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?”
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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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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May you all feel the way about the person you love that I feel… Read More »
But it wasn’t all buttercups & pumpkin pie for country mouse, who chewed her way in to a cardboard box but somehow couldn’t chew her way out again…. #deadasadormouse #coldcoldground
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But it wasn’t all buttercups & pumpkin pie for country… Read More »
The great thing about running is that even when the marathon you’ve spent 4 months preparing for is canceled 20 minutes before it starts, by the first mile of your consolation lap your disappointment is washed away by the simple act of running: it was a beautiful day to run 15 miles as training for some yet-to-be-determined challenge. #whyirun #whyirace #centralparkmarathon #running (thanks @runsmartproject & @brooklynrunningco for getting me ready!) #sorrytheressomefuckedupgrammarinthisbuticantfeelmyfingers (at Central Park In Manhattan)
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The great thing about running is that even when the marathon… Read More »
For the new year, Tessa Rumsey’s “Poem for the Old Year.” I’ve loved this poem unreasonably since I read it at the desk of my first job in New York 16 years ago. Happy New Year!
Poem for the Old Year Read More »
I was in high school when R.E.M. was being born, and I was against them on principle. They were too popular with girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day to be trustworthy. But the cover of Murmur said almost everything about the south that mattered to me. Those shapes lost to kudzu so thick that even in winter it masked everything; scrappy, shabby woods, filled with decaying junk, abandoned barns; mystery at once cheap and profound.
Understanding their southernness was what brought me around to R.E.M., and now every time someone holds up “Sweet Melissa” or “Free Bird” (though I love them both) as the anthem of the south I want to say no, “Catapult”; and anytime someone holds up a skillet or a leg of fried chicken as the icon of that place I still think of as home I want to show them the cover of Murmur and say, no, this.
I was in high school when R.E.M. was being born, and I was… Read More »
Adventures in sewage, with Edible Brooklyn.
There, 10 feet below the surface of the road, was a grim river that carried all the waste from our block, from Bedford Avenue, from who knows where. It rippled below us all day and all night, carrying garbage disposal puree, the Wesson oil you spilled in the sink, the latex paint you washed out of your brush, suds from your Kiehls, and everything you sent down the drain. It was the effluvia of a dozen restaurants, every corner deli, dry cleaners, nail salons and hundreds of apartments. It was like having 10,000 secrets exposed to you at once.
I wrote a piece for Edible Brooklyn’s Alcohol Issue on not drinking.
“There’s a dark side to not drinking. There’s nothing more uncomfortable—especially for a person in the hospitality business—than saying “no thanks” when someone offers you a drink. It’s a refusal of the simplest gesture of human generosity, like refusing to walk through a door someone’s holding open for you.”
Teetotaling, and Totally Not Read More »
