Good Days

On good days he flosses. Sometimes he doesn’t. All of the women he dates are obsessed with their teeth; with them, no perversion is more reluctantly revealed than the secret of his high mediocre oral hygiene. Are all women that way? All women in his demographic? (All women, properly understood, plainly a concept that exceeds his grasp; even being glib has its limitations.) Maybe it’s the bad days that he flosses, neglect signifying, rather than torpor, blissful repudiation of the routine.

On bad days, he imagines there are no stories to tell. To imagine that there are stories yearning to be told, entrusting themselves to his care, these are the good days, a sense of purpose, the supple embrace of purpose like a fine leather coat. Stories are like, well, stories – what could be better than that? What metaphor adequate to elevate such an august referent? Sleep on it, and he does. There’s tomorrow, and the stories are in his care. Or, perhaps it's on good days that he imagines that there are no stories to tell. But there are. He thinks.

Creo, Creare, Creavi

For Z, who was kind enough to ask.

I don't have a child; presently, it's fair to be skeptical that I will. Not because that's how I intended it to work out, but because we're most credible when we view the world as it is. But tonight, I found myself wondering what wisdom I would have to impart. I would not be young for a father now -- not old perhaps, but not young -- older, for example, by seven years than my father was when I was born. When my father was the age I am now, I was seven. The mind reels; I digress.

The occasion of my wondering was my attendance at a lovely performance at the Hard Rock Cafe (of all places) by young pianist Jonathan Biss, alongside PSO Artistic Adviser Sir Andrew Davis -- a cesspool of commodified music misery, with the usual menagerie of outstated rock and roll onesies, guitars, platinum records, and the like, punctured to its core by a Steinway baby grand and musicians worthy of better environs. I learned of the performance only this afternoon near quitting time, and despite my other plans and the event's fund-raiser-esque pricetag, despite my lack of suitable clothing, despite my recent penuriousness and my lack of interest in Biss's weekend program of Schumann with the greater PSO, despite my lack of companion (and whom would I ask these days, really), something about the event called to me. I negotiated the best of my business casual and bike attire, lingered at the office past six, and finally unreined my steed and headed over the Smithfield Street Bridge into the stinking brownfield of Station Square.

I was not surprised to find the event relatively uncrowded, and I was only vaguely unsettled when Sir Andrew and Biss walked in like any other attendees, Biss in shirt tails and corduroy and funky hipster sneakers, Davis in tweed and dungarees, and began to mingle with the distinguished guests. I sat at the bar and minded my beer, my rough and tumble bag stowed out of sight along the bar's footrail. Around me was a smattering of older symphony patrons, who speak as though knowledgeable but I wonder (my own ignorance of the classical canon, admittedly, makes me a poor ombudsman, but my suspicions remain), and younger musicians self-possessed and silent. My $40 bought me a ticket good for some specialty drink involving pomegranate that I refused on principle to accept, preferring to pay cash for a good beer, and granted me access to a buffet of cheese cubes and mustard and fruit. These were the refreshments I was promised in the promotional materials. I spoke to no one, straining to find hidden meaning in the thin literature handed me at the door concerning public radio and TV, and listing the program for the evening, which was as follows:

Sonata in c minor, Op. 13, "Pathetique," first movement, Beethoven;

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, second movement, Schumann; and

The Dolly Suite, first and second movement, Faure.

Finally, a WQED DJ explaining that some delay was in order given a disparity between the number of tickets sold and the number of attendees in the house, I wandered to the front row, where an unoccupied seat beckoned. I tucked my bag beneath it, silenced my phone, and waited.

Biss finally emerged, casually, and with little fanfare turned to his labor. His Pathetique seemed sloppy, but in a most forgivable way. If I'm hearing missed notes, and more than a few, surely you're missing, but Biss's touch was light and vigorous and his pacing was merciless. The performance was riveting, Biss so close to my seat I could contemplate the peculiar irregularities in his breathing and the sound of his left foot thrusting to and fro beneath him in rhythm with the music. If anything, the errors merely served to emphasize the singular intimacy of the performance, the humanness of the performer, the wisdom in my decision to attend. By contrast, I am now listening to the same movement as recorded by Richard Goode, whose entire cycle of Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas I am in the process of moving from CD into iTunes, and it has an almost clinical polish to it that is at once admirable and alienating.

Kreisleriana I found less compelling, perhaps for the same reason I was unmoved by the prospect of the Schumann-heavy program associated with Biss's weekend visit to the PSO. I appreciated the discussion about Schumann's torment that the DJ and Biss engaged in before Biss took up the piece, and so educated I appreciated some of what Biss said about the movement's nascent passion, but overall I found myself nonplused.

For Dolly's Suite, Davis joined Biss at the lower register of the piano, and the two engaged in a playful and delightfully well coordinated bit of play, in engaging this piece for children, the second movement of which, I learned, is aptly entitled on some scores, "Meow."

But this isn't about the music, or at least isn't about the particular performance detailed.

I do this sometimes, wander off to things by myself, and I've written about it here before, though I'm too lazy to hunt down an example. For serious art, really, solitude seems necessary to unfettered appreciation. One can't very well immerse oneself in magnificence while chatting with an idle companion, who more often than not is more or less interested than one is in the work presently at issue. Better to disappear into it, into art, leaving everything behind, trusting in one's return but at the same time indifferent. Should I find myself forever imprisoned in any number of Picasso's blue period pieces, would I grieve? Perhaps -- but I'd look good doing so, hanging on a wall at MoMA or the Louvre, eyed hungrily by a multi-ethnic smorgasbord of jealous onlookers: this is me here, and you there -- have fun getting through customs, coaxing your children to eat strained peas, balancing your checkbooks.

Biss is a third generation world-class musician, son to two violinists, grandson to a noted cellist, inheritor of lifetimes' musical wisdom. With that pedigree, that he is an alumni of the prestigious Curtis Institute (Lang Lang among his handful of classmates) seems almost an afterthought.

I have been reading prodigiously of late, prodigiously for me, prodigiously for law school and post-law school me, as though in preparation for something. Fiction, all fiction all the time, until a recent left turn into non-fiction for purposes of research, but even so still in fiction, immersing myself in others' creations, worlds and psyches alien and familiar, constantly leaning into the buffeting caused by demanding an exit, however temporary, from all of this. The trend goes back further, but since Thanksgiving alone, my reading list includes (but is not exhausted by) the following:

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Mary McCarthy, Birds of America
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
Paul Theroux, My Secret History
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Banville, The Sea

In addition, I am currently reading, if reading is the word, Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions.

This is not to pat myself on the back. I could have read far more in that span, and probably should have. Rather, it is in service of a larger point that I enumerate. I haven't just been reading these books, but scrutinizing them, immersing myself at once in their narratives and their manifestations of craft. I didn't consciously choose to do this; it just happened. My readings, thus oriented, may sound in discussion like those of a critic, an academic, and that is my training. But I am reading differently now. I am all technician these days, never affected by a passage that I don't ask, Why? It's a thrilling way to read, an engagement that makes everything else pale by comparison, but it's instrumental as well.

This development coincides with, or arises from, my growing sense that I ought to be writing. Not writing, in the elementary sense -- I do that every day -- but composing, creating, writing with a real sense of purpose, writing like graffiti, writing like those handful of words you'll never forget, whether you found them in a film, a book, a seminar, or crossing a lover's lips in the darkest hour of night. It's thrilling, this sort of reading, ennervating, terrifying.

Which brings me back to where I began. I don't feel terribly wise, or even as knowledgeable as I'd like. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time feeling inadequate to whatever task presents itself, confident in my competence but entirely unconvinced of my excellence, and unsatisfied with anything less. Nothing is more tragic than a lazy perfectionist.

But I know one thing I would say to my child as often as I might, no matter his age or inclination or peculiar ability, my one grasp at wordly wisdom, my sole excuse for myself. I would say, "Create." Make something new. Create. Create.

Create.

If there is a God, a Heaven, a meting out of judgment, surely creation will be valued most high and destruction villified. There's nothing new in this thought, which is surely derivative of any number of sources I might name were I not so weak of memory, but in that, at least, they were right. To create is everything.

And by this I think in larger terms. Snob though I may be, I would not intend that my child should take me to mean that he must create something that would assume a place in this or that canon, only that he create rather than obey, for obedience is not creation, it's survival. I would have my child be proud, and defiant, and undaunted by the thought of the billions who have preceded him, each trying to add something to the human mosaic in one way or another, courageous before the inevitable fear that there is nothing new to add, unwilling to accept mediocrity even if it is -- or precisely because it is -- the rule.

(And then my child, being a child, would sigh and turn on his heel to storm from the room as though I'd insisted that he eat brussels sprouts, but the memory would linger.)

I have been an absentee blogger, and for those who drop by with any sort of regularity I apologize -- not so much for the silence as for the lack of explanation. My dedicated readership may be passing small, but I know you're there, and for all your patience with my erratic maundering you deserve more than implacable silence.

But this is not to announce my return. Rather, this is the explanation I have owed. I have liked a few things I have written here, more than a few perhaps, but the medium does not lend itself to the discipline necessary to the sort of thing I would like to create, at least not in my hands. I lack the patience for revision, here, and it frees me from the complication of sustaining my confidence in the face of creative adversity, which in turn impoverishes the work itself.

I can, in short, do better. And it's about goddamned time.

So I'm retreating to meatspace for the time being, turning my undivided energy to a larger project I hesitate to call a novel but (for want of a better word) might as well, something I've been playing with in my head for quite a while, and toward which I've been researching of late. I don't assume I can do this, that I'm technically adequate to the task or tenacious enough to stay with it for as long as it takes to find out, but I'm so very sick of wondering, of fancying myself something I take for granted but refuse to vindicate in deed.

I won't officially wrap this up, because I'm not convinced it won't serve some purpose as a sort of overflow valve when I've been writing long enough on my own to create some momentum. And those of you who really care for my brand of blather might come back every month or so for a while to see if there's anything new. But this is, if nothing else, a substantial hiatus I'm announcing.

Thank you for reading. Perhaps I'll have something more substantial for you in the distant future. But that's the question when it comes to writing anything with literary pretensions, isn't it -- for how long can one delay gratification before tearing oneself apart, like Van Gogh, like Schumann?

Let's find out, shall we?

Taking Stock, 2006

Another year ends with the requisite lists and accountings, the arbitrary grouping of events and developments into a 365-day unit, the looks backward and forward, and so on. I would offer links, but the sources are, as we say in legal documents, passim, too numerous to identify specifically.

As a warm-up to posting something this afternoon, the last of 2006, I reviewed where this weblog was, where I was as a quasi-public being, at the outset of the year. In the dawn of the year, I read and commonplaced in this space Anthony Swofford's Jarhead. After explaining my frisson at one of his more notable sentences, I observed, "In a million years I could never write that sentence or any like it. And if I accidentally happened upon a sentence so laced with potential, I could never set it in its due context."

I hope that I was wrong, at least insofar as that sentence was a broad lament about my ability rather than a narrow observation about each writer possessing unique and inimitable gifts; in the next two or three weeks, as something like a resolution, I intend to begin blocking significant chunks of time into my schedule to write, and to write. And to write. And to ignore the voices in my head telling me to stop, voices like that reflected in my Swofford post. And to write still more. Until June 31, at least, when I pause to take dispassionate stock of my progress. This is not idle, not this time -- I've designated an entire room in my house, presently occupied by nothing more than a roll-top desk, a (not terribly comfortable) period-appropriate hardwood desk chair, and five lovely volumes of Edward Gorey, as a distraction-free zone, a studio, my fortress of solitude. There, the computer's wireless will always be turned off, the room always silent but for the sounds of cats padding around, my murmurings, and my fingers abusing these keys -- no music, no adornments of any kind . . . maybe a space heater, but nothing more lavish.

But that's next year; this is an accounting of the year poised to expire. This year was exhausting, as I wrestled with a few very difficult realizations about myself.

I am lonely. I don't mean this in its broadest sense. I am blessed with a loving and supportive family, and too many friendships to count, each of which I treasure. But I lack a deep spiritual connection with the fellow traveler I persist in believing I can find. Not only do I cope with this very poorly, my efforts at changing it are largely misguided and wasteful in ways that should be predictable enough to avoid. But I don't avoid them.

I'm no longer young enough to write off my complaisance. Knowing this doesn't seem to make it any better. I am diabolically inventive with regard to diverting myself, not that my diversions are all that creative in themselves. Rather, the invention comes in convincing myself, albeit subliminally, that manifestly unproductive activities (or inactivities) are more justifiable than they really are. Whole tracts of time disappear, as into an alcohol-induced blackout. Hours, days, Seasons.

I have lost the tremendous momentum I carried into and out of law school; I am treading water. The water is temperate; I am the fortunate residual beneficiary of the mighty effort I put into accomplishing the quantifiable goals that are the privilege of formal education. But I fare far worse in the real world's unboundedness. I seem incapable of choosing among several visible shores to swim toward. Once, I flung myself at new opportunities with reckless abandon in my personal and professional lives. But I have grown tentative. Choice and sacrifice are inexorable aspects of lives well-lived; an inability to choose, to commit, to take risks, characterizes the most unhappy people I know. Sometimes I wake in the early morning terrorized by the prospect that I am becoming one of them. I question whether the person I have become would have taken the chances I have taken -- moving to Pittsburgh, leaving a promising career for law school, falling in love -- that have led to my most gratifying moments. How disorienting to fear that you are no longer the person that brought you here.

I am lazy. Like "lonely," this requires qualification, since my occasional comment to this effect among intimates usually is resisted with an enumeration of those things I have accomplished and the various things I continue to do. That in objective, absolute terms I keep myself occupied, participate in non-work-related projects, socialize reasonably well, read steadily, is no comfort to me when I confront almost daily vast tracts of unredeemed time. For me, "lazy" isn't vitiated by crossing some threshold, after which it is my privilege to loll about in self-satisfaction -- it's about making the most of the array of opportunities I enjoy both as an accident of birth and a product of my strivings and effort. I am so fortunate in this regard that it seems sacrilegious to fritter it away.

Perhaps I am a servant of my own arrogance, deluded in my desire to do more, to make an impress on the surface of things, to validate my time here, the air I breathe, the space I occupy. There is humility, to be sure: I no longer imagine that I will write the Great American Novel, that I will reinvent constitutional theory, that I will star in the movie of my life story and get the girl in the end.

But if living lies in the effort, in the undaunted aspiration, it seems necessary to remind oneself that there is more to do, more fibres to weave into the fabric of things, and that each of us is responsible for being a better person -- more humble, more loving, more involved, more productive by whatever definition suits the context and the person.

2006 wasn't a bad year for me, not really. It was a necessary year. 2006 will only reveal itself as wanting if I fail to heed all that it has taught me. That said, I'm happy to see it go -- better things lie ahead.

Thus, I raise a glass to all of you: may the next year bring you all health, prosperity, and happiness by whatever definition you choose.

Housekeeping in Progress

So the three of you who have continued to visit after my long hiatus might be interested to learn that I'm not going anywhere. I don't pretend that I'll post as frequently as I used to, or that I'll post as frequently as I have been of late. I am, however, building up to updating the template with some of the handy new tools Blogger is providing. Before I do so, however, I'm working my way through my old posts, applying categories to each.

My new template will include categories, by Gawd, and feature a radically reduced and updated blogroll, among other improvements. I'm approaching my two-year anniversary, after all, and it's not like I have nothing to say. Not for the first time during this blog's tenure, but in a far more systematic and determined way, I'm about to begin writing more seriously outside the blogosphere. So once again I return to the original idea of this blog as a repository of annotations to myself, a collection of observations and ephemera -- in general, as an annex to more dedicated writing. Or so the story goes.

In any event, as it stands, starting from the beginning, I've categorized something like 60 of nearly 700 posts. It's a start, and an unsurprisingly engrossing task for the obsessive-compulsive. It might take a couple of weeks for all of this to come to be, so be patient.

And just for the record . . .

. . . I'm back.

To Market

I am obsessed with my hometown, Montclair, New Jersey, bedroom community for the outrageous wealth newly generated in New York City in the past decade, land of tiny fifties ranches torn down or expanded to more than double their original size, Mercedes and Volvos and Jags (oh my!), no scrap of land undeveloped as the opportunistic (and well-financed) seek to insert interstitial McMansions among the ranches and tudor revivals, no curb uncobbled, no boutique too moderately priced, no sidewalk un-tabled, no BoBo unbeautiful.

When I'm back -- and not infrequently -- whether by bike or by car, I find myself turning spirals around the perimeter of the town, slowly spiraling inward to any of its pretentious shopping centers, eyeing the impeccably dressed scouting the antique stores and design houses on every major corner who in turn eye their quarry -- a magnificent shaker end table, perhaps, or a sleek nickel and glass coffee table like a relic of a Kubrickian future.

The pavement is unfriendly to bikes; notwithstanding nearly universal five-digit property tax burdens, the Powers That Be extend the life of the road surface by sealing it as it ages in tar and gravel, which only smooths over time, and never completely. Moreover it stains shoes and rocker panels, spotting sumptuous floormats in the heat of summer. Nothing one would notice from the supple-suspended air-conditioned splendor of a leased luxury car, windows closed and air conditioning whispering almost inaudibly, radio turned to an investment show on talk radio, blue tooth surgically fused to one's ear beeping from time to time its message of validation.

Does anyone own anything here? Is it all ARMs and leases, a cover story to deflect attention from impending financial ruin staved off by creative borrowing and endless jumps from one overcompensated job to the next, paper wealth or its mere prospect. Financial management and millions of the allegedly wealthy in orbit around the black whole of their own insolvency, falling eternally in perfect equilibrium until finally their orbits deteriorate, one by one, and they disappear into the darkness.

Or maybe they really have this much money, all of them, and I describe my own equally perilous but so much more modest solar system of tiered debt. Perhaps in projecting my own situation onto them, a couple of orders of magnitude greater, I reveal my own desire to believe I am not irresponsible; perhaps I need the wealthy to be overextended and desperate to compensate for my own overextension and occasional desperation.

I am an attorney with impeccable credentials; consequently, my earning potential is effectively limited only by my prerogatives. This is not a pity party. Not even close.

But there is a decadence to all of this, my native surround. And I have trouble determining whether my wonderment at this never-entirely-familiar fact is a product of envy or disgust. I cannot discern -- though I try mightily -- whether I am second-guessing my decision not to return here to make my way in the metroplex of my youth or gloating over my own perspicacity and leaving this place before entering an unsustainable orbit. In Pittsburgh, my finances will right themselves as soon as I make that a priority; in New York, however, I'd be forced to accept, as have my friends and family, a far more precarious existence. At some point it's not about the money, a lot or a little, that passes through one's checking account each month; it's where it goes that matters. So many of the expenses, necessary and merely recommended, that happen here are black holes -- paying rent into one's forties or for a lifetime, leasing what one cannot afford to buy in other areas, the psychic expense of working under the threat of a dozen qualified people looking for your job and just waiting for you, or someone like you, to slip up this much.

And all of this, too, may be a fiction contrived to assuage my ambivalence. Who's to say?

Today I went to my favorite used bookstore south of the Hudson River Valley, a small place in Montclair Center (there really are three centers to this town, as though it were too overlapping ellipses, but only one goes by that name), and negotiated the discounted purchase of a first-edition of Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations. I may not read it for a while -- such painfully elegant writing acts as an obstacle to my own -- but at the discounted price it was a bargain, a fine hardcover first from 1991 in near-fair condition. Then I headed to Watchung Plaza, another town center (and this one more accurately in the middle of things), and ordered a late breakfast from a tin-ceilinged bistro run by Spaniards in an old Montclair store front, their patois behind the display case unnerving as their unlikely trade in hypertrophic bagels. I ate inside, and then took my book, Coupland's Hey Nostradamus, across the street to a small park, where I found a bench in the shade to finish my iced coffee.

On the way home, heading down Bellevue Avenue (just downhill from the third and most northerly of the shopping areas), I spotted two girls, perhaps 14, one tall and one short, both pretty and innocent, walking a beagle like a credulous little brother between them. As I drew even with them, slowing for the red light at Grove Street, they turned to the man driving the car in front of mine and smiled and waved familiarly, with the entirely undirected ebullience of young women in pairs, and I detected in the slow roll of the driver's head no more familiarity with them than I had.

The light turned, the car in front of me passed through the intersection, and I eased forward unhurried to make my left turn, waiting for the girls to negotiate the crosswalk. The other driver gone, they turned as they walked to the car waiting to make the left that mirrored my own and waved and smiled with the same mock familiarity, the same unrequited jubilation, and after a moment they turned their attention my way and continued the ritual as I waited for their passage to open a car-width corridor. I was oddly affected by their unlikely bonhomie -- good neighbors in the land of tall fences.

What Cost Passion?

"I'm not claustrophobic," I reassured myself as I slid into the surprisingly slender white plastic tube, the whirr of the servos piloting my pallet silky and subdued. On my left shoulder rested a white plastic triangle no less mysterious to me than Bones' magic diagnostic handset in Star Trek, a tube snaking from it into the bowels of the machine.

On the inside of the tube, perhaps six inches from my eyes, two plastic rails, backlit, ran the length of the tube, and my unspectacled eyes reluctantly drew into focus the fine-grained texture common to molded plastic components in the clinical setting. Gently inserted into my ears by the technician, ear plugs muted the commencement of an indecipherable pattern of clicks and snaps signaling the machine going through its paces. Attending the insertion of the ear plugs, the tech explained to me that the machine was loud, something like a jackhammer. But once it began it sounded more like a failed hybrid of Aphex Twin and Nitzer Ebb.

Very quickly, my breathing became labored, the tech's injunction to inhale only shallowly complicating my efforts to stay my left arm's sudden desire to twitch and tremble to ensure a clear image of my damaged shoulder. "I'm not claustrophobic," I again reminded myself, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that I was claustrophobic-phobic. My increasingly ragged breath suggested as much, and I began to lose my faith that I could get through this.

I have had at least one severe, and perhaps two or three moderate anxiety attacks in the past few years; identifying them as such, I have come to accept that my general ability to work through irrational fear is not complete; there are limits.

In my right hand, the rubber panic bulb adhered to the skin of my clammy palm, and I massaged it, surprised to find myself seriously considering squeezing it, my means of escape no more complicated than that. Just a moment outside, the inside of the tube now familiar, my fear suggested, would enable me to brace for a second attempt. Do over, please.

"But I'm not claustrophobic," I remembered, and held on for a few more seconds, focusing on my breathing, closing my eyes, steadying my grip on the odd rubber wedge the technician had placed in my left hand to stabilize that arm.

An hour or so earlier, in the waiting room of Montefiore Hospital's radiology department, the only item in the Pittsburgh news cycle on June 12, 2006, (a date that will live in ignominy in Pittsburgh Steeler's lore), ran constantly on the only television, which was tuned to KDKA's special coverage: Ben Roethlisberger, sans helmet, was in "serious but stable" condition and in surgery after a head-on collision between his motorcycle and an oncoming car propelled him, face-first, into the other car's windshield. In honor of the occasion, ESPN republished excerpts of Big Ben's May 2005 comments concerning his helmetless riding, and he sounds like precisely the 23-year-old (now twenty-four) he was at this time last year:

It's just like anything else, the more risk you put into something, into whatever it is ... Just like gambling. You're gambling. The more money you want to put into something -- you can lose, or you can win big, so you take gambles with things and you can get burned.

* * *
You can get injured and killed in a car, too. You can get killed walking down the street. You have to know what you're doing, and I'm not saying anyone didn't know what they were doing, but it's a risk and being in life is a risk.

Last night, after a two-day charity ride on the fixed gear totaling nearly 150 miles and a few recuperative hours on the couch, I stood to find that nothing worked right. My hamstrings were tuned tighter than a violin's, my wrists and injured shoulder ached, my back felt molded by cement into the fanciful shape of a harp's arc, and my knees murmured in their orbits of a certain future on the operating table, serpentine arthroscopes probing and refining their striated inner surfaces, their masticated cartilage and mottled bone.

In the past few weeks, a congenital heart problem, a simply arrhythmia I've been aware of for a decade or more, has reemerged with a vengeance. Now, instead of a single missed beat every few months, my heart momentarily racing to restore its proper rhythm, I feel a lowgrade discomfort for hours of virtually every day. It's possible that I've simply aged; my father wasn't much older than I am when his cardiologist monitored his heart and enjoined him from freely consuming caffeine. And in any event, that he's had problems like this off and on for thirty years suggests nothing dire is happening. We age. Things work less well today than they did yesterday. We adapt and proceed because there's nothing else to do. But the pressure in my sternum has continued in the wake of the first awful day, and I cannot disregard the possibility of a correlation with my intense training in the past four months or so, my aggregate distances on the bike increasing virtually every week to spike last week at just over 180 miles.

And it's not all present injuries and today's training. My hands sometimes throb without immediate insult, and the obvious etiology is five years of bouldering now two years' remote, hanging my body weight from two or three fingers at a time, cramming my small feet into smaller shoes and channeling the full power of my then-powerful core in a line from, for example, the first two fingers of my right hand through left big toe, all of my weight suspended like a cable drawn taught between the friction between skin and rubber and a few square inches of textured plastic or grainy sandstone in two small unyielding patches six feet apart. Everything along that path, the line like lightning corkscrewing through my body in white heat, trembling and compressed at the ragged edge of failure. Gravity taunting more insistently with every progression up the rock face, every additional foot and yard of open air between my body and the ground.***

Always the nascent risk. Like Big Ben, I agee that the risk isn't really the point. The most difficult thing to explain to people outside the relevant communities, especially with climbing but also to a lesser extent with urban cycling, is that adrenaline isn't the object. Sometimes it comes, and often it is not unwelcome; surely, adrenaline furnishes the purest, most powerful chemical high the body has to offer, and it has its virtues, practical and aesthetic. But if adrenaline becomes the point, as it does for those rare individuals, like any other drug its demands become progressive. Last week's sufficient rush this week is passe, and the addict moves on to the next thrill and the next, each more hazardous than the last, each with the inimitable frisson of novelty.

Very few people believe me when I say I'm risk averse, but I am, and incredulity doesn't make it otherwise. Big Ben says he rides to relax. I believe him.

But the bitch of it is that even those of us without significant others and children have responsibilities, if this world we have is to have any sense of community (and what Hobbesian nightmare awaits us in the absence of community). We have, if we are fortunate, friends and family who care deeply for our well-being and who depend on us as members of their inner circle, whether simply in virtue of our presence, our inclination to pick up the phone when it rings in the darkest hours of the night, our ability to divine the glower hiding behind the smile donned for appearances, our shared memories of experiences positive and negative and every permutation thereof, or as a consequence of those tangible acts we can perform. Our knowledge of those people, our people, makes them more whole, just as their knowledge of us completes us. Our loss works a diminshment on everyone who knows us, as their tangible worlds depopulate by one. We are selfish, comes the suggestion, when we play with mortal risk like a toy with sharp corners.

And what of the ineffable responsibility to the human enterprise writ large, the question whether it is embracing mortality to endeavor risk or insulting to the magic of our inception to rush into the teeth of danger. By what high arrogance, the question runs, would I insult the blessing of my life by smoking, rock climbing, riding my bike in traffic, or a hundred other activities calculably more dangerous than their myriad, more prudent alternatives? And I have no answer. The question, ultimately, is rhetorical, unless one's morality is so pre- and proscriptive as to make a mockery of any notion of human agency. Frankly, I'm more terrified of the prospect that there is an objective answer to that question that I've been missing than I am of the next car that heedlessly crosses my path on a workday morning, or of the possibility that the flake from which I'm hanging might peel off the rockface and send me tumbling toward the rocky ground in a mortal tumble, or of the idea that my hobbies are working into my joints and bones to gnaw.

The equally pat answer to this challenge is that we can only achieve our full flower, with all the blessings full realization of ourselves enables us to bestow on our people, by embracing those things that animate our spirits. We must be who we are, or some such piffle, or we are no one, and our true natures cannot be denied, only suppressed, at incalculable cost to our innermost selves. But this answer is insufficient. Its predicate selfishness defies the sacrifice that underlies the notion of community. But I have no answer to offer in its place.

Finally, counting breaths, something I've never used in the past as a calming exercise, brought me slowly back from the brink of low-grade panic. In the first position, arm placed rigidly at my side and strapped down, I began counting, without consciously choosing to do so, perhaps three minutes into the scan, and I reached 400 breaths, most of them more even than those at the beginning. My mind wandered to the seed of this very post, and I further calmed myself by imagining the complex images formed by blasting my shoulder, injected a half-hour earlier with a cocktail of agents designed to create contrast in the presumptively damaged soft-tissue of the joint, with varied magnetic pulses, a high-powered computer processor somewhere in the bowels of the control room translating data into a diagnostically robust set of outputs.

After I was withdrawn from the machine and repositioned with my hand above my head, the magical triangle resting precariously over my armpit, I counted another seventy breaths, but by then being inside the tube was more an inconvenience than a problem, my breath-counting a background tic newly acquired, a vestigial impulse rather than anything critical to my serenity. Indeed, toward the end I had to fight my body's impulse to doze, recognizing in the incipience of slumber the likelihood that I would move as I went under thus fouling the data. My hand falling asleep made steadying the arm challenging, but the fact of the tube itself was an inconvience with which I had made my peace.

On the way home, I called my general practitioner for a cardiologist referral. Perhaps the simple answer is to do what one must with as much responsibility as can be reconciled with the adventure, compromise being, in one form or another, the best solution to most problems, simply knowledge authoring the most prudent, if not always the most cautious, decisions. I'm not claustrophobic.

____________
*** Just writing this undermines my occasional conviction that I'm done with climbing. Boy on a Bike understands.

Speak

Sometimes, more often recently, I find the thought of conversation almost painfully unappealing. I sicken of the sound of my own voice. Worse, I don't know how to shut up. So I stay home. Confronted with the necessity of conversation, I will speak, and speak, and speak; I will stand outside myself and imagine how I must sound, I will fear that I grow tedious to others as I do to myself; I will hear the repetition, the doggedness, the inability to let a topic go until I have worried it to sodden, masticated tatters; and then I will leave and spend too much time imagining that I have acquitted myself poorly, again, I will vow to change, to shut up, to listen more and share less, to hold my hand closer to my vest. And then I will decline any number of subsequent opportunities to visit others, exiling myself from the world, manufacturing excuses -- money, fatigue, other commitments that either do not exist or will be demurred in precisely the same way -- to stay home.

At home, the ennui thickens like epoxy until it fastens rock hard skin to skin and I find myself immobile, losing interest, disappearing into my own head, which I find comforting even in a vague sort of familiar contempt, as in the company of an especialy unpleasant relation of long acquaintance, the devil one knows, perhaps.

I used to be far more comfortable in the company of strangers, use to work a room with some aplomb, and while to outward appearances I'm no less able to carry it off now when circumstances conspire to force me, it lacks the appeal it once had. I don't know why.

Is it just that I've been there so many times before, that the divergent minutiae are overwhelmed by the general sameness of things, that nothing seems as new as I'd prefer?

Settling down, settling in, is if not inevitable at least very common among even the most admirable of individuals, a honing of focus, a recognition of one's limitations, aiming to do as well as one can within one's sphere, and forming that sphere with dimensions no greater than one's reach. But what of settling before certain preset expectations have been satisfied -- companionship; professional ambitions well-defined, attainable, toward which one is moving; financial stability -- settling in the absence of such things is an excruciatingly solitary process of self-abnegation and compromise, and even as I resist the alternative, I thrash about in my own head.

Just ask me. I'll tell you all about it.

UPDATE: The party, as it turns out, was fun. I knew one more person there than I expected to (for a grand total of two), and everything was fine. Funny.

Ticking Away the Moments That Make Up a Dull Day

Time doesn't fly away from us, it slides out from beneath our feet.

At the gas station, where I paused to buy one more carton of self-loathing at a dear, sin-tax-inflated price, a young woman in DIY-compliant uniform filled up a Mitsubishi's fuel tank. She wore black jeans, various gleaming metallic accoutrements, a black hoodie, and her hair, too, was colored an improbable shade of black. Her nose might have been pierced; I'm going to say it was, so picture it with me.

I did a subtle double-take; there was nothing terribly important about her refueling, nothing terribly striking about her or her car, and yet something pulled me up short. Her car, the Mitsubishi, wasn't terribly small and seemed an awfully nice, less than fuel-efficient vehicle for a woman who looked like she favored Cars Are Coffins stickers. More importantly, the car looked entirely too expensive for a girl in torn black jeans -- a loaner from mom and dad, perhaps. I smirked inwardly, not because it was justified but just because that's what I do: I smirk, alot.

Here's the thing: as I walked into the convenience store, sorting through possible reasons the hipster and her car caught my eye, it dawned on me: the car isn't worth much; it's close to ten ears old. It is the sort of car a poor hipster drives -- maybe not a signature member of that class, but a member just the same.

And in this way, the mind's nefarious tendency towards fixing one time in mind as the present and denying the existance of aggregating evidence to the contrary revealed itself. My time, Moon Time, had stopped moving nearly ten years ago, at least as far as Mitsubishi goes. That particular iteration of the car in question remained in my head a $20,000-plus mid-sized sedan, and so it had remained, even though the model has not issued in anything even remotely resembling that form in at least five years.

Returning to the tarmac after completing my transaction, I noticed that the car was missing a hubcap, shod in cheap tires, and looked its age.

It's impossible not to wonder in what years my other sensibilities are fixed, and what it is, if anything, I view in light of the age it actually is. I'm certain about one thing: I don't see myself for my true age, and I thank my stars for that salutary delusion.

Time Out

The furnace kicks on, belatedly heeding my injunction electronically transmitted. I do not know it's language. I do know, however, how to goad the translator. Sixty-two degrees is all I ask. Sixty-two degrees -- in the dining room, at least, with whatever that connotes for this most drafty corner of the house, my writing table nestled in the corner of my bedroom bracketed by windows that admit nearly as much daylight through the crenellated rot in their sashes as through their murky glass.

An epigraph, apt perhaps only to me:

I'd forgotten. Maybe I'd never known. He sang in that empty packinghouse as I hadn't heard him sing since childhood. Every nub in his sound had been burned away, all impurity purged. He'd found a way at last to transmute baseness back into first essence. Some part of him had already left this earth. My brother, the prizewinner, the lieder recorder, the soloist with symphonies, had found his resounding no. He sang Perotin, someting we'd had in school only as history, the still-misshapen homunculus of things to come. But in Jonah, all stood inverted: more good in the bud than in the full flowering. He'd found he freshness of always, of almost. He made that vast backward step sound like a leap ahead. The whole invention of the diatonic, everything after music's gush of adolesence had been a terrible mistake. He hewed as closely to a tube of wood or brass as the human voice allowed. His Perotin turned the abandoned warehouse into a Romanesque crypt, the sound of a continent still turned in upon itself for another sleeping century before its expansion and ouward contact. His long, modal, slowly turning lines clashed and resolved against no harmony but themselves, pointing the way down a reachable infinity.

The quote is from Richard Powers, deep into the twilight of The Time of Our Singing, page 529 in the Picador trade paperback, far deeper than its poetry should last, but there it is, waiting patiently for each discovery, none so precious as the first, Powers sitting back one afternoon at his computer, rubbing his fingers absently and considering -- Yes, that's it.

At the office this evening, alone after quitting time, I stood from my ineffectual writing, today a labor more Herculean than quotidian, and contemplated the city fallen before me, hundreds of feet down, cars like beads of mercury reasoning in faltering rhythms their ways through constricted grooves attended by insects to absorb into their plump insides, flat roofs graveled over, two rivers made one to run away like the time in every clock I see, whether blinking, ticking, or carving fluid circles in a shallow circular terrarium, metaphors for the ineffable, all of it, of them.

My palms pressed against the glass, I allowed it to resist my falling, a fantasy of weightlessness humming in my core. Unsatisfied, I leaned forward until the full of my chest rested against the glass, which held me with the indifference of one turning to a lesser task. I cannot pen my own story, can neither spin it in gossamer radial rhombuses of words nor fence it in like livestock.

Walking across town, injured shoulder throbbing with a day at the keyboard like a day hammering nails, I gagged on a poem of melancholy. A rejection of blues and grays in the poetry of sadness; a celebration, in its place, of the vividness of solitude, colors knocked off their banal foundations in a shockwave of alienation. Neon neon enough to define neon. The blue border of a posted notice commanding concentration. The atmosphere of sound resolved to order, one conversation to the next, ears like radio telescopes corraling distant messages or tricking static into nonsense facsimile.

Depression is poetry's bad penny. I will not be complicit in its gathering in the bottom of clothes dryers, between cushions, in gutters too valueless to stoop for. I will not stoop. Poetry doesn't need me; it never has.

A backyard, Glenlivet and a cigar, San Luis Rey, sweetish with a mild finish, a hint of something I lack the vocabulary to describe, another language unlearned. But I need no words to enjoy the murky traffic cone luster of its smoldering end, the swirl of smoke eddying around my tongue tingling with tobacco and peat, alive like no other part of me. My Sybaritic essence, distilled.

On my lap I persist in reading a Richard Russo short story I already recognize as an episode from his novel Straight Man, and I try not to feel cheated by the editorial padding, recycling having its place in art . . . and in marketing. And of course a first collection of short stories that emerges long after a novelist has emerged has more to do with marketing than with art.

Upon finishing the story, unfinished when the bus slowed to my stop, I returned to the Powers, and a book I have plodded through for months now, savoring, resisting its inevitable end by reading in sips, as I enjoy the scotch, mulling without haste.

On the street and alley my property connects like the crossbar of a stylized H, someone is always throwing someone else out in a public ritual of shunning alien to my suburban instinct for decorum. Dirty children play unidentifiable contact sports in the untended property two lots over.

An errant ball thudded on the roof of my patio which shed it like water to bounce on the concrete of my neighbor's patio. I eyed its downward trajectory until it came to rest against the low chainlink fence that divides my neighbor's property from mine. I looked up to the children and found one towheaded boy to meet my gaze, daring me to betray my age with an angry injunction. I refused his invitation, determined to remember my own childhood, content that my home, rickety though it often seems, would bear the incursion stoically.

Down the alley, a woman yelled "Get the fuck out then!" with the practiced ease of a leading lady in the third act of a production's final performance, already mindful of her next part, which on paper looks like more of the same.

The grass I have seeded bursts from beneath the overturned clogs of weed and exhausted soil in slim walls of artificial green, the turnedup undersides of the prior yard bare and accusatory. In one patch, the blades number only in the dozens, despite hundreds of seeds. I have probably done something wrong, another task incomplete. I am surrounded with evidence of my impatience. I trail it like a wake behind me.

I live amid mysteries of my own invention for another's gleaning. But whose?

Peanut Butter and Scotch

It's what's for dinner.

Round Tripper

It was Freud, no, who said "Every man is a God in his dreams?" Something like that, anyway, and it's really not that important. I can't imagine anyone would disagree that a great many of us live robust, and completely otherly lives in our minds, in which we pursue and perhaps seize that which eludes us in the world we come to think of as real. Our fantasies our all over the map, some of course more spectacular than others, some more attainable than others. Some have the effect of charting a course to their attainment in the world. Others are more remote, ephemeral, consisting either of things that simply aren't meant to be, or perhaps things that we'd realize had been folly to want in the first place were we ever to achieve them.

Perhaps it's the time of year that leads me to consider this one particular aspect of my fantasy life; as some columnist recently noted, among the more appealing words in the English language for this writer are "Pitchers and catchers." Spring training is nearly upon us. I love baseball, I always will, and though I resist accession to our culture's most dominant metaphors as ultimately stultifying and counterproductive, memes that cabin our imaginations in the worst way, I can't dispute that through socialization and habit I have come to count the game of baseball as a highly instructive and appealing milieu.

Perhaps my fantasy life is richer in virtue of my dominant creative streak. It strikes me as high arrogance to say so, insofar as it's not a quantifiable characteristic, but it does seem to be a dominant cultural assumption: that in certain senses, artists' imaginative faculties somehow exceed those of the non-artists. And I have lived many lives in my dreams, by day and night, eyes tightly shut and sliding anxiously back and forth or open and fixed on some point in the remote distance. But there is one fantasy that never fades, that I indulge virtually (or quite possibly actually) every day of my life: hitting a homerun.

I played baseball from a very young age, and continued on into high school, though I ended my baseball career prior to my junior year because other, er, priorities became paramount. I never played spectacularly well, but once I hit twelve or so I played competently, and had moments of great success. At fifteen years old, I pitched an honest-to-goodness no hitter in my town's equivalent of Babe Ruth level baseball, a considerable feat given that in town leagues it's a given that at least one of your outfielders will be hopelessly incompetent. My last high school team, the junior varsity on which I spent my second year, was atrociously bad, and I was able to pitch only one truly good game (which we lost anyway, I should add). That my freshman and JV teams won only one or two games in two seasons probably had something to do with my early retirement.

At 21 or so, when I contemplated attempting to walk on to my Division I university team as perhaps a relief pitcher, I joined a men's league team for one season. I enjoyed modest success, but my always mediocre hitting had become even more dubious, and as a pitcher I probably hit ten batters in fifteen or so innings due to tremendous problems harnessing and spotting the curveball on which I'd always relied. I also was just beginning to wear glasses, and was dubious about whether to wear them on the field, which led to the rather embarrassing handling of a number of infield fly balls when I was tasked to play second base.

Since then, with one brief exception, my diamond has been smaller -- the softball field. There, I have found much greater success as a hitter, and as a third baseman I've proven far more effective than I ever was on defense in my life as a baseball player. That the ball covers the 60 feet between home plate and my glove in an eyeblink, I think, makes things easier for me: as this blog might attest, I tend to overthink things, and the longer I have to contemplate a task, the more likely I am to muff it. Third bass in softpitch softball isn't a game, it's survival. Evidently, I have a strong will to live and fairly sharp reflexes.

But the homerun -- ah, it has always eluded me. I have hit precisely one homerun in competition: an inside-the-parker in softball in the spring of 2003 that skidded by a shortstop and a centerfielder en route to the far reaches of the park, the low line drive skipping frantically along the parched desert-hard outfield and to the playground over 300 feet from home plate. It didn't hurt, of course, that I am still young and thin enough to be fairly quick around the bases, or that in softball the basepaths from home plate to home plate measure only 240 feet -- even factoring in high speed turns and the arcs they necessitate, the transit covers less ground than the 100m.

But every day, at my desk, in my bed, in the shower, I am hitting homeruns, I am feeling that indescribable satisfaction of a fastball striking a bat's sweetest spot, and watching it streak skyward, watching the pitcher and middle infielders snapping their necks back to follow its transit, the outfielders converging on the groundline of its trajectory at a full run and then relenting long before the ball begins its descent in the simple knowledge that the ball will land far outside the field of play, that it will exceed their best efforts entirely.

Nothing feels anything like making square contact with a swift-moving baseball. Nothing is even close. And perhaps it's this, or perhaps it's that I was roughly a .250 hitter at every level of baseball I ever played (I hit closer to .500 in softball) and didn't hit long balls very often, that makes my memories of the few balls I hit truly well so vivid.

I have a mediocre memory at best, but still I remember as though it happened this morning my first basehit in organized baseball. I was young, perhaps seven or eight, and most bats were as tall as I was. We were playing at a field nestled into one of the quadrants formed by a busy suburban intersection, the monolith of a turn-of-the-century schoolhouse looming beyond the distant right field fence, the skin infield tan, unforgivingly hard, and humped with the ossified footprints of muddy post-rain games long past. A pitch came in, low, but I had nothing like a strikezone back then, and at my height nothing was really unhittably low. I swung, following the ball on its path towards the top of the plate, and watching my bat make strike the ball -- I saw it, and still can -- and I peered up into the blue sky incredulously as it arced up and over the first baseman, who I could see was backpedaling toward where he thought it would land. I dropped the bat and began to race to first base, following the ball's flight as though it were a shooting star instead of a bloop fly ball hit perhaps 80 feet. As I approached the bag, the first baseman continued to stumble backward but to no avail: the ball thumped to the grass just beyond the edge of the infield, and just barely in fair territory. A basehit. A single. My first hit ever.

I remember nothing else from that age with such vividness or urgency. Indeed, I remember my first sexual encounter, when I was considerably more than twice as old as I was that little league afternoon, far less vividly. No graduation, no kiss, no party, no accomplishment or victory compares. Which suggests to me, albeit weakly, that perhaps that first basehit was, for me, more a coming of age than any of these other events were -- an astonishing thought.

I remember other significant hits with similar vividness. I remember my first long ball. This occurred on a field across town, at a higher competitive level, and both the pitcher and the centerfielder on the other team were regarded as among the best players in the league (the centerfielder would eventually lead our high school football team to a state champtionship). That day, the outfield playing me in as they always did given my diminutive stature and failure to prove myself a significant threat, I laced a fastball low and hard, perhaps the most satisfying linedrive I ever hit, the ball rising steadily as it streaked toward centerfield. The centerfielder, Derek P., took two hurried steps in, fooled by the low screamer as anyone who has played outfield has been fooled at one time or another. Once he realized his error, that the ball would sail far over his head, he hurled his glove upward toward it in frustration and futility. The ball, of course, eluded the glove, rolled deep into the centerfield grass, and I scrambled into third bass with a triple. Throwing the glove, it turned out, required a one-base sanction. So I jogged home with an umpire-aided homerun.

That same season, later in the year, I hit another gapper, at another field named for our nation's first president, another triple. After that, I remember fewer hits. As you grow older in baseball, your season comprises more games. Certainly, those were not the last of my extra base hits, and I hit a good deal more over the years. Never, though, did I hit a homerun over a fence in a game situation.

The closest I came to doing so was in that summer of 2003. The field at which I sometimes play softball has a hill in right field that climbs toward a fence and then the street. There's a quonset shack standing in dead center field, the point of its roof constituting a dividing line: to the right, balls that clear the building or the adjacent fence are either ground-rule doubles or singles, depending. To the left, however, a ball hit onto the roof of the shack is a homerun. Although in softball I prefer to place line drives (even the long rolling homerun mentioned above was intended to be a single) than to swing for the long ball I virtually never hit, on one occasion I swung foolishly at a ball far outside the strikezone and up at shoulder level. Something about the swing the pitch necessitated, however, accelerated my batspeed considerably, altered my swing, the result being a mammoth flyball to deep center field. I almost didn't leave the batter's box, as surprised by my show of power as a puppy is by its first true bark. The centerfielder raced over to receive it, should it bounce off the side of the building, and that's what it did, ricocheting wildly off the aluminum face of the structure no more than five feet below the roof's gutter, the de facto homerun line, I'd missed it by nothing at all, but still, another double, another rare extra base hit, and my wait would continue.

Strange mythologies inform our lives. I have spent periods of time lulling myself to sleep by typing out my thoughts in my head, by which I taught myself to type 90 or so words per minute. I have spent years lulling myself to sleep by visualizing the completion of various rockclimbing projects that have bedeviled me; I have no doubt that these exercises improved my climbing. But baseball is always there, the din of a modest group of onlookers, the simple symmetry of eight defenders orienting themselves towards my at-bat, chattering back and forth in shows of support and exchanges of information relevant to their defensive enterprise, the left fielder taking a step or two in and to the left, catching my observation of this move, taking compensatory steps to the right and back, me eyeing the infield for a hole through which I might poke a basehit, and then the pitch, the decision whether to swing or take, and the split-second wait that feels, on the best day, like an eternity.

Softball has been a great deal of fun for me, but it also has confirmed the singularity of baseball. Last year, I returned to New Jersey for a weekend to learn that a legacy game was planned for alumni of my high school's baseball teams: my younger brother, a far more talented all-around ballplayer than I ever was, intended to attend. I demurred reluctantly; I hadn't brought any of my equipment. But before long, I was furnished by brother and father with passable spikes, a glove, and a hat. So there I was, playing alongside fifteen or twenty years of assorted old guys, lined up opposite that year's rather abysmal varsity squad. I made numerous mistakes in that game, and on defense looked like what I was: a guy far more accustomed to the soft, fat unwieldiness of a softball rather than the lean and cruel heft of a baseball. At the plate, I prolonged my first at-bat in probably ten years against full-speed pitching, fastballs, curveballs, and fought off a few pitches to reach a full count before going down on a called strike at eye level. My next at bat, I waited on the first curveball I'd tried to hit, stayed with it (as they say), then went with it (as they say), and blooped a Texas leaguer behind first base, which looked like it just might get down before the secondbasemen could wheel around and get under it, following the same path as my first basehit had, some twenty-plus years ago. Alas, the second baseman was a bit too fast, and he managed to extend his glove at ground level just far enough to catch the ball, the heel of his throwing hand sliding in the grass to halt his skid. A nice try, but not enough. O for 2.

In my final at-bat, our team trailing by a couple of runs, two on and two out, I came up in a position that had become a source of great humor in my family for twenty years. Historically, I have had a knack for coming up with two outs in situations where my team trails. And if you do that enough, even if you're a decent hitter, you will make a lot of final outs. And I have. More than my share. And there's nothing fun about returning to the bench as the guy who failed to keep the team's hopes alive, though it gets easier with practice.

I was all too conscious of this as I dug in against the varsity's closer, a pitcher who threw much harder than the other guy I had faced. He was tall and broad of shoulder and thigh and generally imposing. He pitched from the stretch with a slidestep that left little time for picking up the ball out of his hand. I felt as I had during my first at-bat: wholly lost, ten years' removed froom any proficiency at this sort of thing, and at least modestly concerned about getting hit by one of the stopper's hard fastballs. (Getting hit by a fastball is another rather unpleasant thing one doesn't easily forget, and for which there is no adequate comparison.) His first pitch, surprise surprise, raced toward my jaw, and for a moment I stood transfixed, certain that I didn't know how to evade the ball. At the last second instinct kicked in, and I dropped the bat, raised my lead shoulder, and fell away from the plate just escaping the ball's groove by a few inches.

This of course did nothing for my comfort level in the box, and I decided my best bet was to guess what the pitcher would do next. I decided to look for a fastball on the inside part of the plate, but in the strike zone. He threw me precisely that pitch, and everything seemed to slow down. It was a bit further inside than I would have preferred, but it was a strike, one I couldn't afford to take idly. Instead, I stepped into the pitch and brought my bathead around swiftly, looking to pull the pitch into left field. The contact couldn't have been more perfect, the ball leaping off the best part of the bat and hooking down the left field line. It was low, rising just enough to pass cleanly over the leaping thirdbaseman's glove as it arced left toward the line and dropped to the ground thirty or so feet into left field just inside the line -- a single, but an honorable, sharply hit one. I had beaten the pitcher; I knew it, he knew it.

That was possibly as satisfying a hit as my first, and as any of the hits that followed. Trivial as it was in the end (not only did we still lose, but we lost two batters later when yours truly got picked off breaking too soon in an attempt to steal third base), it occurred under adverse circumstances for which I was woefully underprepared. Of course, I still managed to come up with a way to make the last out. And I still continue to fantasize about the heroic late-inning homerun it becomes less likely I will ever hit with each passing season. And I don't care. It's my fantasy, my game, my childhood.

Back back back -- GONE!

And the crowd. Goes. Wild.

Glider

It's under suboptimal conditions -- leaving my eight-month-old car with my beloved Polish Hill mechanic (if you ever need a killer mechanic, as honest as the day is long, drop me a line) -- that I find myself on Bigelow Boulevard this morning walking on the crumbled downhill sidewalk toward downtown to the next 77A/B/C bus stop, below the second pedestrian overpass from the Bloomfield Bridge. The cacophany of high-speed traffic speeding by on my left is enough to chew up what ration I have of early-morning tolerance; by the time the angry blat of an engine-braking rig subsides, I'm scaling the chainlink fence to my right and keening skyward in a voice that only slowly comes back to me as a lull in the traffic follows a change in the traffic signal.

Embarrassed, I unhook the fingers of my right hand, move it down to my hip where I thread it back through the links and begin the process of returning myself to the sidewalk, checking over my shoulder to be sure that my bus isn't just around the bend. I'll run to get to the stop in time if I have to, congestion and all, and I'll climb aboard blue-faced and winded with a smile, anything to get away from the incessant rush of traffic speeding toward downtown, which hastens to arrive there it will inevitably start wishing it could go back the other way. I know these people. I know myself.

There's no bus in sight.

I resume my modest progress toward the second footbridge, ears ringing and heart pounding, and chastise myself for not remembering that I could have taken an alternate foot route that would have shielded me from Bigelow until I was just downhill from my stop. But I'm out of practice; whereas my last car had me at the shop every three or four months, it seemed, I'm spoiled now, unaccustomed to a car that starts and runs and seems to enjoy his life a great deal (yes, "his" -- this weekend, after he put up a hell of a fight under adverse conditions, I named him Luther, a strong name he fully earned) . I fancy myself the reason, but he seems a car designed to have fun, so he probably would enjoy himself with anyone who would let him run. Of course, very few people, even among those inclined to pay the premium money for a race-tuned sports-compact, would run him like I do. But then he doesn't know that. It's so rare that any of us recognize our own good fortune.

Anyway, enough with the personified car. He -- it, after all, is just a car.

So back to Bigelow: I'm walking toward the bus stop in the morning fog that slowly lifts like a stage curtain, trying in vain to block out the racket of passing vehicles, looking over my shoulder every so often to confirm that the bus has not yet rounded the bend, and that a tractor trailer isn't bearing down on me intent on tossing aside the thin concrete barriers (which I imagine wouldn't protect me from so much as a Range Rover moving at moderate speed) in lethal pursuit, and trying to avoid puddles that will force water through the porous leather soles of my rain-inappropriate italian shoes. (I simply will not wear galoshes. I've come to prefer the consequences of my stubborness to what I might gain by changing my mind. In my humble opinion, there's only one good reason to wear "rubbers.")

To my right, as I near my objective, a few sad houses slouch on their knees against the sidewalk, benumbed and benighted with soot and road grime, eyes slit in mockery of sleep must elude them like water eludes Tantalus. Unlike so many houses dotting thoroughfares in well-off parts of the country, these houses have no shield against the frenzied back and forth sinewaves of traffic to and from downtown, no armor except their grimy vinyl siding, their bloodstreams the povery-stricken, equally set-upon families that choose to live there, in houses they surely must have selected in full knowledge of what they were getting into, as I imagine Bigelow is older than the number just about any ordinary family's eldest members' house-buying years.

And so this does happen. People live in trailers in tornado alley. They build and restore and rerestore ramshackle cottages on floodplains. People live in broken down homes because they have no choice. They rent, because they need three bedrooms for their children but can't afford even to think about owning; or they own for similar reasons but for their good fortune in somehow cobbling together enough money at one time to secure a mortgage. Indeed, nothing should be more self-evident to me, in this particular neighborhood, on the ribbon of dilapidated pavement that separates this end of the Hill District from Polish Hill, each neighborhood comprised in significant proportion of houses I can't begin to imagine living in, virtually all of which are called home by some handful of people, a family or a young working-class couple, or perhaps an heir who took the property when her last parent died because she didn't know what else to do. There's nothing extraordinary about this.

But the porches -- they're what get me. These porches, narrow, painted in gray peeling away to reveal aqua peeling away to reveal seafoam, sided in vinyl and viewed through a sliding window far smaller than the original window in that opening must have been. Porches of plywood and clapboard and poured concrete riddled with injuries like giant bites that reveal it's dry-rotten entrails of gravel and dust, which bleed into dusty cones on the sloped and sagging floors. And on one of these porches, an old steel chair, rustoleum'd within an inch of its asphyxiating life, preserved in its misery, forlorn in one corner of a porch. On the next porch, a glider, its plywood platform exposed by the absence of cushions, perhaps taken in for the winter, which thought merely reinforces the suggestion prompted by these two unlikely pieces of furniture: that people actually sit on these porches for recreational purposes.

Do these houses lack back porches or decks that look down into the valley from a vantage shielded by the house from the worst of the traffic noise? I'd rather play Boggle in the basement with a pre-literate buffoon than so much as smoke a cigarette on any of these porches, where for all the CO one probably inhales smoking seems redundant. The thought of trying to sleep behind one of the low-enough-to-touch second-floor windows, even when closed, gives me chills. And my stomach turns at the thought of the exhaust stench the room would collect were the window left open for any significant period of time, as evidenced by the blackening residue in the corners of these homes' siding and splintered and peeling porch supports and everywhere else in sight.

At the busstop, I'm restive. I can't stand still. I move to the lee of the pedestrian overpass but then I can't see my bus's approach (soon, please be soon). I move to the other side of the stairs, and step back away from the road, but the noise appears to rebound from the concrete beside me in a reverberating process that's more horrifying than walking down the side of the road was. I pace back and forth in a futile lowercase t, resigning myself to my discomfort, wondering what it would be like to try to have a friendly conversation as I walked by one of those porches if someone were sitting there. A conversation in which "excuse me?" and "what" mortar together the bricks of whatever smalltalk we might muster before surrendering to the impossibility of sharing ideas under such adverse circumstances.

And this -- all of this: this is somebody's morning symphony. His cup of joe. Her orange juice and newspaper (delivered to the downhill side of the house, ostensibly, though the thought of a maverick paper boy racing down Bigelow Boulevard is not without its charm). Someone's communion with humanity each day. And it could be mine, had things gone differently. It still could be; I assume nothing.

And I count my blessings.

Often.

Nights Like These

Nights like these, the poetry won't come, the cigarettes burn and singe and yet there's always one lit, sitting in the ashtray, mocking your presumption to health, the occasion is tainted by the lingering knowledge that the new car needs to go into the shop tomorrow, early, thanks to what manufacturer's understate as a "road hazard," thus avoiding liability under the warranty. The lawyer bristles and knows resistance is futile; the consumer wants to scream and remonstrate and insist and turn blue in the face at the injustice of it all.

Nights like these, the checkbook doesn't balance; the apartment doesn't clean or rearrange itself in anticipation of guests tomorrow; and you don't know anything more than you did yesterday.

Nights like these, from your desk you watch the receding taillights of yet another car hurrying the wrong way up your one-way street, and cringe in anticipation of the bang that in five years has never come, but one of these days . . .

Nights like these, a Norton's Anthology, a Dictionary, and a yellowing Dylan Thomas collection lay atop each other in a way that does not conduce to spinal health, lexical lovers in frolic, and fail in their fervor to remember that they are here to serve you, and so their distraction prevents the words from coming as they writhe and groan and get in the way of your elbow when you reach for your cigarette, which shouldn't be burning in the first place since you just had one ten minutes ago.

Nights like these, the city is damp and chilly to an extent the mercury can't explain, and everything whispers conspiratorially about your failings and restively awaits the overnight blanket of another Pittsburgh fog, which will obscure everything but your own insistent malaise. Sherlock Holmes would be comfortable here. But you're not. Not tonight, anyway.

Nights like these tapping away at a filthy keyboard doesn't solve any of these problems -- indeed, it becomes a new problem in highlighting the aggregate effect of the myriad others. And the cats sleep or chase cellophane around the apartment or miao plaintively while you ignore them, ignore yourself, ignore the damp and the drizzle and the fog, the ache in your lungs signaling an incipient cold, ignore the stubbornly noncompliant checkbook and the lascivious menage a trois, and whatever else you might otherwise consider, the incidents and erata of another day dealt with dubiously, another sunrise and sunset unseen, a few more wasted hours on your aching buttocks before a glowing LCD screen, the ailing whirr of a cooling fan the size of your zippo buried deep inside obscure machinery, the various pools of light and scraps of paper and detritus of a mind as scattered as seed in an April breeze too remote to imagine.

Nights like these, sleep is the only solution, and yet . . .

Nights like these, the temptation to stand tiptoe and try to see over the darkness to the coming dawn is as overwhelming as it is impossible even were you willing to stand. And you're not. Dozens of empty bottles won't carry themselves to the curb, nor will the newspapers; the garbage won't tie, extricate, and remove itself from the apartment. Dishes won't dance to their own melody in the sink before diving, clean, into the drainer to await their next tasks.

And you won't sleep. Won't clean. Won't write. Won't learn a goddamned thing or effect the slightest bit of change. Not on a night like this.

Nights like these, your past mistakes crowd you on the occasion of their recurrence, and they laugh . . . they laugh until you weep. Nights like these . . .

UPDATE (the next morning): Okay, so the apartment is clean enough for company, the dishes washed, the checkbook balanced, I still feel vaguely sickish but probably better than I did yesterday morning (Thank you, Thera-Flu, thank you), and I seem to have slipped the recurrent mistakes' bony clutches at least for the time being. All of which is to say [/self-indulgent high school literary journal maundering]. Thank you, drive thru.

Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

I've tried hard, and will continue to try hard, not to let this site devolve into an ongoing political screed. I am very politically minded, and I am left of center (as anyone with a moment to ponder anything on this site would easily surmise). Still, many others do politics better than I, possessed as they are of more knowledge, more rhetorical skill, and more passion to share their views.

At present, I have yet to get around to setting up my template to accommodate links. Accordingly, you have no access to my Favorites file, which is chockablock with blogs and media sites that satisfy my political appetite. I will post many of these, eventually, because they inform who I am. Still, I will largely refrain from doing more than occasionally calling attention to certain stories or postings of particular interest.

The personal being the political, however, sometimes my poorly articulate vision for this repository of ephemera coincides with my political interests. Baltar, over at bloodlesscoup, has done a belated but excellent job of parsing at length the speech President Bush delivered on the occasion of his inaugural. With political speeches, especially historic ones honed over months by innumerable talented aids and writers, it's appropriate to read the words like poetry, and milk them for every cadence, their import in context, their under- and overtones. Baltar has done a great job of it, and makes a number of excellent observations. Go read it.