Signals

I want to print a retraction. In December, I wrote a post about the passing of my great-grandmother. In it I said: "I know too much about death lately." But that was false; I don't really know about death at all. What I know about is life after someone dies.

I saw three armored trucks today on my way to work. Two of them belonged to the MTA and were servicing different subway stations. The third was parked outside Grey Advertising. The men emptying the back of it were holding guns. There was a sign posted on the swinging doors: "Caution: Wide Right Turns."

Objects can contain people; I have written that before. And I suppose that -- strangely, unfortunately, morbidly -- the armored truck will forever be one thing to me, one thing only.

I have blogged about all the Sade stories, the way the universe (is that you Meg, I always ask?) has given me snippets of one song or another in a cab, on a stranger's iPod. Sometimes I will hear Sade on the dumb generic radio and I know it's not Meg. But sometimes I hear it from somewhere else, and my body gets warm and I feel this unbelieveable pressure all over myself, like she's trying to get me to pay attention. Look over here, it says, and for a moment I feel like a dumbass.

But I never know what she's trying to get me to see. Maybe that's not the point. Maybe she's just trying to tell me: I'm here.

Where They All Go

I struggle with the knowledge, as a writer and as an artist, that there are probably a finite number of pages I'll write in my life, and inevitably, too many things will be left out. My great-grandmother never looked any different to me. When I was born she was already in her sixties. She remained until she died that tiny, white-haired lady with shaking but strong fingers. I saw her crack a pecan open with her hands once.

This image came to me today while I was walking up Park Avenue. Motion always unhinges my brain: walking, rollercoasters, headlights beaming down a curving road. Even escalators. I thought about where to put that image. An essay? Fictionalize it, and turn it into something some character remembers? I thought about the surprise I felt when she squeezed the shell, and with what looked like no effort at all, it exploded in her palm.

Patience is really an invitation. This is a lesson I'm learning. You have to be satisfied with what you're creating in your own time. You have to trust that your method is the right method, and at the same time you have to be open to how that method might change, and also be changed by teachers and friends, by other books you read, by magazine articles and art exhibits.

You have to be okay with the fact that not everything will make it into the work. In telling you about my great-grandmother cracking the walnut open in her hands, are a hundred other images lost? A hundred-thousand? You have to trust that what comes is what comes. You have to let all the memories go where they go. If she and I were the only two people to ever share that moment, that has to be enough.

Martians, Part 2

In the 1960s, Dr. Frank Drake, one of the founders of SETI, invented an elaborate equation for use in thinking about the possibility of finding and communicating with extraterrestrial life. The equation is supposed to allow scientists to quantify the uncertainty of all the factors which can determine the number of civilizations out there. The Drake Equation looks like this:



N equals the number of number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we could expect to communicate. The other pieces include the rate of star formation in our galaxy, the fraction of those stars which carry planets, the fraction of those planets which can support life, and so on in smaller, more complex pieces until you get to what I think is the most interesting part of Drake's equation: L. It is referred to as the "lifetime factor."

If our own is any indication, civilizations create technology that allows them to potentially communicate with extraterrestrial beings at approximately the same time that they create the means with which to completely annihilate themselves. Therefore N, considering L, equals those civilizations that don't blow themselves up.

Martians, Part 1

Imagine this. Billions of years ago, before humanity, before the earth itself was anything remotely the way it is now, before even our solar system was the way it is now, the planet Mars was covered in free-flowing water. I'm not making this up--it's currently near-proven, an almost non-theory. From studying the rocks and rock formations on the surface, it sure looks like there were oceans of water at some point.

Now imagine that in that mineral-rich Martian ocean live tiny organisms, extremely small, uni- or multicellular, that have for thousands of years, for hundreds of thousands of years, (or for millions more) lived happily, not worrying about a thing.

The organisms that live at the bottom of our own oceans--miles down where no sunlight reaches, and thus no photosynthesis can occur--survive solely on the chemicals released into the water by underground vents. These vents are pumping water at nearly 750 degrees Fahrenheit into water that is just above freezing. Thus the animals living there must be able to withstand shifting temperatures of hundreds of degrees, changing like a whim.

So imagine billions of years ago, Earth is still a craggy, unfortunate rock. Mars, however, is a sea-rich world, which (also unfortunately) is about to be hit by an enormous asteroid the size of Texas. Or the size of Europe.

The impact of that asteroid throws enormous pieces of rock into the atmosphere, and inside those chunks of rock could be pockets of this Martian ocean. And in those pockets of Martian ocean, traveling through the climatic shifts of interplanetary travel, live some of these tiny creatures who like being hot and then cold and then hot and then cold again.

Some of those pieces of rock land on the surface of the earth. And then those organisms fall down into our own fledgling oceans. And the rocks crack open.

In this way, evolution doesn't begin as we think it might. Evolution begins billions of years earlier, on an entirely different planet.

Lost and Found

The MTA is running a new ad campaign called "Lose Something on the Subway or Bus?" Several of the items appearing in the campaign I find peculiar. Apparently, people often lose track of their:

-crutches
-wrapped gifts
-balls of yarn
-computer mouses
-king cobras
-boomerangs
-prosthetic limbs

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 3

Tom steps out of the bar, his face suddenly swathed in the yellow-ochre light of the streetlamp. Yellow-ochre is the color of this country, he thinks. Terracotta. The heat makes the world fuzzy. His brain, bathed in a loose veil of red wine and whatever the Italian football players got him to drink, seems to clunk along behind him like a dumb animal. “Catch up, you idiot,” he says half out loud. “Put your hand in your pocket and find your keys,” he says. His feet shuffle along the brick sidewalk. “Make yourself a list if you need to,” he says, again out loud, to the streetlamps, to the slice of barely-visible moon. “You are going home alone.” And then, almost as an afterthought, almost unspoken: “And you aren’t as drunk as you’re acting.”

Notes from the Weekend

--Fish Bar is not a great place, despite what the Internet (and certain friends) may tell you. Or perhaps, I was there too early on a strange not-very-bar-going night for New Yorkers. But, either way, no thanks.

--My friends Michael & Calvin, who have just begun the adoption process, are some of my most favorite people. If I won Golden Globe, I would thank them. They are like dads waiting to happen. They are already dads.

--I feel entirely at home in a roomful of lesbians. (Not so surprisingly, perhaps.) The intense processing, the huge salads, the impetus to tell all your deepest darkest fears. The cupcakes.

--Two years ago this week I was mugged/attacked/thugged-up by a kid who (maybe) didn't know what he was getting himself into. I'm a bigger guy than I look, perhaps. Or something. It's complicated. Even now I flinch sometimes when, at night, someone is walking too close behind me. I still think about how I hurt him. About how surprising that was--to both of us.

--The fish tacos at Miracle Grill are always as good as I remember them.

--One of my cats, The Bad Thing, has taken to having to sit in my lap while I am sitting at the computer. This makes writing somewhat difficult: the sad eyes, the chirping meows. The claws which so easily reach through my pajama bottoms into my thigh.

--It was the coldest it has been in NYC in the last three months--17 degrees, 22 degrees at times. 26 as I write this. Ironically, there was so much warmth in my life, that I hardly noticed it.

Dialogue, Vol. 2

T: What I need is to wake up from a coma in three months, and find myself well-acclimated to a new place.

L: How Sigourney Weaver of you.

On Writing

On Monday I worked on my new book basically all day, pausing only a few times to do the kind of work that I actually get paid for: travel arrangements, phone calls, emails, ego-stroking. Writing for that long -- for me, at least -- is akin to running a marathon in heels, or, strangely, spending the day underwater. When I met my friend Amanda in the late afternoon, so we could go see the new photo exhibit at Grand Central, I felt completely misaligned. In a good way.

I was here, of course. But I was really driving my car across the Mexican border, rubbing a turquoise necklace in my hand; every bead had warmed to my body temperature. I was off to meet my infant son, someone else's baby that was soon to be my own, excited and terrified and amazed.

In a completely humble way: I love what I do.

Spaghetti Dinner Article

My novel and I have been given a brief mention in an article appearing in the New York Sun today in the arts section, page 17. My friends, Great Small Works, are moving their monthly Spaghetti Dinner events -- which have been underway for the last 19 years -- to several new locations (Judson Church and possibly HERE, St. Ann's Warehouse and Theater for the New City) before hopefully settling somewhere permanent for the next nineteen.

The writer, Gary Shapiro, spoke with me briefly about the evening. His article includes a short history of the Spaghetti Dinners, as well as descriptions of performances by Bernice Silver, Basil Twist, Circus Amok, Amy Trompetter, and many others.

You have to subscribe to the paper in order to read the on-line version, which is why I haven't linked to it. I can email a scan of it to you upon request.

Poem #36

I fell in love with him,
for a moment,
at the hostess stand of the Big River Grill,
because he knew what I was,
but he still kissed my cheek, and
touched his hand to the small of my back
—where New York fags tattoo sharp, unprimitive
armor into their skin—
and laughed when I told him,
under the gauzy veil of gin,
that I wanted to take him home with me.

And because he had kept his I-am-earth-friendly beard,
his Land’s End polar-fleece and flat-front khakis look,
which to me made him seem so fragile,
like the soft, sinking foam of a good beer.

There was something simple inside him,
something unrestless and successful.
I cried about it later, having wished his kindness
upon me over and over.
And I knew that I could never accuse him
of loving me back.

Tucker Livingston

I'm still listening a lot to Tucker Livingston's self-titled debut, which came out February 2004. He and I have had some small correspondence in regards to how much I love his music -- I'm big on writing fan letters as many of you know -- and I think more people should hear him.

Named by the Austin Music Foundation as the 2003 Singer/Songwriter artist of the year, his record reached as high as the #6 most downloaded folk artist album in the world on iTunes. He has performed all over the festival circuit, and is still, however, looking for a label. He says his influences are Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Wilco.

You can hear three of his songs at his MySpace account here, or read more about him at his own website here.

Red Wife

An Idea for a Detail that Someone Should Write Into a Sci-Fi Novel

In the future, as the world becomes bought by multinational corporations, and the only thing more valuable than water and personal space is the idea of a person's free time, the obscenely wealthy will pay astronomical sums to have a surgical procedure which alters the receptors in their brains, so that all advertising is filtered out. You can buy back your eyes, so to speak.

Companies then subsidize these operations for the middle-class, on the condition that they allow only ads for their particular brand to be processed. Susan, for example, sees only Coca-Cola ads. Jonathan only sees the bloated, freckled face of the now-resurrected Bob's Big Boy. And there are millions of "Archies," the lowest social class, whose brains have been bought by McDonald's.

Joy Awaits

Sometimes I like to think about things on the horizon that give me unfettered joy. And lately I am feeling a certain excitement, because...The Olympics Are Coming.

38 days from today, the greatest athletes in the world will gather in Torino for the opening of the XX Olympic Winter Games. And despite my mixed feelings for any sort of nationalism in the ra-ra sense, the Olympics, I think (or, at least I like to believe) that in this case one should really root for your hometown team.

The figure skating should be especially thrilling this year. Since the scoring fiasco in Salt Lake -- the infamous "SkateGate" -- the committee has instituted a completely new system. Skaters are now given cumulative points based on individual elements according to the level of difficulty and the quality (that's where the subjectivity comes in,) of the execution. Essentially, this creates no absolute "perfect score." In addition, there are no longer ordinal placements. In previous years, judges sometimes would place a skater higher than the individual performance dictated because they "knew" he was generally a better skater, or that she had won the World Championship and therefore somehow "deserved" better marks. This year, with the new scoring system, only the performance on the ice will count toward a medal. Also, judges will remain anonymous, and no one will know which "country" each score came from. The cumulative score also allows skaters, who after the short program might be several places back, to leap ahead and win the big one. If you want to geek out, you can visit the NBC website here, which explains it all in far more gory detail than I have. Plus, all those ridiculous costumes.

Not to mention commentary cameos by my favorite skater of all time, Midori Ito of Japan. She still holds the most perfect-scoring World Championship titles than any other skater, male or female, and she is the first woman to land a triple Axel and triple/triple combination in competition. You can see that history-making triple Axel here