summer

It’s so hot so we turn on the air conditioner
always wanting the opposite of what we have:
artificial warmth in the wintertime
and the nonstop rush of cold air in the summer
never happy, except in the fleeting in-between times of the fall,
and the spring.
and even then, planning ahead, saving for the inevitable electricity bills
wondering if winter or summer will come early
praying for the comfort of a fair temperature, of a temperature that won’t hurt you,
won’t leave you suffering, but instead will be gentle with you,
kind and gentle, and respective of your wishes.
meanwhile, summer is an abusive lover that we beg for when it’s away
and curse it when it comes, so hot and violent
so punishing and smothering
so thick and dangerous.
we say we love spring but we long for summer,
always long for summer.

After the rally

Leonard Johnson walked across America once. He’s 80 years old, but looks more like 60, maybe 55 on a good day. He’s leaning forward on the bench in his hand-drawn Obama t-shirt that says “Da Man” above a pretty spot-on depiction of the president. Leonard’s from Cleveland but says he loves Philadelphia more than he ever loved his hometown. Says there’s an energy here, a feeling. Says he used to sleep on the street in Old City and sell his paintings for money. This wasn’t long ago, maybe ten years ago. A 70-year-old man, sleeping on the street. About to walk across America. Probably in better shape than I’ll ever be. He shows us pictures of his paintings on his iPhone, tells us of the one that had to get approved by Bill Clinton to hang in a federal courthouse. It’s a watercolor of an important-looking man that I’ve already forgotten the name of, but the painting is good, great even; the eyes are alive, the make-it-or-break-it characteristic of portraits. He shows us a painting of his late wife and she looks real, as if you could feel her through the tiny screen, her smile is warm and convincing and lovely and Leonard pauses briefly and in silence, as if he’s seeing her again for the first time. Now we are looking at an image of Leonard, five years ago during his walk across America, wearing a fanny pack and a baseball hat and standing in what appears to be the middle of the desert. “This is during my walk,” he says and then flips to the next photo. So nonchalantly, as if it were just a picture of him standing in his front yard, not walking across this vast country at an age where most people have trouble walking to the corner store. Which was his point: he did the walk to prove to himself that he could, because he had gone to a childhood reunion where he discovered that nearly all his childhood friends had passed away. He felt there was something different about him, maybe he had taken care of himself better, had better genes. Whatever the reason, he wanted to celebrate this victory, cherish the life he still had, make something of himself before he left Planet Earth.

As humans we seem to have this need to make something of ourselves, as if just merely living in itself were not a feat. As if getting up and facing the myriad challenges of day-to-day-life were an easy task, as if loving and creating and working and feeding yourself and managing your money and raising a family were not enough, that your life would have been pointless had you not taken the extra effort to do something that really made you stand out from everyone else. We all have an inferiority complex with ourselves, have the feeling we have to do more and more and more or is it just me? Pushing ourselves to take the road less traveled so that eventually we can say we did when other people are around, and feel good. And we will know we did something with our lives because it was hard, and it will be the struggle that we talk about later, because the history of human beings is overcoming adversity, which we need to do to find meaning in our lives, to measure ourselves by the amount we suffered for what we now have.

Leonard got up at 4:30 AM this morning to bike to Germantown to get in line to see President Obama. He didn’t have to; we got there at 1:30 PM, and took the train. He didn’t have to do it the hard way, but he did. Said he wouldn’t have felt as good about it if he hadn’t.

I knew what he meant.

abandoned

This is a place that once was and never will be again, where people once screamed and laughed and cried and ate, and made love in perfumed shadows, played with fire, looked out windows, daydreamed, sighed, wiped sweat off their foreheads with the back of their hands, whistled softly to no one in particular. Where windows used to not be broken and floors were covered in brightly covered carpets that yielded easily to the touch of bare feet. Where rust was a paint color and walls knew their role and didn’t collapse into heaps of fragmented debris. What is it about abandoned houses that is so fascinating? The abandoned house in Ohio, abandoned but far from empty, filled, in fact, with piles and piles of junk: books, dolls, kitchen appliances, old posters, water everywhere, glass everywhere. we found a diary. it was a woman writing about her daily food intake. in her final entry she was worried about herself and going to the doctor. this was real life, how it ends. the things you can’t take with you.

there are ghosts in these houses, but not the ghosts we imagine in our minds: floating, emotionless white apparitions. her diary was a ghost, a piece of her that stayed alive in that house, that haunted everyone who read it. it wasn’t that it was particularly scary or sad. it was that it became those things because it wasn’t.

state college

There is a woman who roams the streets of North Philadelphia, her face engraved with lines like a bisection of a tree trunk; every line is a story of a time in her life, a time that I’ll never know. This woman has perhaps gone out for a carton of milk for her grandson and, inevitably, a cop car will pull up alongside her and slowly roll down a window. “What are you doing out here, ma’am? You don’t belong out here.” He acts concerned for her safety, but really he is trying to determine whether she is among those white people who come up here for drugs at the pickup spot two blocks away. In all likelihood this cop will determine that she is not, in fact, one of those people; that she really is just picking up a carton of milk for her grandson, and she will be released to walk quickly back to her apartment staring straight ahead, because you don’t show fear in North Philadelphia, even though this woman is afraid, oh yes, she is afraid.

At the top of the rolling hill overlooking the lush greenery of State College, PA, there is a jail and today we are not allowed in it. I’m banished because of the wire in my bra and her name didn’t make the list when her son got moved from another jail in Philly. My parents — “Now didn’t I tell you you wouldn’t get in?” — are in the waiting room and I’m here for at least two hours, on the hillside of a state penetentiary with nothing to look at but green green grass and the eerie metallic glint of barbed wire. So we are sitting on the curb, this woman and I. She tells me of her life in Puerto Rico and Ridgewood, Queens, but mostly we talk about jail. Her son, who was roped into grand larceny via the seduction of an overprivileged senator’s daughter. It sounds glamorous in a way, but this end result — this jail on the hillside — it isn’t glamorous. As we talk a jail patrol car passes us, back and forth. An officer stares at us with steely eyes. “We ain’t doin’ nothing wrong,” the woman says as he passes. “We just sitting out here on the curb.”

We sit and stare but mostly she talks. She tells me stories of slit throats, of jail fights, of hotdogs cooked so long they explode when you try to eat them. She tells me drugs are passed through corrupt guards, through staff, through any way you could imagine. We talk of tests that can tell if you have drugs shoved up in your rectum, of how you should never wire money to anyone if an inmate asks you to. We question what happens when they get out. We talk of gangs, of murder, of robbery. We talk of poverty, of job loss, of broken lives and shattered dreams. I try to imagine this woman as a happy newlywed in New York City — I can hear the accent but I just can’t find a face behind all the wrinkles. This is a woman to whom moisturizer and drinking lots of water could never be a solution. Too much life is the problem. Like the president who ages decades after serving a year in office, this woman has been aged centuries, milleniums, from what she has seen, from what she has known.

I haven’t seen half the things this woman has seen, and I certainly don’t want to. But we have seen the same view from this hillside, from the outside of the jail and from the inside. We have seen the way the men look at you when you enter the room and we both know you don’t look back. We have seen a life full of options become a life with only one goal: survival. We have seen the way it looks when the light in someone’s eyes goes out, when they become the walking dead. We both know all you can do now is pray for resurrection. My parents return; they had a good visit. They’re smiling. I tell her, “It was nice to meet you. Take care.” “You too, honey,” she says. “You too.” We drive past her as we leave. Her car door is cracked open; she’s smoking a cigarette. She stares straight ahead.

bums.

When I first arrived in New York I was given the strict instructions that if I saw a man who looked like he was asleep or dead on the subway platform or in a car, I was not to touch him or get anywhere near him. “He may be dead, but that is not your problem,” Renee said, leaning toward me — I could smell the hairspray on her dark, curly hair, it smelled expensive, it smelled like lust, it smelled like rooftop bars and overpriced cocktails — “and if you stick around to find out, you might get hurt, too.” In Renee’s world basically everyone she didn’t personally know in New York was an enemy, and so they were not to be trusted. She had the worldy air of someone who has lived in big cities all her life — the air i so desperately wanted to exude at 22 fresh out of college and I believed her, believed her words, witnessed the bums she cautioned me about hunched over thousands of plastic bags filled with cans, smelling of piss and hard times, how if you were anywhere near them you’d have to cover your mouth with a scarf to breathe and even then the urine smell would still creep through and linger long after you exited the subway.

yesterday i saw a man lying on his side on top of a street grate, his entire body exposed to the elements: the light mist that was falling, traffic exhaust. his hands were outstretched so that his fingers just barely grazed the fire hydrant and I stood not 1 foot away from him, waiting for the light to turn green. i thought about renee’s words and i didn’t say anything. i told myself he seemed to be breathing. i felt glad he had at least found a warm grate on this chilly april afternoon. when the light turned green, i practically sprinted across the street.

i don’t know how i feel about bums. they ask me for money: sometimes they are nice, sometimes they yell. sometimes they say nothing, just sit with a can beside them or a homemade sign that they wordlessly hold up to passers-by. sometimes they wear nice shoes, which makes me wonder. sometimes they are filthy. sometimes they roll down the street on a wheelchair, singing songs and making moderately offensive comments through a microphone that is attached to a speaker system that is also somehow attached to this chair (maybe this is only in Philly — for example, this man with the speaker once called out to me when i was crossing Broad Street “Hey honey! You lookin’ good!” This would be unexceptional except for the fact that every other person walking/driving down Broad Street also heard this comment).

Once I gave a girl in New York a dollar because she was sitting on the street with her dog and she looked so sad, I couldn’t help it. Once I gave a dollar to a man who was selling cut, wilted daffodils and he said “That’s all you have?” I like to think these people would help me out, if I ever found myself in a similar situation. I like to think I’d never be in this situation. I like to think I am some kind of Good Samaritan and someday someone will do something nice for me because I did this, like that movie “Pay It Forward” with Kevin Spacey. I like to think that these people probably have family somewhere and maybe that family is wondering what has become of them, who they are with, where they are, if someone loves them.

My dad had a friend who was a severe alcoholic and he died alone in a hospice room before he turned 50. when i drive past the hospice when i’m home, i think about him and i wonder what the last thing was that he looked at, if maybe he made it to the window to get his last glimpse of the world, or if he died in his sleep or watching TV. if it was the latter, i hope he wasn’t watching a reality show. my brother’s friend died three weeks after we saw him at a bob dylan concert, on his front lawn where his friends dropped him off in the small hours of the morning. drugs.

i think a good superpower would be the ability to live your life choose-your-own-adventure style. no, no, this isn’t what i want: let’s go back to page 42 and pick the other decision. let’s start over. this story doesn’t end up where i want it to go.

stew

I guess the last memory of my grandmother, or really the last best memory, because seeing someone on their deathbed should not be considered a good memory and should, in my opinion, be one best forgotten — the last really good memory i had of my grandmother was on a freezing-cold day in January. i had asked her to go out to lunch at a cafe in a renovated firehouse in Carlisle, just down the street from her huge old green house on the corner. towards the end the house smelled a little like pee and a little like dust. it smelled like exhaustion and moth-eaten curtains. it smelled like a house that was no longer a home, just a storage vault full of memories. i picked up my grandmother from the vault and i walked her down the icy street, guiding her by the elbow as she shuffled, step by tiny little cautious step, toward the restaurant. it was a crisp, cold day, the kind of day where you think it might be warm but it isn’t. a deceptive kind of day. we walked to the restaurant and we sat down. at that point my grandmother talked very loudly because she couldn’t really tell how loudly she was talking. i remember she was practically screaming, and wearing these huge sunglasses she always had to wear when she was outside because she had macular degeneration in her eyes. we were quite a sight, my grandmother and i. i remember i ordered the quiche of the day and the waitress came over and said the special was a moroccan stew and my grandmother made me repeat it to her five times and then said, “well, i think i’ll take that.” when i told my dad later she ordered the moroccan stew he chuckled to himself and said, “now why would she order that?” i told him she liked it. she ate every last bit of it. i can’t remember one word of what we talked about and i wish i could, because i remember leaving that day and thinking i would probably never be that wise, or have been through that much, my grandmother, who lived through the Great Depression, who never owned a computer, who did the crossword every damn day of her life, who always gave me bowls of Cool Whip and Klondike bars, who knew the type of every flower just by looking at it, who refused to go to a nursing home and lived alone in a 3-story house until she died at 92, who was once addicted to oxycontin, whose daughter was an extraordinarily talented painter (a trait i, sadly, did not inherit), who once had red hair the color of a fading sunset, whose blue eyes i stare into every morning in the mirror, whose parents were off the boat from sweden; my grandmother, who was 4’8” and asked me if i were getting taller every single time i saw her, who yelled at me if i didn’t visit her, who used to take us to the penny candy store, who had a disgusting rat terrier named penny, who used to let us view old pictures on a slide projecter in the living room, who loved beer and gardening, often together; my grandmother, who, on her deathbed, asked for a preacher and when he was finished said “what now?” she taught me that in life sometimes you do end up alone, that you may not die gracefully and that nothing ever comes to you just by asking for it. but hobbies are good. friends are good. treating yourself to a nice perm every few weeks at the local hair salon: good. and moroccan stew? surprisingly good. i didn’t try it. i’d like to, someday.

asthma

In the waiting room at the asthma doctor there are pictures everywhere of snowy white mountain peaks, shrouded in clouds. probably none of us in this room are ever going to see mountain peaks like these in real life, what with our shitty lung capacities even at normal elevation levels, so it’s nice, i guess, that they are here for us to see, to forget the dreary urban landscape of North Broad Street that lies just beyond the doors to the right.

maybe it’s actually supposed to be cruel, those pictures, like some kind of inside joke the asthma doctors all have a good laugh at when everyone leaves for the day. maybe it’s a challenge. Band of Philadelphia Asthma Sufferers Unite, Climb Mt. Everest; Doctors Shocked, say the headlines. or maybe it’s just the result of a blind order from a corporate art catalog.

at any rate, someone once climbed a mountain and took those pictures, and i bet that asshole didn’t have asthma.

god

“Someday I want to have 18 kids. I want my wife to go 9 months — break 3 months — go 9 months — break 3 months — then I want to have 18 kids so I can start a soccer team.”
“So.. maybe you should date Octomom.”
- conversation i had in the bar with some fucking crazy man

when i was little i used to think that when the clouds parted and a ray of sun broke through them it was God lifting someone who died up from the ground into heaven. i also used to think that the devil lived under my bed and at night i would rock back and forth in my bed and plug my ears so i wouldn’t hear anything, wouldn’t hear the devil underneath, chuckling maniacally beneath the cover of the flaps on my floral comforter. i had never gone to church but i had a healthy fear of hell and i believed rigorously in sunbeams and the stories of old people, believed in the spiritual power of the cross, felt the presence of the lord on ski retreats when we stuffed into sweaty lodge cabins and sang and raised our hands if we wanted to be saved. now i realize i had just wanted to feel the presence of something. even then, even now — as an agnostic, as someone who hasn’t been to church since high school — even now i know how people feel when they say it gives them an escape, an alternate life. i work at cubicles all day long for the lord. i eat healthy for the lord. i say my prayers for the lord. i am nice to people for the lord. to do these things for oneself and oneself only — perhaps it’s selfish? or perhaps we need to know there is someone else watching us, that we aren’t alone, even when we are just sitting idly on the couch eating potato chips, even when we are staring blankly out windows, even then someone is watching us staring, someone cares about our distant blue-gray eyes, someone wants to see what we are really looking at, someone is saying “tell me about how that made you feel,” someone wants to smooth back my hair, touch my cheek.

but: i always thought, in accidents, times of peril, where is god then? although i totaled my car twice in high school, was carried out of my car window on a stretcher and took a ride in an ambulance only to find out there was absolutely not a thing wrong with me. someone told me “god wanted you to live.” i said, “well i guess somebody out there wanted me to live.” i said, “well i guess i better find him.”

ch-ch-check it out

Just wrote a post for Tango Echo on how technology — and Kevin Bacon — are dramatically affecting the way we donate to charity.

pamplona

to be that man who waves the red flag at the bull and sees not fear when it rushes toward him, but opportunity, only vigor and excitement, who misses being gored by mere molecules and laughs in rippling waves that inundate passersby, who takes pleasure in the danger of it all, who only feels alive when he is faced with death, who sees the world not in terms of half-full glasses but as mirrors, that it is not the way you look at life but the way it looks back at you, that nothing is about you at at all; when we look in the mirror we don’t recognize ourselves, i touch my mouth as it moves, is this real?

how would it feel to be that man who faces death armed with little more than a piece of flimsy fabric? i spend the days rubbing my hands together, desperately trying to make a fire.