My Maudlin Career

I escaped to Montauk just hours into the new year, where (in solitude of a motel room within eye shot of the Sound-rendered cobalt and foamy in cover of a blizzard) I pounded out another chapter, the below-referenced one set in DC, and all without setting foot on an Amtrak (L.I.R.R. more than sufficed for this latest round). 

So, here I am in Northern Colorado, or approaching it to be more accurate.  By “in”, “approaching”, and “it”, I mean to say that we have moved onto the next chapter in the arc.  I have no present plans to travel to Greeley, where James Michener taught.  I have no plans either to venture to Denver, where Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity caught up with Old Bull Lee.  I will not be leaving New York, except by Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road, or perhaps another Adirnondack up to Montreal.  I don’t need to.  I won’t let myself.  There’s too little time to write. 

And not enough time for this enterprise, I’m sad to say.  We’ve switched up the banner since my last appearance on this blog, replaced with perahps my favorite work of Hopper’s, Office in a Small City.  Insofar as it carries the traditional Hopper themeworld of isolation, at once beautiful and burdened, I also see in it glimmers of transcendance, of contemplatation, of liminality.  The build-up looks much too dense to convincingly be a small city: neither Madison, nor Fresno, nor Little Rock.  Perhaps I’m casting my net too narrowly. 

But this gentleman in the painting, he has two windows, and this fact surely cannot be lost on him.  The proverbial corner office, with scarcely anything at all on his desk.  My office, I think I’ve mentioned, has no windows.  My desk, I doubt I’ve mentioned, is in a perpetual state of clutter (a fact which carries through to nearly every space I occupy for significant amounts of time).  I wonder, perhaps, if our corner office dweller had just begun, and thus the empty desk.  I wonder if that rectilinear object to his back is another desk or an box full of belongings, work product, etc.  Has he been promoted?

I went to extraordinary effort to find a 1982 mongraph of Hopper on eBay many months back.  I had set out specifically for this version because it was edited by former Whitney curator Lloyd Goodrich, who knew Hopper personally and writes extensively about the genesis and progression of much of his works.  I could have, easily, put any of these queries to rest by reading what he had to say and . . .

. . . turning, let’s see . . . page 279 . . . and we have . . .

. . . nothing, just a reproduction of the painting, somewhat more dull than the calendar version that sits above my phone, which I silenced several months ago after the ever-frequent trilling began rousing me to instant panic. 

I hardly miss any calls now.

In more ethereal weather

I can think of few cities less compelling from a literary standpoint than Washington, DC, which must be the setting for my next chapter.  There is nothing I can do about this fact.  I’m writing a fictionalized account of someone’s life and have to maintain some level of verisimilitude to actual happenings.  This much is known: he was in our nation’s capital for a period of time in 1949, during which time had had become unusually preoccupied by death and it’s role in American life.  Amongst his somewhat inaccurate observations was the willingness of American widows to move on so quickly from the death of their spouses, the perceived frivolity of (what I’m assuming was) an Irish wake, and the persistent mockery of the maimed and injured.

None of these, I’m sure, are universal examples.  The individual I’m writing about was afflicted with a rather jaundiced view of American society that long predated his arrival in this country; sort of a disaffected DeToqueville.  These observations would continue throughout a two year stay in the States that would take him to Colorado and, later, to San Francisco.  In Washington, he felt a drought of sentimentality in American society, an observation which, in some respects, is apt for a place like Washington.

My previous chapter took place in New York, my city, and was thus accessible to me in a way that previous chapters (which took place on ocean liners and, more creatively, in Nebraska) had not been.  Washington is a town I’m well familiar with, one to which I had formerly aspired to move.  I am eternally grateful to whichever constellation of circumstances allowed me to avoid this fate; it is true I probably could have gone much farther in my life in Washington than I have in New York, but the outcome would have been a life perhaps too parochial in practice and outlook, too enamored of power, and too saturated in interpersonal politics to ever be very satisfying to me.

Americans have many different opinions about their capital, but I wager that New Yorkers particularly dread the idea of ever having to live, or even spend a significant amount of time in Washington.

It may indeed have something to do with death, which is easy to say from my customary perch in the not-at-all sepulchral East Village.

When I look back on my time in Washington in the summer of 1998, I remember being awestruck by the enormity and everpresence of power; you felt it simply everywhere.  You felt it running up and down the Mall, past and sometimes through the monuments, past the army helicopters, the fine cut military bodies toned for killing, and the marble-clad government buildings.  Your coordinates at any given point were defined by symbols of governance-the U.S. Capitol-and borrowed symbols of empire-the giant obelisk of the Washington Monument.

I was there a few months before the Starr Report came out.  Much had already been disclosed about the Lewinsky Affair, but the complete luridness of it all had not fully come into view.  I would be in Egypt by the time word got out about Oval Office oral sex and penetration by cigar.  The air was indeed thick with power, and it’s boon companion of intriuge; an entire city thriving on palace politics and palace intruige.  It would be exiting were it not so childish and prurient.

To come to all of this as an outsider must have been truly humbling . . . and humiliating.  At the time I was interning for an Arab American civil rights organization, a cause with few natural allies and many structural adversaries.  Having to beg for sympathy and flexibility in the corridors of power proved to be a yeoman’s task.  At the dormitory I shared with other interns, I wouldn’t impress anybody with my employer and their Cleveland Park address.  There were no Capitol Hill parties to attend.  No resume-boosting Committee Assignment to boast of.

I’ve found one could find a million different ways to matter in New York, often on one’s own terms, with the right amounts of pluck and grit.  But there were few avenues to positive notoriety in DC, and it helped a good deal to be possessed with abnormal amounts of sanctimony.

One of the most interesting elements of this business of writing is how much it has heightened for me the power of place.  This is not a new discovery for me: more than anything, I know how to write about place and what it means to a person.  How and why this came to be I’m not at all sure, but it’s an ever present context for me as a write.  I dread writing dialogue, although I appear to be improving.  Ask me to write about seeing Times Square for the first, or walking windswept alone down the National Mall, or experiencing the bracing, brutal flatness of a Midwestern winter and I feel truly invigorated.
How, if at all, can I visit something so troubling as death on a process so self-edifying to me as writing about place? This will be a unique and likely daunting challenge I can tell.  I know a thing or too about death as well-it was kinda the overall theme of my life for a little while there-but I do not relish writing about it.

I suspect another train ride is in order.  Maybe in more ethereal weather.

The Time of Legends

There is something about the frayed edges of cities, where the tunnels and the tracks and the tags and the tumble weeds coalesce.  There is something about these frayed edges that speak to decline, to fading, defeat, and betrayal.  It speaks also to reclamation, of the temporality of man’s defeat of nature.  You see it everywhere, in L.A., near the airport, in Chicago by the refineries.  Cities fray, they are never complete and perfected. Not anywhere. Nowhere

“I’ll be honest with you.  I’ve never been in the dome car.  Terrible isn’t it? 35 years on the railroad I’ve never been in the dome car.  They won’t let me in it.”

It really amazes me how quickly and dramatically nature unfurls itself in this massive, global city.  New York really is the capital of the world, and yet it capitulates to nature quickly and more starkly than any large city I have ever been in.  We expect Boston to melt into Cambridge and, eventually, New Hampshire. We expect the vast electrified grid of L.A. to climb, ever defiantly, up the mountains towards God.  But words evade any proper description of The Palisades emerging into view just inches past the GWB.
The erudite, but chatty, South Asian couple behind me has not stopped talking this whole time.

“What Bridge is That?”

“Is that the East River?”

“That’s Weehawken, right?”

For those concerned, we are crossing the Henry Hudson Bridge at the Harlem River.  I should not have left my umbrella at home

Fog settles in over the Hudson Valley.

“People are sleeping”

Duly noted (throat clearing)

“That looks like a nice restaurant over there” Half Moon.

The Tappan Zee Bridge which my mother used to take to work.  Everyday.  In a Gold Duster.

Fog falls over the Hudson valley.  An opening just few miles north of the Tappan Zee.  The visual is like nothing I have seen before.  The Hudson a vast, and imminently proximate sheet of cobalt. I am reminded strangely of The Time of Legends, from the early 80’s fantasy flick “Time Bandits”.  The Time of Legends seemed to exist outside the continuum of history; a sort of hybridized Valhalla and purgatory, where tall tales of yore existed in perpetuity, in almost brooding isolation.

Brooding Isolation.

Brooding perhaps.  Isolated in only the emotional sense.  The South Asians will not stop talking.  We are passing a prison.  Brooding Isolation.  Are we at Ossining? Do we simply pass through Sing Sing just like that.  Is that all?

We pass through Sing Sing just like that.

Westerly Marina was all that could be made out from the blur of signage that sweeps so swifly from view.  I have never seen anything before like it.  Not even back in August.

No, it was July.  July when we went up to Beacon.  We were supposed to go hiking in Storm King but it was going to Rain.

“Birds walking on the water?”
“Ducks. Ducks.  A lot of ducks there.”

“My wife and I were beginning  to talk about the history of the Hudson.  Please feel free to join us in the snack car.”

Croton-Harmon.

“I have a question for everybody?”

What makes a country wealthy?

How about commerce?

The Hudson Highlands

At West Point

“We hear so many bad things about kids, the ganges, the guns, the violence, the tattoos, and these academy kids are just great kids”

At Beacon

“Notice the terminology. Installations.”

“Are you in the art business? Oh, you just like it.”

The aroma of macaroni and cheese wafts in from the cafe car.

Henry Hudson went North.

Champlain went South

“I’d like to take the tour of Olympic Stadium, take the tour, of that . . . you know, arch thing.”

“If you make it to the West Coast you should take the Coastal Daylight.  Oakland to LA.  Train goes all the way up to Seattle.”

“The passenger trains are running on time becuase of the recession; fewer freight trains to occupy the tracks”

“One thing I can say is, I always appreciate this view”

“There’s an ariel show in Rhinebeck”

“Oh ya! We did that”, said the same gentleman who spoke so eagerly about CIA.

There’s a town called Fleischmann’s, it’s now become in the summer a hasidic village. The sociology of the area has changed.  There used to be leather tanning. The history changed about World War II.

Sun opens somewhere north of Hudson.  Some of the trees are bare, others are, thankfully, mutlichromatic of orange, yellow, burgundy, and even occasional green.

I am reminded of the drive to New Hampshire almost a year ago today and, particularly, the morning after the election, when Dave Henry and I had to throw away literally tons of campaign lit against an endless backdrop of rusted elms at the edge of Concord.

A child waves with his mother to the train.  Growing up, my elementary school, Hawthorn Primary (which later became Hawthorn Primary North, then Hawthorn Elementary North), stood near the train tracks where Butterfield Road hit Route 60.  I remember feeling particularly excited about trains, though never to the extent necessary to want a model set or to become the type of train enthusiast I often see on routes such as these.   I remember, only vaguely, the many freight cars that passed by: for Canadian National, Conrail, Soo Line (there was a kid in my class named Sulin, who surely got grief for this.  “Here comes the Sulin train”, we might once have said.  He didn’t like me much).  I didn’t necessarily know what any of these names connoted.  But it was the caboose I was most excited by.  It looked so . . . little, and homey, and underscaled to the rest of the train. But there mere site of it got me terribly excited, whether I was viewing a train passing by at an intersection, or from school, or at daycare.  I don’t actually know what the inside of a caboose looks: there is a hotel near where I grew up called “The End of the Line” (at least that’s what I last knew it to be called), which consists entirely of hotel suites made from converted cabooses.  The owner also owned a hotel with a jailhouse theme and lived in a gold-plated pyramid in Wadsworth.  A bit of an eccentric, he.

I only ever recall being able to see the train pass from one particular classroom at Hawthorn: it was where I had reading class with Mrs. Bleck as a First Grader, and then math class as a second grader with Mrs. McConnell (I’m not at all sure, to this day, if here last name was McConnell or McDonald, likely the former.  As a child, you here every synonym to McDonald as, well, McDonald).

I won’t ask something so banal as what ever happened to that eager young child.  I know what happened to him: I ignored him, so he left.  He died a long time ago, he may even have passed on with my mother.

You want more than you can actually do.

We arrive at Albany, an odd amalgam of modernist spires by Edward Durell Stone.  A bowl sits in the middle, they hold the bar exam here for those not fortunate enough to get the Javits Center.

The leaves turn yellower, draw closer.

The chatty South Asians are relating anecdotes about train travel to Pune, complaints about their adult childrens lack of incorporation of them into their everyday lives.

“Later on, they will realize this and it will be too late. They should be interracting more.  The problem is I haven’t even seen Navid’s house.  Two years.  Because they don’t want to invite us also.  If they were more friendly, then it’s a different story.  It’s the girls who keep the relationship.  Not boys.”

We pass cities where they made glass and flour.

I’ve never been in a dome car before.  There are no outlets.  I’m sure it’ll be something once we reach the Dacks, perhaps around Sunset.

Passing SUNY-Albany campus.  Looks terrible.

Schenectady.  ”There’s an Afghan restaurant Kabul Night, it’s excellent.  Actually lighter than Indian food, none of the rich foods or creams.”

The Mohawk Valley

The scent of ketchup wafts through the dome car.

I’ve woken up somewhere outside Fort Ticonderoga.  The skies are grayer, the landscape more impoverished, and the cellular signals have disappeared.  I did not tell anyone where I was to be this weekend.  I will not arrive in Montreal until early evening, still not too late to contact my Father.  But how will anyone else know where I am? This is at once exciting and irritating.  Should I just head to the Village? Find a room at the hostel? Go to a Sauna?

Lake Champlain smells awful, but is still very, very nice.

“You’re about to be part of one of the most beautiful scenery views of the entire trip.  You’re not only going to see the Mining Museum, but three rail cars.”

Bales of hay.  I used to love hay bales. And hay balers.  In fact, that was one of my favorite rides at Great America as a child.  The Hay Baler was just a ring of cars that moved very, very quickly around a giant dome covered in hay.  I amused very easily as a child, much more so than these days.

I should have downloaded Dvorak’s American Suite before coming up these parts. They are so starkly beautiful and haunting.  The Burned Over District in all its smoldering resilience, so named for the firey fervor of revivalist zeal that conflagrated across Upstate New York in the early 19th Century.  Here, Joseph Smith believed he was visited by God and Jesus in a grove, and later instructed by an angel named Moroni to dig up plates of gold which told a story of lost tribes of Israel that were actually predecessor cultures of the Native Americans.  Told this way, the Book of Mormon sounds much more like The Celestine Prophecy.

There is something very haunting up here. Not haunting, but haunted.  As though the primary tenants of these fields and tracts are phantasmic tiller men. Mushroom soil.

We are held at the border.  We have been waiting for some time.  Will be at least an hour late.  Stalled first at the border by a couple with a customs issued, then later by debris on the track which we struck in the dark.  It is most irrirating.  My plans for this evening have likely fallen through which, on the one hand, means no plans for dinner and no place to stay but, on the other hand, means that I am free to be as reckless as I want to be.

There is suddenly alot to worry about. How will I get money? Do the ATM’s still work up here? Is there a currency exchange at the train station? Will it still be open at almost 9:00pm on a Saturday?  Shit Shit Shit.

I will probs have to get a hotel.  So much to do.  Will be at least ten before I’m settled.  But may yet still have a date.

Publishing is Performance

In all my years of writing (and mostly reading) blogs, few issues have irked me more than lack of consistency in posting.  Don’t get me wrong, I am usually more than able to keep up my half of the implied bargain between writer and reader: to provide content to be consumed, and to consume and appreciate in turn.  Writers ask for little more than recognition; where most of them falter is in determining the satisfactory scale and scope of this recognition.

When blogging, I rarely let more than a few days, sometimes even hours pass, before writing about some issue, occurrence, or observation in life.  Often, I’ve found, one (in particular, me) blogs consistently simply for the purpose of being consistent.  There is nothing wrong with this habit, per se.  However, if one (in particular, me) is the type to judge other bloggers on the basis of their consistency in posting, the issue of consistent, frequent, and reliable posting becomes all the more irksome.

Blogging is not a new advent anymore.  It will be with us for a while, it is part of who we are and, someday, it will depart the scene quicker and more furiously than we can possibly now imagine.  So, it’s of limited purpose, at this stage, to pull apart all the implications, burdens, and boons the phenomenon of blogging carries for writer and reader alike, except to say that someone who has blogged for as long (if for as episodically) as myself, should know better than to take the better part of a month off from writing, without so much as an explanation or introduction.

What is most striking to me about this absence is its contributing factors.  I owe my most recent absence to a constellation of largely artificial issues all related to fairly recent social networking.  You see, Twitter will not load at my workplace anymore and that has removed for me a superficial, but somehow critical, incentive to blog.

Twitter? You ask, what does Twitter have to do with anything you write on here? Well, I might say, how perchance did you happen to stumble upon this blog (as opposed to StumbleUpon) other than by Twitter? I write these posts as personal essays to myself.  I post them on wordpress.  I link to Twitter.  Whoever finds it, finds it.  That many of my mutual followers on Twitter are publishing imprints is not lost on me.

Ultimately, I am not at all sure who even reads these posts.  In my alternately overactive and inert imagination, I conjure up the notion of a variety of strangers from many walks: some friends, mostly strangers, culled from Twitter or other users on WordPress, marveling over my spare and unremarkable posts on writing about writing.  The reality, however, is much more spare and unremarkable.  Few, very very few, people even know about this blog.  Most of those that do are well-accustomed to my blogging (or to me personally).  And those that do not know me have precious little motivation to continue reading for the reasons discussed earlier.  Put simply, there is simply no purpose to writing a blog (in my mind) if it does not possess even the slightest possibility that a person completely unknown to me could cast their eyes upon it.  And yet, this explanation is the equivalent of someone saying that they stopped writing a book simply because there was no one else around to whom they could whisper about it.  It’s needlessly self-sabotaging for the writer, and completely irrelevant to the reader.

We over-emphasize the self in self-publishing, but this self only addresses the instrumentality of publishing, and does not alter one bit the fact that publishing is performance.  And like any performance, the audience for any particular book can either be broad or niche.  I am dispositionally a niche performer; I do not know what most people want.  Those few times I’m able to get a sense of it, I cringe: most people want , or act like they want, things that are, subjectively speaking, quite boring to me.  I believe  most people want more for themselves what they can ever actually achieve.  Where people are separated in this regard is in the degree of importance they place on the universal chasm between concept and execution. Some take comfort in what they can accomplish, while others gainsay the importance of it in the light of future, more superlative feats.  One of my hopes for myself as I writer is that I can learn to better give shape to these conflicts in the characters I develop.

But that’s enough about conflict and consistency.

At the time of this writing, I am aboard Amtrak’s Adirondack service to Montreal.  I have scheduled a sudden, and somewhat reckless, weekend foray to a city I’ve only been to once and where I do not know anyone*.  My hope is, for once, ill-defined, except that I should get a fair amount of writing in on the ten hour ride through Upstate New York, arboreal rusts of Autumn at all.  What awaits me on the ground in Montreal is of momentary un-importance to me, as I hope to get some ground covered on a, so far, bedevilingly out-of-scale fifth chapter of my book.  I have left far behind me, for now, the agonies of work, the demons associated with Marathon weekend, and the envious inadequacy I often feel every Halloween in a city suddenly abounding with so many souls more exhibitionist than myself

Quite a tall order for only 48 hours worth of weekend, but I suppose I could do better to just not give so much of a shit about so many different things at once.  It may help me to write more consistently.  But then, what good would I be to myself as a writer.  God-kissed, God-cursed Watchers.  I am one of them.  That’s what he said shortly before he left the scene. It figures. It’s not fair, I suppose, but sometimes it can be quite a bit of fun.  Like now.  For once. However fleeting and infrequent.

*(this last fact is a long-running joke between myself and a possible reader of this blog stemming from my last visit to Montreal)

The Latest Touch Point on the Spiral.

I’m still trying to work the jet lag out of my system (not all of it, of course, at least not the part that’s been getting me up at 6:00am every day), so it’ll be a few more days before I post again.  Here is an oldie, but goodie, post from one of my old blogs on overseas air travel and what it has meant to me throughout my life. 

This particular post is thematically inapplicable to my most recent journey to Spain, but it always comes to mind for me every time I fly out of JFK.  It was my second to last post on my previous blog, which I discontinued in early 2008, and it’s one of my favorite posts that I have written anywhere.  Barring a few out of context references to “spiraling in the dark” (it was a much more emotionally raw blog than this one, to say the least), I think it’s still a good read.  Enjoy!

Vaseline Over the Lenses

December 16, 2007

Memory is a critical tool for surviving in the dark, but where spirals are concerned it’s an absolute necessity. I suspect I will have ample opportunity over the next few weeks to pick apart the various component parts of memory, so i choose to focus now on only the latest touch point on the spiral: waiting in an airport, heading back to Egypt.

Egypt’s main role in western history is as a place either to leave or to loot. The Hebrew Bible, from which both the New Testament and the Quran issue, portrays Egypt as a wealthy, but oppressive, metropol, as well as an entrenched pharaohnic hierarchy practically begging for divine comeuppance.

In antiquity, Egypt is a civilization of unrivalled splendor, power, and persistance; udone both from within and by the hands of Western Civilization’s existential forebearers, the Ancient Greeks.

For the West, Egypt has long been a talisman for imperial glories. Whether it was the French or the British, the Ottoman Turks or Nazi Germany, every expansionist empire has wanted a piece.

To me, Egypt is a dirty and confusing place where my entire family comes from.

Again, I won’t harp on that point for now. My focus, instead, is on the distance ahead because, quite frankly, I owe my entire existance to air travel.

I don’t remember much about my earliest trip to Egypt in infancy. As relatively recent as this seems, I don’t know how my family managed the flight to Cairo from Dallas-Fort Worth, what layovers this required, and at what cost to time and patience this must have incurred. I only know that for most of my life, a trip to Egypt meant a stopover in Europe.

So frequent were our trips on KLM that I believed it to be an Egyptian carrier. Of course, I couldn’t identify the vaguely English-sounding singsong tongue of the Dutch (I still cannot, it seems), but it all seemed foreign enough to me at the time.

An extended visit to Paris as a child opened my interests to French culture, a civilization with which I continue to maintain a love-hate relationship. A near full day’s stop in Rome gave me time enough to learn this most Cairene of European capitals by heart. But whether by Amsterdam-Schipol, Paris-CDG, or Roma Fiumicino, I came to treasure this time “in between” from the disoriening time spent in Egypt and the chaotic, often unhappy preparation period that preceded each trip.

I never understood my parents approach to packing for Egypt and I likely never will. They took a decidedly kitchen sink posture towards packing, dedicated a full two weeks to the frenetic process of shopping, packing, and repacking, in tow dozens of items for aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. My mother pursued this task with characteristic angst.

In 1995, her first visit to Egypt during Ramadan in nearly 30 years, she had gone to the trouble of putting together several collages of her and her siblings from their youth. We had only made it a quarter of the way down Buckley Road before she panicked that they were still sitting on the kitchen table.

Somehow, on our last ever trip together, my father had prevailed on her not to attempt to repack my bags in order to make space for items she wanted to bring; I, of course, deeply resented the notion of her “going through my stuff” as it were. This reflected a frustration on my part that has come to color alot of my visits to Egypt, that there, in the cradle of civilization/my parents, I’m never treated as any higher than the mental age of 12.

On our last trip together, she was occupied with the recent death of my grandmother. It was our only time ever flying Egypt Air together. There, listening to Om Kalthoum on the inflight audio, she wept.

My survival mechaism, i’ve recognized, for dealing with so much unexplicably manic energy, has been to focus on the surounds, to take a few steps back from whats happening in front of my face. And so my gaze, when travelling, has turned so often to airports, those great existential incumbators of human travel.

Airports are kind of a big deal for Chicagoans. I suspect this can be owed to a local culture of mass transit and trans-continental exchange. But O’Hare, for all its volume and fuss, only recently developped the infrastructure to take on a significant number of overseas flights. And so for most of my childhood, our trips to Egypt would begin in the makeshift Terminal 4, which occupeid the ground level of the parking superstructure. Cartoonishly wide shuttle busses would them take us to another gate, or perhaps, somewhere out on the tarmac. In the winter time, in Northern Illinois, this experience would be most unenjoyable.

This strange trajectory of air travel to Egypt, coupled with the ever presence of foreign ticket offices in Cairo, would nurture in me a wonkish fascination with other country’s airlines. It always struck me how Schipol resembled a veritable tulip bed of powder blue fliveries, how Istanbul was jetway upon jetway of aspirational Eurowhites. Better still, along the way you would come across carriers that never came to Chicago: Aeroflot, China Airlines, Air Djibouti. Stateside, you always had a choice. Overseas it was another story.

And so it is that I find myself waiting to board America’s name carrier in by far its least American airport. JFK and Queens truly deserve each other. Like its home borough, this place is an innavigable mess of different cultures stretching across nine terminals. Built initially to be a tourist-friendly orgy of neo-googie architecture within eyeshot of the Atlantic-an NYC destination in its own right like Times Square or Rockefeller Center-JFK is today code for every bad idea ever concived in the history of modern air transit. It is unwieldy, inaccessible, and needlessly multiform. Its sole grace is the colorful parade of tail designs from locales as far flung as Colombia, Uzbekistan, and Ghana.

I am fortunate, however, to be flying American Airlines to Zurich (en route to Cairo) which brings me to the unlovely but brand spanking new Terminal 9 This will be my first time flying the Silver Bird overseas and also my first ever encounter with Zurich Flughafen. Im not expecting much, except to perhaps modify my mothers tradition by bringing Swiss chocolates. Otherwise, I harbor no illusions of any transformative quality to air travel. My airline this time, having once esteemed itself “Something Special in the Air” can now only offer the wan acknowledgment of “We Know Why You Fly”.

Memory has taught me to suspect that perhaps they do not.

Skipping over the ocean like a stone . . .

Blogging has been sporadic this week on account of my leaving for Spain for the next nine days.  I will be travelling around Andalucia with my Dad, and trying my damnedest to stay completely off the grid (no lap top, no novel-writing, etc. etc) all the while.  Musings on travel, liminas, and all that transformative hoo-ha will await you upon my return.

A Need to Reclaim

I’ve had about as many gym memberships in New York as I’ve had blogs, a fact which I only wish could be deftly attributed to the same provenance.  I blog because, if I’m to understand it correctly, this business of writing is something which a writer “can’t not do.”  I’ve tried it for a year or two now and it’s been most upsetting for me.  My gym memberships are something else entirely, and while the number is certainly not unusual for really anyone in New York City, what is even stranger is that at this moment, technically speaking, I hold five gym memberships simultaneously.  It is the task of the next few days to officially cancel two of them, which will leave me with a grand total of three.

One of these, I should say, was parentally subsidized many years back, and really quite cheap.  It’s cheapness, in fact, seems to be the one compelling reason for me not to continue using it. It’s all the way up in Hell’s Kitchen, near where I used to work, and where I regularly contemplated moving.  It remains lost on me what presence, if any, I could possibly find for myself in a neighborhood so saturated with theatre and PR queens (this is not to judge, except to say that I am often not well received by either of these demographics), many of whom spend a good two-to-three hours a day at the gym.

My job (which dictates the bulk of my lifestyle), does not allow time for any such diversion.  I have had, in the past year and a half, had to learn to get creative with how I shoehorn physical activity into an open-ended work schedule.  It has been mostly a losing battle, and I now have 20 additional pounds of fat around my midsection to show for it.  Friends and other casual acquaintances do not take this complaint seriously as these 20 additional pounds has brought me up to a much healthier weight for my size.  Moreover, I am able to keep something close to slightly-better-than-average shape.  I am able to run 10.7 miles at a time without injury.  Though I was not able to do it quite as often during this rain-soaked summer, a 26-mile bike ride out to the beach is more or less effortless for me.  I swim at least twice, but usually three times a week.  In short, why should anybody believe me when I say I’m out of shape?

My only response is that I can simply feel it.  It’s not who I am.  I can’t not do it.

A friend of a friend, in response to a Facebook query on whether I should write before or after working out, commented (wrongly, I imagine) that I shouldn’t work out at all because an artist has to be lazy. Many artists, I imagine, are quite lazy, but their craft certainly does not mandate it of them.  Absent the deadlines, the dramae, and the accumulated catastrophes of the office-based daily grind (what my friends so generously call, “Having a real job”), I can imagine that vigilant self-propulsion would easily fall by the wayside.  But I can only imagine.  I’ve had two extended periods of unemployment since ending law school and both were defined by ceaseless, almost punishing, physical and mental activity.

In the first case, I had just finished law school and preceded, for reasons i still have yet to rationalize, to treat my bar study period as some sort of rumpsringa, scheduling two or three sessions a day in the pool in between cramming for 2-207 and CPLR Long Arm Jurisdiction (that I wasn’t, by any conceivable measure, learning either of these two statutes was blissfully lost on me).  The fall that followed brought my first NYC Marathon, which i finished in an astounded 3:28:29 seconds.  Three weeks later, I learned I would have to retake the bar exam.  Four months later I was done, but not without a tiring thirteen-hour-a-day commitment to the study of the bar, which I did eventually pass.  And while I wish I could have enjoyed the three or four month period of downtime which followed, I was caught in the agonies of one personal tragedy after another (the simultaneous hospitalization of my mother and one of my closest friends) and when I finally landed with one job offer (the product of my sole interview in nearly a year), it seemed more like a lark than anything else.  On the other side of this year-long ordeal, I found myself tired, stressed out, poorly fed, and in terrible shape.

I struggled to maintain a fitness regimen that fit with the need to be somewhere at a set time for several hours of a day, something which I had not had to do for three or four years .  The loss of my job less than a year later was perhaps the beginning of the end for me with regards to my continuing interest in the pursuit of the legal profession, and I decided to compel these furies towards another run at the NYC Marathon.  This plan was more than workable for me, until about mile 23, where Fifth Avenue hits Central Park North.  My quads locked up, painfully at that, but something else had locked up too.  That ever present self-propulsion that I had carried with me for nearly three or four years straight was suddenly stalled, unmotivated; still there but yearning for a different expression.  It would be nearly two more years before I could give a name to this need, but instead of the exhilaration of a start and or the sublime satisfaction of a finish, I feel the endless burn of the middle stretch every time I sit down to write.  It will finish, it will have to, but I can’t see the end of it just yet.

I’ve since joined two more gyms, a clean, YMCA with a pool near Chinatown (on the way to work), and a much nicer, more upmarket gym just kitty corner from my apartment.  After two sessions with my (by the way, Egyptian) personal trainer, I’ve learned that my body bears little physical resemblance to the one that carried me across so many finish lines in Central Park.

I do not see this as a zero sum game, there is no reason whatsoever for artists to be lazy except that too much physical activity can easily sap one’s energy, along with too much sex, mania, and caffeine.  However, there is present in the enterprises of both writing and fitness a need to reclaim.  In the latter instance, it is something more ascertainable; a former, more capable, less mistake prone (or perhaps very much so, but with a healthful amount of blissful oblivion to go with it) version of myself.  In the former case, however, it is a much more ambitious process of reclamation: to pan the sands of my own perception for an independent reality that can exist by its own logic, outside the creative confines of my mind and the subjective bias it carries.  This cannot be easily done.

My favorite races in Central Park are the ones which end at Bethesda Terrace.  As I round the 77th Street Transverse, the finish line is conspicuous and beautiful, and it is here that I slow down to wind each of my arms like a toy and accelerate to the finish as quickly as humanly possible for me, often at the risk of near collapse or nausea at the end.  Writing will probably never inspire any such agony, it is too elusive and shifting of an activity.  But, in a sense I’m waiting for my windup, which is the true mark of an amateur.  And as Stephen King has said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

Breathing in.  Winding Up.

An Ever-Present Inertia

Since my first post on this blog, I have made distressingly little headway on incorporating the new nightstand into my apartment.  It remains where I had initially left it, in my kitchen, where it actual serves quite conveniently as a prep station.  This prep station, it should be said, went to ill use yesterday as I attempted (quite unsuccessfully) to bake a semolina cake.

 

 

I have issues with clutter, in that I am seemingly oblivious to it.  I am, I should fully admit, quite lazy when it comes to housekeeping.  The reality is that I spend very few hours out of my day at home.  Those few that are spent, I am usually much too exhausted to make an earnest effort to clean.  Life on Manhattan does carry with it a certain inertial pull that often compels you not to move at all if doing so would be too simple.  Over and over again, I have had one time goblin or another following me around, breathing down my neck, and compelling me to save my energy for other endeavors.

 

 

When I first moved in, cleaning could wait because I was still settling in.  One, of course, rarely arrives at a precisely definable moment of “settling in” to a new domicile.  Initially, in fact, I may even have taken more of a sojourner mentality towards my apartment (a rent-stabilized one bedroom in a comfortable, safe, convenient, and very, very boring part of Manhattan).  As referenced many posts below, it would have to do for now.

 

 

Of course, “now” was supposed to be resolved by law school and it was during law school that the bulk of the mess began to accumulate and much of it still remains. Case books, horn books, bar review books, drafts of dozens and dozens of cover letters, essays, copies of transcripts etc., a veritable debris field of unrealized ambition.  As I’ve mentioned countless times before, I didn’t exactly charge out of the gate in law school.  Or rather, I did charge, but a few weeks in, I suspect I may have flinched.  When and what for are two unresolved matters; it was so very long ago.  But from that moment forward, my career trajectory as a lawyer was going to be defined by a series of false starts and wasted opportunities.

 

 

And now we have a new nightstand to introduce to this dynamic.  It cannot stay where it is currently situated.  At some point, I will have to pick up my bike from the shop (its been waiting for me for the past two weeks, but part of me feels compelled to just trade it in for another, where such a barter even possible) and it will have to return to its appointed place occluding the main entryway to my apartment.  There is, in fact, an awful lot of occlusion occurring in my apartment, and I can never obtain a complete handle on it.

 

 

There are easily four more bookshelves than what I have space for, and this is before getting to the Middlesex County-sized sofa, desk, coffee table and TV.  A plasma screen, could I afford one, would resolve at least two of these issues, and new desk sets aren’t quite as significant an outlay as one would expect.  The problem, of course, is the contents of the bookshelves: two are for books I’ve actually enjoyed reading, the rest is for casebooks.  An outside observer would instruct me just to get rid of the casebooks, as no doubt most lawyers do.  Why I am hanging on to them is not altogether clear to me.  Perhaps I feel as though my legal education was never perfected ( I don’t want to say that it was never completed; it is called “Continuing Legal Education” for a reason), and am thus holding on to the only tangible vestiges of it that remain in my life.  Perhaps it’s that I need to keep myself open to the opportunity that things might change course in my favor but that, in dong so, I carry with me too many possible ways to move forward.  Imagine a Choose Your Own Adventure novel within which you have completely lost site of the overarching plotline.

 

 

The same principle seems to be at play with my other bookshelves.  I’ve already read most of these books, and will likely never read them again.  I will admit there is an obvious vanity to why they remain: I like what they say about me.  The same, arguably, cannot be said for a single casebook lying in my apartment right now.  Since, I have been out of law school five years now, they are effectively obsolete and cannot be resold.  They are also, it should be said, discouragingly heavy.

 

 

There is an ever-present inertia to my living confines, so much of it tied to the narrative of things I tried to become on the way to becoming a writer.  There is the need to keep this narrative memorialized and intact for now, as I strive to channel the energies, demons, and agonies they inspire towards more creative ends.  There is the same concurrent need to simply, clarify, and pair down only to the most essential items and to free my mind of all tarrying complications and burdensome devices.  All of this is derivative of the very simple question of whether I spend a day or two cleaning up after myself or not allow myself to be distracted from the enterprise of writing by all of clutter which constantly surrounds me at home.

 

 

I am not home as I write this.  I am almost never home.  And maybe that’s the only complication that need be acknowledged.  This, I suspect, will not change for a while.  I’ve got a new time goblin now, as most of you know, and it may be the most fickle one I’ve grappled with yet.

The Barista Thinks My Name is “Tulley”

The Barista Thinks My Names Is “Tulley”

I’m usually not given to opening posts with the thematic takeaway, but I have a difficult time wrapping my head around this particular fact.

I introduced myself to him a couple of weeks back, a long overdue exchange given that I’ve been coming to this cafe for months.  The very moment I set eyes on this place I knew this would be the place I would write.  Mind you, I have been most unsuccessful in this regard in the past month or so, owed in part to a fifth chapter that has, instead of advancing the narrative, become almost tediously encyclopedic.

In any event, I’m far too introverted to ever be the first to introduce myself to a stranger.  It has to be drawn out of me, and I suspect one of the main reasons for this is that I have an unusual name.  I say unusual in that I have a non-anglo saxon name.  My name is not at all unusual in Arabic.  That said, it’s easily mispronounced and much, much easier to mishear the first time, which can be owed in turn to my tendency to speak to strangers in a somewhat hushed baratone.  So accustomed am I to mispronunciation, that I don’t bother correcting anyone after the first two tries.  It really doesn’t bother me.  In moments of more smug self-satisfaction, I might say to myself, “All the more reason to become famous, see O’Conner, Sinead or Culkin, Macaulay”.

Anyways, Alex is not only the barista, but the manager of said establishment, no doubt put in contact and on a first name basis with hundreds and hundreds of customers each day.  After finally introducing myself a little while back, he subsequently began addressing me by a name I was certain wasn’t my own.  As of this morning, it is clear to me he has been calling me, “Tulley”.

How one derives Tulley from my real name is really quite beyond me, but it doesn’t strike me as an sobriquet unworthy of further consideration.

Tulley.

I mean, even thinking about it the only thing that comes to mind is a local Seattle brew.  Additionally, a Wikipedia search will net such arcana as British Paleontolgoist Edwin Tulley Newton, U.S. Populist politician Freeman Tulley Knowles, and Bloomberg Television host Matthew Tulley Miller.  I’m assuming none of these men went (or go) by Tulley as a first name.

Tulley.

He could be an occasional guest character on a ‘70s television crime serial like Starsky and Hutch or Baretta.  He could maybe even be a supporting character on a comedy like Barney Miller, or Night Court.  I don’t know why I lay such a thematically penal air over a name like Tulley.  I envision a thick-necked, oafish, but kind hearted gentleman working in corrections or police investigation.

Tulley.

Were we to remove the “e”, we could infer Louis Tully, Rick Moranis’ character from Ghostbusters.  In fact, without the “e”, Tully’s becomes a more direct reference to Tully’s Coffee.  It is also a town in Onondaga County as well as Queensland, Australia, near  Syracuse or Cairns, depending on your outlook.  Tully (no doubt now pronounced Too-LEE) is also a commune in the Somme department of Picardie,  somewhere near Abbeville, hard off the English Channel.  It was also the name of a 2000 independent film feature about put upon brothers living in rural Nebraska.  It looks most sad and compelling.

Most relevantly to me, there is the Tully Monster , a soft-bodied invertebrate that lived 300 million years ago in the muddy estuaries of my native Illinois.  You may perhaps have the same mental picture of myself, thinking of the worrywart, fuschia colored monster from “Sesame Street”; incidentally, in the midst of this metasearch I have also discovered that in the Egyptian version of Sesame Street, Telly Monster is known as “Mosaad”.

Tully.  Tulley.  Whathaveyou.

It’s an Irish surname, as my real last name is often mistaken.  And because my middle initial is O, it is often though to be the prefix to my surname.  I’ve never taken any umbrage to this either.  I rather like the Irish.

But Tully.  Do even I look like a Tully? More to the point, *can* I look like a Tully.  I have dark skin and noticeably semitic features, even though it is rare for others to correctly identify my ethnicity.

There are, however, a lot of places for a Tully, and I, by chance, have become one of them.

The implications of this are more than just cosmetic.  Here, as long as I’m Tully, I don’t have to be, well, me anymore.  I mean, obviously, I still am me, but maybe, just maybe, Tully, can better sift through vonbloompasha’s tellings more effectively than vonbloompasha can himself.  Vonbloompasha gets stuck in the weeds quite often, both he and Tully can tell you that.  But maybe Tully can plum the depths alongside vonboompasha without getting caught in the murk.  The possibilities for Tully and vonbloompasha are truly endless.

It’s also a much more enticing possibility for me than having to awkwardly explain my real name to the barrista as I’ve had to do countless other times in my life.  Besides that,  I’ve been me my entire life.  Most of the Tully’s I’ve come across don’t seem particularly compelling to me either; one more reason, I suppose, to want to become famous.

Alienating My First Referral

I crossed another major rubicon yesterday with regards to writing, albeit one I could arguably have done without.  I’ve had to “out” myself as a writer on one or two occasions in the past week (when, coincidentally, I’ve began writing this blog), this time (and then only by duress) to my father.

I may, in fact, have acquired my love for literature from my father, although only indirectly and somewhat passively.  He is passionate and well-versed in Arabic literature, most of which is inaccessible to me.  I, personally, did not take a fervent interest in reading until my early twenties.  But, he was always a voracious reader and an avid admirer of the written word in all its forms.  In the abstract, telling my dad that I’m writing a novel shouldn’t have been really that great of obstacle for me to clear.

There are, however, two tarrying complications to this disclosure: 1) that I’m supposed to be a lawyer and 2) that he is indirectly cast in the novel.

This second point I won’t elaborate on now, because it involves a plot point I have not had a chance to develop.  As for the first one . . . well, I feel I’ve written enough posts in the past week on the process of evolving from something so fundamentally risk-averse (becoming a corporate lawyer) to the professional equivalent of jumping off of a cliff without a parachute (writing).  I won’t bother with it any further.

I do, however, have much to say about the events that lead to yesterday’s disclosure.  None of them are pleasant, and I admit I resist even re-engaging with them by writing about it on this medium.  Here goes . . .

My brother’s best friend, who I have known since about the age of 12, had recommended (in fact, insisted) that I get in touch with a mutual friend of herself and my brother’s who had just published her first novel.  I finally agreed to take her up on this, and after one or two emails to said person, I have been accused of having burned a bridge between both herself and my brother’s best friend (my brother, for his part, has weighed in that this is all some sort of misunderstanding fueled by projected histrionics; i tend to agree).

In any event, the source of all this discord was a very tongue-in-cheek comment I made on another mutual friend’s Facebook page about how I would read this referral’s new book if she reviewed the chapters I was going to submit to her.  Even re-reading that statement, I believe it to be laughable and unserious on this face.  This, however, was taken by someone (whether my brother’s friend or the referral) as “idiotic blackmail”, leading up to a very nasty and hostile request from my brother’s best friend where she ordered me never to email her friend again.

While all of this was transpiring, I was exchanging emails from the referral who portrayed no sense of umbrage towards any of what I had done.  While, I’m obviously still fuming at the fact that my words were taken out of context (and that I may have been responsible for this, in part), I am also bedeviled by something more fundamental.

Are writers always this sensitive? I mean, I’m sensitive about my work, but I’m still very, very new to the process and have a lot to learn.  I feel that, for all my agonies, as reported on this blog and elsewhere, I have yet to bring to the process of writing the type of rapacious zeal necessary for me to vituperatively guard my own work at all costs.  Maybe I will get there someday, and maybe I too will have to fly off the handle at every perceived insult, just like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man.

Or maybe the takeway from all of this is that my brother’s best friend has a huge pole up her ass and I should only engage her gingerly moving forward.

But that would be too simple and pat of an explanation, and also not very writerly.

I call my dad nightly, or every other night, something I’ve been in the habit of doing since my mother passed away.  The day’s work and non-work-related stresses had accumulated, and I needed to reserve the evening for a truly aromatic combination of Russian steam baths, blueberry ale, chess pie, and pork buns.  On the way home, he had asked how things were and I told him, from the outset, “I got into a huge fight with so-and-so today, and here’s why.”

He was curious and engaged all throughout, and then he asked (catching up with his own thoughts), “umm . . . what is it you’re trying to write?”

And after that point, I couldn’t get him to shut up, going on and on about one aspect or another of he plot that interests him, etc. etc.  I didn’t tell him about the aspect that involves characters based on younger versions of himself and my mother.  This section of the plot is very, very far away from the present task of writing, anyways.

He even offered perhaps the most comforting words about the day’s preceding events, “Don’t worry about alienating anyone, you were bound to start some time.”

But there is no doubt a fair amount of guilt attached to this qualified disclosure; I feel as though I’ve portrayed the novel as less than it actually is, and yet, I feel freed up for having done it.  It no longer feels like a clandestine exercise.

Except now he’s asked if *he* can view some of my chapters as well.

This might not end well.