SORE AFRAID

all interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life

Even though the plane I took from Columbus (Ohio) to New York (New York) was evidently in no real danger of crashing, I thought that it was, and I guess that's all that matters.  One might experience near-death experiences all of the time; who knows what comes falling behind you as you walk down the street?  Maybe I narrowly escape anvils and grand pianos on a regular basis, but they make no impact on my psyche.  But thinking that I was about to die, even if I wasn't, once again reminded me how extremely fragile our lives are, and how I'm still really not ready for it to end.  Like Colin Farrell at the end of In Bruges:  I really really hoped I wouldn't die. I really really hoped I wouldn't die.  Except my flight was nothing like In Bruges, in that there was no shooting, cocaine, or midgets, and no one adorable like Colin Farrell, who I love despite his reputation for being a term that implies a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and engaging in obnoxious and/or irritating actions without malicious intent.

I also realized that if we were somehow free from all disease and the so-called natural aging process we would probably just eventually succumb to an accident of some kind.  How long can we avoid those falling anvils and grand pianos?  I thought of the the genetically perfected character played by Jude Law in Gattaca, who was paralyzed by being hit by a car, although, admittedly, he was trying to kill himself.  In any case, if we could stop the so-called natural aging process, I think we would still end up pretty ragged after a while.  We'd still keep accumulating scars, both physical and otherwise.  I once wrote that the moon isn't covered with craters because of some natural moon-aging process: things smack into it.  Things smack into us too.

I'm still confused by the widespread belief that we live much longer than ever, when Psalm 90 clearly states:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Why were the Bronze Age desert nomads living as long as we do now?

My laser eye surgeon has started to find new things to do with me that have nothing to do with laser eye surgery.  She found a wart on my eyelid that she removed and sent to a pathologist.  When I came for the follow-up visit, to find out if it was cancerous or genital, she decided to remove a tiny mole from under my eyebrow as well as something she said was a cyst.  She had to inject anesthesia into my eye's near abroad using a very large needle -- imagine what could have happened had I jerked or twitched: cross my heart; hope to die!  I squeezed a rubber ball as she poked the needle into my eye, and the intense pain was followed by an unsettling numbness all over my face.

"As we get older, we have to do a lot of work just to maintain our appearance," she said.  I remembered a man in his 60s who I had spoken to recently who had warts and moles all over his eyelids, so I nodded in agreement.  She then admitted that she had been receiving injections of sausage poison in her face since her mid-30s, and that she now gets frequent doses of injectible facial fillers.  She is a very attractive woman at the beginning of her late 40s, and I felt stupid that I had assumed that her unlined face was simply the result of healthy living and no brow-furrowing owing to the lack of worry in her laser-eye-surgery-financed Westchester and Upper East Side good life.

A friend of mine from childhood recently invited me to her 40th birthday party.  She held it in the East Village, a neighborhood that has been making me feel old since my early 30s.  (I remember being in some bar in the East Village on my 32nd birthday, back when Moby was always playing in the background, and I was wearing leather pants or some similar fashion atrocity and groping some kid while his young friends made horrified faces at him, as if to indicate that he shouldn't be consorting with someone so grandfatherly.  Now I can't even really tell the difference between a 23 year old and a 32 year old.)  Anyway, I made my way through the East Village to my childhood friend's party, and she had attended my birthday party last November, so when I got there and wished her a happy fortieth birthday, she said, "you know how it is," and I thought, lordy, lordy, lordy -- this woman thinks I'm forty!  So I immediately informed her that I still had five months in my thirties.  My childhood friend has almost no wrinkles, despite being a casual smoker.  I don't think she gets sausage poison injected into her face, though, since she's a Unitarian.

My therapist friend who told me that many non-homosexuals are interested in non-heterosexual sex also told me that anger and bitterness at the passing of the years was very common, especially among non-heterosexuals, and that many non-heterosexuals in midlife feel a lot of resentment towards the young, especially when the young seem to be having so much fun.  Also: the glorification of youth and ageism and body fascism, etc.  I was concerned that people kept feeling this way through old age, but he told me that once you hit your 60s or so you start to accept things a bit more and realize that you need to move on.  There is a season for everything, evidently. I thought of what Boethius wrote in his Consolation of Philosophy:

He who to th' unwilling furrows
Gives the generous grain,
When the Crab with baleful fervours
Scorches all the plain;
He shall find his garner bare,
Acorns for his scanty fare.

Go not forth to cull sweet violets
From the purpled steep,
While the furious blasts of winter
Through the valleys sweep;
Nor the grape o'erhasty bring
To the press in days of spring.

For to each thing God hath given
Its appointed time;
No perplexing change permits He
In His plan sublime.
So who quits the order due
Shall a luckless issue rue.

Except he wrote that in Latin.

Cum Phoebi radiis graue
Cancri sidus inaestuat,
Tum qui larga negantibus
Sulcis semina credidit
Elusus Cereris fide
Quernas pergat ad arbores.

Numquam purpureum nemus
Lecturus uiolas petas
Cum saeuis Aquilonibus
Stridens campus inhorruit;
Nec quaeras auida manu
Uernos stringere palmites
Uuis si libeat frui;
Autumno potius sua
Bacchus munera contulit.

Signat tempora propriis
Aptans officiis deus
Nec quas ipse cohercuit
Misceri patitur uices.
Sic quod praecipiti uia
Certum deserit ordinem
Laetos non habet exitus.

Maybe that isn't as relevant as I'd thought.

I had the good fortune again this year to go up to Ulster County for a work retreat.  We took the bus, despite the Don-Draperesque glamor of a train ride up the Hudson.  I had developed a terrible upper respiratory infection after having been caught in the rain at a recent street fair with sadomasochistic decorations, about which a handsome, non-heterosexual, half-Greek, half-Egyptian, Muslim acquaintance said: awful.  I was very tired from having been up much of the night with mild respiratory symptoms.  I tried to read.  In a Vanity Fair article about Nancy Reagan, I saw this sentence: "It seemed as if every time we spoke, another friend of hers had passed away."  I decided to nap instead.

We arrived in New Paltz and were taken by van to the lodge where we would be spending two nights.  The driver seemed to have some sort of social-skill impairment disorder and was slightly rude to us, in a socially unskilled way, not like the deliberate and cruel way people are rude in New York City.

I felt pretty sick, and the setting, along with my illness, made me think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), although I don't believe that I had tuberculosis.

My room had a nice view.  But women like looking at a view; men do not.

I had a charming balcony, but I didn't really feel like rocking back and forth, and the air was not as crisp and alpine as the air to which Hans Castorp had access in his sanatorium.

 

There was more humidity than would be recommended for the tubercular.

 

The next day we went for a hike.

 

We had a Cockney guide, who was mostly nice, although she didn't know very much.

 

The outfit of a colleague of mine reinforced my Zauberbergian delusions.

 

We looked back towards the lodge.

 We looked out over the ridge.

 

We looked north towards the Catskills.

 

I spied a house nestled amongst the greenery.

 

We observed many interesting natural phenomena, although our Cockney guide was unable to supplement our preexisting knowledge.

 

At one point a black snake crossed our path. 

 

"That's a black garter snake on the path," said our Cockney guide.  Except that she pronounced the word "path" like "pawff".

Later I learned that there is no such snake.

We took our lunch outdoors, despite the cloudy skies.

 

The amount of food was extravagant, although much of it was wholesome.

We headed back to the lodge for our afternoon meetings.  Despite being stuffed, I still had some appetites.

 

We spent the rest of the day in meetings, although we took a break around 17:00.  People wanted to engage in outdoor recreation.  I still felt crappy, so I headed up to my room.  After a short time I heard yelling and the sound of pouring rain.  I went out to my balcony and saw that two of my colleagues were in the middle of the lake.

 

 

They were getting wet.

Après la pluie vient le beau temps.

 

I prefer flood to drought.

 

I prepared for dinner.  The lodge had relaxed their well-known dress code, but I put on a suit anyway.

 

I was served a gigantic steak.  Its size was obscene and just looking at it made me feel obese and arterially clogged.  I only had a few bites.  It was tasty, but the idea of consuming an entire butter-drenched slab of beef made me feel repulsed and repulsive.  Most of it went to waste, and my carbon footprint grew ever larger.

I went out for some air.

 

Later we had a bonfire.  It was prepared by staff from the lodge.  They handed us metal rods with marshmallows speared at one end.  When we had cooked it to our satisfaction, we would return it to them and then they would hand us back a marshmallow-graham-cracker-chocolate sandwich.  My colleagues had brought alcohol to the bonfire, which I had correctly suspected was forbidden, as this lodge once forbade alcohol everywhere, in the spirit of Carrie Nation.

I thought I saw demons in the fire.

 

 

The next day was truly sunny, and I felt somewhat better.  We had another activity with the Cockney guide.  She fought with us a bit about a misunderstanding regarding our schedule.  I understood why this lodge had trouble attracting luxury travelers.

 

We wandered around for a while before beginning our final meetings.

 

Where the bee sucks, there suck I, I thought.

 

I hoped that her colony hadn't collapsed.

 

We finished our meetings and were driven back to the bus station.  A colleague had an unpleasant interaction with the autistic van driver.

We boarded the bus to New York.  While delayed for hours in the terrible traffic, we learned of the deaths of many celebrities.  We had emotional reactions.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

I suddenly though abut a disturbing image in One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), in which ghosts continue to age after death.  I remembered thinking that this was a horrifying idea, and that there are so many potentially terrible possibilities for the afterlife.  Faruq once read Cien años de soledad and said to me, "It's like Buddenbrooks with dumb people."

Later that night I met a non-Jewish German who had worked for the Anti-Defamation League.  I sent a text message to Faruq right away.  I was willing to pay the extra international charges, since I knew Faruq would be furious.

a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood

My parents had been wanting me to come visit them in Ohio, using an emotional blackmail tactic of telling me that my nephews had been asking for me.  I didn't really believe this, because one time I called my mother and my nephew Zack was over at my parents' house and I heard my mother ask him if he wanted to speak with me and he screamed, "Nooooooooooooo!"

Anyway, we came up with an idea that would seem crazy to most people, but to my parents and me, who spent decades going on ridiculously long road trips (like driving to eight hours to my grandmother's house in the Little Egypt region of Illinois and then driving right back the next day), it made sense.  My father would be attending a conference in Washington (the capital), and my mother was going with him, even though she would be temporarily confined to a wheelchair or walker because of ankle surgery.  I would come down to meet them, then drive back with them to Columbus (Ohio), and then fly back to New York.  I ended up deciding to take the $20 bus from New York to Washington, even though the bus is unpleasant even when it's fine, since I am saving up money to try to live within my means.

I went to the designated intersection about 30 minutes before the bus was scheduled to depart.  There was a line, although it was clearly one of those organically formed lines that was going to cause some anguish once the bus company staff started boarding the bus in disaccordance with what the passengers had created.  I went to the end of the line (which, as predicted, later became the beginning of the line) to wait.  There was a nerdish man in his 30's holding a large box of almond milk and looking around nervously.  He would occasionally take a drink from it, even though its size indicated that was designed for the whole family, and not for individual use.  (Although I am a big promoter of rice milk, almond milk seems to me to be going a bit too far.  When will it end?  Peanut milk?)  He was joined by a less nerdy Asian guy who looked younger (but who can tell?).  I heard him say to his Asian friend, "Well, I got my almond milk!"   Then they started talking about the upcoming ride.  Someone in the line was smoking, and the nerdy guy said, passive-aggressively, "I'm so glad there's no smoking on the bus!"  I tried to remember when there might have last been smoking allowed on buses -- maybe 25 years ago?  Then they started talking to a woman standing next to them.  She would say something to the nerdy guy which he would then repeat in a loud voice to his friend, as if he were translating from another language, but the whole exchange was in English.  The woman told the nerdish man that there would be no movie shown on the bus and that there were electrical outlets by each seat.  "There's no movie, and there are electrical outlets at each seat!" he repeated to his friend, enthusiastically.  He continued, "That's great news, since I brought a little DVD player and some movies.  Have you ever seen Rain Man"? 

I made sure not to sit near this guy.

The bus ride was uneventful.  I sat next to a middle-aged African American woman who didn't say one word the entire trip.  I tried to watch a movie on my computer, but the only one I had access to was Into Great Silence, a two-and-one-half hour documentary about a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps.  I almost immediately drifted off to sleep when I tried to watch that, so I just started reading articles on the internet using the very slow wireless internet access provided by the bus company.  I read this interesting piece of information.

There is a continuous gradation of color from one end of the spectrum to the other. Yet an American describing it will list the hues as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, or something of the kind. There is nothing inherent either in the spectrum or the human perception of it which would compel its division in this way.

I kept listening to a Paul Oakenfold remix of Justin Timberlake's "My Love".  Even though I have many reasons to hate him (like the inanity of his lyrics and his manner of speaking and his willingness to promote fast food), I love Justin Timberlake.  Luckily I had no access to a recent song by the tragic young woman from Louisiana, whose name is a misspelled version of the English name of a historic French province and current French administrative region, in which she cleverly uses words to spell out an obscenity.  I had heard this song on Israeli Army Radio (which I listen to at work with the hope of learning how to say “in cooperation with the National Road Safety Authority” in Hebrew) but had not realized what she was singing.  My friend Eric explained it when it was played at Low Tea on Fire Island.  Even though this song is yet another example of the decline of pretty much everything, it's quite catchy and I had been listening to it with alarming frequency.  But the internet connection on the bus was too slow for the loading of the video of this song, so at least I wasn't slouching towards Gomorrah as we barreled towards Washington.

I arrived in Washington and met up with my parents.  We went to eat Lebanese food.  Later I met up with the friend with whom I would be staying.  We went to a human auction, which was some sort of special event for non-heterosexual pride month.  I felt a little weird watching this auction, especially in a city where I believe slaves were once sold.  The African American participant in the auction received noticeably lower bids than the others.  I wondered if this event was part of the decline of everything as well, but then I was distracted.

The evening was very enjoyable, although I ended up drinking four gin and tonics, partly to counteract the effects of a very garlicky condiment I had eaten at the Lebanese restaurant, and that caused me to feel terrible.  I woke up at around 5:30 and felt very sick.  In the olden days, four gin and tonics would have caused no problems, but I am coming around to the Muslim position on alcohol use, even though I once read this sentence on a Muslim website: "if something is bad for you in large quantities, it is obviously also bad for you in small quantities."  This sentence shows a complete lack of understanding of anything and everything.  Still, I have draconian plans for my upcoming major birthday, and how I felt after four gin and tonics reinforced the wisdom of these plans.

I walked for 45 minutes across Washington to my parents' hotel.  It felt like a walk of shame, because of the relatively early hour and my sick feeling, even though I had been involved in no sexual activity of any kind.

I found the sight of all the green leafiness to be quite nice

 

I saw a minaret in the distance.  That registered Muslim Barack Obama works quickly! I thought.

 

I could see the top of the cathedral from the bathroom of my parents' hotel room.

 

We set out on the drive.  I know it has considerable urban blight, but I find Maryland to be a very aesthetically pleasing state.  There is a lot of green leafiness, which is something I love.

 

They arguably have the second best state flag, after New Mexico.

 

And there seems to be a relatively high level of tastefulness, at least from the highway.

 

After a while we approached West Virginia. 

 

West Virginia does not have a high level of tastefulness.  There were many billboards advertising cheap cigarettes and beer.  I decided to go to sleep.

I woke up, and we were entering West Virginia again, owing to its strange shape, like Tajikistan, a place that is also wild and wonderful.

 

We finally arrived in the featureless hinterlands of Columbus (Ohio).  We were greeted at the door by my parents' disfigured dogs, who are aging at seven times the human rate.  One is blind and covered with oozing lesions.  I did not pet them.

The next day we saw my nephews, who oscillate between cute and bratty.  Still, it was nice to see them. I exhausted myself by pulling them around the yard in various wagons and wheelbarrows.

Among the many adult things I can't really or don't really do is car-driving.  But I was given the opportunity and performed relatively well, although it was under extremely easy conditions.  Don't ask me to drive in New York or Cairo or anywhere like that.

 

We went with my nephew Zack to go see the plot of land where my brother and his family are going to build a house.  It was quite a long distance out of town.  "They are only going to have radical right-wingers as neighbors," I said to my parents. 

We passed a branch of a fast casual restaurant chain serving Americanized Chinese cuisine.  "Diarrhea!" yelled Zack.  Later he clarified.  "Orange chicken," he said.

We drove past one of those Protestant Evangelical mega-churches.  There was a policeman directing traffic in front of it.

"Don't ever go to one of those churches, Zack," I said to him.  "You are a member of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.  Never forget this."

"What?" he answered.

Although Zack was baptized by a Roman priest in a multipurpose room in Children's Hospital, he has no knowledge of Christianity, or religion, or God.  His parents tried to send him to a Lutheran (!!) vacation Bible study program, but he was expelled for violent behavior.  He will probably grow up to be a New Atheist, full of faith in Infinite Human Progress through Science, despite all of the evidence to the contrary around us.

The plot of land was unremarkable.  It could be worse, I thought.  Then we took Zack to a nearby school playground.  I had had a large iced tea and a coffee and needed to find a restroom.  Zack showed no compassion and demanded that my father continue to push him on the swing set.  I went behind a dumpster and relieved myself, probably violating several federal laws designed to catch so-called predators, since we were on school grounds.  I imagined my name on some registry which prevents one from living within 100 miles of anyone under 35.

Later we took Zack home, and he showed me two caterpillars that he had incarcerated.

 

"You should let them go," I said.  "They will die in there."

"No, I wanna keep them."

"But they will die.  Do you want them to die?"

"I wanna keep them."

"Would you want to be kept in a jar with no food or water?"  I asked.

"I wanna keep them."

"But they won't be able to become butterflies, or moths, if you keep them in there."

He walked away with the caterpillars.  I realized that I'm not a very good male role model.  I always joke that the current model for parenting is based on the film The Last Emperor: extreme over-protection coupled with no discipline.  But my brother and his wife are not so overprotective, especially by today's standards.  But I would probably raise fearful, mewling pansies as children. 

I thought of macho philosopher and prestige motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford and how he might raise children.

My parents and I went on a ride further out into the featureless hinterlands.

We drove through an area where there was some controversy regarding a proposed wind farm.  Some residents were protesting plans for a wind farm by calling for "safe setbacks".  Since opposing wind power would be seen as backwards even among right-wing rural Ohioans, the opponents were arguing for stricter limits on how close a windmill could be to the edge of the property.  If the limits were set to be very strict, that would kill any chance that a wind farm could be commercially viable.  The wind opponents even had little peace symbols on their signs.

"I read an article in the paper today that global warming is causing wind speeds to drop anyway," said my father.  This was yet more alarming news.  When will it end? I wondered.

"Why are they opposing wind farms anyway?" I asked.

"They think it will mar the landscape." he answered.

I looked around at the featureless hinterlands.  There are uglier places, I thought, but it's not Tuscany.

We stopped to eat at a raspberry farm owned by someone who I doubt is related to the international dynasty of German Jewish origin that established worldwide banking and finance operations and was ennobled by the Austrian and British governments.  But who knows?

I imagine the name was changed, just as Joan Crawford's character changed her name from Edith Whitehead to Lorna Hansen Forbes in The Damned Don't Cry!

Most of the menu items were contaminated with their award winning raspberry honey mustard, something I wanted no part of.  Why do Ohioans like such disgusting flavor combinations? I wondered.

I ended up ordering a grilled cheese sandwich made with three incompatible cheeses.

Most of the other patrons were doughy Ohioans in varying states of physical deterioration (my mother included, although she is not doughy).  I overheard several conversations about doctors and medical treatments.  Oddly, the waitresses were very hip in a friendly, Midwestern way -- the way I imagine everyone in Minneapolis to be.

After eating I went into their gift shop.  It was filled with all sorts of objects in the country-kitchen style -- valence-curtains, candles in hideous scent combinations, motivational plaques, wind chimes, and -- also oddly -- wine.  I walked into a room filled with different kinds of jams and preserves.  There were crackers placed throughout the room to allow for sampling.  I examined one jar: hot pepper raspberry chipotle sauce.

I went outside.

The next morning we went for breakfast to the French-style cafe that I used to love going to until it fell out of favor with my parents.  It isn't suitable for my nephews, who my parents like to take to breakfast.  But we managed to go once without them.

 

It was like being in France, without any of the charm or character.

 

Still, the bread is good, and it's better than anything that existed before it.  Although better things have come along since then.

The rest of my visit was pretty uneventful.  I went to my father's gym, located in a community recreation center, which has motivational slogans ("responsibility" "discipline") posted around the track that make you feel like you are in the former so-called German Democratic Republic.  I hung out with my parents and nephews, went running in a nearby park, and took a lot of showers in the terrible, pesticide- and fertilizer-contaminated Central Ohio water.

I failed to attend the Episcopal Church in my town.  Usually I avoid it because it is too broad.  I learned too late that it now has an openly non-heterosexual rector.

My parents dropped me off at Port Columbus International (ha!) airport for my flight back.  There was a delay, as is usual with any flights between Columbus and any New York airport.  Once we had all boarded the Canadair Regional Jet, we were asked to get off the plane again, as there would be further delays at La Guardia airport.  This was not the first time this had happened to me on a flight from Columbus to one of New York's absurdly primitive and operating-beyond-capacity airports.  I sent a round of disgruntled text messages and left some annoyed voice mails and then checked with the Latino non-heterosexual gate agent about possibly taking a flight the next morning, when there is less chance for delay.  He told me that the 13:00 flight the day before had not left until 20:30.

Surprisingly, we boarded in less than an hour.  I chose to ignore the fact that the woman next to me was using an unapproved electronic device during take-off.  Then, about five minutes into the flight, the power to the engines decreased dramatically and we started to lose altitude.  People started gasping and screaming.  A child yelled "Mayday! Mayday!"  We kept going down for around 10 seconds.  Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I thought and said.  This is it -- das Ende, I thought.

I began whimpering.  I couldn't believe that this was how I was going to die.  I had always assumed it would be from a long and painful illness.  I thought of my parents, who had advised me to take this flight, and how they would feel responsible.  I thought of Patsy Cline.  I thought about Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian security guard who had been kidnapped in Iraq and who tried to rip the hood off his head right before his execution, yelling "I'll show you how an Italian dies!"  But I was dying like a sniveling coward.  Macho philosopher and prestige motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford would undoubtedly have been disappointed in me.

Then the engines revved up again and we began ascending again.  People started acting normal.  I heard a woman with a newborn baby say, "I'm glad I took all that Xanax!"  But I had no benzodiazepines of any kind, having failed to pick up a new prescription from my doctor. 

There was no announcement from the flight deck.  The flight attendant started the beverage service.  I was still panicking.  What had happened?  Was it engine failure?  I was seated in the back near the engines, so I could hear every slight change in the sound they made.  I felt like I was going to totally lose it.  I tried to remind myself that I was just experiencing an instinctual fear of falling that served our ancestors well for avoiding cliffs but was not going to help anything in this situation.  That didn't work.

The flight attendant finally got to my row.  "What was that that happened during take-off?  Was that normal?  Is everything alright?" I asked in a cowardly and pathetic manner.

"Oh, it was probably some request from air traffic control for us to change altitude," she said, smiling.  She looked like a poor man's Pamela Anderson.  "Would you like something to drink?"

"I'll have a gin and tonic," I answered.

falling as it were upon an immense ocean of joy

I read an article in the New York Times about the psychological and spiritual risks of being a so-called knowledge worker and the many benefits of working with your hands.  I wanted to dismiss the article as a bit of unrealistic bourgeois nostalgia for the mud, since the author is a macho intellectual who now repairs high-end imported motorcycles.  A quote from a book of his is: “People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.”

But there were many parts of this New York Times essay that were obviously true, such as this:

It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

I was probably never happier at work than when I was a volunteer at the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo in high school.  I couldn't wait to get there on Saturday morning and was sad to leave late Sunday afternoon.  I worked mostly in the petting barn, and I started the day by shoveling up goat and sheep crap and ended it by spreading straw for them to sleep on and hay for them to eat.  I always felt such a sense of accomplishment, although, frankly, the animals weren't very appreciative.

I dreamed of becoming a zookeeper, but that didn't work out.

Later I came across an interesting chapter in the book I had been reading by the Israeli author Meir Shalev.

Ten Characteristics of a Good Pigeon Handler

1. The pigeon handler is moderate in his disposition.  A reckless pigeon handler frightens the pigeons.

2. The pigeon handler is loyal and responsible and carries out his tasks in an orderly and punctual fashion.

3. The pigeon handler is kindhearted and cares for each and every pigeon.

4. The pigeon handler is patient and devoted.

5. The pigeon handler is tidy and attentive to cleanliness.

6. The pigeon handler is strong-willed and maintains discipline over the pigeons.

7. The pigeon handler is sensitive in observing and discerning the character and condition of each and every pigeon.

8. The pigeon handler is industrious.  There is always work to be done in the pigeon loft.

9. The pigeon handler is considerate of others.

10. The pigeon handler is adept at learning and knows all there is to know with regard to the traits, eating habits, flying exercises and care of the pigeon.  Further, it is incumbent upon him to know how to compose short, clear pigeongrams.

It was then noted: that the first nine characteristics of a good pigeon handler are important for all human beings, even those who do not raise pigeons, but the tenth characteristic is important only for pigeon handlers.

I am only taking Hebrew this summer, since Arabic 4 is not being offered and I've already taken Arabic 3 twice.  I am waiting for Faruq to angrily send me quotations from St. John Chrysostom's Eight Homilies Against the Jews to protest my supposed Judaization.  I went to my first summer class and learned a patriotic Israeli song called "Blue and White".  The word for "blue" in Hebrew (כחול) is hard to say.  There is a dance remix of an Israeli communist song called חולצה כחולה ("blue shirt") that I love but can't sing along with, which is odd since Hebrew is usually very easy to pronounce, especially compared to Arabic, which is nearly impossible.

On Friday I went back to my laser eye surgeon for another follow-up visit.  "I've heard you've been complaining about your surgery around your office," she said.  She had a long needle up near my eye when she asked this, so I was scared.

"No, not at all!" I pleaded.  I tried to convince her that I was very happy with my surgery now and that I would recommend her to all of my friends.  Eventually she seemed to believe me.  "Who told you that I had been complaining?" I ventured.

"I have my sources," she said, ominously.

I walked across Central Park in the rain, pausing momentarily at the Bethesda Fountain.

Even though I had taken a vacation day, I stopped in at work for a bit, since I am a miserable knowledge worker who is chained to his desk.  My work is not a kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.

Then I went to have a pedicure that Asaph had pre-purchased.  It was excruciating and humiliating.  The young Korean woman who performed the procedure had to ask a few times about some of the unusual characteristics or features of my feet.  A small group of Korean pedicurists gathered round at one point, astonished at the sight.  Since I had already cut my toenails rather short, the filing was quite painful, although some of the rubbing, massaging, and scraping felt fine.  I thought about how I would like to go to Korea.  I've heard it is especially interesting to fly from Tokyo to Seoul, since the Japanese and Korean cultures have many superficial similarities but are in fact profoundly different.  In Japan everyone is quiet and polite and tidy and evidently in Korea everyone is yelling and spitting all of the time.  Although my Korean pedicurist was pretty quiet, polite and tidy and did not yell at or spit on me.

When it was over, my feet did look better than before.  I was surprised.

Asaph and I then caught a very crowded train out to Fire Island Pinès, standing the entire way to Babylon. After the Spartan conditions at our friends' home in Atlantique (not even paper towels were allowed, and everything was recycled or composted), I was looking forward to a slightly more luxurious weekend.  Asaph had planned a vegetarian brunch and had invited friends to come for the day.  Many would then be attending a large benefit dance party held at the home of a socially prominent trio.

We got to our house at dinner time and greeted our housemates.  As we unpacked the many bags of groceries we had schlepped from the city, I couldn't stop humming "Répondez-Moi" by Francis Cabrel, undoubtedly inspired by thoughts of colony-collapse disorder.

Je vis dans une maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y'a même pas d'abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y'a même pas d'oiseaux, même pas la nature
C'est même pas une maison.

Although this song has nothing to do with colony-collapse disorder and was released in 1981, before anyone knew about colony-collapse disorder.  And the abeilles in the song aren't even real.  Still, it's a nice song.

At my rental house in Fire Island Pines, there are definitely des oiseaux.  Those birds!

The next morning we furiously tried to get ready for the arrival of our guests.  Asaph did the cooking, while I provided organizational and logistical support.  Had there been sheep or goat crap to shovel, I would have been on it!

Asaph replaced couscous with quinoa, the mother of all grains, although it is not a grain.

 

Guests finally began to arrive.  An Israeli friend of Asaph's brought an ex-boyfriend who was a flight attendant for El Al.  I quoted Hosea 11:7:

And my people are bent to backsliding from me: though they called them to the most High, none at all would exalt him.

That is the passage from which El Al gets its name.

The brunch was a complete and total success.  People liked the food that Asaph had prepared, although one friend didn't show up, and later he told me that he couldn't eat vegetarian food.  I don't think he understood that the food would include eggs and cheese.  I tried to imagine his all-meat diet.  He won't be with us for long, I thought.  Farewell, friend.

I took a somewhat pornographic photo of our friend Eric.

 

After cleaning up, we went over to the large benefit party at the home of the socially prominent trio.  The music was very loud, and there were go-go persons dancing around.

They were doing the same old tricks.

 

It was hard not to feel chubby.

 

There was a performance by an American high-tempo disco music singer-songwriter, who I believe is unknown outside of certain non-heterosexual circles.  She may also be big in Belgium.

 

There was a celebrity DJ known for his amazing abdominal muscles.

 

A group of pretty young persons from my infamous gym congregated in one corner, to keep their youth and beauty free from any contamination.  Some of them are approaching 30, however, so they already have a whiff of the tomb about them.

I looked up at a large flagpole, and was alarmed by the spot in my camera lens.

 

The music was so loud that my friends all congregated at the edge of the property.

 

Some kayakers observed the spectacle.

 

I was happy to be with my friends, who are amazingly nice, I think.  But I could be wrong.  A true friend stabs you in the front.

At one point a snake slithered under the feet of several of the attendees.  There were some screams from the thin, young bartenders who were dispensing sponsored drinks while wearing small swim briefs.  A strapping young man reached down and picked it up.  He deposited it in the neighbors' yard.

 

He reminded me of some ancient Greek hero or god.  A labor of Hercules/Heracles?

Later Asaph and I saw a sad dog that was heartbreakingly cute.

 

We went out to observe the sunset.  Asaph was inspired to engage in poly/pantheistic religious rites.

 

The sun set, as had been predicted.

 

We turned around and there was the moon.  I wondered how many additional heavenly bodies I would see that day.

 

Walking back to the house, we came across a very drunk young man who had dropped his pizza face-down on the boardwalk.  He wasn't sure what to do, so he tried to use his foot to kick it onto Fire Island Boulevard.  He was having much difficulty.  Asaph helped him to light a cigarette, which was evidently his replacement for the spoiled pizza.  He said it was his birthday. 

After we congratulated him, he said, "I'm turning 30!  It's a [expletive] disaster!"  He said this in a slurred manner or fashion.  I agreed with him that it was a disaster and wished him the best of luck but said that things didn't look promising.

The next morning: those birds!

That morning I read an article in the New York Times about Philippe Starck:

Even when the design superstar Philippe and his wife, Jasmine, unplug, as they do every July at their house near Cap Ferret, France (June is spent on the Venetian island of Burano; August is Formentera), the tiny cabanas surrounding their modest home are filled with friends and family, who gather at the seaside table for an ad hoc lunch that lasts until well after the lights strung in the fig trees have been switched on.

After a run, I went out to the beach.  I should be more worried about sun exposure, but I tan well, like the deceased closeted non-heterosexual far-right Austrian politician Jörg Haider.  I get my complexion from my mother's side of the family.

  

We left after Low Tea.  From the ferry, I looked up at High Tea.  I strained my laser-corrected eyes, but I couldn't tell from the silhouettes that I could see against the colored background if people were talking, dancing, or kissing.

 

It's almost always sad to leave.

there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark

It was the Feast of Weeks (שבועות‎), or, more appropriately, the Day of the First Fruits, and therefore Asaph was required by Jewish law to spend the entire night awake, much of it hanging out with a quasi-famous, non-heterosexual Israeli pop rock singer-songwriter, who evidently met Asaph during a tawdry incident back when Asaph was young.  This holiday simultaneously commemorates the giving of the Torah and an early harvest offering, and it somehow also involves cheesecake and/or blintzes.  Christians use the Greek word πεντηκόστη for the holiday commemorating the supposed descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples (as they were gathering to celebrate the Feast of Weeks) and the symbolic reversal of that unfortunate Tower of Babel incident. 

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Still, as someone interested in languages who has spent a lot of time trying to study them, I have mixed feelings about Pentecost, although I realize I am missing the point. 

Asaph and I were going out for the weekend to the friends who have a house in the hamlet of Atlantique, a non-non-heterosexual community on the western end of Fire Island.  Atlantique is kind of a silly name for a hamlet, although Atlantic would be really boring and/or presumptuous, so I don't mind the foreignization here.  We met the owner of the house, as well as our friend Rob, on the coveted 17:09 Montauk direct train, and I felt that we were not fully taking advantage of the opportunity presented to us, since we were de-training at the miserable town of Bayshore.  There were some fancy non-heterosexuals behind us going to the Pines, and they squealed with delight when the conductor informed them that they could go all the way to Sayville without transfer.

"So you were in the Penis last weekend?" asked the friend who is the owner of the Atlantique house.

"Sorry?" I asked.  I adopted this pretentious and quasi-Canadian way to beg someone's pardon back during adolescence.  It usually makes people think I am not an American and may save me one day if am in a hostage situation with Islamic terrorists.

"The Pines. You know, Piiii-nessss."

I was shocked and ashamed that I hadn't heard or thought of this before.  I immediately imagined a Catalan spelling, modeled after many of the counties, or comarques, of Catalonia: Penedès, Barcelonès, Gironès, Ripollès, Solsonès, Tarragonès, Vallès.

Pinès.

Of course, "The Pines" in Catalan would just be Els Pins, but I strongly prefer Pinès.

I feel some nostalgia -- or saudade, although that is a Portuguese word -- for the Catalan language and my days spent in the small Catalan village near the French border where Centfocs grew up.  Sometimes I seek out opportunities to hear Catalan, like public service announcements from the Catalan government promoting the use of Catalan among immigrants that I found on the internet, since it is such a cute-sounding language. 

Although, frankly, the Catalans can be real jerks.

Anyway, we arrived in dismal Bayshore, and made our way to the ferry to Atlantique.  The atmosphere in the ferry terminal at Bayshore was quite different from the terminal for Pinès.  There were more children and less shade, even though it was enclosed.

The owner's one-eyed Boston Terrier, Uno, was removed from his carrying case for the ferry ride.  Suffering from Lyme Disease, Uno was grumpier than usual.  We were told to be careful as he might snap at us.

 

Rob cautiously cuddled him.

We arrived at our destination.  It was cloudy and cool.  There was no massive crowd of drunken non-heterosexuals with their shirts off to greet us, just a weathered sign.

 

Although some of the shirtless, drunken non-heterosexuals in Pinès are pretty weathered too.

We made dinner and sat around talking.  We discussed the reasons why people are so afraid of same-sex marriage.  The idea that people are concerned that any legitimization of homosexuality will give rise to a massive increase in the numbers of people indulging in same-sex sex was suggested.  I said that this was a ridiculous fear.  The owner, a therapist, disagreed, and said that many non-homosexuals are in fact very interested in exploring this activity or pastime or hobby.  I was alarmed and excited by this news.  I thought of my non-heterosexual friends who were once married.  I envied those who had kids, since they were basically my age but they already had children and didn't have to worry about being an elderly parent.  It's too late for me, unless I adopt an adolescent, or someone in their twenties.

I slept soundly.  There was no dawn chorus, since we were too close to the ocean for there to be many of that kind of bird, the kind that sits in a tree and screams its head off before dawn.

In the morning we drank coffee, and I read the latest issue of Monocle magazine, which I love but wish I didn't, since it puts money in the pockets of Tyler Brûlé.  He already has enough.

 

In a recent column by Mr. Brûlé in The Financial Times, he offered this advice for men looking to add to their summer wardrobe:

Socks: I’ve pretty much given up on most brands and find myself stocking up with Japanese brand Tabio, either at their Omotesando Hills branch or, occasionally, in London.

Polo shirts: While I’m not big on logos I think Kitsuné’s fox is quite fun. Otherwise it’s hard to do better than Drumohr and Napoleonerba.

Dress shirts: After five years I’m still stuck on having my shirts custom made by MCR at A Gi Emme.

I used to like to claim that I only bought my dress shoes from the Camper store at Rambla de Catalunya 122 in Barcelona.  That's still technically true, although the pair I currently wear to work was purchased in the spring of 2007, and they won't really last much longer.  I do try to be thrifty, though.

I went for a run through some of the hamlets and villages and settlements and whatever to the west of Atlantique: Dunewood, Fair Harbor, Saltaire, and Kismet.  They were charming and reminded me of a European beach colony, like one might find in Catalonia or France.  I had recently re-watched the short film Une robe d'été by François Ozon, which is set in a beach colony in France on the Atlantic, and I was thinking of that film as I ran through these Fire Island hamlets and villages, specifically and inappropriately the non-heterosexual and non-homosexual sex scenes.  The main character in that film is 18-years-old.  That might be an complicated adoption, I thought.

I saw a lighthouse in the distance, and I forced myself to run all the way there.  I realized that I was on a section of Fire Island accessible by car, since there were tourists waddling around.

I had to run back quickly, since my college friend Paul, with whom I was not friends in college, was set to arrive.  Paul lives in the Hudson Valley and had recently shared photos of the snakes living under the steps leading to his front door.

 

I used to handle snakes when I worked at the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo as a volunteer throughout high school.  Many Pentecostals continue to handle snakes today.

I always like hanging out with Paul, since we are both trying to figure out what in the world is going on.  We are both suspicious of easy answers and annoyed by smugness and complacency.

I waited for his ferry to arrive.  A freight ferry arrived first, bringing the residents of Atlantique much-needed mulch and annual floral plantings.

Sans toit ni loi, I thought.  Except I am covered by both.

His ferry arrived.

 

After eating lunch, we decided to take Uno on a walk to the neighboring community of Ocean Beach.  Ocean Beach is much worse than the communities I had run through earlier.  It is full of terrible people.

We came across a horseshoe crab, which is not a crab.

 

We came across another one that had had other creatures growing on it.

 

I felt slightly repulsed.  Nature can be awful.  I never feel that the world is more meaningless than when I am confronted with the brutal realities of nature.

Paul and I talked about how we hate Cherry Grove but wish that we liked it, and how we like the things that Tyler Brûlé likes but wish that we didn't.

The walk was uneventful.  We were not arrested, although we probably violated several of Ocean Beach's draconian laws.  Uno was exhausted from the walk and the Lyme Disease, so he allowed me to carry him back without biting.  This was all for the best, since dogs (and any beverage other than water, and music, and games) are forbidden on Ocean Beach beaches.  We walked along the edge of the ocean, since most of the beach was taken up by temporary Piping Plover habitat, so I figured I could claim that I was in international waters should the Ocean Beach police come to arrest and beat me, as is their wont.

We got back just in time to miss out on the work being done on the house.

 

We decided to go back out to the beach.  Asaph made drinks.  Sadly, he used vodka, which I do not like at all, because of associations.

It was chilly, so some of us bundled up.

 

Still, Rob and the owner played the Israeli game whose name in Hebrew means "racquets" (מטקות).  In Israel they don't usually call it "Kadima" (קדימה‎), which means "forward" and is the name of Tzipi Livni's political party.

 

Paul and I talked about how people don't seriously consider the implications of the things that have been happening and assume that we can just keep going on as we have been.  We talked about the naive faith that many casual atheists have in the myth of infinite human progress.  We talked about how improbable it is that current living standards can be maintained.  I remembered that I had read about the Japanese concept of mottainai (もったいない) when I was doing research on the Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist Wangari Maathai, and how it is a word like saudade that is pretty much untranslatable, but that it more or less means "a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized."  As I stared at some trash in the sand, we talked about how people have been living in this unsustainable manner for a such a tiny period of time compared to the span of human history and how we are quickly bumping up against the non-infinity of the planet.

Eventually it got too cold and we went inside to watch a movie starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley and Eduardo Noriega.  Much of it did not make sense.

We ate dinner and watched some old episodes of "Cagney & Lacey", which was much better than I would have expected.  One even featured the use of the word "fag".

Later Rob and I went out to the beach.  I wanted to test my post-laser-eye-surgery night vision.  It was fine, more or less.  Rob kept wiping his hand over the sand by the water to trigger a phosphorescent effect, which we later researched.

In bed I read a depressing article in The New Yorker about "The Sixth Extinction".  Humans have been triggering mass extinctions ever since we learned how to hunt (the poor mastodons and the moas!), but the process appears to be accelerating.  Evidently all of the frogs and bats are dying now.  We've already heard about the bees and colony collapse disorder.  What's next? I wondered.  I understand why biologists tend to be atheists, since the world of living creatures seems especially cruel and random.  On the other hand, human beings are disrupting the natural order in ways that have required asteroids and volcanoes in the past, so that surely indicates some human singularity.

Richard Dawkins wrote:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

I slept poorly.  There again was no dawn chorus to wake us up, but maybe this was because all of the birds were dead.

It was cloudy in the morning, but by noon the sun had come out.  Rob volunteered to help out with work on the house.

 

Paul enjoyed the sun.

 

The light was pretty.

 

I decided to run back to the lighthouse, but this time with a camera.

Paul wanted to go for a run as well, but he was going to run on the beach, barefoot, since he had read an article that claimed that running barefoot was better.  We discussed the endurance-running hypothesis, which speculates that humans evolved to run long distances to tire out their prey.  I mentioned that I had read other speculation that humans evolved from aquatic ancestors, since we are the only apes who can swim and we only really have hair on our heads.  We will never know, probably.

I started on my run, wearing shoes that I did not buy in Barcelona.  I passed again through the charming hamlets and villages.

 

The lighthouse was still there.

I made it back in time to help clean up before our departure.  The owner told me that he had seen the remains of a deer on the dunes.  I went to look. 

I thought of the pitiless indifference of the universe.  At least the death of this deer was almost certainly unrelated to The Sixth Extinction.  I have read that there are more deer than ever.  For now.

Menacing yet picturesque clouds started to gather.

It was like being inside an inspirational poster.

Non-biological processes are somewhat more compatible with theism.

On our way back we sat on the top of the ferry to feel the wind on our sunburns. 

 

The clouds parted. 

The ferry dropped Paul off at his car, and the rest of us headed for the train.  On board, we ran into one member of the couple that makes me feel like a pile of rotting garbage in comparison.  It was a happy coincidence, especially given the pitiless indifference of the universe.  I got to sit with him.  Asaph was jealous and kept intruding on our conversation.

Our friend who is one half of the couple that makes me feel like a pile of rotting garbage in comparison had recently become betrothed to the other half of the couple, and vice-versa.  We congratulated him.  I wondered if he would have to endure a very long engagement.

I tried not to judge him for his disposable plastic water bottle.

We transferred at Jamaica. 

As we left Jamaica station, I realized that we were missing the twice-yearly occurrence in which the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of Manhattan's main street grid.

When I got home, I saw that I had an e-mail from my born-again atheist friend from San Francisco.  It was a quiz. 

Do you believe that there is a force in the universe that set into motion all being?

Do you believe that there is a being that set into motion the creation of all that is?

If you believe that there is a force or being in the universe that set into motion all being, is that force or being:

a. omniscient -- sees and knows all across space and time
b. omnipotent -- all things are within its power and control
c. both A & B
d. omniscient but not omnipotent
e. omnipotent but not omniscient
f. neither omniscient or or omnipotent, but triggered the creation of the forces that have shaped the evolution of the universe

Is the force or being you believe in material (composed of matter just like us) or immaterial (composed of particles not consistent with matter)?

Do you believe that a force or being in the universe has revealed itself to humans?

Do you believe that a force or being in the universe has co-mingled non-material and material creation in a being that was both human and god?

Do you believe that human consciousness continues in an altered form after death?

Do you believe that religious texts revered by humans were transmitted to humans by a non-material force or being in the universe?

Do you believe that religious texts revered by humans are the creation of humans inspired by a non-material force or being in the universe?

Do you believe that religious texts revered by humans are the products of human creativity alone?

If you believe that religious texts revered by humans were transmitted to humans by a non-material force or being in the universe, do you believe predictions contained within them to be predictive of future events or metaphorical for events now and in the future?

I was excited to read my answers.

we would carve each day like a piece of sculpture, leaving behind us a trail of days like a gallery

A new skin disorder of unknown etiology on my foot brought me back to my dreamy dermatologist.  He was as dreamy as ever, although I was surprised to learn that he wasn't Jewish.  I had made assumptions, based on his slightly swarthy countenance and his combination of Hebraic first name and Germanic last name.

He examined my foot and gave an unexpected diagnosis, although it was not especially serious.  Yet again I had a disgusting skin condition correlated with and/or caused by stress.

Then I asked him to burn a wart off my finger with a laser.  "This will hurt for about four seconds," he said.  It did indeed.

I asked if it would be excessively vain of me to have a cherry angioma burnt off my chest.  He agreed to do it, and I was happy for an opportunity to remove some clothes in his presence, despite my many deformities and the fact that I needed to lose 25 pounds by the next day.

"Will I eventually be covered with thousands of these?" I asked, referring to the cherry angioma.

"Yes, probably," he said.  I wondered what kind of a kisser he was. 

The second burn was less painful than the first.  He successfully destroyed my cherry angioma.

I emerged into the bright Tribeca afternoon with an unexpected diagnosis and without sunscreen.

It was the Feast of the Ascension, but I had my final Hebrew class of the semester that night.  At the end of the class, a pretty young woman who had already identified herself as an Iranian Jew (and who had objected to a short story we read from the Talmud about an obnoxious Persian who gets smacked in the ear by his Hebrew teacher), despite having blondish hair, approached my non-heterosexual-in-his-early-60s classmate and asked him if he was married.

"No," he answered. 

"Would you be interested in going on a date with my grandmother?" she asked.

I felt mortified for him and pretended not to have heard.  I went home and immediately sent a video of Israeli transsexual pop star Dana International (דנה אינטרנשיונל) to the entire class.  It was for a song popular during my first trip to Israel in 2007.  It had scenes of Ben Gurion airport and a packed non-heterosexual dance club.  The video also included a quick shot of two men kissing.  Somehow I thought this would make him feel better, but then I remembered that no one in my class read my emails, and also it might make him feel worse, with its depiction of youthful sexuality, and here he was being match-made with a grandmother. 

I watched the video myself a few times.  It reminded me of a juice drink that I discovered on that first trip to Israel, which was either made from limes (ליים) or from lemons (לימון) -- I was never sure, and Asaph was of no help in resolving the question.

I also remembered another song that was popular during that first visit to Israel, by Timbaland, who I find oddly cute, despite my obvious disapproval of his name.  My first trip to Israel was very disorienting and exciting, so the memories are very powerful and have smells and tastes and feelings attached to them, even though much better things happened during my second trip, when I was already thinking things like: oh, Israel again?  Ho hum.

The next day, Asaph and I left work early and headed off to Fire Island Pines for our first weekend of a summer rental share.  I have come to hate the trip out there, and we chose an especially stressful time.  First there was frantic running to buy tickets (most machines at what passes for Penn Station were out of order), then frantic running to find a seat on the train, then frantic running to transfer at Jamaica, then frantic running to the little vans that drive you from Sayville station to the ferry.  We ran to the ticket booth just as a young man who worked for the ferry company screamed, "Time's up! No more tickets!"

The 20 or so non-heterosexuals waiting in line to buy tickets to the ferry started to protest loudly.  I feel like the vacation has already started once you get to the ferry dock, so I don't mind waiting, although waiting an hour seemed a bit much.  I had objected to this particular train-ferry connection choice, so missing the ferry would have given me an opportunity to gloat.

The young man relented and we were allowed to board.  I remember wondering why everything has to be so difficult in New York.

There was a group of young (and some less young) persons sitting near us on the ferry causing a lot of commotion.  They were all drinking pink or red drinks out of disposable plastic cups and shrieking and laughing.  Several were wearing comically over-sized pairs of sunglasses.  After the ferry got underway, one of the young persons lit up a cigarette.  I waited for one of the adolescent boys who operate the ferry to come over and reprimand him, but the next time I looked over he wasn't smoking anymore.  He had probably thrown it overboard into the bay.  At one point the boat pitched to the side and a woman who was part of the group got her white shirt covered with pink or red drink.  She got up and went somewhere to do something with her shirt, and the cackling continued.  Asaph gave me a grimace.

"I love Fire Island, but you really are exposed to the worst of [non-heterosexual] culture," he said.

"I know," I answered.  "But God loves them all the same."

"If he does, why is he punishing them?" he asked.

"He's not punishing them.  He's punishing us, through them."  Asaph has a very weak grasp of theology.

Once we got to the Pines, it felt as if no time had passed since last summer.  I wondered what was left to say or write or photograph about Fire Island.  It has all already been done.  To death.

I thought that, since I am now in the 39-99 demographic, I could focus entirely on the quiet, calm, peaceful, meditative Fire Island, where people stay in and prepare meals and play cards and wake up early to walk on the beach -- not the Fire Island of drunkenness, dancing, drugs, sex, and body fascism.

 

I shared my idea with Asaph.

"If you just want to be able to sit and poop while listening to the birds, there are cheaper and nicer places for that, where you are also not exposed to the worst aspects of [non-heterosexual] culture," he said.

We arrived at our house and greeted our housemates.

We stayed in that night.  As part of my continuing project to see every film starring either Marcello Mastroianni or Sophia Loren, I watched La decima vittima (The 10th Victim), a crazy movie from 1965 set in what was supposed to be the future, but it just looked like 1965 with weirder clothes.  Apparently in this future people were able to sign up to hunt each other to death.  It was pretty fabulous, despite being totally ridiculous.  Ursula Andress was Mastroianni's hunter/romantic partner.  She got to shoot bullets out of her breasts, although, unlike in a later film, it was not meant to be comic.

We were awakened at around 5:00 by the dawn chorus.  Those birds!

The next day my housemates were talking about how the beach had been made wider during the winter.  I thought they were referring to some natural process, but evidently it was done by man.  I am always expecting Fire Island to be destroyed by a mega-tsunami.

The beach didn't look so different to me, but I have a very spotty memory.

 

I failed to see any Least Terns nor any Piping Plovers.

 

I walked into the town to shop at the store, where a bottled iced tea drink costs $2.50.  Several cheaper houses had a new hideous yellow bamboo covering.

 

I had read that there was a bamboo flowering going on in southeast Asia right now, something that happens every 50 years or so.  Evidently this flowering causes a massive explosion in the rat population, who then go on to destroy all crops.  Massive starvation and disease and death follow.

Bamboo is pretty.

I went running.  Asaph went to take a yoga class that was taught by a young man from my infamous gym for whom I have pederastic feelings.  He said that everyone agreed that it wasn't the best class, but that the charms of this young man were so overwhelming, it didn't matter.  They would take classes from him again and again.

Later, it got somewhat cloudy.  I watched Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She's Bad), a silly Italian movie from the 1950s starring a very young Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.  The cars had hand cranks!

Sophia Loren kept singing this song:

Oh bongo bongo bongo
stare bene solo al Congo
non mi muovo no no.
Bingo bango bengo
molte scuse ma non vengo
io rimango qui.
No bono scarpe strette saponette
treni e tassi’
ma con questa sveglia al collo
star bene qui.

I couldn't tell if this song was racist or not.  Again I lamented the fact that I can't speak Italian.  I kept trying to sing this song, without knowing any words other than bingo bango bengo.

We went to Low Tea, which used to be my favorite thing, back before I lost the ability to enjoy myself.  We saw people who only exist on Fire Island.

 

We briefly went to High Tea, but it was a bit hard to take.  As I've mentioned, Aristotle said: Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.  But in the hamlet of Fire Island Pines, many young people are in a condition that in fact is permanent intoxication, and it is for other reasons.

 

Later that night the entire house had dinner together.  People were very funny.  One of my housemates is from Georgia, and he kept imitating Elizabeth Taylor speaking in a Tennessee Williams-film-adaptation-inspired Southern accent, but describing current events, like the closing of Chrysler dealerships.  I thought that this accent should be the standard official Southern accent, since it is quite nice.  Another pale housemate calmly described his many melanomas.  I was shocked.  I shared a quasi-racist theory that, since very white people have only been outside of northern Europe for 500 years or so, we really aren't even designed to live in places as sunny as most of North America, let alone the tropics or the Middle East.  In northern Europe, it is healthy to lie in the sun, since there is almost never any sun to lie in.

The words for "sun" in Hebrew and Arabic are very nice, and almost the same (שמש vs. شمس).

We were awakened at around 5:00 by the dawn chorus.  Those birds!

The next day I got up to go to church.  Surprisingly, my Southern housemate was there, among the six or so others in attendance.  I finally met a long-time correspondent.  The celebrant was someone I had known several years ago.  I wanted to photograph him, but I was pretty sure that the color of his chasuble was liturgically incorrect, and I didn't want to get him in trouble. 

As I was preparing for what would be an unsuccessful run, Asaph noticed that the sun and my necklace had created a pattern on my skin, which never should have left northern Europe.

 

Not exactly the stigmata, but a reminder to wear sunscreen.

My run was a total disaster, due to a failure to eat properly.  I came back and ate cashews and drank bottled ice tea drinks.

I spent some time just lounging around.

 

You could hear loud parties in the distance, or the not so distance.  So much for listening to the birds while pooping!

Later I tried the run again and succeeded.  There were young persons with little or no body fat staggering around on the boardwalks in tiny swimsuits and large sunglasses.  I was wearing the free sunglasses that my laser eye surgeon gave me after my laser eye surgery.

Later we added Middle Tea to the mix.  It was also free.  Not even $2.50.

We were awakened at around 5:00 by the dawn chorus.  Those birds!

I lay in bed very late, unlaid, listening to birds chirping and propeller planes humming overhead.  It was a beautiful day.  I felt like I was in a Miyazaki movie.

 

Those birds!

 

I stupidly wondered why the flags were at half-mast.

 

Time was spent at the beach.

 

Later I sat with my feet in the pool.  I hoped no one would notice my skin condition, which could not be transmitted through the pool anyway.

 

We forwent the Teas and decided to head home.

 

Lonely bartenders stared at the ferry from their perch at High Tea.

 

There was a young person sitting near us who was so drunk he fell off of his bench once the ferry started moving.  He didn't even try to break his fall with a hand.  His sunglasses snapped when his head hit the deck.

 

We rode the train back with a housemate and a nice guy whom Asaph had picked up in some dark corner.  He was an architect whose work had been featured in the New York Times.  After Babylon we realized that we had gone to the same college at the same time.  I was surprised.  He looked vaguely familiar, but we hadn't known each other at all.  He had very light hair and skin, appropriate for northern Ohio, or northern Europe.  Yet he was aging quite well.  It seemed odd that I could have been friends with this person, or more, and that we had probably walked by each other hundreds of times 20 years ago. 

Upon further discussion we learned that we knew no one in common.

and for the reptiles also

I often sent what I thought were interesting articles or music videos to my Arabic classmates, and these were usually well received, although my Arabic class was almost entirely composed of nerds.  I started sending things to my Hebrew class, like articles about the etymology of the Hebrew word for "Pope" or popular music videos featuring the ecstatic dancing of the Breslov group of Hasidic Jews and the mysterious mantra נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן‎ that one sees throughout Israel.  My teacher, a young religious man from Miami, was generally very appreciative of my efforts.  He asked the class if they had reviewed the materials I had sent.  The answer, from everyone, was no.

Many of the students in my Hebrew class could be described using a pejorative term for a subtype of Jewish-American women, although there is one Mexican and one Canadian for whom this epithet would be inaccurate on several counts.  All seem to have Israeli husbands or boyfriends, which seems to me to be a pretty stupid reason to study a language.  There are two other men: a nice non-heterosexual in his early 60s whom I sit with, and a very old man who I used to think was coming to class drunk, but then I realized that he was just very old.  I would guess that it has been many years since he saw age 70.  He is very sweet, but often something will strike him as funny, and he won't be able to stop laughing, like when he brought a newspaper article with a photo of an orangutan eating a piece of matzah, and my poor young religious teacher has to struggle to bring the class back under control.  My Arabic teacher would have just screamed at us until we shook and quook with fear.

But even my non-heterosexual classmate didn't read my e-mails, and the elderly man does not know how to operate a computer.  To sum up: there are no other nerds in my Hebrew class.  So my efforts are generally wasted, except on my teacher.

A friend of mine from San Francisco was visiting New York, so I met him after my brazen and shameless display of apple polishing in my Hebrew class, where we actually learned the word for "apple" (תפוח) and the word for "orange" (תפוז), which is a sort of acronym using letters from the word for "apple" and the word for "gold".

Anyway, we met for margaritas and Mexican food, although when I arrived at the restaurant at 22:00, I learned that he had already eaten, so he just had margaritas, and I had a hanger steak burrito.  I, and my former college roommate with whom I moved to San Francisco after graduation, used to complain that this particular friend had ruined our 20s, since we spent many weekend nights in the years after college drinking tea and eating cake and talking about life with this friend (whom my roommate had worked with) instead of doing crazy youthful things that we would later regret, unless you include the regret that I felt over all that time spent drinking tea and eating cake.  But now I actually think that it wasn't wasted time at all, and I was able to engage in more than enough youthful craziness in my late 20s and early 30s when Everything But The Girl was always playing in the background, and possibly even now, and maybe it turned out better this way, since I can look forward to going back to a lifestyle of weekend nights spent drinking tea and eating cake as my monumental birthday approaches, although I can't eat as much cake as I used to.  This friend did say that when he first met me (at age 22) I was "chubby", and I remembered that I had a size 36 waist for some time after college, but luckily a ruptured appendix and then a small-bowel obstruction and subsequent post-traumatic eating disorder brought me back down to size 32, where I stayed until my mid 30s.

It was nice to catch up with this friend.  Neither cake nor tea was consumed, only tequila and beef.

On Friday morning I headed over to my laser eye surgeon for the four-week follow-up visit.  My vision wasn't great.  I even had trouble reading the closed captioning on the television screen in her luxuriously appointed office.  I decided to take advantage of her elegant restroom.

 

 

She called me into the exam room while I was putting in some artificial tear drops, which she had instructed me to do every 30 minutes.

"Your eyes are very dry," she said, concerned.

"I just put in drops!" I protested.

She did a scan of my eyeballs and told me that everything looked great.

"You should be seeing fine," she said.  Evidently the physics of the corneal correction was correct, but I still wasn't seeing so well.  It was worse than a question of crispness.

"I am going to put in some larger punctal plugs," she said.

"Will that hurt?" I asked?

"You are such a boy," she said.  "You boys are so afraid of pain."  I wasn't sure I liked her calling me a boy.  It seemed inappropriately intimate and vaguely sexual.  Although I wondered if it meant that I looked relatively young.

She put in the plugs (it didn't hurt), and we discussed a recent article about happiness that had been referenced in a New York Times editorial.  The article claimed that relationships with other people were the key determining factor for happiness in life, and that relationships with siblings were especially important.  Any time I tried to talk about how worried I was about my eyes, she brought the conversation back to the article.

"You should call your brother," she said, with her New York accent.

I never call my brother, except on his birthday.

I walked across Central Park while talking on the phone to my mother, although we talked about my brother.  By the time I got back to my office, I could see perfectly.  Was I on my way to a complete and total recovery?  The only side effect was that tears were constantly streaming down my cheeks.  Whereas I had previously always been trying to cry, now I had to avoid exposure to anything that would make me happy or sad.

That night I watched an Italian movie with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni called Ieri, oggi, domani.  It was a little silly (in one section, Sophia Loren kept having babies to avoid jail), although I liked the scenes of Italy in the 1960s. 

I often wish I lived in Italy in the 1960s, although I'm sure if I did, I would be unpleasantly surprised.

I also decided that I really like the word oggi.  It seems much better than the redundant French word aujourd'hui.  The Catalan avui and the Castilian hoy are also fine descendants of hodie.

It's a pity that the words Gaudeamus hodie evoke terrible middle-school choir memories.

On Saturday morning I met my friend from San Francisco for brunch.  My vision was so clear!  Unfortunately my clear sight was set upon a street fair on 9th Avenue.  Street fairs are the worst part of summer in New York, apart from the filth, the stench, and the vermin.  Also: inappropriate clothing.

We took a walk after brunch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My friend left me, and I went to a birthday party.  One of those being celebrated was turning 31, the ideal age for a man.  The other was much younger: yet another Israeli.

 

At one point an acquaintance arrived, looked around at the other guests, and then said, "Oh, the greatest hits."

This acquaintance was described as "built like a brick shithouse".  I wondered about this expression, and after doing some research, learned that it is now commonly used to describe women, even though it was originally meant to refer to men.  I don't think I've ever heard it used to describe an attractive woman, but I am rarely around persons in the act of describing attractive women.

My first boyfriend's family lived the rural Missouri-Kansas border region, a region haunted by the ghosts of the many bloody battles that took place there during the Civil War.  His family had no indoor toilet, so you had to go outside to use an outhouse that, I believe, was built of wood.  When you shined your flashlight out into the darkness, you would see numerous pairs of eyes looking back at you.

Anyway, it was a nice party.  There were margaritas.  Tony Rizzuto said, to a visiting friend of his, in reference to me, "It's appropriate that we are drinking margaritas, since he is the expert on them: he wrote about them."  I wasn't sure what he was referring to.  I thought about how I wanted to write a book or a poem or story or something called Margarita, Margarito. 

About what, I don't know. 

 

 

Asaph asked me to go with him to a performance at his yoga studio by the children of Hare Krishnas, or something; I never really understood.  I agreed, but the two and one half margaritas contributed to the decision.

There was a lot of improvisational ecstatic dancing and mantra chanting, although it was done less elegantly than by the Breslov Hasids, and then there was some spontaneous rapping.  There was an older woman with the longest mullet I have ever seen -- it went down below her waist!

I thought about the movie In Bruges, which I had seen recently, and how Colin Farrell (who is pretty darn cute in that movie) says, "Maybe that's what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges."

I had another idea.

I had a nice trip to Bruges with my parents in 1990.  I remember lots of geese.  Poor Belgium!

On Sunday morning I got up to serve as an acolyte for Easter 6.  The celebrant was to be the former Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Bishop Frank Griswold.  I was nervous that I would have to do the water.  As I ran, late, to church, I thought about the British quantum physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, who supposedly describes himself as a practicing, but not a believing, Christian.  I wondered if I should start describing myself this way, instead of saying that I am religious but not spiritual.

Freeman Dyson also says:

The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

In his sermon, Bishop Griswold quoted the response of Isaac the Syrian (who was born in Qatar! قطر!) when he was asked what makes a merciful heart:

It is a heart which burns with love for the whole of creation: for humankind, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons, for every creature.  When persons with a heart such as this think of the creatures or look at them, their eyes are filled with tears.  An overwhelming compassion makes their heart grow small and weak, and they cannot endure to hear or see any suffering, even the smallest pain, inflicted upon any creature. Therefore they never cease to pray with tears even for the irrational animals, for the enemies of truth and for those who do them evil asking that those for whom they pray may be guarded and receive God's mercy.  And for the reptiles also they pray with a great compassion, which rises up endlessly in their hearts until they shine again and are glorious like God.

That's pretty much impossible.

I ended up doing one part of the water acolyte job, in which you give the celebrant some water to swish around in the chalice after he or she has drunk the remaining dregs of wine, which are mostly composed of spit by that point anyway.  When I described this to a friend of mine at the gym, his response was, "Religion is so stupid."  This response made me angry, but I forgave him.  Of course religion is stupid, but that's not a good example.

After the service, in the sacristy, people were complaining about the heat.  I wanted to quote Yogi Berra and say, "It's not the heat, it's the humility."  But I didn't.

Later that night I went to the Eagle.  My young activist friend Eric was there.  He is always filled with vim and vigor, among others.  He had attended a same-sex marriage rally or protest.

 

"How was it?" I asked.

"It would have been better if you had bothered to attend," he answered.

It's sad how little I contribute to society.  I was a member of the Seattle branch of the ACT UP political advocacy group during the summer of 1990 (after the trip to Bruges with my parents).  I had trouble participating in any of their protests, since I always wondered if we were going about things the right way.  For years I used my careful consideration of all sides of an issue as an excuse to remain apathetic.

As we stood there watching hard-core pornography projected onto a giant screen, I thought of the words of civil rights leader and Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. 

he received sight forthwith

Nothing like scales have fallen from my eyes, but I have had some moments of clarity.  After accidentally watching the end of El laberinto del fauno on television, when Ofelia is reunited with her mother and father in the underworld and becomes Princess Moanna because of her selflessness and willingness to sacrifice herself instead of allowing any harm to come to her baby brother and even all of the fairies have been resurrected, I wiped away prodigious tears and went on a walk to the drug store.  Things were as clear as they ever had been with my lenses for the duration of the 30-minute walk, but, sadly, haziness returned later.  I wondered if the assortment of eye drops I had been administering on a regular basis were actually clouding my vision.  I then periodically tried to make myself cry by thinking about the plot of a book that Asaph read last summer called The Jewish Dog (הכלב היהודי).  I remember waking up one night out on Fire Island and Asaph was sobbing hysterically next to me while reading this book.  He then told me the plot, and I started sobbing too.

I will not describe the plot, lest it lose its power to improve my vision.

I talked to my colleague who had laser eye surgery on the same day that I had, with the same surgeon.  She was still having problems as well.  She said that she would sometimes make herself cry by thinking about how happy she was when Barack Obama was elected, and that this made her vision clearer.  I wondered if I would be in a better mood if I had chosen a happy tear-triggering thought, instead of the plot of הכלב היהודי.

I wondered why most people reported immediate satisfaction with their laser eye surgery.  Was I just being too sensitive?  But what about my colleague?  I kept watching a trailer for the new Almodóvar movie, Los abrazos rotos, in which Penélope Cruz walks into a room where a blurred image of her in a film is playing.  She shouts ¡Enfócame! -- put me in focus -- and the image becomes clear.  I started saying ¡Enfócame! in my head whenever I was frustrated with my vision, but it didn't work.

I used to dream that my life would end up like an Almodóvar movie, and, for a brief period, it was.  Although not really.  But if my vision never clears up, it won't have the color and crispness of an Almodóvar film, let alone a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie like Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. My friend Koray, who comes from a good family and who likes the aesthetic of exposed dishware, told me to see a new commercial for Chanel No. 5 directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  It shows Audrey Tautou riding the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, something that doesn't even exist anymore (the Orient Express, I mean; Paris and Istanbul are probably still there).  Of course, even with the clearest vision possible, life would not look like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, as there is considerable retouching and computer-generated imagery and a reduction in ethnic minorities.

I had to go to Atlanta for work.  The trip was nothing like Audrey Tautou's trip to Turkey in the perfume commercial.  Before the flight, I took the remaining Valium that my laser eye surgeon had provided, but it was unnecessarily strong.  I felt weak in the knees as I boarded the plane and ended up falling asleep before the plane even took off.  I don't think that I need that level of sedation, even for today's terrible air travel standards.

I saw very little of Atlanta, as I was trapped inside a cavernous hotel for most of my stay.

 

I am always a bit disappointed when visiting The South.  I wish that there was some sort of standardized Southern accent that was used on the radio and television news, like the way there is a BBC Scottish accent used on BBC Scotland, although the Scottish aristocracy doesn't speak with Scottish accents, and I attended a lecture on Afghanistan by a Scottish aristocrat while at this Atlanta conference, and he just sounded southern English.  Anyway, I'm always a bit let down that things in The South aren't as exotic as they are portrayed in movies and books.  Things either seem to be kind of junky, or else they are just like they are anywhere else in the country.  But I realize that a hotel in the middle of downtown Atlanta is probably not the best place to expect Southern flavor.  The one restaurant I ate at outside of the hotel did allow smoking (although I didn't see anyone engaged in this activity).  I guess that's different.

The conference was fine.  There was plenty of predictable self-congratulation, but that's the industry I am in.  The civil rights leader and member of the House of Representatives John Lewis addressed our group, and he certainly had a strong accent.

 

As did the probably terrible governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, whose name is almost comically Southern.  I wondered what his role was in Georgia's terrible flag problems.  I was surprised when I researched this issue.

Several blowhards from the Obama administration also spoke.  I love Obama, of course, but I already felt like I was drowning in buzzwords, and his lackeys made things worse with their use of words lke "partnering" and "architecting".  Those are not words in any standard form of English.

We attended a networking event at the nearby aquarium, and it was one of few opportunities to see some of Atlanta.

We were served chicken at nearly every meal.

The next day the Secretary of Health and Human Services spoke.  She was fine, I suppose.

 

During breaks I would walk around the block, to test my vision.  I was usually approached by the indigent, who were very polite and friendly and would therefore trap me in long conversations that would inevitably end with a solicitation of funds.  I always felt bad that they had wasted so much time.  In New York, people just ask for money outright.  In San Francisco, the homeless are crazed maniacs who scream and attack you if you aren't always on guard and carrying something hard and sharp with which to strike them.

 

I attended a session on modern slavery and human trafficking, moderated by the actress Julia Ormond.  She seemed very arrogant and somewhat crazy.  I wanted to see how she was aging, but my vision was too hazy to tell.  She also had one of those terrible half-English/half-American accents that should not be the standard for anything.

I almost went to a non-heterosexual strip club with a friend of mine from when I lived in Washington (the capital), but I was too tired, and I was driven back to my hotel by an Ethiopian cab driver who asked if I minded if he smoked.  I said I didn't, but then the smell on my clothes really stood out against the antiseptic odorlessness of my hotel room.

On the last morning, the mayor of New York spoke.  He is fine, and I have voted for him, but he's a little bit too smug.

 

He would never have tolerated smoking from an Ethiopian cab driver, since he is well-known for his vehement anti-smoking fervor.

We waited patiently for the final presentation.  Normally these conferences end around noon on the last day, but thousands of us were waiting patiently at 14:00 for the rock-star speaker.  Finally, he arrived.

 

He reminded me of the good old days, back when I thought there were still possibilities.  I could listen to him ramble on for hours, which, luckily, he likes to do.  His ability to combine folksiness with serious issues is pretty amazing.  I remember once having a sexual dream about him, back in the previous century.  I was alarmed by this, as I recall.

Back in New York, I thought about new plans for my life, especially with my milestone birthday coming up and still not having produced many deliverables, or lessons learned.  Asaph was out of town visiting his grandmother, who conveniently and suspiciously lives in Miami Beach.  I slept in his apartment with the windows open, so I could wake up to the sound of the birds singing in the courtyard.  I was reminded of nights spent at the house of family friends (the father went to college with my father, and he had a terrible expectoration issue) that was located by what we called a ravine, although that was probably inaccurate, but we took what we could get in central Ohio.  I remember hearing the beautiful songs of wood thrushes whenever we stayed at their house.  There were no wood thrushes in Asaph's courtyard, but at least there were respectable birds with respectable songs, and not just pigeons, starlings, and house sparrows: the scum of the bird world.

On Saturday I went to Brooklyn to hang out with my friend Christopher.  We had made plans to have brunch, and I had wondered if my phone was homophobic, since "brunch" was not included in the predictive text selections, although the word it kept suggesting was "bruno".

Christopher ate a tiny cupcake. 

I wondered if those shrill harpies on "Sex and the City" tours of New York would be satisfied with such a small cupcake.

We went back and hung out in Christopher's apartment.

 

We then took the dog for a walk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dog was tired then.

 

I rode the subway back to Manhattan in a car containing the actress Julianna Margulies, her baby and her attractive young husband.  I kept trying to steal a glimpse at her and also at her attractive young husband, who was dressed in a provocative manner.  She was aging quite well, I noticed.  They both caught me looking at them, thereby blowing my attempt to be a nonchalant, jaded New Yorker.  I wondered why they were riding the subway.  The wheels of their stroller were briefly caught in the gap as they alighted, but they managed to pull them out before I could come to the rescue and become a hero and be brought into a new life of fame and glamor.

I went to church for Easter 5 the next day.

 

I then walked up along the Hudson while talking to my mother on the phone.

 

 

 

 

She and my father had been in Canada, where Mother's Day is probably a week earlier than it is here.

I went to the Eagle that night.  It was fun, although I tried to ingratiate myself with some attractive Lebanese by referring to Israel as the Zionist Entity, and later I felt that that had been a bit beneath me, and also they might not have gotten that I was making a joke, although they weren't Muslims, and I never know what to expect from Arab Christians.  I wished I could go to Lebanon, since it is seems so glamorous and 1970s.  I have plans to go there once I get a new passport in 2011, but I am afraid that I will still crack under pressure when asked if I have ever visited the Zionist Entity and end up on the first plane back to wherever I've come from.  It would be nice to take a train from Paris to Istanbul and then on to Beirut, especially if it were all directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

the sex issue

At the Easter dinner I attended at the Brooklyn basement apartment of my friend Vince, a group of his age-inappropriate guests began playing the drinking game "I never", in which the fun of the game involves forcing people to admit some sort of scandalous behavior.  The admitting is done by taking a drink, so the more things one admits, the more one feels comfortable to admit.

I had had a number of glasses of that which I had denied myself during Lent, but I suffer from an annoying form of an in vino veritas problem whereby I sometimes get more judgmental and prudish the more I've drunk.  This doesn't always happen, as many, many persons can attest, but I think I was feeling a bit peevish -- in spite of the resurrection -- that I was now in the terminal demographic profile for one of Vince's dinners (those profiles are: 17-21, 22-25, 26-29, 30-34, 35-38, 39-99).

One of Vince's young chorus-boy friends (a perfectly sweet person, with an impressive high kick) began his turn with "I've never...cheated on a boyfriend."  Several persons started to lift their glasses, but then began a bit of a dispute over the exact definition of cheating.  So, I said, "Jesus said that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell."

Then there was some uncomfortable laughter.

I was thinking about how many non-heterosexuals think it is ridiculous to be involved in any major religion since religions pretty much all uniformly condemn homosexuality.  I routinely hear non-heterosexual Christians compared to Jewish Nazis.  I'm not sure the analogy is quite accurate (unless you think that the primary purpose of Christianity is to eliminate homosexuality, which I suppose some people do), but it's perfectly understandable that someone comfortable in his or her non-heterosexuality would not have any interest in affiliating him- or herself with anything that condemns it, regardless of any of the other absurdities of any given religion, like prohibitions on drinking alcohol or eating beef or walking around bareheaded or whatever number of impossible things one is asked to believe before breakfast.

And even in the liberal variants of the major religions, there is always a bit of awkwardness about the sex issue.  The usual answer is that the people who wrote the sacred books of whatever tradition in question didn't have an accurate understanding of homosexuality, which makes sense, since many homophobic persons continue to think that homosexuality is some sort of decadent lifestyle choice, like selvage denim, instead of being a core aspect of a person's identity.  So, as the liberal religious argument goes, the homosexuality condemned in the Bible or whatever really isn't homosexuality as we know it, but instead something that remains distasteful, like rape or incest or pedophilia or a shocking lack of hospitality. 

Some anti-homosexuals, however, do understand that homosexuality isn't just a decadent lifestyle choice, like Pilates, and say that even if it is a core aspect of a person's identity, that's just tough.  It is something to be struggled against -- we all have our crosses to bear -- like a sexual attraction towards babies or kleptomania or alcoholism or compulsive shopping, like that depicted in several episodes of the television show "Big Love", a program that makes polygamy look kind of fun.  Kind of.

I am still unconvinced that homophobia comes from religion, exactly, even though that seems like a pretty ridiculous position, given that the main opponents of homosexuality these days are religious and usually use religion in their arguments.  (When I recently saw the dumber Baldwin brother on CNN say, "God wrote the Bible, and the Bible says that if a man lies with another man, it is a sin," I felt ready to send a check to Richard Dawkins.)  But there are so many other things taught by religions -- things that are much more key aspects of belief -- that no one really seems to care about in terms of public policy, or even private morality.  Only a few of the Ten Commandments are actually laws, and no fundamentalist Christians are trying to make blasphemy against the Holy Spirit a capital crime (that I know of), or to pass ballot initiatives requiring Americans to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  I have a feeling that religious opponents of homosexuality would prefer to live next-door to Richard Dawkins and his third wife (who played the second Romanadvoratrelundar on "Doctor Who") than a pair of monogamous homosexuals aflame with the power of the Spirit.

My hunch -- which could be wrong -- is that revulsion towards homosexuality is similar to revulsion towards (get ready for the comparison!) pedophilia, bestiality and incest.  Or, to take less inflammatory examples, the revulsion many non-smokers feel when they detect cigarette smoke or when a vegetarian is told that they have just eaten something containing chicken stock.  Or if I told you I had just served you fried dog to eat.  These feelings are not entirely rational, even though we can construct quasi-rational arguments for them.  But the visceral revulsion is considerably out of proportion to any rational argument (and often resistant to any rational argument), and yet, for many of these, the revulsion can be switched off.

I don't know of any society where people have sex with infants, but the current American belief that sex with a 17-year-old is pedophilia worthy of a prime time television expose while sex with an 18-year-old is fine (depending on the state) is not really consistent with world history.  Incest is pretty much universally condemned (except in early parts of the Book of Genesis, and brothers and sisters have occasionally married throughout history, usually in weird royal settings, like in Pharaonic Egypt), but cousin marriage is quite normal in the Arab world, and in some Gilbert & Sullivan light operas.  There are several cultures where people eat dogs.  And not too long ago, people put up with smoking pretty much everywhere  -- certainly the idea of non-smoking floors in hotels or non-smoking outdoor parks has little to do with health, and more to do with the idea that smoking is somehow icky.

Many find homosexuality icky, to say the least.

I think our minds want to see order and purpose in the world, and homosexuality, especially for the non-homosexual, doesn't seem natural, although natural isn't really the right word, since even things that exist in nature can seem somehow wrong, like how Mallard ducks are into gang rape.  It has become popular to blame all of the world's homophobia on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but even Plato wrote that homosexual acts were "utterly unholy" and "the ugliest of ugly things".  And didn't the Greeks invent those acts?  Greek active?  Greek passive?

I read some article by the -- atheist -- professor of psychology at Yale Paul Bloom who thinks that we are hard-wired for creationism -- meaning that it is very hard for us not to see purpose in the world, and this is something that children do without any prompting by adults.  As a non-heterosexual, I may see a very different purpose in a man's back and front than a non-homosexual, but we are in the minority.  Of course there are still some religious leaders who preach against heterosexual promiscuity and adultery, but it never reaches the same level of visceral disgust that these people have for homosexuality.  And heterosexual male promiscuity -- despite Jesus' words quoted above -- is often casually laughed off -- or celebrated -- even by the devout.

Since homosexual sex has no other obvious purpose than pleasure, it is hard to fit into some other grand scheme for the world, and this is why, I think, it it generally condemned by most religious traditions, who usually try to claim that there is a way to live in harmony with God, and it doesn't include a man lying with a man.  Liberal religious will try to make the argument that all mutually respectful and affirming love between two adults is good, and will often try to create a homosexual equivalent to Holy Matrimony, by saying that long-term, monogamous homosexual relationships are just as good as what passes for marriage these days.  I agree, of course, but I also have a low opinion of what passes for marriage these days, and I was also the recent beneficiary of the lack of same-sex marriage rights in New York State.  My enthusiasm for same-sex marriage rights is mostly intellectual.

In his Easter sermon this year, The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote: "The present financial crisis has dealt a heavy blow to the idea that human fulfilment can be thought about just in terms of material growth and possession.  Accepting voluntary limitation to your acquisitiveness, your sexual appetite, your freedom of choice doesn't look so absurd after all as a path to some sort of stability and mutual care."  (Those are my italics.)  Although he is required by his job description to be relatively disapproving of homosexuality, it is more likely that he is referring to the hypersexualized culture of today's Britain and America, from the hooking-up of the kids these days to the never-ending stream of sex scandals coming from elected officials.  Or any officials.  He was also putting in a pitch for monasticism, a way of life that has always seemed appealing to me, in theory only.

But, let's forget the God delusion for now. I think we're all a bit weary.

Is there any place for a sexual morality these days, among the urban non-heterosexual?  Do we really think that monogamous long-term relationships are the ideal, and are better than other relationships?  How are we to conduct our sex lives?  Do we just apply the Golden Rule to sex?  It doesn't quite work if someone is interested in being bound and dominated.  And romantic love causes people to act in ways that are less governed by reason than almost anything else, even more than the love of parent for child.  Think of when Medea got dumped by Jason.  Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials.  Then she killed his, and her own, children.

They used to say that all was fair in love and war, but that was before the Geneva Conventions.

A while back I read an open thread on an online diary that asked: would you pursue someone who a close friend of yours was interested in?  Would you pursue an ex-boyfriend of a friend?  The responses ranged from "no!" to "Hell no!"  I remember feeling very dirty and ashamed when I read these responses, since I had done both of those.  More than once.  More than twice.  More than...

Promiscuity is simultaneously celebrated and condemned.  Calling another guy a "whore" is both insult and praise.  If a heterosexual male is condemned for having too many sexual partners, it is usually related to how he is treating the women involved.  This wouldn't be the issue for a guy sleeping with tons of other guys -- there remains something shameful about it, even though a majority of guys I know stopped counting after their 100th partner.  Many, if not most, in our grandparents' generation only had one sexual partner in their lives.  Were they less happy?

I feel like we are somewhat adrift.  Previous generations of activists argued that sex itself was a tool of liberation, and that we shouldn't conform to heterosexual norms.  Now we are fighting for equal marriage rights, even as the serial-monogamy marriage model, where relationships are abandoned when they fail to meet our lifestyle needs, seems empty and absurd, especially as one can now witness the break-up of relationships via social networking websites and online diaries.

Many spend hours and hours shopping for new sexual partners online.  My self-esteem could never take being turned around at someone's door: sorry, you're not what I thought I had ordered.  I would throw myself off a cliff, but not before mailing the rejector a poisoned robe, like Medea did.  

In Larry Kramer's infamous speech in 2004, he said:

Most gay people I see appear to me to act as if they’re bored to death. Too much time on your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on crystal and do your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your hands.

I have no answers.  I only have questions.  Why is it wrong to cheat on someone, but fine to break up with them, when the latter causes even more pain?  (This seems to come from contract law.  I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, and that's that.)  Is there any value in limiting your sexual appetite, or are you just missing out on what makes life worth living? (I remember someone once saying to me, during the act: "we won't be able to do this when we're 70.")   Is sex between men different than sex between men and women?  Should it be taken less seriously?  (A friend of mine compares sex between men to a handshake.)  Are open relationships the only realistic model?  (Among the non-heterosexuals, it looks like open relationships last longest.  And guys in open relationships often seem to be a bit calmer and more secure than others.  But maybe they just like each other less?  Or are open relationships just another symptom of non-heterosexual immaturity?)  Should we be trying to create a model of stability and mutual care?  I know we will never find a perfect balance between desire, infatuation, jealousy, devotion, adoration, security, and heartbreak.  Any rules that have been created in the past always had to favor one over the other: the eternal conflict of freedom versus security.

Should we just keep making it up as we go along? 

I guess there's no other choice at this point, really.

what is this strange confusion that veils my aching eyes

On Easter Tuesday I went to my laser eye surgeon for final measurements.  She walked into the exam room drinking a popular canned energy drink.  My laser eye surgeon is an attractive woman in her mid-40s, although she has a New York accent.

"Aren't you so excited?" she said, in a very animated fashion.  "You are going to be thrilled!"

"I guess so," I said. 

"I want to see some more enthusiasm!" she shouted.  I thought that maybe she should stop having so many energy drinks.

I liked my laser eye surgeon and was happy that I had chosen her over the other option I had considered, despite her New York accent and the fact that she always wears scrubs.  The other surgeon is a member of my gym, and I felt apprehensive about someone from my gym touching my eyes.

On Easter Thursday I walked over to the laser eye surgery center for the procedure.  I was nervous.  There was a woman in the lobby being led out by a friend or relative.  She had weird lenses taped to her eyes and was wearing sunglasses on top of that.  I wondered if she would ever see again.  My anxiety increased.

I checked in and sat down in the lobby.  I then got up and went to the restroom for some more anxiety-induced accelerated digestive activity.  I went back and tried to read The Religious Case Against Belief by James Carse, but I had a hard time concentrating on such a topic.  There was a television playing non-stop commercials for laser eye surgery.  I thought that this was a tacky touch.

My name was called and I was taken to another waiting room where there was another television playing normal programs but with no sound, and with closed captioning.  This seemed a bit inappropriate.  My laser eye surgeon came out to greet me.  She handed me a Valium and a Vicodin.  Then she went over to another middle-aged man in a suit to give him some as well.

"But you already gave me some," he protested.

"The party is just getting started!" she replied.

I tried to read some more while I waited to feel something from the drugs.  After a while, my laser eye surgeon came out again. 

"Are you feeling anything?" she asked.

"Not really," I said.  She gave me additional drugs.  Then she walked over to a new arrival who had a financial air about him and offered him some pills as well.

"I don't think I need them, but why not?" he said.  He explained that he was only there for a touch-up.

Another man sitting in the waiting area who had a different laser eye surgeon started to get agitated.  He was clearly very nervous and was accompanied by a girlfriend.  "These people are getting excellent service," he yelled.  "Where in the hell is my doctor?"  His girlfriend tried to comfort him.

Eventually my doctor came and took away the man in the suit.  I still felt pretty nervous but was vaguely aware of some benzodiazepine activity in my brain.

Finally, my time was up.  She took me back and did some final measurements.  "Do you want another Valium?" she asked.  Not wanting to be rude, I accepted.  I was led into the room with the laser and instructed to lie down.  She asked me to hold a stuffed animal in my arms.  "It's a girl surgeon touch," she said.

I didn't enjoy the part where they cut the flap off your eye.  Despite having had three Valiums and two Vicodin, I was still shaking so much that she had to hold my head down with her hand.  I shake a lot when nervous.  (The first time I had sex, I shook so much that one would have thought that I was a member of a communal quasi-mystical religious sect known for its simple, well-designed furniture and celibacy, except that I was having sex with another man.)  The part where the laser actually shaped the cornea was no big deal.  Having recently ended my vegan fast, I found the smell of burning flesh to be not altogether unpleasant.

When it was done, she stood me up.  "Look at the clock!  Can you tell what time it is?"

"It's kind of blurry," I said.

"But can you read it?"

I admitted that I could, but I had expected everything to be crystal clear immediately, so I was a bit disappointed. 

Asaph was waiting for me.  "These are garbage now," she said, handing him my glasses.  I thought that she shouldn't speak so soon and that it was disrespectful to say that about my glasses.  I was still somewhat skeptical, although I had very bad vision before (-7.00), and even with the blurriness, I was able to see in a way that I hadn't been able to see unassisted since I was in early elementary school, back before Asaph was born and before they had color television in Israel.

I was told to keep my eyes closed as much as possible.  Asaph took me back to his apartment, and I went to sleep.

 

I only got up for about an hour, in order to eat a chicken quesadilla with extra guacamole.

The next day my vision was very clear.  I walked across Central Park for my follow-up appointment.  My laser eye surgeon's office is very fancy, with fresh flowers and a marble bathroom with wireless internet.  I was able to read the 20/20 line on the chart.  I still failed to show the expected amount of enthusiasm, however.  I had forgotten even to have coffee.

I went to work.  A colleague of mine had had the procedure with the same laser eye surgeon on the same day, and we talked about how happy we were.

The next day I woke up and my vision was blurrier.  I went for a run in the park, which my doctor had told me I could do (although I would later learn that many don't advise this), and I was disappointed.  Despite having had bad vision, I could see very well with my contact lenses, often better than people who didn't wear glasses or anything at all.  But my laser eye surgeon had told me to expect what she called "fluctuation".

The next day my vision was still pretty blurry.  I went to church for Easter 2 and was unable to see the service very well.  Then I met up with Asaph and our friend Eric for brunch.  We were going to see a performance of the Gilbert & Sullivan light opera The Sorcerer, starring our friend David.  Because my mother was the choreographer for a light opera repertory company in north-central Ohio when I was a child, back before Asaph was born, I have seen every single Gilbert & Sullivan light opera with the exception of their first, Thespis, but all the music from that light opera was lost except for one song, "Climbing Over Rocky Mountain", which was inserted into a later light opera, The Pirates of Penzance. Consequently, Thespis is never performed. 

I rarely have the chance to impress anyone with my exhaustive knowledge of Gilbert & Sullivan.

I warned Eric and Asaph that Gilbert & Sullivan light operas were not very relevant to our lives today, and that the entire plot is generally resolved in the last song, usually by finding out that characters had been switched at birth.

The performance was in the Museo del Barrio, which seemed like the least appropriate place for a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, although it matched Eric's shirt.

 

The performance was wonderful, and our friend David was outstanding as the title character.  They had set the action in present-day New York, and changed some of the dialog to make the jokes more intelligible.  Although some Gilbert & Sullivan purists would object to that, much of the humor is so topical to the 1870s that it can be difficult to appreciate.  Sometimes I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia (I remembered pretty much all of the songs) and tears would fill my eyes, temporarily improving my vision.

I was reminded how much the word "rapture" is used by Gilbert, and I felt renewed annoyance at the way the word has been hijacked by American Evangelical Protestants.  I was reminded of a song in another Gilbert & Sullivan light opera called The Yeoman of the Guard, in which a man is forced by circumstances to marry an older woman.  Then they sing:

Dame Carruthers:

Rapture, rapture
When love's votary,
Flushed with capture,
Seeks the notary,
Joy and jollity
Then is polity;
Reigns frivolity!
Rapture, rapture!
Joy and jollity
Then is polity;
Reigns frivolity!
Rapture, rapture!

Sergeant Meryll:

Doleful, doleful!
When humanity
With its soul full
Of satanity,
Courting privity,
Down declivity
Seeks captivity!
Doleful, doleful!
Courting privity,
Down declivity
Seeks captivity!
Doleful, doleful!

Dame Carruthers:

Joyful, joyful!
When virginity
Seeks, all coyful,
Man's affinity;
Fate all flowery,
Bright and bowery,
Is her dowery!
Joyful, joyful!
Fate all flowery,
Bright and bowery,
Is her dowery!
Joyful, joyful!

Sergeant Meryll:

Ghastly, ghastly!
When man, sorrowful,
Firstly, lastly,
Of to-morrow full,
After tarrying,
Yields to harrying—
Goes a-marrying.
Ghastly, ghastly!

I suppose that song would be seen as somewhat sexist now.  Still, I'd like to reclaim the word "rapture" from those idiots.

I had to go home to do Arabic homework after the show, so we walked through the park, and again I was disappointed by the lack of crispness in my vision.  I could hear my laser eye surgeon saying the word "crispness" in my head, with her New York accent.

 

 

 

 

The next day at work my colleague said that she was having crispness issues as well.  We checked in every day.  There was no real improvement.

On Friday I headed back over to my laser eye surgeon's well-appointed office.  I couldn't read the 20/20 line without drops.  She told me to be patient and that I should use eye-drops every 30 minutes, to ensure maximum eventual crispness.

That night Asaph and I took the bus to Washington, the capital.  Despite the presence of wireless internet access (that allowed us to watch episodes of "The Office" and "30 Rock", albeit with difficulty), we both agreed that the bus is never fun, which is sad, since I read that the bus is the most environmentally friendly form of transportation.

After we arrived, we went to have dinner with a friend and then took at taxi to an industrial area, near what appeared to be a cement mixery and/or a power station.  We went to a bar that had naked young men dancing on elevated platforms.  This doesn't exist in New York, which is known for its strict morality.  It was fine, although Asaph made me talk to one of these naked men who grabbed my hand and put it on his chest.  This seemed humiliating to me, although it was a nice chest.  We noticed a notable lack of sexual energy among the patrons.  I suppose everything was directed towards the paid staff.  Some people complained to us that none of the performers had body hair.  I met someone who was in the Coast Guard, and I actually said, "many thanks for protecting our shores."  Asaph told me that he wished I had said something else to this fellow.

The first floor of the bar was used for drag performances.  The performers were also being offered dollar bills, although I didn't quite see the rationale.  For the naked dancers, a patron would take a dollar bill and then run it along the performer's oiled body before slipping it into a sock.  I didn't know what benefit you got from handing a dollar bill to a drag queen.  I am generally afraid of calling attention to myself in the presence of a drag queen.

The next day, after brunch with Nick, our host, we went on long marches around the city.  It was very hot.  We passed two banks whose windows had been shot out, by guns, with bullets.  I guess the anger over the bank bailout is at quite elevated levels in Washington.

We ran into Batala, an all women's percussion band.

 

There was a very cute woman conducting them.

 

I never felt more heterosexual.

It was very enjoyable.  If all music is just an elaborate way to remind us of the sound of our mother's heartbeat in the womb, an all-women's percussion band is the most direct manner by which to experience this, other than putting your ear up against a woman's chest.

I was reminded how I had recently learned that some babies -- even boys -- lactate for a while after birth.  I learned this from an episode of the animated comedy "King of the Hill".

We kept walking.

 

We had missed the cherry blossoms.  We were heading into the tulip period.

 

There were attractive young men jogging shirtless everywhere.  I am exposed to perfect bodies all of the time at my infamous gym, but something about these young men seemed more appealing than the pornographic performers with whom I routinely compete for lockers.  Maybe it was just the combination of masculine/muscular/military.  More likely it was the innocence I was projecting on them.  I last felt truly young when I lived in Washington, back in the mid 1990s, before Asaph was born.

We went to the National Gallery.

We took a tour related to American painting.  Our guide was a thin woman in her 40s who had a strange, affected way of speaking, often ending sentences with "yes?" and sometimes pretending not to be able to find the word for something, as if she were foreign.  But she wasn't.

 

She paused at a painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, to show us an atypical example of American painting.  Evidently Whistler hated America.  She told us to go to the Freer Gallery to see the Peacock Room, an entire room he had painted for a wealthy British patron.  The patron and Whistler had had a big disagreement over this room, and Whistler passive-aggressively painted his frustration into the room.

I wandered around the National Gallery while Asaph worked on an art activity that was part of some special event for children related to something Dutch.  I checked on him occasionally, to see if he was coloring within the lines.

 I went back to look at some of the paintings we had discussed during the tour.

 

There was a series of paintings we had seen called the "Voyage of Life" by Thomas Cole.  This voyage had four stages: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.  I figured I was in "manhood".  It was a painting of a terrified man about to go over a waterfall.

 

I went outside for a while, disappointed that the lack of crispness made ogling the joggers and those playing sports on the Mall difficult, although it made it easier to deal with the large groups of overweight Southern tourists.  Asaph finally finished his project, and I went back to congratulate him.

 

It was very hot.  We walked over to get something to drink.

 

We got iced tea.

 

 

We had reservations for an activity at the International Spy Museum, but Asaph started feeling unwell, probably from dehydration, but things weren't helped when he was bitten by a large fly.  I tried to reassure him, but I am not so good at that.

Once I determined that he wasn't having an allergic reaction to an insect bite, and that it was just dehydration, I kept telling him that he would be fine.

"You're well on your way to a complete and total recovery," I said.  It wasn't really an appropriate thing to say to someone who was dehydrated, but I couldn't think of anything else comforting.

The experience at the International Spy Museum was silly.

Later we went to the bar where our host worked to meet my friend Jimbo, Durban (whom I had never met before in person) and his boyfriend.

 

 

Jimbo regaled us with interesting stories of equine sexually transmitted diseases and specific pointers on being a good house guest.  Durban was exactly as I had predicted.

I ran into a friend from college who was celebrating his 40th birthday.  He said that the New York Times was very biased, since it has been running articles about how great Washington is ever since Obama was elected, and he keeps running into visitors from New York.  "DC is not cool," he said.  He lives there.

Later Asaph and I went to Town, a relatively new dance club.  It was very pleasant and spacious and so well-ventilated that shirtless dancing was uncomfortable, as one might catch a chill.  Still, it was hard to imagine a nicer space for a club.  There were even drinking fountains!  I had to close my eyes occasionally, however, since the sight of some budding youthful threesomes was not how I wanted to use any of my limited crispness.  Although I do like them young, I have high standards.

The next day we had brunch in the neighborhood where our host lived.  We passed a place made cool by a visit from the Obamas.

 

It has probably also been featured in the New York Times.

We had brunch with the ex-boyfriend of a friend of ours.  He is very masculine and muscular, and he was in the military.  I had to expend a lot of energy trying to hide how weird I am.  "Did you know that some babies lactate?" I asked.  He did not.

We went to the National Museum of American History to meet Asaph's cousins.

 

I walked through the exhibit on the flag that inspired the national anthem of the United States.  There was a video playing at the exit of the exhibit that showed different uses of the American flag.  One scene depicted two men holding hands at a protest while wearing shirts decorated with stars and stripes.  I heard a child say, "That's a disgrace to the American flag."

I tried to formulate an opinion on the massive statue of George Washington depicted as a Roman emperor.

 

We decided to walk over to the Freer Gallery to look at the Peacock Room.  Also, we had heard that the restrooms were nicer there.  The National Museum of American History was swarming with large Southern families.

The Freer Museum was quiet and peaceful, and the restrooms were lovely.  A woman told us the story of the Peacock Room.  She contradicted the story the woman at the National Gallery had told us.  "The National Gallery is not part of the Smithsonian, so they often have their facts wrong," she said.

Asaph's cousin asked if Whistler had any connection to the ski resort in British Columbia.  I pretended not to hear her.

The Peacock Room was impressive.

 

There was a sign outside the Peacock Room that slightly contradicted the story that the woman at the front desk had told us.  Then a man inside the Peacock Room contradicted something else that the woman, and the sign, had told us.

I started to get a headache.  I went to look at some of the other exhibitions.

 

 

 

There was a fountain in the courtyard that soothed my aching eyes.

 

 

We made our way back outside.  I wondered if I detected some renewed crispness.

 

We went to get some more tea.

 

We headed back to the apartment to get ready to leave.  We were taking the night train home, instead of the bus.  I love taking the train in general, and at night it's even better.  It makes me think of the W. H. Auden poem "Night Mail".

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

That's not the whole poem.

Our host's boyfriend had just returned from his stay in Asaph's apartment in New York, and he offered to drive us to the station, so we had time to get some drinks back at our host's bar.  It wasn't crowded, like the Eagle in New York is on a Sunday evening, but it was pleasant.

Asaph got a snack of which I was not a big fan.

 

The train ride was nice, although I wasn't that excited about getting back home.  I thought I detected some genuine crispness as I looked out the window.  Was I well on my way to a complete and total recovery?  It was hard to imagine.

O happy fault!

On Wednesday of Holy Week, the first night of Passover, I went to a Seder hosted by the Israeli mother of a friend of Asaph's whose family moved to Queens in the 1960s.  He gave us a brief tour of the neighborhood, pointing out the new ostentatious mansions built by recent Russian immigrants and a house that looked like it had been relocated directly from Israel, with rounded beige stone walls (the Mediterranean Bauhaus style that is somewhat unique to Israel) and semi-tropical plantings that are managing to survive the New York winter.

The Seder was the most chaotic I have ever attended.  The event was periodically interrupted by cries of !שקט ("silence!") by our friend's elderly mother.  Ceremonial items of food like small matza-maror sandwiches and leaves of lettuce filled with horseradish were occasionally passed down a line of 20 or so bare hands.  I put my trust in the LORD.

Our friend is in his forties, and looking at his slightly older brothers and sisters starkly illustrated the way that non-heterosexuals age so much better than their non-homosexual peers.  I remember always being annoyed in college and in my early twenties when girls and women would claim that all of the good-looking men were not interested in their sex, since it was clearly not true (usually the most attractive man in any given room would be thoroughly heterosexual).  But somewhere around age 32 this stops being the case.

No one had read the Gourmet magazine article about how the entire Exodus story is untrue and how it isn't even the "Red Sea" in the original Hebrew but rather the "Sea of Reeds", so we didn't discuss that.  There was a lot of complaining about the length of the ritual and predictions that it wouldn't survive many more years, even though it has been going on for a couple thousand now.  Eventually I went to the living room to read the entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica on the anti-Jewish Ecclesia et Synagoga motif in European medieval art and architecture, in which a blindfolded and dejected woman holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments is positioned next to an upright and triumphant woman bearing a cross.  I wondered what Faruq would think of this motif. 

The next day was Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum.  It's one of my favorite holidays, although I never engage in the foot washing, owing to having disgusting feet.  The former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church presided at the service, which is always nice, although he doesn't use Mozarabic chant for Eucharistic Prayer D, which is sad, since I always look forward to that and our rector does it beautifully.

My friend Christopher came along, as did my former roommate who is of Swedish Lutheran and Moroccan Jewish descent, but who likes the service for anthropological reasons.  Towards the end, consecrated Communion hosts are carried into a procession to the so-called altar of repose, where a vigil is kept all night.  I remember a priest once referring to this practice as "pious", and he meant this in a somewhat negative way.  I think the ritual is forbidden in the founding documents of the Episcopal Church of the United States, but they have bigger things to worry about now.

I loitered in the church for a while after the dramatic stripping of the altar, when the baptismal font is dumped angrily onto the altar, which is then scrubbed with a homemade bundle of palm fronds.  Our church doesn't really have too many other decorations to strip.

I was afraid to take a photo of the altar of repose, as it would have disturbed the other people sitting around meditating and praying, but luckily an acquaintance took one at four in the morning.

 

The next day was appropriately gloomy. 

 

The Good Friday service is my least favorite of the year.  I hate it.  I hate hearing the Passion story, especially the new politically correct translation in which "praetorium" is changed to "headquarters" and "Caesar" to "the Emperor".  I hate the dramatic venerations of the cross, which seem quite fake and forced to me.  I was pleased to see that a prominent Episcopalian did not take part in these venerations, although I myself went up and gave a quick curtsy, which makes me a hypocrite, and it's a pity.

The only thing I like about the service is this beautiful anthem.

Crux fidelis, inter omnes
Arbor una nobilis,
Nulla silva talem profert,
Fronde, flore, germine.
Dulce lignum,
Dulces clavos,
Dulce pondus sustinet.

Faithful cross, above all other,
One and only noble tree.
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be,
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
Sweetest weight is hung on thee.

It's quite lovely.

 

The former Presiding Bishop did read the testament of Dom Christian de Chergé, OCSO, a Trappist monk who was killed in Algeria by Islamic fundamentalists in 1996.  Although I had heard it before, the manner in which he addresses his future assassin always brings tears to my eyes:

And you too, my last minute friend, who will not know what you are doing, Yes, for you too I say this THANK YOU AND THIS “A-DIEU”-—to commend you to this God in whose face I see yours. And may we find each other, happy “good thieves” in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. . . AMEN!

I imagine that at my college people would have argued that the killing of the seven monks at Our Lady of Atlas Monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria was acceptable in light of the anti-colonialist struggle, and that Dom Christian de Chergé's last testament was condescending and imperialist.

On Saturday I had to attend a rehearsal for the Easter Vigil service.  Because I had a relatively easy job that night, I was given the additional role of Quasimodo -- I would be ringing the church bell at the Easter Acclamation.  I was scared and excited and thought that I could use a hump.

I couldn't practice ringing the bell, as that would have evidently thrown the entire West Village into a state of confusion, but I went up to the belfry to take a look.  I had never been up there.

 

Sadly, there wasn't really a belfry.  There was just a rope hanging from the ceiling in the room in front of the choir loft.

 

I showed up later that night for the vigil.  The acolyte master tried to finagle me a tunicle, knowing how much I love wearing them, but it was decided that cassock and surplice were good enough.

 

As I have mentioned before, the cassock is of barbarian origin.

The vigil service was lovely, as always.  There was some problem with the new fire, but it lasted long enough to light the Paschal Candle, and soon the entire church was illuminated by candlelight.

The Exultet always chokes me up.

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels,
and let your trumpets shout Salvation
for the victory of our mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendour,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.

Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a Son.

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.

Holy Father, accept our evening sacrifice, the offering of this candle in your honor. May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning--he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Only children were baptized, which takes a bit out of the symbolism of the Vigil, but adults who get baptized nowadays are usually weirdos, so there are advantages.

Someone came up to help me ring the bell.  It was like something out of a physical comedy routine, since the rope carried us up into the air after each pull.  As the choir was singing and the organ was blasting and the members of the congregation were ringing their own bells, I couldn't hear if we were actually pealing anything.  I hope we were.

I carried the banner out.

Then I ate some sausage pie and drank three glasses of white wine.

 

After my first Easter Vigil in 1998, I remember staying up all night afterwards.  I didn't know what was wrong -- I felt sad and happy and overwhelmed.  Maybe it was just the poetry of the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom, which was read by Bishop William Swing in place of his own sermon.  It echoed in my head all night:

Are there any who are devout lovers of God? Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants? Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting? Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; If any have come after the third hour, let him with gratitude join in the Feast! And he that arrived after the sixth hour, let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let him not hesitate; but let him come too. And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first. To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows. He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor. The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together! Sober and slothful, celebrate the day! You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.

He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.

He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said, "You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below."

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!

Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!

Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!

Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

In his Easter sermon this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote:

Do you know that God exists? the interviewers ask; or, How do you know Christian faith is true?  There are two tempting ways of responding, both wrong.  There is the apologetic shuffle of saying, 'Of course, I don't really know; this is just the truth as it appears to me and I may be wrong'. And there is the confident offer to prove it all to the hearer's satisfaction; here are the philosophical arguments, here is the historical evidence, now what's the problem?

Two kinds of mistake: the first because it reduces faith to opinion and shrinks the scale of what you're trying to talk about to the dimensions of your own mind and preferences; the second because it keeps you at arms' length from the whole business by making it impersonal: here are the proofs and it doesn't much matter what I or anyone may be doing about it.  It's just true in much the same way as it's true that Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles.  You may say, 'Well, there you go' but are unlikely to fall to your knees.

As you know, I have many, many doubts.  But that night, at least, I fell to my knees.

 

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.