One of my emerging personal traditions is to take a hike by myself somewhere for Easter, since I don’t live near family, and usually most of my nearby friends are either working or with families of their own for the day. Here are some snapshots from my hike in the Rockefeller State Park Preserve this year (as well as through nearby Tarrytown)!
A green sloping hillside with a view of still mostly bare brown trees against a blue sky, with some little white clouds scattered above.
View from high up (the summit of Eagle Hill) looking south and east over hillsides of bare trees, with the coastline of New Jersey across the Hudson River in the background.
A lost dark turquoise hat perched on a tree stump in case someone comes back for it.
There’s a small art gallery near the main entrance of the park; this is a large charcoal drawing of a magnolia, by artist Anne Bell.
Old Royal typewriter in the window of a local bookshop. The type on the paper loaded in it is a haiku poem: “the temple bell stops/but the sound keeps coming/out of the flowers –Matsuo Basho
I scrawled this in a bar one night and then realized I actually liked it. There’s mild profanity in it.
So here is the problem with realizing that “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” is just the flipside to “I come so that they may have life, and have it in abundance,” that Lent is about the fact that life is precious and not merely finite, that it’s precious because it is finite, that whatever trials or deprivations we put ourselves through are supposed to be about reaffirming life and not just deprivation, but what is and isn’t truly important…is that it occurs at a time of year when there is so much shit to do that I don’t want to do! That while I try to spend the season in deeper reflection of how I actually want to be spending my time, about what my responsibilities truly are to the world, and how to feel more genuinely connected to it, there are so many obligations to things that are not that! That are not how I want to be spending my time at all! And so as much from procrastination or anxiety as from inertia or bad habits, I find myself falling back on the very ways I really, really don’t actually want to be spending my time. Scrolling through the internet without actually reading a word. Playing stupid computer games. Making Twitter comments that don’t matter.
Because I don’t want to be doing my taxes! I don’t want to be getting around to trying to answer e-mail I don’t know how to answer, or saying things to people I don’t want to have to say! I don’t want to be spending my morning on the phone with the bank and the landlord trying to figure out who lost my rent check and whether I need to stop payment and send a new one or whether the management office is actually just two months behind on processing checks, and then also eventually having to write the property manager and tenant liaison to get them to give me a rent credit because the bank charges $30 to stop payment on a check, even though it wasn’t my fault it got lost in the first place, and also all my bathroom things got ruined the last time the ceiling fell in from the leak they swore was fixed and quite frankly they should be reimbursing me for the new towels and bathmats I had to buy.
I don’t want to be spending my life doing any of this!
And so I dither and procrastinate and hate myself more instead of just flat-out ignoring it or refusing to deal with it.
And like part of the irony is that, for instance, my taxes wouldn’t be a weeks-long, maximum anxiety-provoking ordeal if I just did something stultifying for a living that I don’t really want to do, like—not work in theater, have a normal job, have one job.
But ohhh no, I have six employers in an average year, and one misclassified me as an independent contractor, I co-edited a book so now I earn royalties, I collected unemployment, I won a class-action lawsuit we’re collecting payments from, I have expenses to claim from working out of town, so my taxes are a hot nightmare.
[Image description: Michelle Yeoh’s character Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once sits at a dining room table in a cluttered apartment attempting to confront her unmanageable tax situation]
This is why people just walk off into the woods, just walk off into the desert, I get it! I get it now!
If I just walked off into the desert, and the Devil showed up and offered me “all the kingdoms of the world,” if I only got down on my knees and worshipped him, I’d be like “…Am I supposed to be tempted by this?”
Is this supposed to be a temptation?
I have my doubts it was even that hard for Christ to turn his back on the offer.
I have my doubts about how much he even wanted any of it.
I can very much imagine the human part of him looking out over what Satan was offering him, and understanding what it would really mean, what it would really take, for all the kingdoms of the world to be yours, and just being like “…No. Thanks, though. But I’m good, actually….”
I keep trying to unsubscribe from all the mass e-mail, all the deals! and special offers! because deleting it all every day takes more time than it takes me to read and deal with the ones I actually need or remotely want to deal with. But by virtue of having read an article or sent a message to my Senators or bought a single tank top or gone to a concert, it just. comes. back.
How many pairs of shoes does Merrell imagine I go through in a year, anyway?
Speaking of which, I actually need to deal with this one e-mail right now, and that one about something else, both of which concern utterly trivial matters but are now making me more anxious due purely to how long I’ve neglected answering them.
I don’t want to! I don’t care! Why can’t things just work, and keep working???
I don’t want to learn how to use the new Equity website! Or this new employee portal! Or that one, either! I don’t want to do another mandatory online diversity and anti-harassment training! I don’t want to have to call my ACA navigator about changing my health insurance for the sixth time this pandemic! I don’t want the app for that! I don’t care anymore! I wasn’t put on earth for this!
I want to be writing, or sewing, or hiking, or having sex! I want to paint the way the patch of moss on my favorite rock looks like a piece of music. I want my commutes not to take time, I want the transition time that normal, stupid things take me and not other people credited back to my day, I want other people to quit doing shit to me that I have to go and figure out how to say something about, I want bureaucrats to stop screwing up my life in ways that destroy my time and cognitive bandwidth to fix.
I’ve been feeling a little taken aback by the lack of comment on the three-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic this past week. I mean, I know we’re all tired of hearing about it, of thinking about it. Maybe it’s just that everyone feels like what could possibly be said has been said. But it feels somehow more significant to me than the second, or even the first, when we were still very, very much in the worst of it than we are now.
Three years since the world just stopped. Since I got a last drink with a friend at my favorite bar, had a last shift at work before they called off the rest of the school year, bought a last book at our local bookstore because there was a real chance, within the next day or two, that I wouldn’t be able to for a long, long time.
I sit finishing a cup of coffee by the back window of my apartment, where I watched so much of the past three years go by. It’s quiet out now, mostly because people are at work, or working from home, not huddled in their apartments afraid of dying by breathing the air outside. Strangely I remember those first days as so noisy, even though the streets were empty. Other people say they remember the constancy of the ambulance sirens. I remember the constant phone calls, text message notification chimes, news on the radio, Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences, the inescapable sounds of three people more or less trapped in a tiny apartment together, of people moving out as other residents fled the building. Of a crescendo of fear and anxiety more than any literal sound.
I wore my noise canceling headphones more or less constantly at home once my roommates got up in the mornings and before they both left town for the duration of that spring and summer. I’d taken to getting up at 6:00 AM not only to go outside for a walk before there were almost any other humans in the park, but just to get a couple of hours of quiet to read in before the rest of the building woke up.
It’s quiet now. Trees with reddish buds are starting to wake, giving a faint rosy glow to the afternoon. The park is just barely veiled in pale green. The sky is bright cornflower blue. Starlings and chickadees are singing.
I won’t say things feel more normal this year, but they feel different. Quieter.
One night back in 2018 or 2019, Nathan and I spent an evening scouring a building from top to bottom in search of a missing marimba for a concert that was starting in a couple of hours. Not only did we find it in the nick of time, I somehow walked away from the whole ordeal with two spare bottles of post-show reception wine.
Now his group, Faoileán, is fundraising to produce their debut album, Far Hills, written during the pandemic, and I would really, really like to see them make it. People ask me from time to time if there’s anything they can do or contribute financially to me and my work, and while I will never dissuade friends and readers from contributing to the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, this is a project that would mean a lot to me to see succeed!
If you are so inclined or love Irish music or supporting independent artists and performers or all of the above, you can contribute here!
I go wandering through Iron Horse Park in Tucson on a brief diversion from another errand, and it is simply one of the most liminal spaces I have ever encountered. It’s not a pretty park (indeed, it seems to be scheduled for a significant upgrade and redesign), but I think it’s weirdly beautiful.
It contains probably my new favorite piece of public art, about which I can find virtually no information whatsoever online. On maps it tends to be identified either simply as “public art” or “existing artwork.”
I honestly don’t know what to call this other than…it feels like some kind of a tiny sanctuary.
I am dying to know what happened here but the internet’s not giving me anything.
A small plaque on a rusted metal piece of sculptural artwork reads “This plaque honors the deeds of Jo-nathan, CBike, Jass-Hammer and Bripod, when on August 29th, 2011, four men drank Four Loko, fought crime, and still made happy minute. Thank you for your service.
On another plaque I encounter the work of poet Genevieve Taggard for the first time.
Train: Abstraction
The steely train in the stupid green Of sleepy, sleepy summer tore An even rent in the placid clean Cloth of the air with an onward roar.
Above the sharp diagonal, -the two Lines either side the rended cleft— The air closed in, the green stuff grew Almost together—until the train tore left.
I saw this happen daily and watched both: Saw the air mend, and the round earth pinch the crack- After the train sprung them both open with an oath, A massive pressure. Until the train came back:
Dark spot of these rails—lines laid merely for speed- Dark clot of speed on pure line, to assert: Idea the line; the dark acceleration, the deed, Passing along the line to kill the inert.
-Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948)
Her writing reminds me just a little bit of Ray Bradbury or Ogden Nash. Sadly, most of her books are out of print, but I found a link to a free download of one here.
In case you missed it, I recently contributed to “How Non-Autistics Can Be Good Friends to Autistic People” from the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, along with three other autistic adults and advocates, about what non-autistic people might need to know in order to be good friends to the autistic people in their lives.
A post of yours I had bookmarked in my “best goddamn writing about autism” folder, but which, off of the top of my head, I can remember nothing whatsoever of the content or subject matter anymore. The entire contents of your blog, thankfully, made it into the Wayback Machine, but not, for some reason, that one entry. (And I find it darkly funny that an otherwise entirely searchable index page for your blog now appears titled “404—Page Not Found.”)
I should’ve asked you for a copy of it sooner. I think you took this one post down before the rest of the blog. I’d noticed the broken link before but wanted to respect your decision if you’d taken it down deliberately for some reason, and now here I am hoping against hope that someone else didn’t and either saved or reposted it without your permission.
A cursory Google search doesn’t give me any lead on the document itself, but still illuminates, tangentially, something of its spirit, of its substance. Like a planet or a particle that can’t be observed directly, but becomes detectable by its effects on the space or bend of light around it. The pull it exerts on the orbits of other nearby planets.
It’s like the inverse of that. I can’t see the thing itself anymore, but I can guess at some of the matter it revolved around.
A numbers station. A folk song of hunting. A band in England.
Mysterious, opaque, or maybe purposeless communication.
Tucson is lovely in a way I didn’t know how to expect. It’s greener than I thought it would be. It feels a little bit stuck in time, in a different way than parts of upstate New York do. Part of it is the weather, and part of it is the quiet, and part of it is almost literally being in a time zone unto ourselves (since Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings, it’s part of the Mountain Time Zone for part of the year, and part of the Pacific for the other part).
One of the strangest things is how early it gets very dark. The clouds are astonishing every single night.
New Yorkers kept talking about this place as if it were a Republican hotbed, but there are Support Ukraine and Climate Action Now! yard signs everywhere.
Trains, both freight and Amtrak, run close by my loft all night and it reminds me of a friend’s place back in Athens. Radio towers remind me uncannily of the ones in the Selenetic Age in Myst, where I’m still stuck in a game I haven’t played since February.
There are a lot of tattoo studios, a lot of ice cream parlors, and a lot of feral cats. A fluffy black one seems to be the night patrol of our block, and a green-eyed tabby crosses my patio wall in the mornings. There are wind chimes somewhere I can hear but can’t see. There’s a bird with a strange, complaining call who’s always too fast for me to glimpse.
The grasshoppers are enormous.
Browsing in a local head shop, I find the “I Want to Believe” poster in their stacks. The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” comes up on the shop playlist, and I want to tell my 14-year-old self things she wouldn’t understand or believe.
It’s a beautiful fall day, and you’re in a hippie shop in Arizona. The Moody Blues are playing and people still love the X-Files. You’re 40 and you’re here for work because you have a career in theater. Also you just survived your first global pandemic. There’s a café that will make you an Irish coffee. Everyone here has tattoos, and so do you. There’s a bar that doesn’t treat you like you’re strange if you go there to watch baseball and write letters.
A plaque says Jascha Heifetz played at the dedication of the theater here. The church downtown has a mosaic of the lyrics to my favorite hymn, and the bookstore carries my preferred brands of planner and notebooks, which is good because I should’ve but I didn’t bring a spare one.
Hallelujah.
A young man approaches me on the sidewalk one night. He sounds German or maybe Dutch and he’s asking me where the Old something-or-other is, and at first I say “Sorry, I just got here, I don’t know anything!” before I realize exactly which establishment he’s looking for, and luckily, it’s one of the three or so things I do know.
Hi all! I don’t have a clue how many people may be interested, but just in case, I am going to be blogging my reread of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia over on my Tumblr (where I tend to keep more of the photography, random thoughts, and early drafts of things than I put here).
My Ántonia is a book I read far too young to really appreciate it, and though I have a sense of having liked it, I truly remember almost nothing about it. My curiosity was rekindled when I ran across this essay, and when the local high school that hosts my polling location was having a library book giveaway this past election, I snagged a copy of an old Cather anthology (as well as a replacement for the copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe I lost in college when the neighbor I’d lent it to dropped out three weeks into our freshman year and took it with her).
Not promising any particularly deep or organized analysis (though you never know!) or even necessarily a schedule) as opposed to thoughts and observations as they occur. Relevant posts will be tagged “my antonia.”
Chavisory's Notebook 