The Problem with Indifference

Y Kan't Tori Read starts to sound just as good as Little Earthquakes.

Irish Day

After a very strange and very early Saturday night I found myself coming home from the East Village just before midnight. I am wearing my headphones and pondering whether I'm capable of intimacy: In other words it was a normal commute, except that the train was completely full of people who'd been drinking since the afternoon. An above-average number had freckles, strawberry-blonde hair, and blue-green eyes.

At Delancey, a rakish young Irish man of about 30 comes in and sits down next to the woman across from me. She's wearing a winter hat that says MONTREAL. At first I think he's drunkenly assaulting her but when they fall into conversation, I decide they know each other. He steadily gets louder and louder describing the other residents of the train. I finally turn off my iPod so I can eavesdrop, but leaving my headphones in as he shouts "You win best boots in the subway!" to the half of a punk-rock lesbian couple who's wearing a seventies-inspired pair of knee-high Wellingtons. I smile. The man next to him says "Are those really the best shoes on the subway?"

He points at my feet and says something nice about my trainers. I take off my headphones and blush a little.

Guy number 2 says "What about my girlfriend's shoes?" They're green Converse. They all get engaged in conversation about whether or not there are leather Chuck Taylors until I get off at Carroll St. The man says to Ms. Montreal "Oh no. Fag guy is getting off." I flip out but don't turn around from the door. "Come back FLAG guy" he says as everyone exits including Ms. Montreal. I realize I'm being hypersensitive and that he's referring to a man wearing an orange, white, and green scarf.

The feeling of free love, brotherhood and drunkeness St. Patrick's Day invokes makes me feel like it's ok to ask Ms. Montreal "Did you know that guy before he got on the train?"

"No, he was nice though."

"He seemed harmless. I think his heart was in a good place," I say.

"It's sad though," she says, "I don't think he realized I was going out here to meet my girlfriend."

I laugh and say "I think St. Patricks is kind of like Gay Pride for Irish People."

"I think St. Patricks is for amateurs," she says and then laughs and walks off.

Flag guy approaches and I realize he's wearing white canvas boat shoes with shamrocks on them. "Gay Pride for Irish People? That's a good one," he says. "I'm totally going to use it from now on."

"Feel free," i say as we all separate to our own south Brooklyn homes. Sober, gay, and English I still felt the love.

Fresh Start

I'm not getting rid of anything that's already here, but I am making a fresh start of it. Expect a new design soon and maybe a small declaration of intent.

Second Cities

I'm on the first full day of my second trip to San Francisco and feeling a particular sense of melancholy that I'm only now coming to understand -- the sense that nothing is ever quite as good as you remember it to be. You can never go home again, but you can also never go on vacation again.

I think I love cities the way other people love people. The first time I met San Fran, briefly, many years ago, in cookie stores and shopping centers, I felt ambivalent. I was heady with the intoxication of my distant lover New York who I was about to get serious with. I had grown out of a codependent relationship with my college town. It was comfortable but I wasn't growing, and it was a little boring. It needed me much more than I needed it.

I do miss her though.

I returned to San Francisco many years later. New York and I were in an abusive affair that had gone on for many years. When things were good, they were amazing -- New York constantly taunted me with possibility, almost magical coincidences and a sense of history and connection that could be found almost nowhere else. Ultimately though NYC also enacts a heavy cost with overcrowding, a high cost of living and an oddly paradoxical sense that nothing was permanent, no one could be counted on, that one day your favorite bagel store would become a Chase without a moment's warning.

My return to San Francisco was magical. I had come from L.A. on a 10 day trip up the coast and felt warm and welcomed. Judgment was suspended here. Cruising took the form of men and women looking at you with desire and not the NY sneer of judgment that could be interpreted as either lust or hate. No one worked a five-day week, and those that did worked from home. My affair with Seattle was forgotten. Instantly. He was a hirsute, quirky, charmingly outdoorsy lover who ultimately had very little going on underneath. San Francisco was a pansexual, polymorphously perverse rebel with a heart of gold and a love of the country and the city and equal access to both.

I laid in parks, ate pastries, and feared for my life in the Tenderloin. I ran on black sand beaches and climbed on the most spacious wall this side of Colorado. I made friends and fell in love with t-shirt shops. It was a whirlwind affair and when I left to camp in the Cascades the next day, I could barely look SeaTac in the face.

Less than sixth months later I return, ostensibly to use an expiring JetBlue frequent flyer ticket, visit a good friend and escape a glut of holiday parties. But really it's because I can't stay away. As I get off the plane the pilot says to someone waiting to get off: "There's no rush in Utopia" and I have a hard time not shouting "Amen."

Then I wake up today and try to find breakfast. I pass the Juvenile division of the police department, two or three homeless shelters, and shanties to doorways. I start to feel extraordinarily sad. I am surrounded by fancy restaurants, designer housewares stores and clever boutiques. And men and women living and dying in alleyways. I assume my sadness is caused by hunger and stop to eat.

I eat breakfast with an unsmiling Chinese waitress. My meal is all beige and costs as much as a New York brunch (although I must say the sausage gravy was amazing). Still sad, I decide to wander to the Castro. Cute boys always make me happy.

I can't help but notice the high-end underwear stores. The million pharmacies. The million and one bars. Everything except flowers and comic books has been sexualized. Desire normally sustains me and brings me joy but here I feel like it's grown out of control and gone malignant.

As I walk back to my friends apartment, I wonder what has changed and it occurs to me: First love is beautiful and magical and all you see is the good. You start a long-distance affair and look at pictures of your beloved, reminiscence on your experiences together and pray for the day you can be reunited. But it's when you come back together that your idealized image meets reality and you go from broad strokes to fine details. You have to seriously decide whether this is a face you could roll over and look at every morning. You wonder: Is this the same city I fell in love with?

I am about to go back out and try to find out.

Consolation prizes

I have a friend Negin who is a writer / actor / comedian. Many years ago, in the brunch times, she was in a comedy group and we would often hear things we had said at sunday afternoon breakfast repeated as the punchlines of sketches a few weeks later.
We all learned to keep the stories we wanted to use in our own work to ourselves.

The years passed and now both the comedy group and brunch have become no more.

But last night the old group gathered for happy hour drinks and it was like old times. I was relating the story of fight night when negin whipped out her notebook.

"Could you repeat what you just said?"

if nothing else the years have made us a little more honest about theft.

"The thing about creating zero sum mix tapes or the detail about how there was always a perfect balance of songs saying 'I love you' and 'I don't care?'"

another friend: "jes-s, that's f-cked up."

and a third: "It makes a good story at least!"

me: "did you get that all down, negin?"

It almost makes all the years of pain and confusion and mixed-up mix cds worth it.

We're all in this together

I was riding the train this morning and a large portly man kept falling asleep on my shoulder.

He was warm and heavy. It was so comforting I almost didn't transfer when an express train appeared across the platform.

I might be a little starved for human contact. The man woke up and looked shocked when I got up. I think we might both have been helping the other out.

Things you will never get credit for

I was at the Metropolitan with a friend after having had a blow up with him there on saturday. He'd accused me of being unsupportive of him and not curious enough about his love life.

I used to think I was *I* was in love with him to the degree that it had helped f-ck up not one but two previous relationships.

I had gone there to "break up" with him and be through with it once and for all. He was now dating a "gentlemen" now who bought drinks and insisted on getting him cabs.

These are things I'd never do, valuing strength and self-reliance above all else.

I get to the bar and he's seated on a couch with a drink. I approach the bartender and a woman gets there at the same time. She asks what's cheapest and the bartender says "Pabst." She fishes out two dollars and a bunch of dimes, quarters, and nickels. The bartender says "we don't take change below a quarter."

Before she can react I say "I'm going to give you a dollar and you're going to take it." She thanks me and leaves the change on the counter as the bartender says "the bar will only take quarters, but I'll take anything."

He thanks me when she's gone and I say that we've all been there at some point. He says "If I only have two dollars I don't go out to drink." I say "Me either." He says "It's because you were raised right."

I return to my conversation and manage to not get angry about being called disinterested in my friend's life despite the fact that I'd flown to L.A. this summer to see him in a play. I let it go. We finish our drinks. He goes to the bathroom. I ask the bartender to get us another round. He has no idea what my friend is drinking and neither do I. When my friend returns he orders another round and the bartender remembers he's after a Sierra Nevada. I pay and mumble something about owing him for drinks on saturday.

I am not cut out to be gallant and when I try to be it is never seen.

Some people are not meant to dabble in altruism.