I had no where to be, and no poets in my bed. Alone: I packed up my work and two books and walked North. I sat in the grass and read As I Lay Dying. Then I kept walking. A day to stroll through Brooklyn and nothing else. Windy, after a week of April showers. My backpack scrunching up the back of my dress like a school girl while I walked, and my hair, wild in my clean face–I felt so fine. I decided to dock myself at a coffee shop, get some real work done, and as soon as I rerouted, all of my peers were coming towards me down the sidewalk. All of them. It is a sunny day in April. They were going to a circus in the park, and so what could I do? I saw the circus in the sun, spent the afternoon roaring with writers about the construction of a mobile, sensory, literary sideshow. 

Better to dance awkwardly than walk lamely. (Zarathustra)

Letter to New York
By Elizabeth Bishop

For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Who needs the Internet when you’re staying in the most eccentric house in the Northeast? We lived without electricity for three days, and read each other stories by candlelight. We bought baguette and honeydew from a nearby town in the mornings, and ate it at the long dining room table, beside piles of sequined dresses, Mikasa stonewear from the 1960s, reference books about prescription drugs, and plastic animal figurines. We were in the Catskills. The trees weren’t in bloom yet, and they looked barren and red the way they do in Fall. April and November are parallels on the color wheel. Lyndel’s mother keeps an acre of land up there, on which sits two cottages and the craziest old farm house which may or may not exist on mafia money. She stays there in the winter sometimes. It’s empty right now. Her mother is manic depressive, and so is the house.  

There are only small towns up there. In Woodstock Lyndel showed us the apartment that Bob Dylan resided while he was working on John Wesley Harding. We stood underneath it. It was night, and Sweeney wondered if the swimming happened behind the house, and so we went behind where the creek was, and he searched his childhood. Lyndel and I stood at the window of a candle shop and vowed to live without articficial light next year–

Rabbits and deer were sprinting across narrow, winding Route 28, and it was flat dark by the time we took a left at the church and parked next to houses. We filed onto the front porch and Lyndel said, “I forgot to ask my mom how to turn on the electricity.”

We crept inside, dark and mildewed, feeling around surfaces for candles. Eventually, each of us with a flame, the room was illuminated. Tea cups, laundry, bookshelves, cassette cases, novelty table lamps with hula girls and unicorns filled the shallow rooms. “My mom’s a little eccenctric,” Lyndel tried. There were lifesize cardboard cut-outs of classic monsters in the kitchen, in the living room windows, flattened on the floor: Wolfman, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon. 

We crept into the cellar with our quivering candles. It was so cold our breath was like smoke. And it was so dark. And The Catskills were white under the moonlight, towering outside the windows. Sweeney flipped some fuses, but nothing happened. No light. No water. We went upstairs, waited. Lyndel showed us the bedrooms: “Haunted,” she said. With our candlelight, we could see bedsheets all asunder and drawers pulled open and old jewelry. What to do, what to do.

The boys gathered wood, and we started a fire in the woodstove. The room glowed and heated. We sat around a low, round table, drinking wine from glasses we found dusty, in the kitchen. The four of us talked all night.

When there are no lights, you can focus only on each other’s faces, and whatever is directly in front of you: a book, a poem, a notebook, needlepoint (needlepoint?)–it made us moderate, calm, patient, engaged. We decided to come back in the summer and live as though it were the 18th Century, to grow vegetables and speak French in the garden. No electricity. Eating raw or cooking outdoors. Bicycles. Bootlegers. We could turn one of the cottages into a playhouse and invite our friends from the city for feasts and performances.    

By day we played Peter Pan by the river, and read on the rocks. We wore costumes, hats, walked through a pine tree forest. Those trees grow like metranomes. Robi is rewriting Peter Pan ontelogically, as he knows and remembers it. At night, we built another fire, settled down for a long, warm discourse in the dark. Lyndel and I snuck through closets and put on furs and fine dresses. I fell asleep in a green oak armchair, wearing a white sequined gown. Sweeney and I took the bedroom facing East, waking to pale light and birds each morning. 

The sociopath-themed week of discourse started when Gabe relayed a few passages from the Manson court testimonies. Maybe this was two weeks ago, even. (Time has been swift and boundless lately.) And this theme extended beyond the walls of the Gates apartment, coming up in just about every conversation until this weekend: sociopathy as non-psychotic, unemotial and pragmatic–as well as murderous and hateful. Where does the hate come from? Maybe from always being stuck outside of everything, like a puppeteer. 

When I mentioned this in my previous post, I wanted to find the Manson quotes that started the exploration, but I couldn’t find them.

Unbeknowest to him, Greg Afinogenov responded to that post with the very testimony I was looking for. What follows is Manson’s first-person court address:

“I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I arn or who I am.

I was given a name and a number and I was put in a cell, and I have lived in a cell with a name and a number.

I don’t know who I am.

I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are.

You only reflect on me what you are inside of yourselves, because I don’t care anything about any of you and I don’t care what you do.

I can stand here in front of this court and smile at you, and you can do anything you want to do with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love, and it is all for me, and I give it to myself for me, because I look out for me first and I like me, and you can live with yourselves and your opinion of yourselves. I know what I have done.

If I showed someone that I would do anything for my brother, include give my life for my brother in the battlefield, or give where else that I may want to do that, then he picks his banner up and he goes off and does what he does.

That is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do.”

Excerpted from Sweeney’s old letters to me:

I have been reading Pound’s ABC of Reading–going back to the start again. He has these lines–”music begins to atrophy when it departs far from the dance; poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from the physical movement.” He talks everywhere of the music.

***

In class, we were to study a Romanticist poet, imitate a piece, get cozy the author and then write an ad-lib correspondence. My brief penship was with John Donne (1572-1631). In my letter to Donne, I said:

…Looking back, there are always only a handful [artists, poets, thinkers] who really saw the heavens and knew what to say about it—whether or not this is true, this is always how it seems.

Does lyric begin to atrophy when it strays too far from God?

I studied Donne’s letters, and decided that to answer my question, he would have written:

To my honoured friend, “Lady Adrian C. Shirk.”

My lady—By this time the carrier is as wise as the horse; surely you must know what I mean. Never could I answer such a question as you’ve posed, but I can question in return for affirmation: Does God begin to atrophy when He strays too far from music? If so, my little mongoose, we’ve trod in perfect circle. If poems are as hymnals, than agreed, we have our priests—but we have our lords and ladies, too, our bishops, deacons, infants and patron saints. Each of whom play weighty role, as minor poets do. I would no more hear again what I write in an officious letter than what I said at a drunken supper. The poet is ever only writing the doctrine of mortals, that is all I know.

Your very true and affectionate servant,
J. Donne

***

From the same letter as before, Sweeney had continued:

I sat in class today and didn’t want to be there, didn’t know where the hell I wanted to be, haven’t been able to write recently, have been struggling to climb out of this terrible brooding, and I thought of Donne’s “The Ecstacy” and Mallarme’s “a lovely drunkenness enlists/me to raise though the vessel lists/this toast on high and without fear/solitude rocky shoal, bright star.” And I love the music of those lines and I remembered music again and it might be gone again now—I don’t know—but I drove home singing.

An idea on titles: choose a sentence from the body of a text.

How much of writing craft idioms are actually just rules for life? Show, don’t tell. Be economical. Allow for gestation. Clarity, clarity, and clarity. Pay attention to tense. Be careful talking in second person. Word choice. Awk.

This is a Polaroid of Gillian, Lyndel and me. These have been hot Spring days. We are standing against the base of a piece in the campus sculpture garden. The sun was setting. Lyndel and I are living together next year in a 20 x 12 bedroom, our own stove and bathtub. We are pushing our beds together to save space, and investing in an orthopedic mattress and king-sized canopy netting. We, apparently, will have revolutionary sex lives due to proximity. We will have tea parties. She is a Taurus, Sagittarius rising. Sweeney and I are driving down to Florida to pick her up at the end of the summer in a U-Haul, which we will fill with her furniture and matching hand towels. She will take us to the springs, where the Spanish moss droops, show us the crocodiles, and dance around a fire.

This is a Polaroid of Sweeney and me. Lily took these pictures. She was in a rollicking mood and a very long skirt. She kissed my cheek a hundred times and the four of us went out for a lazy dinner. The leaves have grown. The blossoms are heavy because, according to Lily, a slow-coming Spring makes the growth more lush. Lyndel was sad because she hadn’t slept for about a week, and her studio teacher attacked her from a place of emotion rather than craft. Sweeney said, “Your teacher’s not wrong though; imitation of The Greats is something that writers miss out on in their education. Visual artists are encouraged to copy famous works tooth-for-tooth, all the time, to strengthen, like exercise. In writing we are so often merely coming from our own brains, and it makes us weak.”

I need to be reading a lot more than I am.

That night we went to a ho-down at Jody’s, slow danced to Johnny Cash. The night ended with Sweeney fighting for C.S. Lewis and Chris, Gabe, everyone fighting Sweeney’s biological Catholocism. And Lyndel, who used to be a Southern cheerleader, now ends her evenings at the Gates apartment, eating refried beans off of a hammer, because that’s all that is there. Do you know these places? I have this distinct memory of my stepmother telling me as early as sixth grade, that if I was going to be involved in creative communities when I left home, it was “going to be a lot of poor, hungry, crazy people, eating cashews, complete disorganization, last-minute fixes, like ‘Did anyone remember to bring the so-and-so?’, no sleep–and stoned, lots of pot.”

This is what it reminds me of. Only this community, or rather these communities, aren’t conducive to pot. Speed maybe, but not pot. Things move fast. I would attest to the average college student being addicted to over-the-counter amphetamines these days. The demands of the world shifted, and so the drugs of choice followed suit.

Sweeney and I finished Correspondence, with an ISBN number and everything. We finished, and looked at the table of contents and thought, Wow, this really looks like a new generation of writers. Most of the contributors live out-of-state, or abroad, but are all connected somehow through this group in Brooklyn. Hence the name. We ate candy and watched Harold and Maude and, exhausted, fell violently asleep.

This is a Polaroid of Sweeney and me in which he looks like Charles Manson, and I, some kind of fleshy parasite. But what a picture, right?

Speaking of Manson, sociopaths have been a reoccurring topic of conversation between myself and lots of people for the last two weeks. Everyone I know has one in their family. We’ve been coming up with definitions, patterns, ways in which their a necessary part of society.

On Monday, I went into the admissions building to register for Fall classes, and Erich Kuersten, the writing program adviser, asked about Sweeney and I. “How’s the man?” he said. I said, Oh you know, the best. Great. He’s coming out West to visit this summer.

“God,” Erich said, “Are you going to have babies?”

“What?” I said. “What? Heavens! No.”

“You’re the only two people I can imagine have babies together that doesn’t make me want to throw up,” Erich said. He began to describe scenarios about our literary children, and then he launched into a story of an undergraduate couple who graduated from Pratt recently and who had two babies together by the time they were finished with school. He said, “It was so great to watch them because they were so young, and had all this energy to be really great par–”

I threw my arms over my head, and said, “All I wanted to do was register for classes! You have to stop. You have to stop. This has been coming up too much. This needs to stop. No babies.”

I registered for US Lit, World Civ, Studio with Samantha Hunt (!), The Story Cycle, Friday Forum and a class on the Situationists (May, 1968 Paris).

Monica Nelson invited me to her experiment, The Dinner Party. Her thesis was that, under specific constraints, more genuine social interactions arise. So she invited five strangers to a dinner, designed us field notes booklets, and said we couldn’t talk about ourselves. So of course we talked about philosophy, what is sacred, can one ever be a “free thinker” etc… leaving us sort of winded and wounded. And full of wine and veal.

Things have been very domestic lately, except for the one night, when Sweeney slept with his boots on. This evening, Robert, Amber and I helped run a benefit gala for a theater company called The Team. I wore a long, polyester Star Trek orange dress, Robert in a 70s stiff ensemble. We helped bounce, and serve food and drink. And the man who played Inigo Montoya (Mandy Pintikin) in the Princess Bride, hosted and performed (he’s a wonderful singer.) He announced the 30th anniversary of he and his wife’s first date, when he had said to her at the time: “I am going to marry you.”

To which she evidently responded, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes; no you’re not. You’re a baby and an actor, and I’m going to break you.”

The Team: an inspiration. There are seven of them, actors and Shakespeare scholars, fresh out of graduate school, pulling day-jobs like cake decorating. But somehow, in between it all, have written plays together through correspondence, and take them to festivals every year, and perform them at P.S. 122, and are running on pure youth, spit and vinegar. They work with music and space, they write a lot about America, obscure but accessible. Tonight they previewed a bit of their new show, “Architecting,” all about the congessional reconstruction and Gone With the Wind. Wow. At the end of the night, the whole fancy gala did a synchronized dance to “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire. You know how that goes. That song makes you feel like forever.

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die. I am going to marry you.

Sometimes the world reveals itself to be ungoverned by theology. Human aspirations perpetually exceed nature’s indifferent dispensations and often I forget this. Two Thursdays ago, Lyndel and I found ourselves walking through a puddle of blood on Classon Avenue in the middle of the night.

It was raining. We walked through a pile of bottles that had been smashed in a shopping bag, and noticed after walking over it, that it was surrounded by a deep red wash. Suddenly we could smell it. We looked down and realized that the blood continued in patches up the sidewalk. Lyndel clutched my elbow and said, “It’s in the streets.” Our perspective zoomed out and we realized it was everywhere, coursing through the gutters with the rainwater. It spattered the sidewalk the entire length of our destination. It left a heavy, acrid stench from Greene to Gates Avenue, and when we got to the apartment, Sweeney’s roommate came at me with a toy plastic dagger and suddenly the world was ungoverned–

What had we just seen?

We told them all about the blood, but in the morning it was as though it had never happened. The sidewalks were clean. I passed a man sweeping up the glass bottles several blocks away and asked if he knew anything about it, but he did not. The rain had stopped. I wondered how crazy I was to live in a place where blood moved through the street on a current, and my dad said, “It doesn’t change the energy of the place. It just means you really have to be awake.”

Where I am right now: It is raining hard. Grace just said, “Did you see the African drumming and the naked dancing on the fourth floor?” My school is sponsoring a twelve-hour Write-a-Thon and Draw-a-Thon in the oldest building on campus. It ends in the morning. They brought writers who held workshops on one side of the dilapidated studio while nude models lay tangled together on the other side of the studio, for the art students to paint. There are tanks of soda and coffee. There are four typewriters. We are writing in a brick hallway next to large, old windows and there is lightening outside. And according to Grace, the nude models have risen from their positions and are dancing, to a set of African drummers that were evidently also invited.

It is April, and there are still no leaves on the trees.

Walking through Bed-Stuy last night, we continued a stream of seasonal concerns carried over from the week before. The branches twisted above me, bare like sick things. We walked in the dark under creamy gingko blossoms, and fleshy dogwoods blooms–but there was no green.

Supposedly, It stayed too hot, late into November, and the trees spent all of their verdant energy too soon. Now that spring is here, they’re not producing. They’re not producing yet. And then it hit me, sick slap in the belly: “What if they just never grow back?” I said.

Grace and I went to the Public Theater the other night to see “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You.” We were almost late, so we ran. How many times have I had to run to something in this city? The play was this allegory about the citizen’s relationship to his country, disguised as a narrative about two gay men who have left their wives and family to be together. It took place in complete blackness, illuminating only a single sofa which the two men sat on, suspended in the negative space. They would reach into the blackness and pull out coffee cups, cigarettes, syringes and pencils. Then, when they’d made their point, would drop the objects into the blackness without a sound. Like feathers.

Heading back to school under a light rain, I quoted my grandfather: “Always forward, never straight.” I said it a few times, crossing traffic, dodging people. And all at once, maybe on the third repetition, Grace followed it, with her fist in the air, with “…and twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

“Is that really the rest of the quote?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you waited all this time to say it?”

She laughed but didn’t explain.

“Say it again,” I said.

“Always forward, never straight. And twirling, twirling, TWIRLING towards freedom!”

Bill Finnegan, a journalist, came and read to us at Friday Forum today. For the first time, I wondered if this was something I want to do. After all, most of his work is telling other people’s stories, documenting, and largely, this is where my sensibilities lie. He read a piece about going to East Texas and staying in a poor, black community whose occupations lie in chicken plants and pulp wood after the “White Tornado” that shut down their drug rings–the importance of that business, and of mobility: upward, downward.

Robert and I held our second Making Skeletons Dance reading at Unnameable Books. The audience was warm and engaged, and the work was alive. There was a handful of new faces, twenty-five bodies. Davey read from Plain Words, Gillian wrote about inheriting mental illness, Lily read her birth poems. There was a theme of paternity. We supplied five bottles of wine, and Julie made scones. We should really get a snack grant.

We wore sleeveless shirts yesterday. Read in the park surrounded by gnats. I read T.S. Eliot and selections from A Treasury of American Folklore. Lily read me a passage from Diane DiPrima’s, Memoirs of a Beatnik, called “Fuck the Pill: A Digression” which, in a nutshell, she says, “Yeah, great, now you can have sex like a man! Except you puke, bloat and burst into tears. You increase your risk of cancer and heart disease, and you lose your sex drive. And for all you women who are trying to avoid pregnancy–congratulations. You are now in the first stage of pregnancy, all the time!”

Fertility awareness. It’s so strange how few people know about it. Sweeney is the only young man I know who knows the chart. He went to a Catholic high school, and those Catholics are way excited about this idea: a loophole in contraception. So they teach it in health class. How great? As my stepmother once said, “Catholicism is all about fucking anyway.”

Lyndel and I have been pulling all-night work parties and then sleeping on our days off. There’s this lovely, steady stillness in the tiny hours. Lyndel has been coming home from the Gates’ household wearing the same clothes from the night before. I have been running, practicing French, lazing. Matthew read an amazing poem at Gates’ Salon last night. He used his whole body and made us all think about the wide range of vocality and rhythm that we’re not using. Sweeney and I realized this at the same moment and didn’t talk about it until the next day. It was a Salon that restored our faith in the Salon tradition.

Several nights ago Sweeney and I were about to go to sleep. I was feeling foul. I told Sweeney to leave me be and I rolled onto my side. The blinds were drawn and spun shut. Within a few dark minutes, there was a knock on my door followed by two small voices. “Hello? Hello. Let us in.” It was Lyndel and Robi, who have recently fallen into a courtship, and they were drunk: “Let us in, let us in!” Sweeney and I looked at each other and thought, OK, OK Universe–send ‘em in. Naked as the sky, we opened the door and within minutes it was everybody else, too: Amber, Davey, Lily, John, Robert. I had my comforter pulled up around me like sea foam, while everyone crowded onto my bed. We talked about poetry the way some beer-stained men talk about football teams at barbecues. We talked about family and all night and all outdoors. And I stayed naked, wearing my blue comforter.

And wouldn’t you know: I woke up this morning. I woke up this morning and there were tiny leaves on the beech outside my window. Green. And twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

This weekend in Sleepy Hollow we stopped at a roasters and got espresso that the guy called “Cuban Coffee”: triple-brewed, pressed with a fine layer of sugar cane. As I handed back my dish, the roaster described it as having “a lot of viscosity.”

I telephoned my grandmother yesterday. We spoke about spring cooking, forsythia, and how she doesn’t understand “this Sweeney character’s poetry, but maybe [she’s] just being dense.” I asked her how old she was when she got married. We talked about how my mom’s generation was the first to reject marriage and childbearing at a young age, and how, breathless after all their hard work, we, their daughters, are reclaiming the old-fashioned ideals they were trying to liberate us from. People are starting to have babies early again. Even the whitest, most middle-class demographics are into this new spin on archaic motherdom–Hip Mama, movies in the media like “Knocked-Up” and “Juno.” My grandmother said, “Part of it is purely physiological. Your mom’s generation realized that they had a sufficiently less amount of energy in their thirties, and that having babies late wore them out. ”

Then she said, “Is this your way of trying to tell me that you’re pregnant?”

Shocked, I said, “No! No, this is just for the sake of inquiry.”

She said, “It’s OK if you are; I was just wondering.”

I called my mom afterwards and recounted the conversation. She was on the Oregon coast, playing flute in the Yaquina Bay Orchestra. She giggled, and then she probably wondered quietly, “Is this her way of telling me that she’s pregnant?” because that’s what mother’s are supposed to wonder.

At work, Christian was showing me photos of his his nephews and nieces. He comes from a large, tight knit Dominican legacy where domestic affairs are priority, where there are no secrets, and everyone has babies at twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and the whole family rears the children, bells and whistles. This is what brings them fulfillment. “Das’ what it’s all about,” Christian said. “Das’ what’s up.” An anomaly, he cannot imagine himself having babies now, but granted, he is surrogate parenting his cousin’s children all the time. I can’t imagine being ready to have babies before the age of, like, forty-seven, but who can? You sort of grow up when it happens. You don’t do the growing up first.

As soon as you are willing to not be the center of the world, therein lies grownuphood.

I’m sure this happens in more ways than one, but usually it happens by making someone else the center of the world. Am I wrong? Parents spend so much time telling kids that the world doesn’t revolve around them–but it does! And it’s parents who made it this way. First they were the axis, and then they got out from under the earth and let it spin on their children.

So Sweeney and I have been following babies around when they come through campus. It’s spring and they’re walking. We’ve been editing a literary journal together called Correspondence;Sweeney’s endeavor, but he needed some help. We’re almost finished and he has some sponsorship to get it perfect bound & pressed. I have been getting little sleep but only because we lay in bed talking all night, with the lights off and the moon coming in. Lily and I got breakfast this morning at Choice (spinach omelet with Swiss cheese, blackberry tarts, pecan pancakes & coffee.) We sat on their benches outside; it was so windy we were screaming: she wants someone to blow her mind. Her hair is growing out like the 1970s, feathered. Radiant. We talked about babies and our fathers and being a longshoreman. She is one of the sharpest girls I know, and she too is dreaming of housewifedom. “If I had the money,” she says. “I’d drop out of college for babies in a heartbeat.”

Two Fridays ago was Katie Oh’s, Vagina Monologues performance. It was a lovely event. We all wore black, fastened a giant cloth vulva as our backdrop. Allie performed about twenty different kinds of orgasm noises in front of a full auditorium. Grace England-Markun wrote a seductive letter to a handful of vegan bakeries and they donated hundreds of desserts for us to sell at the Monologues bake sale: all proceeds from the show & the cupcakes went to Safe Horizons, a domestic & sexual assault relief.

Knina’s friend Tiffany invited me to sublet this summer. I will be living in a quiet, sky-lit apartment on the corner of Flushing & Broadway for half of June, July and August. She has two tiny kittens, a kitchen, a bathtub, and an extra bedroom. Gold easy-chairs, wooden animals, teacups. She’s a photographer at School of Visual Arts, and her love is photo restoration so her walls are covered with faded family portraits that she salvaged. A friend offered me a twin mattress I can use for a bed. Ta da. I’ll have one box of belongings, my dresses, stamps, stationary and my laptop. A summer of sweet, thick heat and solitude.

I have fallen in love with a boy who has been reading World War II case studies since second grade. Who reads Fuccoult six times a year. Who reads when he walks, reads when he pees, reads between class, carries books in his pockets. My father has been telling me since grammar school, that when the time comes, to never let my boyfriend-of-the-time teach me how to drive. Despite all his effort, breathless like our mothers, I have decided to let Sweeney teach me how to drive this summer. My dad is shaking his head right now, biting his hand.

We’ve all been gathering at Sopolo Chinese & Spanish restaurant recently, for margaritas and astrology. I organized and MC’d a reading for Rachel Levitsky’s poetry studio, and we all made a commemorative chapbook of our work. We have extras. Tell me if you’d like one. Robert and I’s radio show has been fun, and has turned into Love Line as well as a salon. Lot’s of good stories, sexual confessions, and Sylvia Plath imitations. The studio we record in is always sweltering, and smells like ass.

But honestly? I’ve driven up to Westchester for the past two weekends. Sweeney and I have been going out to dinner and going on runs and being obnoxious, completely. Through the trees, he said, “I hope you don’t feel like I’m barraging you with my family.”

And I said, “No. I actually love it.”

He said, “I mean, most people come to New York to sever their ties and meet someone else who has done the same. I don’t think people plan on getting tangled up in family all over again.”

God, I laughed. Could I do it any other way? Tell me. Even if I try not to, I will only ever be drawn to relationships like these. And we laughed. We kill each other. We just kill each other and I hadn’t anticipated any of this. We are that couple that recounts their beginnings all the fucking time–

Oh, back when you were a mess and you’d stumble into my room, depressed, incomprehensible, smelling like malt liquor. God! And I let you stick around? Back when I’d pace by Fort Greene Park trying to work up the nerve to call you. That night. At the Salon. At the birthday party. At Knina’s. At Tuesday night dinner: the only thing stopping us from throwing a party at dawn was that stupid flight. I wanted to say something. The night you kissed my cheek. It killed me. You were sitting on your calves. You looked terrified. Oh, You looked beautiful. Back when I wooed you. Oh, is that what you call it? OK, OK, back when I tripped over my feet and mumbled for four months until one day you kissed me. It was my plan. I tricked you. Even now, it’s only sheer luck when I speak a complete sentence.

We had a lovely dinner with his father at a Pleasantville grill where everyone knows your name. We ate steak and talked for two hours, about divorce, Sweeney’s ex-girlfriends, debt, rules to live by etc… Sweeney’s friend Dave was back from Scotland for Spring break, so we snagged him, went to Sweeney’s mom’s house and built a bonfire in her yard, talking all night. Then we slept, all, soundly under one roof: Sweeney, me, Dave, Sweeney’s mom, sister, brother & their respective significant others. His mom hassled him into yard work in the morning and made a giant breakfast, blinking at me.

And, God! we went again this weekend, for what? His dad helped me do my taxes, in perfect fatherly cadence, talked about fishing & scored me returns (”That’s right, baby,” he said, holding up his palm for a high-five.) We grabbed Dave again. Went to his mom’s house–empty.

Dave said, “You guys, all I can think about lately is having a house. And like, a family and dinners and a wife.” And Sweeney and I gaped at each other and were like, “Dave, I know! It’s all we’ve been talking about!” And so we all made a giant steak dinner, drank a moderate amount Sam Adams and talked about books.

What is happening to my generation?

Caitlin Oppermann made a hip hop video of me and her performing “Little Houses” in Kansas City. Check it out. http://vimeo.com/867714