All I can say about yesterday’s big storm — not that my comments have any relevance — is that I had no idea it was as bad as all that. Like everyone else I thought it was going to be an inch or two followed by rain to wash it away. I remember looking out the window and thinking it was coming down harder than the forecasts made it sound like it would. I also noticed those weird new ambulance sirens not so much for their eerily funereal sound but for the fact that the ambulances themselves did not seem to be moving. Beyond that I was blessedly ignorant here in my private cocoon. Snow plows couldn’t do their work because they were stuck in the same gridlock as everybody else. No one expected so much snow, otherwise they’d have known to stay off the roads. A lot of sucky situations out there. Bus loads of kids stuck on the roads for 10 hours, probably pooping and peeing themselves, while other groups were lucky enough to take refuge in restaurants or wherever they could get to. That scenario sounds like it could be fun, for the kids at least (not the parents), but other situations do not. What happens when the Port Authority Bus Terminal closes? I mean, do the people who are turned away just stand around outside? I guess the subways were moving well enough, from what I heard on the radio. Well, it’s a beautiful day now, and sunnier days ahead. It reminded me of a woman I knew some years ago when a similar kind of storm formed. Bloomberg was mayor, and his private jet from Bermuda landed just minutes before the airports would have been forced to close. In the same moments the woman I knew was extremely pregnant and, like Bloomberg, got where she needed to go just minutes before it would have been too late. She told a dramatic story about going into labor in a yellow cab, but her narrative was spun in a deadpan kind of way. She had a thing for me, and I for her. But she was taken. She moved to Europe 7 or 8 years ago but while I was on Facebook she would send signals she was thinking about me, this while she knew I was in a relationship. Nothing so lame as a “poke”, but unmistakable. I never said anything to anybody about this, because what does it matter? Exes and past infatuations, assuming they stick to the rules, are allowed to signal their lasting respect for each other. She is still with the dude who knocked her up. I don’t think they got married. The way she talked about her daughter almost made me cry, it was so sweet. When she was pregnant I would see her around the neighborhood, so thin it didn’t seem she should be able to walk with such a relatively enormous belly. It looked like the kid would weigh as much as she did. Her body was kind of weird, though, with way bigger boobs than seemed to make sense. I don’t know anything about the man in her life, except that she would occasionally post pictures to Facebook that failed to make them look as impossibly happy as is par for the genre of social media sharing. That’s part of why I gave up on FB. It’s a manifestation of what I’ve come to call the Digital Divide, which has nothing to do with poverty or wealth or the haves and have nots. It’s the curated illusions about ourselves that we put forward, both as individuals and businesses. It’s a world built on lies and even myths, no different than in past generations but with more potential for toxicity and consequence. I see you, you see me, but what are we really seeing? How long and to what depth can you know another person without truly knowing who they are? It was one of the more profound episodes of All in the Family where Edith was talking to Gloria about a time Archie came home from work, got a beer, sat in his chair and read the newspaper. This had been his routine for however many decades they had been married. But this time Edith just looked at Archie and though “Who is this?” She told Gloria she’d been married to this person for 30 years (or however long) and she realized one day she had no idea who this man was. I should find that episode again, since it made such an impression on me the first time I saw it. It informed or perhaps awakened my instincts which say that each of us is a profoundly singular specimen, and that no amount of time together can get you any closer to knowing another person more than you did in the first moments when you meet. From that moment, when the seemingly mystical mechanics of attraction and possibility are evaluated and the intellectual transaction is complete, nothing really changes. I heard a song on the radio this week, at the Trade Fair on Broadway. I recognized the voice as Phil Collins but had to whip out Shazam to name the song. It was Turn It On Again. What drew me in to the song was his use of the words “my life”. For such an upbeat song I found it strange to hear ruminations that, to me, evoked mortality and the container of years we have to inhabit this planet. We have no idea what size that container will be, nor do we know how or even if its characteristics will evolve. I am probably missing whatever the point of the song is but it reads like a lonely guy finding companionship in the people he sees on TV or hears on the radio. Then he either tries to impress you with how many friends he has, or else he is inviting you to flip through the channels with him to meet his surrogate companions: “I can show you some of the people in my life”. I don’t know and don’t care enough for the song to study it, but I felt a sourness form when I heard the words “my life”. He set it up as if it was something special or unique, but all lives are special and unique. At the beginning and continuously until the end our life is all any of us has. Our lives. Your life. My life. Without it there is nothing. I might go to the mausoleum today, the one across the street from the one still being built and where I will probably end up. I came to dislike cemeteries, quite abruptly, but this line of thinking makes me feel attracted to such a place. In the past I regarded boneyards as places of beauty, history, and discovery. I don’t think I ever really thought of them as peaceful, since the stories of the dead were constantly swirling. It is also true that most of the yards in New York are not exactly quiet or serene. Calvary is like a giant soup bowl of din and noise from the surrounding highways, not to mention the smells from the nearby fortune cookie factory — smells I originally thought had something to do with breached mausoleums or some other connection to the stench of death. But it’s not the atmosphere of cemeteries that turned me off. It’s when I looked at it as a means of disposal that I came to consider a cemetery’s very existence to be supremely archaic and pitifully inefficient. I think we should blast bodies off into space or establish burial grounds on the moon instead of what we do now, although I had an idea long ago that still sounds compelling: build a stackable mausoleum where bodies can be piled up to the sky. It could be in the shape of a pyramid, and as the centuries pass it would become taller than Mount Everest, a truly colossal structure joining the ranks of the world’s wonders. But that’s crazy talk, thoughts the like of which seem to have just prompted a slight anxiety tic.