6-15-08 Well, thank god I got THAT over with

I could see them coming over a block away - three guys, one crosses the street, the other two come on. "Here we go," I think to myself.

Hoods up, they're within striking distance, I try to go around, the one blocks my way, the other saying, "Gimmie your money."

They leave with 20 bucks and a couple of bruises, while I leave exhilerated and furious, but otherwise unharmed (details will be found here when I get around to writing, but suffice to say, I'm fine, and feel that I acquitted myself rather well).

6-1-08 There, but for the grace of God...

Walking home from the subway after my show opened, a long walk straight down Classon Street from the G Train through Fort Greene, and it’s mostly a pretty nice neighborhood, but I have trouble letting go of my fear (is this group of people walking toward me going to hurt me? will that guy try to mug me? will I have to fight? will I have to run?). A beautiful tortoise-shell cat with a white face and green eyes walks around a tree in my path, and I make my usual “tsk-tsk-tsk” noise to get its attention, expecting it to run off, as strays usually do.

Instead it begins following me, meowing, almost running to keep up, plaintively looking up into my face to beg (something, what?) of me, and I begin to be a little worried about this very friendly cat – I mean, I can’t take it home with me because of my cat, what do I do? – until it stops in front of a door on the street and begins rubbing on the wall beside it, obviously comfortable and at home.

My heart breaks for a little cat that doesn’t know how to open a door when it wants to go inside, but I see the homeless guy on the street and I think, “ah, he probably did something to fuck up his life,” and there’s not really a difference – both are confused, lacking certain skills to be able to help themselves, maybe made a bad decision, went outside once too often and forgot how to get back in.

5-31-08 Camels of the Heights of Guam

Katie and I stopped by a historic site in Park Slope called the Old Stone House. The informational placard on the outside relates that the house was built in the 1600's on the hills of what is now Park Slope which at the time was called "The Heights of Guam" back when Brooklyn was run by the Dutch and spelled Breuklen.

The humid day wrapped around us with slightly cold clammy hands, and we walked around Park Slope saying "Breuklen" over and over, in faux-Dutch accents.

Katie then stopped into a store a bought a shirt with camels on it, and by the time we got out, a breeze had blown the humidity away.

5-30-08 Jesus Loves Me (but you may still be crazy)

As I'm walking to work through my neighborhood, a black man on a bike with a leopard print cane stops me. "'Scuse me, but why would you want to live here?" He asks.

We talk about some things, my money situation, my girlfriend, where I used to live, and he offers me advice on not getting mugged ("Don't let anybody take advantage of you," he says, and it takes me a minute to recognize what he's talking about), before telling me about how he and his wife go around talking to people about God.

Just then, a white woman with sad, pious, watery eyes rides up on another bike, and she proceeds to rattle off a string of almost unintelligible blessings: "Maythelordorallcreationbleesyouandwatchoveryouandgrantyouallspiritualandmaterialblessingsandmayyoubewashedinthebloodofthelamb. Do you love Jesus?"

"Of course!" I say, and shake both their hands before walking away into a sunny morning full of light.

5-27-08 Storm's coming

The sky glowers with heavy dark gray clouds, thick with rain and bruised-looking. The wind sifts through the leaves and bends the trees with heavy, fat fingers, and pushes bags full of garbage rolling along the street. I lean into the wind as I walk home from the subway, all thoughts of crime and the depression of my neighborhood blown away in the weather, happy with the feeling of being very small on a very big planet. Big weather reminds me that everything placed here by human hands, all this city and industry that we are so proud of, can be shaken off and reduced to rubble by the earth so much as twitching it's skin.

4-18-09 - Making "friends"

Coming home last night from the laundromat, pushing my clothes in one of those metal fold-out carts, I arrive at my front door, and sitting in a chair to the left of the door is this heavy, round-faced woman who lives in my building. I've seen her before, sitting in this chair, smoking and laughing raspily with the thin, older man who sometimes sweeps up in my building, and she's seen me, and, feeling friendly, I greet her. She promptly asks me for change.

After explaining that I don't, in fact, have any change ("How about a dollar?" she then asks) she finally relents by saying, "Well, I'll look out for you anyway."

4-17-08 Yeah, me too, kid.

Listening on my iPod to Alan Watts talking about Zen on the way home from the grocery store after work, walking through the glorious spring day, trees budding, flowers blooming, blue sky above, moon rising straight down St. Marks, and all's right with the world. He says, "...and so the present moment suddenly expands, and it contains the whole time, all past, all present, all time. You never have to hold on to it."

I walk by the row of houses, and a little boy stands behind a steel gate, solemnly blowing bubbles between the bars and watching them sail out into the sunshine, sparkling, iridescent and lovely, until they dissolve into nothing in the air.

4-13-08 Duly Noted

I'm walking home from Katie's house after dark, two gentlemen are standing on the corner, one of them talking to an older lady. I walk between the two men, and one makes eye contact with me as I pass. "What's up?" he says, as I continue down the street, and I'm at least smart enough not to turn around. Continuing, I hear, "Yo, I thought that nigger was gonna step to me," and I try to impress on my memory the fact that not everyone has the same personal space, especially after dark in my neighborhood.

4-12-08 One block this morning in Crown Heights

An older, glasses-wearing black man in a natty tan suit stands holding a bible next to a woman in a similarly colored dress on the corner, the man in a heated conversation with a thin man in a yellow, black and green dread tam. The dread says to the bible-holder, in a thick accent, "You can't tell me nothin', because whom God blesses, none can curse, and you don't know me from Adam!"

A fat, balding white man lies on the ground in front of an apartment building, passed out, his pate covered in sores, still breathing, so I observe him for a moment and move on. Not ten yards away, the well-dressed folks in their Eddie Bauer sweats line up in front of the newest hip restaurant in the neighborhood, waiting to get in for brunch.

4-9-08 Shoes

Spring's here, and you can tell because girls are starting to wear their cute shoes again. Red and pink painted toes peek out from open-toed heels like tulip buds pushing out of the ground, flats and ballet style shoes in metallics flash across sidewalks and up stairs; thick, clunky boots retreat to the back of the closet and the sandals begin their warm-up stretches after the long winter.

Speaking of shoes, I tend to be pretty hard on mine, and, after only a month or so of wear, the shoelaces on my new work shoes needed replacing. Nothing makes me feel so much like an adult and a little kid at the same time as buying new shoelaces: the tidy loops tightly wound in their paper wrapping, threading the new shoelace (never exactly the same color black as the previous shoelace) through the eyes on the blind, gaping shoe, tying the shoe extra tight again without fear of breaking the old, worn shoelace.

4-7-08 Flowing with the Tide

Between Sixth Avenue, where the B train arrives on 42nd Street, and Fifth Avenue, a tunnel stretches to funnel commuters beneath the street. For some reason, today all of the trains in both directions arrived at the station at once, and the tunnel was full of people, hundreds of people bobbing along in the stream of bodies, all flowing down the conduit.

I was worried that, if I surrendered to the flow, relaxed and let the tide carry me, that I would lose my individuality, but I realized that if I relaxed my body, flowed with the mass, while keeping my eyes open and paying attention, that I actually was freed to be even more myself. I didn't have to push or impose my will, skirting between slower walkers and constantly searching for an opening - I could be both myself and a part of the crowd, anonymous, unremarked, necessary.

4-5-08 The Class War Continues

Walking last night home from a thing, recounting a conversation from the evening before to Katie.

"...and I told her that the reason I hadn't been mugged was because I look kinda mean when I'm just walking around, and she told me to show me my mean look. She looks at me and she says, 'You don't look that mean.'"

Katie says, "Honey, you don't look mean, you look poor!"

4-2-08 Gross Out Post Warning - Sinuses

After enduring an inexplicable stuffed up nose for the past 2 weeks, today during breakfast, for some equally inexplicable reason, my entire sinus cavity abruptly liquified and drained. I imagine the flooding of the Nile River Valley might have felt like this, if the Nile River Valley were a nose that suddenly began to gush a thick, clear mucus over its morning eggs and toast.

The upshot of this rather disturbing event was my sudden increased capacity to smell the newly arriving spring. The heady, floral perfume of the woman walking by on the subway, the acrid smog from the bus idling in the intersection, the loitering smoke of the cigarettes burning in the vestibules of the buildings I pass, that man's coffee he frantically sips as he hurries along to work, everything opened up and my world went from black and white to technicolor, 360-degree, smell-o-vision.

3-31-08 And Then Comes Starbucks

Across the street from my apartment building, in what used to be a vacant lot, a backhoe performs it's balletic, spinning dance, bowing it's long, yellow neck, burying it's head in the surprisingly dark soil, lifting up its load and depositing it in a pile several yards away.

A man and his son watch the process with fascination, and the father turns to me and says, "Another condo going in."

I agree that, yes it looks like another is going in, like the many up and down this block, and he continues, "It's 'cause of the stadium going in, people are buying up all the lots, man."

"It used to be," he says, "that after ten PM, you stayed inside, but now," he shakes his head, amazed, "now, you go out and you see people, you know, walking the streets, unafraid."

3-28-08 The Invisibles Contact Me (At Last)

He stands on the corner wearing a brown, army-style jacket with a knitted dread-cap of yellow, red, and green, and he begins speaking to me while I am still in the crosswalk walking toward him, smiling at me all the while like a physics professor attempting to explain a particularly complicated point of string-theory to a promising but slightly obtuse student.

"Four majesties came down on the sun's rays," he says, underlining the names of various deities (Yaweh, Allah, Jehovah, Amen-Ra) with his thick, curved fingernail on a crumpled, photocopied page where texts full of sacred names and alternate histories criss-cross like a dadaist manifesto, "and they created the universe and built the pyramids."

"But the weren't black men," he continues, still smiling gently with yellowed, crooked, but strong teeth, his soft caribbean accent lilting over the traffic hum, "they were aliens and there were four of them, so how could one god create the world?"

I look at his kind face a moment and say, truthfully, "I don't know."

3-27-08 His and Hers

Many of the buildings along the tree-lined walk to my subway stop have fallen into a slightly shabby gentility, stone facades and carved faces worn away, paint cracking here and there, front yards a little disheveled from the winter and neglect. Above the doors of many of these old-timers the lintels proudly display names: The Park Court, the Woodrow Wilson, reminders of an earlier century and more prosperous times.

Above one particular building, however (flanked with two fussy, pillared entrances of grey stone, like a matron drawing her skirts back in dignified offense from the dreadfully vulgar brays of traffic) there are only two words: over one entrance is the name "Lillianette", and the other, "Paul."

I imagine them, an unhappily married upper-class couple, building their mansion with separate entrances so that they never had to see each other, divided servants forming up alliances, intrigues, plots; or conversely, the lone romantic architect, building a tribute to his beloved, sundered in life, but together forever above the discrete doorways to the same building, and their great love - unknown, unremarked, forgotten.

3-9-08 Liminal

The day was spent walking the blocks around my new place. I now live right on the border between Prospect Heights (beginning to gentrify, but still affordable to certain people who want to live near the park but are priced out of Park Slope) and Crown Heights (decidedly not gentrifying in the least, entrenched poverty, hardcore gang tags and run down buildings everywhere), and as with all borders, war is the order of the day.

Each street shows the scars of battles, in graffiti and garbage and half completed condos. Outposts of money (a Pilates studio, a cute bar, a coffee shop with indirect lighting and a selection of international brews) jostle up against poverty (the apartment building with garbage in the yard, the empty lot full of discarded auto parts lorded over by a single baleful-eyed rottweiler) and the old-guard of the neighborhood (a Jamaican bakery, a hair salon, an auto-parts store), all uneasy, suspicious each of the other, wondering who will take each contested block.

1-18-08 that which does not kill me or my city

After seeing Cloverfield, we walk through Manhattan, trying to clear our eyes of the visions of terrifying monsters rampaging up and down our city streets, and Katie asks me where we'll meet in case of monster attack. I make a few suggestions, but the upshot is that she eventually wants to live in Manhattan.

I understand, but it seems foolish to me. Where can you go when the strange, hateful monsters of our world finally go mad and send their wrath embodied through the streets, wreaking havoc on our innocent buildings and trees, all of them merely paying for what we started, so long ago?

1-17-08 Who's laughing now?

I walked from the subway to work today, feeling foolish because of the umbrella I was carrying since I watch The Weather Channel every morning while I eat breakfast, and it told me there would be snow today. The flashes of blue sky between the light scrim of clouds mocked me with every click of the tip of the bumbershoot on the pavement.

This evening it snowed, huge wet flakes that splattered into watery nothingness as they dive bombed the pavement like kamikaze-rebel-angel-snowmen. My umbrella, half-crippled by an errant wind several weeks ago, hung down on one side as I walked through the brief storm, and I was terribly proud of myself for having such foresight.

1-11-08 A New York Moment

A man crossing the street in front of us is cut off in the crosswalk by a cab turning left. He says something to the cabbie (presumably about driving etiquette, though it may have been about his parentage, this being New York and all) and the cabbie begins to curse at him. So now the cab is blocking the whole crosswalk, and the cabbie is arguing with this pedestrian about how he's in the right.

"If you're in such a hurry, keep driving!" I shout, and the cabbie looks startled for a second, as if he's never thought of it, and then drives on.