Saturday, November 12, 2022

On the terrace the black birds descend on plates of leftover food moments after diners get up, their brittle feet clambering over forks and plates like nothing, their beaks stabbing at breakfast sausage and crusts of French toast. You can shoo them away but they come back immediately. They hide in the bushes and wait for people to leave, the waitress tells me.

Friday, November 11, 2022

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

Thursday, November 10, 2022

The waiting area by the gate, one flatscreen showing a storm surge lashing Florida’s coast, another showing golf, white men hunched in a green expanse, the tedious unchanging leaderboard displayed. Plus. Minus. Even. The bar and grill across the way is closed but already at this early hour you can glimpse a server behind the screen of idle taps, getting things ready for the coming onslaught of anxious, booze-mad fliers. The agent at the gate informs us that boarding will begin at five forty-six, one minute past schedule.

Man he really is concentrating on that putt. 


Last call for San Francisco from the neighboring gate. The others in our seating area are utterly unremarkable. No defining features, mannerisms. No intriguing conversation. A terrible torpor has set in; they barely reach their hands up to their faces. They’ve been reduced to this: travelers. When they get back to where they come from they’ll reinhabit themselves. People with jobs, friends, hobbies. Secrets. Features that define a life. But for the time being they’re in a state of grace: they’re nothing.


In fact the TV screen with golf has been frozen all along.

Monday, September 05, 2022

You wonder whether the wax figures are thinking of you. Resenting you for your mobility, your ability to dart in and out of their personal space, taking endless selfies and family portraits with them as props, objects of reverence or lust or derision. You walk away into the next room of the exhibition and they stand prone as though frozen in time. Maybe there’s something they know that you don’t know. You sense it from their sly smiles and unblinking gaze.

After the pop stars and the Royal fam you get a bit of history: in the Reign of Terror Madame Tussaud was enlisted to make death masks of aristocrats by clutching their freshly severed heads between her knees. I guess someone had to do it. Exit through Star Wars and the gift shop.


Sunday, September 04, 2022

I couldn’t really comprehend it all so I decided to focus on random details: the wording of a billboard, the arrangement of furniture in a living room spied from the top of a bus. It seemed to help.

Thursday, September 01, 2022

At the bus stop at night I was suddenly gripped by the impulse to take a picture of the street sparkling from the rain. It was a humdrum scene—parked cars, kebab shops, delivery guys on bikes. Traffic lights on red. When I first tapped the button it didn’t take. Almost like it wasn’t meant to be. The light turned green, I tried again. It worked.

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

There was a red form through the frosted glass of the loo. It had a human quality, like someone’s head cloaked in the hood of their anorak. It was probably something nothing.

The hot water came out cold and the cold water came out cold.


I noticed all the wines on the pub menu were high in alcohol, fourteen, fourteen and a half. It’s a sure sign of global warming if there ever was one.


There were two aging portly men at a booth talking about how they’re fucked, they don’t know where the money goes, there’s not enough to last. One said, “I ask myself, can it get any worse? And it gets worse.”


The pub beside Trumper’s, full of yuppies drinking after work. A man walked stiffly on his prosthetic legs across the street. I made a point not to stare but of course I did after he’d passed by. Then I thought, he must feel everyone’s eyes on his back too.



Tuesday, August 30, 2022

What I saw through the lens of my phone didn’t resemble what I saw through my eyes. It was duller and flatter of course but also it didn’t seem to feature the charming little village off in the distance to the left. I took a picture anyway and put it down. Now there’s just poles and fields and low forests racing by.


Writing is exploring undiscovered territory. The text prediction on the smart device is a tool like a helmet lamp in a cave. It sees everything a moment before you do but it doesn’t care.


It must be said it offered me the word “care” a bit reluctantly there.


A road with a new black surface and bright white stripes darting from below the tracks into the woods.

Gravel piles, always gravel piles.

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

And the French have businesses with names like Crea Concept, the stenciled name reaching from the darkened picture window into your addled brain. What do they think they’re doing to a people at night tossed on red wine with a word like that. Concept.

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

TROOPS

Poe squinted, his small eyes peering out beneath thick eyebrows.

Saturday, June 04, 2022

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.


Friday, June 03, 2022

I awoke gradually, hearing the radio play dimly over the air conditioner. Some tune or other and then a voice intoned: What is jazz?

I stay in bed through the six-thirty news read by Gary, or Bob, can’t remember now, one of them’s the DJ and the other does news. When I hear their names fresh out of my dreams they’re obvious and recognizable but in later, lucid hours it’s all a blur somehow.

It ends with the scores and weather. And when a tune starts up again that’s when I rise.


Tuesday, May 31, 2022

The artificial intelligence took us through unfamiliar streets, the types where bashed-up cars are parked and weeds grow through the sidewalks. “In one thousand feet, turn right,” she says, and we obey.

At a stop light I observed a used car lot. CROWN FORD PRE-OWNED, it said, and all the letters were immaculate blue and white, the logo we all know below. I marveled at the correctness of it all, the font, the kearning. The folks at headquarters must be hands-on. But then as I rolled away I noticed the entire block of text was off-center on the concrete facade. Not by much. Only by an inch or two. But enough.

On the Belt Parkway we watched as the planes came in. There’s always one that surprises you, that appears right out of the trees and blots out the sun.

At the party she didn’t speak to us except to say excuse me. But at least we stayed until after she left.


Monday, May 23, 2022

At halftime I ate the pizza like a, what? Animal. Sure. But what? Like a dog, maybe. Like a rat. Then it occurred to me the reason that rat with the pizza video went viral is because deep down inside we’re all the rat. Snaring a cold slice and running away furtively, desperate to make it descend our throats before someone or something intervenes to tell us: No, you can’t have that.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

I walked up the ramp to leave the 4th Street station, lost in my earbuds, Winterland 1974. A man waved to me frantically, imploringly. I scrutinized him and tried to assess the situation. He seemed stuck in the turnstile somehow, straddling one of the tripod arms in mid-rotation. Did he need my help? In a flash I decided not. But of course that assessment was self-serving. I didn’t want to approach this wide-eyed stranger and disentangle him from the teeth of this machine. If that’s even what he wanted. I thought in fact he wanted something else. The mechanism seemed to be turning a bit. And even if it wasn’t, it was absurd to think he couldn’t clamber over it, or under. Yet he still appealed to me fiercely, arm outstretched. I turned away to exit one of the other gates a little farther down. I looked over my shoulder. He was still there and seemed to be watching me. If he does get free then surely he’ll run up behind and clobber me in the skull, I thought. Kill me. Surely he’ll kill me. What else could he possibly want? Before I reached the stairs to the street I turned around again. I didn’t see him anywhere.


Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.


Monday, May 16, 2022

The radio said there’d be violent storms, a tornado even. Watch out for flying branches. But instead it was beautiful, just a little cloudy. It got weirdly bright and silvery midafternoon and then big, fat drops of rain fell straight down like they were dripping from a sieve.

When you’re watching your team it doesn’t matter how good they are, they seem plagued to you, forever vulnerable, unlucky. Because you see yourself in them maybe. I was so sure they’d lose the penalty shootout I braced myself. Clenched my stomach against the inevitable sorrow. Then they had a chance to win, and missed. Now for sure it’s all over. How can it not be over? But they won.


Friday, May 13, 2022

In my slight abbreviation. Sorry, my slight inebriation tonight I remembered that S. said she wanted to watch a documentary about a famous comedian. I know his last name: Carlin. I’m pretty sure it’s Carlin. A very famous, legendary comedian. But I cannot now, and haven’t for some hours, been able to remember his first name. Bob? Joe. Jim?

Bill Carlin. Is it Bill? I’m pretty sure it’s Bill. It’s not Jeff, it’s not Tom. For sure not Tom.


We’re not even going to talk about Adam or Andy or anything like that. It’s a one-syllable name for sure. Of that I am sure. In fact there are very few male names that are not, or can’t be reduced to, a single syllable. Think about it.


It’s not Mike. It’s not Dave.


Bill. Bill Carlin?


Thursday, May 12, 2022

A strange, quiet evening when dinner’s too early because Jackie was at the dentist and they brought back Shake Shack. Now golden sunlight streams across the space and birds are chirping and there’s nothing to do, not even a kid to put to bed.

On my morning run I thought of writing a play about the tragedy. Why not after all? As I turned around at the end of the park I thought of a cutely poignant little ending. Then I thought no. Now I’m not sure.

Sunday before last we had dinner in a covid enclosure on the street, a neighborhood Italian on Sixth Ave. We took our time, had dessert. Everyone so nice and friendly. I observed a shadowy figure pacing a living room on the second floor above the restaurant. A drizzle began to fall but not on us.

On our way back we passed another restaurant. Their street tables were bustling. The food looked good. We thought we’d like to try it sometime. Just past its perimeter, where cars again occupied the parking spots, there was something strange. You could feel it before you saw it. A nice SUV parked beneath a tree, dotted with fresh rain. The windshield was smashed in by a pipefitter’s wrench that remained nestled in the breach, radiating a web of cracks across the glass. It seemed staged, theatrical. Like there was a hidden camera capturing our reactions. A performance art installation, maybe. The wrench was just too perfect. Weighty, industrial. Everything else was just so pretty. The dusting of pink blossoms on the cars and street. The lamplit walls and stoops. We scrutinized the wrench for a minute. Peered at the front seat of the car, apparently unaffected. We thought of taking pictures but we didn’t.


Wednesday, May 11, 2022

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.


In the supermarket after the game. There’s no such thing as pretzel rods anymore. Ever since the pandemic. You can buy a bag of black truffle sea salt potato chips but no pretzel rods. I dropped a couple things trying to carry them away from the checkout counter and the guy ahead of me apologized profusely like it was him who knocked them out of my arms. Then the cashier offered me a bag and didn’t make me pay.

It was a quiet time at the bar. Just a few of us out back, a few inside. A man with long white hair and a goatee sat at the table in the corner of the yard, smoking a cigar that never seemed to get small. Not paying attention to the game. But there just the same.


Tuesday, May 10, 2022

The outside TV was way ahead of the inside TV. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds. Just crazy. There’d be a chance, we out there would cheer and groan, and like clockwork our exclamations were echoed half a minute into the future.

Perhaps for this reason people gravitated out. Some heavy hitters, shouters. They drew others out by their gravity. There was nowhere much to sit. I had my place at the picnic table, Andy opposite. Others were sitting all around us now, some crouching on the gravel. The mood was antic. Adam and Paul talking about the Irish in Liverpool like there’s no fucking game on, come on.

Then the equalizer. A deflection into the corner of the net. Howls of glee like the game was won, not tied. The scoreline didn’t change but neither did this undue jubilation. Buckets of icy cold Carlsberg appeared, like something someone ordered for a shitty party and left behind. I drank one, or almost one. Saleem from Lebanon sat down beside me and told me what it meant to him to be a fan. He couldn’t say exactly why it was important, he just knew that it was. He spoke around it, elliptically. I will remember this moment right now for the rest of my life, he declared. It’s a way of marking life. Punctuating. Of better remembering what’s not the game. There was a bombing near where he grew up on the day of the Champions League final and as soon as it was established that his mother was alive the TV went on. He keeps a football journal now, he said.


Thursday, April 28, 2022

The owner of the bar came out back to turn up the TV volume after I’d already turned it up partway. I was sitting back on the table bench. He said something to me, gesturing.


“What?” I said.


He said it again, a little different.


“What?”


He said it again. I made out a couple words. “Up.” “Top.”


“What?” I said again like a total jackass moron.


“Didja turn it all the way up to the top?”


No I had not. So he did, and the volume was now loud and clear, reaching out across the graveled back patio and reverberating gently off the tin walls. There were some ads before the game began.


I thanked him and he made a joke and I thanked him again and he went inside.


Saturday, April 16, 2022

Houses glimpsed from the highway through the trees.

Thursday, April 07, 2022

I had something to write about yesterday, something to do with the weather. About how people went out and went to work in it, in spite of it. Something about they shuddered at the forbidding cold and rain, except it wasn’t that. I tried to remember and forgot.


Tuesday, March 29, 2022

I started the stopwatch on my phone for something over the weekend—timing the length of a work presentation. When I opened the clock today for something else I was startled to find it still running, 39 hours 26 minutes and something something seconds, tenths and hundredths flashing by. It was eerie to observe the stupid machine going on like this, devoid of human attention and oblivious to it, too. It could run for a million hours, it doesn’t care. A hundred million hours. Long after life on earth has been eclipsed and our sun has collapsed into a singularity the machine will be counting the hours. Long after time does not exist, the machine will be counting the hours.


Saturday, March 26, 2022

I peered up at the sky from the sidewalk table on Fifth. The white expanse was screened by leafless branches, budding in the early spring. I remembered lying on the couch with an ear infection circa 1975. The pain shot through my skull. I tried to kill time by tracing sinuous lines around the bare branches in the picture window; they were a maze, a problem to be solved. I saw a Facebook post of a newspaper photo from 1976 of seven or eight kids from my high school, musicians. Due to the composition those in the front row had to kneel, hands behind their backs. Their posture was deeply familiar to me, triggering a peculiar emotion. It occurred to me this is how terrorists present their captives to video cameras before beheading them.


Tuesday, March 01, 2022

Day 8

While up in the parasail I observed to Jackie that it almost looked like you could see the curvature of the earth. It was a dumb remark but we were up high, higher than I’d noticed on previous rides. We approached a tiny island with a boat moored nearby. There was no one on its patch of beach. In the distance were the curving white shapes of resorts, Sandals, Hedonism II. I was aghast at how easy it might be to unhook myself from the harness. Or maybe it wasn’t easy. Perhaps safety features were in place, an autolocking mechanism. I didn’t try to find out. It was better to look down.

Day 7

I must have lost consciousness for twenty seconds or so on that floatie. I found myself on the other side of the roped-off area. In the neighboring zone, with its different swimmers and different beach. I propelled myself back with my hands. The sky looked the same.

In a land far away they’re lining up for rifles to shoot at the rampaging invaders from the East.


They’re playing The Song now, I’ve heard it twice. Everything goes to hell eventually.


Thursday, February 24, 2022

Day 6

There was a dragonfly in the pool, up against the wall. We weren’t sure it was alive. I scooped it out a bit carelessly and now it lay in the spilled water at poolside, wings tangled and bent. But it moved. Three of its four wings were stuck together on one side. I figured fixing this was essential to the thing’s flight and so to its survival. I was able to pry them apart painstakingly, like layers of wet tissue paper. They were separate now but still heavy with water. The bug moved and even flinched its wings but seemed stunned, uncertain.

We automatically ascribe human qualities to animals of course, especially qualities of thought. It seemed certain to me that this creature was narratizing its ordeal to itself as we might: Fuck. How the fuck am I wet? How am I going to fly now? Am I dying? Is this it?


The thing suddenly hopped an inch or two and took flight. Right back into the pool. I took it out again and placed back it on the tile. Its wings were fucked up again but even worse. They were rolled up and bent, rolled up pin-shaped, bent like rabbit ears. I went and tore off a corner of my bookmark and used it to try to work them back into shape. They were impossibly delicate—I couldn’t believe they didn’t tear. From time to time its legs moved. Not dead yet. It kind of worked but the wings were still crumpled and misshapen.


Now I wondered if that was my fault. I’d swooped in pretending to be a savior, my daughter watching. Yes, I’d be the miracle man who’d restore flight to a doomed and stricken insect—its insignificance didn’t matter; in fact it made the endeavor all the more poignant.


There was something else my new friend might be saying: Fuck this asshole! What the fuck does he think he’s doing? Does he think he’s fucking helping me? Keep your fingers off me, fuckface. I’m trying to take care of myself here. To dry off a goddamn minute and fly. Away from you.


Yes, I was certain my interference had done more harm than good. Other than removing it from the pool, I should have left it alone. This is an evolved bug. Its wings can right themselves. It knows how to get back on its feet and in the air. It’s such human vanity to imagine we’re helping. To think our petty meddling actions are essential all the goddamn time. 


I swam away for a minute, disconsolate. When I looked again the thing was on its back, legs wriggling. I turned it over. Still seemed fucked up. But alive. I gave up now. It was never going to fly with those fucked wings a thoughtless human being had manipulated. Again I swam away, thinking fuck it.


But then I did come round to have a final look. It was gone.

Day 5

Back on the beach again, It’s Five O’clock Somewhere and Cheeseburgers in Paradise. It’s interesting that I haven’t yet heard The Song played a single time. And the volume seems to have gone down. Might there have been some sort of emergency arbitration between Margaritaville and the nearby businesses that resulted in a series of edicts? 

Out beyond the buoys Captain Moses’ One Love bobs softly with the Giant Bubba in tow, awaiting a clutch of drunken, sunburned tourists to rake across the waves.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.


It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Monday, February 21, 2022

Day 3

I should avoid all news while here, let it be an intriguing, unpleasant surprise upon our return, the aftermath of a brutal invasion depicted on the array of CNN screens at JFK immigration. But instead I’ve been compulsively checking the Times and the Post.


We went to the mini mart this morning and there were stacks of Red Stripe cases, so now there will be two eras of this vacation: the bottle and the can.


An older guy on the beach came up to me pulling a baggie out of his pocket. What do you need mon, that rap, and I said yeah but I don’t want to spend much, what can I get for ten. He wanted to sell me two for thirty, two for twenty-five. I said twenty, he said fine. A light rain began to fall and he led me to a covered space nearby. He ground a bud into a paper and made small talk, where you from, who you with. At the mention of the word wife he said it’ll make you real hard mon and I said you don’t need to tell me that and he laughed but what I really meant was, you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t have to sell this shit. It’s fucking marijuana. It sells itself.


I rejoined my family buying trinkets from a woman displaying her wares from a scarf in the sand.



Sunday, February 20, 2022

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.


Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.


I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 


I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

Saturday, February 19, 2022

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.


I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.


At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.


I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.


Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 


I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.

Friday, January 21, 2022

They’re in India in the book I’m reading, the color and chaos. I distracted myself thinking about Indian food, a forkful of rice and curry. How many grains sit uneasily upon the tines? Eighty? A hundred? How many grains are produced for human consumption each year? No, how many have ever been produced, to date in the history of agriculture? To be devoured by rich and poor alike across the globe. It’s in the trillions, right? Hundreds of trillions? Or is that number woefully, naively low? Is it some other order of magnitude? I imagined being punished if I got the answer wrong. All mankind punished because of me.

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

I awoke haunted by a dream I couldn’t remember. It was too abstract, or it was about something most dreams are not about. But I know it’s there.

The water main break a block away has diverted traffic and caused a jam all down the street. Honks and shouts rang out all day and into the night.