my love,

There is no place without you, there is no breath, there is no hope or joy or -wait. This is crap. This is drivel. This is beneath me. This is not what you signed up for.

This is not what I promised you. This is not what was on my mind on the tram over Randall’s Island. This is not what was on my mind when I kissed you for the first time in November. This is not what was on my mind when we walked from Lark St to the Blockbuster on Colonial Ave. This was not what was on my mind when I wrapped my arm around you for our first dance as a married couple. This was not what was on my mind in Paris avoiding the hustlers at Sacre Coeur. This is not what I promised you when we looked at the bones of this house and thought we could raise a family here.

You were never hope or a place or a fleeting thought. You walked into a room and we went outside and never came back. You walked into a room and everything became something. You walked into a room and I disappeared.

You walked into a room and we were, as if we had always been and will be, always and forever

happy twentieth

me

Not a day goes by, every day that goes by, once a day, not since that day, but some day, it will happen all in one day and it will be as if that day never happened and we will sit and say, as the sun filters through the alley, do you remember back in the day?

While watching the movie, sudden horror of my mortality. Not sure what it was, but it was sudden and there and solid. In the middle of the living room, after an indoor jog, I tell her, how much longer can I lift 400 pounds. My little girl is in Arlington on the phone telling me how a fortune teller told her she’s an old should and has lived 47 lives.

47, a star trek favorite. It repeats. Does any of this repeat? No, it’s all at once, only once, then it ends and I cannot face it, still. Yesterday was the first day it invaded during the day. I’m a ticking time bomb. There are very few things I know, and this is one of them. The finality of death. I believe in quantum physics. I believe in high probability and the beauty of chaos. That is how I know that death is an end that is total and complete.

The best I can hope for is a quiet end of a long life, alone and she has been taken care of, I’ve seen her off and she will be buried close enough for the children to visit her that I won’t know it’s coming, it will not be on my mind, it’ll be a night like any other and everything will be taken care of, but I won’t know it.

Was there ever a time, this time, some other time, time and again, this isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

Running into parents we’ve known throughout the years but never quite clicked and the ease of it, the shared songs and fears of growing children and aging pains. And just the night before, with a completely different group, we were the geriatrics at the dinner table, the senior couple, the ones with the most miles in. Not quite sure how to feel about that, if we’re a success story or not with so many variations of a common theme, people trying to do more than just get by in a world that was determined to constantly escape their grasp.

And again and again, I’ve met you all before, I’ve known you and listened to you and ignored you and befriended you and abandoned you and resented you and it’s the most important moment in the world and also the most trivial.

Once a day, every day, even if the mantra is the thing itself. Even if the telling is of the telling itself. It doesn’t matter, it’s the practice, the doing, because sometimes, something else will come from it, the repetition, the routine creates the groove, the groove creates the ease, the ease assuages the guilt of the telling. The guilt of it all. the guilt of taking the time out to take your yourself out of this time, to dictate of that time. Shameful rip form blanchot. When I am writing, I am not living, but if I am not living, what is of there to write.

On and on it goes, but it doesn’t matter, the practice matters. You cannot practice life, there are no rehearsals, not out takes, you are suddenly on stage without lines and so few cues. Merely suggestions accrued over time, of being under the spotlight when such and such a scene has played out before, and you improvise, you hesitate, someone else steals the spotlight but in the end it’s always been your show. You can however, practice this, the writing and the telling and the saying and the revision and the something that escaped notice and was truly trivial until you made it real and whole here, in this empty space.

We can say there was never an end to it, that it went on and over, on and over. But was there a time before it, before this? Or was it always already concrete and sinew?

That’s beautiful, he said and strokes his son’s head. Or was it his daughter’s? Or was it a dream he had while he was passed out on the couch and she was at her mother’s funeral? They had argued about this, about the memory, and made love afterwards and she slapped him as she left. It was funny but he was tired and bored.

In the end there was a very promising beginning, and if his dog hadn’t gone deaf, or was it the cat going blind, or the fish turned upside in the yard sale bought aquarium, he might’ve gotten up to draw the blinds and stop making a show of it.

There’s a talent to this, she said.

Earlier today, a construction crew was driving down the block pulling out old cable with the cherry picker RAISED and ripped right thru my internet line. I approached the guys and said hey you know what you did?

One of them says, ya sorry, you have optimum or Verizon?

I tell him Verizon.

He says, ok we can’t touch it, you have to call them.

So I call Verizon, they tell me earliest to fix is Friday. I tell them how does that work? Everyone is remote now, what do I tell my boss?

They go, we understand your issue.

I say, no you don’t, I’ve been a loyal customer for ten years.

We appreciate your loyalty.

If you appreciate my loyalty get someone here tomorrow.  otherwise this is all thoughts and prayers. Show me your appreciation.

We’re sorry, we can’t bump someone else.

I say, you mean to tell me everyone else scheduled for tomorrow pays Verizon 400/month? Been with Verizon for ten years? That would show me appreciation. Then I tell them, that’s alright, here’s a picture, I’m at the Verizon store right now to cancel all my services.

They put me on hold. Guy comes back and tells me tomorrow afternoon.

Motherfuckers man

You want. And want. And want. It’s all yearning and desire and ennui and goddamn it I wish I could do more. Didn’t I write about spindlefingers?

No, that’s not right. It’s never right. It’s an attempt, a series of attempts. Aborted attempts. Not a safe topic. Not something to talk about. Write about. We’re not in a safe place. Increasingly not a safe country. Was any of this really possible? But it happened and we weren’t dreaming.

I keep coming back to this memory I have of Blitz, taking about a near future of indentured servitude of credit and how he must feel silly that it didn’t come to pass. But what is passing is far worse.

And I want to write that none of it matters. None of it has mattered, nothing has really changed. Not for us at least. We’ve been lucky riding the coat tails of privilege that never belonged to us. We’ve been passing.

I will not write about the fourth of the July. the split in the country between the true patriots and the idealists. The ones filled with angry nostalgia for a country seemingly lost to them but never truly was. Or the ones teetering on a certain kind of despair that the dystopian worlds they secretly had a fetish for is coming to pass.

No, I will not write about them. Instead I will write about my son that left our home today with a kind of jittery confidence and arrogance to watch the fireworks at the beach but left in the middle of the day to do so. I will write instead of my daughter anxiously optimistic but terrified of becoming a young adult as she preps for college in the city at the tail end of summer. I will write of my wife as she joined me in the pool that was still too cold for her tastes at 86 degrees.

I will write on how I picked up three mike’s hard lemonades with the intent of downing them all but barely finished one. I will write instead of the dread I feel going back to work from the comfort of my gaming chair and not feel the slightest bit of guilt over it. I will write instead that my mother bought me the first edition paperback of kazantzakis’ report to greco and perhaps that was the most thoughtful gift she had ever given me.

So, no. Not about the fourth. If my fiftieth was a day like any other, then so is this one.

Although the fireworks were kinda nice.

Blank page. Where are you. The you will always be different. You are different. You haven’t changed at all. greyer, a certain finesse to the temples. Isnt that an odd thing to say, a finesse, to the temples? I mean, what the fuck is that? Does it matter?

Roaming around brooklyn, looking for The Stranger Things Experience at the brooklyn naval yard. A town in itself. Gentrification in full effect. Cafes with six item menus placed blocks apart with working class delis in between. Still early. Come back in five years, it’ll all be vegan burgers and high end boutiques. The “experience” itself fun, kinda slick, but you look at it too closely, overpriced and kitsch. You need to give yourself into those things. You need to suspend your anti-capitalist tendencies and just give into it. it is what it is. Expensive and overrated.

But who cares goddammit. I’ve turned fifty. I want to be a child again. I’m really not going to go down without a fight. Fuck that. The past five days, the constant mantra, take a serious picture, come on, grow up. That’s the point everyone, I’ve grown up already, this is not the way I want to be remembered. I want every photograph to be a disruption to your sensibilities and expectations of age, of time, of me. Time will not beat me because it already has beaten me. Like that Jack White songs, time, takes takes takes.

I’m going to give it a fistful. I’m going to laugh in its face.