An emergency prompted I sit in a lawn chair on the Gulf of Mexico with my family this weekend, slathering layers of pink pigment from the Sun’s demand on to my shoulders and chest. I wore a shirt in four days the same amount I stood under the shower faucet — once total, to the agreement of my self and my what would seem the inner interlocution concerning my life’s direction, which is not as large and complex as I once thought it to be.

Ask a year ago — or to another extreme — two years ago, what I ought to be doing with my life, and surely some insecure pretense would say “I know exactly what!” though no actions embodied seem to provide a paralell verdict. Of course, much of that’s been discussed here and rather than repeating motions of awareness I only wish to build upon them and show some forward movement.

My family continues to be a strong source of scaffolding for my existence — not only a reassurance of who I am, but moreover a reinforcement of who I ought to be. My sister especially, for in our adult years all the shared experiences of she and I with our parents, whom I love deeply and understand more and more deeply that who I am is because of who they consistently have been for no less than some two decades and more than a half, her understanding of unintelligibly long sentences if this is an example.

I love them much that I find more and more my placement here is a man of Family — a man who understands his household is what best embodies who humans in general ought to be: the mutual selflessness, giving, benevolence, and well, ability to laugh at each other.  And with burned shoulders and the curliest hair my mother framed on my face and the dimpled grin my father placed in my cheekbones, I’m sitting in bed, back in Dallas, hoping for so much, after years of what seems like missing out on it all.

Some things from this weekend have stayed, where as some were meant to stay with the weekend. And specifically how it ought to apply in my life. What ismost valuable?

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade resolving I was a single man, fit for the work of the Kingdom and what extra time singleness allows for study and for service. I searched deep and wide for whether or not it was that precise calling or my own anti-calling (that of selfishness and to control my own time, effort, and finances). I’m coming closer to the understanding that it’s indeed not the former.

These newfound (though not sudden) discoveries have also shed intense light on how I ought to live. I told my parents only a few months ago (on their extravagant back porch, somewhere aloof my memories of that very same space growing up though it occupies the same; lawnmower sounds and allergy attacks), that the next roommate I have will be my wife, to further solidify earlier statements.

Probably the best thing I have done in years is move in to this house — Maté — benefiting from and hopefully benefiting others by sharing this communal space to musicians, scribes, searchers, the depressed, the most burnt and bitter to the most reverent and rejoicing. If ever I have grown socially in such a compressed amount of time, it’s surely these past six month. And even after a few months living here I might have had the thought, “I am never living alone again.”

After all, I am quick to say things far too soon.

Tonight I spent a drive to Whole Foods in Lakewood, an equal distance from both Ellsworth and from Vickery as is Maté, and purchased a plot of goods I might dine on the steps of either/and. I had accumulated much in my silence on the beach this weekend, and when I returned to Dallas proper after the four days away, I wanted nothing more than to revisit past nights of unpacking I have hardly known but one night a week or less since moving here.

In so doing, I lead west up Abrams to Richmond, took a left and went on through Skillman, making a left at Matilda. A few minutes later I was at the stoop of Vickery in which so much clarification internally was reached about my time in New York — so much was spent with one I love — and so much searching was exercised in light of, well, what seemed to be the entire world staring. I sat with an Avery Seventeen and looked to You, great God, and thought how I had missed trusting you like I once did, and that thankful that I am now again learning more sincerely and truly than ever.

I spent a good thirty on those steps, before I knew the next stop was ultimately to take a right from Mockingbird and on down to the Williamson trail-mast swingsets. I didn’t swing, though at those picnic tables we know I sat and stared at the inertia above the gravel pit, the question “why would you tell me that?” & a smile I have not felt as genuinely since.

The last time I watched a game of the World Cup also was the eighteenth, when Germany faced Portugal. I had been in New York City as resident for no more than two weeks and sat across a table and a salmon brunch from my roommate, Allen, an alien before that day of audaciously hot summer city apartment-hunting walk we did (and to no avail).

God, I hadn’t met you yet.

Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.

Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.

The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?

In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.

In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons —  I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.

I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?

It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.

On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.

I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.

I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.

Though I ultimately decided that not moving was in my best interest (while for years I thought the opposite) one interesting way I have remained connected (and was initially connected) to the idea of New York is my Uncle Mark, my mom’s brother who lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for upwards of 20 years.

I didn’t know much of Mark growing up. After all, he was the brother of my mom who’d moved to New York City immediately after graduating college, years before my birth, on to an exotic life of a bohemian artist and carpenter living in the then dangerous and quite dark downtown portion of the Island.

In the mid-90′s, my mother’s side of the family began to arrange family reunions — mostly in the Hill Country of Texas, as that was a fairly central location for those of us dispersed spread about Houston and Dallas. I couldn’t know why we started having the reunions when I was 8 years old — in fact I was a bit too young to have understood that this was a suddenly new ritual without precedent.

It is natural that the terrible things which happen and wonderful things that happen remain more explicit in memory than other than the mundane of course. However, there is a particular ilk of memories which adhere to the seat of emotion so securely and the purpose for their continued presence is hardly identifiable until, well, sometimes decades later.

I grew up riding in Chevrolet Astro vans. When you’re a kid, your reality is tiny and your language for describing reality is extremely specific to the personal experiences you’ve been able to acquire, so it was easy for me to assume that all kids grew up riding in Astro vans. It’s all I knew. Well, that and Amy Grant. It wasn’t until we pulled into Terminal E of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in July of 1995 that the significance of our van was altered, and my understanding of my family was suddenly widened.

He had a spotty black beard and tinted glasses, a cocky posture and a cigarette woven between his fingers. Only a few little bags. I could tell he was a simple man. When we pulled in to the gate my mom quickly exited the driver’s side door after stopping. I watched them embrace. I could tell that he loved my mother deeply, and that she cared similarly for him — she had begun crying a bit.I didn’t know who the man was other than his perfunctory title “uncle,” but I did begin begin to understand at that moment his importance.

When Mark got in the car, my mom introduced me to my uncle. I’d heard of Mark in some stories from time to time, but it was always a detached description of the guy who lives in New York that my mom knows. And plus, it’s hard to think that conversation is fun when you’re a kid, and listening isn’t always the the highest on the list of Value.

Mark ducked into the van, moving past my sister’s seat which, and plopped into the seat in front of me.  He lit a cigarette, following it with the question, “It’s okay if I smoke in here, right?”

After a peak-hour van ride of careful observation of the quirky and quite eccentric foreigner in the seat in front of me, we arrived home. I remember Mark taking a special interest in me, asking me questions about the things I spent my time drawing and imagining, and commenting on how well done the model airplanes were I built and had strung from the ceiling of my bedroom. He told me he too was an artist, and that that’s what he did “for a living.”

Of course I had my suspicions that this could not possibly be true — an Artist for a living? Another vocabulary confusion. I thought that “for a living” meant either a Home Child Care Provider (my mother’s occupation) or an Insurance Salesman (my dad’s job at the time). I had no idea that one could make money doing the things I loved — drawing, exploring, creating.

Perceiving my doubt, Mark pulled out a piece of construction paper, grabbed for some crayons, and quickly drew a beautiful image of the sunset over the ocean. It was stunning. When Mark left I put it immediately in my top drawer among other important items — a box of pins I was collecting, two books of airplanes my grandfather had bought me, a few pieces of smooth printer paper, and the mechanical pencil I’d used to sketch.

When Mark came to Texas that trip, I felt a stronger connection with him than I had felt with many people, which I can say from hindsight. Of course at that point in my life, I didn’t understand the significance of his presence, nor did I realize the urgency of his timing for coming. I didn’t know why suddenly we were having family reunions.

I didn’t know Mark was about to die.

Mark rode with us down to Foxfire that summer. I could sense my mom was feeling every moment of our time together deeply, and it was curious.  At one point on the trip south our Astro had overheated, forcing us to stop on the side of the road and wait for some sort of help. It was before any of us had cell phones of course. We had been standing out in the Texas sun for a bit, and I was growing bored and sweaty while we waited for someone to come along and help. I remember what Mark suggested, making eye contact with me and pulling the sides of his mouth into a grin. “Let’s go see what’s past those trees!”

Following Mark’s lead, we hurried on down through the pines on a hill, and found a stream. There was a complex community of fire ants whose territory this obviously was, and my mom warned us from getting any closer. We stood there for a little while without moving, studying the water which trickled over smooth stones and ran on down the valley.  It felt like an important few minutes — the kind of minutes that seem to last for days.

When we finally found the car in good repair, we headed on down to the cabin we’d reserved. Mark walked into the bathroom, quickly unpacking a bag before anything else. I walked in curious to see what the urgency was for, and saw the orange bottles. There were over twenty of them, all different sizes and labels.

“What are those for Uncle Mark?”

“These help me get better,” Mark said gently and with a bit of a grin. He patted me on the shoulder.

Later in the trip my mom let me know that this was maybe the last time I would ever see my Uncle Mark. I couldn’t understand. It was only the first time I’d ever seen him, and I had instantly felt a deep connection with him. Maybe because I saw how deeply my mom experienced those moments — maybe it was something else.

When I graduated college and had finally decided to move to New York, my curiosity began to grow about my Uncle Mark and his time in Manhattan, since Manhattan and the type life lived within yields extremely specific experiences which only those who share the space are able to understand. I began to wish I could have known him growing up. I longed to know him as an adult.

When I first moved, some of my time was spent searching for Mark. He had been gone some 10 years before I moved, and so while I knew a lot has changed about Manhattan in that decade, I felt as if at least part of my purpose for being there was to discover who Mark was, and how I might be able to carry out some of the things that he wasn’t able before his passing.

As my curiosity grew and I had a increased capacity to handle emotionally complex situations, I decided to talk to my mom a little more about it. I felt very attached to Mark. I felt like I was quite similar to him in a lot of ways as well. I felt as if he was one person who might be able to understand me — especially at this volatile “becoming” part of my life — which I felt like very few people could. I wouldn’t say I was trying to communicate with him directly, but in some ways I was so intrigued by his search for meaning and for understanding and the simple way in which he lived his life in Manhattan that I began to find ways to connect with his past. Which was, in a way, my coming to know him increasingly so.

Mark’s best friend, Hali, still lives in Manhattan. Mom was exuberant when she made the realization and had the idea to connect us. Mom told me how special it would be if she and I could connect and hear from Hali first hand stories about my uncle, who I had begun to love very deeply as I discovered more about his life and understand the significance of our short time together in person.

When I lived there in 2006 unfortunately I wasn’t able to connect with Hali. I was simply too busy, of course a bit insecure, and honestly a little intimidated by the image of meeting with a woman who was the best friend of a man I didn’t know. A bit of maturity was necessary for that to happen, and of course years and the experiences for which they allow would assist in that.

After I moved back to Texas from Manhattan in early 2007, the years which followed where characterized by quite a mix of confusion, a confusion of emotions, and an inability to understand whether or not I’d actually fulfilled my purpose there or if I’d given up and simply lost my chance to live the life I dreamed there. Of course I realized through those years the immaturity tied up in that belief — in my inability to accept circumstances outside of my specific ideals, and the way in which it affected my Presence among those with whom I lived and actually shared life here in Texas.

However, through those years, my interest in the life of my Uncle Mark increased, and on one of my visits back, having known the East Village to a more nuanced level than when I first moved, I decided to make one last trip through the streets just west of Tompkins Square Park to find where Mark lived, and tried to imagine his life there.

I couldn’t find it.  I didn’t have an address, and all the brownstones look exactly the same save the color of their brick the brass numbers hung over the doorpost. It was August in New York, when the heat is trapped beneath the skyscrapers and made stolid and thick with humidity from the Hudson. I looked quickly for a coffee shop, and ducked into Think, a little place at the bottom of a brownstone on the Bowery.

I opened my laptop and started a letter, using the email address my mom had sent me three years ago.

“Hali, I am the son of Karen Simpson, Mark’s younger sister…”

Since August of this year we have been writing letters back and forth. Hali is in her 60′s, splitting her time between her Manhattan City Hall apartment and her house in the Hamptons. She is a part of a wealthy Jewish family — the very family which became Mark’s when he moved away from his own and found New York City to be his bohemian reaction against the establishment in the 1970s.

My Uncle Mark passed away from HIV/AIDS in 1996, and while I never quite knew him like I now wish I did, Hali and I exchange letters, and in ways I never thought, I am able to know and to love and to cherish Mark. And in some ways I too feel as if he understands me and appreciates me and supports me.

Hali usually will write me letters on occasions during each year that were important to her and Mark as a whole. In September, she wrote to tell me about a plant that she waters regularly. She calls it her “Mark Plant.” She says that when she waters it she cultivates the memories of one of the greatest men she’s known.

In her most recent letter a few days ago, she described her Christmas traditions in the City with Mark. It was one of her first years in a new apartment downtown, and she had recently met Mark. For her it was a natural and easy connection.

“Mark and I became fast friends and naturally I invited him to christmas with my mother and three siblings who were teenagers along other family members. It was my first year hosting at a new apartment I shared with my boyfriend.  Mark was pretty irresistible with his devilish grin and irreverent observations. He fit right into my psychological, dysfunctional, fashionable, fun loving family.  He sussed out the family dynamic and was teasing everyone before they knew what hit them. It was instant chemistry. Mark’s tales of his Baptist Texan family and childhood were so exotic to us, we couldn’t get enough. He had a gift for taking events that must have been very scary and painful to a small child and infusing them with drama and humor.”

I could see Mark sitting at the table, wearing the hat I inherited from him, the one sweater he owned from Banana Republic which I also inherited, a cage of birds in the background, weaving in to the conversation with a group of near-strangers perfect wit alongside reactionary expletive or two. The devilish grin arising out of what serious experiences he must have had as a child and his uncanny ability to use these for the good of conversation and the relationships he now experienced — which he must have lacked in his earlier years.

Last night my mom and I were sitting in the living room of my childhood home. My dad was on a flight back from Hawaii, and it’s actually quite rare that she and I have that sort of alone time, and, well, especially in that specific context. She knows how much interest I have in the life of her big brother, and that Hali and I have begun exchanging letters this last fall, and brought up the fact that she found a VHS of my Uncle Mark, but didn’t know what was on it.

We popped in the tape to the VCR, and after sitting through a few seconds of static, Mark appeared on the screen, sitting on his bed with a lit cigarette in an East Village apartment. I was immediately overcome with emotion, and wondered what measure more my mom must have felt in that moment.

“Hi. I’m Mark Simpson. It’s the summer of 1992, and I have had an idea for about 10 years now that I have HIV, but have been positive for over two now.”

It was obvious the film was some sort of documentary memoir to different types of people who were either victims or suffererers of some sort of disease living in Manhattan. In the video, Mark took us on a tour of his little Losaida apartment, replete with cats, a greyhound dog, and an entire room-full of birds. He took us on a tour of the drugstore where he picked up his medication, and ended the video a few moments later in a short interview about his last days on earth.

The video ended with a centered shot of Mark’s face in a very tight crop, and it slowly faded to black.

“PORTRAIT #4″ appeared in bold yellow letters across the center of the screen. “MARK SIMPSON.”

Hali ended her letter to me, describing her relationship with Mark and the special moment they shared during our current season.

“Mark loved christmas for the excuse to decorate to excess. When everyone else was doing tasteful minimal trees, his had color, blinking lights and endless beautiful ornaments.  Your uncle ronnie got the ornaments when Mark died so I hope you have or can get a few as mark would have loved for you to have them. It was a tradition that mark and i christmas shopped in the West and East Village each year then smoked a joint and went for coffee or a drink. When the light is gray and it’s damp and cold and almost seems like snow, I can feel those days of hunting for ornaments and treasure with Mark.”

So too when the light is gray and it’s damp and cold and almost seems like snow, maybe I too can remember. Mark would have turned 60 years old today.

In my mother’s living room hangs the yellowed construction paper drawing Mark made of the brilliant sun’s set over the ocean for me, that summer of my eleventh birthday. And I am the child who was, and I remain the child who wanted to be.

Time, or whatever redefinition of it today appends, shows that a past want is neither it or what brings one back to a Thing or a Time, but rather the certain ways the pieces didn’t quite Seal — the Mortar not quite dry — and how it needs simply a consistent intake of oxygen to complete the Process which makes that which was once a malleable paste into a binder; resilient, and a source of fortification for those things with which it comes into contact.

If anything, I can affirm now that Ryan Adams’ Demolition is a dangerous listen, and to add within a related framework if any a time to feel human this is that. Until writing fully about this next, I’ll rise with the Dawn, hand off a guitar amplifier through which six years of music has passed — the meaning of this transaction something gargantuan, and my time with dear friends at the lake only serve to reinforce this very transition has been inaugurated but of course has not fully come to pass.

Another year, and I am the child my mother is nursing, and I am the sixth-grade child whose baseball games my dad never missed once, and I am the high school child who wishes to be anywhere close as cool as his older sister, and I am the college child (child, child, child!) with a girlfriend I’d obviously marry, and I am the intentionally single child living in the Upper East Side of New York City, and more fully of all I am the child who returned from a remote East Texan lake with sunkilled shins, laying in a bed at the city-center with the whole of each of these parts combined for seeing. And I am the man in forty-two years who will more truly be yet will not most truly be.  This is the land of “yet” and “not fully,” and I know this isn’t my residence if in terms of permanency.

Lake-lays tend to do terrible things to a person, which is our hope.  And of course I can’t agree more that we are being created by being destroyed.  None of this is at all negative if above the narrative, which we really aren’t.

So I arranged a meeting with Sarah at my office. My objective: train her on the basics of the role she’d be filling, and I attempt to get a sense of her personality — at least as much as can be gleaned from a singular meeting.

Some people had asked me before meeting Sarah if I’d met her before, or if I knew her. Laced in these questions was always something articulate about Sarah’s personality, though I couldn’t tell what it was at first. I quickly gathered even before I met her, that she was a strong presence.  That she was a “no bullshit” type of person.

What I did not know was that over the course of the next seven months, Sarah would come to be one of my closest friends. Of course we didn’t share much space because I wasn’t really able, but I found myself wanting her to know me and to trust me.  It’s that desire, I think, that made it special.  Because it’s something rare.

+

After developing something strong during my time in the City, Sarah and I managed to keep in touch via text messages, email, and of course “The Facebook”  (They soon would remove the definite article for the better.) over the course of the two years following my move to Dallas from New York.  I felt like Sarah was one of those people that I shouldn’t lose contact with.

It’s probably because I knew she could see straight through me the minute we met, and though I was scared of it, I also longed for people to know me so actually. I felt like Sarah did immediately like few others do.  I felt understood. Though I might not have always been able to articulate the specific nature of Sarah’s magnetism, at least I knew I should trust my gut and not over think it all too much.  I over-think a lot of things all too much.

Of course Sarah knew that.

+

Knowing I was returning to Manhattan for a visit a few weeks ago, she asked me to photograph one of the bands she is currently managing. I knew that this would be a good chance to spend time with her, and that it would be something refreshing after two years of digital correspondence. I also knew we’d have some time after the concert we could catch up in some setting where earplugs were not required.

After the concert we parted ways.  Sarah had to stay and help the band pack up, and a good many of my church friends who’d made it to the concert were going out for cocktails immediately afterward.  Though most of my purpose post-concert was to hang out with Sarah and the band, I also knew she ran a parallel existence to most of the artists she managed and represented, so I decided to join the others until she was out and about.

A few hours went by with the group — which included my old roommate, my best friend from high school, and some others I met during my time there. When it was time for us to split ways, I let the group know I’d be heading back downtown from Union Square to meet with Sarah, and began the short pace to Astor Place.

By the time I reached the destination, I realized how late it was and decided that I should just call it an evening.  I’d been awake until 3:00am the past three nights in a row, and I thought it wise to head back to Midtown, where I was staying for the week.  It was now 1:00am, and I knew that it was dangerous to my health to begin considering this sort of hour “early.”

I turned my body 180º, facing north, and planned to take a left at 9th Street to meet the uptown 6-Train a little more than a block away.

“Hey man……You, ehh, you got a light?  You got a light?”

It startled me a bit.  I was already in a daze, sorting through thoughts of my plans for the next day; how long I would have to wait for the train; and if my mom was scared that I’d be moving back here (and if I did, how she might react.)

I stopped and looked to my right; the direction the voice came from.  There stood a skinny guy in his late 20s with a pair sunken brown eyes and wiry hair matted down down by one of those Che Guevara caps that were pretty popular a few years ago.  A cigarette hung from his lips, unlit.

“Sorry brother, I don’t.”

I translated the overcoming worry on his face as a need for nicotine, compounded by my inability to assist him getting his fix. I scanned the area just in front of Ray’s Pizza — where we stood — and noticed an open book of matches on a neighboring table.  I slid over and swooped them up, and struck up a flame by holding the front and back of the book together, pulling the match through the rough area with haste.

I brought the small flame near his lips and imagined smoke filling his lungs.  A little white cloud leaked from the left corner of his mouth.

“Thanks.  Thanks… thank you.”

“No problem man.”

After performing my duty, I intended to speed on my way to the Subway stop, knowing the trains run much less frequently this time of night.  I took a step North past the guy, and was about to bid him a Good Evening.

“Hey man .. That a camera bag?  You a photographer?”

“Yeah .. Actually .. I just got back from photographing a concert, and I’m on my way home.”

I’d hoped he’d take a hint and set me free from his grip.  Instead, he asked me inside. He wanted to show me something.

At this point, my inhibitions for spending any more time with the stranger were thinned, as I’d become extremely intrigued if by his mannerisms and appearance alone.

I walked inside of Ray’s — a place I frequented my first month of living in the East Village a few years ago — to some corner spot he’d rationed off.  His table was in the darkest spot of entire restaurant, free of fluorescent light and the the late night pizza patrons attempting to soften the blow of their oncoming hangover.

It was much darker on the street (where we were standing earlier), and so I was able to observe in greater detail. He was an unabashedly short guy — probably 5’2″ and around 110 pounds.  His complexion was a little gritty and weathered, but no more gritty than Bushwick tends to make a person. (I later found out he really does live in Bushwick.)

Across his wiry shoulder bones hung an oversize striped green hoodie contrasted by — in both color and size — a pair of women’s black skinny pants.

As I watched him prepare to show & tell me whatever he was about to show & tell me, I might’ve guessed he was on some sort of stimulant, but later I wondered if he might have just been odd, which of course is not untrue about all of Us.

I looked him in the eyes — his were a lucid green — and when ours connected, his crooked smile rose a bit on the left.

“I’m a photographer too. The difference is that I make stuff.”

I didn’t really know what he meant. I wondered if he’d meant it philosophically; providing some sort of short artist statement about the Artist as “maker.”  I also wondered how he already knew, without seeing my work or knowing really anything about me how we were so different.  I mean — no doubt we were, but I wondered how he saw it.  I inquired further.

“Oh really? What sort of stuff do you shoot? What are you making?”

He reached in a large paper Whole Foods sack and hoisted out a grey, rectangular device with the care of a man harvesting water from a well who hadn’t a sip in months.  I recognized immediately that it was a film negative scanner, albeit it a very cheap one.

He said a few things about the scanner, and while doing my best to ingest every morsel of information he was offering, I couldn’t help but notice the steno pad sitting on his table beneath a scattering of AA batteries. The steno was filled with all sorts of scribbles — all ineligible to me — and a number of shapes he had traced over so many times and with such vigor that his ballpoint pen nearly pressed and tore through the pages.

He watched my eyes turn down to his notepad, perhaps able to tell I’d be intrigued by his hieroglyphics. Or perhaps hoping I’d understand them.

“I’m an inventor. I make stuff.”

“Yeah? Would you tell me what you’re making?”

He went through a list of his recent innovations and planned inventions, and honestly I didn’t understand anything he was saying. Plus, it was getting late, and I didn’t want to interrupt my friends in Midtown by entering their home at some absurd hour.  After all, it was already an absurd hour.

I waited for a break in his speech to let him know I needed to head back north but that I would love to keep in touch with him and hear more about his inventions.  I also said I was very interested in seeing some of his photography.

“Do you have a card?” I asked, as I often do when I meet creatives.

“Well… Actually.  Well… They are still at the factory.  My cards are Lunar powered — that is — they are powered by the moon.  And the circuitry required to interpret Lunar signals is still being worked out.  So they are still in the factory.”

“Oh really?  Wow, eh.  Well that is very, very interesting. I’ve never heard of Lunar powered business cards.”

“Yes, I invented them.”

I was having a hard time processing all this so immediately.  “Well, could I write down your email address?” I petitioned. “Do you have a website?”

He thought for a bit, and his eyes turned curiously to the ceiling and then quickly turned down and met mine again.

“I tell you what. I don’t have business cards, but I do have these.”

He reached down into the same paper Whole Foods bag and pulled out a brand new package of walkie-talkies.

“I would love to continue communicating with you on these walkie-talkies. Are you… Are you a night person?”

I didn’t know the motive or purpose of the second question, so I went ahead and answered the first question first, knowing this to be an opportunity I couldn’t — shouldn‘t — miss.  “Sure, I said.  I’ll continue to communicate with you on the walkie-talkie. I like nights as equally as days.”

He looked down at the walkie-talkie package with wide, excited eyes. The packaging was one of those shifty pieces that — from my experience — are nearly impossible to open without some sort of razorblade or scissors. I watched his shaky, unstable, bare hands aggressively rip through the incorrigible plastic binding with some metaphysical strength. I was astonished.

One walkie-talkie fell on the table. His shaky hand shuffled through the Double-A batteries covering the steno notepad with the hieroglyphics, and many fell to the ground.  He inserted what remained on the table into the battery bay of the first walkie-talkie, handed it to me, and told me I was free to go.

“Channel 11.”

I honestly could not believe what was happening. I walked outside of Rays, leaving him at his corner nook, where he’d begun to insert batteries into the other walkie-talkie.

“Channel 11,” I whispered to myself.

Within seconds of tuning the radio, I heard a transmission.

“Your mom.”

“Oh yeah?” I responded.  “It was nice to meet you.”

“It was nice to meet your mom.”

I grappled with whether this was actually happening.  Knowing I wouldn’t get a radio signal in the Subway, I decided to walk north past two stops so as to continue the conversation.

For the next 15 minutes I carried on with this man about a broad variety of topics, not limited to photography, my mom (of course), and some weightier topics.

“Do you believe in all that Creator of the World stuff?”

“Yes, I do.  I think it might be a more nuanced view than you are accustomed with, though.”

He took a few seconds.

“I think as humans it’s a very comforting and secure thing for us to believe in some sense of Order — in some sense that there is an Architect and those sorts of things.”

“I agree. I think that I might diverge from you on why that is, but I’d love it if we could meet up tomorrow and talk about it a little more.”

He took a few seconds.

“Your mom.”

With that, I descended beneath the ground at the 23rd Street and Park Avenue, still trying to assess what’d just happened. After waiting thirty minutes for the train, I boarded a nearly-empty train and headed north to 51st Street.

I awoke the next morning to find Trae,  hovering above me, curiously inspecting the walkie-talkie on the table. “What on earth is this?” he said.  I responded that day with the same thing I would respond with now weeks later.

The more time one spends in the city and in the underground transportation system, the more attuned one’s ears become to the immanent approach of a train.  Even in one of the major hub stops like Union Square, a New Yorker will somehow find the nuanced difference in the approaching 6 train to their right and the departing F train to the left.  Of course this is nothing in particular to say about New Yorkers as an advanced breed but rather the remarkable ability of humans to understand and accept the training their environments offer.

Just as the 6 train was soon departing from the stop, I squeezed through the doors.  My heart was pounding, I was out of breath, and my forehead was characterized by perspiration.  I wiped it off with the sleeve of my favorite grey hoodie — which of course I couldn’t not wear — and scanned the traincar in which I found myself for an open seat.

I noticed a large Puerto Rican woman whose face was a leathery tan and all her features had a droop about them, some portrait of a sober, resilient grief.  I assumed she was somehow responsible for the kids who were sitting on the dirty floor of the car, but by their candor it was clear they did not share the pain that seemed to beset their guardian.

Directly across from the Puerto Rican lady sat three hefty guys clad in oversize New York Yankees paraphernalia. The 6 line, which is my most frequented variety, is a line that extends up out of Manhattan and far into the Bronx, so it often serves as the means in and out of Manhattan.

A few years ago when I lived here, I’d be on the train as early as 5:15 on Sunday mornings, and, having lived at 96th Street, I knew that all of the people on the train were descending from the Bronx, or even more closely, Harlem. Through a year of observing these early Sunday people, I came to recognize the cultural forms which identified them with these parts of New York, and while a generalization is — by very nature of the word — never specific to each individual within the Whole, it is easy to see a “type” emerge from the Harlem and Bronx portions of the City. Nothing derogatory is meant — it just “is what it is,” as a friend of mine will say. Anyway, these two guys were the archetypal Bronx guys, rapping aloud with the sound in their headphones, which no one else is able to hear.

I shuffled through a few others and finally found a seat in the corner of the train near the rear door.  I plopped down, removed my bag from my shoulders, and anchored it between my boots.  Reaching to the inner pocket of my trenchcoat, I fumbled around in the empty space and finally found my iPod.  I hoisted it out, spun the dial, and let it land on Appleseed Cast – Two Conversations.

If the train is moving along nicely — that is, if I’m not riding at Peak Hours — I can listen to nearly this entire Appleseed Cast album in the time it takes to reach Bleecker Street from 96th Street.  It’d been over two years since I’d last taken to the task, so I thought a try was in.

Bleecker Street is far enough downtown that, even at 4 pm in the winter, the Sun still peaks above the brownstones, and spills onto the city walls, sometimes even catching the chrome bodies of the fixed-gear bikes on the street below.  I like Bleecker Street for the way it afforded so much space for me to write when I lived here, and because of that it’s a space which I must visit perhaps every time I come back to the city.

“Next Stop.  Is.  68th Street.   Hunter.  College”

I pull out my journal and sketchbook.  I haven’t written anything but task lists in it for the last few years.  I like to think it’s because I’m able to type faster, but it’s probably because I’ve become increasingly lazy.  I started this blog the week before I moved away for the purpose of translating my shorthand into small pieces much like this one, so there’s that too.

In this handwritten journal, there are no page numbers; only dates. Dates show synchronicity just as numbers do, but better than numbers they provide a sense of setting, of place, of context.  They embody a portion of life much better than a simple roman numeral ever could.

3 March 2006

this weekend i took a train to new haven,
hoping to enjoy a bit of what its name describes.
i am beginning to wonder if youth is hope’s most faithful client.

I’ve met a lot of new people this trip. A few good friends of mine who are photographers live across Brooklyn, and after they hosted their launch party in SoHo, I was able to spend a few moments in observation of how and with whom they spent their minutes here. As a result of the particulars of the job that brought me here in 2006, I steward a very small framework through which to understand life in the City, and one of the things which so often troubled me after moving away was that I was never fully able to experience it as others did.

Of course even that was a sort of silly, considering everyone’s experience is within the exact context, which only they will ever know.  Even so, I thought there was some intrinsic “this-is-what-it’s-like-to-live-in-Manhattan” factor that I’d somehow missed out on, and I wanted to not miss out on it.

4 August 2006

Do you remember
When we were through Brooklyn?

Sure. We took the A train.

Yes, to Rockaway, that hole:
a ruined host to reunions of gulls
gnawing something red.

Of course.
I remember everything about it.

You wore mittens onboard -
“wool is the most sterile bet.”
concealing veins, deadly spiders

Throbbing, angry ants
turned the corner of the wall.
I brought my knees to my chest.
I am allergic, after all.

I recall.
Why do you mention it?

We could see our breath.
but couldn’t feel any life.

You’re sounding ridiculous.

I’m getting to the best part.

Remember, at Mott Avenue?
we were sure it was the ocean.
the smell of salt-tang

The A skims it with fury.
“it’s like we’re on stilts!” you proclaimed
with that Coney spirit.

unoccupied mittens

STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS, PLEASE.

black sand spotted snowy silver,
purple frozen seaweed, littered at our feet.
barnacled boots in tundra-tide
crunch. crunch. crunch.

Well now, I didn’t mind it at all.

this scene was different in my dream.
my dream was different in this scene.

+

“Next Stop.  Is.  Bleecker.  Street”

I tried exiting the train, squeezing between two gentlemen in trench coats, and, at long last, emerged.  I followed the sunlight that was beaming through the opening at the stairs that led underground, and ran up the stairs.  I looked up, took in a thick breath of gasoline fumes, and Realized.

I should write
very  l o o o o n g
post

Script;

I somehow locate it in the shuffle, pick it up and look to the glass doors that lead outside, each breaths brimming with an thick insecurity and anxiety.  I live here.

I signaled for a cab, trying my hardest to look as if I know what I’m doing.  I’ve hailed a cab only once before – when I was heading to this airport from Harlem a few days ago. The cab driver’d taken advantage of me I suppose because he could surely sense I was neither a native or a resident yet.   I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

I slid onto the black plastic seat in and false-confidently demanded – as I thought one must here – a ride to Spanish Harlem.  I would not fall for the “road fee” trap again, or whatever the story was.

+

My father and I drove to the city by way of the Blue Ridge Mountains only two months ago, and somehow I feel like I’ve already lived in New York City more than a year. In those two small months I’ve already moved on the Island three times, spending some time in East Village, and finally finding a more permanent space in Spanish Harlem with two other participants in the church I’ve come to serve.

Both guys have a background in investment banking, which is a job title new to me before meeting Allen and Ryan.  Ryan quit his job after Conversion and quickly accepted the call to serve on the Apostles Church staff.

+

Riding in the cab through Queens, I’m realizing I’ve not yet gained a sense of “Where” as everything looks relatively the same around me — a lot of lights, speeding cars, and a lot of people who seem to know exactly where they need to be – and in a hurry to be there. What I do know is that none of the buildings are tall yet, and that this must mean we haven’t entered Manhattan.

We pull onto a four lane road, and my cab driver increases his speed to 70MPH.   I swim up next to the window and peer out like a curious dog (trying to keep my tongue inside my mouth).  I can see the Chrysler Building in the distance, and I see all sorts of basketball courts that look something like what I’d seen in Dangerous Minds.

I really do live here.

The first ride on the FDR is an inexplicable experience, unless of course it’s one you’ve had.  I think what makes it so remarkable is discover that what you’ve naiively thought of your entire life as no more than a movie set is – well – a real place. New York is real city in which millions and millions of people work and call home.

Glaring up through the window of a speeding, wreckless yellow cab, my stomach was in turmoil, and I staved off vomiting from the mere grandeur of the place.

+

Growing up a suburb kid, the City is a dream.  Maybe this is no more than my propensity towards dreaming, but one of my largest issues is a silly belief that Where I’m not is The Where I would be most happy. I think my affection for the city was something of a compression of that. 

When my friends and I were old enough to drive, we made it to Deep Ellum in Dallas as frequently as we could — lust over the city lights and the somewhat foreign and romantic idea of city living.  We had no concept of the people there.  Our city was no more than the stage for idealistic mind-play.

+

Driving down FDR that first time from LaGuardia, I could feel the weight of Place.  Of lives lived in a context.  It was really my first time out of my Texas stronghold, and within seconds I sensed that my entire worldview needed adjustment.  Perhaps the very primary stages of culture shock, to use the common language. I could feel the history of the place in my chest – I could feel the cries of injustice that Dallas seems to silence its efforts towards comfort and security.

The sensation was so strong I could feel it in the very tips of my hair.

I had arrived, and I had, never before in my life, felt this small.

+

We swung a hard right on the 106th Street exit, which I recognized vaguely from my trip to the airport in late July.   We flew through a yellow-to-red light and quickly hung a right on 2nd Avenue, which runs south.  As we pulled on to 97th Street, I wrangled for my backpack straps and felt my heart pulsing heavily.  I fumbled through a clump of cash to secure a tip for the cabbie, and yelled “HERE IS FINE,” again trying to let on tha I was more a resident than I really was.

He halted in front of 57 E 97th at a gap between the scaffolding and a dumpster full of old furniture.  I reminded the cabbie to open the trunk so I could hoist out my luggage.  I opened the door, and stood against the Manhattan wind.

+

I took a trip to Russia once, and ever since then I have gauged all awful smells by my experience there.  The smell “Russia” is a simple odor; a synthesis of boiled cabbage, vodka, and cigarette smoke.  I never thought I would endure a similar smell unless I visited there again.  And to my surprise, here I was, on the street I now called “Home” taking into my nostrils the heavy fumes.

The cab zoomed off, leaving me solitary in the street, and I walked up to the wood-and-glass entryway to my Harlem brownstone.  Shuffling through my keys, I found the one that opened the outside door, inserted it, swung open the door.  Opening my mailbox after a few days absence from the city, I found six letterrs addressed to Reingardt, my apartment’s previous tenant.   I stuffed the pile into the front mesh pocket of my backpack and began the five-flight-walkup to my apartment.

I entered #19 to find the apartment completely black.  My roommates were out somewhere, and the only thing lighting my way down the hall were those from “Manhattan’s Best Laundromat” which blared through the living room window from below.  An ambulance screamed by (A sound I’ve grown accustomed to), I went into the kitchen to drop the Reingardt’s mail on top of the microwave where I’d begun a pile of “Previous Tenant Mail.”

Entering my 8′x10′ space, I slipped underneath the covers on the mattress Reingardt sold to me.  I stared at the ceiling, which was slightly lit by a tungsten sliver coming from in between the curtains of my neighbor’s kitchen across the shaft.

“Is this really where you’ve called me?”

“Jesus Christ, intercede?”

And I knew. In my shock and in my insecurity and in my total lack of understanding of context – here in a city where I knew nothing and hardly anyone – that this – this “place” where I was in control of nothing – is exactly where I am supposed to be.

It is precisely where We are supposed to be.

Tuesdays are monastic nights. Nights for silence, for solitude, and for simplicity of mind. Really the only night among the entire weekspan I have freedom for the same disciplines.

After exiting my office on Madison and walking to Washington Mutual for a quick check of available funds [usually few funds are available], I board the train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue. One of the PS primaries lets out around 6PM, along with the majority of businessmen suitclad and resolute. We all board the train at the same time, hope being that we can all actually squeeze in before the unidentified electronic voice from somewhere overhead lets forth its stern demand: “STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS, PLEASE.”

Today I’ve made it on the train. And I’ve actually scored a great spot near a hefty Jamaican woman and her three shouting kids, just near the doors on the train-side opposite where people board. Spots near the wall on the peak-hour-6-train are treasures, and it is especially rare to board and immediately after find such a spot. Usually you can expect to spend at least a few stops next to a guy with body odor stretching his arms to the ceiling handrail.

Quite content I’d spend 55 blocks of travel time in this prized location, I put in my ear monitors and started Sufjan Stevens’ Songs for Christmas.

+

Growing up, I possessed a strong aversion to Falling Backward from Saving Daylight in October each year. For a child whose curfew was Dark [followed immediately by the resounding confidence of my father's whistle], a pre-6PM sunset meant my time to play was cut short [and much shorter by December]. But what Winter did do was allow me to cultivate the imagination I so much loosed when sports became a central focus. Winter as a child was a time to build model airplanes, to learn to play the guitar, and when I first began to write.

Here in Manhattan‘s November, the sun sets sometime around 4:45 pm. For one, New York is much closer the Arctic Circle than is my Texas homeland, and for another, Manhattan’s collection of scrapingsky building sblock out the light from the city below at least an hour earlier than, say, somewhere just across the Hudson. In my older young years, I’ve grown to deeply love the early nightfalls, for I find my thinking to be much more fruitful when the sky hangs the moon.

+

On Tuesdays, I get off a stop early at 86th Street which follows Union Square, Grand Central, and 59th Street as one of the East Side’s major hubs. The area surrounding the 86th street stop is an interesting fusion of the Old World and the consumeristic, lust-heavy culture of the 21st century West. Here, preserved pre-war brownstones are overshadowed by gigantic neon signs, and chains by the likes of Best Buy, Taco Bell, and Starbucks, run local Upper East business into bankruptcy.

There is, however, one small market with vast variety of freshly baked bread, rare fruits from the East, cheese, olives and other fine pickled vegetables, and, most impressive of all, an entire wall-full of the most rare and cosmos-spanning selection of fine ale one could imagine. The storage case is divided into the regions of the Earth, each with a wide variety of styles within [although often Region determines a Style -- but I'll save that for a discussion on semantics]. A stop in this market is something I’ve drawn into the architecture of Tuesday nights since I first arrived to the City in June.

The year’s drifted into November now, and that means my little sundry fine-food nook has put away the Märzens to make space for the Winter Warmers. And in my Tuesday night rhythm, I’d come here to find one most suited for an evening in the Hours.

To my great surprise, they carried Anchor Our Special Ale 2006 [the freshest release of this rare type to be sure], so the decision was easy. Forking over $14 for six bottles clad with the Christmas colors and tree, I tied tight my scarves, fastened the breast-buttons of my peacoat, and set out into the frigid Manhattan dusk.

Eleven blocks to walk. Up Carnegie Hill on Park Avenue all the way to where Metro North emerges from the ground in a loud, angry vigor, I take a left on 97th and walk halfway to Madison Ave. In the distance under orange streetlights I can see some people in their winter running attire are coming in from the Park just a block away.

I face right at 57 E 97th, unlock the front door, check for mail in tenant post box [another night empty-handed], and ascend the five flights of stairs before reaching tiny apartment. I notice my calves don’t burn anymore, which must mean my body’s grown accustomed to life here.

Four keys are required to function in our Spanish Harlem brownstone – one for the front door into the mailroom, one for the door on the other side of the mailroom that leads into the stairwell, one for the mailbox, and one for the Apartment 19. Two hours after I left the office less than two miles away, I sift through the series of keys and find the one marked “19.”

One roommate is in the living room watching Nascar, and another will likely be working until Midnight. I place the Special Ale in the fridge, hoisting one out before I do, and pour it into a glass frosty from the freezer door. I head down the long, narrow hallway back into my room and close the door. And as I sit down to read, I can remember no earlier time when the concept of Home seemed so distant.