Thursday, June 27, 2002

Yesterday it was the hottest day of the year so far, and the heaviest with humidity. In the middle of the afternoon there was a cloudburst and rain fell in great big drops. Chris opened the back door of the office and went out on the fire escape.

"It's raining but it's still just as hot. Check it out," Chris said. Denis and I stuck our heads out. It was true. It was pouring but the air was still thick and hot. It occurred to me that I had maybe never felt that before.


Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Kevin and I went to the downtown Olympic Park to watch boxing that night. The arena was really an elaborate circus tent built around steel scaffolds and bleacher seats, ready to be taken down and forever disappear. Inside the vibe was edgy and mean – I wondered why and then I realized there were virtually no women at all in the entire place. Starving, I got in line for more of the awful, bland food they were serving at all the events. And beer. 

We watched a succession of semifinal fights graduating up the weight classes: tiny, wiry light flyweights giving way to bantamweights, lightweights, bigger, slower, stronger. We struggled to make sense of what was happening in the ring and sometimes the outcome was obvious and sometimes it was not, and sometimes the judging seemed arbitrary and maybe unfair. Many boxers were from former Soviet Republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. It was hard for American boys like us not to root against them in a "Rocky IV" kind of way. With their unpronounceable polysyllabic names and machinelike demeanor they seemed immediately forbidding, their humanity calloused by years of tortuous nationalistic training.

In the audience men shouted at each other in different tongues. They cursed in Russian, Spanish, English and everyone understood everyone else perfectly well. Several times I thought men might wade furiously through the crowd to grapple with each other. We sat directly behind fans of the British super heavyweight Audley Harrison, a black family – maybe his family – carrying a Union Jack. Evander Holyfield sat at ringside and got up between each bout to greet fans across a partition. He posed grandly for pictures, signed autographs. Kevin went down there with his camera and it was funny to look down and watch him stare dully at Evander and the clamoring throng.


The peeler clattered in the sink. 

Thursday, June 13, 2002

I remember when I was a kid, I would watch sports on TV with a ravenous passion. I didn't much care who was playing. I had teams I liked but it was enough to watch the formal green expanse of any field fill up the shimmering screen and to see things happen on it; balls bouncing, flying; officials at their marks, measuring, assessing; cleated players with uniforms bearing bold, block digits. A numerological world of ineffable mystical representations. Formal chaos.

I once watched, enrapt, an indoor soccer game on the dining room TV of the Colbys' apartment in New York. It was me and Lis and Lenny, the parents had gone out. What delight there was to be visiting this manic, thrilling place; and within it to be safe at a table looking up. Watching the ball careen ferociously around the curved boards, to be cleared or kicked on goal with momentous urgency by this player or that one or the other; the ones in lime green or the ones in orange, it didn't matter, it was happening.

Lenny's mom had left us a pan of brownies with Swiss milk chocolate bars melted on top.


Sunday, June 09, 2002

The little gasp the microwave gives when you turn it on.

Saturday, June 08, 2002

 Off to the discovery of somethin', on a Friday night.

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

I walked from the subway, 1:30 in the morning, and P. C. was up, tip-tapping away at his computer, playing Scrabble online or God knows.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, Campesino."

It had been a longer night than I expected, hustling out of work at six and going to dinner and then going to the one-woman show by my co-worker's sister. It was quite good and funny, she talked about how their dad had a mail-order bride from the Philippines. Later we asked Geoff how much of it was true and he stuck his tongue between his teeth and laughed. 

We all went out drinking after that and talked about seeing celebrities, how they seem small in person, how they disappoint us, how we want to connect with them and how they fill us with rage.

On the way home from the train my mind was preoccupied with a fantasy rant against religion: ALL these doctrines, I thought: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Nazi, Buddhist – all of them, right? – they all distance man from God. All their mechanisms for piety, for, rationalization, for redemption, they can only serve to distance us from God, and what insanity that is! What reckless, awful insanity. Because out of that you get all the strife, the killing, the hatred, the torture. That's what you get when you deny the one truth: everybody knows. Let them know. Let them feel.

Saturday, June 01, 2002

Long after we broke up, she used to send me letters with confetti inside.