For a week or so I've been gestating my next post here; another typical epic treatment of ephemeral thoughts, striving for profundity, edging towards profanity. Taking in and swishing around Steven Johnson (who spoke here last week), his thoughts on the reluctance of people to return to the Freedom Tower, my parallel thoughts on the celebrated re-opening of the Superdome and how willing people are (against my early expectations) to return there, the workings of the mind, the way we learn and unlearn deeply ingrained habits and anxieties, the emerging possibility that we can take an active part in undoing and unlearning them somehow. Making our mind more clear of unnecessary and obsolete fears....making our minds more healthy...making our whole selves more healthy, perhaps, in the bargain.

Those thoughts will wait for another day. It's a little after 8 on a chilly, damp Friday night here; all I can really think about is that in less than two hours, Kiki's going to have her last treatment session. The last time she'll ever have to endure that poking and waiting and drugging and all the aftereffects of chemo that she so hardheadedly spares me. The one that finally sets her fully clear of leukemia forever (so hard for me to say the word sometimes; now I want to say it, take power of it, ball it up physically/mentally and throw it away, forever). But also the hardest of the sessions, so she tells me. She's done this all brilliantly; the last hurdle is a doozy, but she's gonna stretch and leap right over it. Still, it's only human to be anxious. And we both are.

I'm not there to sit there beside her tonight, and that really bothers me. If ever I should be there...it should be now.

I won't dwell. What can I do, here? I was listening to this song late (late!) last night. A song I love and that meant a lot to me, and I believe, to her, a couple years ago. For very my own little Top of the Pops....try to avoid your worst fear...the thought of me singing along with it....

Lovely day here today; one of those clear, mid-80s, mid-September beauts that you clutch on to and revel in, knowing that it's just a few days before the air starts to crackle, and the leaves with it, and then it's really fall. What better way to take full advantage of it, AND mark a new season of Grey's Anatomy* than to spend half the afternoon down at the local hospital?

I spent the better part of the day waiting inside - in a sunny, spartan waiting room, in a little examination room in which I feared I had been misplaced - to get this new red lump, with intriguingly bite-shaped marks on my forearm checked out. Two and a half hours of waiting, to find out...not very much about the provenance of my wound. They got the slivery black legs/fangs/probiscises out of me, which was convenient; I'm handy with tweezers but my autoclave is busted. I wonder how much I'm gonna get charged for this operation, though. I ended up with some parting gifts - a script for antibiotics, and instructions to put a warm compress on it five times a day. That last part is nice, but redundant. I typically apply warm compresses to my body 12-14 times each and every day.

So, who wants to see some pictures of my apparent staph infection? I figured so much. While I'm uploading a Flickr album of it, go hunt down some episodes of Appalachian Emergency Room. You'll get the gist of my afternoon.














I'm relieved to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed to their scrotums, a la SNL. But I'm a little sad to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed anywhere. However, the mountain mama who asked (inasmuch as someone "asks" by boldly announcing that she's going to "put on some cartoons, since there's so many kids in here. Pokey-mon, Shokey-mon, or sumthin'") to turn off the Bengals-Browns game around the 80th minute of my stay nearly made me give up - antibiotics, or amputation, almost waited till Monday.


*I'm just about as interested in the tribulations of Meredith Grey as I am in that other media It girl of the moment, lonelysham15 - which is to say, I'm not. At all. But I guess I'm in the minorities on both of these.

Why do we take such pains to commemorate these anniversary days - one year, five years, twenty-five years - as if they were especially different from any other day, just because they round off the units we tend to so neatly? What's the difference between five years, and four years and a bit?

It is twenty years, two hundred and fifty-nine days since the first time I went up to the top of the World Trade Center. That was the day after Christmas, 1985; it's pretty easy to remember since the trip, a gift from an aunt and uncle, was 'delivered' in the form of an inscription inside a NYC picture book.

I remember the strangeness of many first experiences that day, like taking the Long Island Rail Road in from Suffolk County. I realize now that it was my first real train trip anywhere, so it's little wonder that the stations, names and sights flashing by made some deep impression: Cold Spring Harbor (that town where I had seen actual Ferraris and Rolls Royces on the street, it fascinated me,) Syosset, Jamaica. The wind whipped down the canyons of Manhattan; though I grew up within a hundred miles of the city and saw it a hundred times from the Throg's Neck and GWB, it would be almost another ten years before I went there very much, and so for a long time after I associated the place with clear, biting cold. I remember the longest elevator ride I've ever taken (and ever will?) the floor-to-ceiling windows on the observation deck of the WTC and the vertigo they induced, my grandmother's town in New Jersey marked out on the glass (but I couldn't make that little burg out) and small planes flying over the river, below us.




It is five years and three days since I got tremendously drunk on a Saturday night at that beautiful, barely furnished apartment I shared with an old college friend on Boulevard East. Drunk on red wine along with M. and M., dear friends who are now split, dispersed and lost to me - one back to Poland, the other still in the city and enthusiastically enmeshed in some motivational cult the last I heard. Five years and two days since I woke up, hungover and not remembering what had happened to me, how I even ended up in my bed at the end of it all. Also five and two since Kiki and I had our first "fight" over the phone. Five years and one since we followed up with a desperate, drawn-out, hard evening conversation on that Monday night. I was sitting in that chair beside the window with the West Side view, trying to convince her not to give up on me, to keep her from "taking some time off" from us. What in the world possessed me - sometimes a fatalist, but never a clairvoyant - to say what I said to Kyra on the phone that night, in protest?

"None of us knows if we're going to be here tomorrow."

It is still incredibly weird to me that I said that, on that night, and I'm not certain anyone else would believe it if I told them. But it's true. September 10th.

Well over five years have now passed since I was regularly practicing with a local soccer club on the rooftop field at Pier 40, the towers lit up and beautiful just down the Hudson on those chilly spring evenings. And it is five years and a couple months since I would finish work in Newark, take the PATH into the WTC, and amble out to Battery Park City. There I would soak in the late summer, late afternoon riverside vibe; park-goers, sailboats, water-taxis plying back and forth, the haze over New Jersey. Eventually, invariably I'd fade into sleep for a while, the whir of the city all around me. A little later some fellow Metro fans would show, and we'd start a clumpy post-work game.

My father has told me about when he was working down around the city in the early 70's. The Towers weren't yet finished, but for some reason he and a colleague were inside one of the buildings, and decided to go for a little trip as far up as they could. When the elevator doors opened, they were on an unfinished floor, minus the windows and thus mighty breezy. They got out of there quick. I get dizzy just thinking about it.

Today it is five years and one day since I finally put a plan into motion - my half-baked plan to make a few bucks on the side teaching English, and in doing so, preserve my sanity. This, after all, was what I had come to NYC to do, what I did do for a little while; qualifications aside, I was always more apt in the classroom than the cubicle. With a stack of flyers fresh and hot off the printer and the idea of covering Washington Street, I went into that Hoboken evening on my mission. Now we know that this was the last night of an age. Let history note that it was oppressively hot, humid, with glowering black clouds rolling in; my flyers, my packing tape and I made it about halfway before the skies absolutely opened up.

Damning the expanse between bus stops, I sprinted to the dim end of Washington Street, and waffled on tacking one last flyer up inside the bus shelter, lest New Jersey Transit hunt me down for desecrating their property. I got home soaked to the skin, only to have that pleading, forlorn Monday night conversation, which I finally lost. And I never, ever got a call about English lessons.




It was outrageously beautiful out, five years ago this morning. I saw many glorious morning, afternoon, and night scenes, in the course of living a year and a half just a mile from the city, with that broad, all-encompassing Hudson view which I loved. But this one was remarkably so, so much that I really was dazzled by the bright, clear yellow band of sunlight on the river, despite being so late. I had woken up late and was rushing; the last regular bus to Hoboken went by at 9:15. A few minutes after nine I hurried down to the street, without breakfast, without having turned on the TV. At the bus stop a block up, a few people were pointing downtown, across the river. That's when I saw the tower smoking, and a reddish-blackish puff come out of the side.

Perhaps it's only this way in retrospect, but today, the most amazing, amusing, befuddling thing to me, is that I still tried to go to work. Of course, neither I nor anyone else there knew what the hell was going on; I thought a fire, perhaps a bomb (it is thirteen years, one hundred and ninety-seven days since I was home sick from school, and the show I was watching suddenly cut out when a bomb went off in the North Tower). It was, as everyone has said a million times, surreal. Someone at the bus stop said they had seen the plane hit. Not a little private plane, a jet. A moment later someone came along, and told us they just showed a second plane hit on television. And yet I got on the bus to Hoboken. That amazes me now.

It was a slow, increasingly anxious bus ride down to Hoboken; some kid had a radio and was relaying news: fire and smoke at the Pentagon, planes missing all over the place. When I went down into Hoboken PATH station, both towers were smoking horrendously, almost right above us. I got on a train to Newark - again, I don't know what I was doing - and sat there for a while. People who had been in the towers were getting on now: "They didn't evacuate us, so I evacuated myself." Girls who looked younger than me talked about seeing people jump. Shock.

When we came out from underground near Jersey City, there was nothing but that enormous gray cloud behind us. Someone said the towers had both collapsed. Others, including myself, refused to believe it. That was just the smoke, drifting around to obscure the view. They may be burning, but they couldn't actually go down.

In JC everything - the trains, the station - was in the process of shutting down, and so it was chaos. Thousands of people wandering the streets around Journal Square, without any idea where they were or how they would get home. Bits of dust and paper falling like snow. If I hadn't happened on a bus taking people on its way back to the depot, which lay a few towns up from mine, it would have been a much longer and more arduous day than it was.

I got home around noon, watched the news, finally got through to my family, and steadily ignored my flatmate's phone calling, knowing it had to be his family in Brazil. He worked for the stock exchange after all, splitting time between Brooklyn and Wall Street, and while I was relatively sure he was fine, I didn't want to say. His odyssey home wasn't untypical - he straggled in, having walked from the financial district to Brooklyn and back to the midtown ferries, sometime after nine that night. And he left that job, and the city, little more than a month later, even before I did.

Kiki was the first to call me that day, to make sure I was safe and sound.

And that is my 9/11 story, which I don't really think about too much anymore, outside of...yearly anniversaries like this. There's a bit more, but I've already written a ton, without saying anything terribly profound. While it's amazing to think that I was there, as I sit here in rural Ohio listening to people talk about that morning five years ago today, I find it harder and harder, more and more of a reach to put my own claim in; "I was there." I'm so far away in space and time now; in the end I was very lucky to not lose anyone directly, though a few friends of friends lost their lives in the attack. The feeling is less "witness to history" than "bystander to history." But maybe I diminish it a little. I don't know.

I left that job a couple months later, that place on New Year's Eve 2001. I've been back to the city plenty of times, but I've never been to see the hole in the ground, and I don't imagine I will before something new is in its place.

It's five years and six days since I last was in the WTC, doing the long WTC PATH-NYC subway transfer on my way from Newark to 137th Street for classes, and I remember every last bit of it.




Like Ryan Adams, I still love you, New York. But I'm hard put to say if I could ever go back there to live.

Who listens to NPR?

Only this little fella. And a consistent one he is, dropping by my window most late afternoons recently, right around the time All Things Considered is streaming. Now, he's not like the others who go right to the feeder tacked up on the glass (though he's seen there as well). Rather, he perches on the sill and stares out at...whatever little birds stare at. Good worming spots in the grass? And then he turns towards the screen and peers inside for minutes and minutes at a time. Clearly he's captivated by something. Me. MEE-chelle Norris. Something.









Kiki, I think, would have another adjective to describe him. One rhyming with "burdie."

What is it with people I know making anonymous potshots over the blogs? And being nasty towards a person they don't even know, at that.

Please, please, for the love of God, please stop it. You're not doing anything for me, regardless of your intentions, and you're bothering someone I love. Even more so by hiding who you are. I don't particularly want to know who or why. Just, stop. Thanks.

Summer ends only once officially, a few weeks from now. But by my reckoning The Summer Here straggles to an end, bit by bit: the last sweltering night I spend laying in bed and hearing people monkey around in the pool of the student complex next door (I know my neighbors and their friends play a game called "chairball" during the day, but decline to speculate on the pool games they play at 3:45 in the morning, or to go find out); the sudden accretion of Cuyahoga County-plated SUVs, fresh young faces and jort-sporting parent types around town, inversely proportionate to the amount of street parking available, which signals that university move-in day has arrived; the last bedraggled and broken-down, Suncoast-smacking hurricane to wearily dump its remnants upon us, like so much surplus crops upon a Third World market (we've had only one of these, a little piece of Ernesto wandering over right in time for the football season opener Saturday night.)

Soon it will be autumn, my favorite time of the year. It already feels like it. Goodbye to those lazy, hazy, lazy, crazy, lazy, lazy days of summer. I overdo the "lazy" a little. I haven't really been a sloth, in the sense of sprawling across the futon and staring glassy-eyed at trash television, the shifts of my swollen bulk setting off little puffs of Dorito dust, crinkling burrito wrappers and tumbling fallen soldiers. No, no, happily no. As I wrote the other day, I've done a few decent things with it. But if I haven't yet stopped feeling a little under-accomplished at the end of each night, then it is no surprise that the last notes of this summer pile upon each other to sound a whole chord that is...irresolute. Dissonant.

One problem (among many) of growing up thinking that You'll Be A Writer (and this is fundamental to me, the skeleton key to understanding the strange mixed mind that results - full of bravado, unease, discriminate self-exhibition, love of humanity and the impulse to control it - but how pretentious that sounds if you aren't afflicted, or even if you are) is the mystification of that life, which must lead down a path to that nagging discontent. I used to casually imagine, assure myself of ending up in some (no doubt magical) work-place largely out of time and beyond responsibility; I mean, to live that idealized writing life of quiet regularity, no distractions (i.e. the distraction of living in society, having the concerns of social beings - this didn't really figure in those soft-focus visions), a life of waking early each day to greet the muse, whereby we would copulate vigorously (some image of the creative process!). In other words I worshipped the image of a life that few people, if any, actually live, and one that I'm probably not suited for, at least as currently constituted.

But then those have actually been my living conditions for the past two months. Nowhere to be, much less money to do anything with; I've seen the inside of a bar or two, but that's been old for a while. This summer we have seen that however industrious, I am not really regular (strike one), that I have the attention span of a toddler matched with the aspirations of Faust (fouled off), and that I've got these very, very real concerns - old work to make up, work that's coming, a "career" that's rushing up surely enough, and most of all, Kiki being happy and well. Waking before eleven was a struggle all summer, and so the days flew by (the working people of the world collectively mourn for me). This summer, I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) pacing in and around this place as if it were a boat, thinking about my thinking as it was the sea I was drifting over; I thought about those points out on my horizon, wrote, read, floated a little closer to them, but by eye alone there's no way to gauge just where I've gone, just what work of substance I've done. If any.

I figure I have, but what? That's one thing that's been bugging me, and I think of charting it...finding some bearings.

So here and there I'll try recapping some of the summer stuff I alluded to a few days ago.

June 16-17, 2006: A long 36 hour period, as any that takes you from Connecticut to Newark to Manchester to Hanover would be. Conversations with my mother on the drive down: the funny-were-they-not-so-sad dysfunctions of my extended family; my brothers' jobs and goals (I am not so in touch). Crossing the GWB within view of the NJ apartment I lived in five years ago, she offers an insight so piercing and honest and utterly right about me then (and in the year after, when I left that job, that shocked place, drifted home and more or less shut myself up in the ancestral pile); "you weren't happy then." It's one thing to know it yourself, another to realize your parents knew it too, yet another to have her finally say it so simply. With the implicit "but you are a little more, now," unspoken. And to agree. As I did.

Manchester with four hours to kill. Good taste suppresses any sentimentality over being back in England for the first time in years. Or else circadian arrhythmia does that; no wet-eyed glances at seeing the airport Boots or The Sun again, and certainly no backsliding to M. K. '98, that tortured and searching transatlantic. Once upon a time maybe, but not now; you see it is all the same place, and the pop stars have different names but do all the same things. I just want to keep moving. Momentum, and a succession of moving escalators get me across the airport.

Where I must wait. Baggage belt breakdowns produce stymied Mancunian vacationers and football fans, and that ain't my scene, baby. A proper English vegetarian breakfast; fried veggie sausages, fried little mushrooms, fried "tomatoes", all soaking in deep yellow yolk, brought by an Eastern European girl with that straw-colored hair. Watch the airplanes. I set my laptop up in the stinking smoking section, lanky young janitors puffing and speaking Polish nearby; clamber behind the fruit machines to plug in it and find out about Kiki, only to discover that wi-fi don't come for free here. Should have figured on that. The first time I contend with this pan-European menace, but not the last.

Then, Hanover on Saturday afternoon. Equally unsentimental over this, and it's been even longer since I've been in Germany, where I feel curiously at home. I stayed on a quiet street behind the central train station, in a small hotel run by an exuberantly friendly German. My own Deutsch is six or seven years out of practice at this point, but pride obliges me not just to try and bumble it, but to fake understanding whatever he tells me about the World Cup festivities downtown. I'll find them come hell or high water, later. I can barely mutter "ja" at this point for all my inflight study, but I'm so tapped out I'd be subconversational in English too.

The Bigsoccer YouTube video thread is a little 15 page (and counting) gift to anyone who loves music, especially great old rarities. My most recent contribution to it connects here; after the Ghanaians beat the Czechs I gave in to a mercy nap. Between the channel-clicking and the conking, some cosmic governor of appropriate Germanic weirdness decreed that this should be on my television.



Jet lag + nappy daze + glam roller disco + just how irresistible was Olivia Newton-John (and if you know anything about her in this movie, you'll get the extra delicious irony for me) + I haven't seen this since I was a kid + I can't believe they actually ever made stuff like this in the first place and to think I was alive then, too = truly awesome.

Gene Kelly freaks the shit out of me in that split-screen, though.




And here is where I went to watch the US shoot themselves in both feet against Italy; a patch of dirty grass transformed, Xanadu-like, into a corporatopia of uninspiring German pizza and inspired German beer, cover bands, lingering jubilant Ghanians and utterly defeated-looking Czechs, Germans masquerading as Ghanians, Germans masquerading more successfully as Italians, and the adjoining clatches of blue and red shirts. My wearing the '98 US jersey was about all the jinx we would need. Night fell fully after the match and we tried to forget that our World Cup was pretty over. The house music came on, as it always must in Germany, and there was drunken limboing. Inside I was still cursing the idiocy of Pope and Mastroeni. Everyone I met there was from Minnesota. I don't think they cursed. But they shouted, oh but they shouted, as we were shooed out of the place. I lost them all somewhere on the streets afterwards, before any sort of trouble ensued - the sort of trouble you might find these days, bellowing about the U!S!A! around the Hauptbahnhof after midnight, and I skipped half-getrunkenly the rest of the way back.

I do admire the spirit behind the ad (kind of), but isn't it a bit strange for Johnnie Walker to be giving the symbolic warm hug/rah rah to the Lebanese people? I wonder how it would have gone over if Anheuser-Busch had superimposed two gleaming Bud tall boys on an aerial shot of lower Manhattan, and stuck that on some NYC bus stops around Columbus Day '01.

I won't even get into the fact that quite a large number of Lebanese (but by no means all) would have a slight doctrinal issue with fine Scotch whiskies and things of that sort.

What's "chutzpah" in Arabic?

I had another meandering, inessential thousand word epic half-drafted and I'll get around to finishing it when I feel like it (maybe later, maybe not), but, all there is to say at the moment is...it's been a fucking miserable day/afternoon/evening, the pins stuck in precisely where they needed to be by the people who know where to stick them, and I'm not looking forward to the next one, or the next one, or the next one. Days or pins.