Microcosm: Laundry

There are seagulls flying around in Queens.  They hover over the sidewalk between my apartment and the laundromat.  Some lady has taken up five of the large washers, and she is taking her time filling them up and speaking in some other language to her granddaughter.  Sorry, she says, when I ask her if she is using this last empty one.  No one in the laundromat is speaking English: mostly Spanish and and something else that is mysterious to me.  I stuff my pants into a small washer, and I am thinking about what I'm writing, something about GRACE and grace and Texas and the death penalty.  I fill a dryer with wet t-shirts and underwear and socks and I am thinking about a girl.  There are people folding laundry talking in Spanish on their cell phones, and children running around between the carts full of laundry.

I fold my pants and dress shirts and stuff everything into my mesh laundry bag.  Outside piles of gray and white snow have been pushed to the edge of the sidewalk and puddles of slush have gathered at the ends of the driveways and pedestrian ramps and along the curb.  It's cloudy but the sky opens a little above my head.  Someone is moving out of my apartment building.  I hope they leave a bookshelf on the sidwalk that I can carry back up the stairs.

Read This Now

Maybe things got out of hand, what with that one girl nearly bursting into tears and the professor's head pretty much popping right off her shoulders.  I mean, there it was rolling around on the table snapping at people. Her head, I mean.  This girl said something pretty harsh about George Orwell's essay, Shooting an Elephant, but she was nervous and so did not say it particularly well, and then the wheels, or the professor's head, came off, and there was all this tense "discussion" and even some interrogation and several painful moments.  Maybe it elicits such strong feelings because it's just a brilliant essay.

So, all that is to say that today, instead of reading my blog, you should read Shooting and Elephant here.  It's not too long, so go read it, and don't come back until you do.

Also, even better but not available online is Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin.  Pretty much the perfect example of what an essay, or any literature, can be.  It's fantastic and I almost can't describe it without swearing.  So go read it.  Immediately.

When You Have A Little Heartache

Start with coffee.  Coffee gives you a good kick, the way you need right now: a little adrenaline and dopamine.  And, of course, you're addicted, so coffee always makes you feel better anyway.

Don't spend too much time on the internet.  The internet is a big black whole of information, a place of creativity and genius, and sometimes a big sucking void of loneliness.  Nothing you find there will make you happy. 

Build a city out of the coins on you've found on your floor, write letters, draw a picture of your heart, even if it's bruised.  Stack the furniture: bookcases on top of desks, end tables teetering at the top.  Then rearrange it, something completely new.  Put your desk in the kitchen and your bed in the dining room.  Clean up your mess, sweep the floor, wash the dishes.

Make dinner.  An omelette maybe, with vegetables from the stand down the street, and the heavy cast iron skillet from the thrift store.  It's delicious, because you made it.

Read or watch a movie, don't watch much television.  Good books are whole things, works of art.  So are lots of movies.  Television always leaves you hanging.  Characters that seem like friends for a moment, and then leave you unsatisfied, like your empty apartment after a party, where all the guests hardly knew who you were.

Don't spend too much time alone, though.  Spend time with all those people who love you. You can't be whole without your heart, so when that occasional heartbreak comes along you have to hold on to whatever it is that you love and that loves you back.  Maybe the future is nothing like you hoped it might be, maybe you completely misunderstood yourself, maybe you said things you shouldn't have, maybe you can't get a handle on it all.  Forget it.  Go out.  Get real drunk.  Fall in love again and again and again.

Boom

Denny says I should write inspiring, uplifting stuff.  He says it might change my outlook on life.  Ross says that would like him becoming a vegetarian: Not gonna happen.  

Jason says he's in town tonight.  I say that I'm not sure I have a clean towel for him. 

My boss says the closet is a mess.  I think he means for me to clean it up. 

Emily says I look like I've got a positive aura.  I don't usually talk about auras, she says. 

Weather.com says it's going to snow again tomorrow.  I wonder if I should buy some boots. 

I say I feel a little like my life has exploded, but I am kind of enjoying it.  I say this only to myself.  And to you.

Dear Facebook,

This isn't easy to say...but I think it's time for a break.  I'm seeing other people now.  Real people.

You and I, we had our good times.  We'd see each other several times a day.  I'd stare at you for long stretches of time, sometimes hours, scrolling down your home screen, posting pictures, editing my profile.  You would keep me updated about my friends, help me express myself in a way that required very little effort or creativity. 

But recently, this relationship hasn't been working.  I have to confess that I've been flirting with Twitter.  Don't pretend like you didn't notice.  And even though that relationship is going downhill as well, you and I both know it's time.

I've gotten tired of the way you make me feel like I'm neither here nor there.  You tell me things I didn't want to know about my ex-girlfriends, you invite me to events on the other side of the country and encourage me to attend concerts in Philadelphia.  I don't live in Philadelphia! You and I just aren't interested in the same things anymore.  I mean, honestly, I don't give a #%@& about farm animals, mafias, or what kind of breakfast food I am.

Oh, sorry, please don't cry.  This is really about me, not you.  I just need some space, some time to figure out where I am in my life.  You do help me keep in touch with my friends across the country.  I'd have no idea what that guy I met once at a conference in Texas is doing if it weren't for you.  But right now this relationship is distracting me from the rest of my life. 

This isn't goodbye forever. We'll still be friends, maybe in a few weeks or months we'll start seeing each other every now and then.  But, for now, please stop messaging me at work. 

Yeah, I'm Ridiculous Too.

I packed a sweater.  Than I took it out again.  Then I put it back in my bag.


I didn't use the restroom during the entire five hours because I didn't want to bother the girl sitting next to me on the bus. She looked grumpy.


I didn't do any research, I just applied to a few schools because I'd heard of them.  You know, Harvard, Duke, Rice, The New School.  It worked out OK,  I guess.


I didn't kiss her, even though I wanted to.


I changed my pants three times this morning.  I'm still not sure this matches.   


I ate peanut butter and jelly for about five days straight because I hate going to the grocery store.


I broke my glasses in July.  I finally got tired of not being able to read the street signs and replaced them.  In January.  


I teared up a little watching Spiderman 2.

Full

It seems like looking out the window on the top of a double decker bus at the snow covered ground along the highway and the gray trees that blur together in the dark is the perfect time to listen to Bon Iver. I haven't listened to this band in awhile. I love the rugged, strumming and Justin Vernon's soulfull falseto and the way his voice breaks in a way that almost makes you want to cry. It's  incredibly sad music, but it never makes me sad. Maybe because it's moving and true, and what's sad about that?

Earlier today I had this feeling in church that I was right where I'm supposed to be, sitting in s wooden chair in the National Cathedral next to my brother listening to the these crystal voices singing an anthem by William Byrd, something clear and brilliant and ethereal. I don't know what to call it, that feeling. Joy, maybe? It felt like being full, being whole, and like something was breaking my heart a little, like the music of Bon Iver does and that scene at the end of Where the Wild Things Are when all te monsters are crying because the little boy is leaving.

That's what I want from my art, the same thing I want from my religion: something that fills me up and then cracks my heart wide open.

Classes to Ashes, and Dust to Dust

I have a cold and I'm tired because I've been staying up a little too late and all I have in my stomach is a granola bar and a cup of coffee.  I'm sitting in my Wednesday literature class, it's about 10 pm or so and we're nearing the end of class, and I'm staring at the Lu Hsun's essay "This Too Is Life" trying to think of something to say when the professor calls on me.  Why she doesn't call on one of the four or five other people in the classroom who also haven't said a word during the entire class, I don't know.  Why she chooses this essay, which I'm pretty certain even she doesn't completely get, I'm not sure.  But there it is.  "What does 'this too is life' mean'?"

"Eating melons," I say, stupidly.  The essay is not, I should mention, about eating melons.  Not really.  I proceed to make myself sound like an inarticulate idiot and then climb under the table and hide for the next half hour.  At home I seriously question my intelligence.  I wonder if all analysis of literature is really bullshit.  I try to understand what the essay is really about and then imagine explaining it to the professor, proving that I am not completely stupid.

What I came up with is this:  I am not a genius, but I am not dumb, but if I am nervous, tired, and/or unprepared, I sure sound dumb.  The analysis of literature is at least 75% bullshit.  And Lu Husn's essay is about wholeness.  "The man who strips off the branches and the leaves will never get blossoms and fruit." Eating a melon is life, just as dying is life.  They are important not because they are metaphors or because they teach us something about ourselves, but because they are a part of a whole life, and the entire life is meaningful.  They are inextricably bound together: life and death, the transcendent and the mundane.



Earlier on Wednesday I spent a half hour standing in the middle of Union Square with a small ceramic bowl of ashes in my frozen hands, with the Sacred Harp Singers singing A Capella songs behind me, ancient songs that were like rough cut, perfectly designed furniture, rugged and harmonious and attractive.  I and several other members of the St. Lydia's community stood on the stone slabs of the square pressing ashes to the foreheads of those who came forward.  "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

Ash Wednesday is one of the difficult days in the church calendar that confronts you with your death and all the big questions that religion raises.  Death, it reminds us, is part of life.  Like all your limitations and shortcomings and ridiculous fears, it's better to look at death straight on.

While I have hope that this life, and this universe, are larger than what I can take in with my senses, I'm not sure I believe in an afterlife.  Not one that's anything like this life.  My personality, my feelings, my sense of humor, all the things I associate with myself are so bound up with my physical self, my whole body, that I can't conceive that I'll be recognizable to myself or anyone else if there is a life in heaven after this one.  Maybe we all become part of the universe or our souls are joined with God or whatever, but I'm still a little sad about all the things that I'm going to lose.

Those ashes on my forehead make me take all this seriously: my finiteness, my smallness and the shortness of this life.  It reminds me also of the love and community and grace that I need in the face of those facts.  Maybe I need to live my life a little differently, bring a new immediacy to my actions and interactions.  Maybe I need to prepare a little better for class.

Episcorific!

The new issue of Episcorific is out. It's called Journey to Jerusalem. It's a series of meditations on Christ's journey into Jerusalem. It's a good one. Check it out at episcorific.org.

This is the note from the editors that I wrote:



Walking in the street after it has snowed I feel miles away from everyone else. The snow makes that lonely creaking, crunching sound and the cold air seems to stretch out in front of me. It’s just me and my thoughts. Well, me and my thoughts and my gloves and scarf and hat and coat and all the other stuff I now have to carry around with me.

This summer I moved from Texas to New York, and before I had gotten used to riding the subway it was winter. Winter, it turns out, requires preparation. You have to buy things: a coat and scarves and hats and gloves. You have to learn to layer: t-shirt, collared shirt, sweater. You have to master the art of tying your scarf so your neck doesn’t freeze. You have to watch where you step after it snows so your that you don’t slip on the streets, which quickly become muddy, concrete slip-and-slides.

And, if you’re like me, you have to get used to being by yourself. During the first significant snow a friend invited me out to play pool. I don’t have any boots, so I set out in my tennis shoes and wool socks into the blowing snow. I got about twenty yards with the snow soaking into my shoes and soaking my jeans and decided to head home. Maybe I can’t handle the winter, or maybe it’s New York, which can be lonely place, but I’ve spent a lot of time this winter alone with my thoughts.

During this wintry season of Lent we are forced into ourselves. We turn down the lights, stop saying Alleluia so much, make ourselves a little less comfortable by giving up chocolate or television, try to bring some spiritual discipline into our lives. All of this is a method of turning down the noise, getting away from the crowds, so we can journey deeper into our hearts and the heart of God. During Jesus’ ministry,as he traveled toward Jerusalem and eventually Golgatha, he would take the time to be alone, to wrestle with the devil or pray to the Father. The reflections and the art in this issue of Episcorific were born out of each author and artist’s own solitary struggle with Jesus’ journey as captured in the Book of Luke.

Whether you live in Texas or somewhere with a long cold winter, Lent is your muffled, snow covered street. Just you and God. Still, walking out in the street your footprints are not the only ones. There are others who have walked there before you, patting down the snow, providing a path, and footprints traveling beside you on your journey.

Lent

For Lent I am giving up Facebook. I'm giving up Facebook and television and all those hours wasted sifting through other peoples lives pretending that it makes me feel any less isolated. I'm giving up things that make me lonely and I'm giving up the hollow sadness and the nameless, pointless anxiety that makes me crumple like a crushed soda can.

I'm giving up locking myself in my apartment for days on end debating whether to call someone while I look out the window at the concrete and asphalt and brick town homes and the cars covered in snow and people in wool coats whose voices drift up into my open window and thinking, why is it that I haven't talked to anyone in two days and still haven't written a word? I'm giving up feeling ridiculous and guilty about nothing.

I'm embracing my cheesy, joyful side that makes me write semi-inspirational blog posts and doesn't care what you literary types think, because there's too much beauty and love and joy out there not to say something. I'm accepting my fatalistic, angry, brooding side and letting it say whatever it needs to say because this life is confusing as hell and one day we're all going to end up in the dust of death.

So I'm really getting serious about all the things I've been meaning to get serious about. Really. Seriously. Maybe I'll become a vegetarian and start asking people to call me Jeremiah. Maybe I'll start praying regularly and walking more.

I'm going to make this big, icy, brutal city my home for now. I'm going to buy some boots.

You, my distant internet friends, are my witnesses.