Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.

Sleepers

Most of my friends complain about interrupted sleep.  As one ages it becomes less straightforward-- the biology of it, I suppose. And for those of us in New York City apartments, waking, we often hear our neighbors above-- more often now that they are aging, and sleep no doubt in separate rooms.. one walks around, whatever... we invent narratives.

When I was small I thought love meant you slept together in a bed; I'd imagine the scenario-- it was chaste and romantic. I was one of those children who tucked myself in at night with a menagerie of stuffed animals... giraffes and lions and Yogi Bears and Pinocchios-- Raggedy Anne and other squishy creatures with sad eyes.  Recently there was a piece in the Times about adults and their stuffed sleep companions. Not that I pass judgment. In fact the whole issue has become a major industry-- the way food is so complicated-- now it's customized mattresses and the science of blankets and temperatures-- sound machines and gourmet sheets.  It's a lot, as they say on television.

Many of my friends no longer sleep with their significant other. Together they toss and turn and worry; they blame their partner for insomnia.  Whenever I've had a long-term relationship, sleeping together was essential.  Break-ups meant re-acclimating to sleeping separately; this alone was difficult and occasionally the habit lingered and we'd 'cheat' and spend an occasional night together.  It was confusing and reassuring at once.  But it wasn't just sex, it was the intimacy of sleep.  Even the old one night stands... sometimes I longed to stand staring out of a hotel window, anticipating the strangeness of someone under sheets.  One night on the road I crawled in bed with one of the roadies and he told me things no one had ever told me.  It was like we enacted some scene from a play that had been written just for us; it felt significant and deeply affecting.  Neither of us discussed it afterward.  

Now that these things are mostly in my past, I rummage through them occasionally, to remember who I have been, where and with whom.  Sometimes I have these dreams, although I am generally sleeping with a book these days... and I awake listening to my neighbors who are sleeping alone in a common space, who live separate lives now, as many of us do.  My own father used to fall asleep with the television on; in those days the programming ended at a certain point.  If I were awake I'd hear the national anthem, and if I peeked in, the screen would show those horrid stripes until dawn. No one dared turn it off.

Being awake in the 21st century and checking programming in overnight hours, there are myriad reruns of old sitcoms and TV dramas.  Sex and the City repeats endlessly.  It occurs to me that this is calming for adults-- the way our kids would watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos hundreds of times... over and over. Stressed out people anesthetize themselves with familiar old shows-- memories, visions of New York when they were happier or younger.  Maybe this helps them sleep.

This afternoon, in the rain, I passed the new uptown Barnes and Noble store; the window is filled with pretty much the same childhood classics I read over and over at bedtime: The Hungry Caterpillar, Thomas the Tank Engine... there were dolls and stuffed animals of these same familiar characters-- Elmo, whose name my son pronounced with this very southern accent... the Wild Things, soft train cars with happy faces. Standing beside me was a young British woman from Manchester, with a little girl who was-- yes, holding out her arms to me.  I was surprised-- it was raining-- they were wet, as I was. English people are more accustomed to these drizzles and don't always bother with an umbrella. But children are not so friendly these days-- nor are mothers post-pandemic anxious for strangers to touch their babies.  This child-- maybe 18 months-- was smiling in the most extravagant way at me, and insisting I take her-- me with my terrible arm, I was unable to really lift her properly. She's friendly, her Mom explained, but not like this.  It was as though she recognized me-- there was this absolutely palpable connection and a kind of love I hadn't felt in so long, it brought me to tears-- this lovely little Irish face with sparkling eyes... too young to care about material things.. and there we were:  me, tearing up in the rain, feeling so connected to this child and my lost  days of baby-rearing. The mother, too-- she started to cry... maybe her Mom was overseas or had died... I thought of possibilities... and we looked in the window, and we repeated the names of the characters... as though we were family... and the child-- not quite up to speech, was just happily holding her arms out and trying hard to hug and kiss me as much as I could manage.

It was clear the baby did not want to stop this game with me... and finally I made an awkward excuse and left.  The entire window display imprinted in my visual mind, I went down toward the East River. On the way, I passed St. Monica's church which seemed to beckon; the glass doors were open and the music seeping out. It was the six o'clock mass... and I stood in the back while the priest read the daily passage and proclaimed that God is love.. and it made sense to me, having been lessoned by the little Irish girl.  This is it... the whole church singing and proclaiming, yes... Hallelujah, etc... all of us sleepers in various rooms, underneath the same celestial ceiling... receiving a kind of reprieve, a kind of love.  

I Want the Angel

This season, as in so many previous, the operative human engine seems to be an evolving kind of empathy.  Zelensky's congressional address, like the star on our dysfunctional American political 'tree', seemed to mobilize some kind of national emotion.  Reading World's End, as I am, steeped in the harsh realities of WWI, it had extra resonance.  His small Napoleonic persona, in his sweats, also referred to the Battle of the Bulge; my father earned a Croix d'Honneur that day, and took home the wounds and scars of things we no longer see here in America.  We are much mired in Twitter controversies, the debt ceiling, the crypto implosion... and some of us-- well, only our social media and shopping.  We needed a televised reminder, another reason to care.  

The World Cup for many of us provided a happy reason to wake up-- the games were thrilling and the global celebrations and disappointments were compelling; we forgot about the needless deaths and prevailing bigotries of Qatar culture. We marveled at the modern stadiums and held our breath as country fought country on the field. The stellar final left a hole; for the depressed among Americans, and statistically there are millions, they are back to wondering what now? Football for six weeks. Some of my friends search television for inspiration, like religion; they embrace old Law and Orders, Sex and the City episodes... anything to remind them of their heyday, their moment in the sun-- the way things were, even when they were shitty. 

Personally I will watch any Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini... anything with Benicio del Toro... seasonally the versions of Kings of Kings-- Jeffrey Hunter, Max von Sydow... and especially the DeMille silent one, where He emerges to doves and lilies... and prompted me to ask my Catholic nanny so long ago who washed his robe? Our housekeeper once told us, so we would shut up during her programs, that the people on television could see us.  Like Jesus, I used to ask? Something like that, she answered.  But I felt known.  I behaved-- for Jesus, Santa Claus, the actors on Days of Our Lives and the Man From Uncle.  I felt responsible... 

Reading World's End, discovering the big-business machines which drove wars-- the economic windfalls amidst the devastation and killing... I can't help but draw parallels with Putin's war.  It's worrying.  And while there are geographic boundaries and definitions, we are all involved somehow. We post on Facebook, we raise money, we carry flags-- we worry.  It's a distraction from the usual narcissism and voyeurism of social media which occupied maybe the most massive portion of our attention during the pandemic isolation.  

Sometimes I think rather than just friendships, commonalities... we seek our double on Facebook.  We want to find someone with an equally cruel father or abusive husband-- a cancer patient with exactly our diagnosis...  someone else who has lost all their belongings in a fire and is now laughing in a bar. Or someone who loves cats, or who hates cats and loathes anyone who likes them... some of these pet-haters have admitted this to me and also confessed that they spend hours on YouTube watching videos of ravaged animals being lifted from sewage-soaked gutters, placed in a filthy blanket in someone's car-trunk and nursed back to some version of poverty-life.  It exercises their capacity to feel-- to empathize.  

Anyone who takes the subway especially in early morning or late-night has witnessed the relentless parade of beggars and story-tellers-- addicts, sad-sacks, mentally deranged... and some simply out-of-everything.  The percentage of people who even engage or give is shameful.  I, too, am guilty... I go to pantry, try to distribute food, try to convince the homeless to at least get a daily hot meal from a shelter rather than the garbage.  I do see kind people leave things in bus shelters... on benches... are they safe?  I don't know. They don't know that I am safe, for that matter-- with my sad face and surfeit of empathy-- who returns to a warm home feeling guilty and disturbed, primed to distract myself with a classic noir movie.  

There are other iniquities... among the pet-lovers and animal empathizers among us... a pair of homeless men-- identical twins like an old Arbus photo I often see in front of the HRA on 14th street-- both in need of medication... they talk at one another; last week someone had shaved their heads-- maybe lice or scabies... they are either underdressed or bundled in layers, generally in the warm months.  They do not ask, they do not beg.  They are not appealing. Also on 14th Street I have seen an exasperated father screaming abuses at his mentally-challenged son who grasps onto him and talks without cease, hits himself in the head... makes noises.  Surely this would try any parent or caregiver but the maternal in me feels wounded.  I do no good with my endless private sorrows and foodstamp economizing.  

I have friends who give massive amounts... run organizations and charities.  We follow the billionaire narratives--- we know their loves and their homes, and their likes and dislikes.  I have spoken often about the 'generosity ratio'.... there is plenty left... does this make them less good?  I don't know.  Then we have the monstrous financial fairy-tales like the Sam Bank-Man Fried (as in the past participle) story.  I can still hear his pretentious interviews on Bloomberg, waving his crypto-wand, summoning investments from an audience who maybe admired or envied him? How do these people function, who could have lifted many of the world's poverty-veils with the massive wealth they swindled?  And even post-conviction.. his quality of life will be considerably better than the average flood-displaced Pakistani.

Empathy hurts, for some of us.  Playing music-- or the better part of it, is empathic; we listen and feel one another.  For audience it is often a kind of narcotic.  A sad song can take us into a nostalgic reverie that feels like pain.... or lift our heart.  A great lover is empathic... the way they give, the way they understand what their partner needs.  And yet many of us when we are most happy get up and break the heart of the person who lies beside us... as though we are drawn to the ending, do not trust bliss, feel the tourniquet of guilt.  

World's End reminds me how the earth absorbs blood.. how the theater of this war was cleared and rebuilt.  My friend discovered years later there had been a brutal murder in his apartment... the renovation left no trace of the victim.  And here we are-- the shootings, the hit-and-runs... the bloody sidewalks of New York City. Perhaps hardly a square yard that has not seen some violence or injury... 

Fortunately or unfortunately this empathy, this stray animal or shadow-- will follow us into the new year.  Our best celebrations will be dampened by sad news-- by illnesses and this terrible war... pandemics and crises world over-- the hungry and displaced... the waves of immigrants coming into a freezing city in T-shirts, being handed a blanket.  How do we process this? Where are we? Commercials for anti-depressants, for Jesus, for suicide prevention. Look in on your neighbor, they urge-- and still, for the parents among us... the ones that ask do you know where your children are?  they still stab.  

I am wrestling with these issues... like Jacob's angel... or believing the Jesus on television can see me... yes, some days I am joyful... watching the sun set across the Central Park reservoir, feeling the golden light on my face.  Other nights I absorb my friends' sorrows and discomfort and am a hare's breath from a deep pit of suicidal horror. I write a poem... or a song... and it's sometimes like throwing the coals on a freezing evening fire... sometimes.

Last night at the end of my subway platform there was a man kneeling... close to the edge.  I walked over-- with my bass and my protective mask and my helpless empathy; perhaps he was praying... perhaps he needed a scarf or gloves.  As I got closer I realized he was quietly vomiting into his hat.  A Christmas tableau.  I did nothing. Prayed... went home.  In my head I heard Jim Carroll's haunting lyrics...'I want the angel/whose darkness doubles/absorbs the brilliance of all my troubles.'  Empathy.  It might have killed him. Music. Sometimes it saves us. Amen.  

Jane of Kings

Scrolling through random TV, channel after channel is routinely showing some film or series of extreme violence... pain, human aggression-- terror... blood, injury... death.  Either some scenario or elaborate criminal plot which involves weapons and retaliation...  or war;  science fiction monstrosities with hostility and vicious hatreds. Then there are the natural disaster movies with catastrophic occurrences-- widespread destruction and damage, global tragedies... 

And then there is this unprecedented newsworthy human year: watching images of the Ganges River swollen with corpses, the 23rd psalm came to mind--- the valley of the shadow of death.  Yea though I walk there, the psalm dictates, I shall fear no evil.  

My friend Jane passed away just ten days ago... her 'moment of decease', that is, because for weeks she had been something less than living.  She'd forbidden me, knowing my inclinations to confess and reveal, from mentioning her name in my poetry or blogs.  This was difficult.  Since I was small, I have loved the name Jane as though it were a sheet of prismic glass through which to view the world.  Queen Jane, Bob Dylan wrote... and she was.  Ravaged by a cruel diagnosis, she met her fate with courage and relentless bravery, like a good Catholic.  

Nothing to declare, the hospice priest categorized her, although she tried to muster a few lightweight sins and omissions just for the process... she was true and honest, empathic and observant, smart and acerbic.  Even my son liked her... and he doesn't comment on many people.  At my behest he willingly took her home-baked care packages and always came away with some worthwhile wisdom or TV recommendation.  

The worst part about a long farewell is that the ending overshadows the rest-- at least temporarily.  While we all drudge up past memories and tendernesses, the horror of illness hangs in the air like a low ceiling.  My father died at nearly 97; my mother survived another 16 months without him.  I remember too well the  'old man' claustrophobic smell of the room where they both sat year in and out in their nineties... although they were clean and neatly dressed. When I visited my mother during her last months the air was lighter without him... but I began to realize that she was sitting there not in her own scent but the lingering scent of her husband, like a cloud or a shroud.  She'd befriended death; she was trying to find the doorway. 

While Jane and I had some fun afternoons after her diagnosis, the treatments were erosive and the day ends early for the terminally ill. It is all they can do to go through motions of living while they are being observed.  Being Jane, she fussed and worried over me-- was I eating, did I want a coat-- boots... hats?  These things became important; she lectured me on the merits of make-up and hair arranging since we no longer had our former beauty to conceal our flaws.  She dragged me to shops and stocked up on the junk food she loved despite my protests that she choose healthy options.  We even went to a senior center one day with me shaking my head... she insisted we'd each get a free pair of glasses and she chose some wild blingy glam frames.  The finished pair never materialized.  Later she playfully threatened the staff:  I'll be dead before those glasses appear... and she was.  But it was funny.  She repeated it during her last weeks.  

She was funny.  She was vain and always wore her make-up though she cared more for her birds than herself.  Her things-- her personal treasures-- were copious and carefully selected.  She surrounded herself with a kind of beauty.  But she had no partner... prohibitively selective she'd been... one of a breed of city eccentrics who live this way-- in a sort of community, in a sort of cocoon... knowing neighbors, generations of friends and neighborhood characters... and pets of all kinds, none of whom, save the pair of birds, outlived her.  

She was kind.  She understood things... we talked and laughed on the phone... we'd neglected one another for years until her illness gave us this opportunity for sisterhood.  We shared things-- youtube and films and books... she read my work and gave praise when it was due. She pushed me like a mother. I tried to be uplifting about her diagnosis; there are miracles, I insisted... no one can predict your outcome.  I began to carry her name with me-- like a song-- a prayer-- a constant mantra, as I do... all day... when I walk, when I run, when I clean house or lie awake at night.  Please God or Jesus or Mary... make her well... Jane... I coopted her name like a lyric.  

At the very end I distanced myself a little.  I didn't sit by her bed waiting for the finale.  I sat a couple of times, but I had to separate myself from this Jane-- from the dying Jane.  Then maybe, I thought, she will live.  I sat in churches-- the hospice chapel, St. Patrick's, St. Vincent's...  I talked to birds, to statues of the Virgin... to my ceiling at night... my various crucifixes.  I tried some Hail Mary's.  

And while we try to remember her now.. it's blurry.  I'm not sure to whom I speak, when I conjure her image... I try to erase the scent of death-in-hospice, the stale bedsheet smell, the disinfectant and the coldness of the nurses and aides.  I don't know what death is supposed to be-- the preferred version is that one 'dies peacefully' but I am not certain Jane did not rage a little in poetic fashion.  It is a relief when suffering ends.  I miss her more these days as I miss Alan and many others and walk truly in the shadow of death this year which has altered forever my own heart, my own trajectory.  What I realized today-- like my mother who sat in the room of my father... I walk with her... it became a habit... and while I will add another name to the litany of my private prayer-chain, and I have formally grieved and repented... lit candles, wept, recited... I am left alone with the Prayer of Jane.  

Crossroads

I began this blog in early 2007.  I'd been ghost-writing cd reviews for a time, pretending to be a cynical teenaged harsh critic of music, and a British 'zine was paying a bit for my wallfly's-view of the post-mortem New York City scene-- the death of culture as we knew it, and some personal venting pieces.  The 'zine was bought out by some online publisher and by the time euros converted to pounds then dollars, I actually owed my bank for the wire.

A friend of mine at the time suggested I enter the online word-army: you'll catch like wildfire, she assured me, and before you know it you'll have book-deals and industry followers.  So here I am... I began with a bit more humor, ended up pleasing myself occasionally, accumulating readers-- sharing on Facebook-- peaking out at something like 1,000-1,200 a month.  No, I did not allow advertisements or cheap add-ons.  It's clean-- no web-pollution nor even the stock self-promotion and hyper-links I am constantly advised to weave in.  I sat down and fired off every two weeks or so.  I felt briefly 'completed'.  For close friends it was like one of those newsletters of which you send multiples at Christmas, but more frequent.  They could 'check-in' at their leisure.

This month, after a few early-November flashes of inspiration, I've been dragging my feet here.  I have always used myself-- my brutally honest self-- to gauge the barometric reading of the general public.  Admittedly,  I can almost feel the cold shoulder of viewers and on the rare occasions I check analytics, there are days where they log single-digit site visitors.  It is not lack of audience but the sense that I am burdening my readers with an adult version of homework.  Admittedly, my early pieces were more like stand-up routines-- funny and a little cruel; anonymity was the signature and I slogged quite a few mud-pies behind the disguise, to my own amusement.

Now I'm quite the confessed author of these 320 posts.  I own them, for better or worse.  They've become personal and emotional-- autobiographical and adult.  My life bleeds through the pores of these essays; perhaps it is the winding-down of my activity-career, the increasing ratio of rumination to action that has slowed their trajectory. Maybe they are simply weighted by this elephant of aging that has dogged so many of my old partners-in-crime and turned them from stage-divers to front-porch rockers.

Between the impeachment hearings, the democratic debates, the million-billion television offerings, mountainous piles of even decent literary output and journalism-- there are not enough seconds to eat, breathe, have a coffee... let alone pursue the kind of human drama that used to propel us.  My family has grown up or died off; I have few obligations there, but many friends who have become needy and solitary.  Our days, as my peers well know, seem to fly by; I am far less efficient and rarely make it through my lists.  I am easily side-tracked and actually enjoy the distractions of phone calls from ex-husbands, high-school classmates; I listen to the gossip of neighbors and the petty heartaches of schoolgirls.

Incidentally, the friend who suggested this blog turned out to be a lying drug-user whose sobriety I'd defended in court.  She was not only a husband-swindler but a pathological kind of manipulator who when I quietly distanced, inserted herself in my own family and created all kinds of bizarre twisted scenarios.  Needless to say, her prediction suffered the same fate.  She, I'm certain, has reinvented herself and managed to use the internet and the 'industry' for her own monetary gain.  Not so the victims of her treachery.  No worries, as my son and his generation reply to almost anything from an excuse to an apology to a car crash.

Will anyone miss me if I delete myself from this site?  If I propel myself into obsolescence, or simply extinguish the tiny LED match-flame that has become a bi-monthly stop-off for a dwindling few?  This year has been tiring; perhaps I am just weighted with the reality that my enthusiastic little projects receive little remuneration-- that I must hire marketing specialists in order to see my investments returned, that there is a formula:  You must pay to play, my dear...  when I thought that people would simply come-- even a few... and it would be all right.

No one promises anything in this life... it's not that I'm disappointed-- we're well beyond that.  It's just that I feel apologetic simply posting these things, and the last thing I need, in this phase of my life, is to be sorry to any version of 'public'-- to 'beg' for audience, as people do-- to Instagram myself onto some stage where people have agreed in advance to applaud.

So forgive me if I fail my commitment here; nearly 13 years is respectable... and it could be a phase; it could just be the moon or the cloud-cover that prevents me from observing tonight's meteor shower-- me who looks for signs on sidewalks and hears melodies in train wheels, who feels tonight as though I'm merely exercising some writer's muscle and occupying stagnant space rather than shooting across someone's horizon like a star. Maybe it's okay to just close your eyes.

Old Faithful

I have recently confessed to a clandestine summer television binge-- and trying hard to sit through one of the final dull episodes of The Affair last night it began to feel like just that-- an affair with these shows-- the initial attraction, late-night meetings, staying way too long, being entertained by things which are normally boring... then the long-haul 'meat' of the relationship-- the drama and path-windings-- finally to the denouement, the sense of routine and obligation, on to the cringeworthy and downright head-shaking disengagement.

What I did take from this 'relationship' was a geographical affection-- the feeling of Montauk in winter-- the coast I'd befriended as a child-- the nostalgia and sad permanence of the sea as a neighbor, a companion-- the one that outlives us all.  My 'affair' with Montauk even prompted a quick  trip to Provincetown last weekend where I also found a piece of my past remarkably untouched.

I am of an age now where any trip or visit could be the last one I will make to that place; my activity is limited and decreased by circumstances... I find my compelling obligations and callings are those of the mind.  Television has been a guilty pleasure but it was free for some months, and it was all the vacation I could really muster.  At 4 AM Sunday morning,  I came across the movie 'Unfaithful'.  Now all my girlfriends have watched this many times; most of us have gone through phases during marriages or long-term relationships where we were either tempted or forayed... but here was the very quintessence of ambivalence-- with the very beautiful Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez-- love, passion-- the choice, when we had it, and at this moment in life, the choices are much fewer.

Coming in at the halfway point of the film, I couldn't help drawing the obvious parallels with The Affair-- the infidelity, the 'price' everyone always seems to pay as though there is a judgment and a punishment (Fatal Attraction, etc...)... that violating trust is a kind of crime which not only does not pay, but brings tragedy.  Like The Affair, what drew me into this viewing was the 'place'... New York as it was in the late 90's still resembling my version of the city: the homeyness of the loft-- the piles of books... the Soho streets, the taxis... the Strand, as it was... the old stacks before it was turned into a department store.  I tearfully recalled Friday nights sitting in the dusty basement with children (their tiny category was relegated to the rear cellar, near the proofs section) looking at books opened on the floor-- the occasional mouse running through.  Also remarkable in these late-90's productions-- no cell phones... the poetry of the answering machine.  It occurred to me that in our current culture these random meetings would not even take place--- everyone is so involved in their little screen, they do not connect with human opportunities.

When I saw Unfaithful in 1999 it was in a cinema-- on a rare night when I had a babysitter, my young boyfriend and I would go out-- have a dinner downtown, see as many films as we could manage-- be just a couple.  We used to hold hands during movies... and I remember at the end of this one I whispered to him that I had something to tell him... I can't recall now what it was, but in that moment, I felt his pulse quicken-- not just quicken but speed-- and his breath came fast, as though we was in full-blown panic mode.  I realized my very young boyfriend was terrified I was going to confess some infidelity.   And it was that moment-- that heart-racing, fragile moment-- when I knew he was truly in love, that of all partners and husbands-- he would never be unfaithful.  This was the way, as we say now, he was 'wired'.

Of course this, too, is now part of my past.  I am quite beyond my passionate love affairs and much more committed to the work I need to do while I still can-- music, writing, poetry-- these are my companions.  I have never been completely faithful to any one man, and while I have been difficult and struggled with my tendency to outgrow things, I have tried to be honest and not hurt people more than they hurt themselves.  What I now realize, after failing at these relationships-- and I tried twice to change countries for lovers and husbands-- is I have been in love with New York City--  maybe less so with this current version-- but it permeates my songwriting, my poetry, my dreams and personal iconography.  My heart sings here as nowhere else and while I have a sense of past and the people who have strayed in and out of my apartments and life-- it is the place-- fickle as it is, changeable and cruel, beautiful and hideous, sublime and filthy-- to which, in my way, I have been faithful.

Amen.