Battery

It is getting cold. It is starting in with the snow. The wind is at the stinging stage. Nothing bothers melting. Bootprints of ice are pressed into the sidewalks. Icicles extend like teeth from cars’ bumpers and buildings’ eaves. My car refused to start on Tuesday. It was my own fault for not going outside and starting up the engine at all on Monday, as I’d pledged to do every day, even when I don’t have to drive anywhere, in order to keep the car from sitting too long idle in the cold, in order to avert just this sort of thing from happening. I turned the key and the engine made a strange non-sound, a series of clicks and a faraway whirr, not even a sputter. I kept trying, turning the key in the ignition again and again, suspecting that I was somehow doing irreparable or expensively-fixable-only things to my car’s aging engine block, but optimistically thinking that perhaps through sheer tenacity enough attempts would bring the moribund battery back from the dead. This was right outside my apartment. I was impatient. I had to get out and go. Newly-released Return Of The King Hyperextended Editions waited by the British bushel on groaning store shelves, their smartly-packaged tetrads of shiny movie discs murmuring my name seductively in the Black Speech, demanding to be purchased and viewed today, the unit street date, during daylight hours, none of this wait-for-after-work nonsense. I coughed up fifty dollars for some bored-looking beady-eyed no-necked goon in a van to jump-start my car’s battery with what looked like a bright red dinner tray sprouting alligator clamps on the ends of inky tentacles. Said goon actually hit me with a You new to the area or something? line — why yes I am, thank you, is it that obvious. I did not put on airs. I was the person sans clue in this scenario. He regarded me with justifiable beady-eye-rolling disdain when I admitted I didn’t belong to Triple-A. I will soon belong to Triple-A. I will also soon have a new battery put in. My poor car has not yet begun to truly give out on me. Someday it will strand me properly, and not at home, and not during the day, and when it’s quite colder than Tuesday’s cheerful noontime 19 Fahrenheit. The goon’s alligator dinner tray tentacles did their thing. The car revved back to life then, worked again in the evening, and started twice today as well. Successfully obtained and screened the four-hour third part of the Geekerdämmerung that night while consuming an entire bottle of Black Tower. A good healthy engine-gunning warmup once or twice a day, every day, we’re looking at for the whole of the season, be it rain, shine, or blizzard; so much for the Dickinsonian not-leaving-the-house routine I’ve gotten used to. The clear sharp snowy air has a fine scent and feel to be out in, for short spells. Tonight I am chilly-footed, static-shocked, oversugared, and all hobbited out.

The Festival of Waxes

I was alarmed and bewildered to discover that I had in fact purchased candles and lit them both last night and tonight without it ever occurring to me that last night and tonight were the first and second nights of Hanukkah, which I technically don’t celebrate anymore given that I haven’t practiced Judaism in years, I’ve long since abandoned my belief in the man upstairs, and I’m unable to recall the last time I consumed applesauce-slathered latkes. Admittedly the candles in question are not exactly synagogue issue, nor are we talking menorahs or shamases here. The candles I bought were seven Yankee Candle sampler-size lumps of assorted aromatic frou-frou, to help combat my apartment’s pretty much constant bouquets of sludgy coffee, unwashed laundry, atomized broth, and furnace-scorched dust-bunny.

The ones I lit last night were a) a periwinkle-blue bathroom-soap-ish number entitled Storm Watch, and b) a home-frankensteined combination involving the hollowed-out remains of an old Yankee scented votive entitled Harvest melting miserably around a shrinking unscented IKEA tealight, which combination I privately refer to as Harvester of Sorrow, w/ apologies to Hetfield.

I lit Stormy and the Harvester for atmosphere as I prepared dinner, drank wine, sliced my finger on the Saran Wrap box, and spilled several kinds of food on the floor. Then tonight I re-lit Stormy here in the office to make my workspace smell more like a French cat house and also to work on using up all this excess oxygen I’ve got lying about. I.e. all very secular and none too reverent in terms of Judaic significance or holiday spirit.

I did not realize until about half past ten tonight that I’d gone and accidentally celebrated the first two nights of Hanukkah, though of course I’d neglected to accidentally cough out the traditional Hebrew candle-lighting prayer. The closest I got to religious texts were, firstly, my stopping behind a pickup truck at a traffic signal on Niagara Falls Boulevard earlier tonight, which truck had grandly finger-written in the grime on its rear panel FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE WASH ME (with a large skewed NO! finger-appended to the upper right); and, secondly, my reading Anne Carson telling the Paris Review that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.

In any case I feel that any inadvertent Hanukkanian tendencies were probably offset tonight by my indulging in a bout of bonafide Naziesque boot-polishing. One of my Doc Marten boots’ laces snapped a few months ago and this evening while out looking for replacement laces I got suckered into buying this whole package of Doc Marten boot-care schwag — laces, dustcloth, sponges, a tin of balsam wax, a tin of some mysterious lardy goop called “dubbin” — and I sat down at the kitchen table and cracked open the wax and gave those Docs a shining they won’t forget. They now gleam Reichishly, ready to tread on the oppressed in steel-toed high style. The whole time I was working on them I couldn’t help but keep inwardly hearing Woody Allen’s line from Manhattan about beating down Nazis: It’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.

Charles

I am in Florida this week. I am working my day job from my parents’ home in Punta Gorda, camped out between 930am and 530pm in their combination computer room and romance novel library, plugged into my laptop and perspiring. The weather outside is of course warm and balmy, delivering ceaseless pastel sunshine and a steady hum of gentle breezes so fresh and fragrant you just about wish for a third lung. The swimming pool’s little decorative waterfalls burble cheerfully all day. Tiny lizards dance back and forth across the patio cement and vanish into the patio pebbles. It is all very well and good and I expect to start feeling soothed and rejuvenated any minute now.

Punta Gorda, as one or two of you may vaguely remember having heard mentioned once or twice on the news a few months ago, got spectacularly stepped on by Hurricane Charley back in August. It is three months later now and the town still resembles post-Blitz London with a dash of post-party frathouse backyard. Debris in every direction, towers of adobe-hued rubble festooned with scaffolding and tarpaulins, garage after garage boarded over with plywood and spray-painted with enormous insurance claim numbers. Charles turned nine hundred palm trees over, removed four hundred boats from their moorings, lifted ten thousand scalloped clay shingles off roofs, poured six hundred thousand gallons of rainwater into bedrooms and garages and boxes full of fragile heirlooms and irreplaceable memorabilia, divided nine-and-a-half hundred window panes into geometrical subsections, annihilated ninety percent of the restaurants worth a damn and eighty percent of the ones that deserved as much if not worse, bent one hundred highway light poles in half like jointed straws, re-landscaped sixty sand traps, rotated seven dozen dolphin- and manatee-shaped mailboxes, and inserted eight hundred thousand pieces of building materials, earthbound objects, and patio furniture into walls, automobiles, and persons.

My parents’ house is still standing, but it has suffered a healthy and respectable amount of damage. Charles tore off the patio lanai and sunk its shredded screen and twisted struts into the pool with most of the roof’s shingles. Also sent a few monsoons’ worth of rain through the roof vents and into the house, waterlogging lots of ceilings, walls, carpets, furniture, and hideous 1970s bric-a-brac. Also violently propelled some mysterious heavy projectile at high speed through the master bathroom window and halfway through the adjacent door. Also surely a wince-inducing laundry list of other breakages and trashings and water-damages that I am forgetting but which you know were described in Nicholson-Baker-like detail in the swaying stacks of insurance paperwork my poor parents had to machete through. Repairs are well underway and should be complete in ample time for next year’s hurricane season.

Eclipsing

I watched tonight’s lunar eclipse from my front bay windows, one paper blind rolled up. The Moon hung fairly high in the sky, so I lay down on the floor under the windows with a pillow under my head in order to enjoy a good long look without craning my neck. I peered up at it with one eye through one lens of a pair of binoculars. Usually the Moon looks flat, a disc or a crescent or some variety of oval, but the shadow’s curvature made it appear every bit the sphere it is. For some reason I found this dimensionality eerie; a smooth shaded bone-white half-luminous ball suspended up there outside my window. I caught most of the eclipse’s beginning and the last part of the ending. My vantage point on the floor turned the Moon on its side and made the Man in the Moon vanish. Above me, tenants in the upstairs apartment screamed and roared and stomped on the floor as the Red Sox buried the Curse of the Bambino. Cold air from the windows seeped into my shearling-lined slippers. City-underlit clouds glided by like smoke. The Earth’s umbra crept up over the craters. I breathed heat-vent dust.

SEA-to-JNU

I remember Thursday, 22 July 2004 very well — at least in terms of the day’s density and sheer geographical breadth if not all the details of the day itself, which fatigue fogged over and then some — because that was the day on which I drove from Charlottesville, Virginia to Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC, then flew to Detroit, Michigan, then flew to Seattle, Washington, then flew to Juneau, Alaska. (Then ended the day w/ beer-battered seafood platter + Jack-and-Coke, consumed on an outdoor waterfront bar patio flanked by a battery of space heaters, 11pm Alaska time.)

The most interesting leg of this quadripedal trip was the one from Seattle to Juneau.

REASON ONE

We had just gotten airborne and I was interfacing with a packet of in-flight trail mix when our pilot pointed out over the intercom that we would in fact shortly be seeing the sun rise in the west.

He explained that we’d taken off from Sea-Tac just after sunset and would be flying northwest fast enough that we’d see the setting sun climb back up over the horizon for a little bit. I was seated in a window seat on the left side of the plane, so I saw it come up, and a bold red stripe of rising western sun shone into my eyes for several minutes.

REASON TWO

The landscape below us, when there was landscape, and when there was light left in the sky to see it by, appeared to be impossibly intricate scrawls of dark royal blue etched faintly into darker blue, inset into other blues that were darker still. As the sun went down again the deepening twilit lands and waters slipped that slight bit more into indistinctness and shadow.

I forget who it was who described these sorts of coastal patterns as being conversations between land and water, or transcriptions thereof, written into the planet’s surface like ink into paper. (What would land and water have to talk about?)

REASON THREE

Our plane was Alaska Airlines’ Mickey Mouse plane.

Notes On Pres. Debate #1 (2004 Edition)

I actually quite enjoyed this latest presidential debate, watching it tonight on TV. Both G.W. (“Dubya”) Bush and John (“j/k”) Kerry were extraordinarily vibrant, charismatic, engaging, substantive, persuasive, humble yet self-possessed, nakedly honest yet just a bit mysterious, mellifluous of manner and expression, visionary in matters of diplomatic whip-cracking, T.-Rooseveltian in voice volume and stick size, breathtakingly capable at intertwining hoi-polloi informality with presidential gravitas, well-nigh silver-tongued in their encapsulations of and expoundings upon their geopolitical Weltanschauungen, and in sum total managing to collaborate on a thoroughly enchanting and edifying hour-and-a-half of straight-talking media-savvy dialectic.

Their sartorial sense was, as ever, exquisite. Kerry cut a svelte profile in a midnight-blue Redaelli three-button single-breasted wool suit, an ecru cotton shirt by Bucelli Uomo, a dawn-rose/ocean-blue banded Duchamp tie of woven Jacquard silk, heritage chocolate calf Florsheim Kenmoor oxfords, and a gentlemanly champagne peluche homburg by Miller perched atop his strawberry-blond coiffure. Bush sported a jet-black Armani Collezioni three-button double-breasted wool suit, a gunmetal-grey Basile linen shirt, a Hugo Boss silk tie striped in sanguine reds, and jet-black Mephisto Lucero perforated wingtips, the whole ensemble crowned by a tiny pair of sleek Byblos Italian shades and a grandly billowing black leather-and-silk sashed overcoat by Jil Sander; I thought the new Fu Manchu goatee look suited him well, lending his jawline some much-needed definition. Must admit that I thought Bush’s drumrolled, spotlit, ascent-through-trapdoor entrance was a bit much, though it was a mild improvement over the slightly hesitant limb-knotting Yuen-Woo-ping-choreographed martial-arts wirework routine with which Kerry took the stage.

Something about the way the candidates both stonily refused to shake each other’s hand or even make eye contact rubbed me the wrong way, though I am usually an admirer of classy viciousness. Moderator Jim Lehrer was a clay-faced ghoul with eyes like enormous black jellybeans. The at least foot-and-a-half of height difference between the two candidates became shockingly evident in those split-screens the networks kept employing throughout; Bush seemed to slowly gnarl down behind the podium like a flower decaying in time-lapse, whilst Kerry’s homburg visibly emitted curls of smoke from the overhead lights’ heat, mere inches away.

Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed by the candidates’ speaking voices, command of the language, and deftness at captivating an audience through rhetoric, with both men managing to neither wallow in obsequious mealy-mouthed dithering nor erupt into frothy podium-pummeling histrionics. I had pocket-sized Moleskine and mechanical pencil at the ready the whole time, scribbling down notes like a methamphetamined Franciscan monk, snapping lead after lead in my struggle to keep handwritten track of political positions and forensic parry-ripostes.

As Kerry spoke, honeyed rose petals tumbled from his tongue with every word, a company of tiny kilted-and-bandoliered kittens adorably danced the hornpipe around his polished Florsheims, and a beatific radial-beamed glow haloed his figure in a resplendent wash of pearlescence and starlight, gorgeously heightened by the studio halogens. I noted with interest that he was speaking entirely in rhymed iambic hexametric couplets, or alexandrines. Bush stylishly delivered his statements and rebuttals accompanied by a dark cloud of ravenous squirming cockroaches pouring en masse out of his mouth, thunderous columns of flame streaming from the empty eye-sockets behind his Bybloses, and a cacophony of military-grade Giraite 7.62x51mm (.308) armor-piercing ammunition rounds spouting out of his every unclothed epidermal pore. It was occasionally a challenge to make out his words over the clicking, blazing, and clanking.

Overall I would say my impression was that Kerry seemed to favor “more uniting”, while Bush seemed to favor “more amputating”. They spent the alloted ninety minutes waxing rhapsodic on the ever-metastasizing problems of American foreign policy and its discontents, prodded into candor by Lehrer’s hard-nosed questions and chilling jellybean gaze. Kerry said if elected he would offer a generous tax credit to non-television-watchers and non-cellphone-users. Bush said if re-elected he would provide all Americans with biweekly bread vouchers and circus tickets. Kerry said that if elected he would name Bill Clinton as White House Press Secretary so we’d all get to see him on TV again all the time. Bush said that if re-elected at least we could all look forward to a veritable bevy of Oscar-caliber Iraq War movies coming out in a decade or so, you know, something by a Scott, i.e. Top Gun Tony and/or Black Hawk Ridley. During the Broadway showtune portion of the debate, Kerry of course belted out a heartfelt medley of selections from Miss Saigon, while Bush dipped into the Cats soundtrack and performed a rousing rendition of “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer” (“… for they were incurably given to Rove”).

I made a note in the Moleskine to try to remember to get around to visiting both candidates’ campaign websites while I’m slacking at work so I can maybe get an even clearer idea of how each man might best serve the interests of a middle-class underpaid web designer with a towering Barad-dûr of debt to whittle away at, astronomical heating bills to pay, and a petite amie Canadienne to regularly wine and dine. Kerry said that if elected he would go over to The Rest Of The World’s house with a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates and perform a moonlit serenade beneath their bedroom window and then tenderly ask if all was forgiven. Bush said that if re-elected he would have all the nation’s fireplugs renamed “Hero Hydrants”, and for an encore would order the U.S. Mint to introduce a commemorative $9.11 bill with his portrait on it and Dick Cheney’s face visible in the hold-it-up-to-the-light part. Kerry pledged to introduce a UN Resolution calling attention to Donald Rumsfeld’s uncanny resemblance to Tales from the Crypt’s Cryptkeeper. Bush promised a chicken in every pot, a Hummer in every garage, and a mushroom cloud on every continent. Kerry claimed that as president he would revitalize the nation’s dwindling chin-strap spittle-cup industry by once again giving conservative media pundits a president to adequately foam at the mouth about. Bush said he would press for an amendment banning all late-stage abortions except in the cases of gay engaged fetuses. Kerry stumped Bush by asking if he could pass an Executive Order too powerful for his Daddy to exempt him from. Bush got back at him by making ingenious use of lectern-thumps, eye-blinks, and nose-whistles to insult Kerry in some of the foulest, most excoriating profanity I have ever heard, in flawless International Morse. But there was mercifully little outright mudslinging or personal attacks, aside from the bit where Bush lustfully murmured that oh what he wouldn’t give to see the smoking-hot Kerry daughters on A.-Ghraibian leashes, and maybe the bit when Kerry got wondered aloud how magnificent those nubile Bush twins would look when bent into the choke-proof pretzel position.

From time to time you could see production assistants hustling onto the stage with dust-brooms to clear away the ever-increasing heaps of kitten hairballs, bullet casings, rose petals, and roaches.

I have still not made up my mind who to vote for. They both have their bad points and badder points, I feel. The debate definitely clarified things for me but I still have to think it over. In answer to the canonical campaign question Are you better off now than you were four years ago, I would have to concede that the answer is No: after all, four years ago I was a young and sprightly twenty-three, still within the coveted eighteen-to-twenty-four sweet spot of marketing demographics and pop-culture reference-catching, whereas now I am a withered and decrepit twenty-seven, all but slinking around looking for a quiet and inoffensive corner in which to shrivel up and die.

During the debate’s show-and-tell finale segment, Kerry pulled aside a curtain to reveal the Swift Boat Veterans in dunce-hats and ball-gags and Chinese finger-cuffs, cattle-prodded onto the stage by Teresa dressed in a full-body Licorice-the-Hamster costume, a sign around her furry neck reading “AMERICA”, whereupon on cue Kerry leaned her over the lectern and performed passionate resuscitory mouth-to-mouth (verily, the symbolism could be lost on no one), then stood back up and assumed his My Lai War Face, pimp-slapped all the Swift Boaties with a custom pair of cast-iron flip-flops, and then mercilessly stabbed their eyes and throats out with a Tabasco-dipped bayonet razor-wired to the headstock of a twelve-string Washburn acoustic.

Bush then pulled aside his curtain to reveal none other than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden bound and gagged and standing naked atop faux-electrified boxes, a jovial Pfc. Lynndie R. England standing between them and snickering at their johnsons, whereupon on cue Bush popped open a celebratory bottle of Asti Spumante and showered the two captives with it, then rolled up his sleeves and bare-handedly ripped out Saddam’s spine Predator-style, brutally bludgeoned Osama to death with it, lit the two champagne- and blood-drenched carcasses aflame with Lynndie’s cigarette, and then triumphantly snorted the resultant ashes up his nose with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution.

I missed the closing statements because I was raiding the refrigerator; it’s tough to watch a solid hour-and-a-half of TV without a snack break. All the deathless wrinkled talking heads on television said that Bush had steamrolled over Kerry without letting perspiration drop #1 even leave the glandular hangar, but all the politico bloggers said online that you would have to be some sort of burbling subterranean protozoic invertebrate to possibly think anything other than that Kerry had savagely skewered Dubya upon his own nucular kabob. I have a month left to make up what remains of my mind. I may just skim the polls and trust what the coasts think.

For historical interest: Notes On Pres. Debate #1 (2000 Edition).

Abode

Some more fun facts about my new abode. The alt-weekly classified ad through which I’d found the place had said impressive lake & downtown skyline views, but you have to be on the upper floors to see that, and in my opinion they’re not worth the walkup. My ground-floor views out the front bay windows consist of a small fortress of a liquor store, a gothy leather/fetish/adult-toys boutique whose phone number contains the word DEAD, a bar named after a prominent late German existentialist philosopher, and one rounded end of a diminutive pill-shaped Olmsted park. This park features a tall black spindly Gigeresque fountain burbling with green water and spasmodic songbirds, a ring-shaped flower garden whose center circle on weekends is the slo-mo battleground of a local Tai Chi posse, and an arguably excessive battery of large-lettered signs commanding dog owners to be vigilant in their shoveling of pet shit. The day after I moved in, Buffalo received what the news later said was the city’s largest single-day rainfall in over ten years. During the downpour, one of my living-room bay windows wept, its upper window-frame plunking fat drops of exterior spillover onto the floor a few feet from where L & I were watching DVDs on my laptop (this was before the furniture arrived); I’d thought the water-sounds were part of the movie. So far my gas stove has awarded me with two (2) gas leaks, necessitating my having to twice phone up the gas company’s emergency number after I started getting the impression that the dangerously-subtle gas-like bouquet I was detecting was not my imagination; I have since been presented with a newer (circa, say, mid-Ford-administration) and so far less problematic stove. In the bathroom I have adorned the shower with two shower curtains, one on either side — one to keep water off the bathroom floor, the other to keep the large poorly-frosted exhibitionistic shower-side window covered, for the benefit of the neighbors across the way — and it does nothing to keep my mind off my ever-darkening presidential-election-related cynicism that the double curtain makes the shower feel like the inside of a voting booth. In the celebrity-resemblance department the landlord is Jayson Blair and the on-site maintenance dude is AJ McLean. I once again have a Laundroid in my employ, the hulking washer-dryer combo machine that stands six-three and looks like an ENIAC disk drive. It took me two loads of laundry to realize that my laundry room should not turn into a tropical sauna with dripping walls and a droplet-blanketed ceiling each time I ran the dryer, and shortly thereafter I had AJ come over and obligingly hook up the Laundroid’s air-vent to the massive Shai-Hulud of a duct that’d been idly dangling loose out of the wall. It is a large apartment but is bizarrely inexpensive compared to the sort of rent I’m used to paying, so rest assured I am ever on the lookout for what the catch might be. As of last weekend, whenever I fire up the stove to cook something, the kitchen fills up with the scent of charred tapioca (long story; not the stove’s fault). The shower head that came standard with the apartment dispensed water at about eyebrow-level and with a water pressure on par with that of the average nosebleed; a few weeks ago I finally gave in and shelled out some roquefort at a certain purveyor of domestic frou-frou whose repertoire purportedly goes beyond mere bed & bath, and so I now own a girly masseuse-style shower nozzlette that hoses me down each morning from a height of seven feet and emits a coddlingly pulsing cone of firm but forgiving water rivulets that seems to not so much massage as molest. I have been slow to buy blinds for the windows; for a few weeks I had a black bedsheet thumbtacked over my bedroom window, followed by a month or so of two mostly-opaque sheets of 32″x40″ white foamcore, both of which options admitted minimal daylight and thus consistently wreaked unbelievable havoc on my sleep habits (actually it’d be more accurate to say my waking-up habits); I have just recently obtained a translucent tatami shoji blind for the window, and I now wake up every morning bathed in diffuse sunlight and feeling like a ninja.

Canadian Girls Resemble Birds

Canadian girls resemble birds. As a general rule. I absolutely do not mean this in a bad way. It is just that throughout my travels to Canada, whilst milling about in stores and streets and shopping malls and restaurants, being immersed in the public, and sort of osmotically taking in in aggregate the faces of passersby — and gradually becoming plagued by a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that there was in fact some elusive differentiating quality in how everyone there looked, along the lines of the way young faces from old photographs look subtly different from young faces now — I have observed and encountered an initially-disproportionate-seeming number of local females (of all ages, body types, and ethnic backgrounds) whose facial features strike me as tending toward the vaguely avian: thin-bridged whittled-sharp noses, tapered teardrop chins, elegantly wide-spaced eyes kept ever alert and chillingly limpid, a downward angularity to the lips and mouth that seems both demure and predatory (and/or both pouty and anatine), poised jawlines, raptorially-arched eyebrows, graceful curving necks, etc., and overall an abiding sense of facial streamlining, as though the skin and hair and dainty bird-bones had all been sculpted and drawn backward just ever so slightly in response to high-speed wind- and water-resistance; so that although you don’t actually see the beaks and bills and feathers and crests, your mind just subliminally fills them in for you. // I am confident that this assessment is hardly a revelation. Canadian girls know it and are proud of it. It certainly explains the popularity of the 2000 hit single “I’m Like a Bird”, by Canadian pop star Nelly Furtado, who is about as uncannily birdlike of face as one could dream of this side of Charles Le Brun. // (I am, perhaps judiciously, having a bit more difficulty discerning any sort of consistent character to the faces of Canadian males, other than that there’s an unsurprising prevalence of likenesses to scrappy woodland mammals.)

Apartment

On many mornings I have to keep reminding myself that the apartment I live in is not actually located in a converted five-floor Victorian building of limestone and coffee-colored brick and weather-warped moulding and art deco atrocities, its walls and sills and jambs encased in untold generations of gnarled paint, stopped-up dead chimneys rising like ossified spinal columns here and there through vertically-adjacent tenants’ living and reading rooms, once-grand front windows now glazed over with translucent grime and caught between the airless stairwell’s floors. It is not that. It is in fact located at the bottom of a wind-hollowed, water-carved catacomb of rock, all its silt-carpeted rooms and alcoves and yawning hallways lined high with lamps of gleaming garnet mica and pleochroic andalusite, the neighboring caverns’ climbing tunnel-veins ventilated by river-winds’ updrafts, its milieu somewhat harsh of condition more often than not, chill and damp and dark and but very silent and secluded, remote, enclosed as in the palm of an immense lithic hand, kept peacefully apart from the tailspinning disintegration of soi-disant governments and faute-de-mieux electorates of late, and gifted with a fine view facing willfully westward, fixed upon the Niagara as it flows uphill out of Canada’s glacier-flumed waterlands, the familiar grinning arcs of inverted rainbows floating up through the mist when the foaming current vaults the Falls. It’s just that I am blinded by workaday habit and my bearings sometimes abandon me.

So Then Winter

I am fucking ready, motherfucker; it is August and I am ready. I have moved to Buffalo NY and I am waiting for the winter. The Winter. THE WINTER. Smile when you meet its eyes, I’m told; tremble when you say its name. Here in summer its absence is looming, conspicuous, taut with expectation, like the tidal outflow before a great wave. I am waiting for it and already I cannot wait. Consider me steeled and stocked up.

I have by now undergone a number of passes through the gauntlet of informing acquaintances and relations about my move to Buffalo, and then observing as they inhale sharply and shake their heads and hoist high their eyebrows and stare at me in terrible pity, finally speaking to me in a well-good-fucking-luck-it-was-nice-knowing-you tone of voice about the thing they invariably think of first when they think of this town, the WINTER, their doomsaying send-offs perhaps leavened by talk of Wings or Bills or Gals;

and I have, in passing, been taken aback by the voluminousness of the metro yellow-pages’ section of ominously gigantic aggressive bold-lettered red-inked ads for an avalanche of services involving heat: oil, gas, electric, furnaces, radiators, boilers, hot water baseboards, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, heating ducts, heat pumps, insulation, installation; EMERGENCY this, EMERGENCY that, your EMERGENCY CALL responded to in X minutes or you grimly succumb to hypothermia & frostbite & the jaws of ice-mice, GUARANTEED; heat, heat, heat, HEAT, heaters, heating, heatingness, heatedness, hotness, hotterness, hotter, hottest, hottt;

but these faze me not; consider me socked, scarved, sweatered, mittened, fattened, capped & coated, turtlenecked, long-johned, lip-balmed, layered, liquored up, well in advance, and/or ready at a moment’s notice to suit up suchlike;

also, more to the point, consider me cocooned blissfully within my apartment for days on end, unconcerned about being snow-stranded, not needing to even step outside my front door for the duration (save to help shovel walks for shivering orphans & helpless old ladies), extra stores of high-carb high-starch vittles piled high in the pantry, extra bottles of gut-warming wine & spirits in the cabinets and in the liquor store across the street, a more-or-less steady infusion of direct-deposited telecommuter cheddar accumulating in the checking account for forking over to the local fuel-&-gas conglomerate (whose minuscule twenty-five-dollar summertime Amounts Due snicker quietly at me, thinking of the leviathanic winter gas bills even now hovering darkly just over the seasonal horizon);

and thus I eagerly await the six-plus feet of car-slaying snow; I am hungry for the two-hundred-dollar heating bills; I ache for the low whispering of drafty windows and doors, the burnt dust coughed out by unceasing heat vents, the arctic shock upon stepping out of the morning shower, the icy sting of hardwood floors beneath bare feet; I am feverish for the cold fronts disastrously colliding with airborne lacustrine caloric — Lake Effect, do your worst.

So then Buffalo. So then WINTER. Where is it. Show it to me. Start getting fucking cold or fucking else. Impress me. Cold, burn up my utility money; snowfall, confiscate my yardstick. Bury my car and my street and my way out. Flash-freeze my bones and my blood. I am so very very ready. I say this here on the cusp of late summer: step lively, hurry it up, bring it already, I can’t wait forever.

Beeline

My exodus from Virginia was fueled primarily by one of Bodo’s Authentic New York Water Bagels, hot and moist and sliced in two and dripping with veggie sludge; and, to a lesser extent, one of lowercase littlejohn’s New York Delicatessan’s Five Easy Pieces, a decidedly uneasy sandwich I’ve eaten innumerable times but never really got around to getting clear on what specific pieces the titular quintet actually consisted of.

The Commonwealth’s heartfelt farewell to me came in the form of a vaguely yellow-jacketish bee that tiptoed up the inside back of my shirt and stung me while I was in the car on Interstate 81 North, doing eighty one-way toward the VA-WV border. I figured the fellow for an emissary from the crickets.

Blinding white deluges in the mountains of western Pennsylvania did their inundatory utmost to power-wash every last trace of the South off of my car; what it will take to get the nine years of it off of me still remains to be seen.

I am still here on the Moon, of course, but have moved from Mare Tranquillitatus a few hundred miles up to Lacus Perseverantiae (out near Palus Somni and the Sinus Amoris); a different region, a much cooler one, both in terms of climate and of electoral hue. My new license plate boasts of Empire. I’m told don’t call it upstate.

Springs

At two-something in the morning the upstairs tenants begin getting it on in the room right above the bedroom I use as a study, as I’m sitting here trying to type; the prolonged allegretto bedspring squeakita-squeakita for minutes on end is what rather unambiguously gives it away;

the study walls’ toothy stucco-like texture jabs my ear’s auricle as though in smug admonishment when I press the ear to the wall, attempting to eavesdrop, to listen for moans, cries, sighs, gasped requests, and/or screamed announcements, plus maybe a name or an innovative idea;

my intentions are unabashedly on the voyeuristic side here but not without an honest information-gathering thrust, so to speak, given that I’m interested in establishing roughly how loud I and L. may reasonably get away with being while here in the apartment, in terms of the volume of entertainments and amorousnesses and arguments and flatware-flingings, etc., without unduly imposing upon any sensitive/lascivious ears next door or overhead (particularly in light of my place’s resounding high-ceilinged, hardwood-floored acoustics);

— but no upstairs vocalizations are evident: the springs’ pistoning protests are all I get, and I abandon the toothy wall and return to my desk; perhaps this energetic couple prefers to go about it soundlessly, out of boredom or sleepiness or discreetness or time-tested familiarity or baby-making stoicism or an unspoken awareness that they may very well be one story above a writer’s-blocked scribbler starved for observational stimuli; or perhaps it’s simply that these old buildings and their thick monolithic walls are built for keeping out the cold, in the warmth, and private the midcoital rhetoric;

whatever the case, from my angle, these sounds of voiceless squeaky upstairs sex become coldly percussive and mechanical, like a spin cycle or a mimeograph machine or a dance-mix hi-hat, which (with an eye toward the need to seek insight into the human experience or some such thing) is something of a shame: if one has to overhear one’s neighbors in full-blown copula carnalis, why not at least overhear something of the people involved, rather than simply their tormented furniture? — (but I should be careful what I wish for: for all I know their sex-cries might sound like Diamanda Galás ravishing Captain Caveman);

and but the bedsprings’ hammering stops soon enough (and with an endearing suddenness), replaced by the after-sounds, which subtly mold these neighbors into actual human beings, moving as they do through hinted-at post-Act gestures I recognize: gentle mattress groans, faint barefooted floor-creaks, a door-latch, a faucet, a few murmurs back and forth, slowing and fading all the while, then more mattress easings, then a fine two-body silence.

Preoccupied

Lately I have been feeling preoccupied. By lately I mean within the past two and a half months, the span of time that has passed since I started my new job. By preoccupied I mean that my attentions seem ever elsewhere. By new job I mean the new web job that I got after a shall we say unanticipated eight months off. By elsewhere I mean that my attentions seem divided up much moreso than usual among many disparate matters vying insistently for priority — other than the one matter that you are now reading, that is, which one matter I feel has been somewhat neglected because of this very elsewhereness and dividing-up — and which attentions thus find themselves directed, all at once, toward trying to focus upon work, upon a relationship, upon moving, upon money, upon reading and writing and talking and traveling and a whole bouillabaisse of other elsewhereish concerns. By off I mean not working. By attentions I mean the part of my mind responsible for actually decisively doing stuff, as opposed to endlessly twittering around and never getting right down to it and doing whatever needs to be done. By not working I mean working but not working at the kind of work I would prefer to work at, let’s just say. By web job I mean a full-time paycheck-and-benefits gig doing web design for a company in a certain sunshiney state. By a certain sunshiney state I mean not where I am now. By relationship I mean between me and Laura. By money I mean the lack of it, which probably goes without saying. By moving I mean my already-underway plans to relocate to a different city in a different state this summer, and not to that certain sunshiney state, though I will still be employed by the sunshiney state company. By the kind of work I would prefer to work at I mean web design, although in my heart of hearts the real work I would prefer to work at would be writing books, but let’s not get into that right now. By traveling I mean visiting Laura and apartment-hunting in that aforementioned different city in a different state. By probably goes without saying I mean 100% definitely goes without saying but this is how one gets away with incorporating tired truisms into one’s uninspired late-night missives. By late-night I mean between about 1:30 and 3:30 in the morning, speaking of tired. By this summer I mean July. By eight months I mean beginning with last July. By neglected I just mean I haven’t written here as often as I’d’ve liked to. By written, often, and liked I’m not sure I know what I mean. Same with books and uninspired and heart of hearts and whatever needs to be done and stuff and matter and feeling and mean.

Cup of Mistake

It had been a mistake to order this coffee drink I’d ordered, this black coffee with a shot of espresso. I had never had one before. It is a simple enough drink, common among blue-collar joes, caffeine fiends, and showoffs. I have personally heard it called a Redeye or a Shot In The Dark, but the internet informs me that it is also referred to variously as a Hammerhead or a Speedball or an Eye Opener or a Bellman or a Boilerhouse or a Scrap Iron or a Depth Charge. (One source also describes it as “an Americano with coffee instead of hot water”, which is true, but is sort of like describing the Sun as the Moon with fire instead of dust.) My own newly-coined personal name for this drink is: a Mistake.

I drank this twelve-ounce Mistake after having just sucked down a regular cup of black coffee within the hour. It was around 9pm and I was at an underwhelming but adequately late-houred coffeeshop, alone with a couple of books and some time to kill. I had a shall we say “abruptly rescheduled” 6am flight to catch the following morning, and for reasons I won’t go into, I’d opted to not bother going to sleep. I was looking to gird my viscera and gun my neurological pistons in order to stay up all night before flying out in the morning; hence the first coffee and then the Mistake.

The Mistake didn’t taste bad at first, but with each successive sip its noxiousness grew, evincing a distinctively robust palate-eroding texture, revealing notes of industrial pollutants and astringent grit. Several sippings in, I sensed the ominous beginnings of a headache, a kind of subtle faraway circulatory throbbing somewhere in my cerebrum’s left-hand upstairs. I began feeling serviceably wired — attentive, alert, Raring To Go, eager to face the long night ahead — but then wired turned to jittery, then quivery, then agitated, then rather rapidly down off the continental shelf into fist-clenchingly teeth-grindingly mouth-grimacingly skin-crawlingly out of my mind with every type of caffeine-catalyzed jeebie, meemie, willie, and fantod available.

I huddled there at the table, beset with periodic spaz-tremors similar to the faux-whiplashy episodes I get after swallowing an overambitious quantity of vodka. The uncushioned wicker-woven chair seat I was sitting on made me feel like I was perched bare-assed on a horrible claw of coral. The other coffeeshop patrons’ and employees’ voices turned harshly animal in my ears, becoming the cries of flies, the growls of cows, the shrieks of leeks, the shazams of lambs. Is “amphetaminely” a word? I blinked spastically down at my books’ pages’ rows of letters in a sorry imitation of deeply interested reading. I sank my fingernails into my forearm and opined that it didn’t sting to my satisfaction.

My hands kept curling into little allosaurian forelimbs. My nerve endings started sprouting out of my hair follicles. I was ready to suck all the graphite out of my mechanical pencil and then devour the clicky metal casing. I chewed my tongue like it was a whole pack of bubblegum inserted at once and gone uniformly flavorless. I started scribbling panicked notes in my notebook and my handwriting was the handwriting of an insane person, jagged cursive letters’ baselines dancing up and down the pages’ thin rules, wide pencil scrawls arcing over and below the lines. The headache at this point had graduated as promised into a looming, pounding, thrumming atom-smasher of a headache, its epicenter still in the unlucky left-hand upstairs, its effects fixing my forehead in discomfited furrows and my lips in a rictus of what must’ve looked like (but was in fact not) sneering distaste.

And this was all without my having even consumed the whole drink — there was still a quarter-inch of cold black groundsy sludge lurking at the bottom of the Java-Jacketed paper cup when I cast it into the garbage and pirouetted out the door. O the ignominy.

My body processed the Mistake with its usual metabolic swiftness, and the symptoms evaporated shortly (alertness included); the all-nighter’s many (many) hours went through without incident or difficulty of note; I got fully caught up on my sleep the next day, in the air, on the ground, both in and out of the country.