Morning Disco

I bought a new lamp for my bedside table recently; it has three settings and you turn it off and on by simply touching the metal base. However, it's right near my alarm clock, and sometimes when I reach over to hit the snooze button, as I like to do on occasion, my sleepy arm brushes against the lamp and it rolls through the settings quickly, once or twice in a single second, like a dance party or something. If someone was looking at my bedroom window, I wonder what they would think.

Holiday

It took me 14 hours to get from New York to Chattanooga on Friday -- about as long as it might take to drive -- during which I spent time in four airports, and took four different modes of transportation (car to plane to car to train to bus to plane) How I prayed for a boat. And with all the shitty life-happenings that occured in the last four months, on top of the stress that comes with the (lack of) help given by the airlines, add that I'm tired and hungry and my battery is running out in my iPod -- I just cried all the way from Baltimore to Charlotte. If anyone noticed, they didn't asked me what might be the matter.

Airports are safe places. The whole time that the flights were delayed or changed, I didn't worry about a thing. I'm here, they'll take care of me, I kept thinking. Only when everything fell apart and I found myself in a taxi, in DC rush hour traffic, and then on a MARC train to BWI -- all places I've never been as an adult -- did I begin to get nervous. What if all this is wrong, I thought. What if I end up carjacked by crack addicts and thrown naked into a drainage ditch, left only for the wolves to have their fill, the buzzards to pick at whatever's left, and the maggots to finish me, finally. (Even in our nightmares, writers sew up the ends.)

My nephew, almost 16 months, is smart and adorable and knows about 20 signs -- my brother and my sister-in-law have taught him some sign language (some American and some invented) and it allows him to communicate exactly what he wants even though he doesn't have all the words. He has signs for Milk, Juice, Eat, Diaper, All Done, Where Is It, Drive, Sleepy, Please, and a bunch of other things. Although, as my brother pointed out, he seems to think that 'Please' actually translates into a kind of overriding Now-You-Have-To-Give-It-To-Me.

I think my legs were confused this morning when I asked them to walk the five blocks to the subway, since for a week I've been sitting on my ass. Between the transit strike last week and being in Tennessee just after, they seemed to have forgotten what to do.

Gay Husbands

Yesterday on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the topic was gay husbands. Meaning, the focus of the show was really straight women who wake up one day to learn that their husband of 7 or 15 years is gay. Some of the men had long-term relationships, some just slept around; one of them had more than 1000 sexual partners throughout his thirty year marriage.

The show was frustrating, because Oprah didn't seem to get it. I think she dumbs herself down for the at-home audience -- asking the questions that not so much she wants to hear, but that they want to hear, asking her guests over and over again for a simpler explanation.

"Why do you get married in the first place?" Oprah asked.

The men gave the usual answers: I thought I would change; I was really in love with her; I thought that it had been only one time with a man and that the feelings would pass.

These are not, however, the reasons.

What do we value in this country? Marriage, family, money, success, fame, having a strong religious faith (of a certain kind, of course,) and perhaps education, though I am reluctant to add that one. What we don't value is personal happiness. Which is to say that until gay people are 1) considered a whole, essential, integral part of our society, and 2) given the same rights as every individual living in that society, then gay men will forever marry straight women as a way of arriving at those very values that we hold high. Only until there is a new normal.

Never did the idea come up -- which is to say that Oprah never mentioned this idea -- that gay people are maligned, disenfranchised, oppressed, made jokes of. And periodically tied in chains and dragged behind pick up trucks until their limbs come off, or barb-wired to fences, beaten and left for dead in the desert.

"I still don't understand why you would get married in the first place," Oprah kept asking. None of the men gave the real answer: Because I didn't want to be one of them.

Word of the Year

The word 'Podcast,' a combination of the words 'broadcasting' and 'iPod,' has been named Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player," the word will be added to the online version of the dictionary during the next update early next year.

Some of my favorite podcasts include:

EatFeed: The food podcast that takes you back in time, across the country, around the world, and back to your own table.

Downstage Center: A weekly theatrical interview show, featuring the top artists working in theatre both on and Off-Broadway and around the country.

The Leonard Lopate Show: Conversations with writers, actors, ex-presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, grammarians, curators, filmmakers, and do-it-yourself experts.

Studio 360: A national radio show about arts and culture, hosted by novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen and produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. Current issues, events and trends in art are a jumping off point for an exploration of ideas that aren't necessarily "news," yet are provocative and offer a lens on experience that only art can provide.

Mike Birbiglia's Secret Public Journal: Every month, comedian Mike Birbiglia travels to the far reaches of the earth. Occasionally something interesting happens. So he always brings his secret public journal.

For the coaster geeks:

CoasterRadio.com: CoasterRadio.com is a weekly podcast dedicated to roller coasters, theme parks and thrill rides.

In the Loop: Weekend Review: A weekly show that brings you an in-depth look into the amusement park industry.

Strike, Day 2

Today is the beginnging of the second day of the transit strike. I realized at some point yesterday how New York can skew your perspective on the rest of the country. Half the day had gone by before I realized that in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Kalamazoo, life was moving as usual. Of course, I knew this, but to know something and to know something are two different things.

Strangely, in my mind, I had shut down the movement of the whole country. I suppose between the man-on-the-street madness of New York 1, our city's 24-hour local news channel, and front page stories in all the papers that were laying on the counter at the diner where I had lunch -- The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and severeal smaller local papers -- I had somehow convinced myself that no one could get to work.

Small Joys are the Biggest

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 2

They listened to the open connection, the blank space between them. She saw him sitting at his desk, surrounded by all the papers, the keyboard and the telephones and fax machines, the millions of other mechanical instruments emitting hidden blooms of electromagnetic rays in every direction. All that concrete and metal and glass. New York—the jungle that eats itself, jarring the molecules, vibrating its inhabitants like tuning forks.

Lois Beatrice Payne

My maternal great-grandmother, Lois B. Payne of Atlanta, GA, age 90, passed away on December 10, 2005. She lived in a nursing home for the last few years, suffering from--or perhaps lost within--Alzheimer's Disease.

As printed in the obituary which appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on December 12, 2005: she is survived by her daughter, Allene Cornelius of Atlanta; 4 grandchildren, 6 great grandchildren; 1 great great grandchild; a brother, Lee Pittman of Dawsonville; a sister, Marie Walston of Atlanta; and several nieces and nephews.

She was buried in Crestlawn Memorial Park, next to her late husband, Garnett, who died in 1976. The Rev. Keith Willard, a distant cousin, officiated, and in addition to suggesting that when he saw her on Sundays she looked as if she had stepped right out of the Sears Roebuck catalog--you should read that as a major compliment, which is how it was intended--he managed to include some sentences that I wrote about her in an essay a few years ago: about her kindness, about how easily she fit inside my arms. My friend Foster and I agreed that what was left out was that she made the best carrot cake in the history of the world. And that she hated her middle name, Beatrice, which, for some reason, everyone pronounced Be-AT-trice.

I know too much about death lately. Everyone will be able to say that at some point; most already can. But this one is okay. She lived an enviable life, in some sense: full of family, food so good it borders on sin, and a peaceful way about her that more people should emulate. (This is not including the time she began shooting squirrels in her living room with her BB gun, but that's beside the point.)

It's true that people never leave you as long as you don't forget them. I wrote about her briefly in my first novel, Yield, having given one of my own memories to my narrator, Simon:

"I sit down on the couch, pick up a ceramic figurine off the side table, a little elephant with the trunk raised. It looks fifties-ish, like those accessories that were at one time fashionable and perhaps indicated some status. I used to see that stuff in my great-grandmother’s house—a delicate feminine hand holding a pinkish, glossy conch shell, turned up, its open end to the ceiling. She kept rosy-colored emery boards in it. Then, in her bedroom on the make-up table, she had a strange box, one green and one red light bulb in the base, directed up to three tiger-striped clam shells. The center shell held a crucifixion, the bleeding Jesus near-naked and tiny. I’m not sure what forces this memory to surface—maybe the stillness of this room. Could be anything, really."

Brokeback Mountain

Yes. It's as good as they say it is--one of the most truthful, honest adaptations of a short story I've ever seen. The acting is extremely good. Much of the talk has been how it is really Heath Ledger's film--and it is--but one of my favorite moments is when Jake Gyllenhaal (as Jack Twist) manages to break your heart in about three seconds when he is forced not to look at his naked friend squatting and bathing himself with hot water from the kettle.

The film is quite tense, with not a lot of space for the audience to breathe, to let go of that anxiety, despite the slowness of the story, the spaces created by the leaps forward in time. You know that their love is already doomed from the first few frames. After the movie I felt completely displaced. The images are with me still, and days later, I am unable to get Jack & Ennis out of my head.

My only criticism is that -- perhaps to be expected -- there isn't enough flesh in the film. I don't mean naked celebrities, I mean the sweat, the hot breath, the dirty boys that they would, of course, be. And the sex scenes aren't quite as touching or rough as the scenes of Jack & Ennis wrestling each other to the ground, bloodying each other's noses. Ang Lee's direction in terms of the actual skin against skin is a little precious.

But I was angry at the Chelsea audience, full of gay men who reacted in bursts of laughter and titillation when Ennis's lonely wife catches her husband kissing and embracing Jack in the stairway outside their apartment. It seemed to me the wrong reaction--it felt salacious, and cheap, like some juvenile woo-wooing you'd hear from the studio audience of Friends. And I guess, foolishly perhaps, I expected more out of them. I always over-estimate the public.

It was obviously just a release of that uncomfortable tension, but I wondered later if we, as gay people, do not truly believe in love between one another that deeply, that unabashedly gut-wrenching and rare. Because it took all these straight people--a straight director, straight actors and screenwriters--to make one of the most affecting, realistic gay love stories ever put on film.

"What a waste of two lives," a friend wrote to me the next morning. If you find that kind of love, steal it. Pray that when it happens, you are wise enough to live it.

Going It Alone

On a train ride home over the weekend I was having a discussion about what I'm going through, and about grief in general. "How are you doing?" they want to know. Then there are serious faces and sometimes as much as a hand on your shoulder. "How are you reallydoing?"

What I find difficult to explain is that I am perfectly fine -- and yet I'm completely wrecked. I get up in the morning, I go to work, I see movies, I laugh at parties, I get excited about doing fun things. I'm really fine. No different from my "normal" life, as far as I can tell. Except that I am also sad all the time.

Imagine that someone buries a tiny black stone inside your body which never warms and always pains you, or the sharp edge of a bullet fragment is embedded in your side, and that small piece of jagged metal just lives inside you for the rest of your life. None of them bother you constantly, but more when you move differently, when your posture or attitude is otherwise compromised. When, like this morning, you see an armored truck parked outside of a bank.

You take on a bit of color, and the sadness is just something you carry. It changes you slightly, another tiny weight to add to all the other weights that everyone carries.

"Why don't you call?" your friends ask. And what is really difficult to explain -- and, I assume for people to understand -- is that talking about it doesn't necessarily help. Going to parties doesn't help. Watching TV doesn't help. Being alone doesn't help. Nothing you do or don't do really makes any difference. And the only thing that does fix it -- time, presumably -- is the only thing you can't do anything about.

Kate Bush

I love the new Kate Bush record, Aerial. It's so lovely and so out there--in one song, she simply sings the digits of pi. And when, like today, I feel sort of witchy-woman, environmental, spacial, sound-texture-y, when I want to think about seas of honey, or kings of mountains, I know that she's right there with me. Or maybe I feel that way because I'm listening to her.

Is that some chicken or the egg shit, or what?

My Address Book

I've spent the past several nights doing my Christmas cards, which have become a sort of annual event -- at least in my own mind. I do look forward to them, and occasionally people will ask about them nearabouts Thanksgiving. After I figure out what the card itself is going to be, I go through my address book and see who's still where they were last year, and who I need to get a new address from.

The writer Alan Gurganus said that his address book was the most important book he'd ever written -- it was filled with his friends who had died of AIDS, hundreds of them, he said. And I just listened to Joan Didion on Fresh Air talk about how it was impossible to cross people out of her address book, and so it, too, was filled with the dead.

There are only two entries like that in my address book. One of them just says Mer, for Meredith Helton. The other one, Meg, had so many addresses that her section is filled with smudges of black marker. I've used four different pens, and drawn arrows pointing my eye to the appropriate house number or zip code.

There are phone numbers of men who I no longer speak to, or who I wish I had the courage to call again, or that I never really spoke to consistently in the first place. Wishful thinking, perhaps, on my part. The playwright, the paralegal, the video editor, the photographer, the dancer from Mexico whose name isn't there because it is too painful to write it.

I've been thinking about how you can trace the months as you move through the alphabet, how many years pass when you turn a page.

First Snow

A few days before Thanksgiving, the weather in New York begins to seriously turn. You can have days in the low 60s up through Halloween sometimes, and by the second week of November, you're asking the universe how long this loveliness might last.

Not for long, it answers.

The cold arrives suddenly, almost unexpectedly, even though you remember it from the year before, even though you've lived here long enough not to be fooled.

The first snow of the season blanketed us over the weekend, so that when I woke up on Sunday morning, my fire escape and window sills were covered in soft white powder. I love New York in the first few hours of the snow--not later, of course, when the piles of black sludge, as high as people, sit on street corners through mid-March slowly shrinking, and every afternoon you step over piles of frozen dog shit, and suspiciously yellow ice forms on low drifts--but it can be so beautiful in that early moment; we're taken by surprise. The noise of the city settles for an hour or so, as if it had finally found some sort of peace.

On Being Mistaken

I woke up this morning thinking that, perhaps, it had not happened. Your body can--literally--memorize another person, unconsciously. And it precipitates into actions: dailing the phone number without thinking about it; making mental lists about what to say to them when you see them next. And, of course, as sad as you are, the one person you want to talk about that with....well, the option does not present itself.

What helps:
-Music (some music, not all music)
-Reading
-Ambien

What doesn't:
-TV
-Food (everything tastes the same right now)
-Regret

But before all that, before NPR started yapping in my ear at ten to eight on my alarm clock like it always does--why do I listen to commentary about whatever inane thing the President did the day before so early in the morning?--I got up around four having to pee.

My mother, more than a year ago, sent me a Halloween-ish box which included two Ring Pops, these being the sort which contain a tiny battery in the "setting" and a little LED that blinks, lighting up the candy.

I was suddenly confused by the orange flickering on the end table, thinking it was a candle that I had perhaps forgotten to blow out. Then when I realized that three days ago I had eaten this blinking, light-up novelty of a sucker--and here it was still plugging away--I just laughed.