Darkness

My building houses a blind man. My building downtown, that is. He rides the same elevator bank I do, to a floor several above mine. He never gets off at the wrong floor, even when his companion dog, a majestic and stoic German Shepherd, occasionally pulls errantly; even though the chimes on the elevator are less than consistent; and even though the elevator passes through six floors of a very large firm that clearly prefers the elevator to internal stairwells for short intra-firm trips up and down.

He seldom speaks. He speaks sometimes -- to a colleague, perhaps, implacable and tall, behind sunglasses, within overcoat, balding. His dog makes me sad sometimes, furtively eyeing the other passengers. I imagine the weight of the injunction that the sighted not attend to companion dogs to be heavy, social animal bracketed and cosseted and denied the congress I imagine he desires. I consider: are there little insurrections? Wouldn't there be?

One night a few weeks ago, leaving the building and heading toward the garage where I lock up my bike, I found myself standing beside this man and his dog at a gridlocked intersection. We had the green, but the cars were interlocked densely through the intersection, and the dog, responding, as I'm sure his training dictates, to the cars over the light, remained sitting in the cold gloaming, even as pedestrians divided and flowed around the two, finding passage in the narrow openings between bumpers, between headlights and tail lights.

As soon as I had crossed I regretted not having assisted the man and his dog. The gridlock was likely not to abate in any sort of way the dog would recognize as permitting passage, and they might be there awhile. A few steps past the opposite curb, I stopped and turned. There they remained, the man and the dog, precisely where I'd left them. Their light was still green. Again, though, my fear of decalibrating the dog or insulting his master gave me pause.

I turned and walked a few more steps and turned back. This time, the light red, the man and his dog were not where I'd left them, nor anywhere on the trajectory I might have expected them to follow. Instead, I belatedly realized, they were angling, man clearly reluctant and in the tow of his dog, through the heart of the clogged intersection, at first at a 45-degree angle, and then increasingly straightening out to head wrong-way down a one-way road, into the teeth of a line of stopped cars. As I watched, horrified, or rather mortified for the man as the still cars presented no immediate danger, the two of them negotiated their error to find their way to a curb-side location catercorner from where they'd originally been aimed.

Having seen, in the literal sense, them to safety, I returned to my path to bike and home, thoughts thickened with the imagination of what it might be like, to be sightless, dependent on a well-trained but ultimately rather stupid animal to guide one through the infinite perils most of us manage without much conscious thought, how gloaming with all its perils is infinitely preferable to perpetual darkness and the quiet challenges and ewmbarrassments it brings. And I imagined how nice it would be, after years of seeing him around, to reach down, just once, and offer the dog my hand.

Touring for Dummies

We don't think about these things. Or I don't. The cold. The water issues. The sores. The frost. The reaching out of my sleeping back to find glasses frosted, cigarette lighter encrusted, the wet elbow from the wet sleeping bag from the cold morning. But then if we did, if I did, we'd never end up in these situations, and what's the fun of that.

So instead there I was, awake just prior to done, poking the fire as though to awaken it, lying back in the darkness to envy the moon her diffuse beauty through the pre-dawn mist, wondering whether sleep would return, whether dawn approached, which direction that was, east suggesting a great deal of night left, west suggesting morning's approach, wondering.

It all began innocuously enough: a Myspace bulletin from a friend suggesting a little ride: a jaunt out of the city, through Mckeesport, and twenty miles or so down the Yough Trail, 45 miles each way, Saturday into Sunday, not enough miles to really hurt, especially given the flat terrain, just a way out of town, sleeping in the open, a celebration of fall.

When we met Saturday morning at Tom's Diner, we were a ragtag quartet. B1 (of Urban Velo) and E (of BikePgh) and B2 (whom I finished an alleycat with, once), gathering for a heavy breakfast and a slow prep for the ride. After breakfast, we scattered, variously, to Giant Eagle, Thick Bikes, and REI for random gear and provisions, before finally reuniting at, and leaving from, REI on Southside a little after 1 for our ride.

The ride itself was much as B1 had suggested, short, low key, pleasant. Temps were between 50 and 60, and I changed out of my fleece tights even before leaving breakfast. From REI, we rode out to the end of the Southside trail, then walked a quarter-mile down the railroad right of way to Sandcastle. There, we rode over to the Greenwood Bridge, and climbed the stairs to its southern end, picking up on a strip of dirt alongside the roadbed down toward Homestead, finally entering traffic where it became practical.

From there, it was 837 through Homestead, out past Kennywood, and then toward McKeesport. After passing through McKeesport's blight, we found ourselves at the trailhead, where we passed up a short climb into the woods, B2 and I discovering the surprisingly well-maintained trail for the first time.

Whatever it is that opposes a sense of urgency is what we had, and we took our jolly good time. We were all on road bikes, so we didn't travel slowly, but we were perhaps too confident of the simplicity of the ride, and so we tarried, enjoyed our various and frequent breaks, were slow back to the bikes. B1 rode a track bike equipped with jury-rigged panniers over his front wheel; E rode a touring bike equipped with panniers over the rear wheel; I rode my Ti-bike, the roadie I don't use nearly enough, and my gear and provisions rode in an unfortunate backpack that my shoulders are still talking angrily about; B2 rode a roadbike and carried his gear in a messenger bag.

The mileage was easy, though, and aside from a few close buzzes in McKeesport, everything was very low key.

Finally, after a stop for ice cream at a trail-side convenience store in Newton, we reached our desination, a campground 40-plus miles from my house, fifteen miles or so down the trail. All along, B1 had been defining this trip by the fact that we'd reach a brilliant shelter, a three-sided structure with the fourth occupied by a working fireplace, stone, with a chimney -- the Lexus of lean-tos, in a sense. And the shelter was just where he said we'd find it . . . and occupied.

Ensued from there a faltering discussion of whether we'd ride onward, to the next campground some 12 miles (and the last hour of daylight) away, or set up without cover at one of the firepits in the same space. The campgrounds near the shelter featured firepits and cinder platforms for tent erection, which would have been delightful had we a tent. But of course we hadn't brought tents, confident that we were the only people in the planet who knew about the ubercool shelter B1 had identified.

After some negotiation, we opted to stay, confident in our gear and the rain-free forecast, and, at least for my part, vaguely excited at the prospect of sleeping under the stars on a cold night. We selected an isolated spot, for privacy, and settled in -- picnic tables, firepit, firewood, etc. It wasn't until after dark at 8 or so that we realized that the pumps at the campsite actually were fed by a conventional waterline, and had been shut down for the winter. Reluctantly, we were forced to consider whether four of us could get through the night on the 20 or so ounces of water (not including my bottle of frappucino) we had amongst us. Deciding that we could not, the two B's decided to head back down the trail four miles to the nearest convenience store, which (conveniently) was open. Eight miles on a star-lit trail, with only street-oriented headlights to guide them. Easily, the trip MVP's on that front alone.

All of this is building up to that moment, near midnight, when we bedded down. I can't speak for anyone other than me, but there's something special about lying down in the darkness, next to a fire, and sealing up a mummy bag to leave little more than an eyeslit, and staring up at the stars above. Within moments, the heal I was resting on the ground, the other foot resting across it, began to take on the cold (my pad is 3/4 length), and I pondered for the umpteenth time the prospect of hypothermia.

Of course, a night with a low of 30 isn't the most dangerous condition one might imagine, but I'm no veteran of this sort of camping, and my 20-degree sleeping bag is nearing 20 years old. I've taken care of it, but I had no illusions about it living up to its rating after so many years, and so I spent the first part of the evening suspicious, wondeing whether it was really up to the task, and taking dead seriously the danger implicit in falling asleep in an inferior bag on a night at or below freezing.

But my heel was hardly numbing, the bag seemed adequate in the heat of the first, and then there were the stars overhead. The stars were beautiful, the woods peaceful except for the periodic trains passing on the other side of the river and the snores of my friends.

For a spell, I slept deeply, my sleep growing irregular only near dawn, when I noticed the fire faltering and the fact that most of our woodpile had disappeared, the word of Brad2, who we later learned had slept poorly and thus tended to the fire intermittently all night, making all of us more comfortable.

And then my eyes opened on full-blown morning, B1 tending the fire, my bag and our bikes encrusted with frost, sleeping bag moistened outside with dew. We lingered for a while, hours in fact, toasting cheap bagels, drinking coffee from a nalgene french press, continuing the endless bullshitting session of the night before, warming to the morning.

B2 and I complained of sores; neither of us had done a long ride in a while. But for me at least the bike welcomed me when we finally got moving. Lots of bitching and moaning, for sure, but that's how these things go. We lazily returned, stopping for breakfast in Newton, for no good reason at a cemetery near the start of the trail, and finally saying good bye at the Hot Metal Bridge, where we split for our various destinations.

But what a way to welcome the cold, and to reject its tendency to drive us inward. Instead, we four consider the cripness of its air, its bugless clarity, its way of pruning crowds down to a hard core, and welcome the transition, the invitation, the challenge. I should do this more often.

Passing the Torch

And just now, Bonds speaks, the stadium still echoing with the mellifluous and generous message Henry Aaron recorded in honor of the occasion, congratulating Bonds. Congratulating Bonds. You'd think I'd be tarred and feather for making the suggestion. But I love the game of baseball, and I won't be deterred from honoring one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, in company with Ruth and Aaron and Mays, men whom I lack the arrogance to compare.

I watched the first at bat tonight, catching it (deliberately) between other pursuits. Barry roped a double 400 feet to right center field, centering a good breaking ball perfectly but failing to get under it. Barry's second at bat coincided with my going to bed, and I ran in from the bathroom, toothbrush in hand and a mouth full of foam, to watch him lash a single to right field.

It was clear that he was hitting the ball well, very well -- hitting it like Barry hits it. Adjusting during lengthy at bats in those minute increments that are familiar to those who have watched Barry over the years and know what they're seeing, taking a breajing ball inches out of the strike zone on a 2-2 count, fighting balls off that weren't quite in the right location.

And then instead of reading for five or ten minutes and lying down, as I usually would, I decided to mute the television, read a little longer, and see how quick the Giants' line-up came back around. It was fast enough for me to linger, reading a good novel with my glasses on, looking up every so often to check on things.

I have tickets to see the Giants when they visit PNC Park on Monday, and as Barry slumped and time passed I allowed myself a sliver of hope that he would come to Pittsburgh still at or below 755. But when he tied the record over the weekend, I knew it wouldn't last until the thirteenth. Tonight as Barry came up for the third time, I found myself impatient, knowing in my heart that he would hit 756 this week in San Francisco, as it should be, and preferring it to happen when I could watch live.

And so as the count went to 2-0, then to 2-1 (looking) 2-2 (swinging) and 3-2, Barry then fouling off one, and another, I watched his battle, his focus, and I didn't doubt for a second that he would swing for it with two strikes, as he always does, missing far too rarely for the force and majesty of his swing. His sweet swing.

And he hit it, sky high into cavernous right center field, and what I imagine was an ugly scrum in the stands -- as much at least hinted in the video replay -- ensued.

Perhaps portions of Barry's career have been improperly enhanced by steroids, Human Growth Hormone, or amphetamines. History increasingly teaches us that athletes will do anything to exceed their peers, to reach what they imagine is their peak potential, sacrificing their own safety and their integrity, for the ephemeral incidents of dominance, or simply to push themselves over the hump, to make themselves competitive in a crowd of athletes with greater natural gifts. Barry's case is hardly unusual to the sport, or the person. That we do not know the breadth of the problem, that we may never know, does not entitle us to burden one man with the sins of an entire sports-media complex -- and yes, I impeach the whole establishment, for reasons that may or may not be self-evident, but which in any event are too lengthy to consider now.

If it was true of him, it was true of the pitchers whom he always dominated throughout his career, and if true of them than true as well of the outfielders who chased his flyballs, the infielders who reached balls that might otherwise have slipped under their gloves.

In the past weekend, Alex Rodriquez hit his 500th homerun and Tom Glavine pitched his way to his 300th victory. Earlier this season, Frank Thomas hit his 500th homerun, and that threshold, once itself rather rarefied, came closer to reach, as it will continue to do as the big hitters of the past twenty years, steroid-fueled perhaps; more effectively physically conditioned and video- and computer-aided no doubt; beneficiaries of modern medicine and nutrition, diluted pitching talent, shrunken modern ballparks, maple bats, certainly -- as this class of hitters and those who follow retire.

And what other records coincide with the steroid era? Sosa's and McGwire's three-year epic battle for the homerun title, of course; but so does Ripken's 2157th consecutive game played, several perfect games and myriad no hitters, Clemens' dominant rush past 300 victories, Kerry Wood's twenty strikeouts on a hot day in Chicago -- the Boston Red Sox winning the championship that had eluded them for decades upon decades. What of these will remain, what feats can we recognize justly, if we refuse to honor Barry Bonds' achievement?

None, an entire era ripped from the history books baseball adores like no other sport even begins to emulate, an entire batch of American legends, none more venerated than the sluggers, the men who bat fourth in the order, who can change the complexion of a game, of a season, with one perfect swing.

In order to reach 755 homeruns in a 20-year career, one must average 37.75 home runs per season. Taking into account physical and mental development, injury, external conditions like the ballpark one calls home, the hitters who line up behind you, distracting personal problems, this is an astonishing thought, especially in light of the fact that when I was young and learning to love this game, when Barry was just entering the game to much fanfare in My Adopted Fair City Pittsburgh, gangly and fast and more of a scrapper than a slugger, 40 homeruns was a plateau that no one reached for entire seasons on end, a very different time than the pumped up, power-focused era that has coincided with my majority.

Whatever happened happened; and with or without chemical assistance, Barry would have finished his career honored among the same handful of legendary hitters to whom he is compared now, even mired in suspicion and invective. And isn't it telling that only a few of the loudest and least informed naysayers seriously maintain that he ever was not destined to be one of the great hitters, or deny that this event, this night, was something that fits a pattern of mastery established long before anyone has suggested any impropriety on Bonds' part. Whatever Bonds has chosen to do, he's done.

At home plate, Barry's son, Nikolai, stood alone, waiting for his father, his complicated, standoffish, embattled father, professional teammates at a discrete distance ringing the dirt at home plate. The real celebration, Barry's embrace of his son, his elevated hands and his upturned face, having passed in a few seconds, the for-the-cameras festivities ensued. The sound of fireworks past center field, over McCovey Cove, visible eventually on camera, Willie Mays on the field (whom Bonds gestured toward repeatedly, honoring his Godfather and legendary predecessor, perhaps his better), Aaron on the Jumbotron making the only appearance he was willing to make, but doing so with dignity and grace.

And then one of the announcers put Barry Bond's thoughts, pensive on the bench in the wake of the crowd's loving display, to words: "It's over." Until the next time, when I'll be watching if I'm able.

Thanks, Barry, for the memory.

Single

All love is in great part affliction.
--Marilynne Robinson

Bruised, misshapen, piteous, what an extravagant array of flaws describe those last unselected fruit in an emptying bin among the detritus left behind by those selected, desiccated leaves and stems, crushed and oozing victims of the selection process or of their transit to market slouched weeping in a corner.

Passed over, suggesting only by aggregation in isolated undisturbed curves and stretches of incongruous health their betters now exhausted: skin red almost to bleeding, muscular with preserving their vulnerable perfection, the implication of rich aromatic interiors.

And will a hand pause among the remainder, hovering equivocation, to weigh sustenance against displeasure? Will it grasp, gingerly weighing and squeezing, or opt for another ingredient entirely, abandoning premise and conclusion altogether in favor of a fresh argument?

Self-pity's jaundiced murmuring: You dawdled, came too late, will to your bed hungry; or, Softened and pregnable, unpalatable, you are ill with rough handling.

Or another facile metaphor in waiting, perhaps.

On On Being Blue

All week, I have awaited a package, a slim volume purchased without photo or much in the way of description from an unknown Amazon Marketplace seller, something I stumbled across while looking for something else, a thin treatise by William Gass from 1975, On Being Blue. I now see that the volume remains available here and there, but at Amazon there was only the one instance, at one rare book seller, and armed with only a two-sentence description I was moved to action by the threat implicit in there being only one copy in the entire Amazon community, the volume seemingly out of print.

Since last week, I have waited anxiously -- either for the package to arrive or for the dreaded email that sometimes follows Marketplace orders, indicating that the item is not in stock after all, so sorry. I waited as though for a distant great uncle on his deathbed to pass, a great uncle by marriage, a great uncle I haven't seen in twenty-five years, but one I love in the strong unquestioning way of family, as a good man who once guided me around his several dozen acres in rural Maine, an undersized boy of seven in bright yellow shirt and burgundy trucker's hat emblazoned with the name of my father's then employer.

The uncle passed this weekend in the rural Maine redoubt he discovered with his family like an unmapped Pacific atoll, rest his soul, at ninety-two years old. Still, though, no book.

Then today it came. Ever so gingerly, I opened the battered manila envelope, stiffened by boards inside, my heart racing. Hardcovered and dustjacketed, two slight tears at the top of the front jacket and the cover otherwise remarkably simple, the paper thick and creamy and textured, like a woven variation on a grocery bag, the endpapers similarly rough, copyright information but no date, no indication whether this is a first edition (although it simply must be), the cover page adorned by a perfectly lovely indigo impress: "On Being Blue." On the last page, however, I learn that this was a limited edition -- 3,000 copies of the trade edition, and only 225 of the "de luxe" edition. A perusal of copyright information and bookjacket identified, by ISBN, my edition as one of the 3,000 trade editions. A limited edition, thirty years old, in fair condition -- for a song.

Inside, under a Roman I on the first page, I found these words:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit -- dumps, mopes, Mondays -- all that's dismal -- low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty; blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

There's more, of course, and I am grateful for it. But I'll stop there, because that, ladies and gentlement, that is what I call a sentence.

An impulse buy in search of inspiration. I don't imagine Gass will start disappointing me now, after all these years.

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?

Lolita, the Great American Novel?

I hate that phrase: Great American Novel. It's no different than any other attempt to apply abosolute superlatives to art of any sort, and as such it's an intrinsically silly exercise. That's not to say it isn't fun, though.

So who are the usual suspects, generally? Gatsby, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn? Maybe we should throw Roth's Great American Novel out of respect for his hubris?

I submit, and I'm sure a Google search would reveal that I'm not the first, that it's eminent emigre Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's brilliant novel, his third composed in the English Language, Lolita.

I haven't read the book in four or five years, have not in any way been prompted to consider it as a candidate, but damn if it didn't just pop into my head, as I contemplate my own incipient project, that the answer is obvious.

What does Lolita have that justifies the brazen compliment / epithet? Let's consider, shall we?:

We'll begin, out of respect for the author, by noting that it is a celebration of the language, a travelogue if you will of what Nabokov characterized, in precisely this connection, as his "love affair with the English language." That's a healthy start, but of course every author cited above would have confessed to a love of the language, so that's not enough.

What else? Well, the book, textually, contextually, and philosophically seriously games this nation's paradoxical obsession with the prurient, its persistent inner conflict between its baser urges and its puritanical origins, its embarrassed celebration (ongoing) of sex and violence and its latent guilt over its pleasure in same. These factors take it somewhere Gatsby never aspired to reach, somewhere Melville wouldn't have dared to go. Both of those books principally concerned themselves with American striving. And of course striving is a critical ingredient in American-ness, to be sure, but it is only one ingredient, and there are many.

Next (and I recognize this point is debatable, but I'm not a scholar and don't have to deal with peer review), Lolita, better than any of the other novels named, explores quietly the nature of the sort of immigration that forged this nation. Not the refugee aspect so much -- although Nabokov was that, in at least some sense -- but the aspirational sense of it -- give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses -- coming to this nation not to escape appalling oppression or genocide, but merely for capital-O Opportunity, an open-endedness that is peculiarly our heritage, if somewhat more in word, in mythos, than in fact.

Then of course there's the veneration of youth to the point of pathology. Everyone loves their children -- there's nothing peculiar about that. But the celebration of youth, the veneration of it, the singular terror at the thought of aging and the ludicrous lengths we go to forestall and deny it, these things are American, and long before this country succumbed utterly to youth's thrall Nabokov wrote about with brilliant clarity. The book, notwithstanding its censors' protests to the contrary, was no defense or rationalization of pedophilia of any sort -- rather, it was a metaphor for a deep unsettledness most of us share with the thought of aging. And the cycle that reflects is self-perpetuating -- we are terrified of aging because we are all too familiar with our own discomfiture at people aging around us. Reification, to leverage a scholarly sort of term.

Finally, at least among encompassing aspects of the work, there is the on-the-road aspect. No country so celebrates its spaciousness as this country does, and of course in the past hundred years this has manifested in a perverse obsession with the automobile. In this regard as well, Nabokov's sense of this place was ahead of its time. Of course, the road novel aspects of Lolita (and couldn't one argue that his was the first true road novel?) reflects more than mere transience, itself a hallowed American tradition. It reflects precisely the aspirational facet so critical to this culture's sense of itself, the idea of escape and reinvention, which I won't dwell on since it's the subject of too much thought already -- it's become a truism of sorts, and I won't pursue it here.

Then there are more fragmentary aspects of the work that further qualify it for the ridiculous title: the celebrity culture emblematized by Quilty; pop culture refracted through the prism of Dolores, a teeny-bopper entirely in the sway of commercial pop impulses, submerged in the tropes of pop culture that now bombard our children with frightening force and persistence; the preternatural obsession with the One Who Got Away, and so on.

So there -- the case is made and I've persuaded myself. If any novel composed in the English language deserves the title Great American Novel, it is Lolita, by V.V. Nabokov, Russian emigre extraordinaire (by way, of course, of France), who saw us ever so much more astutely than we see ourselves.

Friday Shuffle, Baby's First iPod

Okay, I probably won't make a habit of this, but back when it was new(er), some bloggers had fun posting a random cross-section of their iPods via a short shuffle session. I'm new to the whole iPod thing, but sitting around this evening, book-keeping, I threw my iPod earbuds in mostly to test how my ears like them over a period of time and hit shuffle. So far, I've added perhaps ten or so CD's, chosen more or less at random from a collection it will take me months to entirely rip into digital format. The only guide in selecting CD's at this point is to choose ones that I like, play regularly, and think are pretty good from front to back. Here's my first shuffle, or at least the first dozen songs of it:

1. Death Cab for Cutie -- Stable Song
2. Radiohead -- Tree Fingers
3. Medeski Martin & Wood -- Hey-Hee-Hi-Ho
4. Elvis Costello / Brodsky Quartet -- Dear Sweet Filthy World
5. MMW -- Everyday People
6. Fleetwood Mac -- Oh Daddy
7. EC/BQ -- This Offer is Unrepeatable
8. Beam (local hip-hop fusion act) -- Defiance
9. Nirvana (unplugged) -- Something in the Way
10. EC/BQ -- I Thought I'd Write to Juliet
11. Air -- La Femme d'Argent
12. The Shins -- Caring is Creepy

And it goes on, even presently, but that's enough since, aside from my iPod's apparent aversion to playing the Fiona Apple I loaded, that pretty much covers what I've got in there so far.

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.

Shelter Island

28 August, 2006 (as scrawled on a legal pad by the muted light coming through the windows behind me as I sat on the porch in the rain)

The night is saturated and raw, a rude awakening from summer, but the peach hue reflected against the undersides of the clouds across the bay warms the sky. Runoff drums in the downspouts while baysurf sips at what's left of the beach afoot the seawall, insatiable, its mouth full of salt.

Drifting through the night come the sounds of two boats playing tag in the fog like children of sound cavorting behind parents of light, father first, his searchlight caving the mist in sweeping whorls, fixing the opposite shore for a moment before turning to pin me to the porch moist and still, mother steady in his wake, an emerald perched in her tiara?

As mother and father are eclipsed behind the point, their children still play over the sibilant white caps, which climb over their own backs to surf their bellies, and as their game dissipates higher surf visits the beach like a rumor of their passage.

Beset on all sides by water,
we leap from womb to womb
like sunfish breaking the surfact
to thrill in the gasping
before slicing back into the darkness.

** The photo was taken in 1989 from the top of a dune only slightly down the shore from where I sat when I scribbled the above musing. I remember sliding down it on my belly all the way to the beach as a child. FLICKR has many photos of Shelter Island.

Home Sweet Home

It's 8:20; a string of advertisements drones in the background.

The Steelers just took the field, and as they gamboled all over the field reveling in their Super Bowl XL victory on the cusp of the new season's commencement, the camera pulled back. The blimp shot revealed every building in the city lit up in celebration, fireworks launching from behind PPG 1's spires, spot lights lining the river and the Fort Duquesne Bridge waving beams of light hither and yon, and the crowd, the Terrible Towel waving crowd.

I am the last person to lionize professional sports, especially on the day we lay to rest Mayor O'Connor, who was taken tragically in the first year of his long-sought tenancy of the Mayor's office, but it's simply impossible to ignore how beautiful my city looks tonight.

Pittsburgh, its best foot forward, is resplendant under the klieg lights; a smug glow suffuses me at the thought of how strangers to Pittsburgh all over this nation have turned to each other in the last twenty minutes to remark on how stunning our city really is. As well they should. This flawed, bankrupt rust belt town is gorgeous, and has so much to be proud of.

A born New Jerseyan, I've had the luxury in the course of my life of watching each of "my" teams win at least one championship in their respective sports -- the Devils, the Mets, the Giants. But never has my pleasure in those occasions matched my pleasure last year when the city turned out to celebrate the Steelers' fifth Super Bowl victory or the unanticipated pleasure I feel right now watching the nation celebrate this city for a few glorious moments.

The rush of civic pride I felt when the camera pulled back, as it does just now, my own office illuminated like virtually every other office in the skyline, is something completely singular in my experience. And just now I couldn't be more thrilled to live here.

UPDATE: Today (the next day), from a conference room, I espied three of the pennants atop the convention center in a slot between two towers. As would be expected on this occasion, they were bedecked by alternating flags of black and gold. But despite the festivities they bespeak, the flags fly at half mast in honor of our fallen Mayor. An apt memorial for the Mayor billed as that of the common folk.

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.

Lightening

If rock climbing restored to me the pleasure I take from being in the woods, cycling has restored to me the even more primitive pleasure to be found in rain. Left to our own devices, most children will rush out into each rain storm, plunge their hands, palms down, into the nearest puddle, and cavort heedless of any risk of illness or hazard.

I have logged something like 50 or 60 miles in the past 10 days alone in rain -- first at the Ride of Silence, then in the morning of Pedal Pittsburgh, and then this morning and this evening riding to and from work.

Children are a burden on their parents, no matter how they spin it presently or later. And children do -- it's true -- pick up colds as readily as pebbles and sticks and the inappropriate tics of their parents. Sick children are more burdensome. So we forgive parents, and preemptively ourselves, for being prudent to a fault.

But what do we miss, raised to believe that rain is an adversary from which we reflexively hide beneath umbrellas and oilskin, roofs and awnings?

Were rain lethal, or even a terribly bad thing, we never would have made it to the point of fashioning even crude shelters. We would have perished like all the other maladapted species who speak to us in crumbling, blanched whispers from the deepest strata of history.

Tonight, climbing out of Panther Hollow into Oakland, and arriving at the bottom of Schenley Park, the sky loomed ominously, as it had intermittently all day. I had divined from the satellite map a tentative expectation that I might fit 20 or 30 miles in between the visible rain bands, which seemed in jerky flipbook doppler animation to be moving more slowly than is usually the case. But I am no weatherman, as the world sees fit to remind me, time and again.

The prospect of rain required no mental preparation; the skies had tipped me off for the six or so miles I'd ridden from downtown, had whispered to me even before I turned the office light out on my workweek and embarked on my long weekend, Memorial Day . . . .

As I'd intended, I began my ascent, loose and ready from a moderate-paced ride out of the city. I passed the Conservatory, bent right onto the bridge over Panther Hollow below which I'd passed not ten minutes earlier, and negotiated the complex of overlapping ramps and merges to enter the park proper. I lifted out of the saddle to get up the momentarily steep first switchback, then resumed the saddle for the mild climb to the next.

I heard live music, the Ramones, from inside the park, the tinny sound of a snare played out doors, the flurry of nonsense syllables, and over all of it the piercing squeals of tween or teen girls, mocking a ritual invented by the oldest among their parents as though it were a birthright. Rounding the bend, I saw the source of the noise, the volume of which was increasing. A few dozen kids were crowded into a shelter in David Lawrence Park, tucked perfectly into the rectangular rainshadow provided by a peaked roof standing on four pillars.

There was something surreal about the prospect of a middle school or high school band, playing the same covers I had played in the one living-room-bound middle school band for which I had briefly played keyboards nearly twenty years ago. Aside from this unlikely tumult, the park was almost empty, nothing like it was on Tuesday when Frightened Monkey and I invented, in slightly longer form, the particular route I rode tonight.

As I reached the top of the park, approaching the tennis courts, I considered the prospect of lightning. Even exposed, more or less alone at the top of a park, I couldn't find the energy to worry much. I wondered briefly whether having bicycle tires between me and the ground would save me. I imagined not, but figured the odds of being struck by lightning were, well, like the odds of being struck by lightning. My corduroy shorts became saturated and stuck to my legs; my sunglasses became impossible to see through, leaving me with a familiar choice between uncorrected vision, rainfall constantly interrupting my vision, and obscured but corrected vision through sunglasses that I'm sure look sillier than they really are when the skies darken and empty themselves on the world below.

Descending through the trees, slow to accommodate the danger presented by poor vision, the canopy's untimely shadow, and the prospect of a line of parked cars, I witnessed the absurd spectacle of a man trying to mount a mountain bike to a trunk rack while hiding under his umbrella. I resisted the urge to call out something mocking, recognizing that I looked as absurd to him as he did to me.

But why hide? Why treat the rain as something to be endured only reluctantly rather than embraced and celebrated? The rain continued all the way home, out Forbes through Squirrel Hill, across Braddock through Point Breeze, down Dallas into East Liberty (or whatever neighborhood lurks between Point Breeze and Highland Park), through Highland Park and up Stanton into the Heights, skirting the edge of Morningside, and then finally, shamelessly riding the brake down into Lawrenceville and home.

As the rain diminished, my glasses dried into something less than clear, my gloves squelched in time with my cadence as I methodically climbed Stanton out of the saddle, water moving around within my shoes, dress socks, all that remained of my workday uniform, sodden and bunching around my ankles, and I wished the deluge back, to complete the circuit, rain by morning, rain by evening, and the welcome prospect of a warmer shower awaiting me at home.

A City Besieged

Grousing about the weather is a Pittsburgh pastime of unquestionable pedigree and endurance. Among outdoor athletes, the grousing reaches crescendi in spring and fall, when the sky grows dark and ominous with the prospect of rain, and the sun finds summer at or below the equator leaving us all pining for its grace with the faith of the devout; and on the tenth or eleventh consecutive day without sun, like a lapsed Catholic, our faith falters, and we shake our fists at the sky, bereft, betrayed.

Notwithstanding our uncommonly dry Spring, the delayed arrival of weather more typical of this time of year has provoked the usual hue and cry, our yearly ritual. Brian's in on it. So is David, just days after noting how odd it was that the rains belayed their arrival. And I'm hardly innocent.

This morning, nether regions impossibly sore from 50-ish unpadded miles in the past two days on Susan's miserable saddle, I skipped riding in, especially in light of what should be a long-distance sort of weekend. I figured that if it was vaguely painful just to walk to the shower, naked under my robe, getting back on the bike once again would be intolerable.

Instead I drove, having an after-work commitment making bus commuting impractical. Still half-asleep from the somnolent creep down Butler, I had my breath stolen from me when I turned onto Ligonier and paused at the red light where it met Liberty. Before me lay the narrow strip of Liberty arrowing into the heart of downtown, and at its end stood the monolithic USX and Mellon towers, dwarfing at their feet the cornice of the granite facade of the Pennsylvanian, its lower stories eclipsed by a train trestle in the foreground.

All paled beneath the sky, which was bruised and inflamed with the insistent vibrancy of spring, and lurching toward the city from below, the vividly green flora of Polish Hill, within which hides the narrow, begrudging easement of Bigelow Boulevard. The sky and the hillside formed discordant jaws threatening to devous all the iron and concrete of this city, the water of the rivers perhaps rising up to facilitate in- and digestion. The city, in a word, looked small.

The wind hurtled about my car, the clouds about to reach down and pluck me from the roadway, and all I could think was: I wish I were on my bike.

I can take or leave the rain, in itself, but I love this weather, its profundity, its urgency, its life-giving ablutions, and I love living in a city so green, with hillsides to look upon, waterways to stand beside, backroads down which to disappear.

Missing the sun when it goes is a biological thing, and like anyone when it goes for long spaces of time my spirits plunge and I find myself aching for something I cannot name. But I wouldn't trade those struggles at the expense of this, the heavy gray sky I see out my window, offset with the blues and greens and reds of the city and the suburb, the bright yellow of the right field foul pole at PNC park, the gleaming dome of a distant church, a sliver of brilliant green marking the trees between the Gateway towers, and the gray, always the gray, the gray that is white and blue and purple and even a little green, the gray ever-changing, bringing with it all the joy and petulance of resurrection.

Truly, I do not mind the weather in this city.

MoonOverHarrisburg

Actually, there was no moon to speak of, unless by moon you mean Moon, as in me, inhabiting the streets of this capital city after almost everyone has gone home, or somewhere else at any rate, unless by Moon you mean a small, pale, concentration of reflected energy at Third and Forster, in the shadow of the capitol building, rotunda exterior all illumined in green and cream, the plaza about the building qua astonishment open to the public as though terrorism was just a story you tell your children to keep them in line, flush (as I was) with the intangible learning of an evening spent plying someone with a wealth of knowledge to share (even if the Mets were losing to Philthadelphia in the background) . . .

Yes, let's think of it that way, the Moon over Harrisburg my aquiline face, reflecting dully the shared light of a dozen streetlamps, and Harrisburg itself, among the more storied cities of one of this nation's more storied states, the river a few blocks hence, eclipsed in its unaffected beauty only by the opulent enterprise of men, this capitol, this building atop a hill, and the simple, unpoliced knolls of its setting, a green apron beneath bluish light, reminding me, as every setting does, that home is here, right here, wherever I bed down for the night comfortable in my own skin.

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?

Flowers on His Pillow

Crystal morning reverie shattered
by thought's banal intercession,
he resumes his body to find
his fingers walking the unfamiliar
landscape of a duvet of another's choosing --
weary prospectors lost in the desert
gasping toward a fantasy of water.

As alone in wakefulness as in sleep;
equally uneasy as audience
to the play of morning and as player
in a murder of dreams;
his Grand Guignol
of contingency and regret
wrought rewrought (and overwrought) by day,
staged in perverse infamy by night --

each morning his fate fulfilled:
a series of awakenings in strange beds:
flowers on his pillow
ashes on his tongue.

Kissed By Spring

Over two weeks since last I arrived at work on two wheels, last night I went to bed in a drizzle and doubted my triangle-shaped Tuesday commute would allow for a bike. Even as late as the shower this morning, I remained uncertain. Emerging from the shower, however, I found sun streaming through the open bathroom door and spilling down the tile wall.

I wandered into the living room, wrapped in a towel, hair wild about my head, and leaned over a chair into a high livingroom window, spattered opaque with last night's rain, a thousand jewels obscuring my street view with their brilliant twinkling in the morning sun. But unlocking and then sliding open the tall window, I had the immediate sensation of childhood springtime, a day to bring only a light jacket to school that would never leave my bag once out of Mom's sight.

From an elevated dais somewhere down the block birds sang reveille, the neighborhood's morning news, the facing houses chin-tucked and enshadowed while the sun tried in vain to read the newspaper over their shoulders. The road shone still. The brief pause following the opening of the window -- outside air startled into stillness, momentarily, to find such a warm and generous portal to explore -- ended, and the damp morning chill warily poked its nose through the screen, before entering like a familiar houseguest into an unfamiliar party, head high, hand outstretched in greeting, presumptuous without importuning.

An invitation to ride I couldn't decline.

Forty-five minutes later, fed, vitamin'd, dressed in shin-length cut-off cargo pants instead of the fleece-lined tights to which I've grown all too accustomed, I hit the street. (Actually, first I wrestled with my messenger bag, which for whatever reason continues to baffle me utterly. The cats were laughing, I swear. If they're not careful, one of these days I'm going to bathe them. Then we'll see what's so goddamned funny.)

On the street, for the first time in two months of learning, I was comfortable on my still new-to-me fixed-gear cycle from the second my foot left the ground. I started on the sidewalk and was snapped into both pedals before I reached the first driveway ramp into the street. On the street, my cadence was immediately smooth and easy as I held back just a bit heading down my hill to the light, acclimating my legs to the locomotive circles that would define their next 20 minutes or so. Passing to the right of cars waiting at the light, my head swiveled unthinkingly scanning at once the traffic and the road surface for hazards, errant cars making unexpected moves, pedestrians, pocks and gravel. And this was so easy, all of a sudden; my pedaling required no thought: as I looked for an appealing opening to join the flow of traffic, my feet found just the right degree of hesitation, accelerating momentarily when something appeared to open up, and then resisting again at precisely the moment I decided the opening wasn't as good as it first had seemed -- no intermediation whatsoever, hard wiring.

Finally merging into the thoroughfare's morning rush, I discovered that my wrists and my tailbone ached from Sunday's long ride, that my thighs felt a bit hollow and stiff, but my legs warmed easily enough to the movement, and my right shin to the knee was stimulated rather than chilled by the breeze to which it was exposed. For a change, my eyes didn't water as their humor adjusted to the outside air.

Everywhere I rode, every hill taken slowly, every time I allowed myself to quicken to catch a light, every intersection, every abrupt ninety-degree change of direction to angle around a car and thus avoid stopping, all were as natural as picking up a pen and paper, or down-shifting to pass someone on the interstate, like breathing almost, no anxiety for the ever-present risk of someone (quite possibly me) doing something stupid, just being -- on the bike -- on the road -- in traffic -- in the morning breeze.

Kissed by spring, which -- like the jail-trail ride into Oakland I have to look forward to this afternoon -- can't come soon enough. Every day should begin with such promise.

Commonplace, Robbins -- A Propos My Not-So-Secret Valentine

Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable: the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine-thousand-pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. And if the boulder is more special, if it has been painted or carved in some mysterious way, you may find that it possesses an extraordinary and supernatural presence that enchants you, and in coping with it -- as it blocks your path to the bathroom -- leaves you feeling extraordinary and supernatural, too. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Bantam 1990, orig. 1976)

So here's to fresh, high-quality problems, the extreme steps dealing with them requires, and the frayed but still worthy solutions they bear in their fang'd jaws. Salut!

the most interesting woman in town, a valentine

1.

you borrow from burkard:
the most interesting woman in town
walks slower than the spider.
you don't speak
yet i would speak with you

still

we learn to love
the spider
and her slow walk
to love
the slow walking spider
to love
we are taught.

conversely
we needn't be taught
how loathsome are
the spider's prey;
for their slaughter
for their slaughteress
we give praise.

at my own peril i treasure more
the acquired appreciation
than instinct's imperatives,
fine scotch over chocolate
love over lust.

but you are
neither spider nor prey
nor are you a cat
as you might have it
and as i have said
(in pique but not unkindly)

-- neither
treed nor treeing,
slashing nor crying.

you are too
disembodied
for a cat
whose quintessence
whose catessence
is sheer embodiment,
habitation without remorse
without apology.

(you are neither
problem nor solution.)

you are seraphic,
many-wing'd;
your lofty vantage
(where you mistake
the cold breeze coiling
about your naked ankles
for the onrush of
a spring tide to drown in)
confounds your
terrestrial defiance,
yet there too
you find shadows
to hide your fear.

for me no metaphor
of my own devising:
my imminent me-ness
confounds auto-figuration.

but i needn't live as metaphor
to live by metaphor
or to hold a bird in hand
is a bird in hand is
a bird in hand is no
bird at all.

2.

i squint against
the air you churn
in fluttering consternation
before my fool's grin
marshaling conviction
before darting heavenward

one down-wan feather
twirling to rest on my lip
like an eyelash
that tastes of you:

grenache and syrah
cigarettes and coffee
hello and good-bye . . .