she’s willfull in ways that would make her spoiled if she didn’t share her food with us. this is what she does now, feeds me as I feed her. and i think terribly some day the roles will be reversed but I won’t be feeding her, just her feeding her old man, broken finally in all places, mind gone, body gone, wife gone, nothing left but a sack of misery for her. will she be changing my diapers.
and it’s not easy to think of another child while this, not wanting to take away from the singularity of this one child, with her pony tail atop her head like some martian and her gut busting laughter. it’s something to be ashamed of, not wanting to take the spotlight away from this child.
Category Archives: words
redoing room by room
there’s a light to all of this, transforming a house into a home, little by little. lots of echoes still, but here as our youth ends before our child, i hope there will be at least one more thumping and spouter of gibberish to fill up these empty halls.
hear it coming
i hear it coming again, the broken again, the soft scatter of will never come back together: it holds longer for this sound, longer than for any other, the longest it has ever held.
i’m holding it together with bared knuckles and twine for her and i don’t know what it means when she keeps pushing and not moving back, not budging at all, and its cutting the tendon from the bone to the point where it isn’t worth holding together anymore.
i would have done anything for you, if you held it together for me, if you kept it safe. but no where is safe with you, nothing sacred or holy. anything is a target, as long as it can scratched and pierced and cleaved away. eveything is ripe.
it’s a new kind of something to see your life peel this way.
Engagment note for Mike and Mina
It’s about time and finding time. Squeezing time between work days and weekends, snuggling up to time to keep it still. And sometimes, time seems to stop at the right moment and stretch out in all directions, but then others, it just runs away too soon.
It’s about time and making time. Cutting through chunks of it just to be together a little bit longer. As if somehow, through sheer force of will, we can make time out of thin air and keep it safe, tucked in our pockets.
But in the end, it’s about timing and the right time. Having enough time to start the things in life for which we promise the future. Timing your life to match the perfect pace of another’s. The right time to pop the question and make their heart yours.
in the middle of
in the middle of it all there is the still, the dead sound of someone having left, a door closed softly and irrevocably.
the mad, mad sound of nothing… and, and,
the nagging thought, the lingering memory, the hollow sound of a cliche that’s been written one too many times.
i want to say something new, but i can’t be bothered with the putting it down.
i’ve gotten too used to writing about pain and madness and angst and despair when i am no longer any of things.
my daughter semi-squats, makes tiny fists to keep her balance and blurts out before bursting red something of terrible importance that we cannot possibly understand between the yelps and babbles that came before and after.
in an effort to impress me with her technical savviness, my wife breaks our home built tivo.
this is my life now: a wonderfully lunatic child and loony loving wife. where is the sadness in any of that?
in the middle of it all, the still between tears and laughter, the short breath that comes before relief, the sound of shutters opened to the sun.
Old home boy turns good
City hooker ring KOd
Hi-Res | Lo-Res
Video from WNBC; Article from THE DAILY NEWS
Operated through web
BY ROBERT GEARTY and GREG B. SMITH
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
‘Emmanualla’ is allegedly one of hookers once ‘available in New York City’ through NY Elites before Immigration and Customs agents busted up the ring and charged its alleged ringleader.
A multimillion-dollar Manhattan-based prostitution ring used the Internet to snag customers and arrange “dates” with hundreds of supposed supermodels in 22 states, prosecutors charged yesterday.
NY Elites promised “stunning European knockouts” with names such as Vanessa, Roxy and Katrina – charging $500 to $1,500 per hour for sex in hotels from coast to coast, authorities say.
The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raided Elites’ E. 32nd St. headquarters and discovered records listing the names of more than 200 hookers, according to court papers.
At 6 a.m. yesterday, agents busted alleged ringleader Rady Abdel Salem Abbassy. But they missed his girlfriend and alleged partner, Elena Trochtchenkova, who remains a fugitive, prosecutors said.
The ring operated out of an eighth-floor suite off Fifth Ave. where “dispatchers” took calls from johns drawn via a Web site.
The site depicted numerous women who supposedly “appeared on the covers of many mainstream European magazines,” providing a résumé with every physical detail.
Yesterday it featured 5-foot-6, 116-pound Vanessa with the come-on: “Call and Reserve Vanessa today!” She was allegedly “available in New York City” from last week until Sunday.
“If you are in need of beautiful companionship and sharp intellect, check out the most sought after escorts in the New York area,” the Web site promised.
Three of the pricey call girls turned informants and told of being sent on two-week “tours” to other cities, according to affidavits by Immigration and Customs agent Theodore Psahos.
The escort service used Hotwire, an Internet travel agency, to book hotel rooms for customers. Records show the service booked rooms in 22 cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Hotwire officials, who are not accused of any wrongdoing, cooperated with the probe.
Immigration agents discovered $5.5 million in deposits into accounts linked to NY Elites, mostly from credit card payments, prosecutors alleged.
But investigators believe the ring netted much more money, noting that most customers paid with cash.
The ring was quite sophisticated, requiring all first-time users to provide detailed personal information to filter out potential law enforcement agents.
Only after callers were cleared could they request specific women and particular sex acts, prosecutors alleged. “Incomplete forms will not be accepted,” the site warned.
Call girls would collect payments upfront, and deliver cash or credit card receipts to the dispatchers, prosecutors said.
Yesterday, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs confirmed the arrests and said the agency would release more information today.
In Manhattan Federal Court, accused ringleader Abbassy was detained when prosecutor Benjamin Gruenstein alleged he was in the U.S. illegally after being deported to Egypt for a 1985 marijuana conviction.
Two women, Valerie Hairston and Nancy Khaja, alleged to be dispatchers, were released on $100,000 bond.
Originally published on April 12, 2005
my privacy
i had wished for fame and glory, at the very least, a long funeral procession.
you don’t want this
you don’t want this
you don’t want this anymore
or you don’t want this for now
have it put up on a shelf until you look at it again
and notice how dusty it’s become.
this thing between us is hardening, i’m in love with another statue
and everything can be broken, can’t you see
we’re breaking
and i want to scream at you to fix this
to put this here and that there
put it all the way it was
to put yourself the way you were
when you were still in love with me
house work, interrupted
woke up around eleven am today, having gone to sleep at 6:30 am, just
to get a head start on the day.
went to circuit city, bought about a hundred dollar’s worth of coax,
speaker wire & plugs.
came home and started screwing the surround speakers up on the rafters
in the basement here, then started laying and stapling the wire.
get to the next to last speaker and guess what, ran out of wire.
so i stop there, fuck it, buy more speaker wire tomorrow. got the
center, sub and two rear speakers already hooked up to the receiver and
i decide to fire it up.
nothing, nada, zilch. not even a hum. the shit kicker is that the
led/osd on this thing went out about a month ago so i have no fucking
clue what settings are screwed up if any.
ok, fuck that too. i can live without a receiver until the summer time,
when we get caught up with all these other expenses.
so instead i ran some straight over the air antenna lines to the living
room and guest room. discovered i could see straight into the
boiler room from the guest room closet. i could like drop a pack a
cigarettes between floors.
then i start fooling around with that new satellite receiver that
came in yesterday. popped in the latest firmware and literally 2 minutes
after that, i’m flipping through dish like nobody’s business. but this is in
the basement, i want to put this bad boy in the bedroom. i found old
cabling in the wall that was rg-59, not satellite rated, but it was
splitting into a newer rg-6 line that ran right up into the master
bedroom. the trick was to get from the boiler room to that rg-6 line in
the den through the rafters and underneath the stairs.
but i just finished and feel like i actually got something done.
putting it in boxes
and i push her to start with the boxes because i know they’re going to pile up and out and on top of each other until we are on top of each other without the interesting bits that used to happen when we were all alone before baby.
but she dilly and dallied until i started pulling her hair out or putting out the fire that is her thinking about it and just got it all moving along and even the baby helped by putting things in and, with a moment’s hesitation, putting them back out until i reached down and wrapped the edges round and round with tape even if i might have snagged baby’s hand between the seams from time to time.
and each time i thought i was done there was another corner with an article of clothing or an electronic doodad or niggling piece of nostalgia that begged for attention, inspection and packaging, and from neatly ordered and marked boxes of contents and destination it too soon became misc this over here to misc there.
i even had her feet in my hands pushing her up above closets into attics wobbling for the last piece of something or the other that we hadn’t seen in years, completely forgotten about but couldn’t let go for the life of us. when the boxes started covering the floor and blocking our view of the street where we would soon no longer face, the down and up to the tops of the closests finally bummed my left knee and i hobbled on to work.
every joint hurts, sore in the places where little muscles join big ones and a whole life gets packed right in front of your eyes in practically no time at all.