December/January

Icicle fingers and fangs, ICE, The Red Wheelbarrow, bullfighting

December 15

What does it say that I’ve been back in New York for two weeks without once writing here?

I came close to power today, in a meeting with Zohran’s transition team. Across from me was a waify senior advisor with White House experience and fingers slender as icicles. She ran the meeting comfortably, clearly accustomed to a roomful of strangers eager to make things happen. I wondered what her mornings were like. I was reading a profile of her Friday evening that told me what her mornings were like and now here she was sitting across from me on a Monday morning.

December 21

Perversely, some part of me misses the drama that losing Dana and my Dad infused into life. If nothing else, I had a clear purpose then. Now, life feels dull, not least because the two of them are absent from it. Life no longer feels surreal either, just taxing. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been sleeping in more. On weekends, I part the curtains so that I get a face full of sun at 9am. But even then, I lie there tanning my eyelids until 9:30am.

I had a great desire to read but watched three movies instead: Ghost Trail, Festen, Moon. Festen was like nothing else I’d ever seen and a perfect precursor to any big family gathering.

December 22

I started reading Loorie Moore again. Hard to think of any writer more original in their use of metaphors. Think to myself: a Substack post excerpting the best lines from her short stories would do good numbers.

December 25

Sitting criss crossed on the couch with a new book in my lap in pale imitation of my father and feeling newly tender toward my mother on account of Anne Carson’s poetry, which is wintry, Midwestern, and lyrically hints at caring for a dying mother.

I quickly scaled three flights of stairs for privacy and quiet only to be smacked with the powerful tang of catshit. I clean the litter, make myself another coffee, and return to the high desk with my notebook.

My own family is far-flung. Brother in Memphis. Mother in Lincoln. Father in mother’s basement in a box of cinders that’s heavier than you’d think. Outside, it’s one of those days that pulls the blinds over the sun, leaving only an ashy glow.

Yesterday, we made an attempt at the seven fishes. A fish pie did the lion’s share of the work, massacring four of the seven in one fatal pastry. I admit I was wary, but it was good in the end. I was more concerned with the river fish on my cans of beer, which I drily dispatched one after another.

December 27

I woke up to Chicken’s hunger, as usual. After I fed her, I got back in bed to try and summon the memory of my dream, allowing my mind to wander its own shadows. In those shadows, I found a new kind of dreaming -- one I hadn’t engaged with since I was a young student. I simply observed my own thinking, taking notes as it hopscotched from my brother to airplanes to the price of this or that to the opening sentence of today’s diary entry.

When I finally got out of bed 40 minutes later to make coffee, I looked out the third floor window and was struck by the sudden beauty of a red stop sign in a field of white snow. It was perfectly ordinary, but something about it felt precious and innocent, perhaps even civically righteous. The fire engine red stop sign stood tall and officious amid the overnight snow, which was still undisturbed and serene-looking. And though bundled children would soon emerge with sleds to race down the school hill and plows would soon come to clear and salt the roads, they had not yet done so. For now, the snow quilted street, sidewalk, and grass under one cold banner. And the shallow creek appeared dark and syrupy against the clotted creamy snow atop every rock in its thin wake.

The scene reminded me of William Carlos William’s famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow. The famed physician-poet lived only a half hour’s drive from where I’m writing this. I reread the 16-word poem and immediately likened it to the Art Basel banana -- another primary-colored stunt.

Later, driving into the city to see a Talking Heads tribute band, I told C and her dad about my third floor vision and read them Williams’ poem aloud. After I read it a second time, Celina defended the poem’s logic. She saw the important mandate that Williams saw. So much depends on one’s ability to see beauty in what is small and ordinary.

January 1

Dozing off to the strange violent beauty of bullfighting. Not barbaric, but definitely medieval insofar as it makes a sport out of blood and entertainment out of death.

January 4

Went bowling at Whitestone Lanes with Pam/Alex and Ellen/Wolfi last night and got hot pot after in a Flushing mall complex. Rolled a 125 and 162. They gave us two lanes, and the girls took one and guys the other. I had a hunch the boys would make a business of bowling while the girls talked. Sure enough. The boys tried to slow down and gab, but the magnetism of the lane had a strong pull that we had to clench our teeth to resist which made conversation difficult.

Alex and Wolfi are friendly Austrians who grew up in the same small village and lived on the same Berlin block for several years, but never knew each other until they met in New York.

January 12

I spent the morning reading the news. I started on the international desk where human rights groups were reporting that a massacre could be unfolding in Iran which was experiencing its largest protest in decades. As in the past, those in power responded forcefully and, under the cover of an internet blackout, executed hundreds of protestors.

I then read Jasper Nathaniel’s Substack on Israel’s plan to settle the West Bank, and how those plans are plainly telegraphed via spokespeople and local media.

On to the national desk, where ICE has been under severe scrutiny following the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The SUVs, the masks, the sense of impunity these law enforcement officials carry with no respect for the letter of the law or regard for human dignity. Good was killed just blocks from where George Floyd gasped his last breath, launching a nationwide protest not seen since Ferguson.

Finally, local news. Hochul is considering a bill demanding ICE officers not wear masks. Mamdani is being criticized for not commenting on protesters chanting pro-Hamas slogans in a Jewish neighborhood. His move into Gracie mansion. His efforts to bridge the social-first poetry of campaigning into the tougher mandate of governing.

January 18

Outside glows blue like cold lightning. Inside glows orange from flames and bulbs from the prior century. We made it north today. We were supposed to come up yesterday, but as we were packing and watching the snow come down harder and harder, the cottage owner called to warn us the roads were bad and we all agreed to delay our trip by a day. Thank god because I was horribly hungover, the likes of which hadn’t happened since the time I went to New Orleans for my ex’s 21st birthday and tried to match an alcoholic twice my size shot for shot because he was my ex’s ex and I didn’t want to be outdone.

But we’re here now in what looks like the Hundred Acres Wood. It is truly a storybook scene: perfectly still and snowcapped. Yesterday’s snow sits inches high on the thinnest of branches and in the slightest grooves on the bark of a tree trunk, as if an illustrator reverse-shadowed the scene to illuminate the heaven-facing earthly matter rather than that which is cast in shadow.

C & I are happy to be students of the quiet. On snowy walks through the wood, we like to stop and listen. We did so on a rail trail by the Rondout creek. It was silent at first, but then the world slowly revealed itself. First came the beating of wings as geese flew overhead in what I thought was the wrong direction. Hungry mallards invisibly paddled. Two woodpeckers traded messages in morse code. The low surf of distant traffic asserted the shadow of civilization. The creek gently lapped the frozen, pebble shores. When we finally move, the heavy snow packed underfoot carries the sound of bubblewrap wrung out but not popped.

I listen now to the fire, which crinkles hot like highly carbonated soda. And to the staccato drip of the faucet made to leak so the pipes won’t freeze. And to the hushed rise and fall of C’s chest.

Last night, I dreamt of an immovable knob of stone in a bed of grass. I kept returning to it, or it kept returning to me as I lay waiting for the sun to rise and then Celina. This stubborn stone stank of the bar.

The fire purrs and I miss Chicken.

January 19

We went for a walk in Minnewaska State Park to Awosting Falls. The trees are different up here, even though we’re only a ten minute drive up the modest mountainside. Reminds me of New Mexico, where dry low deserts and snowy peaks neighbor one another.

Icicles fang over the mouth of a dark cave. We try to name the color of the ice: mucus, urine, citron, baby’s breath, iron, umber.

I would like to return tomorrow, and the next day. I would like to know the many seasons of this place: the freeze that arrests the edges of the river in its icy clutch; the first thaw and how it refreezes overnight; the melt that finally licks away the last of the ice packed hard underfoot.