My parents weren't here long; we spent three post-work evenings and one Saturday morning together (when they decided to wake me up after they'd been quietly shuffling around the apartment for three hours).
My apartment is ideal for one (not three), but somehow it didn't feel unusually cramped; my parents are experts at making themselves small and unimposing. As expected, we didn't argue, and we all contributed to cooking and cleaning and making plans; we were like a small successful country. I was even treated to breakfast in bed, which, of course, is an important component of small, burgeoning family-nations.
Some things that we did in the short time they were here: walked around DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights, ate Grimaldi's pizza (followed by homemade ice cream), stood at the edge of the East River (absorbing the wind and the towering lights from the borough opposite us), discussed lots of things (such as politics, fake meat, Photoshop, photographs, and people), threw dry food at a stray cat in the alley beneath my window, watched a movie and part of the Democratic Convention, and sat on a blanket in Prospect Park while They Might Be Giants performed (for free).
In preparation for my parents' visit, I sort of accidentally cleaned out the cabinets underneath the kitchen sink. I didn't really mean to waste my time on an area my parents probably won't even see (when the rest of the apartment could use some attention), but I got distracted by all the plastic bags and the fact that I couldn't find anything down there, and the next thing I knew, I was in the process of a giant overhaul.
The mouse droppings didn't really surprise me that much, especially since recently discovering a flower-shaped hole in my cat's food bag that had been carved with tiny teeth. Tonight I found their abandoned civilization: some flattened, dropping-decorated plastic bags, nestled right on top of my mousetraps, as if the defiant and arrogant mice were trying to send me a message. Granted, the traps weren't set, and they are live traps that aren't designed to kill my rodent housemates anyway, but it was humbling just the same.
I also finally got rid of my old 1980s tape deck, replacing it with a free (and better) one from the street! I wrapped its cord around its belly, gave it a yellow star-shaped sticky that said, "I work! Please take me." and I set it outside on the sidewalk (a customary gesture in these parts). Of course, as soon as I wrote the note in the voice of the tape deck, I felt ridiculously and anthropomorphically sad, even though my rational self knows that tape decks don't have brains or feelings. Anyway, I'm optimistic that it will quickly find a new home and take the place of someone else's inferior tape deck, just as I had replaced it.
To round out the Week of Health, I came down with something on Friday that stole my voice, or at least made it faint and undependable, like a badly wired stereo speaker. (Like a cell phone!) I'm told I sound completely different: a mix between a ten-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman from Queens. I'm doing much better otherwise, though; currently my only distinct ailments are Punky Brewster Throat and being so tired I can't walk through my apartment without literally running into walls, two things I'm certain will cure themselves.
At the moment my parents are in a car, on the Interstate, heading this way, and they're bringing with them the secret to the amiable Southern disposition: sweet tea. Better than that, they're bringing themselves.
I think I finally figured it out tonight. It's not my head that I injured, but my neck. My neck is tricky and deceitful, you see, and it channels the pain to my head instead of keeping it all for itself. I'd forgotten to consider the contribution of a minor car accident I had two years ago—which, I just realized, happened July 17, the same date that I whacked my head with my bike (apparently waking the demon in my neck). I'd been told to expect recurring problems, but I didn't make the connection until a couple of hours ago. I'm still not feeling perfect, but at least I now know what to fix. Can I have my Tuesday evening back?
Moving on...
I put up some photos from Coney Island. The first several are from a generic summer Saturday, and the colorful, fleshy ones are from the following week, at the Mermaid Parade.
There is a two-and-a-half-foot-tall Jesus that hangs on the wall of the ER waiting room. He's three-dimensional, with his hands outstretched and peeled forward, so that it's unclear whether he's being crucified or whether he's leaning out for a hug.
The room's sole window is to the right of Jesus and covers the entire wall. At street level, we're able to watch the people scurry around behind the glass as if they're in an aquarium, coming and going to places undoubtedly better than the one we're in. I watch a double-decker tour bus pass by, thinking that if the tourists really want to see New York, they should visit this place.
...
My headache had persisted for 73 hours by the end of work on Tuesday. I decided it might be time to visit some sort of medical professional, who could confirm that I wasn't at risk for something sinister like brain damage; at 5:30, my only option appeared to be the emergency room. I chose the hospital by its proximity to work, rather than for its familiarity. Apparently I'm on the ER tour of this city, as it's the fourth one I've seen in less than a year.
...
The seats were metal mesh and had armrests for your discomfort. There was a loudspeaker—everything was amplified for me, of course—that called out last names and occasionally reminded you that patients were seen in order of ailment severity, rather than by time of arrival.
It was crowded. Sitting behind me was a tall boy wearing a basketball uniform who let his mouth hang open as if on a tired hinge. He moaned loudly every few seconds, sounds that were distinctly brain-related, rather than due to whatever pain he might've been in.
A guy hopped by on one good leg, a woman near me complained of heart attack-like symptoms, and a man came in whose bones seemed to be improperly arranged, as one appeared to be jutting out of his back. A girl sobbed in the lobby, her face hidden by the arms of a boy, and a woman with no teeth and a protruding lower jaw gummed silently at the security guard.
Across from me was a mannish woman who wore a bright yellow t-shirt tucked into her jeans and gleaming white sneakers. Her glasses were thick and tinted, and her hair was short and combed away from her face. I noticed her immediately because of the obnoxious hand-held game she was playing. The volume of the little machine was impressive, and reminded me a lot of a car alarm.
Due to the nature of my ailment, it was hard to be in the same room with her, but impossible not to be, if I hoped to hear my name called. I quietly asked a nurse on duty whether she had any earplugs, explaining that my head was extra-sensitive due to a possible concussion. Within minutes, a security guard was telling Yellow she needed to stop playing her game because it was bothering someone in the room.
Uh-oh. Yellow didn't like being told that. She stopped playing her game, and instead started complaining to the entire room, for the benefit of whomever it was that "didn't have the balls to tell her to her face." "My horoscope said somebody was gonna tee me off today!" she bleated.
I sat on the other side of the room and exchanged glances with Martin, who was there to keep me company, doing his time in the ER as as I had done mine. Although the offending noise had stopped, I felt like I'd traded a bad thing for something just as rotten. I'm never thrilled to be the source of conflict, even though no one else knew it was me.
"You could be that guy," Martin offered optimistically, pointing toward the hallway at a handcuffed man being led by police past the waiting room. He had bare feet, a once-white bandage wrapped around his head, and tributaries of blood dried on his face. Later I heard him literally beating down a door to one of the private rooms. At least I think it was him.
...
By 7:30, Ken Jennings had won another round of Jeopardy on the TV hanging in the corner of the room. During Wheel of Fortune, I was seen by the nurse: blood pressure, temperature, generic questions. "At least you've gotten this far," she told me, before sending me back into the waiting room.
During Extreme Makeover, I got my paperwork squared away with a funny man named Reggie, who had two bottom teeth, a shaved brown head, and white sideburns shaped like triangles. I liked him right away. "Have you been to our country club before?" he asked, grinning, through bullet-proof glass.
At some point I was sent into another waiting room, which wasn't a room at all, but a row of chairs within the emergency "chamber." It was not an improvement. Not only was it a tease (I'd assumed that I was put there because I was about to be seen), but it was cold, there was no distracting TV, my company was forced to wait outside, and I was sitting next to a door that was perpetually being slammed. For a while I covered my ears in anticipation of the door hitting the frame, but eventually I gave up.
...
"Are you Whiteman?" I nodded and gathered my things. "No, don't get up. I just wanted to point you out." I sat there, deflated, wondering what that was about. A few other people in scrubs would show me a hint of attention before disappearing down the hall. It was almost midnight before I was actually seen.
More people wheeled in on gurneys; some conscious, some not. A man who said he was knocked over by a large branch; his female friend nodding and saying all she remembers is seeing a lot of leaves. A Japanese businessman with his suit pant leg rolled up, exposing bloody skin. A twenty-something girl in a wheelchair who was audibly breathing directly from a small metal tank. Charles.
Charles looked something like a biker, with his long brown hair, black t-shirt, and chunky jewelry. Like Yellow, he wore thick, tinted glasses, and his pony tail poked out of a black visor that had "New York City" written across the brim. He walked around in his gray underwear and sheer white socks, wearing the pink robe he'd been given like a jacket. The hospital staff treated him dismissively, like he was a regular, and like he was crazy.
...
The person who examined me literally shrugged at my case. I didn't have enough symptoms to be in serious danger (no nausea, no passing out, etc.), but she agreed that my headache had some odd features, namely that it was still persisting. She stabbed in the dark. Caffeine? Cholesterol, perhaps? "Maybe it's because I hit my head," I offered, with hidden sarcasm. After spending about three minutes with me, she gave me and my empty stomach two Percocet and told me to sit there until it kicked in.
I was in a small room with three doctors wandering in and out, and one or two other patients being treated. While I was waiting for the drug to crawl from my stomach into the rest of my body, I listened to the radio, and to the doctors chat.
Charles was the only other patient consistently in the room with me, but he was waiting for a psychiatrist, rather than a high. He wasn't satisfied with the attention he was getting from the staff, so he raised his arms in the air and slid down his chair onto the floor, yelling and farting the whole way down. The staff more or less ignored him.
He put his hands in his underwear and raked around, before pulling his underwear down, exposing himself, and them yanking them back up again. He found some packaged disposable medical equipment and tried to steal it, fruitlessly searching his pink gown for a pocket to put it in. He tried to peek behind the curtain to watch the doctor examine another patient, which awarded him some negative attention from the doctor. Finally he was carted down the hall.
I was given a prescription for Tylenol 3 on top of the Percocet in my system and was sent on my way. By the time I got home, I had trouble even standing. My headache was gone, sort of, but it was replaced with heavy ocean brain and nausea. Around 3 a.m. my Percocet—my whole evening in the emergency room, in fact—was regurgitated into the toilet.
This morning I woke up with the same undying headache.
I was still in my neighborhood when I noticed him riding his bike behind me, to my left, then pulling ahead. Since we kept making the same turns, it wasn't long before we were talking: about the best path to downtown Brooklyn, what it's like to be doored, about how I flew over my handlebars last September.
We rode slowly next to each other, becoming single file when a car approached from behind, and resuming our side-by-side conversation after it had passed. I reached my destination first and peeled away.
It still occurs to me how briefly people enter and leave my life, but it's much less profound than it used to be. Had we been ten years old, such an interaction might've justified becoming friends.
Less than five minutes after exchanging injury stories, while carrying my bike up a steep set of stairs, my front tire swung down in an arc and hit me squarely in the face, shoving my plastic sunglasses into my skin. My first thought, aside from recognizing the stinging pain as something significant, was that the woman walking by on the sidewalk below must think I'm a total idiot.
Since that moment, I've had a swollen face and a headache the size of Kilimanjaro. My head has become heavier and more fragile, like the head of a baby, and the slightest noise makes it throb—a pulse that, I imagine, spells out "shut up" in Morse code.
Several hours later. The cab driver on the way home showed concern, suggesting that I looked "distressed," a comment that surprised me. Had I been thinking with my face? I hope not. He made me confirm that I was fine, we exchanged a few words, and he told me several times to have "a better one," before I thanked him and walked away. Had we been ten years old, such an interaction might've justified becoming friends.
We'd have way too many friends if we behaved like we were ten.
Apparently there is more than one person in this city that sees getting the wrong number as an opportunity to meet new people. This is the second time someone has tried his luck with me in this fashion, which is a little mind-blowing to me, since the callers know nothing at all about me, beyond the fact that I have a New York number. I could be hideous and deranged, for all they know. Even more absurd that the latest phone call came at 3:47 a.m. on a Tuesday.
me: Hello?
caller: [Pause] Hey, who is this?
me: ...Lisa.
caller: What part of New York are you in?
me: ...Brooklyn. I need to go back to sleep now.
caller: Where'd you go to school?
me: Not around here. Okay, I'm gonna go back to sleep.
caller: Where'd you go to school?
me: Okay, goodbye.
He didn't call back. I wonder if he had more luck with any of the people he called after me. I should hope not.
There's a man who walks around Fort Greene, Brooklyn, who's known to some as "the screamer." He's an older man, has dark brown skin and graying hair. Tall and thin, with long, demonstrative arms. He doesn't scream, really. It sounds more like he's in the middle of a confrontation, except that he's always alone, talking to no one. Often he talks about an invisible "white-ass m.f." and "black-ass m.f.," whom he berates and taunts. His performance is amusing, if you can let yourself forget that it's ultimately sad.
A few weeks ago, in an unusual interaction with some non-invisible people, he walked up to an occupied Lexus that was in the midst of being parked, and yelled repeatedly, "I got twenty-six chil'ren! What you got?!"
...
I've been enjoying the beautifully bearable heat of summer. Grilling in Prospect Park, riding my bike through the seams of Brooklyn (in one case, pulling along a skateboarder, Back to the Future-style), lording over my borough on windy rooftops, drinking red wine with ice cubes on my fire escape, eating brunch in the sun, watching a rainbow of kids run through playground sprinklers and get their face painted like Spiderman, going to parties (birthdays, going away) that ended in dancing/pool playing/hip hop karaoke, eating ice cream at Coney Island, riding in a car(!) with the windows down, and listening to the street noise that seeps through my open window.
[written 7/7/04]
I've seen three documentaries in theaters during the past month—Supersize Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, and The Corporation, which I saw tonight. None of them are easy to watch, really. In the latter two I had to fight to keep from crying several times, and I left the theater with something of a renewed sense of responsibility, even if it wasn't readily clear what I was(/am) supposed to do. Since crying is no fun, and lack of responsibility is infinitely easier, why go see these movies? I guess it's because I don't want to be part of the problem, or maybe because I wouldn't respect myself if I paid no attention.
The Corporation was the worst in my opinion, and by the worst, I mean the most intense, and perhaps the most disturbing. I think it was the hardest for me because I am more directly a part of the corporate machine than I am of the industry that produces fast food (which I don't eat) or the America that gives power to the current administration (which I don't support).
(Yes.) I work at a non-profit; I'm careful about what I buy, eat, and consume; I watch very little TV (which I suppose means I'm exposed to less advertising, bad journalism, and reality TV, which—corporate or not—is a good thing, right?); and I tend to be fairly well-informed and self-aware.
(But, to name a few.) I'm wearing brand-name clothing produced in a third-world country (I cut the tag out, but that doesn't change anything); the bills I pay are written to corporate giants; like anyone else, I fall victim to suave marketing; and I consume products on a daily basis that are made by companies that exploit and pollute and own governments and deceive and abuse. In fact, I'm typing these words on a computer made by a company famous for outsourcing.
I'm caught between helpless frustration (thinking the only escape is to live on a commune, which is not an attractive option) and motivation to—at the very least—try to do my part, whatever that is.
What's okay to buy? What's not? I'm lucky to be in a city not yet stripped of its small businesses, but of course even those aren't islands.
...
There are people I wish I could force to watch the movie: the ones unfamiliar with these issues, and the ones who acknowledge the issues but refuse to look at them out of discomfort (the "I know it's bad but I don't want to know how bad" people). I kept thinking of a certain family member while I watched the film. Half-composed thoughts such as, if I bought it on DVD and gave it to him as a present, would he watch it? (And would that be ironic, for me to buy it on DVD?)
...
Lately I've been looking for things I can completely trust, something pure that hasn't been manufactured with my wallet in mind, something not meant to manipulate me. There isn't much anymore that I'm not wary of; at first something will look fully wholesome, but when I peek behind the curtain, I learn there aren't that many virgins left after all. I'm pretty sure my cat isn't out to screw me over, so there's one.
...
I can tell my frustration has already softened from when I was sitting in the theater, sick to my stomach from information, and I can tell my sadness has dimmed since I took the train home sitting among the working poor on the JMZ.
When I read these words next week, tomorrow, in an hour—I'm only going to be able to faintly recall the feeling that once drunkenly overwhelmed me, without knowing how to fully ignite it again. (The ever-wise Scott P suggested that I don't really want to live in that overwhelmed state anyway, because I would surely have a coronary.) I'm certainly not able to adequately communicate the feeling; it's like trying to explain what being drunk feels like.
I worry about coming across as anti-capitalist, which I'm not, and about presenting my global and generic reactions to a film you may not have seen. (I don't want to seem like an overreactor.) I'm probably going to be embarrassed of my passion, which is really quite sad.
I imagine that tomorrow, when I wake up, I'll still be thinking about the film and how it relates to the society I'm part of, but it will be even hazier and more dreamlike. As if someone had read me a bedtime story by Orwell, and that now it's time to move on and return to "reality."
[For the last few months, I've needed a break from this city: from bodies clustered in tiny spaces, from restaurants and subway cars full of imposing elbows and knees, and from sidewalks packed with slow, erratic walkers. A break from the constant push of forward movement and productivity; a break from concrete and skylines and trash; a break from sirens and car alarms and ice cream truck jingles. As much as I like this place, lately I've been craving its antithesis.]
...
Martin agreed to go camping with me, but the steps between the decision and the arrival are not easy for either of us. How does one go about planning around unknown variables? I'd much rather just leave and improvise.
All of the official campsites within two hours' radius were completely full for the holiday weekend by the time I called last week. In fact, to camp in Montauk right now, you have to reserve a camping spot for an entire week. Who wants to camp for a week?
Through the tip of a coworker, I decided to head to the Delaware Water Gap on the PA/NJ border, since reservations weren't necessary and camping was free, and, perhaps even more important, we could find an isolated campsite, away from the screaming children (etc.) that we might encounter at a proper campground. Oh, and another necessary feature: the Delaware Water Gap is accessible by public transportation.
We shopped and borrowed on Friday evening, and hurriedly packed early Saturday. Too much food, insufficient bedding, not enough water, no maps. Martin's tent didn't move with him to New York, so we had to pack my heavier and bulkier one. We were laden like mules, and had little idea where we were going.
While sitting at the terminal killing time (after we'd missed the bus we wanted), we discovered that we'd forgotten much of the food we'd planned to take for both lunch and dinner, so Martin ran around the neighborhood collecting replacements while I guarded our stuff. He returned just in time to board the bus.
Once we arrived in the tiny town of Stroudsburg, PA, we took a taxi to look for a trail head. Despite the Appalachian Trail's relative fame, the driver didn't seem to know where to find it, but she was patient while we guessed at where to go. She was chatty, had long, greasy gray hair, and wheezed when she breathed. She had an odd spurt of a laugh that sounded like the cranking of a wind-up toy. We leaned out the window to ask a few strangers directions before being deposited on the curb.
It got easier. We hiked for an hour-and-a-half, stopping to take pictures, talk to hikers (everyone says hello on the AT, apparently), and to put down our packs and rest. At the top of the mountain, we found a grassy clearing that overlooked the Delaware River and we set up the tent. We explored the mountain, cooked dinner, drank wine, played cards, listened to random stations on the radio, and watched the sun set. We could see about 150 degrees of horizon from our site; after the sun fell, we watched premature 4th of July firework shows spurting out of six different towns like bombs and geysers.
Except for the fireworks and the hum of a highway far below, there was no evidence of any other humans in the area. Sore muscles, blisters, and mosquito bites, but I'm really glad all the proper campgrounds were full.
I'll post some pictures soon.
