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Monday evening, Chester looked to be hours from death It came on suddenly–wouldn’t eat, couldn’t stand up, twitched spastically, couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop panting. We gathered round him on the floor and said goodbyes, afraid he wouldn’t wake up in the morning. The girls slept next to him in our room and I lay awake wondering what we would do with his body if he died hours before the vet opened. He hung on through the night, but didn’t look much better Tuesday, and I called the vet to have him checked and–surely–euthanized.

The vet was out on Tuesday, though, and the soonest they could see him was Wednesday night. They asked if I thought he could wait that long and I said I supposed so, he didn’t seem to be able to tell night from day anyway, what would it matter, but again I fretted all night about what to do with his corpse if he died in his sleep.

Wednesday morning, what was to be his last day, I woke up early and came into the kitchen. I made coffee and sat down to work. Minutes later I heard Chester’s claws clicking on the floor, and I turned to see him trotting into the room as he has a thousand times before. He pawed at his food bowl indignantly. He whined for his bed, which I brought to him. It was as though the previous two days had never happened. When the vet opened I called them to say I didn’t think we’d be needing the euthanist after all, and oddly I worried they’d think I’d lost my nerve. But they know this dingbat well enough to know that he’s one resilient beast. He’s back as good as he was last week, demanding, ornery, contrary as hell, here to stay, at least a little longer. #dog #chestermcfester #mrwiggles #pigglesmcwiggles #whattheshitchester

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Tales from Ungentrified Williamsburg, ep. 1: we moved recently into a new office, so I called Verizon to have a phone line & internet brought in to the space. I waited all day yesterday for Verizon to show–didn’t–and half of today. When a technician finally did show, he surveyed the area and determined he’d need to run a line from the pole in our new neighbor’s backyard. He hitched on his tool belt and set off to get access to the pole. He was back a minute later with his tail between his legs. “I thought I was lucky because the owner of the lot I need access to just happened to be there, so I asked him if I could get access to the pole and he said no, never, he hates Verizon and has hated them for 10 years, and then he drove off.” “So I can’t get phone service?” “All I can say is hang out around here and try to talk to him yourself–maybe you can persuade him to let us in.” “So the only solution is for me to wait around and hope he shows up again and then hope I can persuade him to change his mind?” “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” #ohwilliamsburg #themorethingschange

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Every single body in the city is out tonight. Afropunk Fest, #E24X, a dozen newlyweds, firefighters icing the knee of a boy who fell off his bike, “so many 1st birthday parties out here, everybody was gettin busy in the winter,” and a hundred selfies I ruined by running through them at shutterclick. #whyirun #iloveny #summersinthecity (at Brooklyn Bridge Park (Pier 5))

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“That’s how you can tell someone’s poor.” My babysitter pointed slyly at the neck of the boy sitting ahead of us in the bleachers. We were at a basketball game at her high school, a small public school in a small Virginia town where pretty much everyone was just one shade of poor or another.  

I don’t know why she’d taken me to the game, but I felt important and nervous, the only kid there who wasn’t with his parents. I was paying careful attention to everything, afraid I’d do something to give away the fact that I was a 5th grader and not a sophomore, young enough to believe that people couldn’t tell the difference. I wasn’t sure where I fit in. I stared at the boy’s neck, unsure what I should be seeing. 

“They cut their own hair. They don’t get that peach fuzz on the backs of their necks.“ It was light and soft, like the hair on a never-shaved cheek.

When I cut my hair now, I shave my nape blind. I cut myself about half the time.

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Just inside the gate of a garage in Greenpoint, a wiry man with gray hair and a deep-set scowl sits on an upturned bucket. He spits on the ground as I approach. “I’m not fucking sheep!” he yells, shaking his head and glancing at the man sitting across the door from him. “Do I look like a ewe to me?”

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A video posted by George Weld (@georgeweld) on Jul 6, 2015 at 4:31am PDT

You may learn to sleep through sirens and the screams of neighbors and the crash of garbage cans being thrown to the curb, but a bird will wake you up even when there is no tree to be seen. #newyorkcity #birdsong #iloveny #wakeup #wildernesswhereyoufindit

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From somewhere up the bike lane I could hear a man bellowing, his voice funneled my way by construction walls and buildings as he came rolling up the street. “Fuck you! I hate it! I hate the fucking motorcycles and the loud fucking cars and the fucking bass amplifiers fuck you you fuck I fucking hate you all!” He was in front of me now, pedaling a commuter bike at a frantic cadence, his face mostly obscured by the shade of his helmet and his sunglasses but still clearly twisted with rage as he yelled at the Honda cruising along next to him, a Civic with tinted windows and a pair of chome exhausts the size of beach pails. The car was purring, windows down, its driver grinning like a toadfish who’s swallowed a hook.

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James Wright, “Breakfast”
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May you all feel the way about the person you love that I feel about this one, a dumb breathless love that smothers cynicism and fills you with wonder, a love that’s undiminished over this first 17ish years of marriage. Happy anniversary, Nif. Thank you for marrying me.

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