Sadly, I think it was the party bed that got us all sick. We’ve been having movie nights on my pushed-together twins, and two nights ago we watched Seinfeld and Hannah and Her Sisters and the next morning three out of six of us were sick. We’re like a first grade classroom. A cesspool.

Kind of a party bed buzz kill.

I went to mass on Sunday morning. Got up and had poached eggs at Julie’s, across the street and fifteen floors up. Mandy and Sarah stumbled in, saturated and sleep-deprived from the night before. Mandy is reactivating the Roman Catholic in her and invited me to a service. It was a beautiful morning. Sarah talked about her confirmation; Julie talked about Lutherans and all of their cooking. Mandy said she stole a vat of communion wafers when she was fifteen and ate them with salsa and sour cream.

The service had been rescheduled. Bi-lingual every last Sunday of the month, so we only caught the end. Stood around a fiberglass statue of St. Francis, light streaming over his shoulders, onto our faces. We talked about religion from Taffee St. to DeKalb. Mandy is writing a coming-of-age novel about a Hassidic girl, and she’s been spending a lot of time in their neighborhoods, talking, sitting next to them in delis. “And ya know, it makes you think: whatever it is, it gives their lives meaning,” she said. The shaved heads, ankle-length skirts, the fact that they are not encouraged to read, go to college, and that they are put in match-made marriages by professional Hassidic match-makers.

The other night I went into the city to karaoke for Jenny’s birthday. Before we departed, ten of us gathered at the foot of her bed, and it smelled like manufactured girl-girl. We were wearing eye shadow. I had just gotten back from winding around New England, had just woken up from a quick nap. Lyndel, freckled and still Florida-golden, asked me how it had gone.

“Oh, you know. It was like the Lost Boys up there.”

“Mm. Oh, Wendy,” she said. And that’s all she said. And that’s all she could have.

We wandered around the financial district, looking for an entrance point into Chinatown. And in heels and a disco-top, I saw Ground Zero for the first time. I saw the World Financial Bank. Before we made it to the bars, I decided to turn around, go back to Brooklyn. I was too tired, and I’d spent the energy I’d rationed for karaoke wandering around Wall Street instead. I wouldn’t have been able to pour myself into it.

That has been a theme lately. If you can’t pour yourself into it, don’t do it. Focus on the chalices you’ve chosen, the ones you can fill.

And Connecticut was like the Lost Boys. When I’m with him, and them, I feel out of place if I brush my teeth (but then, I always brush them anyway.) Sweeney and I drove up on Friday after dark. We picked up Chanel from Albertus Magnus near New Haven where she studies art therapy.

“How does New England look compared to where you’re from?” Chanel had asked on the darkened freeway.

Outside, the trees looked like Baba Yaga’s teeth. Witches and headless horsemen and things come from these thickets. The trees are naked and sharp by December. Also, there are actual towns. Lots of little, Victorian towns, and not sprawl, not 1960’s-developments that cover the West like sheet cake.

We pulled into refurbished Colonial student housing at Weslyan in Middletown where they pummeled Farid in the doorway. All of them on the floor. We played and drank Jim Bean and ran around the dilapidated hallways. Just inside the massive columns bookending the entrance was a grand foyer with a gutted fireplace they had made into a stage. Farid’s band played, and a four-piece called Jack and we danced and danced, and Chanel hooked her arm into mine: what a lightening rod. “You’re being insipid, man! You’re being insipid!” She has limp, angel blond hair and spit in the corners of her mouth.

I woke in the morning on a bare twin mattress, sharing Sweeney’s jacket, in the middle of a vacant room with holes in the sheetrock, and plumbing wretched out of the wall. I feel feral around him. I want to feel feral more often. The mornings I wake up with him, my hair is knotted and matted to extremes it could never reach otherwise. And on those mornings, I hold it back with a rubberband, but I don’t brush it. I just let it fall down my back, gnarled.

We kicked our way through Connecticut ice and found Chanel and Farid at a cafe. We all sat on barstools by the window, ate turkey sandwiches, stared at subsidized housing across the street.

Farid loaded his van with equipment and headed up to Boston for another show. Sweeney, Chanel and I drove home in the bruise-colored winter chill. We wound through Westchester and to Sweeney’s hometown, Pleasantville, because he needed to swap cars. We parked in his mother’s driveway. A blue bird farm cottage. The three of us walked single-file up the stone path, quietly, through the garden.

And kind of like the way Chanel had declared, “God, people get married!” when she heard one of her friends was to be wed earlier than morning, I declared: “People have parents!” Because sometimes you forget.

His mother was very grounded, earthy, beautiful, jolly and subtly Catholic. He asked her if she needed the steaks that were in the freezer, and then put them into his bag. And also, what about these chips? This orange? She spread the remainder of a chicken salad onto a sandwich, and showed us baby pictures, some of the placenta ones, too, told us that she thought birth was really cool. Chanel and I stared at picture of Sweeney and his siblings that was tacked to the fridge: Five years old and mostly the same. Sitting in that way he does with his knees pulled up and splayed out, his lips curved in thought.

And I’ve been sick since yesterday morning. Missed my first classes ever today. I’m feverish and my head feels like a bowling ball and I cough so hard I can’t breathe.

Every time I walk into the library, I have the uncontrollable urge to pee. It must be psychosomatic. A way to avoid work. I walk in and suddenly, I’m squeezing my legs together and my eyes are watering. The bathrooms in this building are so nice, though. They’ve got big, deep-oak windows. And they’re tucked in quiet, old corners. Oh, there’s so much to be said about our relationship with institutionalized bathrooms. It’s the modern day oasis, a refuge. There’s nothing like the bluish calm that seeps into you when you swing open the door, and step into the silence, stare at youself in the mirror.

Sweeney and I went to Brooklyn Academy of Music to see the P.T. Anderson flick, There Will be Blood. New Yorkers are so loud at the movies. There was a lady behind me who said a resounding, “Mm,” in the silences after anything mildly profound happened. There were people coughing all over the place, squeakers, scratchers, and everyone made wretching noises when Daniel Day Louis fell down the oil well, and also when he went stark crazy at the end. Daniel Day Louis is a lion.

The BAM cinema is in an ancient, velvety amphitheatre, and the seats are steep, each row set high above the one below so you’re facing the screen straight-on. We put our feet up. Sweeney has been learning French on Rosetta Stone, and talked about going to Paris this summer.

What I remember about Paris: Nebulous, suffocating, plastic cups, plastic-wrapped pastries, wanting to go home. I remember being served tiny cups of coffee from a window, with a square of chocolate. I remember wading in the fountain across the bridge from the Eiffel Tower. I remember sitting down at a restaurant tucked inside a spiraling cobblestone alley, and realizing how many of these secret establishments are braided into the spirals of the city. You could live there forever and never find this restaurant.

Thanks to Katie Oldaker, we are officially booked to produce The Vagina Monologues in March at the student union.

We took a long walk to Unnameable Books last night in the prickling cold. A little used book store on the edge of Park Slope. Books stacked on the floor. We poked around, bought poetry, Calvino, Lydia Davis, HOWL, and inquired about booking events in their subterranean performance space: folding chairs, no espresso machines, fifty seats.

I’m working on a story for The Prattler about Envirolution, a social activist organization that has been instated in the school to essentially facilitate the radical whims of the students–and no one knows about it: Renewable energy, electricity quantification, improved recycling & compsting systems. I’m also working on a story with Jenny about our swampy meeting with the head of the department, about academic leadership, about what that means and to what extent students can be involved. We’ve got a couple of interviews lined up.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Alisdair shed a tear and I said, what about our other heroes? At Rope last night, Lyndel talked about energy and exchange, talked about trying to grapple with the feeling that within a physical mile of her, people are dying. In our poetry studio we are studying the art of correspondence. Robert and I are studying the art of Woody Allen, movie by movie. (Next: Hannah and Her Sisters.)

After work today, Sweeney, Robbie and I are taking a shotgun-adventure to Middletown, Connecticut, deep, deep into the woods, into The Night Kitchen.

(This was recently published in the biannual Pratt literary journal, Ubiquitous.)

The whole Seattle brass musician scene would get together for drinks and talk shit about other brass musicians. They’d complain about having too many gigs or not enough, who was giving gigs, who was holding back. It got pretty boring. The seventies had gone, run out like honey from a jar, a stiff jelly stuck to the bottom. My friends were real adults for the first time. Women were getting pregnant or not getting pregnant, and men were wearing khakis—these ugly, shapeless slacks. No more all-morning hangovers; you just had to throw up in the toilet at work, if you worked. Most of these people gigged for a living. Gigged and bitched.

A lot of the talk surrounded our contractor, Roy Cummings. In most cases all you had to do to make music connections was buy the facilitator booze or drugs. But Roy was a dry fish, he’d corner you on the on the sidewalk, dead of winter, to tell you about the evils of drinking. He’d berate you if he found out you’d gone out with the guys. So in order to get Roy to hire you, you had to do one of two things: play in his stage band at the University of Washington so he looked like an incredible band director, though, little known to the audience, his “student” orchestra was mostly made up of professional musicians, or play the Ringling Brothers Circus. It was very political. If you turned down either of those gigs, Roy would never call you again and you were out of a job.

So Ringling Bro’s coming to town was never happy news. When asked to play it, it filled one with a sense of dread, though not as great as the devastation of not being asked at all.

I had to play it my fair share of times. It was an unpleasant gig. Your face is buried in music for two-hundred fifty-eight minutes, twice a day, three times on Saturday. There is one six-measure rest in the entire show. That’s it. The entire show is about working towards that six-measure break. Your lips hurt, your lungs hurt, you lose your body, your soul somewhere along the way. It was physically abusive, really. It’s like two-hundred fifty-eight minutes of dry heaves. We were up on a bandstand, but not once could we look up from our music to see the act. We just had to play. The bandstand is at the corner of the arena where the animals are brought in, so often times we are standing next to the horrendous stench of tiger piss and elephant manure.

The very last time I played the circus, I was picking at a zit on my back during the six-measure rest. My wife had refused to pop it before I’d gone to the show. It started to bleed right there on the stand bled through my crisp white shirt down to my cummerbund, and then the brass section kicked in. So I’m filling my trombone with all the breath in my body, up, down, and the score starts to speed up. My god, we’re playing the theme to Superman. It’s getting faster and faster, and we’re spitting, pumping, sweating, our faces purple and my back bleeding.

Roy Cummings is playing trumpet in this show. We’re always nervous around him, trying to do our best. He’s got a band director mentality, always watching over your shoulder. And we’re playing the Superman theme song, building to a crescendo, with those crazy, neverending, pile-driving bars. Roy Cummings lifts his head ever so slightly to see what this ferocious music is accompanying, and then he sees it; he sees the act.

Roy throws down his trumpet—throws it!—and starts screaming, “Fuck it! Fuck this shit! What the hell is this?! What the hell are we doing?!” Saliva is flying from his mouth after the sudden break from the mouthpiece, and he’s panting. The rest of us are floored. We’ve all stopped playing, and now we’re all looking at the act.

A slender woman in a Spandex suit in the middle of the arena is leading a line of teacup poodles through a Hula Hoop.

I look back at Roy. He has barely recovered from the blow, still panting, drooling, looking at the floor. The conductor is cursing and throws his baton at us. We remain still until the act has finished, and then quietly take apart our instruments and place them in their cases. The lion tamer comes out, but there is no music to be heard. He stops and looks around, his whip limp on the dirt floor.

I get home early that night, My wife is reading in bed. I step towards the closet and loosen my collar. She looks up and me and says, “I see you dealt with that zit.” I’d completely forgotten about it. I peer over my shoulder and see the small trail of blood.

On any idle Tuesday, I could feel backed into a corner or by the exact same right, feel very, very alive. Circumstances the same. Either, or. It’s just my response that changes. Sometimes everything locks into place, my swift pace unthinking, just feels right from somewhere deep inside the earth. And then there are the life crisis days. Like Tuesday. I called my father and wondered. What are my priorities? Should I be fiery, flattened with flame, a lit match under my ass at all times while I’m here? Should I give myself plenty of room to breathe? I talked to Sweeney about it and I grew sallow. What does it mean to not be mediocre? Does it mean that every time I write, cook, speak, make love, I say: This is going to be the best I’ve ever done. Or, this is going to be the best that ever was? Does striving for anything less defeat the purpose of living? “How do you go about being a writer?” he said. I didn’t know. I just do. I woke up yesterday morning and felt gray.

And should writing be my life or should my life be writing: Now this is really serious–

It’s like the Pilgrim’s prayer in Salinger’s Franny & Zooey. The whole point of recitation is to get over the idea of putting time aside to pray. After a while, the prayer is supposed to be a part of you: in your stride, your heartbeat, the soup ladle as you stir. You become your form.

Speaking of my form, on February 13th I’m reading with two Harpers editorialists at a literary bar.

I met a friend of Alisdair’s named James, who, each time I have been in his vicinity, was double-fisting beers and speaking quietly, carefully about No Rio, the non-profit activist art center. A writer and collectivist. Very kind. They were looking for one more reader, preferably female, and I followed the lead.

In addition to whatever I do (what am I doing?! They asked for something “performance based”) Ando Arike will be reading from his novel-in-progress Mood Weather, which is based on the idea that human desire is causing global warming — this is also the idea behind his Harper’s Magazine article”Owning the Weather,” (harpers.org) and then Carl Watson will be reading from his work-in-progress about the “outsider artist” Henry Darger; Carl is funded by a CUNY grant on this project and has exclusive access to Darger’s manuscripts. Maybe you remember: there was a movie made about Darger a couple of years ago called, In the Realms of the Unreal.

So that’s cool.

I’m the food representative for Stabile Hall, which means I get to speak for the people [!] over a free lunch, once a month, with Ron Jones the CulinArt guy. He’s great. He added a falafel bar in the cafeteria, and presented it to me himself, beaming. Babaganush, dolmatas, cabbage, fresh onions and tomatoes. I am taking on too much. Or am I? Am I? That’s what I’m wondering. I have been standing underneath people’s apartment windows and yelling their names because my cell phone is out of minutes and I don’t feel like buying more. And I like this better. The yelling. The shoving-up of the old window frames and the looking down at me. And it costs no money.

Am I not pushing myself enough or am I over doing it? That’s the question! God!

Katie did a feature on me and we ate granola in my breakfast nook. Katie is great, full, warm, Virgo, totally addicted to food. I know the compulsion. I walk outside and I can see that fat yellow moon, and also the spire of the Empire State Building. Right there! I do not feel bloated, puffed like rice, like I have felt since November. I made a great salad tonight, and I don’t even like salads: Spinach, romaine, cooked tofu in turmeric, cold black beans, salt, pepper, vinegar. I’ve discovered that the student store we can spend our meal money at stocks different things everyday, so I’ve been almost only cooking my own food.

For those of you that don’t know: On Wednesdays they stock hummus, lettuce razor refills, and an assortment of condoms. Get ‘em quick. And if you hadn’t caught on, they often have pears, oranges, and big jugs of Odwalla juice. Sometimes bags of spinach. And tons of canned beans. Rice cakes. Oatmeal. Tofutti ice cream. (Also goes fast.)

Commitment. What does it mean to commit? That’s another one that’s been coming up a lot. I can’t stop writing about it. I think everyone thinks my standards have holes. Ryan Chang and I went out for breakfast this morning. He left the program last month, and I knew something was up: he’s going back home he said. Broke up with his girl. Sad times over buscuits with raspberry butter, corned beef hash. And so, of course, in this relationship-obsessed culture, I asked him what commitment meant to him.

I feel so gotten by Alisdair it’s overwhelming. Gotten is commitment. Every time. And he’s redefined what trust means to me. He said once: “When you’re talking about trusting someone in a relationship, it’s not like you’re saying you trust them not to hurt you. That’s easy. That should be a given. You trust that this person will make you feel like a human when you see them. You trust that whatever you say will be received, so you don’t have to hold back.” And in that way I trust him wholly. We studied, and he worked on his music, and I hummed, and we feasted until the light in the room was creamy saffron, and then it went dark.

This sweet, old-timey closeness has come back between Allie and I. Allie and her honest face. We talk like old-ladies, walk around with our short legs.

I biked myself into an icicle. Love riding through the neighborhoods. Is never a moment when I am not in awe. Writing poetry. Lot’s of poetry. I am reading Checkov’s, “The Sea Gull,” which is so good, and actually speaks to this idea of living up to oneself that I can’t stop ruminating on. I just read Basho’s “Narrow Roads to Provinces,” reading lots of haiku, working on my correspondence.

Dorn: …You have taken a subject from the realm of abstract ideas. A thing is only fine when it is serious. How pale you are!

Treplev: So you tell me to persevere?

Dorn: Yes… But write only of what is important and eternal. You know, I have had varied experiences of life, and have enjoyed it; I am satisfied, but if it had been my lot to know the spiritual heights which artists reach at the moment of creation, I should, I believe, have despised my bodily self and all that appertains to it and left all things earthly as far behind as possible.

Happy anniversary, Roe vs. Wade. I’m blogging day-late for choice.

Oh God I just watched “Manhattan” for the first time and I am clutching my heart. Those scenes with Woody Allen and Muriel Hemingway, seventeen-years-old and laying next to him in bed, making him sweat and jump up and say, “Where’s the aspirin?” are so wholesome and crazy. God, when she tells him at the end to just have a little faith, and the camera cuts to the cityscape–you say, “Ah! Because there it is. The thing to invest faith in: Humanity!” and just like him you think, What a knockout.

Being back at The Karrot is nice. Chewing astrology with Christian, talking urban politics and shooting the shit with the neighborhood folks. Listening to Rhadames spout conspiracy theories, widening his eyes, and still finding a moment to hold a new brand of soap under my nose to say, “Smells good, right?” Someone recently suggested I quit my job and commit myself entirely to my studies, but I couldn’t imagine. This is my link to the world. This way I am not just taking up space, but offering a service. I am a cog in this community. And I just really like these guys. They pay me more than I’m worth, make sure I’m getting fed, shout my name in Spanish when I walk through the door.

A woman came in today and told me that, as 4% of the world’s population, Americans consume 75% of all illegal substances, and this does not include alcohol of prescription drugs. “And you cannot possibly buy the idea that communities of color are responsible for the bulk of that,” she said. “That’s what we’re made to believe, but if you look at the numbers well–we just don’t have the funds to do it. And Bed-Stuy,” she continued, “was always a perfectly fine neighborhood. I just hate it when people try make the old days out for some kinda’ dark ages. Shit. I’ve been here for twenty-five lovely years.”

The barbershops on Myrtle Ave. are full of customers, every hour of the day. They are mostly filled with men, oldies and little boys, dancing and scrapping. Even at night–the barbershops shut down after the bars. Men getting their beards trimmed in the middle of the night.

The gentleman who frequent the one next door to The Karrot gave me a little nod today.

Last Wednesday, Robert and I hosted another reading at Smooch. The theme was food & meals, and I wrote a flash-fiction about The Messengers in the lens of what we ate together while we were still playing music together:

We took westbound busses all winter long to play folk songs on freezing street corners downtown. We were The Messengers. Austin, Peter, Ezra and I. We played for quarters and dollar bills until midnight, picked up transient back-up singers, saw players, Coke-bottle tubas. We gathered crowds. It was freezing. We’d play until we couldn’t feel our fingers, and then stop by a doughnut shop by the Burnside Bridge, and pay for a five dollar, ten-gallon utility bucket of day-olds. Grape flavored. Maple and bacon. Butterfinger. We’d take the bucket to a coffee shop. Get coffee. Butter horn. Blueberry. Fruit Loops stuck to the frosting. Austin and I would sit on am overstuffed couch and talk until two, full of holiness, teeth sunk into cake. We’d catch the night-owl busses home, and one of us always ended up stuck with the bucket… (cont.)

Robert wrote about a family meal at a strip mall in Springfield, Oregon and watching an inebriated country bumpkin throw up all over the parking lot outside their window. He called it “Springfield Dinner Theatre,” and it was mostly about his mother.

Lily and I went to the farmers market by Fort Greene Park, and then to the one in Union Square. There are tons of roots this time of year: potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets. Deep velvety purples and watermelon turnips with insides the color of candy. We got apple cider doughnuts, German Butterballs, a loaf of Kalamata olive bread, fresh tofu, farm eggs and pear juice. We’ve been cooking a lot. Feeding everybody on the first floor like a 1950’s backyard party: Shitake mushrooms and quinoa. Cooked spinach and potatoes. Fried eggplant in bread batter.

Alisdair and I met up on the corner of Lorimer and Metropolitan as though on a coordinate grid, and then turned on our heels and almost smack into a car pulling out of a garage. The driver ended up being his friend, Joe Falconetti, who leaped out and began waxing poetic like a Beastie Boy. Looked like one. Owns a hardware store in Williamsburg. Kept talking about a restaurant called Pies & Thighs. These things happen and I cannot help but wilt under the love I have for being in this city, around these people, about every ten seconds, on the dot.

My heart skips. Someone pops out of the woodwork and you know them.

We ate big, roast-beef and brie wraps over his coffee table, talked about starting a community based organization together. Also about making a movie. I just started this graduate class taught by two exceptional women about community development through the arts, and I feel like that’s my calling (right now?) except that my plan might include a bus, or a roadshow, but I don’t know if I have the agility to take it on right now.

Amber showed me some amazing spoken word recordings of Patricia Smith (”Hot Water Cornbread”) and it made me want to start going to see shows, and also to start slamming myself.

Sweeney and I made pork loin, broccoli, and lentil soup last night, and drank wine out of Christmas mugs with broken handles, and cleared the ash and dirt from various surfaces to make space to dine. His roommate drank thick, bitter tea and told me about a sea voyage he took to the Dominican Republic last year. We started to read “Silas Marner” together, but got distracted. Did you know George Eliot was a woman?

I hailed my first cab today on the way to Alisdair’s show at The R Bar. His band’s called Illustration and he jets around the stage like a rock & roll queen with a wireless mic.

My bike tires had gone flat so I went to security to see if they had a pump. They said, no, they did not, but that I should go see Sam Hill in The Engine Room. I went, but Sam Hill was out to lunch. I went later that afternoon, but his office was empty. I went the following morning, but a spindly old man with mutton chops told me that Sam was on sick leave, and should be back tomorrow.

In a corridor between Chapel Hall and North Hall, therein lies The Engine Room. It was built in 1887, the same year the school opened, so that in the event that the whole art school thing didn’t pan out, they could use the energy from these huge engines to power a shoe factory. Now, based on that, who can deny that post-secondary academia is a consumer product?

The head of my department can. He just did. Six freshman writing students and I met with him regarding a letter we had written him a month earlier addressing some concerns we had about the dynamics of the program. He was very receptive, though he called one of our qualms “laughable,” and, blaming it on the materialistic tendencies of our generation, berated us for viewing college from a consumer’s standpoint, asking us to rethink its relationship to the dollar.

But this is not true for me. It’s all about money. Of our own volition, it just is.

Finally, I went to The Engine Room yesterday and stepped onto the balmy mezzanine that overlooks the massive, cast-iron red engine, and I yelled for Sam Hill.

“Hello?”

“Come on down, come on down,” he said.

I took a staircase into the belly of the generators and there he was. Round-face, brown-eyed, brown-skinned, smiling, looked like he’d been wandering around the pipes for five-and-a-half decades. I told him my situation over the rumbling and steam of the machines, and he found a foot-pedal air compressor, and I brought him to my bike.

“I ride my bike everyday to work, I always have,” he said. “Come from the top of Williamsburg, all the way here. And I used to ride even when I lived in Queens and worked in Manhattan, I always have. I’m a bike man.”

He started to work on my tires.

“Sam Hill is a pretty legendary name,” I said. “He was this crazy rich guy in the twenties who built a railroad in Oregon, where I’m from.”

“What in Sam Hill are you talking about?” Sam Hill said.

I laughed.

“What exactly goes on in The Engine Room,” I said.

“Why, we heat the whole campus,” he said.

My heart sank for a moment. How had I not known? How privileged am I? All this time I thought they were simply preserving it for novelty, as a relic, did not know this was where the action happened. Did not think about Sam Hill keeping us warm all winter long.

One of the maintenance guys strolled up to us to see what we were doing. He stood to the side, his arms folded over his barrel chest. “Cute bike,” he said. When Sam had finished, I extended my hand in gratitude, but his arms were full so we knocked elbows, and he said, “Anytime, Adrian. Anytime.”

Something I am learning: There are an infinite number of people out there to help you, at any given moment. You just have to ask. There is someone very close by who has what you need, be it cooking oil, Band-Aids or lovin’. Allie got her jaw sliced by someone’s shattered bottle last night at The Salon, and on our way home we ran into an ambulance at a stoplight. The driver said it wasn’t deep enough for stitches. Back in the dorms we found all manner of supplies, and sleep-eyed willingness.

It was such a good night at the Gates house. It’s too bad it had to end in blood. It’s a tight, safe community, but now there’s been a breach–dynamics change when someone gets hurt.

It is sunny and blue here in the mornings. Ten, fifteen below. Big, sloppy snow flurries at night. Sleet. Nothing sticks. One of Sweeney’s teachers said, If you are not writing about death or love, stop writing. And Sweeney thinks most people are operating at a mediocre level, and so he agrees. But how can you write at all, about anything, without inadvertently writing about death or love?

And there was Sweeney at baggage claim, soft and stork-like, suspended in the revolving doors. He looks like the Catholic version of Jesus Christ. A savior. Almost midnight and I was back in New York.

I shrieked as I came over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Snug and sleepy in Sweeney’s passenger seat like the queen of an insect colony (an ant, a bee), the wind through my hair, the smog in my pores. Ah! I was a slice of moist pollution cake. I couldn’t stop shrieking. Ah! I’m home. Ah! We talked about crossing state borders, adventures, Nashville, Tennessee. He swerved between lanes like wildfire (”Never had an accident,” he said) and I threw my arms above my head and watched the skyline move in waves. Ah! I am back. I am home. It’s like Disneyland without the Disney, like–

O! The BQE! and “O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire…” (last paragraph of Ulysses. Nicole made me read it just now, and that is how I felt. On the Expressway. On Friday.)

My heart, my heart, my heart.

The hello’s and goodbye’s in Portland happened seemingly back-to-back. Second jamboree. This time with songsheets. Welcome back suppers. Goodbye brunches. Greek glutton with my dad and Tessa the last day. Baked a final batch of granola. Left it warm in the pan for my family in the morning. Hello. Goodbye. When Kate and I made dinner: Shitake, Portabello and Crimony mushrooms sauteed with rosemary and garlic, and served over chicken. Mashed potatoes (purple & russet) with their skin still on, salt, butter, pepper. Ceasar salad. Toasted baguette with smoked salmon & feta cheese. Served for a pair of boys who, though eternally grateful, could only say, “But seriously, thanks guys. This is really gude (good.)”

We forgot the bread pudding!

I watched movies in ancient theaters, sat on top of a dormant volcano with Robin and Kate in the rain, looking out over the city. A sacrament. Tobacco and herbal tea. Hello. Goodbye. Ida kissed me like a daughter. Tallboys to boot. Dustin hugged me like a pal. Everything was peaceful. My sister is growing up. My parents have enough money and are working very little. Hello. People were doing just fine without me. Goodbye.

Who needs a vacation for a whole month? (Ask me again when I’m thirty, and laugh when I change my mind.)

My roommate dropped out at the end of last semester (cracksmoke, overactive thyroid, too-deep sleep) and now I have my very own space. And I’m still a bathroom away from Allie and Janine. We listened to Pat Benetar on vinyl and pushed the twin beds together, threw a sixties-chick sheet over the vacant desk and made it into a breakfast nook.

I have a nest. I come in between classes and almost faint I’m so happy. A refuge.

Allie sat in my window sill and told me about her winter. Janine was dumped within an hour of returning to Brooklyn, and mascara streaked down her face, and what the hell can you do? Sweeney came over and told me about things, about his father and his calling. In life. We talked about how I am breaking his heart, and what the hell can you do?

Be really responsible. That’s what. Be really fucking accountable. Be honest. Communicate what you are willing to commit. Communicate. Communicate. Ad. Take. Responsibility.

And I just didn’t go to sleep. Not for another twenty-four hours. In bed from 7am to early afternoon, but I didn’t sleep. I rode my bike through Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg. It was crisp and clear

On Sunday, Robert, Amber and I went to go see “Particularly in the Heartland” performed by The TEAM at P.S. 122, and afterwards we met up with the troupe at a pub on 2nd Avenue and I said to one of the actresses, “We’ve only been here a few months.”

“When you first got here,” she said, “did you sleep?”

And what a perfect thing to ask. Because of course not. No. Not a wink.

The show won a writing award at the Edinburgh FRINGE Fest this year. It was about reconciling red & blue America, and about Robert Kennedy and Kansas and there was music and national holidays, and at the very beginning they led the audience in a full-throttle sing along of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

At the pub I asked one of The TEAM members, Jessica, about the writing process. It’s collaborative. They write it through correspondence and through improv. They met in school and work day jobs and their troupe, their TEAM has been slowly gathering momentum. Theaters are sponsoring them to work on their shows. They can quit their day jobs. Jessica never planned on this.

She said, “I truly hope that the furthest thing from your wildest dreams happens. Because it will be better.”

I swooned. We walked out of the pub and it was snowing. We talked about projects, plays, performance. Got doughnuts. Got home. On impulse I called Alisdair and he was awake.

The night before he and I had gone to a show at Three Legged Dog, a musical called, “American Hallucination, The.” Live music. American history, 1920-1960, told through video, dance and shadow. Beforehand, I had a hummus and avocado sandwich at a twenty-four hour cafe called Sugar. You sat at copper-topped tables in a long skinny corridor, against floor-to-ceiling windows that face the sidewalk. The woman who waited on me was the matriarch, a Serbian accent, earnest and doting like a mama.

I am taking new courses: Shorts–flash fiction, one-acts, prose. Modern Drama. Arts, Culture and Community Building. I am calling my mom with financial panic outbursts, and then bursting, and then sleeping in my ludicrous party-sized bed.

I wasn’t packed the night before I left for college. Sometimes this is my style. Virgo by day, Cancer by night (it’s my ruling Moon sign) and sometimes I am slippery, unprepared, feverishly packing by lamplight, two minutes to go and I’m trying to force my suitcase shut.

Panic is pleasurable. Why else would we do it? It actually inhibits the progression of whatever you’re panicking about, and so there must be something juicy about it. It’s a way to dispel responsibility. Instead of dealing with the situation we can hyperventilate, cry, sigh, yell at each other. So much more cathartic. Am I projecting? All I know is that I was in the airport terminal this morning, on the phone with a bank teller who said the only way I could make a transfer at this point was if I came to the bank in person. My voice was shrill. My eyes welled up and I said, “I’m leaving for months! I’m leaving right now! What do I do? I don’t know what I’m going to do,” and she told me to hold on a moment and in those moments I looked around, said, “I know you enjoy the tragedy, Adrian, but everything is going to be fine.” In that moment of non-panic, I looked at my tuition bill one more time and, unlike the night before, when I swear blaring red text said “If you don’t pay up, we’re going to fine you up the Nile,” it actually read “a late payment fee may be assessed if payment is not received.”

Wow, I thought. That doesn’t sound so bad.

I am quick to panic. It’s an addiction. If only I could be this objective, always.

The bank teller got back on the phone and said, “How much do you need to transfer?”

And I said, “Everything. Transfer everything.”