"HOW TO QUIT"

don't get me wrong: i'm not necessarily saying that i want to. at any rate, i think i've already missed my chance for meaningfully declaring any resolutions for the new year. but the party doesn't exactly stop exactly on january first, so it's possible, maybe, that i'd actually make my more meaningful resolutions now. but the party never really stops, does it? and one way or another we keep going. so resolved: to make whatever decisions are required of me with each slice of life that i'm served up -- one way or another.

i bought the current issue of n+1. i didn't buy it at the main-chicago newsstand, but that is where i first picked up a print copy and remembered having started to read "the intellectual situation" online (a different party). and i think that the magazine -- although i think that it will be happy as i continue to buy print copies -- would have me quit my fawning devotion to print. so be it. i can acknowledge the criticism. the slice of intellectual life served up by n+1 is almost always so delectably sympathetic. and maybe i should quit my fawning devotion to that...but, like i said, it's probably too late for that for now. so i'll keep going.

in the current issue of n+1 there's an essay by kristin dombek. it's called "how to quit." and that essay couches the author's ideas on her serial relationships with "drunks, drug addicts, sex addicts, compuslive gamblers, and/or people on or recovering from deep, life-threatening benders" within her experience of trying to hold on to bohemian williamsburg (and to one particular holdout building). "if the old building was real, this building is a steam-powered time machine. if the new neighborhood is real, this building is a dream, or a crypt. in other words, all this building makes me want to do is drink and fuck." ... "this building is a question about how you live after a tragic reversal, thrown back into history and wondering what can be recovered by returning to the scene." as for the author's compatriots, the people, "with a dead parent or two, bipolar or otherwise depressed people, musicians, writers, and/or pathological liars," she doesn't know when she meets them. "at some point, a week or two into the friendship or the affair, i find out, but by then i'm already hooked, because the things these people do to ensure they don't have to live in the straight world are wonderful." and the author and these people ride their time machines together.

or maybe it's the other way around, and the essay's picture of gentrification is meant to be its focus, and the author's interpersonal relationships are meant to frame or to highlight or to augur it. inasmuch as either could be the case i'm sympathetic. it's all, anyway, much larger than the specific slice of life. in fact, this particular slice of life turns out to be also about death, about letting things die.

this is one way to quit: wait until the bitter end, when you have done all you can to make the time machine keep working. you have learned its inner systems, improvised workarounds, carted in the water yourself, but it becomes harder to keep it alive than leave it. what they call hitting rock bottom. the final tragic reversal may be slow, boring, and horrible. the time machine has turned into a crypt, but it is not a crypt if you go inside with the body. if you must raise it from the dead again, know the power it has is your own: bend over it like a vampire, fire it up like dr. frankenstein. when you are able to stop, there will be a moment when you have to just walk out of the building. it's not that living will be the opposite of addiction now; there can be more life because you know how to stretch out time, more joy because you have practiced the art of reanimation. you are a professor of transformation; you just need new tools. there is no outside or inside to it, no opposition, no right way to go, just this new way of seeing.

at the head of the preceding paragraph: "it is important to know that there are things that end." when i thought to write this i thought that i was going to take it somewhere else. i was going to backward from that conclusion, quote dombek's description of the double bind of recovery and the addiction of the addict to the discussion of the double bind. then earlier: "in paradise lost, it's satan who thinks the mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heavan. he is, famously, the best character in the movie." then i thought i was going to go back to dombek's description of the ritual of her ministrations to her lovers. i would have given the entire long paragraph. "i do not say no, i do not say this is fucking ridiculous...don't die. stay with me. never leave." then i was going to bring in that sarah kane monologue from crave (to "tell you the truth when i really don't want to"). and the comparison, by nothing more than the juxtaposition of two paragraphs, would have been restrained but poignant. a silent augur. the capricious wild card chimera of love. but i think a different thought in the morning, in front of this much more boring table in this different light. i am resolved to stop here. it's important to know that there are things that end. so i won't go on -- with this -- even if the party does, one way or another, implicit. feet dragging an emboldened face into the new neighborhood. fire it up, dr. frankenstein! and cheers to the tail of the end, which is also the lingering trail of the beginning.

HOW TO KICK A DEAD GIFT HORSE -- ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY; or, PROVERBS, CHAPTER 1.5

on the third day, i rested. god, as they say, didn't sleep with everyone in rome in a day, and he needed to take at least one for himself to admire his handiwork while rehydrating and watching television. (glory be to the extra long weekend.) but that didn't mean i couldn't eat. to the contrary: baby, as they say, gotta eat. first, however, baby had to finish up his all night interview with TED (spreading ideas and absolutely nothing else), which might have ended more promisingly had the light of morning not shown baby the abysmal quality of TED's books.

the saturday crossword maybe isn't the best for your rest day, but verb had it for free, and the morning was young. unfortunately, i'd spent nearly all of my battery getting my interview materials together amidst the hilarity of having depleted the last reserves of rum in caracas, and when it died i figured i shouldn't be incomunicado (as they say) with the other set of keys in case there was business needing doing that wasn't going to have any other way back into the apartment. an excuse to sideline the crossword with only three clues answered? perhaps...but i would take it with me. and i took my cup from verb too, to the apartment and then to the southern restaurant where i ordered a mug of coffee anyway because it made the doughnut cheaper. you do the math -- because i didn't. it was my rest day plan to chase all of the rum in caracas with all of the coffee in williamsburg until my kidneys forced me to drink all of the fizzy non-alcoholic campari something that we found at the cheese shop when she was buying ingredients for pesto later in the day. either way, that is, i was coming out ahead. a dollars worth of one, a cup of coffee's worth of another, as they say. and in the end, even with the extra breakfast sandwich that we got for the table to share, everyone came out pretty well, including our servers, including tip. if there's one thing worse than cool, it's expressed authenticity. (with age, no resignation to collective wisdom, as they say.) refreshingly, the cool southern place didn't claim to be authentic. and, even better, it was deliciously cheap.

one stop later at blue bottle (you know, that one place in new york that the coffee bar you're in reminds you of?), she and i didn't get much further with the puzzle, but we did have a good time staring at it until someone had the giant fucking balls to flaunt the less than day old amnesty of the torch passing and get in line at the bar wearing a powell's tee. unfortunately, big balls or cute dyke-y recent transplant cashier or not, no one was going to have his or her face sat on at that place this morning after that low blow.

so she and i went down to the pier. we weren't there for smorgasburg, but neither were we immediately hungry (and the guy who told me it wasn't to miss was also the one who told me that larry lawrence was the bar to go to, so, you know). plus, we could see all of the food carts from where we were sitting on some steps in the shade, and it wasn't hard to imagine what was on offer. the new white street food refugees had escaped the flames and gotten asylum before the torch passing proceedings and the enactment of the amnesty. bored again with the scene, we played hot lava monster, hopping shade patches as far as we could down the pier, at the end of which we were welcomed with a pretty view of the skyline of old new york. could that ever have been public housing? then, turning back, a view of the authentic loft living experience of new brooklyn. did she know about "flag wars"? i asked. she didn't, so i gave her a run down. but as we were hot lava monstering through authenticity town back towards the streets of walk-ups strung with the flag of puerto rico, i was thinking less about that movie than adriana camarena's article in this summer's issue of n+1. "street food" is about the changes taking place in the mission district of san francisco, but one of camarena's most poignant statements goes for anywhere and everything on the way from christopher street to the castro, over to the mission, and back again to williamsburg: "we think of gentrification principally in terms of real estate, race, and class, but i more often find that food is the thermometer reading the temperature of gentrification." food for thought, as they say.

or so i was thinking. and at my next interview, when he asked me if i was a foodie (because we'd been talking about the strudel he'd had at smorgasburg and i'd told him about the southern place and the pesto she'd made for late lunch), i asked him in turn why he thought we needed a baby word for being hungry. and, well, i don't think i got the job. and rightfully so, because it wasn't really the occasion for misplacing the acute guilt i was feeling over what camarena describes (and well and in depth) as her "class and identity contradictions." you'll have to just believe in mine. or, as they say, not. the point is, who am i to talk. breakfast was still fifteen dollars. and, i mean, i shut myself up eventually by stuffing my mouth full of clam pizza at fornino. but i was only quiet over dinner. because then i made us stop for ice cream. in my defense, however, it was my day of rest, and i needed it, and replenishment, if i was going to keep on talking the talk, as they say, the next morning when i was going to have to walk the dog and bitch about the flea market. yes, the food carts would be gone, but damn if white people didn't like buying other people's marked up trash, which will remain trash...until i can afford it... 

GOLDEN

it was new. just new -- but also old, although not in the sense that anything bore an apparent age relative to the things anywhere else. and the change of scenery hadn't done anything for the pressure in my temples -- although it could have been that the similar climate meant similar airborne allergens. suffice it to say that, thankfully, i didn't feel at the center of anything that morning, the world nor much less. but the walk from williamsburg to downtown brooklyn was pleasant. alone (and, in my solitude, far from the center of the world), i was able to walk my cup from oslo across north portland and not at all regret gambling my hope for a couple more hours of dryness against running the steps at fort greene park. (at the time, i was still hopeful of visiting prospect park and archipelago.) unfortunately, after i'd happily given a cold shoulder to brooklyn heights and turned to walk myself down under the manhattan bridge overpass -- and even after ditching my empty oslo cup and taking the time to put another three dollars toward the progress of my headache -- the melville house bookstore wasn't going to be open until noon. and unfortunately too it wasn't going to take very long to take pictures of the building used for the exterior shots of the humphrey loft. (at the time i was still hopeful that some of the lies of television might still turn out to be true.) it was nice that the powerHouse store wasn't far (and that the man who came down from the offices to find something on the tables was showing so much of his chest -- of his chest hair), but even two times around everything wasn't good for much more than fifteen minutes, and so i ultimately had to give in and let the japanese tour group follow me and my tenugui (my imperturbability, my sweat soaked calm amidst the melee) to brooklyn roasting company for killing the last hour. and there, the faggots sitting like straight people, the alien baby about to make its way out of the middle of my forehead, the faggots talking straight about mitt romney's failure to commit to his heart of hearts and all of the other fucking people we married were, for better or for worse, a fitting prelude to my finding melville house still closed at fifteen past twelve. back in spain maybe, but not here. unacceptable. today, i was the center of the world, and the center was on its way back to manhattan. and it was a shame, because before i left i would have bought that new edition of "jacob's room" from the art of the novella series.

but up onto the manhattan bridge overpass and onto the bridge, which i took slowly because my sweat rag wasn't going to absorb much more, and my slowness gave me more time to contemplate why the cyclists in the bike lane got to be completely shaded and the pedestrians had to take the full force of the sun. we did, however, have the better view of the growing freedom tower and that time to wonder about the post-traumatic stress that would soon enough be recollected at ground zero from the rest of the slowly approaching island. or that's what we should have been contemplating, she told us later when we met at her office. the bridge sent me to chinatown, so of course i looked for vietnamese, and it was just as i was being unable to eat my second sandwich that she sent me the message asking if i had made it to the museum. i hadn't, of course, even made it into the bookstore, and i told her so, so she told me just to find her at work, since i apparently wasn't far. and that's what i did, through what she later told me was the demur of that diffuse but still lingering trauma, to the beautiful office where they stood at their workstations barefooted to end modern slavery and where i waited over coffee and my criticism of monocle next to my purse full of bánh mì. she noted the smell when she tried its weight later, but the shop boys in soho didn't seem to have a problem when asked after where it was from. and what's more, if i hadn't had the leftover sandwich halves on me, i wouldn't have had anything to offer to share with my new boyfriend on the train back under the water. too bad he lived in the east village and got off before i could make my proposition and do it for him. spurr. that was the name of the brand of his jeans, i told her. and she said she was okay with them as long as they weren't from uniqlo or zara, but i was happy for the distraction because i hadn't been as productive as i would have liked. hopefully, whoever found my charged up metrocard had made it to the whitney in my place.

and then there was tim; and it didn't matter about the book store or the museum or the metrocard (or the new one that i would lose later that i made after the shower so that i could make another meeting in manhattan). let's call him tim, anyway, the man of the night and of that one hour in the lobby of the ace hotel. portland was burning, and everyone had gathered to toast having escaped the flames. except for tim, who went to boarding school in massachusetts with a girl from beaverton and who had taken his new book on oregon wine country to his analyst that afternoon. tim was headed west. and on his way from his analyst to his mom's place on 76th and 5th he had stopped at the ace to pick up the torch we were passing. the other celebrants could have done without (although this wasn't obvious to tim), and he probably should have offered to pay for all of our eight dollar cans of beer, but i was won over by his infuriatingly brazen naivety. an arts district, tim, just means that gay people used to live there, i told him, and he took it in stride -- or in ignorance -- and asked me, then so how was gresham? it's true that dj huggy nonsense was doing his best to make sure that no one could hear, but i'm sure that tim said gresham, and i was all the more ingratiated by his persistence through the noise. it could only have been better had it been lady dottie. better for me. it was bad, apparently, for the others, who told me that the musk of the midwest had been wafting even stronger over the hotel lobby than it had been from the sandwich purse. but then the party stopped for the full moon, which was rising over what looked to be a corner of madrid somewhere on broadway. and the center shifted. but it was still me. and since tim took the torch without paying for drinks, someone was going to be responsible for buying me all the birthday rum in the world at the venezuelan place back in brooklyn.