tammytoes

It’s impossible to not feel nostalgic at Coney Island. On an overcast Saturday with few people strolling the boardwalk and most of the attractions closed, the landscape seems to sigh. I can’t wait to experience it in the sunshine and crowds, when the midway can wake up and blink.

Later that night, Lanie was sitting in her garden, feet hanging over the side of a chair and we were talking, just talking. There is precious little nostalgia that hangs between the two of us – although we might laugh and marvel about a decade of shared experiences, we never long for the places we’ve been. It’s a process of comfortable reinvention. The biggest mistake anyone can make about the two of us is to assume that she is delicate and I am fierce; in our years of friendship, quite the opposite has often been true.

I attended a reading by Donald Hall while I was in the city. His voice will stay with me for a long time:

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

A walk across the Brooklyn Bridge was warm and sunny. All the tourists, including myself, had big smiles. The day before, Paul had taken me for a walk through Brooklyn, and we ended up at the Broken Angel house, right next to the site of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. As we pondered the deliberate, random architectural marvel, an older woman walked by with several young children. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked us. “It’s been in the New York Times, on the news, and in a movie!” Her voice was totally full of pride.

So many moments in a week full of questions about home and what’s next and the answer beckoning “over here” so often I was wondering in a happy circle.

Lucky enough to be a part of two readings for Bitchfest this past week; even lucky more to meet readers who remember the essay from its original publication several years ago. It feels so good to perform words in front of active listeners and feel the connection between myself and them and the text.

And also so good to have friends. On both sides of the bridge.

an extremely short, incomplete list of things that exist here that do not exist in in my present home:

- red velvet cake
- fines for honking
- “car service”
- an adorable dog named ingrid
- all-you-can-eat sushi buffet
- brooklyn bridge

i heart nyc. yes i do!

I’m boarding a plane to NYC tomorrow morning. Almost a year ago I landed there and ate Greek food with Lanie B. and realized that I would live through the end of my marriage; we ate donuts and drank coffee in a brightly-lit bakery in Brooklyn full of elaborate wedding cakes; we spent a rainy afternoon in the movie theater. There were adventures galore on that trip, but finding the quiet moments, normalcy, all by myself – that’s what I really sought and found there.

This now, new year. New adventures, imaginings. See you when I get back.

Today at an afternoon meeting:

“I applaud all the energy at this table, but what we really need now is synergy.”

I really felt, actually, like I should stab out my own eyes with my pen. Synergy? Not so much.

Which leads me to a poem. The Tuesday is incidental.

Sean Penn Anti-Ode
- Dean Young

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb
so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.
Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.
Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up
and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.
Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,
regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,
internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment
of laboratory animals.
Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.
Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.
Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.
The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.
Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.
The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.