Tag Archives: Local News

And just like that I’m a mommy blogger

At the age of 35, a woman has to answer some tough questions. Is boxed mac & cheese an essential food group? Yes. Does infinite time remain to incubate a human being in one’s uterus? No.

Temporal Anxiety was supposed to drive me to publish several brilliant and precocious novels by the time I turned 30, but instead it just hovered around my desk year after year, reminding me that I was a failure. Writing books takes serious time, and conceiving a baby takes an instant. It’s no wonder that Temporal Anxiety is so much more effective in getting women pregnant than in getting them published.

Last fall I became furious with the male psychiatrist I was seeing when I came to him with morning sickness, mood disorder flaring, looking for medication advice so I wouldn’t give birth to an artichoke. “Are you happy to be pregnant?” he said. “Because you don’t sound happy to be pregnant.” Just because he couldn’t hear “the angel of the house,” he wanted to reduce my first-trimester mental state to some binary notion of happy mom/sad mom, and this made me an angry mom indeed. I soon found another doctor, a woman who recognized my neurochemical needs, who didn’t prescribe feelings, and who didn’t try to see my inner world in terms of black and white.

Most women I know are ambivalent about having kids. I was ambivalent about having kids. I might spawn a dozen babies who grow up to be magnanimous world leaders and still be ambivalent about having kids. It mystifies me how anyone can plunge headfirst into parenthood without having a full-blown psychological crisis. Birthing centers should have mental wards attached. Because this transformation from person to mother-person is hard and often paradoxical. You’re happy, and also sad. You feel gain, and also loss. You’re elated, and also emetic (I spent New Year’s Eve toasting the toilet water with my stomach bile). You want to have a child, but you also resent that you weren’t allowed to wait until age 80 to do it. Thanks a lot, bod.

But also, non-sarcastically, thanks a lot, bod.

Now that the ultimate biological decision has been made, I can resume racing against the clock with my creative projects. In six months I’ll probably have to put my pen down for a little while (is a couple days realistic?) in order to cater to a helpless baby, so I’d better knock out some grownup fiction in the meantime. I wonder if the prevalence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll peak in the work of female writers just before they give birth. I actually suspect this happens postpartum. If there’s one thing I don’t anticipate motherhood making me, it’s soft. I’ll probably come home from the hospital and immediately start writing gritty crime fiction about homicidal babies.

I’m also comforted by the fact that I’m entering motherhood with my innate selfishness still entirely intact. I’m already hatching ways I can use this child to advance my business ventures. Thanks to having a photographer father, the kid will be the most photographed kid in America. And thanks to having a writer mom, the kid will be the most photographed barn in America. And Dad will stage-dad the hell out of the kid while Mom will Anne-Lamott the shit out of the kid and the kid will just have to put up with it until he’s old enough to move in with Grandma, and everyone will be…yes, I think, happy.

Where the sand goes

On the same day we see a 6-foot tiger shark at the beach where we like to bob for hours in the water, we see a young woman emerge from the ocean, lie flat on her back on a towel, and proceed to bury herself in sand from the neck down. When she’s done digging herself into the beach like a nesting turtle, she rubs the sand into her bare belly in a sensual, exfoliating motion, and then gets out a book. I applaud this head and two arms reading amongst the seashells.

The sand spills out of his tennis shoes and disperses under the kitchen table in an area he likes to call his litter box. I tell him it’s his turn to sweep the condo.

Clumps of sand adhere to my scalp when I return from the beach and I gleefully pull the grains through my hair likes bits of scab.

Every morning a Sunny Isles employee turns his leaf blower to the Sisyphean task of clearing all the sand from dozens of public access pathways to the beach. It’s unclear why these long carpets of blue rubber that lie on top of sand and also terminate in sand must routinely be cleared of sand when sand is obviously their element. I worry sometimes that the Sunny Isles employee will eventually get carried away and blow the entire beach back into the ocean with his infernal machine.

The first thing I’m going to do when I get old is buy a metal detector.

What’s the proper etiquette for shaking out beach towels from condo balconies? I’d normally hesitate before raining sand upon our neighbors at lower levels, but no one else in Florida seems to use the balconies, because that would require experiencing a world without air conditioning.

Never have sex in the ocean. Revenge will be exacted on your genitals.

The heavyset Latina women stand in the breakers, pointing toward the water and yelling in Spanish to their heavyset husbands, who are drinking beer on a sandbar. It’s comical to watch the men dash toward the shore juggling beer cans and snorkels. Then I realize that they’re running from a shark.

Through the hourglass. Only one more week in Miami.

South Beach selfies

For the next few days, the girls must inundate their Facebook pages with staged bikini shots. They stand in glossy clusters up and down South Beach, documenting their spring break cleavage. You get the sense that the girls selected their vacation companions based purely on how physically complementary they’d look in photos. Every thirty seconds, someone exercises veto power over a group image and the bikini shoot begins again. These young women are modeling spring break, rather than living it. They’re starring in a swimwear catalog available exclusively on their social media accounts. And Poseidon pity the boyfriend who’s conscripted to take photos of his lady as she rolls around suggestively in the surf, thong pointed to the sky like an arrow. In the distance, a dolphin splashes merrily in the Atlantic, but he doesn’t make it into the picture.

The newlyweds wander hand in hand through the historic lagoon gardens of Vizcaya. A selfie stick precedes them like a carrot promising relived experience later on. The cell phone on the stick’s extremity shoots amateur film of the man kissing his new wife on her sunburned cheek, then the man sweeps the camera around to include some unknown future viewer in the tour. Here is the picnic pavilion that resembles a sailing ship. Here is brackish water being pumped into a fountain made from limestone and coral. In the background, other tourists wander obliviously through the honeymoon video. Once they’re in, there’s no way out.

Florida Republicans keep snapping pictures of Miami. To foreign investors they text photos of Bahama-white sand, DJ Paris Hilton dressed as Barbie, and private yachts the size of naval destroyers cruising Biscayne Bay. Then the Brazilians send cash for new luxury condos they’ll never inhabit. No one takes pictures of the seawater flooding the streets at high tide. No one takes pictures of the storm surges that swamp ritzy nightclubs on the barrier island. The recent flood of real estate development is the only way to save the city from the actual flood. “There’s no such thing as climate change,” say Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, as they frantically delete Miami’s selfies from her phone.

Fuck yeah Everglades

Scenes from a Florida horse track

The minimum bet is one dollar. I bet five. When my horses come around the bend and stampede toward the finish line, I scream so loudly that a nearby baby starts crying in his mother’s arms.

I’m surprised that I’ve never been to a horse track before today. I’d always assumed that I had, because it seems so characteristic of me, but in retrospect I think all my familiarity with the racing world came from reading Seabiscuit.

People here are deadly serious. Most of them operate alone. They sit at picnic tables in the shade of the tiki bars, poring over stats in their official daily programs. One man’s future seems to depend on the performance of Bingo Kitten.

What is a horseman? Is it a jockey? Is it a centaur? Is it someone who enjoys the company of horses? And why am I not allowed to park in the spots designated “Horseman”? Is it because I’m a woman? I enjoy horses just as much as anybody.

I send my mom a text about being at the race track. She responds, “Slippery slope, that racing. When I lived in Florida I used to bet on the dogs.”

M and I win $15 and do an end zone dance. Everyone glares at us.

No one here seems to be rich, even the gamblers who bet with $100 bills. The only individual who appears to have done well for himself at the track is a man exiting the compound in a Ferrari. But his smugness seems less about winnings and more about taking money from poor people, so I assume he’s a manager.

According to the program, Bingo Kitten’s parents are Kitten’s Joy and Bingo Queen.

A statue of a horse towers above the palm trees at the entrance to the parking lot. The horse is ten stories tall. He is fighting a dragon. I rack my brain for a similar scene in mythology, but come up with nothing. Maybe the artist based his work on a cartoon. In any case, it takes my breath away.

For all of those gamblers who are down to less than a dollar, there are slot machines.

Post-time is at 12pm next Sunday. I will wear a sunhat and bring lots of quarters. My mom will be in town, but I’ll hold her to a budget so we can still afford tacos after the races. And I’m not leaving the track until my horsewomanhood is acknowledged, at least by the babies.

 

 

A word on public toilets

I once stood in a bathroom line for 25 minutes at a Starbucks near Central Park, only to have a European woman barge in front of me holding her child’s hand when I was next to go. “My little girl she has to tinkle,” the woman said. “She will wet her pants. Please can we go first?” I gave them my coveted spot, and I’m pretty sure they both used the toilet while they were in there. Or perhaps just the woman used the toilet because the kid had no bladder urgency whatsoever and had only been classically trained in the peepee dance.

Imagine giving a $5 bill to a homeless woman on the street because she’s holding a baby in her lap and the baby’s face is all grubby and sad, and you assume that your $5 will buy the baby some medicine for her drippy nose, then you find out later that the homeless woman actually lives in a penthouse apartment in Tribeca and earlier that day she’d smudged expensive chocolate into her baby’s cheeks right before bundling them both into rags for the sole purpose of extorting $5 of sympathy money out of you. Well, I would think better of that woman than someone who cuts in front of me in the bathroom line of a Manhattan Starbucks falsely using her child’s bladder as an excuse. She might as well flush all my good will down the toilet with her five lunchtime martinis.

That is a lengthy preamble to my point: anyone familiar with New York City knows how precious a commodity a commode can be when you’re walking around, which is most of the time. I have bought unnecessary cups of coffee, bottles of water, and once even a cheeseburger to earn the exalted privilege of using a Manhattan business’s restroom. There are no public johns anywhere. It really sucks. And if you do manage to find one, it’s probably disgusting because Lavatory Grinches steal the toilet paper, soap, and toilet seats. If they could steal the water out of the bowl, they’d probably do that, too. The real reason that native New Yorkers don’t watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in Time’s Square isn’t because it’s cold outside and the whole thing is kind of dumb, but because they know that if they have to pee at any point during the evening, they will never be able to thanks to Manhattan’s egregious restroom deficit.

Which brings me to Miami. [OMG a white sailboat is passing by right now OMG] I took a jog along a beach trail this morning and counted no less than seven public restrooms. And I don’t tend to jog very far. In Miami, toilets are everywhere for the taking. They’re so prolific that not once in my first week here have I ever felt the need to urinate. It’s as if the bathrooms come to ME, saying, “In five minutes you might have to pee, so why don’t you take a load off now as a preemptive measure?” and I’m like, “Thanks, I think I’ll take you up on that,” and then it turns out I DID have to pee, but it just wasn’t urgent yet because the nerve pathways between my bladder and my brain are so retarded (until they’re not), but that’s okay because the bathrooms here totally bypass those nerve pathways and sense my body’s yearnings before cognition. And they’re really nice bathrooms! Only once have I gotten the sense that I was interrupting gay beach sex when I arrived to do my business. The hand dryers are modern, the TP is fully stocked, you look tan and beautiful in the mirror, and after you pee you kind of want to hang out until you have to pee again. But you don’t because you know that the next sunlit bathroom will be even better. I’ve never seen so many doors marked WOMEN in my entire life.

I can’t get over how different this is from New York. The palm trees and the blue-green ocean and the short pants are all wonderful, of course, but I could also see them on a Jumbotron in Times Square. If I looked hard enough, I might find an authentic Cuban sandwich in Manhattan. But the wealth of public restrooms is what distinguishes this city from its northern rivals. That and Gloria Estefan. But she has no need for brick and mortar facilities. She just uses the ocean, like a starfish.

Drunk and in Danger in Luna Park

Because I’ve been working nonstop on my miserable books, I think I’ve forgotten how to write (as opposed to revising/copying/pasting/crying/hating/etc.). It’s been a long time since I stepped away from the same two stories I’ve been trying to tell for two years and faced a blank page. Writers are supposed to write things, or at least I think a superior said that to me once in an expensive MFA program somewhere. But here are the current mental obstacles impeding my elite practice of the literary arts:

1)    Fuck writing

2)    Fuck that I’m even sitting here writing about writing. Let’s go to Coney Island instead.

Every few weeks Coney Island summons me with its don’t-go-in-the-water-if-you-have-so-much-as-a-paper-cut-or-you-will-die-from-sepsis siren call. The last time I went swimming at a beach of better repute a maxi pad brushed past my leg like a menstrual jellyfish, so the film of grease on Coney’s fair waters doesn’t tend to bother me. Something about this Brooklyn resort town resonates with me deep inside, tickling me and delighting me and stirring up all the Chlamydia I caught the last time I swam there.

I really don’t get why I like the place so much because I’m always too broke to ride the rides and I don’t eat hotdogs due to the nitrates and the freak show performers always strike me as bored out of their skulls even when those skulls are firmly fastened to their persons by the swords stuck down their throats. Coney is the kind of place where most of the girthy sunbathers are simultaneously chain smoking and drinking Pepsi. It’s the kind of beach you bring your portable television to. If you want soleil, go to the French Riviera. If you want to step in sandy dog poop, take the F train to the end of the line. For whatever reason my idea of a fanciful getaway is much more aligned with the latter.

My last visit to Coney was particularly fun. I was a touch drunk, which makes everything free because money is just pretend, so I was tossing dollar bills at the French fry vendor and quarters at the skeeball machine like I was freaking Beyonce. And then M suggested that we ride the Cyclone, the ancient wooden skeleton held together by pipe cleaners that dominates Luna Park. On all my trips to the Island, I’ve never approached this terrifying roller coaster, not necessarily because I’ve feared for my life but because it costs $8, cash that is better spent on cheap sunglasses or two ounces of beer from the boardwalk. But fortunately money was no longer an object that day. We had already lost $30 to a carnie who inveigled us with the empty box that a Macbook Pro once occupied. We had already paid $10 to watch a man squeeze his entire body through a tennis racket. What was eight more dollars to me, a rich and famous pop diva? So we bought our tickets and got in line.

[Note that I’m now switching to the present tense after all that preamble.]

And we wait and we wait. And we get sunburned while we wait. And then we’re not Next but Next After the People Who Are Next, and we are so goddamn excited. Counting down the seconds until it will be our turn. Adrenaline coursing through our veins with the pricey light beer. Making sure we have nothing valuable in our pockets that could fly out.

The four or five sleepy high school boys who operate this roller coaster of death so they can use their seasonal paychecks to buy Crackerjacks or whatever have been hustling trains through the loading area with the utmost boredom and efficiency. It makes me a little nervous that they ask all the women in any mixed gender pairings to take the far seats of the cars. This means that the Cyclone lawyers want more weight distributed on the outside of the train so it won’t topple off the tracks when going around bends. But all right, that’s fine. No one ever requests that of me at Busch Gardens, but I get it. Still feeling pretty good about my survival prospects.

The People Who Are Next wait in their coveted positions as a train pulls up with passengers in various states of heart attack. These passengers stumble from their cars, and the People Who Are Next take their sweaty places. But one car in the back is clearly off-limits for whatever reason. Maybe its safety bar is broken. Maybe it has throwup in it. Maybe if any weight, male or female, is inflicted upon it then the whole coaster will go down in flames. Whatever, it doesn’t bother me. I am Next.

But this teenage girl a few people down from me is also Next. And after the high school boys gruffly lower and lock all the safety bars and the train starts to shoot quickly down the tracks, this teenage girl who is Next leaps into the empty, off-limits car in the back. She does not understand why any solitary car would remain empty on its journey through the pits of hell. She does not understand why she can’t just ride the Cyclone now instead of with her natural community, the new and improved People Who Are Next. She does not understand why she can’t just sit quietly atop the safety bar permanently locked down at the tail end of the train and enjoy a little spin at 60mph, 85 feet above the pavement, around harrowing loops that look and feel like 90-degree angles. She does not understand that a safety bar is supposed to be in your lap, not under your butt.

The train is now speeding toward the loading area exit where it will immediately drop 20 feet and then throw its entire being into trying to buck people off. And this teenage girl is just riding in the nethermost car as if she’s in Cinderella’s carriage or the Popemobile or something and not about to lose her life.

We all start screaming. The high school boys are now wide awake and wishing they’d gotten summer jobs at Arby’s instead. One guy who looks as if he might be a veteran Cyclone operator because he’s over the age of sixteen shouts things like “Fuck!” and “Retarded!” and sprints to a tall metal pole on the far end of the tracks which I gather is the universal roller coaster brake. He seizes this pole and yanks on it with all his hotdog-fueled might. With a lot of screeching, the train gradually slows to a stop. Then the teenage girl nonchalantly climbs out of her car and rejoins the new and improved People Who Are Next, who are still too shocked and dazed to tell her that she’s been banished from their number for life.

M and I think the crisis is over. We search the teenage girl’s face for some indication that she’s recently had a lobotomy. And then, while everyone is still distracted by this near-calamity, another full train comes barreling into the Cyclone loading area. And naturally it rams into the back of the braked train, giving passengers whiplash on both ends of the collision.

Fortunately the car that would have suffered the most from being rear-ended is now empty of its teenage stowaway, but overall the atmosphere is chaos and confusion and the high school boys seem utterly astounded that no one has been maimed or killed on this fine June day. But the boys don’t have time to gather their wits about them because the Cyclone is committed to its infernal schedule and before anyone in the first train has a chance to escape or call a chiropractor about the pain in his or her neck, the cars start moving again and the accident victims quickly disappear in a violent jerk around the corner. Back in the loading area, looking like people who’ve just survived a Great White feeding frenzy, the passengers in the rear-ending train bound from their cars, women first. I look at M in horror. We are Next.

Something borrowed

The other day I walked through the rain to my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I would get a card to make this move official. Until you have a library card you can pretend you’re off the grid, but my gypsy days are over because I borrowed a spy film and a copy of Chess for Dummies. But the walk, the rain. The Bed-Stuy streets were basically deserted, so I felt the presence of the approaching man from a block away. Wondered if I should play it coy, keep my eyes lowered until the last second, then say something affable about the lousy weather. Was my neighbor also formulating a plan for our intersection? Maybe he would compliment the bright colors of my umbrella. I’d have to be conversationally flexible in case he had his own agenda. Most likely we’d exchange a few universal words about spring. (Me, privately, to spring: For fuck’s sake, spring!) We’d walk away from each others’ faces feeling either worse or better about ourselves.

Sharing the world with other people is draining. Not draining: the puddles on the sidewalk that the man was fording with his shopping trolley. They were deep and wide and barely navigable by human persons of our sort. As we closed in on each other, I noted that the man’s cart was filled to the brim with folded laundry. But the top of his laundry duffel was loose, open, getting drizzled with rain. I nodded mutely at the man with what I thought was an exemplary amount of neighborly affect. He nodded back, and at that moment a dozen bundles of paired socks dove out of his shopping trolley like lemurs, then became absorbed by the puddles I described earlier as build-up to this lemur analogy (perhaps the most overextended analogy of all time, yet still applicable to at least two thirds of my enterprises).

At first the man didn’t notice that he was dribbling socks behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs that would return him to the laundromat. (Sometimes it’s fun to really commit to making certain things like other things.)

“Sir!” I said. “Your socks!” The man stopped short and turned toward the wake of his shopping trolley with dread that bordered on existential.

“Oh noooo,” he said, surveying the carnage with hands crumpling in slo-mo to his face. “It’s a dreeeaaam.”

When he said it was a dream, I was immediately transported into a storyline where the soiled socks and the cold rain and the library books I coveted and my soggy shoes and my wet hair and Brooklyn-at-large and the seasons distorted beyond recognition were all part of a dream, his dream. The man’s dream made sense of the past ten months, when I wrote a book, got divorced, said goodbye to my Virginia family, moved back to the city, stared through countless windows at countless grey skies, ran back and forth across bridges, shivered, blew clandestine snot rockets, held babies, listened to a million songs, burned to write, wrote little of worth, made my peace with obscurity, washed the stink out of my clothes, neglected most films, most books, most people, lay facedown on the hardwood floor long enough to make my roommates uncomfortable, thought about whales, thought about the sex lives of teenagers, explored bad and worse habits, drank green tea to counteract aforementioned habits, made a profession of having feelings, contemplated dropping out of my profession the second I had something tangible to offer it, discovered rap music, fell in love with Dunkin Donuts, mourned my grandmother (forever), mourned my dad (forever), did a lot of dishes (when you do the dishes, do the dishes, says the Buddha), gave too much leeway to men, briefly inhabited the Pleasure Dome, and then was asked to leave.

Don’t you see, my bloods, that it’s all been a part of this laundry man’s dream? A dream, not a nightmare. Let’s not cast our judgment upon a stranger’s subconscious. His long winter created this fantasy world. Our sleep world where the rain can’t get in. If life is but a dream, my own modest butt is square in the middle. Together we made the dream, a function of this beastly climate. We wear the dream, launder the dream, in an infinite wash cycle until we die clean. Or maybe dirty. The dream tumbles out. Who died? It’s a dream yo the deaths don’t count. Who loves or is ditched for other lovers or feels hurt and want. It’s a dream. It’s a dream and then there are libraries to give expression to it. It’s a dream, it’s a borrowed book, and then it is pure, dry, dry as a desert, dry as sleep.

It’s weird to see a cemetery through a Starbucks window

I’m at a Starbucks in Charlottesville and from where I’m sitting by the window I can clearly see the cemetery across the highway. Which is pretty weird, right? From this angle it looks as though all the cars exiting the shopping center are driving straight into the graveyard, maybe because the passengers just bought some cool stuff at Target that they’re now looking to deposit on some tombstones.

Yesterday I read about Mary Ellis’ grave, which is in a New Jersey parking lot. I don’t know which is better: to be buried in a beautiful, remote place where people trek once a year to pay their respects, or to be buried in the midst of a profane hustle and bustle where your death is acknowledged every day in between shopping lists and rearview mirrors. My dad is buried on his parents’ working farm, so he gets a lot of traffic: dogs and tractors and little brothers and delivery people and my grandmother passing by with her walking stick. That seems all right, but the minute someone installs a coffee kiosk next to the graveyard and people start pacing across the sacred earth, talking on their cell phones and chugging Americanos, I will lose my shit.

Items that I will gratefully accept on my shopping center tombstone:

1) Anything from the dollar bins near the entrance of Target – that’s usually pretty good stuff.

2) Starbucks skinny lattes poured out homeboy style, but please don’t leave the empties.

3) Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons.

4) The giant pastries that Panera Bread employees like to give away at closing time.

5) Magazine subscription gift packs from Barnes & Noble, specifically for Lucky or another shopping-oriented periodical.

6) Anything from ABC.

Items that I will absolutely not accept:

1) McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

2) Blu-ray discs from Best Buy.

3) Anything from Gamestop. Nerds be trying to change me when I’m dead.

Beforehand

I want to write about the hand I saw in the subway car, how I was sitting in the corner of the train and the five fingers crept around the mirrored surface of the car in an odd, backward way. I remember that the nails were wide and the fingers themselves were thick and sturdy and pale brown. The fingertips were almost near enough to touch my hair, which was still wet from an evening shower. I was drinking white wine out of a travel mug because I was on my way to my bereavement group at the university. I used to drink wine at a neighborhood bar before bereavement group, but lately I have started commuting with wine so I’ll be ready to talk about my dead relative the moment I arrive on campus.

When I boarded the train that evening with my mug of wine I had a feeling that I smelled like an actual wino, perhaps a homeless woman. I had done nothing to convince the other people on the train that I was not a homeless woman because I was sitting very still and sad in the corner and probably appeared spaced out to them. There was also a half-smoked cigarette in the pocket of my coat, which can tend to smell worse than any other thing, even if the cigarette is only five minutes stale.

Read More →

Notes from the margins of the NYC literary world

This August I have been traipsing all over Manhattan with the intention of touching famous writers in person. Here is a quick summary:

1) Richard Russo and Pat Conroy at Barnes & Noble. I didn’t have a seat which made me nervous about fainting from excitement and having to sweat it out on the floor like a sensitive Victorian lady. I was stationed behind the velvet Barnes & Noble rope and I knew that my swoon would distract the audience from the authors so I held it together as best I could. Russo sat in the chair meant for Conroy and vice versa, throwing me into a brief confusion because neither one of them looked like they did in my mind or, more importantly, on their book jackets. Also I discovered that famous authors really do wear khakis and loafers and blazers just like they’re supposed to.

2) Nick McDonell at McNally Jackson on Prince Street. I had to see this guy as a way of proving to myself that I’m not a jealous person, that all my ego deflating work has been successful. I got to the bookstore early, hungry, thirsty, nervous, sweaty, and thankfully all the chairs were empty so I could sit down and read a magazine. Ten minutes later I took an inventory of the room and saw 100 new arrivals, all young and attractive and fashionably clothed. I pretended not to see them and instead focused on the elderly man next to me because his neglected breath and raggedy plastic bag felt more my style. I hung out with him after the show, and it turns out he’s writing a book about who really killed the Lindbergh baby. He brought some newspaper clippings to show McDonell.

McDonell seemed just as nice and smart and self-deprecating as described in the recent New York Times article. He had artfully floppy hair with blonde highlights probably acquired naturally in the African sun. He used delightfully unexpected verbs like “leaven.” He dog-eared his own book. He admitted to planting friends in the audience. He wore khakis like the other guys but he tucked them into haphazardly laced boots that have probably been on safari. I didn’t once think about him with his shirt off even though I could have because he reminded me of a Holister model. At Barnes & Noble Richard Russo had joked about losing his train of thought while trying to make effective eye contact with the audience “like Obama,” but McDonell was a born public speaker who could read from An Expensive Education and stare into your soul at the same time. I wasn’t one bit jealous of his success but I think if he had been a female version of himself I would’ve been because my ego is sexist. Also, some people in New York City are so far out of your league that it wouldn’t cross your mind to compete with them. You’re happy enough just sitting in their proximity while you discuss Lindbergh baby conspiracies with someone more relatable.

3) Literary Death Match at Bowery Poetry Club. Todd Zuniga of Opium Magazine created the Literary Death Match because I gather he enjoys both literature and boxing and the LDM is the nearest he could get to making writers fight each other. At these events celebrities from the bookish world judge four contestants over the course of two rounds on literary merit, performance, and intangibles. Some of the authors at Bowery read from published work, some told stories, and some did stand-up. I thought the assembled talent – judges included – was phenomenal. I actually touched some people at this one, but not with their permission.

4) Mid-Manhattan Branch of New York Public Library. This doesn’t mean that I will stop buying books, but it does mean that I will start paying overdue fines. The trouble is you have to walk through Midtown Manhattan to get to the library so by the time you reach the stacks you’re so pooped from the visual and bodily assault of crossing streets in a pack that you just want to sit in the quiet stairwell and practice deep breathing exercises. But I’m thrilled to have my NYPL card at last even though I can’t believe they just give these things to anybody. But the joke’s on them! I’m not going to use the card to educate myself in order to be a better citizen of this democracy. I’m going to use the card to gain access to the bathrooms whenever I’m in Midtown.