To my father, I said: Growing up, how many times have I heard you say “When I was twenty-one” or “in college?” A million times, at least. And each time a specific image came to mind: long hair, bell-bottoms, immature maybe, but definitely grown-up. Twenty-one meant something. But now I know–you were not grown up! You were like me!

And my father said: I don’t know. I’m still waiting. I’m now four years older than the first time I met Grandpa George [my mother’s father]. He was 48 when I met him for the first time. He was sort of larger than life, a little scary, mysterious, and apparently very, very wise. I have no idea how any 20-year-old people looked at me when I was 48, but I certainly couldn’t have been viewed by them the way I viewed George. Right?

In our culture, you won’t recognize when “when” comes.

And of course, I know this. But it just hit me, laying in Druid Park the other day, under the first warm sun since I’ve-forgotten-when, next to three twenty-one-year-olds (and I’m as good as any; nineteen to parenthood, it’s all a spectrum) who are as suspended over the abyss as I am.

I got a package from Tessa yesterday. All day my room smelled like jasmine and creamed honey and French clay and beeswax. It smelled like her and home and walking into their sun porch when the heat is drawing fumes from the turmeric, rosemary, violet that sit in jars in the kitchen. And the day before I would cry every time I was alone. Lily’s brother is being sociopathic again, that charming, tight-lipped lilt, and she suddenly wondered why my brother doesn’t show up in any of my writing. I said, He used to. It’s just that I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen: on our back deck, drugs and the charming, tight-lipped lilt, against the bright green of our neighbor’s foliage before the Military Officer escorted him away. And we lived together again, sure, could say the last time I saw him was this past July–but he died when I was fourteen and I mourned it alone.

So when I listen to the way Lily’s voice moves on the phone when she talks to her father, and I hear her father say, “Where the hell did this kid come from?” I remember mourning. The mourning is over, but the weight of the world [is love] pools in my diaphragm and I have to let my voice come from there.

Lily and I watched this wonderful Ralph Arlyck documentary called “Following Sean” wherein he revisits a subject, a little boy growing up in Haight-Ashbury that made a short film about in 1969, as an adult. But really, it is about nostalgia, and trying to separate actual events from our delicious, achy memories of them. And it is also about family, and how politics shape families.

I got lost on Flushing Avenue again, and I started to wonder outloud what I was going to do with myself. Sweeney and I were sure we had turned on Kent, but low and behold, the space-fold. We threw in the towel and headed home.

“What’s wrong with me? I keep leading people astray. I’m usually vigilante,” I said. “To the point of teeth-gnashing. I’m usually the ringleader. I’m sorry.”

Sweeney said, “I really don’t care.”

“But,” I said, “I’ve been less exact than I’ve ever been. Or prepared. I can’t be responsible for a lot of things right now. What do I do? People will stop trusting me.”

Sweeney said, “It really doesn’t affect me. I would follow you for a hundred miles if you said we had somewhere to go.”

Will I stop trusting me?

We were walking up a cold, dark street. Unbeknown to me, it was going to drop a half-foot of snow that night.

“Ok,” I said. “I know what I need. I need to surround myself with guides. In turn, I will have something for them–food, maternal love, ballast–but I need guides.”

Sweeney looked concerned.

“That includes you,” I said. “You are a new kind of guide.”

And there it was: Parked on a dark, cold street was a yellow Mustang. I stopped and looked at him and said, “I can explain,” and tears streamed down my face.

And I did explain. How they’re the patron saint of Lupe Covarrubias and I, how when we were thirteen-years-old they followed us up and down the California Coast, and then for the rest of our lives. Any time we were in trouble, wound up, out of breath–one would sneak around the corner, or park in front of our houses. Yellow Mustang, patron saint of adolescence.

We made egg-in-a-hole with Lily and in my room, he said, “You know, this trip to Baltimore is contingent on whether or not this blizzard stops.”

“What blizzard?” I said.

He pointed out the window but there was nothing.

Later, after leaving Five Spot with some friends, the snow had begun to stick. Jenny and Lyndel slept in my bed, and we watched the snow fall all night long, in the dark of room. We laid together, talking until dawn about magic and science (Jenny: The part the people miss is that it’s observation, not innovation! It’s all one!), sleeping habits and the South and love and the way that everyone woke up all at once.

I worked on my long poem (like Louis Zukofsky’s “A” or William Carlos Williams’ “Patterson”) about roving Oregon with my mother for a week, pastiching regional history from old textbooks, family history by word-of-mouth and passages from Joyce’s “The Dead.” I was at work one day, and the idea came to me when a fleeting memory flashed through my head:

The brown bear in a chain-link cage kept in the middle of the one-street town, pacing from side to side.

The snow melted. Sweeney and I went to Baltimore. Drove up on a dreary Saturday, large coffees, taking rest stops, reveling in transience, one dirty bathroom after another. Talked about science ruining the mystery, the divine, which in turn changed poetry, made it less religious. When we got to Matt’s house, this sweet, scathing young man with soft eyes and dark hair, he said, Did I tell you Lulu had kittens? And he raced to his sofa, in his softly lit room, records playing, and beckoned–It’s really magical, he said. The three of us leaned over the edge and there they were: these sausage bugs, and mama staring up at us with her terrified, green eyes. I didn’t know she was pregnant, he said. Right after she had them, she raced over to me, crying, leading me behind the bookshelf.

We sat in his sweet, quiet kitchen, plants hanging over our heads, a French press on the table, talking, our hands folded. He’s a New Forms artist at MICA and a musician. He recently took up the accordion. He took us to some parties with his girlfriend, concerned about keeping us occupied, but the four of us just sat by the cake and stuck our fingers in the frosting, drank wine, ate cookies and had a much nicer time when we got back to his place, cozy in the crunchy static of his vinyl. Sweeney, in the dark, voraciously romantic in Matt’s roommate’s bed: “How the hell did I bamboozle you into being with me?”

Baltimore is strange. In the 20s and 30s, it had a population of one-million. It now floats somewhere around six-hundred-fifty, and going. It’s the shrinking city. The next Detroit. Apparently, there are parts of Detroit that have turned back into prairies because of vacancy.

The next day, at a diner where some of the women had no teeth, no chin, in a neighborhood known for inbreeding, I thought, Baltimore is some freaky crossroads of Appalachia and the North that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country. Matt took us to a place called Book Thing, a non-profit bookstore where everything is free, and we took home two boxes of classics, but not before laying in the park and seeing Sweeney next to me one second, closing one eye and seeing my father in 1976 the next.

Book Thing of Baltimore Inc.

Magic. The weight of the world. The tragedy of brothers. Tea parties. Toddling. Sleeping. People are gathering around me like a loose string on a pulled hem. I went to Baltimore for a day and a half, and found infant kittens behind a couch, and cradled them until Sunday. The French Revolution essentially took place because the nouveu riche wanted more respect, and the peasants piggy-backed their movement because they had nothing to lose.

Allie and I were being sassed out of our single dorm-rooms last week by Residential Life. They think freshman need to learn how to live with roommates, and also, how was it fair that we had our own space and no one else? We took political action: Let them eat cake.

I made a series of sweet phone calls, and a list of arguments. Number one: our rooms are the hub of our community and to uproot us would be counterproductive to the bureaucratic sensibilities of Residential Life in addition to simple human ones. Number two: We have made a household. What more could you ask for? Number three: Who said anything about fair? My first semester roommate smoked crack while I wasn’t around, and our other suitemate recently had to leave to avoid a nervous breakdown–what does equity have to do with it?

We had a formal meeting, and I think they fell in love with us. We are the community queens. The next day, we received an email from their offices, saying, “We have decided you can stay where you are.”

We watched Marie Antoinette and a had a kingdom reclamation party like French royalty in a dayglo-colored fortress: cake, fancy dresses, cravats, parlor games, bird’s nests, and a midnite parade with woodwinds and shakers.

Can you believe it? Castro! Left on his own terms, or at least on Father Time’s terms.

And can you believe that Hediegger was a Nazi, lecturing in Nationalist schools, forever refusing to refer to the gassings as a mistake? And he loved the world! And Ezra Pound, Mussolini’s right-hand man, a proud Fascist. Even after spending a decade in prison camps, giant interrogation kleigs blaring down at him, Pound could only spit, “I can’t believe I fell for such a pedestrian idea.”

It is cold and pretty here. We are missing the lunar eclipse due to fog. At any given moment I am around six girls or two boys, two cats, old trees. I am witnessed all the time. How is it that we live, every day? It is so great, but hard, impossible. Every interaction is a crapshoot, and I forget that until something goes crooked or breaks or doesn’t work and I remember: a crapshoot! There are patterns you can follow, little threads of magic, pink rubber balls small enough to hold in your clenched fist: bounce bounce bounce.

Alisdair ran into the man from my readings who worked for Penguin Publishing on the street. He was coming from a bar and about my work he said, “She’s great, but she’s gotta make it even bigger, go deeper: but this thing with her family–this is it–she’s gotta follow that and make it BIG!”

I ate wraps with Julia today, in a quiet house with a cat that meowed like an old sheep. “Yeah, I don’t know,” Julia said, gesturing to the rumpled cat, and we resumed our conversation about divorce, butts, and how when you complete some phase of life with a group of people and make it to the other side, you’re like siblings: untouchable and transcendent. I finished a Sappho collection translated by Willis Barnstone in Ozzie’s coffee shop, and afterward decided to name my first born Sappho. Sappho. Just look at her. Things were not so different in the 6th century.

Then

In gold sandals

dawn like a thief

fell upon me.

Author, Ariel Gore, in a recent interview with Lorette C. Luzajic on Bookslut in response to Gore’s new book How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights:

Q: You write about making time for writing and feeling entitled to a creative life. I agree that it’s not a luxury and that my workday is sacred. But what about the millions of people worldwide who cannot yet or never will have the luxury of doing what they love for money? How can writers alleviate that guilt and stop thinking like a starving artist?

A: That kind of thinking is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” You can’t eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they’ve saved your life. Ntosake Shange books saved my life. Maya Angelou books saved my life. Katherine Arnoldi. Tillie Olsen. A lot of books. But we don’t say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It’s interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don’t we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

I’m beginning to believe Sweeney, who believes Heidegger, when he says that the world is made up of only revelry, sorrow and awe.

Tuesday: it snowed up to our ankles. Robert and I had a stack of books and a cue chime with a tiny mallet for our radio show. When you hear this sound (Ding!) turn the page. But alas, were stranded outside the chapel in our goulashes because the station signal was down. The snow was dry. It fell like glitter.

When Diana was here, she tried to explain this type of snow to me. You can’t explain it.

The old sickness left me empty. I didn’t feel like myself for two weeks, but now I’m back, scrapping and yelling. I forgot I was capable of engaging like this. My voice swings out of me, like the accidental slamming of a heavy door, and I can breathe, scream, fight, fight, fight. I can even make jokes. We exchanged Valentine’s at metal tables we pushed together for space. We stayed up all night crafting in the workroom the night before, stamping, gluing, shuffling through sheafs of 1960’s wrapping paper. We, the big “we,” have been traveling in a pack lately. Six, seven, eight at a time. We pick people up like barnacles on our way–to where? This morning it was to Violeta’s roof-top brunch but somehow we missed Flushing Avenue, and we just kept going. Flushing Avenue had simply disappeared.

“Oh, that old space-fold trick,” someone suggested.

Alternate dimensions, multi-dimensional conspiracies, and black holes were brought to the table. Either way: it was gone.

Soft, wet day today, cool, breezy, we could have walked forever. Nine of us. We missed our turn and it was too late to go back, so we went forward (never straight!) until we hit Kellogg’s 24-hour diner. We sat in a wide booth, Sweeney got an egg cream, my feet in his lap, my face in the small of Lyndel’s warm, sweet neck, grieving over having lead everyone so far away from the magic, warehouse-flat brunch.

I recently found out that Lyndel was a biter when she was a little kid, was in special-ed until they realized she was actually exemplary, and also that she plays the viola and the flute, and shares old-person maladies with me, popping fiber like cough drops.

Most of us were cinder-block tired, others were hung-rum-over, but we cozied up like bedmates, drank coffee, bad pancakes, OK steak & eggs. Four of us walked the long walk back and lo and behold:

Flushing Avenue was back!

And, I know that I am not producing stunning work, am not producing a whole lot more than what is being asked of me: I am in a number six year. I’ve been thinking a lot about numbers, sequences, the cycles of success and play, work and transition. There is a method to the madness! I used to believe in it like religion, talk about it the way some thick-necked women talk about Jesus Christ.

Number six years (9+5+2+0+0+8) are all about love, marriage, family & domesticity. They are poor breeding ground for industry and project completion, just like, say, watery *vaginal fluid is poor breeding ground for sperm. Mmm. Number six years are like watery vaginal fluid? They are more **visceral than cerebral. They are slow-paced, and will only bring you joy if you accept s.l.o.w.n.e.s.s.

O! GOD! That SLOWNESS. I am trying. Not trying to be slow: I already am that, but rather, trying to own it. So we made a fort, a giant, billowing fort over my bed and covered each other in ink stamps, COVERED! and watched Kill Bill. Ten of us. Lily’s brother, too, who had come to stay for the weekend, the glow of the movie on our faces, bouncing off the sheets.

Someone said, “I can’t feels my legs.”

Jenny said, “That’s how you know you’re in the party bed.”

Family and love and home and nest are huge right now. Love and spooning and three-times-a-day there is a girl-stack in my bed, and we are reciting. Sweeney and I played in the fort last night, and then went to a get-together at Jody’s. I found Sweeney in the dark, under a tree in Fort Greene park on the hill overlooking Myrtle Ave. He was reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and he had changed his outfit for the first time maybe since I’ve known him: a ribbed sweater, button-collared and tan corduroys. He said, “I felt like a human being today.”

A symposium called “I Love Female Orgasm” came to Pratt on Thursday. I’d heard of them before. They’re a pair of sex educators, and also a couple, and they travel around the country, and broadcast on NPR and network television all about, well, the female orgasm. They brought this two-hour workshop, for men and women, and they gave presentations about the G-spot, practicing female ejaculation, and a cocktail of information about gal sexuality. They even talked about Taking Charge of Your Fertility (by Tony Weschler) and about the *Fertility Awareness Method–which is important because they never teach this to young women, only teach us about fallopian tubes and how to say “No!” to sex, but never how to say “Yes!”, and never how to chart your fertility, never even explain that women are only fertile a few days out of the whole month. www.ilovefemaleorgasm.com.

I had a reading at Outrageous Look Gallery on Wednesday night. The space was white and brick and had old, paneled windows. My friends came, sat on the window ports. Alisdair came, and James, and also Sweeney who had fallen asleep in Williamsburg, woken up freezing, and burst inside like a crazy man. As he draped himself on the radiator, I kept thinking, how the hell did I hook up with someone so crazy? Someone so completely ill equipped to operate in this world? Oh! Right! Because he makes me believe in magic, and doesn’t say anything that isn’t the truth. Because he is beautiful and true and in awe of the world. Because he will always do what he needs to. Because he made his own world.

I read four stories under a soft light over a music stand to an audience of twenty-five. It was thrilling. That is where I feel most right, alive, in my place. Alisdair and Sweeney chatted by the wine for a long time, we all chatted. A guy from Penguin Publishing Group bought two of my audio books.The mood was lovely and bubbly. Andrew even showed up, a friend from high school who gave Diana and I brunch-on-the-house at the Catalan restaurant he works at in the city. (Blood orange mimosas, potato and bacon croquettes, mushroom omelets and brocata.)

Andrew pointed to one of the film crew guys who were recording Ando Arike’s piece, and all red in the face, pointing, he silently mouthed, “I slept with him.”

Alisdair was in his work clothes, long coat, shiny shoes, and sat next to the window and said he needed to bring more **visceral things into his life, and I said, yeah, I know, we all do. At work, Rhadames told me he loves to party, doesn’t like to drink, maybe a shot of Bailey’s, but loves to be around people, and go dancing–that the club he used to frequent  calls him The King. This is a robust fifty-year-old Dominican man. He said, “But Adrianna, I’m so busy now, with work. I’m so sad, I can no longer go and party. They say they are going to take away my title.”

My suitemate, dark-eyed, Long Island, photographer & film maker, Italian, Janine Tirone, with her diamond studded name necklace and her long acrylic fingernails, left school today for the better. To take care of herself, to not have another nervous breakdown, to figure out how she wants to take up space in the world. She moved everything out of our suite, leaving a heavy, blank space. We will miss her throaty cackle, her long explanations with her long-vowel accent, and walking around together in our underwear.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, the morning after. I think Edna says it all:

   Recuerdo

    We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

    We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

    We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Make big love.

Not that St. Valentine had anything to do with love–it’s a mess of several different traditions, all of which center around crooked-nosed political (though, you could call them religious) figures. The way we observe this day does our saints no justice. It was truly invented by Hallmark. However, and really however, why not rock it anyway: Rock the love, cut out hearts, give out flowers. And we could do this everyday, should do this, but why not also do it, all of us, on the same day once a year? Hallelujah.

I finally feel like myself again.

Direct quote: “The birthday boy (and his girl?)”

Jenny told this great story some weeks ago about the vitality of mothers during a crisis:

She said that she was eight or nine-years-old, and that they were in the process of moving from Chicago to Colorado Springs, and that her dad had already started working in Colorado, rendering her mother responsible for the girls until their house sold. She said they were having a sleepover, all the girls in the basement, and that there was a flashflood. The basement began to fill with water, and one of the girls wouldn’t wake up. Jenny remembered seeing her mother’s silhouette at the top of the basement stairs, her bathrobe blowing behind her: “Everybody up,” she screamed. “Everybody!”

And this poor woman was trying to sell their fucking house so she could finally meet up with her husband across the country. All of their possessions were being stored in the basement, and the water was rising.

Jenny remembered her mother flinging everyone up the stairs, eying the tragedy before her. Then, without hesitation, beginning to pick things up and throw them after the girls: “Catch!” There was thunder and Jenny watched her mother pick up an entire couch and literally send it hurling up the cellar stairs.

“Go, go, go,” her mother screamed, lightening on her face, as she sent packing boxes and kitchen chairs sailing through the air like baseballs.

Diana arrived on Chinese New Year, and we met up with most of my writing crew at our neighborhood Chinese-Spanish restaurant (doesn’t everybody have one?) Sappalo’s, where they all sat in a wide half-moon at the window. We had grand New Year prospects, but ended up getting take-out from Kum Kau. Just she and I, on the splitting booths, talking about this one time she looked at me, ten-years-old, wide-eyed, and said, “I just love my family,” because she didn’t know how else to say it.

She’s got this huge Chinese family on her mama’s side, and they gather for New Years and party for days, ninety-five-year-old Popo killing everyone at Mah Jong.

We walked up the street and met everyone at a local dive called The Five Spot, got one-dollar Pabst and danced and did karaoke with our Fort Greene neighbors. Diana fell into step, so easy, and Robert and I discoed, and Katie mounted the stage, unflinching in her white cardigan, and sang Kanye’s “Jesus Walks.” The whole neighborhood hollered and reached for her as the music died. Lyndel gave everyone sexy eyes, softened, swung her hips. A man in a camel-colored coat tried to woo Diana: “Hey, why aren’t you up on stage?” and with the flick of his wrist, dawned dark glasses and sang “Unforgettable” like he meant it.

Before she got here, I’d been just barely catching up with myself, always on the tail of about 75 to 80% energized. I’m still trailing. Two steps forward, one step back. Reading “The Story of O,” Rousseau, Checkov plays, trying to match Sweeney with philosophical discourse, Heidegger, Aristotle–but I’ll just never know enough, and I told him this at his birthday on Saturday and he said, “Oh, sure. It alienates me from everybody. But just to have you to listen is enough,” and that was liberating. I have never been so healthily uncomfortable, humbled, challenged, sweaty.

We went and saw an Antonin Artaud play called “The Cenci” at The Ohio Theatre last Wednesday. Sweeney, Robbi, Chris, Jason. I had just been reading “Jet of Blood” (woah. Check it out.) in class, and studying the Theater of Cruelty. The stage was wide, maze-like, and divided by pillars. The evil father reminded me of Jon Lovitz. It was sexy and staged beautifully, but afterward there was a talk-back with the director and we realized he didn’t get it. He didn’t get the play at all, wanted to know “what Artaud was smoking,” thought the Theater of Cruelty was about cruel content when, I think, it was actually about transforming plays from pure amusement into a a sensory spiritual service.

I started drinking coffee again. We drank coffee that night. We drank coffee tonight, too, on our drive home from Pleasantville. Sweeney invited me home for a birthday dinner with his family. They were lovely, mom reminds me of Cindy Koprowski, dad was such a dad, kids all have the same curved lips. He’s very close with them in an intimate, unspoken way. We talked about broken bones, airports, serial killers. His sixteen-year-old brother was recovering from knee surgery and refused to explain how he messed it up.

Sweeney said, “Come on. You were drunk, right? Badly, badly drunk and woke up in the morning on your friend’s mother’s basement floor or something, with your bone sticking out?”

His brother kept his lips shut over his braces and shook his head, blushing.

Diana and I slept in late, went to a slam show with Nicole at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, ate poached pears and pizza at a vegetarian restaurant with furry chairs and poor lighting.  Found a music club cum record store cum coffee house called The Cakeshop. Nicole said, “Love it, right,” in that throaty, no-bullshit way she speaks. Took Diana through the Hassidic part of Williamsburg on foot, then to the fancy part. Got lentil soup and shoes. She explored the neighborhood while I worked at The Karrot. Sonrisa, a Portland friend at Wellesley showed up on a whim, and we all got Cuban food way uptown, click-clacked to Union Square and met Cait and Morgan at a soul food place called Chat n’ Chew. They were a sweet load of good fun. They were getting ready to go see the Spice Girls. O! the way Cait laughs–

Cait left Pratt, and is going home to Kansas. She is the best, and I’ve lost her.

It began to rain hard and I took Sonrisa and Diana back to Brooklyn where Sweeney was having a big birthday party. They sat on a couch and watched every character, all the writing majors (a sculptor and interior designer here and there) do their thing, a little taken aback maybe: but Asheley wound her finger at me and roared like a black-out tiger, and I thought, yeah, family.

Robert and I had breakfast in the workroom, the bright blue winter pouring in. We planned things, our radio show (Tuesday, 8pm Eastern time, www.prattradio.com), our reading. I got a neon pink note on my bed later that afternoon that said: “Adrian, Thanks for going on this crazy journey with me. Keep on truckin’. Love, Robert.” On top of it lay a tin bicycle bell covered in hearts.

Lily had a breakdown on my bed, a break-up, and then resurfaced. She is back in business, with verve and a heavy heart. She’s got the cutest mouth. Speaking of cute mouths, after Sweeney and I drove Diana to the airport, a blast of snow soared up the BQE like a wall of locusts and made everything fade.

Dear Friends,

We invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 13 for a memorable literary evening featuring:

Carl Watson, introducing his newly re-published novel, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts

And readings by:

Adrian Shirk

Ando Arike

We begin at 8 P.M. in the Outrageous Look Gallery at 103 Broadway,
Williamsburg, between Bedford and Berry (see below for more directions).

* Ando Arike’s work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, the
Progressive, Leonardo, Carbusters, and Writer’s Chronicle, among other
places. From 1998 to 2006, he edited and published The Williamsburg
Observer, Brooklyn’s most erratic and original art&politics journal; see
the WBO archives at <http///bopcollective.org>. Arike completed his
doctoral dissertation “What Are Humans For?” in 2002, and this spring is
working to finish Mood Weather - literary history’s first pornographic
global warming novel.

* Adrian Shirk was born on a stifling hot Labor Day in Brooklyn, 1988. She
was raised in Portland, Oregon, collectively, by musicians and social
workers. She would like to revive a certain rock&roll enthusiasm in the
literature scene. Her writing can be found in *Spork, Look-Look, Slouch, and *Broad Magazine*, as well as *How to Leave a Place: An Anthology of Portland Writers* edited by Ariel Gore. She’s been a featured author at writing symposiums up and down the Northwest including Michelle Tea’s RADAR Readers series. Her audiobook, *Stories w/Snacks* is available through Powell’s Books or through her website at <http///www.adrianshirk.com>. Today, Adrian is back in Brooklyn, attending Pratt Institute’s Writing for Publication, Performance and Media BFA program.

* Carl Watson is a novelizer, essayer, and itinerant studier in various
fields of metaphysics and mood alteration. His oldest novel has been
newly released under the title The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts. There are
other publications. He is currently writing his dissertation

In a small Pratt studio in the building that shares the mail room, a student working on her Masters in New Forms, erected a tall, gleaming, princess-and-the-pea style bed. Her name was Rachel Heinz. The bed (and the girl) sat about ten feet above the ground. A white comforter billowed down, as well as her freckled, impish face, wondering if I wanted to spoon. The lights were dim and she spoke softly.

“This is my thesis project,” she said. “I’ve been sitting up here from 9-5 for the past two weeks. I invite people up here to just spoon. They don’t have to talk, but they can. I’ve had people cry, tell me secrets, laugh, some fall asleep.”

Three of us ascended the white stairs that wound around the platform, and climbed in. Rarely have I been so comfortable. Oh, Rachel, in her white pajamas, in a bed like Mt. Olympus: This should happen more often.

We all blinked at each other afterward, calm, softened at the edges.

And also: TUNE IN to my literary radio show, The Oregon Trail and Other Stories, at www.prattradio.com, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5th, 8PM Eastern Time.