Often, when I need a little extra encouragement, I'll mutter under my breath to myself, or to inanimate objects or entities. When I need to not vomit despite a horrific hangover, I'll mutter, "Steady, Weinstein." When I need to not freak out even if things appear to have taken a turn for the worse I'll mutter, "Roll with the punches, go with the flow. Rooollll with the punches, goooooo with the floooow." As I inch my surfing learning curve along the tides of Rockaway Beach I whisper to the ocean, "One day, Ocean, I will ride you. I will ride you yet!" When I have to haul ass through a long day of work that is all for money and not for love, I look at New York City and whisper, "I will sink my fangs into your neck of steel and suck upon the river of money that flows beneath your streets like sewage, you den of sin, you city of broken dreams and dreams undreamt." When I share a glance with a passing stranger I think, "Who are you, and what were you before? Where did you go and what did you think?" When a car comes too close to my perambulating self I mutter, "Look at this asshole!" Then I often shout, "Watch where you're going, asshole!" accompanied by appropriate and classic hand gestures. When my feelings have been hurt very badly and I don't want anyone else to know, I mutter, "Eject! Eject!" and hop the first train or hail the first passing taxi and ride it either directly home or, alternately, as far from home as I can afford to get, where I can kick things in solitude. When I have a great idea or want to remember something for later, I tell Helen, my imaginary secretary, to make a note of it. "Make a note of it, Helen," I say primly. In this way I accompany myself through the dwindling hours of my short life on this ruined but beautiful planet.

Today, like most days of late, was overbooked. I used to play that Velvet Underground song, "Run Run Run," on fast days, but it wasn't on today's playlist. Not that I was running. I was cabbing it all over New York's poshest neighborhoods. Takes money to make money, I've learned of late. I've gotten really good at eating pizza with one hand while hailing cabs with the other. If I plan everything just right, pizza here, espresso there, nuts, chocolate, green tea and a banana in my purse, I can make it through a whole night of teengers without becoming irritable. They're really not so bad, the teenagers. They're kind of great. It's just that I'd rather be sitting here, writing about all the depraved things I've done, witnessed and heard tell of than teaching them algebra.

I hailed a cab on Fifth Avenue to whisk me to the West Side. In the cab I munched my almonds. My dad, when he found out I wasn't eating for hours at a time due to the demands of the high season, said most Semitic-paternally, "Whaddya mean you can't eat? You can eat! How about some nuts? Just have some nuts!" Like most things my parents say that make sense, I hear his voice in my head telling me to have some nuts, and I begrudgingly obey it, most Semitic-offspringally.

All the way across the park I was wondering to myself if and when I might get an iPhone. Probably I would get one eventually, I figured. Don't we all probably eventually give in to the technology of our age?

I've been mocked for years for my fantasies of "the Device" and "the Chip." The Device, I always imagined, is a combination cell phone/iPod/digital camera that would lighten the load of my pockets and travels. Technically, the iPhone is The Device, but its camera is so crappy that I can't consider it a full realization of The Device. The Chip is some kind of as-yet uninveted solid-state memory you get injected in the fat of your arm at birth that takes the place of all important documents, money and hard drives. The Chip is your driver's license, passport and credit card. It also contains the files of all your photographs. Family photographs could be scanned in to computers and transmitted to The Chip of newborn members of the family. Medical records and grocery lists--it's all on the chip. No more wallets or keys or photo albums destroyed in floods the fault of environmental destruction or government negligence.

The iPhone, I marveled, almost The Device. A true nerd never gives up on her dreams of ultimate technology. I imagined the heft and smell of a future iPhone in my hands, the fun we would have together, (wo)man and machine. Maybe the next generation I would get one. The next generation was bound to be smaller on the outside and bigger on the inside. If only people evolved that way, we could conserve natural resources.

My fantasies of devices yet unowned took me all the way to the West Side, where I juggled my pizza crust and wallet and paid my fare. Slamming the door of the cab I reached almost reflexively for my phone, and found it missing from my shallow pants pocket. Panic immediately ensued.

"I didn't mean NOW," I said to the universe. "I don't want an iPhone NOW. I can't afford one NOW. Give me back my phone, universe, give it back! I need it very badly."

The rumblings of yoga propaganda began to whisper unhelpfully in my ears. "Free yourself of material possessions," they said.

"Maybe later," I said.

"The shit you own," said Tony Soprano in a memorable clip (Melfi's office) from Season 4, "it owns you."

I couldn't quite bring myself to tell Tony Soprano to go fuck himself, but I raised an eyebrow.

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery," said Bob Marley.

"What's that got to do with my missing cell phone?" I asked. "By the way, Lester Bangs got you pretty bad, man."

Marley laughed and lit a spliff and vanished down Amsterdam Avenue.

Just as I had been lusting after the iPhone moments before I now missed my old phone terribly. "I didn't mean it!" I told my lost phone. "You're everything to me! Come back!"

"Steady Weinstein," I told myself. "Roll with the punches, go with the flow. Roooollll with the punches, goooooo with the flooow."

It wasn't working too well. "Shit, shit, shit!" I yelled. "Fuckfuckfuck." I hurled my pizza crust at a stop sign. I kicked a garbage can. I made whiny, growling noises. "Helen," I howled. "Find my phone AT ONCE!" But she didn't answer. She never does.

Hours later I returned home to an email from my parents, subject: WE KNOW WHERE YOUR PHONE IS. In their attempt to get my attention they made their exciting information appear ominous. The email included the phone number of a taxi driver, who had eventually answered the phone. His name was Mohammed.

"A skinny woman leave this phone in my cab," he told my parents as they frantically tried to discern why the number where they were expecting to reach their daughter was now being answered by a man with an inscrutable accent. Note to self, I thought when I read this detail. Rearview mirrors are slimming.

I dialed. "Mohammed?" I said, "This is Emily. You have my phone."

"Oh yes," said Mohammed wearily. "Your mother call me so many times."

I was forced to admit that my parents have done more for me than Helen ever has. After I paid Mohammed the fare to Brooklyn and a lot extra for his trouble and kindness, when I held the phone in my hands, pressed the cool surface of its screen to my forehead and sealed our emotional reunion, I felt complete again. "Close one, Weinstein," I said to myself. "Good to have you back, Motorola," I added.

Labels: cell phone, iPhone, loss, materialism, taxis, technology, the Chip, the Device

The little girl in the stroller was eating pizza. Her mother was feeding it to her from a white paper bag. The pizza was cold and the cheese had congealed, but the little girl made happy noises with every bite.

I was in a foul mood, one nostril inexplicably stuffed up, eyes itching from the ungodly mutant pollens the plants must be spurting in their pornographically excited state, cheeks aflush, hair afrizz, covered in that layer of city grime one acquires after the second or third subway trip of the day. Still, when the little girl waved her pizza fragment at me happily and murmured, "Pizza? Mmmmmmm?" I replied, "Yes, pizza is delicious. I just had some. Mmmmmmm." Goddamn unbridled joy of children, sneaking up on scowling aging adolescents posing as adults and forcing them to acknowledge that pizza is delicious.

"Mmmmmm," she agreed, and rubbed the piece of pizza all over her face before taking a bite. I laughed and she laughed and her young mother laughed, and suddenly the C train, though it and I were twenty minutes late, was not so bad.

So I felt a certain remorse when I inevitably alienated this young mother and her small child not five minutes later with a spontaneous and uncontrolled outburst. In my defense, this outburst was brought on by what I consider to be an enemy of art, my army of one is sworn to fight the enemies of art, guerrilla-style, wherever they appear.

It's like this: I had come to the end of the chapter in my Fitzgerald novel, and realizing I wouldn't have time to finish another, idly started leafing through the introduction of the book. This was a terrible mistake. With some notable exceptions, I despise commentary. If you don't have the guts to make your own art, don't insult this most sacred of acts by explaining line by line why an artist did what he did, and what he really meant, and whether this is a good work or a great work or a really fine work. Notable exceptions include David Denby and Anthony Lane, who often raise the dreaded work of criticism to an art form itself, and the readers of this website, whose infrequent interpretations of the work herein presented never fail to illuminate me. But writers of introductions and forwards, dissectors and commentators and meticulous footnoters, cross-references of allusions and miners of biography, seekers of common threads of narrative and conjecturers of reasons why, you are cowards, to a scholar. The only worthwhile response to art is art, or possibly sex, or possibly an act of senseless violence against one's enemies, self, personal property or the nation-state. A footnoted essay with block quotes and an extensive bibliography is a cowardly response to the ills and beauties of the world.

The introduction to the Penguin Popular Classics paperback version of Tender Is The Night was no exception. It takes a peculiar and reverse form of talent to write something boring about the life and work of a crazy, talented drunk married to a bonafide loon, but such are the abilities of the graduates of literary doctoral programs. In not one minute of perusing the introduction I found dozens of inexplicable sentences speculating on the multiple meanings of the main character's name. There were arcane arguments as to what Shakespeare play Fitzgerald might have been referencing, though incorrectly, when he used the word "awning." And so on and so forth.

I was particularly annoyed to find this offensive introduction in my Penguin Popular Classics paperback, because I had paid extra for the English edition. During a semester abroad in England I found out that English book cover design is far superior to American, and sometimes can't stop myself from purchasing the paperbacks with the prettiest pictures on them via the interweb. The cover art was art itself, but lurking right beneath the photograph so alive it breathed was a stifling slice of writing dry and dead as sawdust.

In a moment somewhat inspired by the film Dead Poets Society, I began ripping the pages of the introduction out of the book, neatly and noisily and one by one. (Critics of the future, should I be so lucky as to have any, you don't have to guess. When I did it, I was thinking of Dead Poets Society!) With the third or fourth rip the young mother looked up at me with alarm, noticed me systematically ripping and muttering to myself, and stood up, though we were between stations. She pushed the stroller to another part of the car, leaving me to fling the discarded pages of the introduction to her now-empty seat. I tore out the last one just as the train pulled into my stop, gathered the pile and tapped it twice to bring it into line.

Though I was now thirty minutes late, I stood on the platform for a moment, tearing the introduction into more or less even shreds. I stomped up to a garbage can and pondered the mass of paper in my hands. I wanted to consign it to the trash in a state even more prehistoric to its snooty evolution, and remembered today's unusual store of phlegm. I spit mightily into the center of the crumpled paper, making a satisfying dent and stain that began to spread over the block quotes that proved none of the self-satisfied assumptions of the critic who'd picked them. I closed my fist over our combined expulsions, slam-dunked them into the trash and headed up to street level to meet my newest student.

The new student turned out to be British, and the first thing she asked me is why everyone gets so riled up about the SATs in New York. Her bedroom window took in a sweeping view of the entire Central Park reservoir. Night had fallen, and the park was dark except for a ring of lights reflecting on the surface of the water. "It's in there," I pointed. "It's in the water."

She looked at me, incredulous, the squinted past our reflections in the bedroom window.

"In there? In the wahtuh?" she said Britishly, with none of the vowel-gnawing that identifies Americans in general and New Yorkers in specific.

"Yes," I said. "There is something in that reservoir that makes everyone in this city crazy."

Labels: "Dead Poets Society", "Tender Is The Night", criticism, F. Scott Fitzgerald, pizza, subway

They're closing down that place where we give readings! Doesn't that suck?

It does.

Where will we read now? I propose the roof of my apartment building. It's beautiful up there in the sky, and I have devised a way to transport martinis safely up the stairs. The real estate developers are closing down the sky, too, by filling it with high-rise condos, but its many farewell performances have been top-notch.

There is, however, one last reading at Mo' Pitkin's House of Satisfaction and I will be reading in it. 8:00, this Sunday, October 14. It's at 34 Avenue A between 2nd & 3rd Streets. Do come! We know not how much time is left for any of us! The apocalypse is nigh! Don't be shy! Come, drink, listen! Afterwards we can go get some dumplings at the diner.

Labels: reading

In a few moments the red timer will ring. It just did. It is exactly 4:00 p.m.

The red timer marks off the ten minutes for which I boil my eggs (which leaves the yolk just the tiny bit soft, but not liquid) the three minutes for which I steep my coca tea (which imparts to me the mental focus of many other stimulants without the jitteriness of caffiene or its chemical analogues, except for that one panic attack last year but I think that was because of an unfortunate falling away in my mind of the veil that usually softens my perception of time and death), and the eight minutes for which I boil ravioli. The timer came with a little sticker that said something like, "The design of this timer is distinctive and patented and replicating it is a federal offense."

It's true--the design of the red timer is distinctive. It's brand name is Lux and it's what I think of when I think of timers. Its bell is real and old-fashioned and its face is analog. I know it well.

When I was a child and so allergic to the world that I was sick every week of first grade, my mother took me to an allergist in Connecticut who cured me of all my allergies. He did this by testing me for every known allergen in the world and then vaccinating me against my own body. When went there for a number of days, and each day was partitioned by the ringing of the Lux timer.

During the testing phase, I received serums under my tongue every fifteen minutes. I'd set my timer and wait a few minutes to see if I went crazy or had a sneezing fit. I would then report my symptoms on mimeographed sheets. After a week, the doctor made up a series of serums to be injected into me. When I realized that these serums would enter subcutaneously instead of sublingually, I took off running down the halls of the allergy clinic, a team of nurses in hot pursuit. I was eventually tackled, subuded and injected. My mother, desperate to cure me of my allergies, promised me innumerable Hershey bars (to which, testing had determined, I had a "moderate" allergic reaction), upon completion of the course of injections. I relented, and set my timer for the sixty-minute intervals at which the injections were administered. They would ask, at first, which hand you wrote with, so you could get the most injections in your other arm. But after a while both arms were bruised and limp from injections. I refused to let them inject me in my thighs or buttocks, but I didn't mind the ensuing dead arms. I amused myself all the way back to Queens from Connecticut by trying to pick up my bruised arms and struggling against their weakness. They felt, I kept thinking to myself, like metal. I couldn't say exactly how they felt like metal, only that the pain in them, sometimes, dull, sometimes sharp, not entirely unpleasant, felt like metal.

The allergy center was named for the head doctor's dead son. He had died of a drug overdose. His name was carved into the cement out front, and I touched it reverently with my sneaker each time we entered.

The treatments worked. My allergies went away and never came back. This past spring, I felt this strange burning sensation in my eyes and throat on the first spring afternoon I spent in the park. I called my mother. (Lately I have been amazed that I carry in my pocket at all times a device on which I can push a button that says "Mom" and be instantly connected to her voice. Isn't that the fantasy of all children? That no matter where we are or what we're doing, if we are in the least bit of distress we can push a button and call our mommies? I think the cell phones of children with living parents, particularly Jewish, formerly allergic children, should come with buttons that say, "MOMMY!" Because that's what pressing the speed-dial or scrolling down to "Mom" in the Address Book and hitting "Send" really is, isn't it?)

"Mom," I said, "I feel so strange...my eyes are burning. I'm sneezing. But I'm not sick." My mom pointed out that I was probably having an allergic reaction. It was a particularly bad season for hay fever, she said. Reassured by my mother for the millionth time since birth that I was probably not dying and whatever was going on was normal I left the park and found my allergies relieved by the mercifully inert concrete and steel of the city. It turned out I was not entirely immune to the intersection between myself and the world, only mostly so.

I consider it a psychological triumph that I'm willing and able to use this very same sort of timer that once rang hourly to summon me to be poked with needles to measure the innocuous chores of my kitchen. But why not? Time is the same whether its marching us toward stabbing pain or a cup of tea. You can pretend otherwise, but you know what the man said, the man now dead so very long--"never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Labels: allergies, death, injections, tea, time, timers

I am getting closer to my glasses, I can feel it. Ever since I was robbed of my spectacles in South America, I've been dawdling in replacing them. But lately I've been picking up momentum. Every time I see an optician I duck in and try on all the frames. I'll ask the salespeople to unlock all the display cases and spread out several dozen frames on the counter. The salespeople, noticing what I'm trying, will bring me still more frames that look like the ones I already have, but rounder/squarer/two-toned/brownish-green instead of greenish-brown. My original idea was to get the most flat-out iconic Woody Allen glasses I could find, but they just don't look as good on me as the shape I've taken to calling the Standard Hipster, a variation on the oblong rectangles thick on the eyes of Brooklyn.

I went to the optician in my hometown in Long Island. When it came out that I lived in Williamsburg, the salesman started reminiscing. "I used to play in bars in Williamsburg like fifteen, twenty years ago," he said. "I had another life playing the guitar. It used to be a rough neighborhood, but it was really cool. What's it like now?"

"You don't want to know," I said. "It's best I don't even tell you what they're doing. It's not like you remember."

"Yeah, I used to go to work at B & H Photo when it was downtown, then take the train to Jay Street where I went to optician school nights, and then go to Williamsburg or back downtown and play gigs all night."

"That sounds difficult."

"Yeah, well," he said. "Nothing's that hard when you're living on Black Beauties." He handed me some frames. "You might want to try these, if you want to make a statement."

"I didn't know you could live on Black Beauties," I said. "Everything I've read about Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley left me under the impression that you could die on them."

"I'm living proof," said the optician. "Living proof."

I went to the frame store on Bedford Avenue, probably right where the resigned Long Island optician once popped pills and played his guitar. I brought my personal physician, who has some rather strong opinions on clothing and accessories. I kept returning to the table where I'd laid out my possible frames to find them gone. "Hey, where'd those kind of squarish brownish ones go?" I'd say.

"I didn't like those, so I put them away," said my personal physician.

This went on for a while until between her rejects and my rejects there were no frames left so we had to immediately repair to the bar for a drink.

Today I ducked into a eyeglass store on St. Marks, next door to the excellent purveyor of fine imported coffee where I buy my fine imported coffee. "Give me the one with the most adjectives," I always say. I drink Fair Trade Shade Grown Bird-Friendly Organic French Roast Peruvian coffee.

Within minutes, I had twenty frames spread out before me. I love to categorize things, and the minor variations in shape, size and color were providing me with boundless permutations of organization. I was happy. I tried on every pair of frames with my hair up, my hair down, my hat on, my hat off. None of them was quite right and each one cost upwards of $300, before my high-index super-thin anti-glare lenses were even ground to fit. Then I noticed a few frames on a dusty shelf near the bottom of a display case in the corner. I crouched down, picked them up, put them on. They were just like all the ones I'd tried on before, but if everything that had just been wrong was right. "Hey, I like these!" I said enthusiastically to the salesgirl. "These are them! What kind are these?"

She looked perturbed. "Those are store brand," she mumbled. "Here, let me get you some that, uh, look like those." She thrust some $350 frames with a fancy name on the side at me, but it was too late. I had taken my new favorite frames off and seen the price inside. They were a mere $180.

I couldn't believe it. All my life, I've invariably picked out the most expensive thing in the store, before I even knew what money was. When I was a little girl, my Grandma Betty would take me shopping and marvel at my expensive taste. In the glasses store on St. Marks Place I couldn't believe I'd picked out the cheapest frames, and that I was beginning to love them. It instantly gave me hope that one day I could pick out and maybe even begin to love a person who also did not come at great and unnecessary expense. I'd always had the sneaking suspicion that all the things that came at great expense were not really better, and that I was drawn to them because I was deluded or misguided or not seeing or thinking clearly. Maybe, I thought, my new frames would usher in an era of austerity in which I would not pay such high prices for illusory pleasures, would no longer heed the siren call of inflated prices or egos. The glass in the $180 frames was neither concave nor convex, but it imparted to me a new vision all the same.

It was time to go to work and too soon to commit to a final decision, but I bounded down the street, feeling pleased with myself. I snuck past the doorman at the building where my first session was. It's one of my hobbies to see if I can get past the doorman with a well-timed smile, nod, wave or sprint. The skill of smooth entry to guarded places has served me well before and might again, I figure.

The first kid on Wednesdays always pokes in my stuff.

"Lemme see your wallet," she said.

"Wow," she said when she saw my driver's license. "You're gonna be thirty."

"Not just yet," I said. "I just turned twenty-eight. But it's true. If I don't die in the next two years, or learn to freeze time, I will in fact be thirty."

"Wow," she said. "That's, like, not young."

Well, I thought, miffed, at least I'm not fifteen. But because I am almost thirty and therefore very mature, I did not say this.

The next kid had a very strange assignment. "I'm supposed to write a topic sentence about the beginning of civilization."

"What about it?"

"That's it. Just the beginning of civilization. I tried it in class but the teacher said it was wrong."

"The beginning of civilization," she had written, "led to many changes in America."

A long discussion ensued between us about when exactly the beginning of civilization occurred, and what a topic sentence might be. I looked inside my bag for some reading material to use to demonstrate a topic sentence and pulled out the novel Rebecca loaned me today, which I hadn't started reading yet.

"This is a book--let's see--the back of this book says it's about 'the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive in Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasies, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.' Okay, well, I'm sure it has a topic sentence but I think maybe better than reading it right now would be to think of one ourselves."

Luckily the kid had been fascinated by the idea that at the beginning of civilization she would be a mother and I would be a grandmother and all of our parents would be long dead because the life span was so much shorter, as were people, we think.

"In the beginning of civilization," she wrote, "the lifestyle of a fourteen-year-old was much different than it is now."

I decided to ask the rest of the kids this evening to complete the same assignment.

"The beginning of civilization," said the boy uptown, "...wasn't pretty?"

The girl uptown said, "The beginning of civilization was long and stressful."

Then she asked me, apropos of nothing, "Are you married?"

"Nope," I said, and wiggled my bare ring finger. "Single."

"My mom was twenty-eight when she got married."

"It's a popular age for that kind of caper," I said.

I did not say, "I am not married and I may never be. I think marriage is the endpoint of civilization, and may be an attempt to civilize people in a way I don't ever want to be civilized. However, I believe fervently, sometimes almost stupidly, in love, and if marriage has anything to do with love then I might be into it under the right circumstances. However, too often I think marriage has too little to do with love, and so I am wary of it. People who are not in love get married hoping it will fix it, and people who are in love get married and then miss out on being in love because they are planning their weddings and it makes them insane. Also, marriage is an institution, and I am wary of those, and it is an institution that consists specifically of registering your relationship with the state, and I am wary of that."

I did not say, "Marriage sometimes looks to me like a hoop you jump through to get the approval of society, and I have already jumped through all the hoops and gotten all the approval I am ever going to get from something as nebulous and brutish as society, and my interests in society are now geared more towards shocking it, bucking it and ultimately rearranging it. But other times marriage looks like a fantastic excuse to throw a great party and wear a great dress, two things that will still exist in the society I will build after I destroy this one. Still other times marriage looks like a trap, a thing made of metal and money designed to keep people in line, at work, down on the farm, sowing the seeds of their retirement funds and hacking away at their days like they reapers they've become. And still other times it looks like some kind of beautiful warm safe place I've only peered at through the trees from far away."

I did not say, "Marriage sometimes appears to me to be long and stressful." Instead, I said, "You can usually tell if someone is married by looking at their left ring finger, because they wear rings."

All evening, as I asked the teenagers about the beginning of civilization, I kept thinking of Thomas Hobbes, who said so famously that in life outside society there is "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." How strange that we have now created a civilization where within society there is continual fear, and danger of violent death. Though the lives of Americans are generally rich, boring, numbing and long enough to end in some permutation of cancer, obesity-related illness or vascular disaster, the lives of many other people continue to be poor, nasty, brutish and short. For these reasons and some others I am getting the feeling that contrary to what Hobbes said, life outside society would be safer and less frightening, but I am not really sure. That's the thing about marriages and civilizations--some lead to paranoia and self-destructive violence, continual fear or the danger of violent death. Others are a beautiful warm safe place outsiders peer at wistfully through the trees from far away. How are we to know which is which?

On the way home, I started the novel about the young couple whose struggle to survive in Manhattan in the early 1960s involved them in sexual fantasies, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence. It was really good. It was about the time in the writer's life when he was exactly the age that I am now. The beginning of many things, it seems, is not pretty, is long and stressful, and the lifestyle is much different.

Labels: Black Beauties, civilization, continual fear, glasses, love, marriage, the danger of violent death, Williamsburg