I was a click away from a long-planned trip to Baltimore. Then I looked at Streetview around the hotel I chose and said nah. Then I was off to D.C., but spontaneous trips to that mucky-aired dish-in-the-land cost too much for my needs. Then I re-considered Danbury, Connecticut, for to see Charles Ives’ burial site. I had to replace Fargo, North Dakota, on the auto-complete, for to type in a number of other destinations, all of them annoying to me for one reason or other. That was my morning. Instead of those places I am off to a place more exotic than all those spliced together. I am off to Brooklyn, to a comfortable place among friends who feel like family. I say, why travel to foreign lands when escape is just over the Pulaski? I shan’t be gone long.

…..

I printed an old photo on old glossy paper, noticing after the fact that I had printed the picture on top of last year’s tax summary, including dollars spent on (among other line items) office supplies, unreimbursed medical expenses, and “travel”, the last item comprising little more than subway and bus fare. Why did I print last year’s tax summary on glossy photo paper? Why?

…..

I was wide awake at 7am this day. In weeks past I scarcely saw 7am except to stumble to the bathroom, making sure to grab the top left drawer-handle on the chest of drawers next to the bedroom door so as to get my bearings, my precious bearings, for none could bear to see me stumble.

…..

Oh, I remember what I was going to say. It was, of course, about me and my ongoing analysis of my abiding sense of self-importance. I have detected it numerously in myself over the past months, mostly while alone, but always when in the company of others. There is a gesture I make, a facial tic, a lifting of my jaw just slightly toward the heavens, at which moment I mumble “Oh, Idunno” or I interrupt myself in the way I would interrupt you, just to say “Yeah, I know” or “Oh, I used to do that” or some other dismissive gobble of male brinksmanship (which I see every day in women, too, otherwise it would not be brinksmanship), and I look up and away, over your head, over the river and through the woods. I confronted this gesture 3 weeks ago, on a bus, at a bus stop, 4 or 5pm at  some asshole part of Queens where a busload of day laborers waited for a bus and that bus arrived right behind the bus I was on, and one man, one man out of the crowd lept out at me, not literally but his face, its sincere urgency, he saw the bus he needed arriving, the Q45, and he opened his wallet to find his MetroCard, and his longingly urgent eyes were ablaze but sleepy, making eye contact with the bus he needed, not with the driver of the bus but with the bus itself, I saw him for but a split second and I had a hard time turning away, turning up my jaw, looking over or past him, but I did it. I did it.