These bird’s-eye-view-of-a-city-as-an-abstract-painting paintings by Xinjian Lu are super fun to look at on a Tuesday afternoon in the office, assuming you’re not tripping. (One thing I’ve learned heard others talk about is that things meant to look triptastic rarely do much when you’re actually tripping.) The one pictured above is New York City. (via Animal NY)
Today is my effing birthday, so I took off work, because is there anything more painful than having work colleagues wish you a happy birthday. Of course there are — I mean, there’s FB — but in the league of trivial pains and embarrassments, it’s up there: at my old company, I used to get a card signed by the mailroom guy and the front-desk receptionist, which was seriously :(
Which reminds me, did anyone else LOL last night when Don Draper was like “I never had a birthday” because it sounded like something Ron Swanson would say? (That’s my one-sentence recap.)
Anyway, I’m trying to enjoy our Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ’Shishigashira’), which is now in Season Five and just starting to kick some ass.
Here’s my block on a sullen Sunday morning. (Actually it was three or four days ago, but you get the idea.) On a related truth-or-not-truth note, with all of the Mad Men hype, I thought I would take a few seconds to remind everyone that the show gets basically nothing right about what urban life was like for gays in the early 1960s. (It’s not necessarily a huge strike against it, because basically no show or movie being made these days — I’m exaggerating, but not much — gets anything right about being gay, as the Onion recently reported with satirical truth.) Which is not to say life was horrible or not-horrible for gays in 1963, but it in any case it was very let’s-just-say “active” to the extent that parks and avenues now filled with one-percenters were once the domain of gays/queens/hustlers/scores, etc. Seriously, can you imagine men having sex outside in Bryant Park circa 2012? I’m not saying I’m advocating for (or against) outdoor sex (or even gentrification), but what’s clear if you go back and read books from the era (I just finished City of Night by John Rechy, whose 1963 account of NYC very much dovetailed with Samuel Delany’s of the same era in The Motion of Light on Water), is that the past fifty years have liberated us in some ways, but have enslaved us in others.
I thought it was going to be cold and rainy out today, but for now it’s actually kind of perfect, the sort of end-of-March day you usually get after a month of annoying when-will-it-end cold. Whatever, I’m not going to rehash the global-warming spring we’re having. I don’t know why I’m obsessed with dawn redwoods, or actually maybe I do: it’s that they are deciduous conifers (which makes them sort of gay or at least “queer” in the tree world?), they were thought to be extinct until a grove was discovered in a remote region of China in the 1940s (that’s actually true), and they grow incredibly fast, like six feet a year, which if you think about the fact that most people are around six feet tall, imagine what it would be like to add your own height every year. We’d be so tall! Also, their needles do look sort of fern-like and prehistoric, like you could totally imagine dinosaurs stomping through a forest of dawn redwoods. (And there are fossils of dawn redwoods, so they’ve been around a lot longer than loser humans, for starters.) Our dawn redwood is a columnar variety (“Sheridan spire” or for you Latin buffs: metasequoia glyptostroboides totally awesomenus), which means (fingers crossed), it will stay relatively narrow and thus not interfere with the 10,000 other trees we managed to squeeze into the ten-foot space that is our backyard garden. Click through for more pix.
Dante: I thought I was alone? But OMG can’t shake the feeling that someone’s looking over my shoulder :(
Zephyr: (lol)
Have you guys read Douglas Martin’s books? The Summer King introduced me to his work a few years ago, and I also highly recommend. Bonus: he’s now on Tumblr!
Really feeling this put things in perspective.
Dante: Dear God, can I please have a glass of red wine? It’s been a hard week — I’m trying to be a better person and not be goaded into fights I will later regret — and I need to relax.
God: Your wish is my command.
I saw this post a few weeks ago and was thinking about a “good” time to reblog — like maybe Caturday or something because it’s sort of about Beatrice (RIP) — or maybe I could make some kind of joke to make myself seem less self-promotey, which I realize can be annoying, even though it’s obv part of the game. Ultimately, though, I decided to just reblog it for the most selfish reason of all, namely that I want to remember it, and also because it’s Friday afternoon and my office is basically a ghost town and the thought of doing “real” work is preposterous. My real point is that there are many reasons to write a novel, and now that I’ve had one out for over a year (and like most novels, it’s sinking into the vast ocean of publishing, where it may or may not be permanently buried depending on factors completely beyond my control), it’s become apparent to me that the most random reactions to your work are often the most meaningful. Like sure, it would be nice to make the best-seller lists or whatever, but to write a story and know that it touched even one person in the manner described below makes the whole venture seem worthwhile, because otherwise the business of writing fiction is a shitload of work and nervous-breakdown-inducing agony that 99.9999 percent of the time won’t change your life in any practical way. So anyway, random person who wrote this post about grieving for your dad: thank you for sharing.
Awash in helplessness, all we could think to do now was to restore some semblance of dignity to the most undignified thing in the world, death in a modern hospital. We took a small cloth brought from home and began to groom her; we started with her face, and as best we could we gently wiped away the thick saliva from her cheeks, the blood that trickled from her nose and the gunk from around her eyes; from there we moved down to her neck, chafed from the collar, and then progressed over her shoulders and down her side, where each one of her raspy and labored breaths continued to make her stomach rise and fall with a slight shudder. We cleaned each of her polydactyl paws and remembered how the old woman (who by this point we were officially conflating with our mother) had told us that they were supposed to be good luck, and for a second we hated her. But then we reconsidered; maybe she had been right about Beatrice, after all, which was why it was so difficult to think of losing her.
I remember reading this passage in The Metropolis Case, and finding it to be very touching. I re-read it a few moments ago on Matthew Gallaway’s blog and started sobbing. Of course I thought about Dad.My boss made some crass joke this afternoon on the drive back from his last meeting about a friend of his who had heart surgery today and how the friend’s wife could do the friend a favor by rubbing one out for him. I tried to convey that, maybe, someone coming out of open heart surgery a few hours before might not really want to have one “rubbed out” for him. Not meaning to, I thought of Dad in the Cardiac Care Unit after they went in to relieve the blockage in one of his arteries. He was so weak and out of it, and they had him on so many drugs, that he had no idea, I think, or comprehension of what was going on. They had gone in through an artery in his leg and there was a tube there, in his groin, that made it necessary for him to rest on his back with his legs straight out in front of him. He hated being in bed, and it was his natural tendency to try and sit up. They were worried about him breaking the tube and bleeding out (because he was anemic and his blood was too thin) so to stop him from moving around, they had to tie him to the bed. Dad couldn’t sleep with socks on (too confining - he used to make me take mine off if I went to bed with them on…something about letting my feet breathe (??!!)), so you can imagine how horrible it must have felt to be tied down to the bed?
He was already very weak and though I didn’t realize it at the time, would be gone in less than six months.
It’s relieving, in a way, to break down at passages like the one above. I have spent the past year feeling so incredibly and debilitatingly sad. It’s not that I haven’t cried at all this year; my friends can tell you that I’ve cried a lot, but only recently have I begun to cry because something directly reminded me of being helpless and angry and sad watching Dad slowly fade away in the hospital. Before, I think I was so sad that nothing in particular would set me off, I was always just a few threads away from crying. Now, I’ll be fine, poking along, when something causes me to remember certain moments from a year ago. I feel like this is progress…or healthy in some way? It’s different, at least.
In conclusion, The Metropolis Case is such a fantastic novel…probably one of my favorites from the past couple of years. Also, my boss is lacking in some basic empathy gene. A few years ago, I think I found it kind of amusing or charming in some way. Now it just makes me sad.
Today at lunch I overcame my paralyzing fear of global warming (or actually, a fear of this summer) and took a little stroll up Park Avenue.
One of the best things about gardening is that you learn to appreciate signs of aging, like in this beech tree (which can live for hundreds of years), the branches are starting to twist and gnarl in ways that are elegant and awesome to behold, even or especially before the leaves appear. (I don’t think I’m using “gnarl” in a grammatically correct way, but whatever, you get the idea.)
