On our way to Philly, I looked to the side and saw a bunch of my friends and collaborators sitting quietly, collecting scabies (and the sundry and exciting skin disorders adventurous, working class New Yorkers are susceptible to on the Chinatown bus), and listening to their Ipods. Lights flickered across Scot's face, which was peaceful and composed, and DR's face was hooded by his cap, but concentrated on something. Maria sat next to me, listening to Tori Amos or something equally emotive. I was overcome with affection for all of them.

Now, the Chinatown bus may be a breeding ground for tapeworms and drug mules, but it also has a certain tendency towards deep and contemplative thought. Perhaps its the combination of the smell of chicken skin and lack of breathable air.

In any case, I myself was listening to a particularly hilarious episode of This American Life, about the complex and contradictory nature of a breakup. I wanted so badly to have deep thoughts so I thought of that book we had to read in college in our gender...something class, 'Maurice'. About the trials of a gay kid throughout his life, written in like 1926 or something. The only part I really remember, which always seems to a testament to either the human inclination towards multiple sex partners, or, more quaintly, the tenuousness of humanity or something, is when his closeted boyfriend freaks out on a lawn and starts a rant about homophobia. something to the effect of 'why can't love just end where it begins?' that it's not natural to love with procreation in mind. that there's something beautiful and singular about just two people, being in love, with nothing left to leave once they themselves have evaporated. i always liked that idea, found it empowering, even while my own thoughts and fears about romance and companionship vacillated. It's angry and righteous and rails against the conventions of strollers and ovaries and loneliness and all the blahblahmeow i'm supposed to worry about at some point, all the while i strut knowingly, my libido skyrocketing, but examine my tits in reflective surfaces for descent.

But I then thought of Diane. She was one of those non-blood staples at family events, my cousin's best friend since they were teens and thus when I was a toddler. She was warm and probably nicer to me than any of the people I was related to, to whom I shared blood and sat uncomfortably between on Queens couches, younger, smaller, unrelatable, odd? But Diane was a joy. Kind and engaged, big and lush haired. Recognizably a gem to me as a kid. She was at my grandmother's hospital bed and every other event the family shared.

She and Danny married I think at 30- they were robust and so, so happy. The few times I saw them together, I marvelled at the depth and realness of their affection. But Diane grew sick, tumor, struggled, and died by 32. Danny was there the entire time. 6 months later we heard that Danny died of a heart attack. These two people, with everything ahead, were gone. He didn't live without her.

I don't know how to attempt to broach the depth of that idea. I won't even try. i'm just genuinely haunted by that speech in Maurice- love sometimes ends where it begins.

Sufficiently goosebumped and emotional, I took off my headphones and signaled to my friends to talk to me. Topics- bus topics- flowed and stumbled, flickered like the lights on the garden state parkway, took me away from my ever calculating thoughts, of ones i dont even deserve to have because i'm looking for them.

i don't know what to say about diane and danny. they were too important for someone as small as me to try.

I noticed during tech for The Ghost Dancers how much i like to walk and eat tuna fish from delis out of plastic containers.

What I just wrote makes me think that blogging will never, ever equate virtual immortality even though its the basis for most contemporary communication, because that might be one of the dumbest things i've ever said. i meant it, and i'm going to elaborate, but really, that was fucking dumb. it's a curious thing, where all this writing (not mine, everyone's) will go in the end, but please be aware mine will not go down as most significant, and thus don't lament the loss of this post at world's end, when the internet goes out like Mordor.
in any case, there's something so comforting to me about the walks i take when i'm too busy to sit down, or nowhere near my stove, or i'm en route to a project that excites me. it combines an intentionally metropolitan 'too busy' attitude with really terrible fish breath. i can't think of a better way to live. i like deli owners, and the way they ask me if i'm sure i don't want a sandwich, i like petting deli cats and testing the variety of mix-ins that different establishments apply to their tuna salad. i've even gotten accustomed to celery, which makes my react physically on its own. i like how walking and eating out of non bio degradable containers with a plastic fork gives me the opportunity to keep moving and looking at things. it's usually very filling, too.

here is a rundown of the particular establishments that have stuck out at me in my past decade in New York City:

(oh my god, really, what am i doing with my time today?):

1st Avenue and 7th street- they put dill in it! and it's mad cheap. dill, still growing wild in the east village, it surprised me the first time i had it from there. there's still little surprises in new york. this place puts dill in their tuna salad, and they have 6 dozen rows of organic spinach. whatever.

Key Food near my house, Washington and Eastern Parkway- a standby, reliable, convenient. it has red and green peppers in it, and the deli guys are charming. i feel so home there. my grocery list varies very little, and i only occasionally get tuna salad, and it's usually part of a sunday late afternoon shopping excursion. luxuriant, quiet and private times that i make a salad in a vintage plastic bowl, get stoned and mop my floors- these are rare times and so cherished.

23rd Street and 9th Avenue- a departure from the mayo based standard, there's olives, peppers, vinegar, and a cheery Ecuadorian named Max behind the counter. next door is Joe, amazing coffee, but you can't walk, eat tuna out of a container and drink an au lait. even i would never attempt this. also, that combination sounds disgusting, i just realized. but strolling west chelsea, hopping over dachsunds and smiling at locals while getting necessary levels of Omega -3... wonderful, peaceful.

Stanton and Allen- represents the split personality of the irritating-on-saturday, dreamy-on-tuesday lower east side. Pickles! oh, how pleased that makes me. 32 varieties of protein bars behind glass (?) and tuna salad with pickles. of course, if i'm in the area on a weekend and not headed anywhere in particular, it's best to go big and get whitefish salad from russ and daughters but that's something i prefer to do with alan. eating whitefish alone seems sad.

unlike this, the height of sophisticated and insightful prose.

dont get me going about meatballs on west village stoops.

quickly:

I woke up around 6 am on Tuesday morning, sweating, with a massive toothache and a pounding heart, because I had just had a dream that I woke up from my futon and Hillary Clinton had won the Republican nomination. I woke with such anxiety, and such a sense of futility and anger, that it took a moment to register what had bothered me most- that in my dream, I still owned a futon.

I think it stemmed from the moment I rolled over on our college apartment futon to see that George Bush had won the first time, as I had fallen asleep waiting for the outrageous results. I started crying, on behalf of everyone, with one leg up and the pillow falling slightly off the front end (casue that's how you sleep on a futon- uncomfortably, gymnastically... you adjust to anything in college).

except ideals, those didn't waver. in fact, the more i learned about the world, the more staunch my convictions became. I'd protest anything i could get my feet on, a canvas bag became the prominent platform for my vaguely formed ideas about social and economic injustice. i was a sponge for injustice, we all were, it's what helped start a totally balls-out, unashamed theatre company.

but now i'm voting for hillary clinton, and i don't own a futon anymore (that lumpy, beer stained symbol of so many of our transitions), and i don't go to protests anymore because i have to work. so many adjustments. so much reality.

barack says change but maybe i'm looking for a cold, executive hardass because i don't dream as much as i did at 19. i shop at target AND the market at grand army plaza. i'm adapting. i don't know how i feel about it.

i have health insurance to cover part of this nightmare tooth that hasn't felt better since that dream.

emerging from a hastily appointed 7 am saturday dental consultation ( i did not call my dentist all week due to the 'wait and see' policy) with some jerk who flat out refused to give me a cleaning because i woke him up, i held a bottle of vicodin in one hand and a village voice in the other and remembered that dream and felt a little bit in crisis- for myself, for the world, feeling the infected tooth and hoping it wasn't a sign, punishment, for somehow not helping to uninfect everything around me.

it still really fucking hurts.

It’s about 2 am on a Friday night, and I’m sleeping in a bed that isn’t mine. Well, at the moment I’m on a beige loveseat in a fairly beige living room, in the sparklingly beige Chelsea. It’s Gay Lite around here, Tasti G Lite (when did that happen?). It’s my brother’s crib and his laptop, a white Ibook, 12 inch, with the most pleasingly raised keys that coo and click. I’m crashing here before a bar mitzvah we have to travel to Flushing for, and then to the Crest Hollow Country Club where I ’ll wear a modest dress and feel alienated and defensive. We’re seeing our cousin’s kid become a man at 9 am and I can’t sleep. Not unpleasantly- again, the sound of the keys is comforting, the loveseat is precisely long enough that I can prop my feet AND my head up, and the glow from the screen feels so singularly Manhattan. I feel glamorous and secret. While Brooklyn feels like home, Chelsea, it appears, feels like a movie set, albeit in boring miniature. But I like it.

I like the living room here, I like his bedroom. Bret’s crashing in his roommate’s bed while I took his, but everyone who knows me knows I can’t sleep in any bed but mine. At least, not without over the counter sleep aids. So I’m on the loveseat and thinking about rooms, space, this private moment in a space that isn’t mine.

His bedroom is small but elegant- he fucked with the lighting so it’s a dimmer now, I think someone gay did that. I think the walls are beige or brown- I’ll check in the morning. I know the color was chosen to complement the other rooms in the apartment. It looks like Starbucks, which when you think about it, is actually quite a lovely color scheme. I mean this.

god i LOVE this clicking sound

the colors in my current pad are also, i think, soothing and congruent but bright, carefully considered this time, unlike the last one, which was plastered in color, every room different, a lunatic day care center, done by a different me. although ’winter cocoa’ certainly united the rooms in a way, yes?

This time, the colors are similar but the application was different, calmer, more spare. it’s just mine. It’s a place I love to look at, get into bed, surrounded by molding enclosing confident green squares. I love that bedroom. I love the company it’s welcomed and the conversations it’s overheard.

I think about all the bedrooms I know or knew- Bret’s new one, signifying his own growth, and the polar but always loving directions we go in; i think of marsha’s, which starts to resemble her more and more everyday; randi’s grown up conference phone and the defiantly punk footwear strewn by it. the lovely friends with whom i can always crash with, the lovely boys’ with whom i shared moments that, thankfully, all make me smile; i think of the one i grew up in, where i heard birds and my dad’s voice ordering me to get up at 9 on saturdays because ’i’d never sleep tonight’ (seriously, what the fuck?); i think of his voice breaking that night when i walked into their bedroom, right next to mine. he sat at the edge crying, unable to speak, as my mother told me she was sick. i was 8 and so sad, scared to see him cry. i don’t remember another time i saw that. but even now i equate a parents’ bedroom with the sanctity of that moment, of fear and love and pain for the person you chose for forever, and felt like i interrupted something none of us wanted me to see.

i don’t know my future with bedrooms. That’s cool. because the bed itself is fabulous. i got it on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. I got a massive discount because I listened to the sales woman (who bore a sadly striking resemblance to Calamity Jane) rant about her husband cheating on her in chat rooms in the early ’90’s, "on the computer I bought him! Can you fucking believe it, Nadine?". No, Laura, I could not. But I would like free delivery and a mattress pad.

I’m terrible with math, but I think the price of the bed went down $50 with every 5 minutes I nodded sympathetically and robotically exclaimed, "That sounds traumatizing" or the more succinct "Fuck yeah, bitch!"

She eventually got a new boyfriend who bought her a house. I assume that bedroom saw better times. I hope so.

most everyone who knows me is well aware of the means best and worst used to communicate with me- phone calls and the written word, nay... i don't check voice mails and i don't open my mailbox. christmas cards were opened late(but with equal affection had they been pre-2008). so it was ordinary for me to walk into my building last night, ready to avoid the mailboxes. But, as it had been the customary 2 weeks or so, i steered myself and and unlocked 4M's trove of dusty bills, stacks of GHI's tangled Explanation of Benefits, and Chase statement that just... just make me feel bad.

Assuaged that no establishment wanted anything but money from me in the next 2 weeks, i closed the door and calculated when the next bimonthly confrontation with my mailbox would be.

One thing i do daily, briefly, is note the lost/ unforwarded mail for past tenants that stand on the bank of boxes (i frequently have left 4M's last lady Patricia Mills' mail there, hoping that somehow the HollyWould gift certificates and teeth cleaning reminders make it into her hands. I know so much about her, and will never know who she is). Stood amongst the forwards and lost last night was a postcard, text side out, and it took only a moment to read:

Bret and Abby,
Next time we should do this together.
Love,
Mom & Dad

after absorbing the feminine, magenta writing, i kept walking, but felt bothered by the card... why? it was a friendly, casual note, simply a family member sharing something. it was concise, and the cursive Mom-ishly warm, and, were i Bret and Abby, it would keep me curious till I talked to Mom & Dad when they got back from wherever they were. but- aha, what was troubling!- if they were so familiar, why didn't Mom & Dad know Bret and Abby had moved?

I was... sad? the single sentence now seemed less like a casual check in, more like... grieving. or a plea. maybe Mom & Dad were never given the new address, and thought it would arrive somehow by starting from the last known point. a gesture to erase distance, to reconnect? or, maybe aware the card wouldn't get anywhere but left on a row of mailboxes, she had to send the words into the world anyway. maybe there was an argument during the planning of the trip, and Bret refused to come. or maybe she just used an old address because she's old and forgetful and farts a lot. but in any case, it was too late, and Bret and Abby don' live here anymore, and I didn't know how to help Mom & Dad get heard.

I went back to the postcard to turn it over- I figured someone should see the majesty of wherever it was Bret and Abby weren't. It was an illustration, of a pastoral Alpine winter fairyland dotted with puffy skiers, "Snowland Village".

Maybe the remoteness was worse than a lost address- seems it spans mountains.

Bret Dakin: call your mom.

"Would you rather be the kind of person who DOESN'T get thrown an emotional curve ball by a heartbeat?"

fucking gorgeous question. not just in context.

golly, life is exciting. and weird and painful and exciting.

as a postscript to yesterday-

my landlord agreed to let me pay an extra $10 per month to pay them back for the window gate i'm going to get. now, it's just a matter of getting them to install it. they also said they'd reimburse me $100 for a broken lock that I paid $300 for, awhile back.

when i described in further detail what happened with the lock, he sweetly clarified that it was a cylinder problem and that it would be a $10 reimbursement, rather than $100. I do adore these mom n pop, community realty organizations.

i recall that evening with the broken lock as one of the few times i've felt entirely alone and pathetically female-ly vulnerable, and it culminated in me jogging down washington avenue at 6 am in my ugliest shoes to withdraw $300 from an ATM while two surly Russian men waited for me in a van.

i mean, in summary.

it was 5:30 on a Sunday morning (still a saturday night?) had walked into my apartment and opened the door, tipsy, with at least a few intriguing saturday night memories formed, and tried to pull the key out of the lock. it refused to come out. tugging and twisting till my palms sweated, i gave up and went inside, the door swinging open and the keys still firmly in the lock, door stuck open.

i considered going to bed and waiting to deal with it in the morning, hoping no one came in, or leave, wander brooklyn till i woke up a friend to crash with and hope i didn't get robbed while gone; in my drunkenness, i had enough clarity to do neither. but i did begin to force frustrated tears, the kind where your own, gently fake wails is entirely soothing, if only because you sound like a childish idiot in your own ears and you shut the fuck up.

i found a locksmith who sent two burly, irritated eastern europeans who stood in my apartment while i splashed water on my face to sober up. it was awkward, intimidating, and the fucking sun just still refused to come up. they replaced the lock, telling me no credit card, only cash. $347. they'd wait there for me.

see, i didn't have $347, and I certainly wasn't in the mood to leave my apartment to two polish giants while i went to an ATM in the dark.

no credit card? no check?
nope!
can you come with me?
no, we'll wait here.

(Quickly, quickly sobering up in the panic of poverty and potential bodily harm)

i'm kind of nervous to go withdraw this much money while you stand in my apartment. go wait outside. in... your conversion van.

(Better and better!)

agreed.

so, i put on my old running shoes, totally incongruous with that evening's outfit, and start running down washington avenue to get the money i really don't have, to fix one of those new york problems that you can't predict and thus can't lament.

that's when the real tears start coming- thoughts that don't usually plague me (why don't i have a man to fix this? or come with me? why can't i save money? why do i even fucking live in this city in order to pay for an apartment that, at the moment, anyone can get into, except for me, because i'm jogging at 5:45 am to an outdoor cash withdrawal machine?) start to pound in rhythm to my running.

the absence of certain things are amplified by the presence of others- hot, helpless tears and, still, the fucking moon. It appears that, in March the sun doesn't come up till around 10 am. And none of the things I'm wishing for are going to materialize, of course- the closest thing to a savior that night was my overdraft account. My bank in shining, 19% interest armor.

i got the money and they gruffly wrote me a receipt. on a legal pad.

i don't use those sneakers at all, they're pretty ugly. i found some new ones in the lobby of my building.
so there's ups and downs to every living situation, i suppose.

I got home yesterday around noon and slept from 1-4, then went food shopping. then made meatloaf. then went back to bed on the couch, in front of the tv. tired.

i woke up around 8 to see a guy climbing the fire escape on the adjacent wall of my building, particularly stealthily, then sliding against the wall in between windows, then up to the roof. not a 'lost my keys and being inventive' variety of stealth, or an 'urban adventurer' kind. A 'robby' kind of stealth. then he stopped becasue saw me on my couch in the flicker of the tv. he couldn't tell if i saw him, of course, but he saw me there. he climbed up to the roof and at one point, peered over the ledge to see if the person on the couch had moved to call the cops, i presume.

too sleepy to freak, i called the cops, said 'fuck it' and rolled over and went to sleep. that, that tired.

i just realized my brother will see this at some point. don't worry, bret. i'm getting a better lock, a gate for the window and maybe some curtains.

my point is, i was really tired.

so tell me

if i organized a cage fight between the girl who sings:

If you are chilly
please take my sweater
cause iiiiiii
looooove
the way you call me baby

on that fuckign annoying old navy commercial

with the girl who sings that cover of the cat stevens song:

how can i tell you that i love you
i love you
But I can't think of right words to say

on that fucking stupid diamond commercial

would you make a donation to pay for the cage, and the song rights for when we play it for the winner at the end? oh, i also need an admin assistant to do the scheduling and the afterparty coordination, so that's 36K for salary (hey, this is new york) and a catering budget of about 14K.

wait, maybe debeer's will sponsor this? i'll have my assistant get in touch.

although i just found out (i didn't know Director of Events had to do their own internet research, this is why i need an assistant, thanks) that Cat Power does the diamond commercial. and we all know she's fucking crazy so i guess the outcome of the death battle won't be much of a surprise.

hell, just get me two plane tickets to old navy and kay jewelers HQ and i'll just punch the marketing people in the face.