Notebook

New Hampshire. I dreamed such vivid dreams last night in the White Mountains, a series of bizarre scenes that arrived with the force of revelation. A world without the color green. A man who repainted all the seashells on the beach. My parents appearing and disappearing in a parking garage filled with water. These dreams had a heat and pulse that reminded me of this quote from Haruki Murakami: “It felt as though a fragment of real life had slipped into my sleeping mind by mistake. Then the moment I awoke, it fled like a quick-footed animal, leaving no trace behind.”

C. and I escaped the city for a few days to see some space and light. We joined a few friends for a trip into New Hampshire’s mountains, and I felt that old happy thrum of possibility as I pointed the rental car north. I was overwhelmed by speed and motion after four months spent within a tight radius of the bedroom, living room, supermarket, and the park. As Interstate 91 gave way to empty lanes lined with trees, we talked about finding a diner for lunch, maybe someplace with massive menus and chrome. And it was remarkable, this sudden act of forgetting among the five of us, a split-second glitch in thought as if we’d left the past four months behind.

A degraded and muffled Fourth of July. The prospect of celebrating America these days feels like a dark joke. Last year the president threw himself a parade with tanks in the street. Yesterday he stood before Mount Rushmore and stoked white resentment while he raged against boogeymen and science. Hopefully these are the last gasps of something dying. Meanwhile, local officials are pleading with Americans to stay inside this holiday weekend. Another fifty-thousand cases of coronavirus yesterday.

This morning I tried to gather my thoughts about being an American in 2020. I stopped mid-sentence after realizing I’d written the same words fifteen years ago, back when I thought the Bush years marked some kind of nadir: I am an American. I say this to myself and marvel at the flush of embarrassment, the red tingle of some forgotten humiliation or slight. I feel as though I owe someone an apology.

Sometimes I hum a nonsense melody I heard years ago from a man on the corner: I don’t care if it gets warm or if it freezes, just so long as I have my plastic Jesus. At dusk I went for an ugly run through the park and found relief in the clumps of people with their blankets and little grilles, laughing in the night and not reading the news.

Tonight I’m hanging onto this quote from David Lynch: “I think it’s money in the bank to get a good feeling going in the world.” Or as George Clinton laid it down forty-five years ago: “Good thoughts bring forth good fruit, bullshit thoughts rot your meat.”

Funkadelic – Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

Standing on the Verge of Getting It On | Westbound, 1974 | More

Today’s the perfect day to revisit the greatest American band. Eddie Hazel’s guitar was made for times like this, and George Clinton arrives at the seven-minute mark, sounding like a god: “You gravitate to that which you secretly love most. You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts. There is no chance, coincidence, or accident. Free your mind and your ass will follow. Be careful of the thought-seeds you plant in the garden of your mind, for seeds grow after their kind. Play on, children.”

Sometimes I dream about tollbooth operators, the half-glimpsed faces with cigarettes nodding on their lips, their left hands forever clutching a quarter and a dime in change. They are the interstate’s guardians, the nation’s unmoved movers among the restless current of people going someplace else.

After looking into the eyes of thousands of travelers and handling their crumpled bills and sweaty coins, these cashiers probably understand humanity better than anyone. The reckless teenagers, hungover commuters, and road-ragers. The cheating spouses and insomniac prophets. The broken-hearted and the hopeful, their belongings jammed in the backseat with plastic-wrapped suits and blouses pressed against the windows like ghosts.

Perched in their nests of space heaters and thermoses, the tollbooth operators watch these vehicles red-shift through the night, darting across state lines in search of fresh lives, hoping to give Plan C or D a shot. In my darkest hours when I tried to drive away grief and confusion, I sometimes thought I saw compassion in their eyes, a look that reminded me of my mother’s hand against my forehead when I had a fever. Maybe they knew I was just another soul searching for deliverance beneath the highway lights.

A ninety-degree day in New York, bright and trashy. Is there a word for the tendency (or desire) to leave one dish unwashed, one bag unpacked, or one message unanswered? There’s an interesting line between procrastination and fear of completion. Both conditions apply to the book I’m forever writing and rewriting.

More than fifty-thousand new cases of coronavirus today as America prepares to celebrate the Fourth of July. Tonight I sat in front of a fan while premature firecrackers echoed through the streets. I wondered how to live in a nation that’s circling the drain. Thinking I might find comfort in philosophy, I thumbed through some old books. Here’s William James writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

Bertrand Russell kicks it up a notch in The Future of Man: “Although the last survivor may proclaim himself universal Emperor, his reign will be brief and his subjects will all be corpses. With his death the uneasy episode of life will end, and the peaceful rocks will revolve unchanged until the sun explodes.”

That’s enough philosophy for tonight.

Union Jack – There Will Be No Armageddon

There Will Be No Armageddon | Platipus, 1995 | More

Scrolled through the day’s lunatic headlines and screamed into my hands. It wasn’t a single piece of news that broke me, just the general gestalt, the accumulating language of degradation. Too much has been infected by the binary logic of social media. Like. Don’t like. Follow. Block.

Maybe I should go live in a tree. Learn the phases of the moon and teach myself to cook with the sun. I asked C. if she would join me if I genuinely wanted to abandon civilization. She paused for a moment and said, “Maybe.” We discussed how long we would last in the wilderness before deciding she would be bitten by a poisonous creature and I would probably starve to death.

But I like thinking about those few seconds of silence before she politely said maybe. I can’t imagine a better kind of love: broad and generous yet rooted in reality like a tree.

Green Velvet – Leave My Body

Portamento Tracks | Relief Records, 1995 | More

Another mode of escape: the Muppet-voiced lyric from this mid-90s anthem has been looping in my head all week. Sometimes I want to leave my body and float away into space…

Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020. Maybe my attention span is too shredded, my brains too cluttered. How many people believe in some kind of god by necessity rather than choice? Are there people who don’t want to believe in God but are unable to stop?

I envy the ecstasies described by philosophers like Plotinus and Origen as they contemplated the realm of consciousness and eternity. Whenever I try to do the same, I only make myself anxious.

A hot and muggy Sunday, the kind of day that’s begging for a thunderstorm. At dusk, it finally came, followed by another wall of humidity. We had a pleasant June for a while, but the long mean heat of summer is finally here. Beyond this, I’m losing the plot.

Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Pandemic denial despite headlines about surges, spikes, and overburdened systems. People are buying “mask exemption cards” from a fictional outfit called the Freedom to Breathe Agency. You can buy 500 laminated cards for fifty bucks. This morning our president shared a video of one of his supporters hollering white power from a golf cart. And on and on until god knows what happens in November.

Went for an ugly late-night run through the park to empty my head. I still prefer running at night because nobody can see me cry. Last night I wondered about the origins of the words peace and please as I fell asleep, and I became convinced the two concepts were etymologically connected. (They’re not.) Tonight I might contemplate the dynamics between victim and victor.

Recondite – Humid Green Haze

Theater II | Dystopian, 2017 | Bandcamp

Sometimes I’m hit by a mad urge to capture everything at once. The traffic lights and dramas playing across the city on a Saturday night, the thousands of bulbs over kitchen tables, and the drowsy voice on the radio saying there’s light rain at the airport and temperatures will be holding steady throughout the evening. The sound of someone in the street laughing and saying, “How did we get like this?” A woman putting on eyeliner in a mirror, the way she looks so serious. “Another dead satellite will fall to Earth this weekend,” said a television in the other room. Silhouettes in yellow windows, freighters on the dark ocean, and all those other late-night sensations.

I try to keep my mind on these details rather than the headlines. But I need to get used to the fact that this isn’t just a difficult season that will soon pass. The daily lurching from the unthinkable to the disorienting is the new rhythm now, and the insults of 2020 will cascade and compound for a long time to come. I close my eyes and remind myself that growth is always painful and messy, and we will be better on the other side. Then I click on a headline that says, “You’re Probably Inhaling Microplastics Right Now.”

Seems like aliens could land in America and, after a day or two of awe and panic, we would politicize those poor Martians until they became just another round of ammo in our endless red versus blue battle. The terms conservative and liberal lost all rational meaning years ago, and this media-warped argument has become primal and all-consuming, absorbing every new event no matter how cataclysmic. We acclimate. We adjust. We can adapt to anything, no matter how awful, so long as it can be broken along party lines. Forty-five thousand new cases of coronavirus today and our record-breaking streak continues.

I-F – Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass

Fucking Consumer | Disko B, 1998 | More

This morning in the park, I sat across from a woman who was talking to the pigeons gathered around her feet. She complimented their feathers as she tossed them bits of a hamburger bun. “Oh, you’re a beautiful one with little flecks of gold in your wings.” She giggled as they pecked and flapped, and it was a wonderfully roomy kind of laughter. “Don’t be afraid to express yourself,” she told them.

Something about the pitch of her voice, combined with her complete focus on the world she’d invented with these birds, reminded me of a song lyric that never seemed to end. This one thing I know, that he loves me so. I repeated the phrase for a minute until I remembered: “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” by Gavin Bryars, a 25-minute song attached to an anecdote with the qualities of myth.

In 1971, Bryars walked through a rough part of London with a tape recorder, taping drunken jive and street preachers. Then he captured the song of an unknown homeless man who would die within the year. Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. Never failed me yet. This one thing I know. Returning to the art department of the university where he worked, Bryars looped the man’s voice on a reel-to-reel player in a classroom. Then he went to get a coffee. “When I came back, I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued,” he said. “People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realized that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s singing.”

Do I believe in god? I have no idea. But the persistence of this unknown man’s voice makes me think something like grace is possible. I hear it in the childlike wonder combined with elderly poise despite living in dire conditions. It’s built into the lyric itself, the blurred line between suffering and faith. And I think the pigeon lady lives in the same neighborhood: someone finding absolute pleasure and presence in a humble ritual while the world feels like it’s falling apart.