Proust wrote about memory.  Look what it did to his facial hair.

The scenes come together in pieces.  Scents first, always.  Citrus shampoos, sugary pastries, the salt-air of the Atlantic, coffee in the morning, sautéed onions, your grandmother’s ancient and surreptitious farts, bleach in the nursing home, beer drenched floors of nameless bars in cities you visited once.  Then extremes of weather.  It rains a lot by memory’s estimation.  Soaked feet on moody walks with hands in pockets, pack of cigarettes bought that one time in London, all in the rain, lost umbrellas on trains.  Barefoot walking in Virginia thunderstorms.  Running with a pizza box to a meeting. Too hot.  Sweating through dress shirts on walks to the Metro.  Lolling along slowly in sunset humidity on the High Line, above the restaurants and traffic on 14^th Street.  “How often do you get to see New York from here?” she said, leaning over the railing.  To the El in Chicago, where one always sees the city from forty feet aloft, rumbling along, twisting above Lincoln Park.  It’s too cold there though.  Childhood winters when your father pushed your sled down the hill, and you built igloos in the backyard till your face went numb with cold, and your sister lost a mitten and cried.  And your mother called you in for soup, and the feel of the heat on your face when you took off your wet boots and your jacket.  First drunk, first joint, first kiss, fuck, plane ride, time in the ocean, speeding ticket, rejection letter, line at a party, lie that hurt you so bad you bit your lip and it bled.  Breakdowns, breakups, freight trains awake at four and five AM, nightmares about work, about death, about talking blue ostriches plucking out eyes. 

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6:26 pm  •  5 December 2009  •  view comments

1) My fingers (Weather)

2) My nose (Weather)

3) The motion of Earth upon its axis (Not Weather)

4) The mediation of the world through a lens of fetishized commodities (Not Weather)

5) That we are living in a post-ethical age (Weather, kind of, as I walked past the homeless guy standing in his coat outside the bakery, didn’t give him money, and felt bad, but then thought, “hey we must still be living in an ethical age,” and then felt better).

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2:35 pm  •  4 December 2009  •  view comments

"He climbed Mount Moriah, he drew the knife."

— Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling……I don’t care what he says, if I were Isaac, I would have definitely been a little peeved.

2:28 pm  •  4 December 2009  •  view comments

It’s 27 degrees and feels like 16 in Chicago.  I thought I’d warm it up to Paris in August.  Also, the cafe above is “Flore” which is where the surrealists used to hang out.  It’s next door to the Deux Magots (mentioned below in Papa Hemingway) which is where all the other modernists used to hang out.  Supposedly they had food fights.  I cannot confirm this, but it’s fun to imagine…anyway:

One time, we took a night train from Milan to Paris.  We drank wine out of paper cups in our bunks that night, talking whispering across the compartment.  The Polish students on the bunks below snored in what we agreed was an Eastern European way.

Eventually, I hopped across the compartment in my socks, and we slept on top of the thin sheets, full of wine and very tired.  Stephanie got off at Charles de Gaulle, and I stayed on the train until Gare du Nord.  The shining departure boards and high ceilings.  The birds in the rafters and the humming of the electric wires above the TGVs.

I found a hotel in the Fourth and the woman at the desk was grayed and fat.  She wore half-glasses and wrote in immaculate French penmanship.  A black striped cat prowled behind her as she recorded my name in a ledger and told me the rate for the room.

“Je suis tres fatigue” I said to her, and she smiled.

“Go take a nap,” she offered.  She handed me the key and I nodded.

There was a garden in the back of the hotel, with a small fountain.  The morning felt lazy, and I figured most of Paris had escaped to the South by this point in the summer.  I thought how great it was to know where everyone had gone.  I was no longer a confused tourist.  I knew the escape routes, and had come to an empty Paris on purpose.  It was the best place in the world to be alone, and I felt ashamed that I knew it.

“Oh no,” I would say later, with crossed legs probably, “everyone goes to their villas in Lourmarin, or wherever in August.”

But there were still people to watch.  I walked around the Luxembourg gardens that afternoon and saw them walking around the perfectly manicured lawns, kicking up the white dust that characterizes every pathway in Parisian parks.  The women wore scarves, even in the heat, and the men wore linen pants and squared shoes.

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2:13 pm  •  4 December 2009  •  view comments

Another bit on home improvements.

“Are we men yet?” he asked.  The mailbox hung at a 45 degree angle in the wall and, distressingly, wouldn’t budge.

“Well.  We got one nail in there pretty good,” David said.  “But so far, I think I’d have to say: absolutely not.”

They had driven to Frager’s Hardware Store on Pennsylavania Avenue earlier that morning.  They stopped for breakfast on the way at a bagel shop, and talked about the cool morning, about their plans for the day.

From breakfast, they walked to the hardware store.  They found a haggard looking gray-haired woman with thick glasses that had clear rims.  She was wearing a red vest with a pin on it that said, “Fragers!  Buy Local!”

“We need to know how to hang a mailbox on a brick wall,” David said.  They hadn’t received mail since moving to the new place, weeks before.

“Yes, and I want to be clear that we’re very much not men,” Andrew said, smiling.

The store attendant looked at Andrew, puzzled.  A dark cloud of misunderstanding passed between them.  Andrew looked at his feet and chuckled, as if it had suddenly become too much to be standing in the mop aisle, asking for advice.  David felt it too.  The geriatrics roaming around, wheezing and looking for duct tape.  The place was a mortuary.

“You’re going to need mortar nails,” said the attendant, looking back at David.

“Okay, mortar nails.  Which we hammer into the— ”

“Mortar, yes.  Not into the brick,” she said.

“Sounds perfect.  Some mortar nails and the cheapest mailbox you have.”

They paid and walked back into the gathering heat of the day.  David whistled on the way to the car, and when he put the key in the ignition, Andrew turned the radio on and turned to look out the window.

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10:43 am  •  3 December 2009  •  view comments

In honor of the completion of one term of study after two years of ulcers, nightmares, and carpal tunnel syndrome…oh yeah, and a paycheck.  This only applies to non-professional schools, where life is, well, better.

1) You’ll say “Gee, I just can’t sleep past 8!  I just pop out of bed at 7 and go for a run!” for about four days before you’re snoring till 10 every day.

2) Undergrad objects of physical attraction (read: skinny young people full of life and vigor) will find you no better looking after your two years of stress, hair thinning, waist-expanding, and nightly drinking.  And it will be SHOCKING that this is the case.

3) Given that you work less often, when you do all-nighters they are a thousand times harder to get through, one third as productive, and four times more difficult to get over.

4) Given that you drink less often, when you have hangovers they are a thousand times harder to get through, one third as productive, and four times more difficult to get over.

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10:20 pm  •  2 December 2009  •  view comments

We got tight on absinthe and shot lions in the afternoon.  In the evening, we drank strong Spanish wine.  Catherine told me that she was pregnant.  And that I gave her gonorrhea in a cab two summers before.

-Really?

-Yes.

-Damn.  Is it a boy?

-Darling, I don’t know.

-Damn.

It is damn hot in Africa, so we don’t say much more than is necessary.  One thing they don’t tell you about the damn place is that there is absolutely nothing to do.  Good thing there is so much good gin and we bring our guns everywhere, so that we can feel quite manly.

Our Tanzanian guide Quambo takes us out in the mornings before the heat gets so damned hot.  We pile into jeeps with thermoses full of good, cold gin and flasks disguised as binoculars filled with rum.  Our water buffalo sandwiches are packed in wax paper.  Always wax paper.

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12:09 am  •  2 December 2009  •  view comments

The assault was violent, efficient, precise.

“Five years ago, this was practically an open air drug market,” yelled Julie or Julia directly at my eardrum.  She retreated to check my reaction.

We were standing roughly seventeen inches apart, an insurmountable distance for volumes traditionally associated with conversation.  An enormous dude drinking a bottle of Miller Lite backed into me for the fourth time as he belted out a laugh, and I clutched my gin and tonic close to my chest, protecting it as though it were a child.

Julie or Julia swooped toward me for another strike.  I had not responded in enough time.

“Look at this place now!” she smiled and did a little dance move.

The patio trembled under the weight of the crowd.  The motion wasn’t helping.  I swayed and nodded, a combination of movements that proved effective in combating the movement of the floor.

Wheat Thins.  I had eaten a whole box before going out.  That was my dinner.  Everyone in the apartment was watching Animal Planet when I walked in.  They were laughing at spider monkeys.  The ease with which they flew through the trees.  Dodging branches and grabbing hold and munching food.  I dove for the booze.

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11:03 pm  •  1 December 2009  •  view comments

"But as soon as the morning light hits my eyes I want to be out in it— / moving along the moor / into the first blue currents and cold navigation of everything awake."

— Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God, describing a feeling that I wish I understood.  I lean more toward sleeping in / making omelets at noon / scratching my head as I wait for the butter to melt in the pan / not caring what I missed at dawn.

1:07 am  •  1 December 2009  •  view comments

1) “Wow wherever I am in Brooklyn sure is nice in the morningohgodI’mgoingtopuke.”

2) “I have never, in the history of transportation, cared less whether you take the bridge or the tunnel.”

3) “Wait, you’re taking the tunnel?  WHAT THE F##ck?”

4)”If I don’t figure out how to turn off this in-cab news update, I’m going to have to put my foot through it.”

5) “Well, even if I do have a hangover, I certainly can’t feel it.”

6) “Oh wait.  There it is.”

7) “No, actually, I don’t need a receipt.  Right now, all I want is to murder.  All of you.”

8) “Well, you know, in the short run brain cancer is an awesome excuse not to go running for awhile.”

9) “MOMMY!!!!!!!!”

10) “Am I going to blog about the part where I throw up into a Gap bag in the family Honda?  Probably.  I’m real like that.”

12:54 am  •  1 December 2009  •  view comments