

It all began with a god named Thor; there were vikings, and boats, and plans for a furniture store.

2009-02-18T22:19:15Z

I have a really big hi-definition television now. Lord knows I don't need one, especially, since my life is mostly confined to the interwebs and a now growing web of far-fetched social adventures that I seem to keep whimsically dragging my friends out for. But, by god, I now have a really big teevee, and Corydon and I decided that, having one, we also had a good excuse to redecorate the apartment.

But, we're bachelors, so redecorating the apartment basically just meant buying an entertainment unit and setting up a shitload of Nintendos.

The Nintendos came from my storage boxes. The entertainment unit came from Ikea.

Now, it's important to note here that I have a very, very spotty history with Ikea: anytime I go there, it seems, I buy some piece of furniture that's invariably missing a piece, and whenever I go there turns out to be pretty often.

Last year I even went out to Jersey to buy a bunch of things for the apartment which I then lugged back, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of them, in my lap, on the Ikea bus, grumbling all the way, only to get home, open the boxes, and find them all missing wheels and legs.

So, I get the entertainment unit the other day, and it's basically a pretty straightforward thing. Couple slabs of particle board, couple wheels, couple casters, everything seems to be there. And then I get to the directions.

This is the instruction manual. The *entire* instruction manual:

That's it. Now, in case you're curious, I'm not so great at building things. In spite of my granddad being a jack-of-all-trades handyman fisherman janitor, and my father being a generally handy guy, I am *clearly* the most evolutionarily useless member of the family. I seriously can't figure out how to work the vacuum. So, basically, here's what I've figured from what little instructions I've got:

1. Hi! are you planning to murder someone? You'll need a pencil, two screwdrivers, an ice pick, and a hammer.
2. Shave your head. Do not attempt to carry anything on your own. If you happen to know anybody that looks like Bart Simpson, call them now, and ask them for a favor. Remember: the less fingers, the better. Be sure you are both naked.
3. If you're going to make love to your new table, take it easy.
Use a rug to make sure any excess fluids don't seep into your floor, and remember: Style counts, so try to fuck casually.
4. If you find that you've been delivered a set of Lincoln Logs instead of an actual television table, please, call Sweden.
5. Now, if you *do* have all your pieces, please proceed to skip twenty-two steps. They are not important and/or are probably impossible with only two fingers.
27. Turn a thing over. Grow more fingers. Screw everything in. Voila'! You're done!

When Corydon walked in later that afternoon, he found me in our living room, in a wifebeater, my hands covered in band-aids, huffing and puffing, sweating and cursing, slumped and half-teary over our new entertainment unit.

Which I had built completely upside-down.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

2009-01-20T17:04:51Z

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering about America, transformed; whether my forefathers, founders of this country, patriots and heroes, would recognize the nation they would today find. Our clothing alien, our democracy changed, our pace hurried, our buildings scraping skies scented of gasoline and our style, to them, perhaps undignified.

Today, listening to a crackling radio whose simple technology they wouldn't have understood, broadcast from a city that many of them never saw, with the words of a man they would have shackled and enslaved, I can't help but think that this is the unlikely dream my forefathers could never, in their living lives, have ever imagined.

I can't help but think that this dream they never had is, perhaps, the call to surpass the one they actually did.

I am haunted by waters.

2009-01-16T20:51:04Z

I had a meeting with Donald Trump today- it was nothing serious, or for that matter impressive, and wouldn't even merit mentioning but for one thing- it was my first time meeting him. Obviously, I'd heard all the stories, his TV show, etc. and had a sense of his personality.

...The man arrived by *helicopter.* To our meeting not fifteen blocks from his own office. And not only did he arrive by helicopter, but his helicopter was midnight blue and had the word TRUMP in big white letters, taking up nearly the entire side of the body, scrawled across both sides. He insisted on landing said helicopter on the roof of the building- which does not, by the way, have a helipad.

I'm sure this is nothing compared to a lot of his usual antics, but I just can't get over it. Helicopter. To go fifteen blocks.

That's the plan: rule the world, you and me, any day.

2009-01-12T19:52:19Z

I have a longer post coming probably tomorrow, but I just wanted to mention this:

I know a lot of people don't believe my various exploits- after all, they are occasionally exaggerated for effect for the sake of a good story- but yesterday my friends Kate and Keenan, who both read this journal and sometimes doubt me witnessed me get into a fifteen-minute long, vaguely physical argument on the subway with a man named Jacob who was from the island of Dominica and claimed to be a prophet sent by the archangel Michael to slay the Jews... meaning me.

There's more to the story, but in reality, added words will rob the story of some justice.

There is no reason for this, just a starved dog's logic about bones.

2009-01-07T00:08:09Z

So I was putting my pants on a few minutes ago- yes, at 6:30 PM, it's a rough life I lead- and it got me to thinking.

You know how celebrities always drag out the old saw about how they're just regular people, because they put their pants on one leg at a time? Well, here's the problem. I don't.

Now, I haven't really spent a lot of time analysing the pants-application scenarios of my friends, but generally speaking, for me it usually goes:

1. No pants.
2. Right foot.
3. Left foot.
4. WHOOSH.
5. Pants.

Doesn't everyone do it that way? It just seems massively more efficient. Maybe what these celebrities are trying to say is that no, actually, we're not like you plebeian losers, we actually put our pants on one leg at a time because hey, you never know, a shag might break out in that minute of lag time or, you know, it's not like we need to go to work, here on our jets to the French Riviera, so let's take our sweet time with the whole pants scenario.

I'm just sayin'.

Following the wrong god home, we may miss our star

2008-12-26T04:58:20Z

Actual conversation I had with my father at dinner last night:

Dad: So, since we're talking about stolen cars...
Brian: Uh-huh?
Dad: (serious) I have a question to ask you.
Brian: ...Okay. Shoot.
Dad: It's about your graduation party.
Brian: My graduation party? You mean, from High School?
Dad: Yeah.
Brian: That was eight years ago. I don't really remember it.
Dad: That's what I'm afraid of.
Brian: Huh?
Dad: Well... what I want to ask you is, uh, did you do drugs at your graduation party?
Brian: Drugs? No, as I recall, we had a barbecue. Weren't you there?
Dad: Well, Susan and I left for a while.
Brian: And you thought me and my friends were doing drugs.
Dad: Yes.
Brian: Why?
Dad: Well, you had all that aluminum foil.
Brian: ...Aluminum foil?
Dad: [long explanation about how, back in his day, the hippies would use aluminum foil to make bongs, or pipes, or something, I don't know, I don't actually know a lot about how to use drugs]
Brian: Yeah... we were having a barbecue. We probably used the aluminum foil to make corn, or something. You know how I am about corn.
Dad: So, you weren't doing drugs at your graduation party?
Brian: No, not so much.

I had no idea aluminum was so subversive.

You're an abacus, and my heart was counting on us.

2008-08-18T02:42:12Z

I had the following conversation the other day with the Latin man serving the bagels at my favorite place in Brooklyn.

Counter guy: What do you want?
Me: Yeah, can I get an everything bagel with lots of cream cheese?

Sure, he says, as he wanders to the counter, pulls out an everything bagel, and starts taking pieces of smoked lox and laying it on my bagel.

No, no, I say. With LOTS of cream cheese. Not lox.

Oh, oh, okay, he nods, carefully removing the salmon and pulling out a big tub of pink cream cheese.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Lox cream cheese, mister!"

"No, no, LOTS, not lox."

"Oh, sorry," he says, and goes back to putting on pieces of salmon on the bread.

....

......

No, no, I tell him. I want LOTS of cream cheese. The woman snickers behind me. "I want a *great deal* of cream cheese."

"Oh, don't worry," he says. "Our cream cheese is pretty cheap."

I quietly sigh to myself. In the future, maybe I should stick to butter. Or avoid Brooklyn.

Make way for ducklings, motherfucker.

2008-08-16T12:18:44Z

All the running around I've been doing lately has given me two business ideas. The first, I got after walking around the city of New York at well after midnight some time back with my ex. We were trying to find a waffle maker because she, in one of her more endearing moments, had a pregnant-like yen for home-made, fresh waffles and, in turn, to make me some in the morning.

Anyway, I want to open a store called "SHIT YOU NEED" and it'll only be open from 8PM to 8AM, and it will contain lots, and lots, and lots of random products that you wouldn't find in your everyday dollar store but that people might want and need at 3AM. I figure a lot of my patrons will be, at the time, pregnant or married to the pregnant. So we'll have things like waffle makers and ice cream with little chunks of pickle in it, but also nose hair trimmers and the individual parts of picture frames and lots of hardware items, not just things like hammers and pipe snakes but also chainsaws and ice picks and opaque drop cloths for hiding the body.

The other store, I thought of while making my way through Cape Cod last weekend with a good friend of mine. We stopped to visit Martha's Vineyard; a tourist trap constantly overhung with clouds, it's full of little tchotchke shops as far as the eye can see, all selling lots of random crap emblazoned with "Martha's Vineyard" and "Cape Cod" and various Boston Red Sox paraphernalia, most of it of the high-brow sort that implies that Derek Jeter drinks wine coolers.

I want to start a chain of shops in various well-touristed areas of our country, from the biggest, grandest cities, to the quaintest of the countryside resorts, selling souvenirs from cities you are not in.

This way, when you tell your wife you're going on a business trip to Chicago, but are really going on a romantic getaway with your boyfriend to New Hope, you can get her a nice sweatshirt with a picture of the great lake or a snowglobe with a little asbestos-covered Sears Tower on it, knowing that she'll be utterly thrilled that you thought of her enough to get a gift while you were giving a reach-around to Derek out back of a Pennsylvania antique shop.

Hell's bells, we'll even have toys for the kids!

That is, if the kids like waffle makers.

Kiss my ass, I bought a boat, and I'm going out to sea.

2008-07-17T01:08:29Z

I was so mad at my girlfriend the other night that I stormed out of the house. I actually stormed out of the house on her. This is extra impressive as we were not, at the same time, even in the same house- I just got so mad that I could not be contained by houses.

Anger is an interesting thing; people like, fundamentally, to get angry, to get in other people's faces, to get in other people's business. This is especially true when people feel that, for good or bad, "the children" are threatened. This is universally true, as everyone feels, rightly or wrongly, that the world's children are somehow their ward, and it's the reason why, whenever a politician needs to pass some sort of difficult legislation, they'll put riders into it to save the children. You'll see senators trying to push bills to provide, say, higher spending limits to purchase nuclear missiles off of the Soviet bloc, putting a rider on it to also provide an allowance to provide milk in elementary school cafeterias. They know that no congressman in his right mind wants to be caught stealing milk from children, so their bill gets passed.

This manifests itself in other ways, too, though, which is more the point I wanted to get to. I was in Toronto a few weeks ago, traveling with a female friend, when we stepped into an elevator and found a baby, who couldn't have been more than three years old or so, gleefully pressing the buttons and riding up and down the building- alone. We asked him his name, if he knew where his mommy was, all the usual questions people are trained to ask in these situations, since we all, sort of, become appointed Universal Mom. He was pretty silent, happy to press the buttons, and I thought it best to take charge of the situation and get him some help. I took his hand, ready to lead him out of the elevator for help, when I thought better of it. "Here, take his hand," I said to my friend, "if I'm holding some strange little boy's hand, people will think I'm a molester." And she took his hand, and I stopped a tick- why is it that people automatically assume that men are predatory, prone to such ill-behaved activity, and not women?

Reaching the lobby, we came to a small bar that had been set up on the first floor of the building; as we walked out- looking confused, no doubt- I told the bartender what had happened, and he eagerly took the child's hand, confidently and with great velocity whisking the child back into the elevator, without saying a word.

As the door closed, we looked at one another, wondering if we'd done the right thing; how could this frumpy bartender know this child? What were his intentions?

I wonder how it got to be, this stereotype of the male molester; how did it come to pass that all men, in spite of their personal sincerity, honesty, and temerity, come to be assumed to be brooding, animalistic, clamoring-at-the-bit-and-waiting-in-the-wings pedophiles at merely the slightest hint of an opportunity? How did this defect become universal? I'm willing to bet that the actual rate of pedophilia in men is incredibly low and, in fact, probably no different than that of women. Yet, in the same situation, so many of us would feel perfectly comfortable handing off kids to women who run equally high chances of being covert predators. Does this come out of the stereotype of the distant, emotionally uninvolved father? Or just some sort of stereotype of men being lusty horndogs? I remember when I was a kid that it was assumed that all gay men were secretly pedophiles waiting in the shadows to snatch up our children; it's a ridiculous notion that I've not been exposed to in a long time, living in Manhattan, but I wonder if it's still pervasive in un-jaded corners?

When I was about fifteen, sixteen years old I became friends with a gentleman on the internet, a really great guy who I should still be in touch with but, mostly due to my own flakiness, no longer am. He, like I, was deeply, passionately interested in genealogy, and being from the same hometown as my father's people with a similarly old lineage, we were related about fifteen different ways.

One day, he invited me to visit him at his home on the Chesapeake Bay, in Maryland, and I being fifteen was excited to go somewhere new and eagerly accepted. When I told my father of my plans, you could instantly see the cogs turning, as he assumed that any man (a *schoolteacher*, no less, another oft-maligned profession of men) must surely have villainous, carnal intentions towards his son. That anyone, male, female, young or old could have had prurient intent in my pimply faced, scrawny fifteen year old body was laughable enough, but that it was this guy- a warm, honest, and earnest fellow if ever I've known one- was even sadder. But, as an adult, I understand what was going through his head- we've come to expect the worst in people, hoping even to avoid pleasant surprises. It seems that, these days, good intentions are as rare a species as the roadside hitchhiker- and for much the same reasons.

I still regret not going, anyway.

I've been stewing about this for a couple weeks now, and started writing it while on a train out to Long Island to attend a wedding. The train, packed on a Thursday afternoon before a holiday, was cramped and crowded and I got stuck in a booth with a 30-somethingish black fellow also on his way out to a wedding, and a woman with about three million children with her. She had kids in her lap, kids in her arms, a kid hanging off her back like a monkey, and was clearly sitting there, trying to figure out a way to secrete babies from her pores.

As I tried to read through the pompous- if erudite- text in Barack Obama's three-hundred-page-stump-speech of a book, I found myself returning again and again to their conversation, as the fellow asked questions again and again about her, her family, her kids, how old they were, offering up as comforting evidence stories of his own children and their terrible twos and the challenges and pratfalls of fatherhood. I noticed the lack of a ring on his finger and the perky, bloodless, energetic eyes of a man unencumbered by children. This man looked like he regularly got sleep. As he chatted, I went into the rogue agent mode that all men secretly have- it's tough to describe, but if you want to see it in action, go to a bar and wait for some male to give lip to a female bartender. You had better believe every eye will be on him, quietly planning some act of supreme, over-the-top malice, no matter how idly they might be nodding and pretending to follow their date's conversation.

As he asked her about the oldest, blondest daughter's interest in some particular Saturday morning television show, I quietly, and with careful pacing, turned over unread pages of my book, wondering exactly what he'd do if he found a lost child in an elevator.

And although it seems heaven-sent, we ain't ready to see a black president.

2008-02-14T03:33:40Z

I was driving down to Philadelphia the other day- ostensibly, to get a cheesesteak sandwich, but in reality because I had some work I needed to do- and, because I live in New York, I had to go through New Jersey.

Now, people in New York like to blame New Jersey for everything short of the apocalypse, and they’re giving it an unfair break. New Jersey, at least the parts that aren’t immediately facing New York, is actually quite nice, and if you go to any realtor in the Garden State they’ll sell you a four bedroom, four bath, four garage, four acre home for like a dollar. They’ll even throw in a medium coke and a side of fries.

But seriously, New Jersey. The roads. What is with you people?

For those who’ve never driven through New Jersey, let me explain: New Jersey has about a million towns, all of them with no actual separation between them, and all of these towns, somewhere within their legal city limits, have a River Road. Not only do they have a River Road, but the River Road in town A and the River Road in town B are extremely, extremely unlikely to actually touch one another.

Also, the streets that do exist? They all have extremely nondescript names, which change every like three blocks. And you listen to Google Maps, right, exact Google Maps was made by computer science nerds who believe things make sense, and can’t possibly believe that New Jersey’s famous roads, which are always named something really generic like “Winding Bush Washington Parkway” don’t become “Squirrel Tree Pennington Boulevard Street” every time they pass over a dirt ditch.

So, you know, you’re driving down fucking Squatting Possom Road, right, and you cross over one River Road, and another, and now you’re on Jefferson Moon Lane Avenue, and you’re making your way down to Philly. Except, oh wait, asshole, you used Google Maps, so now you’re on the Turnpike North to get to the Turnpike South because, oh wait, there’s like four Turnpikes and they all go in different directions and have different kinds of vehicles, and different rest stops. (Truckers get a Roy Rogers on their New Jersey Turnpike, lucky bastards.)

So you’re on the Turnpike South when all of a sudden you cross from North Jersey to South Jersey.

There’s a huge psychological difference between North Jersey and South Jersey; the former is far more industrial and lives in the shadow of New York City, while the latter is more rural and lives in the shadow of, officially, Philadelphia but everybody mostly just thinks of Atlantic City when it’s mentioned.

Now, there’s no actual sign when you cross from one to the other. The only way to tell at all, really, is that the streets change names. You don’t even get the LUXURY of a Flying Moose Skyway anymore, bucko! No no, you get PIKES. Lots. And lots. Of PIKES.

So, say you’re in, I don’t know, Westville. And you want to go to Appletown. Well, obviously, you’re in South Jersey, some colonial asshole three hundred years ago wanted to ruin your day, so you can take the Westville Pike, the Appletown Pike, the Westville-Appletown Pike, or the Appletown-Westville Pike. Only, wait, it’s New Jersey, so every time you pass a log on the side of the road, POOF, all four roads change names at random. Fuck you, New Yorker! We’re from Jersey. Our hair is big and we make no sense.

O, and by the way, you’ve still got your Google Maps directions, right? Great. Google told you to get off at exit 4 or whatever, and now you’re just psychically following some signs that are going to get you to Philly via every one-pony town between the Turnpike and Camden. So you’re following Bat Radar, right? The map says 295 is on the right, but there’s no sign for 295. There’s just a K-Mart and an unsettlingly cheap gas station.

So now you’re going blindly on through South Jersey, enjoying the downtowns of places like Whitehorse, Whitehead, Whiteguy, Whitemama, and Whitewashingtonpenningtonroeblingville Township of BoroVille. Congratulations. There’s a bridge ahead. If you’re lucky, it’ll take you to Pennsylvania, but in reality it’ll probably just lead you to a White Castle or a WaWa.

And the radio, forget about it. If you’re driving through Jersey, they only play a very, very small selection of pre-approved songs. So unless you’re name is Johnny, and you work on the docks, you better be prepared for just a small town girl living in a lonely world, hiding behind her wonderwall until someone comes along to pour some sugar on her.

And don’t even get me started on Philly.

You wear nothing, but you wear it so well.

2008-01-14T03:08:24Z

Февраль. Достать чepнил и плaкaть
Писaть o фeвpaлe нaвзpыд,
Пoкa гpoxoчущaя слякoть
Вeснoю чepнoю гopит.

I'm a county lineman, on a highline;so will be my grandson- there are powerlines, in our bloodlines.

2007-12-28T15:27:07Z

I just received this generic Christmas email from my hat-maker.

Subj: Don't buy a hat.

Dear Brian,

I cannot write an email suggesting that you purchase a hat. Chances are, you do not need another hat. In fact, it is likely that you have recently bought a hat for your one and only head. (If so, we hope that hat is serving you well.) In fact, you probably don’t need any more stuff right now. Especially not hats. So, I suggest that you take a walk in your neighborhood instead. Identify a plant that’s new to you, or watch the birds, smile at your neighbor, or pet a dog - but take a moratorium on consumption.

It's a bad sign, when your hat-maker tells you you have too many hats. It's like a barber telling you you don't need a haircut, or your wife telling you that you're adequate! It just shouldn't happen! Where's the profit-driven greed America has come to know and love???

I don't discriminate. I regulate every shade of the ass.

2007-12-01T15:03:35Z

I was gay-bashed yesterday.

It's a weird thing to say, you know? Don't worry, I'm fine, and it's really not a big deal; I was lucky to have been set upon by the two most piss-poor gay bashers ever to take up the sport, but yeah. Two guys tried to beat me up for being gay.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a few hours to burn so my buddy Keenan and I decided to get some lunch and knock off some of our Christmas shopping.

We made our way down through sixty blocks of overpriced, handcrafted, tribal, artisan knickknacks amid the annual Christmas fairs that dot the city, with the goal of making it to Union Square and a sushi place we both like.

For my foreign readers, Union Square is in-between Chelsea and Stuyvesant Town, two high-rent, high-maintenance, highly liberal and highly gay neighbourhoods in New York. It's the place where all the incense-smoking topless hippie Dakota Sioux college students go to protest against the Mann Act and killing whales for Christ.

So, Keen and I are walking through the arts-n-crafts market when two late-thirties, very drunk guys go walking by; one knocks over a vendor's display of lace hats for shits and giggles, yelling 'woo!' to his buddy. "What a couple of assholes," I remark to Keenan. They walk past us a good, oh, fifty feet, before I hear "we're gonna kick your ass, you fucking faggots!"

Maybe they heard me, maybe they didn't. In hindsight, I actually think they didn't- but my Spidey alarm went off and I turned around.

These two guys are standing up straight as peacocks, clearly trying to make themselves bigger. They were, I'll admit, big guys to begin with. I suspect- again, with hindsight- that turning around identified me as a fucking faggot- after all, walk into a crowded room and yell "Emily," and you'll get a quick response from all the Emilys around. Yell "fucking faggot" in Union Square and, apparently, you get me.

The guy comes charging towards me. This is actually no-nonsense journalism you're getting here, so you know, which is a great rarity.

You've got to be kidding me? I've gotten myself into a fight... Christmas shopping. I thought to myself.

The guy walks up and puts his face an inch from my face. This, by the way, is actually a show of fear in a fight- an attempt to emasculate the other guy by size alone, to get yourself out of it. It's similar to the way that people will wave their arms around like chimpanzees before fights, too. The "hold me back, man, hold me back" effect. If you've ever seen a bunch of young Italian guys argue, you've seen this- and it's really stupid. You put your face an inch away from somebody, and you can't see what they're doing with their hands.

In my left pocket, I was quietly slipping my finger under the nail-crease in my knife to open it. I was pulling it open when the guy shoved me.

"YOU FUCKING QUEER! I hate you fucking faggots!" he yelled in my face as his buddy lined up behind him.

I let it go. I don't like to fight and, smelling his breath, I realised he'd had a few. Me and my big nose. Every time he called me a queer, I got a big lungful of beer stink.

"You stink," I said, doing my best To Cruise Top Gun impression. "HELL YEAH, I DO", he yelled back in my face. "I stink like a fucking MAN, you fucking pussy."

"Come on, Keenan, let's go." Keen and I turn and start walking away, as I slip my hand back into my pocket and open the knife the rest of the way.

"And this is for you!" he says, and sucker punches me in the back of the head.

When I was a kid, I had an accident and hit my head- the bone in the back there isn't exactly made of the toughest stuff around, and it hurt like hell when he smacked me. I turned around to ask the guy exactly what the fuck his problem was.

"Fucking sissy-ass faggots like you," he said, and I grabbed him at the base of the neck to shove him away. He responded by grabbing Keenan and throwing him to the ground like a rag doll, no small feet with a 6'1" man.

"We're going to gay bash you fucks."

He said this really loud. Verbatim. We had a nice little crowd of 30 or so people watching us by this point- some obviously gay, too- and, in true New York fashion, they didn't want to get involved.

I didn't think so at the time, but I do now- it would have been a social service to dispatch this loser. There was never any point in the entire event where he actually had any control of the situation, though he thought he did. But the next time he gets tanked and goes out to beat up some homos? What happens then?

But my honest-to-God sentiment? Right then, right there? If I give this guy a little shove off the mortal coil, there's going to be a lot of paperwork. I just figured that if you kill someone legally, the city of New York probably makes you sign a lot of forms. Get them notarized in triplicate. There's a lot of lawyers involved. The dead guy's family would call 1-800-ABOGADO and get a guy who specialises in the defense of gay bashers. The New York Post would write about how I'm a gay hero and find some photo of me looking effeminate on the Facebook and call my grandmother to ask her about her man-loving, bruiser grandson, killing drunks for Gay America.

That was it. That's my moral crisis right now. The world would be better without him, but not God, not the church, not my family honor could stop me. 'Twas bureaucracy that staid my hand. I just couldn't fight City Hall.

When I tell people what happened, thy all seem shocked- I've never been shy, and everyone knows I carry a weapon with me all the time as a habit from years ago, after I was mugged on a train platform as a teenager- and everyone wonders why I didn't, you know, just stab him in the neck.

I tell them to go on Wikipedia and look up Bernie Goetz. My girlfriend asked me why I was so shaken up after the fact, and I told her the truth- it wasn't because I was scared. I knew, every moment, that I had the upper hand. It was that, in year 2007, thirty people watched as two drunks tried to gay-bash two other living humans. In New York.

It wasn't about honour or business, or any real emotion. Just about insecurity. Thirty people watched and condoned it. Thirty people enjoyed the show. Thirty people went back to their Christmas shopping.

Someone is coming up. Someone serious.

2007-11-28T12:11:21Z

When the Civil War broke out at the Battle of Bull Run, the first shots were fired across the field of a Virginia farmer named Wilmer McLean, whose home Confederate generals had taken over as a battlefield office. That evening, at supper, the crowd inside McLean's house was startled by a lobbed cannonball's rude entrance through the dining room window, where it crashed into the fireplace.

McLean, a 47-year-old man with a family to look after, worried over the war, and lived in fear that its violence would come into his home again. He packed up his things and moved 120 miles south, far from the front.

Four years later, after a few million men had died and the war's lines had moved down to the Caribbean and back again, his house was reassumed, this time by the Union brass. General Grant and his staff used Wilmer McLean's new home, in Appomattox, Virginia, for the signing of the war's truce. The top generals quickly removed his furniture-- General Custer made off with the table on which the document was signed-- and Mr. McLean marvelled at how, against his every wish, the Civil War had started in his dining room and ended in his front parlor.

That has nothing to do with my actual jotting for today. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to tell you about it.

A few months ago, I had to take a drug test, and was ordered to appear at a little clinic place out in Jamaica, Queens to provide a sample. I arrived at the place on my lunch break, and found an absolutely deserted little office with big glass windows separating the combination receptionist/nurse/doctor who ran the whole place alone. A pretty young woman of about 25, I couldn't help but notice how pretty and young she was. Did I mention she was good-looking?

I signed all the appropriate forms- of which there are many- and the nurse led me into the back room, where she dutifully attached a temperature-reading strip to the side of the cup and helped me to the bathroom.

I closed the door behind me, not noticing that she had slipped into the room with me, ninja-style, and was just standing there.

Watching me.

Excuse me, I politely coughed. I have to... you know...

I'm sorry, sir, but by regulations I have to observe to make sure the specimen is, in fact yours.

Um, um, really? Okay, can you at least, uh, turn around?

No.

Please?

No.

Okay, I sigh, and open up my trousers. [By the way, ladies, let me give you some sincere advice: if you're having an occasion to see a man open his trousers, at least feign surprise. You know, a little interest? Just a little something. You might not realise this, but it's an occasion and, yes, us men need to feel a little special now and again. I'm not saying there need to be theatrics, but just a little "...oh" will do.]

The nurse stood there, emotionless, just... looking at me.

So I'm standing over the bowl and, well, I have the cup in my hand and, well, uh, nothing's happening. Give it a little shake.

Nope.

Doot doot do.

You sure you can't turn around?

No.

Her expression wasn't severe. Her makeup was perfectly applied. I know, because I was looking at it with great interest, as I watch all things hawkishly eyeing my excrement, or lack thereof.

I shake again. Nothing.

And again. Nothing.

This goes on for ten very, very, VERY long minutes. I start to get frustrated, I start to get flustered, until finally I give up and tell Nurse Hottentots that I have to leave, sample or no sample. I just can't do it.

She stamps the word "REJECTED" in big red letters on the bottle.

I get in touch with the people requesting the sample, pleading with them to let me do anything, anything, to avoid providing a urine sample. Blood! Hair! Skin! I don't care! Anything you want! Just not that. I am angrily informed that I have until the end of business the next day to produce some urine like freaking Yellow Johnny On The Spot, or my goose is cooked.

So, that night I drink a gallon of coca-cola and head off to bed, satisfied in my ability to vanquish this awful, pee-shy demon. The next morning, I roll out of bed and, still dressed in my pajamas, drive to the clinic.

O, hi, you're back, she answers with a smile. Apparently, the real junkies don't come back to suffer the humiliation a second time, so the pansies like me get better treatment when we show up for the new cruelty.

I'm sure it'll be fine, she says to me softly, and I can't help but notice the nice fragrance of her perfume. Her softened demeanor...

She leads me to the bathroom again, making the requisite stop on the way to prepare the cup and the little thermometer. She touches my back as she leads me through the door. Gosh, she's pretty, even if in a Queens County I-should-be-in-beautician-school kind of way.

I stand over the bowl, motionless, as she stands in the corner waiting patiently. It's first thing in the morning, I've had a gallon of Coke and, God help me, I HAVE to go. I just *can't.*

Sweat beads down my forehead. I plead quietly with myself- we've been in tougher jams than this, haven't we? Come on, just do this for me? Just relax? Please?

Finally, in a swell of tension, it happens, and not in a trickle, but as if the whole goddamn Hoover Dam has just burst in my withered presence.

"THERE WE GO!" she exclaims, clasping her hands together like a proud mother.

WHAT? I shout, hyper and startled, not even registering what she's said in my burst bubble of relief. I instinctively swing around to the sound of the barely-processed noise, my brain trying to make sense of it all.

O, it's a disaster. In the excitement, I'd turned, stream and all, a hundred and eighty degrees, arcing a thin stream across the wall, across the mirrors, over the sink, finally meeting the nurse's shocked, dreamy eyes.

Turrets of urine fly forward, soaking her calves, her shoes, the floor, her shoes again, as I realise the horror of what I've done and jerk back around, again coating some more sink, some more of the floor, and arriving at the barely touched specimen cup. The entire room looks like R. Kelly's vacation suite.

It's.. it's... she stutters, trying to grasp- it's what's happened okay in the room it's okay. it's okay. it's okay.

I try to apolog- no, no, don't, it's okay, you were nerv ize but it's too late. You can't really unpee on someone.

Can I get you a towel?

Go. Just please go.

I left. And, by the way, I passed.

Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society — the social ramble ain't restful.

2007-11-20T16:06:50Z

Before you start thinking about how much you've missed me, and my jottings in this journal, I feel I should warn you: I've been in Puerto Rico until just now and it's been sunny and beautiful and the women haven't been wearing hardly any clothing.

If it makes you feel any better, though, I'm meandering my way back to New York, where it's 32 degrees and snowing, and I'm sitting here in my big loose linen shirt and my white straw hat and I know I'm really in for a complete and total horrible shock and I'm trying really really hard to sort of...well, I figure if I can just concentrate hard enough I might, I don't know... evolve? Yes, maybe I'll evolve a subcutaneous layer of fat.

But anyway, I have a lot to say. I know I've been absent for the past year, but the truth is that its been a pretty rough year in a lot of ways. I'm not really about to lay some sob story on the lot of you- nobody's woes ever make for interesting reading, no matter how hard the Irish Public Relations Board might try to tell you otherwise- but you should know that it's mostly because I moved to Brooklyn and didn't have a porch anymore. I had gotten into the habit of writing through sunsets out on my porch back in the town I grew up in and, once I moved to Brooklyn, I lost the will to sit and do much of anything, writing included, so these sorts of things ended up at the wayside.

But, I think I've taken care of that quandry- like so many problems, I've decided to fix the whole matter by throwing piles and piles of money at it, and went and bought myself both an apartment in Manhattan AND a crushing heap of debt. Yay!

So, yeah, I've been thinking a lot lately, about time. Time is an interesting thing, especially considering that, in a tangible sense at least, it doesn't exist. We treat time very much as a commodity, like a product that can be purchased, exchanged, traded in for new hope like a used car going off to a new lot. It even shows up in our language- we spend time with our children, don't we? Late with that business proposal? Boss breathing down your neck? Well, you're probably just trying to buy time until you can get the whole thing done. If you're behind, you can always make up time and, like money, love, and your senses, you can certainly lose time.

Time is, perhaps, our most precious commodity and yet, unlike our other possessions, it has neither a price nor a purpose. O, sure, on any given day the price of gold may rise and fall, breathing in the day's chance happenings and accounting for it in dollars and cents. But time does not trade well on the cotton exchange; neither labour not heat can quicken its step or halt its pace. Time, unlike cotton, does not grow; no more of it has come. No matter how quickly your manager might be walking down the hallway, time cannot be bought, not on any floor of any business.

For a lot of people I know, the world is changing, pushed forward, ever forward, by the sound of time's marching feet. My peers have finally broken free of the post-college doldrums; it seems time, now, to settle down, to get a home, to make a life, to find a job, to run around and make some money and then, at the end of the day, sit back and wonder where the hell the time went. For the older generation, it is also a time of flux- a lot of parents, their children seemingly self-sufficient in a world that is, at least, pliable to their efforts, begin to think of retirement and the chance to... spend their time more wisely.

When I was a child, I used to find it exceptionally cruel that the only time people get any free time is before the age of 18 and after the age of 65- after all, you spend your youth unable to deal with the world and, even more importantly, completely clueless to how wonderful that is. Then, well, you have some choices, which over the centuries have happily changed, at least for the better. My family, of course, always missed the memo on that one: if you were a woman, you had the choice of getting married or having some babies. If you were a man, well, the choice was the same as in so many families: work or prison.

Off we went.

Now here I am, and I have a nice little apartment, a nice little job, a nice little life, but not without a struggle. Like a lot of people at my age, that horrible thought has crept in, the notion of settling down, of making a life instead of having a good time. For those people who've come casually to my little nook on the interwebs, I should tell you that I'm twenty-four years old. But here's the interesting thing: my father is sixty-two years old and what's he up to these days? Just got a nice little apartment, just got a nice little job and, after a long time, is giving some thought to settling down, of making a life instead of just having a good time. I imagine when I'm forty and he's ninety, I'll have to go and write this goddamn thing all over again, talking about how it might be time for us old coots to start acting responsible.

(Of course, that's all moot; by the time I'm 40, Google will have anthropomorphized into a robot army and enslaved us all. By the way, GOOG is up 6.9 points on the New York Stock Exchange today, GOLD is trading at its highest level since 1981, and TIME... well, the only way you can get any more of that is at the corner newstand.)

Good to see you all again. I have to run to an airport fast food joint and try to turn myself into a fat fat fattie in the next four airborne hours.

I am drowning, there is no sign of land; you are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

2007-09-15T00:07:01Z

People always go on and and on about how tough life is; they're wrong. The truth is that it's only the first hundred years or so that are really, really hard, but if you can get through that it's pretty much smooth sailing.

I have, historically, been known for two things: my inability to fire a gun, and passionate interest in my own legacy. My friend Angus, who compounds my shame by being, quite literally, an Olympian, world-class marksman, often jokes that I certainly know as much about guns as your average American. I can tell you about the pistols, revolvers, carbines, field howitzers, pack howitzers, shotguns, and handcannons, but in all likelihood I could fire into a field and miss at such width that not even the grass would object. I've often toyed with the idea of a military career, in the footsteps of my father and his father and his father before him, but could never really cope with the idea of some chain-smoking sergeant sitting down at his typewriter to fill out his daily combat report, "fierce enemy fire today from the left flank, until Lt. Brian, seeing an opportunity, drew his pistol and hurled it at the oncoming enemy."

This is all to say, I suppose, that I, like so many people, am overly concerned with my legacy, and it was ignoring that important, deep desire that lead me to best present my reputation through steady employment at an escort agency.

When a long-standing friend and business acquaintance of mine presented me with a suggestion -that I photograph the numerous female employees of his long-running, extremely high end escort service- I was hesitant. After all, I have a solid career, am well-respected, and don't generally engage myself in such sordid activity.

And if you believe that bullshit, I can give you plenty more. The truth is, I couldn't stop giggling.

There were some snags to becoming, well, assistant manager at an escort service. My best friend, Michelle, decided to get on a feminist kick and call me every other night at three in the morning to tell me about how I'm engaging in international white slavery, blah blah blah, and I'd tell her about how the girls live in apartments twice as nice as mine on their dirtiest days. She tried to tell me that I would quickly grow tired of an environment where everyone was walking around nekkid* all day. I agreed with her, and told her I'd refuse the opportunity.

See? More bullshit.

(*By the way, yes, nekkid. It's quite distinct in meaning from naked. Naked means you have no clothes on. Nekkid means you have no clothes on and you're up to something.)

Now, I'll admit that it's not my dream, but there are definitely perks to the job: the pay is more than generous and the hours, like the staff, are flexible and easy. The boss even offers, as a perk to management, free time with the girls, which is not really a big draw for me but certainly a friendly offer.

Oh, sure, white collar workers of the world, you can rest easy on your 401K's and your golden parachutes and your full medical insurance. Bet you feel grand! But, at the end of the day, none of you get a corporate benefits plan that includes sticking your genitals in people.

Plus, there's my legacy. One day, when my children are dressing me up as an Eskimo and putting me on an ice drift somewhere, they'll think to themselves, "Aww, Dad. There goes Dad. He was one of the world's greatest Assistant Pimps, y'know." And all the people from the St. Patrick's Eldercare Ice Floe Service, stnading behind them holding clipboards, will roll their eyes because they've heard it a million times before.

It's a classy place, though; a dozen rooms (though most service is outcall,) decorated in a dozen different elegant styles. There's rooms for the people who like to have a fun time in ancient Rome, rooms for people who like to have a fun time in a casino, rooms for people who like to have a fun time in a Russian sauna room. And then there's my favourite room, dressed to look like a typical living room: regular carpet, TV in the corner, a curio and, of course, a Scotch-guarded sofa, which always reminds me of my grandparents' in Elmont, NY.

It's all, I guess, to make people feel normal. Thrown into situations they find unusual or stressful, everyone seeks something familiar, comfortable, the whiff of a memory. It's the reason why people so often wear the jewelry of loved ones instead of newer, nicer pieces; why soldiers so often crave to have the clergy on the battlefield; why immigrants so often set up elements of their homeland in their new, unfamiliar neighbourhood. And when it comes to sex, people are so often obsessed with trying to feel normal that they forget that there's very little that's 'ab'normal. Everybody has a secret. And for some, it's the burning desire to do it in my grandparents' living room.

We take so much of our sex lives with us everywhere we go; as we move through the course of our lives, our psychology changes and adapts. As we gain a cache of former lovers, we ourselves gain habits, styles, desires that we've picked up from our past. Through our experiences, we develop a sort of sexual heritage, and with each new lover we drive to recreate a part of someone we've lost.

So, no, Scotchguard is not weird. I bristle a lot when a particular friend of mine uses derisive terms to refer to the girls I shoot every week and who, truth be told, I've grown paternally fond of. Sure, there's plastic on the furniture, and it's a little odd that all the grandpas among the clientele beeline for that room. I feel like they and I are all in this together, a band of siblings joined in the serious business of keeping our furniture from combining with Oxygen.

The biggest problem for me has nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with kink. Yes, I have my own personal morals. A feather isn't kinky. Neither is the whole bird. The only problem I have with the job is that no matter how high you hold your head walking into work, you always kinda feel like Buckner walking back into Shea. As a photographer, especially, it's a difficult task- your job is to make the women look classy, beautiful, and elegant. In truth, it's rarely a difficult task. But, in the end, you spend half your time trying to compose the shot to avoid random used condoms, negotiating your tripod around small but effective wee puddles of lube.

The clientele reads like a who's-who of the New York City elite, but I still have trouble trying to cashier a man who uses the agency. The girls, with every accent, background, educational level, are an amusing cross-section of Earth. There's the sassy Latina, the single mother, the former Israeli mossad agent, and her best friend, a tall, strapping blonde from Austria particularly popular with our Jewish clients. They all are reminiscent of someone to somebody, of course.

As you get older, I've found, life becomes a series of new people who remind you of people you've already met, and as we grow older those people become younger and younger in our sweet imagination.

My girls are gorgeous, and charming, and to so many people, perfect; sometimes, I walk in and am amazed at what's really going on, as one of them strikes my eye and I realise that her looks could make a steam train take a dirt road.

In an expensive gilded room at the Waldorf=Astoria, a door opens, and a happy hand pulls back the knob. A young woman who looks just like the love they've never had takes them by the hand, and they get, in that brief moment, what we all so sadly crave: to meet an old friend for the first time.

This is my corn. You people are guests in my corn.

2007-08-08T15:56:25Z

Last night, horrendous storms struck the East Coast- here in New York, subways, trains, bridges, tunnels and highways were all shut down in a snarl that's crippled the city a day later. A tornado even struck Brooklyn, not far from where I live. Some grids were left without power, others without phone. What people don't know, however, is that even some faxes were disrupted mid-transmission, such as this one from former baseball lifetime home run record holder Henry "Hank" Aaron, to the record's new holder*, Barry Bonds of San Francisco:

The fax was sent after Barry Bonds slammed a long arcing fly ball into the right field stands, where it was caught by a woman and promptly stolen by a New York Mets fan named Matt Murphy who punched, kicked, and bit every fan in his way to claim the prized, multi-million dollar trophy. Murphy, nose broken and face bloody, came up with the ball after covering it with his body while other fans removed his clothing piece by piece in an attempt to get him to move, marking yet another glorious aspect of this tremendous moment in baseball history.

The message, received and read aloud on the big board in San Francisco, came through as follows:

"From the desk of Henry Aaron: I would like to offer my congratulations to Barry Bonds on becoming baseball's career home run leader. It is a great accomplishment which required skill, longevity and determination. Throughout the past century, the home run has held a special place in baseball, and I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 of those years. I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historic achievement. My hope today, as it was on that April evening in 1974, is that the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams."

Unfortunately, it was at that point where Aaron, whose storied battle for the record as a young, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound player entering baseball in the dawn of baseball's desegregation was made notable by his clean, honest, respectable personality, saw his fax machine flutter and stop as that malicious storm struck the East, knocking down vital telephone connection lines between Atlanta and Northeast Verizon hubs, cutting off the important last line:

"...And I hope those dreams involve breaking the record again- you dirty, sweaty liar."

In '69 I was 21 and I called the road my own-I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on

2007-08-07T13:21:24Z

I was going to come on here and write a piece for the anniversary of my mother's death- it will be ten years this coming Saturday- because, I guess, I feel you need to in situations like these. People feel a need to mark anniversaries, birthdays, and the like as if the day has some added value, as if any one day is any more or less precious than the one before or after it. I was going to come on here and give my personal insights as a person who, under the legal, technical definition of the term, was orphaned at the age of 14. But my life hasn't exactly been a David Copperfield melodrama; sure, it was rough, and I can't imagine how tough it must have been for my father, an ex-Navy, former airplane construction mechanic, to deal with a young son and a dead wife, but the truth is that my life wasn't so much gruel as it was lots and lots of McDonald's and Boston Market. I can't really come in here and tell anybody about how fragile and vincible we all are when it's no secret to anybody; my mother, just like everybody else's throughout history, has just shuffled off, hand in hand with Generalissimo Francisco Franco, into the halls of people who are Still Dead.

So, I'm not going to bore you with a long story about the history of life as I've known it; there's nothing in this entire world more boring than people droning on about their mothers, and besides, life as I've known it has precious little to do with her. Instead, I'll share an article; I came across it the other day looking for a picture frame for a new family photograph I recently had made, and it was a fun little memory. My mother had the largest purse I've ever known- she could fit enough supplies to keep the Army Corp of Engineers in butter brickle for a month, and often did. In between bottles of pills, Tums, cigarettes, lighters, the funerary mass cards of every Italian person who ever died in Brooklyn, old love notes from my father, photographs, coins, thirty year old mementos from the old country, and little broken bits of pottery she'd made, and then dropped, was a yellow newspaper article folded up.

I have no idea when it was written. When I found it in her purse in 1997, it already looked old; it's from Newsday, though, the paper I later worked at for four years. I can't remember my mother EVER reading a newspaper, so I don't know where this came from, but I know why she kept it. If you understood my mother- not that, I think, anybody ever did- you'd understand why this resonated so deeply with her that she kept it in her movable treasure chest all those years.

FIRST PERSON
A Sentimental Thread

BY PAUL VITELLO. Paul Vitello is a Newsday columnist.

THERE WASN'T a will among my grandmother's things when she died, so
I had to use my best judgment in handling what I guess you would have to
call her estate. I didn't expect any complications. There wasn't a lot
of stuff. I decided to give to friends and relatives whatever they asked
for, donate the rest to the Salvation Army and get somebody to help me
carry out the sewing machine. It was the only thing I wanted.
It was a Singer that popped up out of a folding wooden table, and it
came with a flip-top seat. When it became a source of some discord later
between me and a longtime friend of my grandmother's whom I will call
Carmella, I had to think about why I wanted it. It wasn't because I
wanted to sew.
My interest in the machine was purely sentimental. It was my
grandmother's machine. She had bent over it, made shirts for my father
on it, made shirts for me on it, literally bled on it, and I wanted it.
I could say it was the main instrument of her "self-expression," but
this makes her sound too modern.
Francesca was not modern. She was an antique of the type that
settled here around the turn of the century with high hopes for the
future and a deathgrip on the past. On the Bushwick Avenues and Stanhope
Streets of America, she and her generation re-created their Sicilian
villages in every social detail they could: from the dialect they spoke
to the food they ate to the customs they kept to the way they negotiated
their truces with God. The fact that all these customs were changing
back home, would never root very deep in the lives of their children and
would never exist again except in their own minds, didn't seem to
matter.
They are mostly gone now. And I don't really know that much about
them. When I knew them best, I guess, I was about 5 years old. They
seemed like a formidable tribe then. In retrospect, I guess they were
holding on by their fingers to ways they knew would not translate well
into the next generation, and that they feared would be a complete
garble for the generation of their grandchildren.
Well, I don't know what they thought. I was only 5. And most people
don't see the signs of their own extinction.
But if they had thought that, they would have been right. Whatever
Francesca and her friends said to each other, laughed about, considered
good in a man, honorable in a woman, worth the price of admission at the
movies - all these things are irretrievably lost to me. I don't know
what they did on the day Valentino died.
I could call the sewing machine an "artifact" of their lost
subculture. It does look like an ancient icon: black shape, slope-backed
like a beast of burden, a wheel at one end suggesting eternity. But I
wouldn't care much about it if it weren't my grandmother's. And for some
reason - I couldn't tell you why - I wouldn't care much about it any
old way if she had been a happier woman. It would be almost
funny as a melodrama, although she never looked at it that way; she just
wore black most of her life. She had a lot of what she and her Sicilian
friends used to call Bad Luck. Her first husband died in his 30s. Her
son died in his 20s. She lost her only sister in America. She was stuck
for most of the rest of her life in a second marriage she could have
done without. "My life is too much bad luck," she used to say, and say
it so insistently I sometimes wondered if my own untimely demise
wouldn't have to be added to her list of heartbreaks someday.
She had a sister and brother in Sicily, and I think she had
convinced them of her unluckiness, which may be why, when I visited them
a few times as a grown man, I was treated like a walking piece of
Waterford crystal: driven everywhere, ushered everywhere, never let out
of sight lest I get squashed by something.
I lived with Francesca for a time, when I was 5.
I noticed she never had bad luck with the sewing machine. She sewed
lustily. Shirts, pajamas, bathrobes, ties, vests, kids' clothing,
dresses, drapes, curtains, slipcovers, pillowcases, pillows, nightgowns,
pot holders, quilts, hats. She worked in a bridal shop as a young woman
and when her eyesight lost its sharpness, she made ladies' coats, but I
believe she could have made a tent or a topsail for a sloop if you asked
her to.
She sewed in the dining room of the railroad flat where she lived.
The machine sat against a wall decorated with a pair of paintings of
young nobles in the court of Louis XIV, a couple of painted wooden
plaques from an upstate Alpine lodge, and a large wall mirror.
She would work in a state of high concentration - one of the few
states she couldn't be roused from by me. Her concentration showed in a
certain straightness in her stitch, the steady curve of her collars, the
Euclidian angles of her sewing. Her work was widely admired among the
Sicilians of Bushwick. Other women asked her to make things for their
grandchildren. This was high praise in a world of seamstresses and
world-class grandmothers.
Admirers of her work knew what I knew instinctively. When she sewed,
Francesca was in touch with her own good luck, or whatever you want to
call a person's personal state of grace. I didn't know what to call it
as a kid. But I knew it when I saw it, and liked it. It never occurred
to me that anyone besides myself would have a claim on the machine.
At the funeral, Carmella, my grandmother's oldest friend, came to
me. As the closest surviving relative, I was sitting in the front row.
This is the custom, although I hate this custom and find it a cruelty
equaled only by the open-coffin torture. She said to me, "Paulie, honey,
your grandma promised me the sewing machine. You mind if my grandson
comes by next week to pick it up?" She was planning to make a gift of it
to her daughter.
I like Carmella. She is part grandmother to me, too. She and
Francesca were children together: Francesca's father had a farm;
Carmella's was the butcher in a small town on the southern coast of
Sicily. Almost all my grandmother's friends were from that town. It
is called Menfi.
During the time I lived with her, my grandmother and I visited
each of these friends on their days - Carmella was Tuesdays, LaBionda
was Wednesdays, I think. Everyone had a day. I liked their darkly
wallpapered railroad flats with the long, carpeted hallways; liked their
blue-tinted glass coffee tables; (didn't like their cedar chests because
one of the ladies, to keep me from opening hers, told me it contained
the remains of a dead relative); liked the ceramic dancing figures they
kept on their bureaus ("Paulie, no touch!"); liked the souvenir cart-
and- horse- with- driver- in- traditional- Sicilian- garb that adorned
the tops of their television sets. ("Paulie, no touch!") Their homes
were permeated with the odor of olive oil and tomato sauce, moth balls
and the thick perfume they wore when visiting at each other's homes and,
all in all, I liked them.
They could be morbid sometimes, but always in a sweet-tempered way.
As the child of a man killed at a young age in a car accident - my
father was my poor grandmother's only child, she wore black for 30
years, never got over it, never forgave Jesus and Mary for it, never
stopped kissing goodnight the photo of my father she kept by her bedside
- I was bathed in her friends' lachrymose attentions. This often took
the form of great heapings of good food ("Paulie, eat!"). On the down
side, these attentions also meant long, teary embraces pressed against
their scented bosoms, accompanied each time by the same Sicilian lament:
"Lu povero biciulidu!" meaning in their dialect, "The poor baby," and
meaning, I thought at the time, that my personal prospects were bleak at
best.
On many of these visits, the high point (for all of us) was watching
"I Love Lucy," "The Price Is Right" and, of course, the king of
entertainment, Liberace. These were the Big Three of American Culture
for their crowd: laughs with Lucy, business with Mr. Bill Cullen, music
with Mr. L.
This is all by way of saying that me and Carmella, we go back, as
they say. But I had to tell her that she could not have the machine.
"What are you going to do with it? You. A man," she said. There was
suspicion in her voice. Maybe she thought I planned to sell it?
"I just thought I should keep it," I said.
IIMAGINED how my grandmother promised Carmella the machine. She owed
her a thousand favors, especially in the last years, when she couldn't
walk too well and I lived far away. Carmella did a lot of shopping for
her, and my grandmother took debts seriously. Little by little, in the
last five years, she thinned her household treasures by making gifts to
people who did her favors: a jewelry box, an electric frying pan, a
coffee service.
I imagined her saying to Carmella, "You have to let me give you
something." I imagined Carmella saying no, because she was like that.
And my grandmother saying, "After I'm gone then. Take something then,"
and Carmella saying okay, the sewing machine; not for me, for my
daughter. She needs one. I'm sure it never oc- curred to my grandmother
that I might want it. "But Paulie, who's gonna use it?" Carmella
said at the funeral. "Is gonna sit in your apartment? What's the use of
that?"
With the waxen profile of my grandmother's body as my witness, I
told Carmella that I wanted the machine because it was the engine of my
grandmother's soul, and because if there was anything in the world that
reminded me of my grandmother's voice it was the sound of the machine. I
said other things I don't remember. Carmella gave up.
The sewing machine would sit in my aunt's attic while I lived out of
state, then move with me to an apartment in New York, then become the
telephone table in the foyer of my first house. I forgot all about it as
a source of any dispute until about four years after Francesca's death,
when I visited my grandmother's younger sister, Lilla, in Sicily, to
introduce her to my wife.
Lilla is a lot like my grandmother, though probably more content with
her life. She has four children, all of them doing nicely, and a husband
who owns half the town, to exaggerate slightly. They are prosperous and
healthy, anyway. This was a twist on the immigrant experience you don't
hear too often, but in Francesca's family, those who went to America
regretted it (although I was always glad she did). Those who stayed
behind did better.
I guess it was a reflection of the importance Lilla gave the matter
that on the second night after our arrival, right after dinner, with my
cousin Nino santo waiting to take us out cafe-hopping, Lilla sat me down
in the dining room and asked for my version of this business about the
sewing machine.
Whether by mail, or phone, or in person on one of her periodic
visits home, Carmella had let it be known that she was disappointed in
the sewing-machine affair, and that the agent of her disappointment was
me. This struck me as unjust. In my head I jumped to the ugliest
possible scenario, which is a bad habit I have: I am completely unknown
in this place except as the American grandson of a long-ago, half-remem-
bered citizen, and now word circulates that I am welshing on a deathbed
bequest, practically. The Ugly American Grandson.
The dining room of Lilla's house opens on a balcony that overlooks a
narrow street where half the houses collapsed in the earthquake of '68.
The other half are brand new. As I began to explain about the machine,
the August air was blowing in with the smell of earth and ripening fruit
from nearby farms not a mile away. The streets outside were filling with
evening strollers, some of them waiting for us to join them in a slow
caminare up and down main street, back and forth to the Piazza Santa
Maria.
"Yes, yes," she said in answer to my pidgin Italian version of
everything above, "but what does a man want with a sewing machine?" I
wasn't getting through.
"Were you angry with Carmella about something?"
NINOSANTO, a man my age who runs a farm that his father and
grandfather and great- grandfather before him farmed, seemed to sense
the injustice. "He wanted the machine," he said to his mother, with
finality. I decided this meant he understood me perfectly.
I'm not sure whether speaking Italian better would have improved my
chances of clearing up the matter. Probably not, and anyway, it's
probably forgotten by now.
For a while, it bothered me to think that people in a faraway place
had any notion of me I couldn't control. But after a while I came to
accept that. My grandmother had lived on those terms most of her life.
If people in town thought anything about it at all, at least some of
them must have heard, or figured out for themselves, my version of the
affair.
And it gave me a kind of thrill to think that, after all, there is
even the slimmest of threads of connection between the generations of my
grandmother and me, even if it lives only in some old, half-baked gossip
about Francesca's grandson's sewing machine.

I didn't realize babies come with hats.

2007-06-21T22:18:02Z

The First Worksite Foreman

As I look over my busy schedule for the next week, I'm striken by a bit of superlative nostalgia- how, oh how, I dream of a paleolithic day planner. I mean, think about it- you're a dinosaur. Oh, sure, there's the big head little arms thing, and you're green and scaly and the girls won't talk to you, and there's all these jackass cavemen running around all the time trying to sell you car insurance, but think of how easy the mornings must be! No L.I.E. No L train. No bus. No having to stand under Mike Bloomberg's tiny but expertly coiffed armpits as he rides the subway to City Hall, trying to convince the people he looks presidential at five-foot-two inches tall.

No, it's Monday, and you look at your planner, and it looks eerily like your itinerary for Friday:

Monday: Kill something and eat it.

But wait, it gets better.

Tuesday: Kill something and eat it.
Wednesday: Kill something and eat it.
Thursday: Fight a pterodactyl. Ideally, kill it and eat it.
Friday: Find out if bison have been invented yet. If so, kill them and eat them.
Saturday: Eat caveman. Save on car insurance.

Meanwhile, the cavemen -or, rather, what's left of them after the Missus gives you a quota- huddle around a cold bit of dead caribou, when rumours begin to fly.

"What do you mean?"
"Really?"
"Marge invented fire?"
"My God! Kill something and we can eat it on fire!"
"Well, we should put out the fire, first."
"Why?"
"Hiroshi says so."
"What do you mean, you don't want to cook the food, Hiroshi?"
"Hiroshi, go over there!"
"You know, we should really come up with a word for 'over there.'"
"How about 'East.'"
"Sounds good to me. Hiroshi! Go East!"
"Yeah, and take your stupid fish!"

No commute, no nine to five, no making ends meet, no HMOs, just you, and your buddies, taking turns lighting angry oxen on fire while you flip Hiroshi off as he plods off into the over th...East.

The other day, I was sitting in my bed, overcome with ennui and trying desperately to catch as much of the breeze from the window as I could (I refuse to have air conditioning with the same senseless loyalty to hot air that vegans have for things that aren't food,) when I hear shouting coming from downstairs.

"PEDRO!"

I try to type off something really impressive about myself for the blurb in a crappy little magazine that's going to feature some of my Israel photos. I write a little thing about how great I am, how I'm a good cook, a fine lover, beloved by mothers, daughters, and stern-talking fathers-in-law alike, and

"PEDRO! GET YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FUCKTARD ASS OUT HERE!" bellows the voice of a little boy. I pull back the shade and look out my window, and see not one, not two, but eleven tiny little hellions leaning against my car (parking right in front of my building,) looking mad. There's about four boys- three holding baseball bats- and six girls, who all are clearly spending a lot of their time working on their "nuh-uh-uh, no you dih-int!" faces. It's important to note, here, that they are all clearly Hispanics, talking with very stereotypical Brooklyn Latino accents.

"PEDRO! I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP, NIGGA!" yells Lead Angry Toddler. The girls continue to work on their angry faces, which I found horrifically upsetting: when I was that age, girls were way to busy trying to avoid me to ever have time to practice anything else. Where did little girls get all this free time from?

More kids show up, hearing the noise. An argument ensues among the children over whether baseball bats are necessary. The girls, shockingly, are against violence, while the boys are generally in a pro-face-smooshing stance. My Spanish isn't so hot, but I definitely got something to the tune of "YO, I'M GONNA SMOOSH YOUR FACE IN, MY AFRICAN-AMERICAN FRIEND" in there.

The kids mill about aimlessly, and see me dangling out my window, smiling at them condescendingly. The kids mill about, milling milling. Lead Toddler is still yelling for Pedro. Another one of the kids, with a baseball bat, shakes it at me.

"WHAT YOU LOOKING AT, MISTER?"

He actually called me Mister. I freaking LOVE that. When I was a kid, I absolutely dreaded becoming Mister Van Sise. Now hooligans are calling me by honorifics. I'm kinda hoping one of them will carry my groceries home for me one day. Mister.

"WHAT YOU LOOKING AT, MISTER?"

"YOU KIDS," I return.

"MIND YOUR BUSINESS."

"STOP JUST STANDING AROUND LIKE THAT."

"WHAT DO YOU CARE?"

"I HATE WHEN STREET GANGS LOSE THEIR NARRATIVE DRIVE."

The kids look puzzled, but they've doubled in number. I try to be mad- especially that they're leaning on my car- but I remember that this is America, and nothing really symbolizes America like a growing, puzzled mob trying to pick on helpless Hispanics.

"PEDRO! YOU CAN'T JUST JACK A HOMIE LIKE THAT AND HIDE LIKE A FUCKING HIDER," the kid continues. (Yes, that's right. Actual quote. "Hide like a fucking hider.") He smashes his bat against the ground, and it breaks in two pieces. Another kid produces his bat to continue the spectacle. I've always wondered why youthful mobs are always doing this- I mean, really, why in the world do they think this will work? As if Pedro's sitting in his apartment, playing Nintendo or whatever, when he hears a mob outside shouting his name. He's supposed to, what, march outside and get his ass kicked? Maybe bring tea?

PEDRO! I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP.

After about fifteen minutes of this, again and again, over and over, a cop drives by, and looks bemused. By New York City law, you're absolutely allowed to walk around with a baseball bat, as long as it's not metal. He tells the kids to stay away from the cars.

YOU SEE THAT, PEDRO? EVEN THE COP THINKS YOU SHOULD COME OUT!

A girl walks up. The boy clearly recognizes her, and they're clearly not all that friendly.

WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT, BITCH?

The eleven-year-old girl cooly replies, "You're looking for Pedro?"

YEAH.

"He lives over-" she smirks and tosses her closed hand and stretched thumb over her shoulder bouncily- "there."

A cavalcade of no-you-dih-ints explodes. SMASHER-OF-PEDROS looks like the guest of honor at a gelding. The kids set out down the street, S-O-P leading the way, telling them that it doesn't matter. He's still going to kick Pedro's ass. For all I know, Pedro lives on some entirely different street. Maybe even a different neighbourhood. Hell, maybe Pedro is sitting in that diner in Jersey waiting to pop Tony Soprano? Maybe he's having an O'Douls, or a Sharps, or a Bud Light, or some other non-alcoholic beer, in the comfort of David Chase's trailer.

As SMASHER OF PEDROS and the Electric Light Orchestra walk down good ol' Himrod Street, a lost-looking, small Asian man dressed in pelts crosses their path, headed down Seneca Avenue, dragging a long catchline of fish behind him. A car, driver unheeding of the ever-surprising Brooklyn roads he's driving on, pays sudden attention to him, screeches to a halt, and slams his body sideways as he crumples to the floor. The driver steps out of the car, lighting a cigarette, and sees the bloodied hump of a man lying in a furry heap before the bumper; he thanks his lucky stars that he has a good automotive insurance plan.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

2007-04-27T16:10:46Z

To the Heroin addicts who stole the rubber tubing off my windshield wipers last night,

Dudes, seriously. I got into my car last night, in the rain, and it was really not a fun surprise to hear the metal of my now naked windshield wipers scratching against the glass of my windshield when I had places to be. That was not awesome, guys. I don't care if you want to get high- really, I don't- but couldn't you have the common decency to rob the pharmacy like everybody else? Hell, years ago, my father and I even got a pharmacy to HAND US SYRINGES AND TUBING OVER THE COUNTER with no more than an awkward look when he needed them at home. But noooo, you guys have to steal my windshield wipers. Couldn't you even steal somebody else's?

Raggafrazzin' fraggle froggle,

Brian

P.S. I got three words for ya: ass to ass.

It rained all night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

2007-04-12T23:41:53Z

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

2007-04-01T17:50:32Z

Jerusalem-

Forty miles away, there is a beach. Forty miles away, people rest quietly in the sunlight, watching the insides of their bright red eyelids, quietly pondering the blood that tints their daydreams.

One wave falls forward, meeting another wave falling forward. Rejected by Israel, the sea slides back, brushing angrily against the sand's newer lover on its way out the door. One wave falls forward, meeting another wave falling forward.

In Jerusalem, men pray to a building that hardly ever was, and never will be again; at sunset, songs break out as more and more men come to wail for their lost mother; one wave falls forward, meeting another wave falling forward.

On the other side of the wall, an alien race sings the same songs in a different tongue, pacing like caged tigers trying to test the bars.

As the sun sets, Arab men circle the squares.

Life is on fast-forward here, as perjurious prayers give way to hurried footsteps, the sounds of children playing an old game among older ruins, the laughs of newly former strangers. On high-speed film pass the almost-kisses of almost-lovers.

Even in Jerusalem, life goes on. Layer under layer of earthy reliquary is brought to the topsoil, a fresh monument to an unforgotten age; these are but footnotes. They are hallmarks of culture, oft lamented but rarely regarded. Even the oldest buildings here have the courtesy of amnesia: All heritage here is rediscovered; all kisses are almost-kisses.

There is nothing, if it is not absolute; there is no walking without running. There is no talking without shouting. There is no pushing without shoving.

Israel has no greater enemy than the Jew; Palestine none greater than the Arab.

As the sun sets, Sabbath descends on the city like a funerary armband; wheels stop turning, and the clatter of soft, tired footsteps replaces the din of engines. The sky slowly exhales its fumes, clears: the telephones cease to ring, and the clocks cease to matter.

Everyone waits for a boy to throw a rock. Instead, a sepia-skinned shepherd helps his flock back into their stable.

At the wall, men pray for war. At the wall, men pray for peace. The wall, crumbled from war, preserved by peace, has no memory. It hears only boys playing football and new former strangers leaning together. Almost-lovers almost kiss. Hebrew songs dance their way into the courtyard. A wave falls forward, meeting another wave falling forward.

I'm a one-eyed Mormon Democrat from conservative Arizona.You can't have a higher handicap than that.

2007-02-06T02:46:44Z

Haven't done this in twenty posts, figure it's time. Once again, Dave Letzler has spent his year hovering over his computer like waiting Death, eager to pounce on my precious bake-risen bounty...

23 May: They knew them all from Boston to Dubuque- especially Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. (Talkin' Baseball, by Terry Cashman. Nobody got it.)

27 May: I even contemplated suicide, by inhaling next to an Armenian. (Love and Death, by Woody Allen. Saaxton got it.)

02 July: Unbutton your clothes,undress your soul, show them your vigor-are those inhibitions easiest to fear? (Our Lady Peace; Jess Dersch got it.)

6 July- In volatile market, only stable investment is porn! (Avenue Q. Little Emily.)

11 July: Are you suggesting that I'm not who I say I am? (Abe Frohman in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Trish got it.)

14 July: Is it just me, or does every woman in Queens have some kind of an emotional problem? (Coming to America. Nobody got it.)

17 July: Women's liberation is going to your head- get your biscuits in the oven, and your buns in the bed! (The song of the same name, by Kinky Friedman. Nobody got it.)

20 July: This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. (The Marine Corps. Becca got it.)

6 August: If you have any poo... fling it now. (The Monkeys, in "Madagascar." Kate, hearing the Call of Her Kind, got it.)

4 September: All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born. (Yeats, Easter, 1916. Dave "The Rotten Romanian" Letzler got it.)

9 September: Look on as your love gets lost in translation, to a language that nobody understands. (David Ford's State of the Union. Nobody.)

27 October: I'm the guy that does his job! You must be the other guy. (The Departed. Also Kate, who also knows way more about going to work than I do.)

30 October: A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kin. (The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Nobody got it.)

15 November: ..Bad dates. (Indiana Jones. Letzler got it.)

20 November: Madness. Madness. (Bridge on the River Kwai. Nobody got it.)

8 December: Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one,and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds. (Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream. Letzy Letzler got it.)

25 December: Imagine I'm your teacher,and you stayed after school.You been a bad girl. You broke ALL the rules. (Imagine that, by LL Cool J. Nobody got it.)

31 December: Satan, your ass is gigantic and red. Who am I going to pretend you are, Liza Minelli? (South Park, the Movie. Saaxton got it.)

4 February: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere! (O brother, Where art thou? Minha got it.)

CURRENT TALLY:

Dave Letzler: 19
Becca: 12
Kate: 12
Anna: 8
Little Emily: 7.5
Caitlin: 6
My Dad: 4
Armando: 3
Skinny Eddie: 3
Claudia: 2.5
Veronica: 2
Clare: 2
Deena: 2
Tim: 2
Vivian: 2
Jamie: 2
Jess:: 2
Eliza: 2
Saaxton: 2
Andrew: 1
Eskimo Claire and her Nine out of Ten Dentists: 1
Frank: 1
Taylor: 1
Megan: 1
Brian_Berlin: 1
Minha: 1
Trisha: 0