My Aughts: In which I go local

Eventually I started writing about living in New York City. I wrote about the skyline swallowing the moon at Queensboro Plaza, and a dream about falling off the Triboro Bridge I had while asleep on the N train, and the old, blind Brazilian accordionist who played Argentinean tangos on the 7 train. I recited my verse at every open mic I could find. I made most of my friends at those open mic's. We met every Sunday afternoon for beers at Local 138, a bar in the Lower East Side, and called ourselves The Locals. These were my best friends, my people. We were all wounded, none of us could tell by what. One of us once said, “A poet is a fugitive no one is after.”

Photo by Dennis Connors

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

Paul Greenberg and Captain Frankie in the Times!

Long time (read: pre-List and the Story) readers may remember a post I made at the beginning of the summer about a fishing trip I took with Paul Greenberg and a merry band of fools aboard the Karen Ann, captained by James "Frankie" Culleton. Well, Paul has recently transcribed Frankie's horrifying, seat-of-his-pants story of weathering Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath for the New York Times. Here's a bit:

I realize it’s like being in your boat. No one’s gonna help you.

So I said maybe we have to try to get the kids out and hopefully the fire don’t come. You could see the shock in the wife’s face. You could see it but she was hiding it to make the kids not be scared. They’re upstairs playing with their Transformer toys.

And the water keeps coming and I’m thinking about the people down south during Hurricane Katrina — how they got caught in their attics and drowned. I think we might need to cut a hole in the roof. We got a cordless saw. But we got no power.

And that’s when I look out the window and I see the water joining up — the bay is hooking up with the ocean. The water’s all around. It’s just like being on a boat at sea.

 Read the rest here!

My Aughts: In which I ride

The subway was as much my home as my empty rooms in various apartments I shared with various people in various Brooklyn neighborhoods. I read more there than I did in my post-graduate studies. I would look up between pages, and the world on the train somehow reflected Matthiessen’s everglades, or Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County—teeming with characters I thought I remembered reading in books, families I wished were mine. On the 7 train on the way to and from my first job I read a photocopy of Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That." A former professor had given it to me when she found out I was moving to New York. Didion’s Goodbye was my Hello, and her That was my This.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I struggle and strive

When I arrived in the city, I had two hundred dollars and a list of temp agencies to consult. My first job was handing out flyers for a language-learning website outside Grand Central in the 20-degree cold. Standing next to the newspaper stand and trying to get the attention of thousands of people on their ways to do important things, I learned quickly how unimportant I was. I got to know the layout of Manhattan through the myriad short-term jobs I took. I worked on Park Avenue, at Carnegie Hall, in PR offices, newsrooms, record labels, doing pretty much the same thing everywhere—stuffing envelopes and cold calling. My CD collection shrunk, as I sold them on eBay to subsidize my rent.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which family matters

I moved in January of the new millennium, with my thousands of books and CDs, to a small 4-room apartment in Sunnyside, Queens which I shared with my friend Julia from grad school. We split the $750 rent and I slept on the floor for the first three months, until I took home a stray mattress I found on the corner of 41st Street and Skillman. Our landlords were a Greek couple with two young children. They fought loudly at least three times a week about how to raise their kids, but were tolerant when I was chronically two to three weeks late with my half of the rent. I moved to Brooklyn that August, but Julia still lives in that apartment with her wife, as the State of New York has finally caught up with them. The landlords are now divorced.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I dream of home

The Aughts were the first decade of my life I spent entirely in one place. By “place,” I mean “city,” but also “place” in a metaphysical sense. I knew Brooklyn was my home, because sometime late in my undergraduate studies in Kentucky I read an anthology of writing about Brooklyn and decided, after reading Truman Capote’s and Carson McCullers’ transplanted narratives, the liquid verse of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman in awe of the magical Brooklyn Bridge, and two paragraphs by Woody Allen, that Brooklyn was my home. This was a good three years before I’d been there.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts 

Out of the Nineties is all out!

We are now halfway through The List and the Story, folks! If you need to catch up before we go straight into the Aughts tomorrow, the Eighties and the Nineties are up in their entirety. Or you could always start from the very beginning. You could even read Patrick Madden's wonderful writeup in Brevity from earlier this month. I'm all about choices.

I hope if you're enjoying it you've told everyone you know. And if you're not enjoying it, please keep your big mouth shut. 

Out of the Nineties: In which the beginning is the end, and vice versa

I ended the Nineties the same way I entered them—with unbound hope and unformed plans. Like Dylan, I was moving to New York City to find myself and to find the world. I had an apartment set up in Sunnyside, Queens with some friends from grad school, and $200 in savings. I spent my last New Year’s Eve of the Nineties in Louisville with my friends Andrew and Todd and three girls we’d picked up at a karaoke bar. Andrew sang “What a Wonderful World,” I sang “Closing Time.” The six of us counted down with Dick Clark until—until what? Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. Anything could happen.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

New Caps Lock Rant - Against Twitter

THERE IS ENTIRELY TOO MUCH TO READ IN THE WORLD. I’M SICK AND TIRED OF SITTING DOWN TO WORK, CHECKING MY TWITTER FEED, AND SPENDING MY FIRST HOUR READING A GRAPHIC PIECE IN SALON ON THE POLITICS OF HORROR FILMS, A POETRY FOUNDATION RETROSPECTIVE OF LOU REED AND THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF POETRY, AND YET ANOTHER PIECE ON THE “I QUIT ACADEMIA” SUBGENRE OF AMERICAN ESSAYS. GIVE IT A REST, PEOPLE. I HAVE WORK TO DO, IN AN HOUR OR SO.

Out of the Nineties: In which the plot runs out

By the end of the Nineties, the timeline I’d created seemed more and more inept at capturing the life I wanted to live and to write about. Every time I thought I’d traced some sort of progression, I changed directions; every identity I created bored me. As my plans became my life, I no longer wanted to write about them. Every choice I made killed a little bit of possibility, a little bit of the mystery and the hope I saw in the world outside myself.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which the refrain echoes

I spent January of 1999 finishing and defending my graduate thesis on William S. Burroughs and doing my oral comprehensive exams for my MA. My work was interrupted when my friend Tony’s jilted ex-boyfriend snuck into his house, got into the bed they used to share, put his mother’s pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. All of our friends were devastated and dramatic, but Tony seemed strangely indifferent. The next month, I moved to a loft apartment in Louisville with twenty dollars in my pocket and no lease. My new life there was interrupted when my brother Brian called to tell me our ten-year-old brother J.P. had hung himself from his bed by a sheet. He was ostensibly trying to do a wrestling maneuver he’d seen on TV. Everyone in the family was mortified when the Lawrence Journal-World, in the obituary, described it as a suicide. Ten-year-olds don’t kill themselves, do they?

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I get by with a little help from my friends

During my final year of graduate school, I shared the ground floor of a Georgian house on the outskirts of campus with my friend Andrew and a revolving crowd of artists, writers, actors, and assorted local cognoscenti of southwest Kentucky. We had all-night parties that prompted letters from our landlord about “reports of loud music and guests hanging from the trees,” making out with whatever boy and/or girl we were with, having 3AM conversations in the dark night of the soul while dressed in each other’s clothes, and starting the next night with the optimistic wonder at whom we would end up with by the end of that night. We all felt we knew each other better than anyone had known anyone else in the history of the world. It was the closest I’ve ever come to hedonism, and it saved me from my inborn nihilism. Whenever one of us left another, we said, “I love you.”

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which we aphorize and postulate

Through the Nineties, I developed the theory that long distance running is comparable to life in that both are roughly 95% boredom and pain, punctuated by moments of transcendence. By the end of the Nineties I had refined this theory with the following postulates:

• The more moments of transcendence one accumulates, the less agonizing is the pain, the less dull the boredom, if only for the knowledge that neither the transcendence nor the boredom or the pain lasts forever.
• The more one runs (or lives) the more the transcendence fuses with the boredom and pain, so that repetitive acts—the endless, monotonous progression of one foot in front of the other—become transcendent acts in themselves.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which we sing "O Death"

I wrote my first eulogy in the spring of 1997, when my Grandpa Light, my mother’s father, died. I wrote my second eulogy two months later, when Jeff Buckley died at the advent of summer. And I wrote my third two months after that, when William S. Burroughs died in early August. The girl I was with at the time watched my apartment when I went back to Kansas to bury my grandfather, then wept with me when Buckley rolled up on the shores of the Wolf River near Beale Street, and was trying to teach me Latin when Burroughs, the last and oldest of the Beats, expired. That summer, writing about the deaths of some of my closest mentors and friends while learning Latin with this girl so we would have a language we could share only with each other, was the most alive I’d felt in my life. We broke up by the end of the summer.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Dancin' Skeletons!

As sickening as Disney et al's lobbying of congress to expand their copyright has been, it's pretty nice to watch those old, old cartoons on Youtube with Stringbean. She's been obsessed with skeletons lately, a symptom I suppose of 1) her knowledge that that's what people turn into after they die, and 2) it being Halloween season and all. So we've been digging on some choreographed skeletomfoolery. (I should copyright that word.)

Stringbean's first response on watching them: "When we're skeletons, will we be able to dance like that?"

Out of the Nineties: In which I go two-fer two-fer

As my collegiate track career wound down, the faculty head of the English Department asked me if I’d like to be a Graduate Assistant. I told him I wasn’t a graduate. He said he knew, but I could start my Master of Arts degree in my last semester and be done by the end of 1998. I asked if my friend Tony, a gay philosophy student, could do it as well. “He already is,” he replied, “And he recommended I ask you.” And for the second time, I was the second half of a 2-for-1 deal for Murray State.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I go off on a tangent

By my senior year of college I was a consistently barely-above-average middle distance runner that my coach always said could be a much, much better runner than I was. I took this as a compliment. For some reason, I decided I wanted to be on the 1600-meter relay team even though I was no longer a sprinter. I inserted myself into the sprinters’ workouts, beating every one of them in practice until one of them threw me against a wall mid-stride and another threatened to kill my white ass, but the sprint coach had no choice but to concede and put me on the relay. My performance at my own event suffered as I single-mindedly focused on an event for which I was ill-suited on a relay team that didn't want me. I think now I did this because every time I called Wayne Martin to tell him how I was running he would say, “That’s great! Did you hear about Brian?” My half brother Brian had gone on to become a state champion at Lawrence High and an All-American at the University of Kansas. His race was the 400, and he anchored the university’s 1600-meter relay team.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which the big boys move in

Whenever I went back to Lawrence through much of the Nineties I volunteered at Adventure Bookstore on Massachusetts Street. Perhaps I did this out of guilt for shoplifting so many books there in the Eighties. They paid me in books, so I like to think I was just going legit with them, the same way Wayne Martin moved from selling drugs to selling discount furniture. The ends might have been the same—I still got my books, Wayne Martin still got people to pay him for things they didn’t necessarily want—but at least we were both now operating above-board. My volunteer work and Wayne Martin’s prime downtown location came tumbling down in one fell swoop when Borders came to town. They bought the entire block of New Hampshire Street that the Kansas Furniture Factory Outlet shared with other local businesses, and Wayne Martin moved his business further away from downtown and closer to the railroad tracks. Then the whole block was razed and Borders opened in November of 1996, at the advent of the Christmas selling season when independent booksellers typically make at least half their yearly profits and get out of the red for the year. Adventure and three other downtown bookstores closed by the spring.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I plot

When I was in Kentucky, my first time to live away from my home in Kansas, I began creating a timeline. I plugged into this timeline every memory, every event in my life, in chronological order by year, month, and if possible even the day. This was my first literary framing device, giving my life a sense of linearity and narrative progression.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Layout Update Idea

Today, after reading Amy Butcher's wonderful recent piece on Gawker, I noticed an interesting background photo on her Facebook page: a screenshot she'd taken after Googling "Why are writers" and letting autofill work its magic. Some of the finishes included "so pretentious," "depressed," "crazy," "weird," "important," and "lonely."

This inspired a two-hour timesuck during my office hours today, wherein I typed "why are ________" into Google just to see how it autofilled the rest. The autofills for actors, politicians, corporations, and singers offered some elucidating glimpses into our collective psyche, but my early favorite was unicorns (some autofills included "healthier than dragons," "hollow," "so awesome," "real," and "mentioned in the bible"). Go ahead, try it - it's addicting!

A by-product of my time-wasting was the idea for a new banner, which you see below, which I'm still figuring how to integrate into the site. I think most of it describes me pretty well.