I saw myself as the woman on the sidewalk saw me: a middle aged asshole in jogging clothes, jacket matching shoes. Suddenly I’m a human occupying space and time.

Being on vacation really just means three things: being in a different place, doing different things, and seeing different people. Though you’re also seeing the same people—your family. But seeing them in a different plane and doing different things with them makes them different people. And you too. It’s also about slowing down your brain, even to the point of idiocy. Thinking things like toast is better than a bagel. It has a certain lightness. And things like vacation means three things.

In the Jay Street station I could smell bleach before I started climbing the stairs out. On the landing halfway there was an MTA employee with a bucket and a mop, cleaning something unspeakable. I walked as far around it as I could and emerged in the pitiless light of downtown Brooklyn, trash blowing down the street.

Google Maps told me to cut down a walkway and across a little urban park, a square hidden away from the streets. There were trees and benches and even a few people sitting. It seemed desolate. Lost and anonymous. A public space you’d find in some Second World city. I asked myself if I liked it or hated it. I liked it.

Just like every day I’m sitting here wondering what’s going to happen soon when I fall helplessly into the powerful and vivid psychedelic space of dreams. The only difference between it and dropping acid is that there’s no recovery time. And we’re so used to it. But what sadness or longing or ecstasy will I drift through tonight? Or maybe just a headachy nightmare about work.

When I saw the American cheese on the burger on TV I nodded involuntarily. I don’t know why. Not in affirmation, or agreement. Almost defensively.

 

The planes look slow and lumbering as they take off and land, almost like you could catch up to them by foot, grab hold of the fuselage.

I love the names on the planes. Like Kalitta on the 747s, a familiar-sounding name, I thought maybe just from every other airport I’ve been to in my life. I looked it up and saw it’s Connie Kalitta, drag racer, Beau Bridges in “Heart Like a Wheel.”

TROOPS

I understand, am understanding, do understand.

I lay face down on the floatie, wondering what side of the pool I was bumping against. My mind drifted toward sleep. I considered Kim Jong-un. Was it his uncle he had killed? The ashen-faced man in his military garb, being escorted from a party meeting and to his death. The image I conjured of the supreme leader was of him greedily inhaling a cigarette on the platform where his official train had stopped somewhere on the way to somewhere else. He’d had a personal attendant light it of course. His sister maybe? Keep ‘em coming and he might not turn on you.