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.

Dead of Winter

In dusty apartments reeking of cigarettes --

In vacant lots on ten-degree evenings
when even thought freezes and falls to the ground
to shatter among the broken bottles and feces --

In a parking lot outside a bar like a souvenir
of a heedless bacchanal left behind
for the staff to collect and deposit appropriately --

In nurse-white hospitals that purge their atmospheres
of the life they aspire to prolong --

In a car unaccountably parked on an abandoned pier
in a blighted waterfront district full of big plans
and bigger failures --

In a body buckling under the impossible weight of a snowflake
of the thought that there is nothing more
than this cold, this grey, this frozen bustling
to and fro in an effort to present a moving target.

Night Visions

You find yourself imprisoned where cold grows so frigid that it becomes scalding, long suffering the pendant arrival of a bus on an avenue wide like an ocean, wind plucking your heavy trousers stiffened with chill, flapping about your calves under your thrift-store overcoat; you hid inside your earbuds from the desperate urban congress of a thousand bodies shivering in unison, cold beggaring stillness, yet you are still.

On the bus there's been some mistake -- your magazine scans cyrillic and you close it disconsolately preserving the morning's dogear. Tomorrow, or next Thursday, it will be English, or your facility with the foreign tongue will have returned, unannounced, unheralded, one of a dozen faculties that come and go without warning, unbidden, unlamented, un. Like you, drifting in and out of milieux, wallflower and gadfly, authority and dilettante, gravitas and humor. Un.

Hustling down your block, smooth soles slipping atop the icy veneer without warning, penetrating a wall of private sound, something silly, Scandinavian, incongruous, small children crowding a doorway, at play or in violent confrontation, playacting or enacting (un) assault, "motherfuckers" and "bitches" . . . as you pass, sidelong in every way, you try to gauge the exigency, the emergency, whether to intervene, and despite your suspicions that the fists are angry and the victim pained, the assailants' ages and inertia propel you past, to finish your cigarette on your stoop.

You pass a dark figure traveling the other way a few houses later, enshadowed and hunched, and you turn, guiltily, to see whether he imposes, but he doesn't, his occult moral calculus arriving, by whatever path, where yours has. Vaguely mollified, you proceed to your stoop a quarter-block hence, where you linger on your stoop, remove your aural armor, finish your cigarette safely outside, shuffling in the wintry rime at the stairs' edge.

"R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat," one child repeats incessantly, strafing his friends into hamburger. "Is you a cop or a robber, motherfucker?" one of the impossibly small children quizzes. "R-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat." "Is you a cop or a robber?" "R-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat." And so on.

A child rolls on the street, while another throws a length of PVC foraged from anywhere over a fence nearby to clatter on concrete out of sight. A child screams inarticulately, sounding pained, but what can you make of this, which mimicks child's play's universality beneath a patina of something more local, culturally isolate, inaccessible.

Your cigarette burns down, and you roll it between your fingers to loose its burning end like pinching the third mint from the end free of its foil roll. Your fingers numb, uncertain, unmoored, uninvolved, you turn the cylinder with your key and slip into your house, where familiarity embraces you and forgives you -- un -- all you don't understand.

Then the wheels came off . . .

I've always been fascinated by the image of the wheels coming off. For me, at least, few metaphors are more vivid, more evocative, more perfectly descriptive of a certain state of affairs. The wheels break away and the carriage clatters to the road, scraping and groaning, its passengers tumbled together in the wrack or thrown free of the wreckage, bodies akimbo in the gutter or amid traffic, under the disintegrating debris that was, just a moment ago, a viable conveyance. Literally. Figuratively. No matter.

The romance, perhaps, is in the immediacy of the connotation. Mostly, one hears the figure of speech deployed in contexts that suggest suddenness, a lack of forewarning, an exigency unforeseeable and hence particular startling and traumatic. But therein the lie, a romantic notion belied time and again by experience.

Perhaps the warning appears in the guise of a new creak, nearly inaudible amid the road noise. Or maybe a subtle shimmy developed in the chassis, something only the most neurotic, attentive drover would discern amid the ordinary vibration of travel. That minor wash in the road down around the bend by Simpson's farm? You know the one -- you're always complaining about it. Well maybe it got wuder in those awful storms that tore through town in the small hours of the morning last Tuesday chased ahead of that cold front, and it grew just big enough to swallow the front axle whole and shatter it in its inflexible jaws, turning the carriage's momentum into an instrument of its own destruction.

But what to do what to do? For every shudder does not augur catastrophe, and, as though the contingencies outlined above weren't enough, the very act of sensing threat in every irregularity can so scatter one's attention that it effectively pries the wheels off itself, destroying the vehicle as surely as the supposed threats themselves.

And hence the dance. Do you hear that? No, not that, that's been there forever (a different anomaly once feared but slowly integrated into the understanding of the status quo), that other thing -- that ree ree ree? Shh! -- Hear it? -- Hear how its in sync with the wheels? -- It speeds up as we do -- Yeah, that, right, you hear it. Whaddaya think? I look and can't find anything -- But it's something.

It's a fool's errand, chasing down every noise, and it might be better, on balance, to ignore all of it, to welcome the suddenness that follows blithe disregard, to abandon any notion of prevention. But tonight, I really think I hear something. Something I'm pretty sure isn't nothing. It's there, I can just make it out, but I'll be damned if I can pin it down.

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.

Cresting

At the hilltop emerging from the trees,
the sun like a radioactive lozenge
dispels the illness of shade that lent the climb
an illusory chill. Stomach recoiling
from exertion and heat, legs withering --
who would choose this unlikely occasion
to meditate on the nature of things?

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?

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.

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.

Late Night with MoonOverPittsburgh

It's a school night; I'm tired. Tonight I traveled from work to two grocery stores and home, where I poured a scotch, lit a cigar, and spent three hours reading legal articles in an area of law I'm contemplating writing to. Time flew.

I made a late dinner and watched the end of the baseball game, then watched the first half of the Daily Show. As much as I wnted to watch the rest of the show, David Cross being tonight's guest, I forced myself up from the couch to wash dishes and ready myself for sleep. Almost as an afterthought, I wandered outside to retrieve mail I knew to be languishing in the mailbox outside.

I swear to you the night air kissed me, and promised that winter would never come. But lovers lie; he kiss was for "good-bye.".

So instead of lying in bed, reading yet another article that caught my fancy -- this one on classical rhetoric and advocacy -- I'm out here, sitting on the rarely used bench on the front stoop. I'm fulfilling the blue-collar Italian neighbor's friendly slur of yesterday morning -- "Yuppie," he grumbled sover my shoulder like a paternal cuff on the ear, as he watched me obsessively chip accumulated paint away from a cast iron fixture on the front of my house -- blogging on my fancy laptop in the middle of the night, no wires.

I've known it's warm all evening. Doors and windows are open, fans gently turning on their lowest settings here and there. But knowing it and feeling it are two different things. Would that it always felt like this.

On the street, soft orange light reflects off patchwork brick, cheap aluminum, asphalt beset by esoteric forces, and it curls into the glistening bevels of contoured headlights. A heavyset woman, audibly heaving from a half-block away as she powers toward me as through something viscous, compliments my choice of location as she nears in a greeting more hale than her condition. My neighbor's new beau pulls up in his Volkswagen, and we chat briefly about cold-weather motorcycling and bicycling and other mutual interests -- smalltalk. He's very enthusiastic in conversation, as though perpetually impatient with knowledge of something I erroneously imagine to be a secret, waiting for me to reveal it so he can share his excitement without betraying whoever betrayed the confidence in the first place. I like him, as initial impressions go, and I like that the neighbor seems exceedingly pleased with him, but he makes me nervous just the same.

In the trees in the lot a few doors down an insect clicks nightsong from high in the branches, a half-dozen clicks at a time punctuated by long silences. Here and there crickets chirr despondently, as though aware of how natural death has already thinned their numbers, and conscious of their impending ends. Not long now. A day or two, if the forecasters are trustworthy.

Tonight, though, I'm in sweats and a T-shirt, sitting on my stoop, contemplating another summer's passage and the slow and then abrupt decline into winter. I fancy I can sense its onset in the air, but that pastoral myth won't wash tonight. The air may be softer than the average summer evening, but that's it. If you woke me from a long coma to these conditions I would guess anywhere from March to October, weighting my suspicion toward the beginning and end of the range. But I would detect nothing peculiar -- chamomile and pumpkin spice -- to autumn's august ascendancy.

Rather, I would think, "This is lovely," and imagine that I had missed it during my absence, missed this in particular, and only reluctantly conside the rigors of reacclimation to daily life. I would wish that this might go on forever, this temperate stillness, this peaceful street, safe among new friends and the stability of home, braced for the endless work of living, untroubled by my solitude and the sundry strivings and disappointments that fill up my days and illustrate by opposition the treasures of my successes and discoveries.

I would, for a short time, seek nothing more than now, and resolve in futility never to sleep again.

Stop Ticking!

Tonight found me in Braddock, at a library under renovation, an astonishing building with double-hung windows ten feet on a side, stately woodwork in remarkable repair, a fresco newly restored on the ceiling of an auditorium tiered with a variety of seat I have never seen. The seats sat rest vertically, perfectly upright, until folded down, when the seatbacks drop down to a more comfortable angle. The hardware is pewter or bronze or brass improbably ornate.

A partially dismantled organ console stood just off stage right, a tall panel in the wall above it removed to reveal the wing of the stage, which was gently tilted forward, as though to slide the players to the floor at the foot of the audience. The stage was adorned with the suggestion of a two-story house framed in aged beams that suggested driftwood; a bed, a two-sided vanity, and a miniature of the set on a table toward the rear of the stage like an optical illusion between mirrors; a catwalk from the house's upper story to the balcony above.

I don't really do reviews here. Recommendations, I do. Raves, I do. And this is both of the latter.

The play is Quantum Theatre's production of After Mrs. Rochester, and if a review is something you'd like, try the Times Literary Supplement; locally the Trib offers a piece about the play and the library in which it is staged. Rather, it's the experience that interests me, tonight in particular.

On our way to the theatre, I and my friends talked a bit about Braddock and especially its universally well-regarded Mayor John Fetterman, someone who looks somewhat more biker than Mayor, but sounds all Mayor as soon as he opens his mouth. His left forearm bears a prominent tattoo of Braddock's zip code, someone said. Though I sat next to him at a talk not long ago, I hadn't noticed. As we pulled up the library, though, a very large man stood on the dark street by the library, and offered friendly suggestion as to where we might park. As he gestured with his left hand, the tattoo came into view -- the Mayor was directing traffic at an alternative theatre event. When we walked by on our way to the show, he shook each of our hands and introduced himself; it looks like glad-handing on the page, but it was far too affable, too casual, to be only that.

Once we were situated, I skimmed the program. I knew the play was a sort of biographical piece about Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1960's-era book that purported to serve as a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre, recounting the life of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad woman locked in Rochester's attic for most of Bronte's novel. I knew Jean Rhys was a character at two different ages (portrayed by two different actresses), and I knew as well that Bertha was a character.

And now I need to rewind. Quantum's first production this season, last month, was The Crucible, which they staged in Mellon Park in Shadyside (review). It remains arguably my favorite Quantum performance, the classic play so passionately and inventively rendered, so ably performed. In particular, the Proctors, performed by Robin Walsh and Hugo Armstrong, were simply astonishing. Never on stage have I seen such incredible chemistry, both emotional and physical, and within the strictures of Miller's play the latter was especially striking. Quantum did not meddle with the play's origins or let anachronism spoil its clarity; but even within a period-faithful performance, Armstrong and Walsh breathed each others' breath. That's the only way I can think to describe it; they were so utterly evocative as a couple, and their combined performance suggested what is so often lost in period drama, especially on the stage: the fact that no matter where, no matter when, husbands and wives may and do achieve a degree of intimacy like nothing else on earth. Their performances, never overwrought or oversold, didn't imply marriage or signify it: they exemplified it.

And Walsh herself was a revelation: even within her period dress, the restraint and decorum the role largely requires, she exuded a sensuality difficult to put into words. "Hot" sort of works, but it's incomplete. I couldn't take my eyes off her whenever she was anywhere in view. I didn't want to.

After Mrs. Rochester reunites the two -- Armstrong as, inter alia, Ford Madox Ford, Rhys' lover and first publisher, and as Mr. Rochester himself (Jane Eyre, too, appears, evocatively cast with the same actress who plays Rhys' unnamed daughter); and Walsh, brilliantly, as Bertha.

Walsh's Bertha, rendered without restraint in filthy corset and tangled hair, spouting repetitive creole apostrophes and lurking under and against the skin of Rhys at all ages, the demoness whose exorcism from Rhys' psyche limns the narrative arc of the play, is simply incandescent. And "hot" isn't even the word.

Bertha, as insinuated into this play, is the closest thing to Caliban I've ever seen outside The Tempest -- primal, avaricious, and bereft. Walsh injects such physicality into the role, infuses it with so much force and grief, and extracts (evokes is to weak a word) all of the sympathy for Bertha that Jane Eyre simply doesn't afford. Once again, she was impossible to ignore, lurking over Rhys' shoulder, acrobatically moving between the set's "attic," Rhys' bed and writing table cum vanity, at one point climbing a black ladder behind the organ console to lurk laughing in the shadows. Her vocabulary, perhaps a few dozen words, perhaps a hundred, stunted by the simple adamance of her desire for freedom -- from the attic, from England, from Rhys' mind -- and animated by her lust for some sense of a self she has forgotten, nevertheless is made decadent by the breadth of her expression.

Walsh is not young, is not lithe and glamorous (Karla Boos, Quantum's director who cast herself as the elder Rhys (and who acquitted herself well in a most challenging role -- that of a relatively composed narrator who bestrides the chaos about her that manifests her personal and artistic torment), has the shapely elegance of a woman aging well), but her raw animal fervence, deployed to brilliant effect in both of the abovementioned roles but in very different ways, is nothing short of mesmerizing.

On the way out, standing in front of the library on a dark deserted street in Braddock, a police car pulled up as I spoke into my phone. I demurred to the man on the other end: "Yes Officer?" I inquired. "Is everything okay?" he asked nicely. "Yes, fine, thanks -- just leaving the play." A friendly neighborhood police officer politely asking after my welfare. First the Mayor, now this -- in dilapidated, forgotten Braddock, a compelling show of civic pride.

Braddock has its best foot forward. As does Quantum, which has led off its season with two gems. And as for Walsh, well, I do believe I'm hopelessly smitten.

Visit Braddock; see the show; and enjoy it from deep in the depths of the first of Andrew Carnegie's thousand-plus libraries.

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.

Thoughts on the All Star Game

Tonight, I wandered down to the Point, and eventually over to the Northshore, to sample the All Star Game atmosphere tonight in the hours leading up to the Home Run Derby. It was nice to sample the obvious civic pride, and more than once I overheard people, presumably outsiders, expressing nothing short of astonishment at how pretty this city really is, which brought forth from me a surprising rush of pride in my adopted city. As one might expect, a certain number of security precautions was visible, but nothing overly intrusive. Still, though, it's unsettling -- Coast Guard skiffs in the river, just off the promenade, armed front and back with big 16mm cannons, an occasional fly-by by a circling Cobra that literally bristles with weaponry.

At home, the military fly-by must have passed over my house, just barely subsonically. I lacked the vantage to see the planes, but there was no mistaking the sound of several fighter jets buzzing the rooftops of Stanton Heights on their way to the stadium.

We've always loved our weaponry, which has, at critical times, secured freedom for ourselves and others. And this long preceded 9-11. It would be the worst kind of revisionism to ascribe all of this to the recent climate of fear prevailing in this country.

But it wasn't the same. It wasn't. And it's passing strange to wonder whether I will be hassled for training the lens of my camera on the Coast Guard gunskiff or a phalanx of police mugging in a facsimile of dispassionate professionalism. I remember feeling that sort of apprehension before, but in Mexico, not here, or at least not here before 9-11.

I choose, in any event, to revel in the positive publicity this event is bringing to Our Fair City, and now I choose to close this post as the Home Run Derby begins.

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.

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.

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.

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.