TROOPS

He slashed again and I was forced to jump onto dry land.

It poured rain this morning and then a venomous, vengeful sun came out all afternoon. Sodden trash along the sidewalk shocked in its rays.

TROOPS

These rumors were all nonsense—definitively false—as established by the medical examiner.

This morning I sat beside a young man on the train. He was asleep, or half asleep, his upper body listing from side to side. Occasionally his head landed on my shoulder. I shrugged it away a couple of times, but thought: he’s just a tired person on the train. Let him touch you. It doesn’t matter. But it was hard not to reject the intrusion into my space. I pushed him away more gently the next time. He never did open his eyes. Then the seat on the other side opened and I slid over. I looked back at the man and he was now slowly waking up.

Did I dream that I saw the tallest man I'd ever seen the other day? Or did it really happen? I honestly can't remember. He seemed to be a foot taller than anyone else I'd seen. I was with someone—Sara?—and I said something about him, but she didn't seem to notice, or didn't hear me.

Today I saw the very tall man on Carmine Street, smiling under an umbrella. He had a neck tattoo and his daughter trailed behind. At least I thought it was him.

And I watched a homeless man walk across the middle of the intersection of Bleecker and LaGuardia, shopping cart in tow. He ambled through heedlessly, with no regard for oncoming traffic or the color of the crossing light. Like: I own the street, motherfucker. I live here. This is my living room. It’s like he was walking from the kitchen to the couch.

It's a library-themed bar but no one here has ever read a book.

It does have its drunk at the corner of the bar though. I ordered from the empty space beside him and as he got up to get out his smokes he said excuse me unnecessarily and a little too loud, the way drinkers do. Never hurts to get a jump on Step 8 I guess. As I took my beer away he seemed to be complaining to the bartender that he wanted merlot; she gave him pinot noir. That's the type of drunk and that's the type of bar.

Everyone’s gotta make it home from the office party. That means people who hooked up and find themselves in weird apartments in Astoria, just unlucky drunks who have to wait for the PATH, the numbers or the alphabet, Uber, Lyft. Everyone’s gotta make their sad way home.

When I stepped onto the platform at South Ferry I smelled that deep underground New York summer subway smell and I knew I was on the right way home.

We stood in wonder at 20-something people singing the lyrics to 30-something tunes. It never goes the other way. Old people don't sing young songs.

I imagined the music of Stereolab, the High Llamas and the Clientele, all mixed up together. What is it about that music? It makes you feel like you're high on drugs.

TROOPS

The Third World becomes a reflecting pool that gives a Western Narcissus back his own pale reflection.

I sometimes lie awake at night wondering what’s the secret. And then I think, it’s obvious: there’s no secret at all. He is just what he is. Dimwitted, narcissistic, oblivious. These are the magic ingredients that somehow add up to revolutionary American success. You can think a lot about that, or a little, and maybe reach the same conclusions.

Still, tonight I thought this: he has absolutely no respect for authority of any kind. This is both what makes him compelling to his base and what makes him toxic and terrifying. He doesn’t care about laws or institutions. About structures of power, checks and balances. Civility. The social contract. God. He completely dismisses it all—is contemptuous, in fact.

What the fuck is going to stop him?

I wondered briefly tonight whether “The Americans” was an allegory for the opioid epidemic. A middle-class family on a suburban street. Everything looks OK. But the parents are absent unpredictably. Sometimes they return home bruised, maybe missing a tooth. They go to great lengths to explain it all away. And when one day their child sees a crack in reality, and confronts them, they turn it into a family secret. Us versus them. You can’t tell anyone. But the child knows: there’s something Mommy and Daddy love more than me.

How many people live in homes where the sound of jet airplanes routinely pierces the silence, interrupting conversation, requiring the brief rewinding of video programming? A lot, I bet. I really noticed them tonight. Flight paths might have been low on account of the rain. But I like it. Imagining all those people up there, on their way—somewhere, or home.

TROOPS

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed.

TROOPS

She grinned. “Do you know what I realize every time I see you? That we're very much alike.”

TROOPS

When Reverend Powell went back downstairs for the whiskey,

TROOPS

marketing possibilities to older men, children, and especially women.

We went to the graveyard today. Jackie running up the hills to peer into the crypts. I was fascinated by the years on the tombstones. People died young in the 1800s. But every now and again there’d be a woman who lived a long, lonely life, into her late nineties, long after her husband, her siblings, even her kids were gone. It was hard to know whether to envy her or them.

A bugler stood up on a hill and played taps for all the fallen soldiers. Then a children’s orchestra played a program of works by composers who were buried on the premises. Their music, wobbly and a little out of time, drifted through the faint drizzle to fall upon the living and the dead.

Good ones borrow; great ones steal.

Memorial Day weekend means the start of something new. Everyone finally emerging from social hibernation to be outside with beers in their fists. I associate the Indy 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix with this feeling, but for no special reason besides that they happen then I guess. It all makes me feel like anything is possible, like there’s a wide open space just around the corner, and then another just around the next. We used to go to the Memorial Day races at Lime Rock when I was a kid. The squawking of the announcer through the PA, periodically drowned by the roaring cars; the smell of burning oil, grass and grill smoke—this represented a liberation from winter, from home, from school. It was almost June after all, and forget it, school’s out in June. You can just count the days.

In fact any time of the year can have the same significance. September when football starts, when there’s new things on TV. Then the birth of Christ if you’re so inclined, or at least of the appearance of light in the darkness. Then the new year, then the thawing of the ground and the new buds on the trees in spring. And you can go on and on about them all. But fuck it, now’s Memorial Day.

Jackie found a rose petal somewhere on our walk back out of the park.

There was a lanky man on the couch at the kids’ birthday party. I noticed him for some reason. No special reason. He sprang up and addressed us: were we involved in the sciences at all? He had an idea for an invention, helium-filled balloons that were only half-filled, so they’d hover in the air, immobile. They didn’t even have to be balloons—they could be objects. Ornaments. He wondered why that didn’t exist yet. I agreed. I was supportive. From time to time he spat out a fragment of the corn chips or Cheetos or whatever it was he’d been eating from the snack table. He’d wipe his mouth momentarily, but not self-consciously, and continue. And what about ketchup packets? Why were they so messy? So inefficient? You tear it open, ketchup gets on your fingers. You squeeze it, squeeze it till you’re sick and tired and still there’s a little bit left. A tiny pocket of wasted ketchup. Multiplied by billions. Consider the wasted food. He had a point. Finally there was a lull and I wished him luck and slipped away.

My F train arrived at 7th Ave on the G side just as a G came in on the F side. No explanation. But people desperately ran out from one train to catch the other, just in case it all meant something.

Everything is settling back into quiet now.

Though these perceptions of cultural history bring us to the