january 12, 2011
it was just some snow humor, though i guess snow in atlanta is no joke. we were getting started on a new storm here and i just wanted to throw a snowball your way, having heard that atlanta has all of 8 snow plows to its name.
if i appear to have ignored your season’s greeting card it is only because i made determined effort to ignore the holidays last year. you may not know this but my mother died late in 2009. this was the first holiday season of my life with neither parent. there is no barometer for such things but i am only 42, for christ’s sake, and both my parents are gone. i should have confronted it but i happily dismiss the holiday season as little more than a time for extreme crowds in the vicinity of my 181 (for which i just paid another year’s rent, $72, a bargain at any price, as you once said).
a friend of mine performs a ritual on the anniversary of his mother’s death. he goes to a bar, orders a martini, and just lets it sit there on the counter as a monument. his mother drank only one cocktail: the gin martini. he drinks beers all the while. i thought it a beautiful and poignant ritual, but i couldn’t bring myself to do anything similar. my mother didn’t drink, and i don’t like to cry in public — though i did recently, when i met a woman who works with terminally ill lung cancer patients. i couldn’t help it. she broke me.
i miss my mother every day. she had not been well for a long time. as a self-protective gesture to my heart i tell myself that she’d been gone long before she fully left us, and that physical death was just a formality. i do not believe or take comfort in that.
i might take your cue and move on from the internet as a creative outlet. i had been thinking along those lines anyway. i feel i have nothing left to give to the confessional-personal-website genre, but i also get fed up with the reality that posting content to the web amounts to giving it away, or at least throwing it up for grabs. journalists cherry-pick witty zingers and johnny-carson-worthy punchlines from the web like everything is public domain, rarely citing their sources. it is a disgusting and i would say unethical convention for journalism to have embraced.
i may have alluded to this. i dated a girl for almost 2 years. she is muslim. on account of this i was a secret to her family. i didn’t mind this at first but it got unpleasant, walking around astoria then suddenly having to turn another direction so someone’s father’s next-door-neighbor would not see us together. it is the first time i’ve been the “white guy” in a relationship, and it was surprisingly heavy shit for me. the heaviest shit rained down after it ended. i had never fully confronted race in my life, perhaps reflecting a naïve belief that it should not matter. a few months ago i kept finding myself in the arab neighborhoods of astoria, seeing beautifully-adorned women with their shockingly colorful attire. i wanted to knock on someone’s door and tell them what happened, to see if they, too, would let me in. i would never do anything like that. she might end up dead, or at least in a shit load of trouble, if anyone on her side found out about us. the girl is young (25 when we met) and she had been following my web sites since she was 13. i was her little rebellion. for all that was bad about it we had a lot of good things but it’s better that it is over. it became progressively less possible to continue. it was like when i was involved with that certain celebrity, the weird discretenesses, random changes of plan, and people with whom i could and could not be associated.
i’ve had this plan for a conspiracy of sorts. it follows up to something i did in 1991, when i overheard a man at an upper west side diner tell his kids that he’d buy them stuff and take them places “if i had $100.” from his loud mouth i was able to glean his name, which fortunately was very distinctive. i looked him up in the manhattan white pages, and mailed $100 in cash to his name at the address in the phone book.
in a similar spirit i want to find somebody random or somebody that i can’t stand, and send them on a scavenger hunt. i have found places around town where i can hide things in plain sight. i have left small amounts of coins in various places which are passed by hundreds and thousands of times a day. i want to start with that and get someone’s attention to start a hunt for something by finding objects in public places, but i get lost as to what the final goal should be. nothing too pretentious or dogmatic, but still worth the journey. i might initiate the project with a phony ad in an early-20th-century magazine.
