I have been weepy today. Felt funny about family, overwhelmed by distance, difference, responsibility, terms. Cried while reading my mother’s alternative education thesis from high school on the G train. She’s been meaning to show me for years, and it showed up in my mailbox today, folded in half. This had nothing to do with my weepiness. Or rather, according to Robert, “It had everything to do with it.”

Am reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let me Be Lonely, which is largely about not knowing if you’re alive. Have been reading Short Shorts, “A Doll’s House,” Pound, Martin Amis, Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, “Heart of Darkness” for the second, brutal time, and an anthology of poems (Ecstatic Moments, Expedient Form) in which each author, classically trained in form, has attached self-conscious notes on the way they came about finding their form in each presented poem. How subject matter calls for a specific cadence and cosmetology.

Tonight I performed at a StorySlam in the Lower East Side at a bar called The Bitter End where the theme was “Fame.” Also, Sweeney and I have gone running every day for the past two weeks, but have almost always forgotten to stretch beforehand.

I can’t stop drinking this Odwalla juice they have in the cafeteria called “Serious Focus.” It has apples, cherries, raspberry, chokeberry, elderberry, gingko and green tea, and I’ve purchased one most late mornings for a week now with my meal plan. I’m sure it’s a total placebo, but it does the job.

Allie and I have ants. It’s disgusting. If you sit very still and stare at our floor, more and more come into focus, sneaking around like little, black trolls.

Dear Adrian,

Smoking tobacco is bad for your lungs and your heart. It constricts your blood vessels, depriving your skin of nutrients and oxygen, leading to premature aging of skin.

Almost all tobacco that is sold has nasty carcinogenic additives, designed to help the tobacco burn more quickly.

In addition to that, all cigarettes are rolled in paper, and the process to make cigarette papers uses the same highly carcinogenic chemicals as with the manufacture of regular paper, including, notably, formaldehyde, cyanide and benzene.

So, when you smoke a Basic, you are getting a double-whammy of a frightening carcino-cocktail. The icing on the cake is that those very same additives are the ones that accentuate the dependency on smoking. Nicotine may be addictive, but for sure the additives are addictive.

American Spirit Red Pack is the only organic additive-free cigarette sold.

American Spirit Red Pouch is the only organic additive-free loose tobacco sold, and the cigarette papers that come with it are made of 100% flax, not wood-based paper.

Buy a roller and American Spirit Red Pouch if you must . . .

Love,
Dad

——-

Dear Dad: It’s Sweeney who smokes Basics. If I ever buy cigarettes, I smoke American Spirit. Love, Adrian

——

Dear Adrian,

Tell Sweeney I said to invest in American Spirit Reds. Basics are for people with no money and no life and who spend their days sitting in chairs giving off unpleasant odors. What Basics say about a person = “Loser!” Basic’s tobacco is grown in China next to nuclear power plants that leak.

There.

Love,
Dad

We stole through Savannah, slower than Southern counter service, and we could have been serious when we said, “Let’s stay here. Let’s not go home.” It was so warm, and the azalias were in full bloom. Sweeney took one of the blossoms between his fingers and pulled it back to reveal new growth coming in behind it. The sun spread over us. “People think these bushes bloom only once a year, but if you prune it early enough,” he said, indicating the buds, “these little ones will get enough nutrients to bloom a second time, and then if you stay on top of it, a third and fourth time.”

Chanel was wearing a wrap, fastened around her like a dress. Her hair pattered down her back like yellow fever. We were right outside of downtown, but it was quiet. We circled around four-hundred-year-old oaks growing from park blocks. Their branches spanned across entire houses, cloaking everything in shade, drooping with Spanish moss. “Maybe if Brooklyn was more like this…” we decided, our annunciation slackened with awe. The sun blotted out our eyes like Little Orphan Annie’s.

Three blocks away from Forsyth Park, we found a row of old, cream yellow houses, divided into apartments for rent. We stood on the stoop and looked in the windows: Two big bedrooms, a tiled kitchen with a room all its own, a ceramic bathtub, and an old staircase with a heavy banister that led to two more bedrooms and a balcony. It had a backyard and a dining room, too. Nineteen-hundred-dollars a month. We slurped, shut our flaccid mouths. “Write down the number,” Chanel said. She looked at us as we started up the street. “I’m serious!” she said.

So were we. But we kept walking.

Even the homeless strolled in whimsy, hands in their pockets, whistling on benches. A man named Ron braided palm leaves into roses and sold us two for a dollar. Later that afternoon, Sweeney and I were laying under a beech tree in a cometary (”Twenty-five hours of driving to kiss in a graveyard!”) and lost Chanel (kneeling in front of a grave, braiding flowers), and it was Ron who reunited us (”Hey, you again! She’s looking for you, you know,” he said, passing through the headstones. “She’s by the gates!”) We raced from our spot of recline, the swivel of people’s heads even slow, back onto the streets, smoking Sweeney’s Basics. Love. Love. Sweeney. Spooky Savannah. There is something spooky and delicious about Savannah–back in Brooklyn, a friend said, “It’s just so sexy down there, isn’t it?”

I had always admired and enjoyed Chanel, listened to her poetry, thought that she was ethereal and out-there. But on this trip, I discovered her jaunty wisdom, and found that in her ecstatic, incomprehensible self was infinite accessibility and groundedness. She makes expressions like a baby before she emotes, like those pregnant silences before the screams. And something shifted between Sweeney and I, plunging us deep, deep into each other–and Chanel, she enjoyed it the way one stands under the sun; she felt it, was a part of it– “God, Are we that superior?” he said.

We played on sand dunes like deserts. Shimmied down the outer banks. Sun burns. IHOP. Rain storms. Electrical storms. Ferry rides. Long rides. Plowed through South Carolina in the middle of the night. South of Charleston, all of the gas stations are owned by families. At midnight, it’s a mom and her daughter showing you to their restrooms. Camped on the beach. Got dragged out of every motel we stayed in because we always slept over checkout time. Slept in a hotel outside of Richmond no more than a stone’s throw from the Phillip Morris headquarters, ate fried chicken, boiled peanuts, wound through endless back roads, swam on Tybee Island, pitched a tent by a marsh at Fort McCalistair, solicited Sweeney for Civil War history from Virginia to Georgia: he knows a lot about the Civil War. He knows a lot about everything. Everything about him still surprises me. I keep surprising myself. I really enjoy myself with him, as an outsider might enjoy me–and right there is a point of contention: Boy, am I smitten.

On one of the all-night drives, the three of us had an epic “Tiny Dancer” sing-along moment, instantly self conscious afterwards: “That was way too contrived. We’re just copying Almost Famous. Or is the song just that good?”

Then Sweeney said, “That song started me on an Elton John phase that began in sixth or seventh grade and only ended last year, when my car was broken into and my Elton John’s greatest hits CD was stolen.”

This declaration was moving, for all of us. And we sang Elton John songs, word by word, with our eyes closed in passion, until we stopped for sleep.

And the epiphanies! Sweeping off the second ferry onto Cedar Island, the air thickened, we were in the real South, Sweeney and I gathering verbal velocity, a crescendo, and a thousand answers came hurling towards questions I’d been posing for months as the sun swiftly set, and we swiftly set down the two-lane road–

Lyndel went home to Florida over break, and she had a similar experience. Back in the first-floor workroom of Stabile Hall, while we were talking, she said to anyone who passed us, “Go to The South! Apparently it’s just SHITTING out epiphanies!”

Romance, fidelity, commitment, the four kinds of love (eros, agape, sturgae, phelia), learning to treat people as gifts, and gifts as something you have to work for, live for, maintain. Squashing expectation. Allowing things to unfold. That stuff. You know?

The night before we left on the trip, Sweeney and I went up North to his mother’s house for St. Patrick’s Day dinner: boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, boiled-sugared carrots, boiled beef, and soda bread with and without currents. We plundered his garage for camping supplies as the sun set, his legs dangling from the rafters. We practiced setting up the tent in the dark, unrolled the canvas, fleece-lined Coleman sleeping bag from around the same time all of my father’s camping supplies were made, and climbed in: “I think this will work.” The wind howled and whipped the siding, the two of us zipped snugly in.

Paul and Mckenzie visited the week before. I was busy. They were overwhelmed, but steady, trooping. Sharing something that is sacred (New York, The Salon, the first-floor workroom) to me is terrifying because what if these people who know me–my native people–don’t like it? And in turn, don’t know who I am any more? Mckenzie and Paul were very sweet on each other, slapped each other around, showed me pictures of their cat before we went to sleep every night. Sweeney swept in for the last couple of days, and made everything domestic. We all watched movies, went to museums, strolled through Central Park. The four of us were connected at the hip until we drove them to LaGuardia that damp, gray Sunday.

Sweeney is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and accessible, rigorous, tender. His parents got divorced about a year ago, but he’s deeply close to his family–even if their lives are separate, they all get each other–it’s one of these rare families that really work, in spite of trauma, and manages to be vigorous, playful, treating each member like a celebrity.

Right before we went back to the city that night at his mother’s, we went up to his sister’s room to say goodbye, and she and their mom were sitting in her bed, and his sister had Crest whitening strips on her teeth and was trying to talk on the phone, and she said, “God! Mom just feels like she can climb in here and change the channel (it was on Lifetime), call you in here, and interrupt my conversation!” and their mom just sat under the covers, giggling, and we all sat around and chewed the fat for a few minutes. Sister hung up the phone. Told us a wild story about evading the cops. Brother. Sister. Mama. It was reminiscent of my home, probably of anyone’s home, and it made my heart thud thud.

Something about moms weaseling their way into your bed, or weaseling into your mom’s bed, and pretending to care, but not actually wanting her to leave.

We knew the Mason Dixon line was somewhere between Washington D.C. and Richmond but we didn’t know where. We couldn’t remember whether or not the line was a concept or an official federal border. It was a complete mystery. I said, “We’ll know when we cross it. The spirit will move us. Whoever feels it first needs to shout.”

On a dark, narrow Virginia back road around midnite, Sweeney jumped, as though shocked in his seat, and said uncertainly, “Wait, so do you think we crossed it?” And Chanel and I shrieked, “Obviously we must have if you were moved to speak!”

And there we were, the only car for fifty miles, with no clue in the world as to where we were going. We were just going and the thickets ran alongside us, pitch black and menacing, like a mouth of sharp teeth–the spookiest stretch of highway.

Sweeney knows a lot about the Civil War. Washington D.C. was the union capitol, and Richmond was the confederate, the two a mere one-hundred miles apart. He said that there were more people killed on the roads between those two cities than all the other battles combined.

We looked out our windows into the deep, ghosty night, our hands squashed under our thighs.

Alisdair said, “My friend answered her phone yesterday and apologized, saying, ‘I have to take this call. My friend just got proposed to!’ And then after she hung up, I asked how the proposer had done it, and she said, ‘Over lunch, I think,’ and I just cringed. Lunch? I’m rallying to phase lunch out of my life. Ideally, I’d like to combine breakfast and lunch. Even the word is ugly. Lunch. Lunch. It’s the least romantic repast to do anything over.”

I don’t know if I agree. In France, lunch is a decadent afternoon. Here, it is only kitchen sink sandwiches and Lean Cuisine. Come to think of it, maybe I do agree. In France, all “lunches” are actually “brunches” as they don’t eat breakfast, and take their first meal at about two o’clock.

Brunch is a highly spiritual alternative to lunch any day.  Alisdair said, “He would have done much better to do it over brunch.”

I met Matthew last daylight savings, over brunch. I was with him when the clocks turned forward just recently: tea cakes & tea. I had brunch on a rooftop in the fall. Violetta makes a quarterly “slow foods” brunch. I got Spanish brunch on the house with a blood orange mimosa in the Upper Westside. Often our weekend breakfasts are consumed at “brunchtime.” Lottie made a brunch three weeks ago (see photo). Lily and I have decided to start making brunch once a month for the tenants who live on our floor. Our debut brunch was two Sundays ago: we made creamy, vegan “cheesy” grits, spinach & egg scrambles, Spanish toast, coffee, juice & tea. Everyone dropped three dollars in a box at the door and we served from the pot.

Fritzy, my black 1949-Londoner commuter bike, was stolen several weeks ago. And for several weeks, I pretended it hadn’t happened. I would look at the bike rack where she used to be docked, and each time, when she still wasn’t there, I’d look away, erase the memory, and try again the next day.

This denial can’t go on though. She is gone. Gone, gone, gone.

I didn’t wash my hands as I left the school bathroom, and as I walked out I wondered if someone would call me on it. A hulking woman in a long, black trench coat called after me in the hallway: “You didn’t wash your hands! That’s nasty!”

Before the debut of Making Skeletons Dance on Wednesday. Picture it: Thirty minutes later than planned, full of shame, arms loaded, heading towards the car and the coffee pot slips from the holster and shatters in the walkway. Everyone looks worried for me momentarily. It’s going to be OK, Adrian. Maybe you know what I’m like when I’m frazzled. It was like that. We still trust you. We’re still with you. We just won’t serve coffee, OK? Grace squeezed my arm and I said, “But this would never happen to you,” my eyes wet, and Sweeney said, “Are you crying over the coffee pot?” I felt vulnerable and inept, and in those strange, suffocating moments I doubt my capabilities of parenting or holding down a job or finishing school.

At Unnameable Books the owner still had to move some boxes out of our way, and Julie said, “I’ll grab wine.” So she ran, and Robert and I climbed into the musty cellar, half of it submerged in negative-space darkness, the other half illuminated like a living room, lined with book cases, a stool and a music stand sitting before several rows of folding-chairs. Julie also made scones: soda bread & current. Matthew showed up and I said, “What kind of business would have a coffee pot in their break room, and would let us use it?” He said there was a thrift store up the street. We ran and pleaded through the bulletproof glass: “What kind of New York literary event would this be without coffee?” Denied. We run to a pizza place and I beg a team of dad-aged Italian men to lend me a pot and they agree. The pot does not fit my machine. I drink a glass of wine and a scone with cherry jam and stand up in front of the thirty people that have gathered to hear us read:

“Welcome to Making Skeletons Dance,” I said. “We want to create a space to chew the fat.”

The event was wonderful. Everyone quiet and breathing. Robert and I introduced each writer with an anecdote or an observation. Originally I had asked everyone to send me a bio and no one had–so all I had was gossip and confession. And that’s what they got. The writing was lucid and succinct. No one overstayed their reading-welcome. We had pieces about estranged aunts, carrying a three-generation legacy of unwed Julies, elephants and blow (read without taking a breath), a fishing trip with dad (call-and-response poem), alzheimers and more!

And later everyone chewed the fat.

Grace had “the day” in New York. She had a friend in the Upper West Side so she acted as a sort of liaison between Brooklyn dive bars and Broadway shows. I took her to the MoMa and he took her to the Met. I took her through Hassidic Williamsburg and he took her backstage of the ballet theater. I took her to a poetry slam, a world literature lecture, Bloomingdales and Central Park. We put on make-up in Sephora. She jet from destination to destination with ease, never getting flustered or lost. Always prepared. Scarf tight. First-aid. Snacks. She met a big group of us at Sopolo Chinese-Spanish restaurant, zoombies and zombies around one night after being served dinner by a butler in a Westside penthouse. Hands folded in her lap, she said, triumphantly, “I saw a rat today!”

She threw her head back, gasp-laughing in that way she does. She also read a Walt Whitman poem on our radio show and talked about a new love-interest. I felt like a loose cannon around her. I was picking people’s blackheads in the bathroom and she was like, what? We shared a bed and woke up early.

It rained hard on Friday night. I was late for a play and my umbrella was broken. I keep having these soul shattering moments of ineptitude.

Sweeney paced under the BQE in the middle of the night, worrying that he was only this-thing-that-happens-on-idle-Tuesdays to me, wasn’t welcome in my life, pining for his five best friends, most of whom went abroad earlier this year. The next day, we touched base. It was sunny. I laid him down, held him. We found our silence: Oh. Everything’s fine. It was just one of those days when the world collapses, when your very best is as low as not hurting anyone’s feelings. The afternoon light shadowed his face, shoulder, torso. His breathing slowed. Phew. Whew. Lost touch for a second there.

W e got Indian food in the East Village on Saturday night at the restaurant the size of a shoebox, with chili pepper and Christmas lights cloaking the ceiling and walls, filled with driving Indian dance beats. I turned seventeen-years-old in the restaurant next door, which is essentially the same restaurant. There are four of them, stacked together and they fight each other for business. BYOB.

Grace Shibley: So, I just finished reading Billy Crystal’s autobiography…

Nicole Riviercio: My grandmother wears my first baby tooth, gold-plated, hanging on a chain around her neck everyday, and she thinks this is OK.

Katie Oh: (in response to an MTA worker recently finding a bag of body parts at the Bedford/Nostrand G stop) Sometimes I think my life really is like Law and Order. If I squint. And kind of tilt my head to the side.

We were walking a dog around midtown. Alisdair had the corporate apartment for the night. He, Matthew, a girl from Hanover named Lisa, and I agreed to take a four-month-old German Shepard for a walk around Bryant Park for a corporate friend. The puppy had wrinkles in her forehead. Afterwards, handing her back to the owner, the puppy decided to shit on the sidewalk. Panicking, we searched a nearby trash heap in front of Starbucks for something to pick it up with. Sitting on top of the styrafoam and cardboard was something that looked like a loaf of shrink-wrapped cheese

“Oh my god,” Alisdair said. “This is a pound of Starbucks frosted lemon cake!”

His corporate friend, holding the dog’s leash incredulously, said, “Don’t eat that, man.”

But it was far too late.

“This is twelve slices of lemon cake!” Alisdair held it up in the air like a trophy, yelling. “And I’m going to eat this! I’m voting for Obama! I’m a democrat! I’m going to dumpster dive and eat every piece of this!”

Matthew, Lisa and I began foraging around in the heap and found three pallets of vacuum-sealed M&M cookies, ginger snaps, and espresso brownies. Joy was had by all. The corporate friend cowered into the late night shadows of midtown and the rest of us paraded back to the corporate apartment.

There was our leftover Chinese feast spread across the glass-top coffee table (snowpea leaves, chicken-fried steak, Buddha’s Delight, fried rice, seaweed and pork dumplings). I took a bath and used all of the free soap and shampoo, my feet pressed against the bright, white wall. We all made the free coffee and sat next to the bay windows, watching the city.

Two musicians that Matthew recently met during his hostel-hopping showed up around one in the morning, one of which was a girl named Ella Joyce Buckley. Ella was raised in Johannesburg, and–what is it about South African women? There’s this bright, crisp intelligence, this willingness to engage and create sparks. Their vocabulary is different. We all played songs we’d written, on various guitars, towering over midtown, and all five of us fell asleep on the soft, white rug and woke up with the sun.

I got a letter from Tom Robbins yesterday. It was sixty-degrees and breezy. Everyone was in a glorious, flushed-face mood. I went looking for a coffee maker, wandering around Brooklyn with Sweeney until he said, “Oh, I’ve got an extra one at home.” So then we’re wandering around again, and I’m carrying a sticky, brown Cusinart 12-cup pot, smoking “hello, Springtime” hand-rolled cigarettes and this man stops us on the street: “Can I have one?” Sweeney introduces himself as Chris, which I never hear him do, rolls the man a cigarette and the man offers us a bag of white rice in his shopping bag.

“I’m done with rice,” I said. “It takes too long to cook, and there are better grains.”

People are seriously selling themselves short if they depend on rice. Try millet, couscous, barley or quinoa. They all taste better, have versatile textures, and take five to fifteen minutes cooking time, as opposed to the forty-five minutes it takes for rice.

And I got to my mailbox, a letter from Mr. Robbins, and a quick reply at that. I sent him one a week ago, picking up where we left off when I was seventeen, or picking up where he left off with my Aunt Robin, in the late-eighties. After I wrote Tom Robbins for the first time in 2005, I found out that my aunt had been sending him letters since 1972. It was during a time in my life that I was terrified of going crazy, of turning out like her, arrested in her tiny apartment, and hearing about our shared ardor for Tom Robbins did not help my case.

Over the course of twenty years, my aunt heard back from him only a couple of times, but in 1986, a piece of her letter, a drink list to be exact, showed up on page 123 in Jitterbug Perfume and she felt vindicated. Eventually I stopped worrying about turning out like anybody, and Tom Robbins and I struck up a correspondence of our own.

Now it is back. In my poetry studio, we are studying the art & role of correspondence in the lives of writers. We have to compile a portfolio of edited correspondence at the end of the semester, like one of those books: I’m So Over Rice: The Letters of Adrian Shirk.

Two weeks ago we had a tea party on Alisdair’s bed. Five of us, Matthew, Lily, two girls from Gallatin-NYU with blue curls and waist-blond hair. Stroop Waffles and hazelnut cremes. St. John’s Wort so we wouldn’t get sad. Matthew, the hitch-hiker and Lousiana carnie, is back. Went home to Chicago for a while, but is hostel-hopping now and trying to get a job in the city. He has a deep, quiet soft-eyed wisdom and charisma, not much older than me, but miles higher. He says dry one-liners that have no conviction to be funny or not, and yet they are, moving or hilarious, and he just floats through them, smiling.

Last Friday, Pratt Institutionalized Theatre, started by Robi Snyderman and Chris Martiny, had its second production. Robi asked me to be in his play, sitting on stop of a giant rolling cart, playing violin with a feathered bow, my face painted black and my lips green, cawing like a bird.

Robi has been interning at the Ontological Theatre: The Ontological-Hysteric Theater (OHT) was founded in 1968 by Richard Foreman with the aim of stripping the theater bare of everything but the singular and essential impulse to stage the static tension of interpersonal relations in space. There were some people from this theatre who helped with lighting and also put on their own plays. We held it in four drawing studios with no money in The Main Building. Ray Ray Mitrano led the audience to each room, like individual exhibits, where the play had already started. Mandy’s “Taketh” was amazing. Just her on a soapbox, wondering why she squeezed her legs together that one night in the mulch. A couple of people staged their’s in the dark hallway and the audience was guided to a corral, against the wall, in circular seating arrangements around the platforms they use for nude models in drawing classes.

After the plays, we all went back to Gates to hang out. Chanel came down from Connecticut. She read two lines of Sweeney’s new poem and was spitting she was so excited, a handle of dry gin in her clutch: Kiss him! You better kiss him now, this is so good! And I said, “It’s your joy. You do it.” And she said, “I couldn’t. A sister cannot do that with her brother. But you’re the vessel that brings it to him,” she got close to my face, “And you’re the most beautiful vessel that could.”

This was the best explanation I have ever heard–this idea that your significant other(s) is(are) a vessel that transports the whole world’s love for you, to you. Which is why it happens so intensely and so concentrated, more concentrated than other relationships. Somehow, sweeties become lightening rods, conducting ardor not even their own. I have always had a hard time differentiating between platonic and romantic love, almost resenting that one needs to make a distinction: love, loved, or in-love. But being a vessel? I get this. I welcome this idea.

Last Thursday we had class in Rachel Levitsky’s apartment, right near the Brooklyn Museum. She had floor to ceiling bookshelves, a study with suspension windows, a thick granite counter and wide, white walls. We sat on her rug, wrote Sappho cut-ups, ate crackers. She prescribed us books based on what our writing needs, or how to do something that we have already begun to figure out, a little better. I got Anne Waldman’s Iovis and Ted Barrigan’s sonnets.We’ve been working in the Workroom a lot. We’ve made it into a nest. Last night Grace, the Portland ballerina I grew up with, arrived and we all sat in the Workroom and had a read-around: my peer’s mother’s piece “Cutting Loose’ appeared in Best Women’s Erotica, 2004 and we all took turns, including Grace.

Lily and I wandered Manhattan for several hours, Midtown, Union Square, Soho, and let the universe guide us to a soul food restaurant. O! the universe. Can I say something like that without sounding religious? When I got to college, I knew I wanted to live in a space that people visited, a community space because my whole life I’d been the adjunct one. And split between Allie and I and our huge, lovely dorm-homes, that is exactly what we’ve been, even at the beginning when there were four of us. When I got to college, I wanted to find nourishment, and a then a Dominican family-run health food store hired me, feeding me daily. I wanted a way to not use ATMs, and they pay me in cash. I wanted different kinds of romance, and I wanted everyone to feel safe and silly and enthralled inside of the romances, and all manner of lovely people dipped into my life, landing me with Sweeney, who wanted something different so I met him halfway–and what place! There are guides. I don’t know much more about it, but I do know its effectiveness is contingent upon knowing, very clearly, what you want–or [you might get] what you need.