I started this evening making asparagus and watching Page One, the documentary about the New York Times. Early on in the movie, someone says, “News will still exist, but the quality will change.” That guy was right on, because I spent the rest of the night on Twitter reading about the Hurricane. During a weather crisis, no well-produced, rumor-free article can be as fast or as easily digestible as 1,000 people spouting information in 140 character increments. But the accuracy isn’t great. Every time I went back to Twitter after doing something analog, I’d read that some story I hadn’t heard about–like ConEd workers being trapped in a power plant–was a rumor. Fifteen tweets down, I’d see the story posted as true.
I still think it’s a little weird that tonight I was getting my news from the same place I get my retweeted GIFs. While 90% of my twitter feed was about Sandy, occasionally, there was news from a bar or a picture of the sunset in L.A. During a national crisis, can we all agree not to send foursquare updates in?
I ask because I now have a banana holder. And while my bananas are in great shape, they aren’t turning ripe as fast I would like. I have a whole jar of nutella waiting for them to get yellow. Not that nutella can wait, nutella is a hazelnut chocolate spread that has no capacity to take on verbs, but my point remains.
I’ve been thinking about bananas more lately since listening to this Terry Gross interview with this guy who wrote a book about bananas, fittingly called, “Bananas!” That title is sort of a gimme, but still works because anything else would have been a disappointment. And also, ever since I was in Berlin, in a bath, drinking sparkling water and eating a banana with nutella, I’ve decided that where possible, I want my life to include the pleasure of nutella and bananas.
So my apartment in Denver is more or less set up. I mean, I have a banana stand. No TV, obviously. On one of my first nights in my apartment, before I had a bed, and I was trying to fall asleep in a sleeping bag, I had a brief bout of anxiety about how I would pack up all the pots and pans I had just bought when the time came to move. I mean, I’m not going to die in this apartment—right?—so how will I transport allthese things?
And even as I was buying this banana stand, I was thinking about moving it. Probably the most (or only) appealing thing about living with people from the internet is never having to acquire such stuff. Because stuff—I don’t know, it’s the worst. But also, the best: my bananas have a home.
Everybody owns a piece of Coke. What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
- Andy Warhol
The first time I was allowed to walk alone to my dad’s midtown east office building, I was 11 and had no sense of direction. When I called my dad from a pay phone from the the corner of 47th and 6th, he suggested a cab. On my way over, his partner told him, "Just like a woman to get lost in the diamond district.“
But by her first fall, Fran was happy to be on Broadview Avenue, though it wasn’t for anything she could have told Isaac that she wanted. It was simply that the leaves on her street were beautiful. Their block in Brooklyn was nice in the fall too, but Broadview was different, different than even the streets in their neighborhood. On Bayeau, the leaves on the birch trees became a sickly yellow before falling off. But Fran’s street was lined with oaks, maples and sweetgums, and all of their leaves turned red and orange. The block was fragrant with decaying leaves, a smell Fran had forgotten about after spending the last seven falls in the city. Across the street from her house was her favorite tree, a maple whose leaves stayed red for all of October before becoming a bright, almost translucent orange. Besides the tree, all she knew about her neighbor was that she drove an old Saab and lived alone.
During Fran’s first suburban fall, she spent her weekends reading about the Mondale-Reagan campaign in the living room by the window overlooking the front lawn. Between page jumps and sometimes paragraphs, she found herself staring out at the tree.From the distance of across the street, she had a better view of her neighbor’s tree than if it had been on her property. Eleven years later, she still spent her fall weekends watching the tree change colors: it was still the thing she loved most about New Rochelle.
Returning to New Rochelle tomorrow. Hoping the fall is happening
A while ago, two people I had met in real life but mostly follow on the internet broke up. They both started posting a lot of stuff online. The ex-girlfriend, who, to be fair, does have an excellent sense of style, put up pictures of each day’s outfit on her Tumblr, as if to say to her ex, “Look at these fashionable scarves you’re missing out on!” It’s unclear from Facebook what role the scarves played, but the couple did reunite, bought some land upstate and got an adorable dog. Recently, they married. They seem to share a pretty great life from what I can discern from their online presences.
Without getting into too much embarrassing detail, this is not a practice I am above employing or projecting onto failed suitors. Break-ups cause me to put a lot more flattering material of myself online. It’s only when a semi-forgotten friend comments on a post that I had hoped would sway the course of my romantic life that I remember that social media does not consist solely of my crush and me.
These posts don’t disappear after I have moved on. The other day, I came across a blog post I had written about obvious dreams. The star of my obvious dream has been gone for a while now, but reading my old writing felt like looking at a childhood photo of myself, a snapshot of how I wrote.
I realize most everyone in the world does not care about my internet presence. This is just something I’ve been thinking about lately: how we often have specific, fleeting motives for our online creations. For better or worse, these ideas of ourselves become real to the people who see us only online. And with enough time, they become real even to ourselves.
My friend Scott’s dad is an oenophile, and sends Scott an assortment of very good wine every month or so. Scott enjoys it, but rarely thinks about which cheese or fruit would go well with whatever has arrived. This father-son wine of the month club has given Scott a taste for good wine, but no knowledge of how to acquire it on his own. He has become, in his words, an ignorant snob.
And so it has been with me and the mountains. I spent many July 4ths at a large estate in the Adirondacks, where my friend’s dad’s encyclopedic knowledge of local hikes made guidebooks unnecessary. It was all so easy: the best hikes were minutes away from their home, and from running, no hike was too hard for me. Afterward, we got onion rings and milkshakes, and back at the house, the view rivaled whatever we had seen on top of the mountain.
In my first six months in Colorado, I barely left Denver. I looked at the Rockies through my bedroom window. I found some comfort in their existence, as if this landmass was proof of something bigger, or more personal, than shifting tectonic plates or melting glaciers. But I didn’t know where to start, and I had no one to guide me. Once the snow melted, I began going on disappointing trail runs based on google searches, and continued to know effectively nothing about the geography of Colorado.
I’ve been luckier with mountain biking. I have a friend who knows the trails, and more importantly, has access to loaner bikes for me. The first time we went, I got a concussion trying to get the bikes out of the car, but I loved the ride. Mountain biking has everything I like about hiking—the lack of cellphone service, the way food tastes on breaks—but is faster. That first ride, we went out long enough for me to think I could have gone longer. The terrain was just the right amount of difficult to hide the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to keep up on the climbs, and the bike I rode took all the shocks on the way down.
Yesterday, we went on a faster, longer course. The casual arrogance I’ve acquired toward the physical turned into some embarrassment as I struggled on the uphill. Where my usual indifference to bodily harm went as we cruised downhill, I don’t know, but I spent most of the last five miles afraid of crashing into a tree.
My previous understanding of the physicality of biking was always based on the existence of the bike seat, and that at any time, a rider can sit down and cruise. But that’s a trick. Since my body wasn’t being worn down at the same rate as my electrolyte balance, when the crash came, it came as a surprise. And so I realized with some disappointment how little I knew about mountain biking, and also, that it would take a bit longer than immediately to get any good at it.
Riding back from the trail on the fire service road, drinking beers we had hidden in the creek, a herd of deer ran by us. There were mountains in the distance and the sky was blue, and I felt a million miles away from everything except for that moment. It is easy and lucky to be an ignorant snob, but to get to a feeling like that is worth any effort.
And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn’t lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don’t know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.
Let’s face it: fiction’s a gamble. Nothing that happens in a novel is a fact. Read a book about Alaska, and no matter how the sentences are put together, you’ll know something about Alaska.
But I read fiction for the chance to learn something about being a person. I lose this bet more than half the time. But I keep reading to learn a truth, which I can keep in my pocket along with my penknife. Richard Ford’sRock Springsis that kind of fiction. Reading it right now feels like the best thing that has ever happened to me.
Before I moved to Colorado, a friend gave me a card titled “How to Make Friends in a New City.” The advice was basically: meet people you may like doing things you definitely like.
Despite knowing no one in Denver and liking running, I was hesitant to join a running club. It took me years to get decent at running, and I didn’t want to feel bad about my pace around strangers who were faster than me. Hanging out with people who were slow didn’t interest me either. I also occasionally like to party, and I assumed the kind of people who joined a running club would be too serious about a full night’s sleep to be any fun.
But I finally did join a running group to take a speed work class, and while some people were fast or slow or square, I did meet some people who were down. I never went to the Saturday runs, the cornerstone of this club, because who wants to wake up at 5:30 on a Saturday morning to drive to suburban Denver to go running?
Well, a new friend of mine did, and she wanted to discuss going camping with me, so I went. A few days before, I went on a club trail run, and there, an older woman said of the Saturday morning run: “Finishing that run is the best part of my week.”
It struck me as odd and kind of depressing that the best part of anyone’s week is being done with something they didn’t really want to do. But after I went to one of the runs, I understood what she meant. Hanging out in a parking lot in Englewood after running 12 miles before 9 am did give me a huge sense of satisfaction.
Yesterday, around mile 8 of a 14-mile run in Broomfield sprawl, I was afraid I would have to do something unseemly in a manicured traffic island. I was desperate for a port-a-potty. I stopped running and started knocking on doors. Eventually, I saw a couple gardening, and asked if I could use their bathroom. The wife was a runner, so she knew the place I was in and also knew what would happen to her toilet. Still, she let me go.
I’m an optimist, so I’m hoping the week will reach greater heights than using a stranger’s bathroom. But if experiencing man’s empathy to man ends up being as good as the week gets, so be it.
Things I miss about New York: running into James Nord at a party, making fun of his suit, and hearing him wax poetically about lactic acid build up.
Life isn’t all that different from cycling really. When the road tips up you have two choices: sit back and let it hurt you or attack it, and when you think about it, that’s not really much of a choice at all.
The thing that surprised me most about the Lance Armstrong news from last week was that I had any opinion about it at all. From 1999 to 2005, Armstrong’s dominance in a sport I didn’t care about was so complete, I didn’t have any reason to think about him. His success was like the sun rising: a sure thing.
But when I did start to think about him, or when those yellow bracelets came out, I didn’t like him at all. Those bracelets are still the worst. Even now, I’m not sure what they mean, other than being against bad things happening to good people. I’m against that too, but those the bracelets yellow-coat cancer. Cancer isn’t this new, singular pandemic that scientists are just a few grants short of funding to crack. It’s a million kinds of diseases, each of which needs its own treatment. And it’s been around since the beginning, though back in ancient Greece, dysentery struck before testicular cancer. More people die of cancer now because they have to die of something. Being against cancer is like being against the human condition, but you don’t see Woody Allen hawking bracelets that say LIVENERVOUS.
When Armstrong’s teammates started coming out against him, I was easily convinced that Armstrong had doped, if only to have another bullet point in an argument against those bracelets. And anyway performance-enhancing drugs are so pervasive in cycling and Armstrong had been the preeminent cyclist: it made sense that his blood was thicker than it should have been. And after George Hincapie’s testimony, believing Armstrong was clean was like believing in Santa Claus. As a Jewish non-cyclist, I had no reason to believe in either.
I had never considered Lance Armstrong’s talent until I went trail running in Leadville, Colorado. Armstrong has competed several times in the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike race. On my run, I went up Powerline, a 3.4 mile stretch with a 1,300 foot gain that is included in the bike course. The first part is even steeper, but no statistics are readily available from a cursory google search, so this picture will have to do:
Walking quickly up that first half mile was difficult, and pushing a mountain bike up it would have been a pain. One of the guys I was running with told me that Armstrong was the first guy to ride up it, which I can’t even imagine. But I did get, finally, that Lance Armstrong is an incredible athlete.
The thing that’s often overlooked in discussions about performance enhancing drugs is that they are not a short cut. If anything, they’re the opposite. These drugs improve recovery time, so athletes can train harder.
For instance, last night, I didn’t follow through on my last speed repeat because I have a very limited interest in lactic acid pain. No performance-enhancing drug could change that in me. But if I were taking a drug, I’d be less sore this morning, and I’d be able to do speedwork again tonight. The extra workout, not the drug, would be what would make me faster.
So while this Nike commercial is now kind of awkward, it’s not inaccurate:
Lance Armstrong was on his bike, busting his ass six hours a day. The fact that he probably had more red blood cells in his system than was natural has nothing to do with his commitment to the sport.
The people who can now dismiss Lance Armstrong as a cheat or a coward are being intellectually lazy. Lance Armstrong did cheat, sure, but that doesn’t change what he accomplished. There’s no performance-enhancing drug for hard work.
“I feel like I’ve done something with my life. I have given myself an addiction, and weaned myself off of it.”
The only thing my dad seems to remember from high school is the longest and shortest days of the year. As facts go, these are a good pair to know. It’s not that Halloween, which is now less than ten weeks away, can’t be a marker of time coming and going, but there’s something more official about dates based in science. And besides, natural light, more than miniature candies, affects moods and plans. Light makes it easier to be outside, easier to get out of bed, easier to go for a walk after dinner for ice cream. Coming up to June 21, there’s a certain romance to the extending days, when each time the sun still hasn’t set feels like a gift.
June 21 should be my favorite day of the year, but I have a tendency to be sad about things ahead of time. While I did spend most of the evening of the 21st enjoying the late-night lightness, I was already worrying about the shortening days. Still, for a month or so after the solstice, it was easy enough to pretend that the days were staying long. It was bright in the morning, and still light after the streets had quieted down. But now, in the last stretch of August, there’s no fooling. I’m waking up to write in dark skies and finishing my runs in twilight.
Camus claims “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and so I try to find some joy in these shortening days. For most of the summer, I didn’t get to see the western light that fills my apartment in the hour before the sun sets; now I’m here when the great streaks of light inch along my wall. And even though it’s harder to get out of bed in the darkness, there’s a certain satisfaction to watching the morning begin. I feel like a witness to the day’s origin story.
These changes come every year, but somehow, they always surprise me. The shifting light is sort of like that second cousin who was once an idea, then a belly, then a person. Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the passage of time, but then the sunsets before 6 and that kid is in kindergarten. And sooner than you can believe, it’ll be December 21, and the light will start going the other way. Time, however, can only go in one direction: forward.
“Check out my hot new printer,” I said to my new Denver friend in my new Denver apartment. I had just bought an HP Photosmart Premium printer. It had a scanner and could print photos. But this is not why I described my printer as hot. I had found the printer on Craigslist, listed as new, for $100. It retailed for $150.
Part of me thought the printer was stolen since the guy met me at a 7-11 parking lot to sell me a deeply discounted product in its original packaging out of a car that smelled like methanol cigarettes. The other part of me was prepared to go under oath to say I had no knowledge of the printer’s origins. While I generally don’t condone theft, this was during a period of my life when most of my social interactions came through Craigslist. I spent an evening with a couple who were renting out their spare room because the boyfriend was about to lose his unemployment. Back in the Pacific Northwest, they flipped antiques on Craigslist, but here, the girlfriend said, “people think their shit is worth a lot.” And when I knew no one in Denver, talking to them about online classifieds made for a fine enough evening. After I found a place of my own, I spent most of my free time driving out to Longmont and Aurora to stand briefly in a stranger’s foyer to pick up a side table or dresser. It seems weirder now to meet a guy from the internet in a parking lot to buy something that was readily available at a retail establishment.
The thing about this hot printer is that it’s optimistically wi-fi compatible, which is to say, it didn’t come with a wire to connect to my computer and the wi-fi didn’t work. When I went to Office Max to buy the missing part, I learned that the purchase of my exact printer came with $75 rebate.
So my printer wasn’t hot, but someone had still been ripped off.
Last night, the co-host of a birthday party I attended gave me a hug, and said, “I’m so glad you came,” to which I replied, “Really? Because I don’t think you know my name.” And even though he thought I was Jamie, I was still being a jerk.
I can be just as reckless with my body. Take this summer: I scrapped my leg against a nail at Sleep No More, tripped twice while running, and got a light concussion from mountain biking, or more accurately, from getting the mountain bikes out of the car. My most recent scab reaches another scar I got from slicing my knee open on a bathtub faucet.
Part of the problem is a lack of depth perception. The other thing to blame is a happy childhood spent in scabs. I had a lot of fun playing sports I wasn’t good at. But the skin always came back to my elbows and knees, and I never broke a bone or had a bloody nose. The only consequence to my carelessness I can remember was in 4th grade. I was riding my bike down a hill, swerving along the line where the asphalt met itself, and I fell and hit my chin. My mom had made goulash that night, and I couldn’t chew any of the meat.
There’s no larger point to this story except that I have a feeling I’m going to be an old lady who walks into an armoire, breaks her hip, and that’s that. Or that’s that plus some slow years in a wheelchair. And there’s nothing to do until then but take a multi-vitamin, which I don’t even do. Maybe I’ll start in 2013. It would be a nice compliment to my 2010 New Year’s resolution, which was to start cleaning out cuts and applying Neosporin.
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortune may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken from the epigraph of Unaccustomed Earth
The other night, watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics at a friend’s house, another guest asked me how long I had been in Denver. “So not even a year,” she replied, which struck me as odd, even though it was factually correct.
A year isn’t that long, sure. But I’ve been here this whole time, trying to figure out how to live and make friends in a city that until less than a year ago, I had never visited and where I knew no one who owed me anything. All that I had was an idea, stolen from Jhumpa Lahiri, stolen from Nathaniel Hawthorne, of striking my roots into unaccustomed earth.
I might have known that an idea is not the same as a friend who’s not doing anything, but wants to know what I’m doing or even a crashable house party. There are times when I find myself, if not homesick, then acutely aware of where I would be if I hadn’t left New York. Some of my friends rented a house in Woodstock this weekend; I’m sure I would have had a great time.
I’ve never regretted my decision to move to Denver. Like Hemingway’s idea of love, there is no choice anymore. I live in Colorado. Still, there are lonely times, when I wish I had one more person I could call or a place where the udon soup always put me in a better mood. While wanting these things, it’s easy to forget that my new life isn’t even a year old. I know I’ll look back on this time as a transition, but meanwhile, I have to live it. And unfortunately, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, there is no remedy for time but more time.
But there are many moments when moving on an epigraph makes sense. Every time I parallel park successfully (which is not every time I parallel park) and sometimes when I ride my bike along streets no one I used to know has ever walked along, I feel proud and also free. Last weekend, I’m not sure what I would have done in New York. Probably something fun to escape the heat and maybe a party where I would have known all the guests for too long. I couldn’t have predicted a year ago what I ended up doing in Colorado: mountain biking and then going to a house show where the band played Side A of Rumours. But there are still more friends to make, a set of Colorado license plates to be acquired and hiking trails to learn. In short, there is still more time to pass.
There are two things I love about this blog. The first is the most obvious: these two people dated? What did they talk about? The second is a reminder that fame, or anything really, is no protection for the heart. I wonder if Selma or Jason got that bubbly, nauseous feeling in their stomach after their relationship dissolved. I wonder if they slept a lot, or not at all, after the break-up. And I wonder if they listened to that episode of This American Life when Starlee Kine wrote a break-up song and played it for Phil Collins. (Probably not, unless they had a time machine. That episode came out seven years later.)
And unrelated to loving this blog, I wonder if Starlee ever got over Anthony.
For the first few hours after finding out about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, any social media about the weather, a good iced coffee or Frank Ocean made me kind of furious. All I wanted to read in 140 character increments was more about the murders. I wanted to know the last tweets of the Channel 7 sports reporter who died, about the tear gas that the audience mistook as another special effect, and about the kinds of costumes people had worn to the screening. As if these facts could give some definition to something so senseless. Of course, they did not make me feel any better than a photo of an iced coffee.
In terms of national tragedies that I’ve been in a 20-mile radius of, this one was different than September 11. On 9/11, all the senseless murder was connected to something larger. That’s not to say an international terrorist plot makes the untimely death of a brother or mom any easier. But for those who were only attached to the tragedy as a witness, there was a narrative that unfolded afterward, and there’s something comforting in a story.
There has been an effort to blame the senselessness of the Aurora shootings on the NRA’s interpretation of the second amendment. But I don’t think that’s fair. Just as the pro-choice movement isn’t in favor of abortions, the NRA doesn’t like mass murder. (Though to the guy wearing a second amendment t-shirt in Lyons on Saturday: maybe too soon?) James Holmes was going to do something awful no matter how long he had to wait for whatever kind of weapon he was going to buy. There’s nothing tangible to blame this tragedy on.
I went to bed on Thursday night maybe a little drunk, but safe and cool in my air-conditioned apartment, ready to wake up to a Friday morning and the coming weekend. Instead, I woke up to a panicked email from a friend who knew I would never go to a midnight showing of Batman. I don’t think she thought I was in real danger, but my proximity to the random unfairness of life left her unnerved.
Last week was not slow in the senseless tragedy genre. In Burgas, Bulgaria, a suicide bomber blew up a bus of Israeli tourists. While I was as unlikely to be on that bus as I was to be at the Batman premier, I have been in Burgas. In fact, last summer, an Israeli real estate investor gave my friend and me a ride along 99, even going so far as to pay a cab driver to lead us to the train station in the city. For those who aren’t up on Bulgarian history, the country takes much pride in being one of the few places that didn’t turn their Jews over during WWII and Israeli tourism is a strong part of their economy. My friend who lives in Sofia said there were more than a few Facebook statuses equating the suicide bomber to September 11.
It’s easy to go months and even years and pretend. But with the Aurora shootings and the suicide bombing in Burgas, there it is, and in a place I’ve been: life is uncertain and unfair. What’s kept me happy and healthy for the past 29 years has been nothing but luck. And it could go the other way at any moment.
I should have fit in. My dad took the train into Manhattan, my mom had a good dermatologist, and my family went to synagogue three times a year.
I am writing this late at night after a long think by myself, & I am afraid it is going to hurt you, but, I’m sure it won’t harm you permanently.
For quite awhile before you left, I was trying to convince myself it was a real love-affair, because, we always seemed to disagree, & then arguments always wore me out so that I finally gave in to keep you from doing something desperate.
Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. It’s alright to say I’m a Kid, but, I’m not, & I’m getting less & less so every day.
So, Kid (still Kid to me, & always will be) can you forgive me some day for unwittingly deceiving you? You know I’m not really bad, & don’t mean to do wrong, & now I realize it was my fault in the beginning that you cared for me, & regret it from the bottom of my heart. But, I am now & always will be too old, & that’s the truth, & I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy - a kid.
I somehow feel that some day I’ll have reason to be proud of you, but, dear boy, I can’t wait for that day, & it was wrong to hurry a career.
I tried hard to make you understand a bit of what I was thinking on that trip from Padua to Milan, but, you acted like a spoiled child, & I couldn’t keep on hurting you. Now, I only have the courage because I’m far away.
Then - & believe me when I say this is sudden for me, too - I expect to be married soon. And I hope & pray that after you thought things out, you’ll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are.
