poorly-edited selections from blennny and friends

Walking home. A piece of gravel is lodged in my shoe. For an avenue I choose to ignore it. An experiment in patience. Overcoming small annoyances. Like my daily ill-fated attempts to avoid checking my phone. An experiment but also a mistake. I empty the contents of my sneaker on the pavement. A couple pieces of green turf fall out, the sticky ones that seem to get attached to everything. I resume walking yet the rock still rattles. Again, I bang my sneaker. An empty pinata this time. The cause of my misfortune has somehow embedded itself in my sock. I do not have the energy to remedy this disaster and the piece of plastic remains put. Until a minute ago. When I walked in the door and began to write.

A crippled man with a Coors in his hand walks across the train. I am honestly unsure if he has a disability, but I believe it more likely than inebriation. He is around my age. His friends, sitting in a cozy two-seater at the end of the car, embrace him. But do not stand to give him a seat. I suppose that is true friendship.

Along for my journey home are two couples. One sits across from me; one stands to my right. I do not really see them, but every three stops or so I will hear the man kiss the woman on the forehead. I am not sure whether I am jealous. Or rather, I am not sure if I would like to be in their position. Jealous, sure. I do not look to see their attractiveness. I am sure they are fine but unremarkable. As all couples are to the outside world. The potential of two stifled into one.

I got my wisdom teeth out Tuesday. The doctor said I cannot have alcohol during recovery (one week). It is the longest sober stretch in recent memory I can recall. I have learned nothing about myself from it.

The septuagenarian ladies sitting at the booth behind me have a conversation no different to the assemblage of girls I eavesdrop on at Forget Me Not. It’s comforting. To sit in a diner and know there’s another fifty years of slow ossification. Doing the exact same thing. The same thing I’ve been doing for half a decade already now. A lot more time to perfect it.

The diner hired a new waiter a couple months ago. He always comes and talks to me about whatever issue of the New Yorker I have brought with me. He incorrectly tells me the magazine used to be a monthly. I only gently correct him, and he asks to connect with me on social media. I wonder what he’ll think of my story posts. He’s a smart guy studying semiotics somewhere. I imagine him and I will have pleasant conversations for perpetuity while I eat corned beef hash. Maybe it’ll be with someone else taking a passive interest in what I’m reading. To pass the time. Another half century of this too. 

The apartment next door welcomes friends with jovial greetings as a new song starts. It feels like the beginning of a concert. When the opening act is just getting set. 

I know when my eyes sparkle. I love the feeling. It often feels infectious. I wish I knew how to make them shine on command. When I want something. Or someone. It usually comes out when I’m talking about something I like. Other times in coquettish disagreement. In both cases there’s no need for my eyes to glimmer. The people I’m talking to already know the game. I guess it’s no fun when it works on demand.

I wonder if professional soccer players feel the sun turn vicious and wonder if they’ll get burned midgame.

The bridge is a muddied mess once rain envelopes the city. My jacket is tattered in little splotches of dirt the bike has kicked up and onto my back during the ride. But none of that is of concern to me right now. 

With rain comes mist. And when it descends on the city only the best buildings are visible from the bridge. Many times I have tried to use my dogshit phone camera to capture the phenom but by now I think the feeling rests in the heart and the heart only. Water droplets that float forever turn the present into a memory in real time. The lights of the skyscrapers glow faintly yet brighter than ever. Just like when her mouth is covered yet you can still see her eyes smile. Her eyes smile just for you. 

And if you’re lucky enough you don’t need sight at all. You can feel the smile on her breath. No matter how faintly, the Chrysler Building will shine for you.

The now-shuttered storefront pictured above used to house a Dunkin Donuts. Astute eyes may have already gleaned that from the D-shaped door handle. There is, or was, absolutely nothing spectacular about this specific location except that it inexplicably had a decently nice porch. And that I once bought a medium iced coffee from it. 

Recollections like these make me very uneasy. I had been to that specific location only once and passed it by three other times in my life. Not only can I remember a Dunkin used to be there but other benign facts about my wholly unremarkable past solo patronage. I was there because I wanted coffee while waiting for a burrito two blocks away. The burrito, much like everything else in this story, is another a boring tale. I remember paying two dollars more than I should’ve, although I didn’t mind because the woman running the register was very kind. I remember sitting outside and struggling through ten pages of a book I bought that morning. I remember going to that specific spot because they had a breakfast burrito. Or maybe it was some lunch special. I cannot tell you how it tasted. I’m sure it was fine. 

I lost my train of thought again. Precisely why these fading realities make me uneasy. My world changes much like yours and a physical scar on the storefront is at once a complete nothing and yet far too important to avoid making a remark. The only issue is no one cares. 

Back to the story. I passed by this now derelict pseudo-coffee (just a little joke poking fun at Dunkin) establishment while ten minutes away from my final destination, where I’d acquire a couple of new co2 tanks for my beer. I’d been walking for a while and the vast quantities of liquid I’d consumed earlier started to demand release. Five minutes before arrival, the uncomfortable delay of my bodily functions forced a change in gait. I made it – a minute longer and I might not’ve – but it’s all utterly inconsequential. 

I have plenty of these loose tangents masquerading as stories. No one cares. Maybe a partner or an eventual kid. But I’ll be describing a reality that no longer exists in their eyes. Like when someone tells you the bar you’re at was better twenty years ago. All there is to do is smile nicely and hope the winds of conversation shift, or grow faint completely. I’m 25 now, which is the oldest I’ve ever been. It’s painfully obvious that the rest of my life, and everyone else’s, will involve more of these sudden, involuntarily pangs brought about by nothing important at all. I’m not all that against it. And I guess there’s not much else to do about that phenom but talk about it. And maybe get the chance to work it in a story if I’m so lucky.

Here’s another one I remembered after editing my thoughts above. Eight months after my grandmother’s death I got off the subway nearest her old apartment. While it was obviously quite sad when she left us, her unfortunate decline had foreshadowed the inevitable, and I had not exactly been emotional over it. I had been with her less than half a day before she died. I had been in that exact train station many times since her passing. I don’t know why but that’s where the loss suddenly rushed to the surface. All I could do was sit in the little park outside and think about her. What else to do about these sorts of things brought on my innocuous sightings on daily commutes?

I have included a picture of the US Open above because she took me yearly. We wandered around the Billie Jean King Center together would complain how prices had got worse and worse – but it was okay because the tennis was always great.

I get similarly emotional every time I now go to the US Open in her absence. I have become the person talking about how it used to be better. Probably because I no longer have my favorite companion. Much like the aforementioned person discussing how the bar you’re at used to be better. He too is separate from his past friends and lovers.

It is very cold out again which is a welcome development. November has announced itself with a bang after October didn’t come at all. There are less people out and the crispness of Autumn has nettled its way into the stinging wind. Two more weeks and gloves will be necessary for every adventure undertaken on bike. It is perfect. 

I walk down 47th street towards a makeshift park known as Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza. A place with no greenery, just adequately spaced benches and concrete. I was here once before – eight or nine years ago – on assignment. Back when I wanted to do something with my life. When I wanted to live and work as a journalist. My favorite author lived across the street and I was doing a story on him. His favorite bench was and still is emblazoned with his name.

An eclectic mix of characters make up the after dark park crowd but as no one pays me mind, a tenet of social constructs I am well familiar with from my days of conspicuous public drinking long after the sun has retired. Retelling this story it seems those days are not behind me yet. I know exactly which bench the plaque is on but ostensibly check every single one as if unsure so I can read the lives of others which have been edited down to a few words. Mom, husband, humorist, friend of the community. Ordinary people come and go, and no one looks for their benches.

For some context, I have undertaken this walk after coming out of Chantal Ackerman’s wonderful 1996 romantic comedy A Couch in New York. Shown in the lowest level theater at MoMA, which rests right above the E/M tracks, the movie is oft interrupted by the familiar rumble of the trains passing just below – a frankly beautiful reminder that neither movies nor the cinema exists in a void.

I go on this evening voyage with my tote being my only companion. I do not bring with me a light jacket and it is early October so I walk into the museum hot and exit cold two hours later. The bipolar temperature means it’s finally getting to the season where I can do things alone and not feel worse off for it. A walk with friends is beautiful in the spring, opportunistic in the summer, delicate in the fall and lonesome in the winter. The breeze puts us all on edge once it is no longer welcome. And now the only problem with sitting at a table for one is no one with to share. All else is fine. 

As for the aforementioned bench. I am unable to photograph it. There is a homeless man sprawled lengthwise across it and I do not wish to disturb his slumber. In fact I think Vonnegut would’ve liked it this way anyways. He’s getting some use in his old age. People are remembered in funny ways.

I would also like to mention the three dollar hot dog I got not long into my journey. It was delicious.

I swear the area around Central Park is ten degrees colder than the rest of the city. There is, of course, a very real reason for that, but it’s more fun to imagine it as a metaphor for our sudden arrival of Autumn, a collection of months I frankly do not care for. 

One of the frankly nicer parts of the season is school starting back up. When you’re a kid, every morning is promised. You go to school, see your friends, roughhouse, laugh, occasionally cry, go home. Rinse and repeat. You know who you’ll see every day. There’s defined ends to the social seasons. Sure, a friend might move away but the milieu stays largely the same year after year after year. I wish that were true now. Friends fade; relationships end. The older I am, the more people pop into my mind. I hate losing any one person and I’ve never fully accepted that’s how life goes. 

The losses add up. I ran into an old coworker from my days working at my local bodega on Sunday. I hadn’t seen him or any of the all-Latin, all-drunk-on-the-job staff in years. I loved each and every one of them. Except the one guy who hated me. But I still kind of loved him too. There were just like seven regular cohabitants with me behind the deli counter and their “loss” has stuck with me all afternoon. No wonder it takes a lifetime to get over a loved one. September has always felt like a mourning month anyways.

Summer to fall is like the morning laze on the beach to the afternoon swim in the lake. Yeah, I prefer the lake more – I don’t sweat as much – but it fast turns dark and cold. I saw a couple breaking up on the Williamsburg Bridge yesterday. Not even a third of the way up the Manhattan side. The sun sets earlier and earlier. 

No one thinks of me the way I think of me. If I ever went missing how I would look if everyone who knew me could put me back together. Would I even like this reproduction? When Autumn comes around, I spend three months walking around thinking about stupid shit like that. Waiting around for Winter reminds me of the moment before a storm hits. The rain appears to have already passed. Yes, the downpour will still come, but it’s a good reminder that all you need to do is weather it. I don’t believe in umbrellas either. It’s nice to feel the pitter patter on my jacket. 

Who decided what hue to color the car lights that flick on when I pull down the passenger’s seat mirror to check my acne? I am in my parent’s Mazda on the way to Montreal with two co-inhabitants. I overshoot an exit ramp and make a relatively easy turn a g-force simulator. If I were driving with my mom she’d scream at me, rightfully so, but I’m not. I laugh it off. 

Talking to border agents is a favorite activity of mine and thus I do not like having to play the role of passenger passing between countries. The topic of conversation with these almost always weary yet severe men is my favorite: me. Where have you been? What do you have with you? On and on. All about me. But my friend is driving now and thus gets the spotlight. It’s okay. I’ll turn the experience into an anecdote and bring the conversation back to me.

I do not do well in large groups outside my usual environment. Last summer I went up to a good friend’s summer house filled with a cohort of people I had met once a year prior. I disappeared for an entire day, not because of the acquaintances, who are lovely people, but because I had trouble socializing with them, breaking into their rhythms. I left midday with no plan except not being there. I ended up going to a couple of local breweries and sitting in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot alone for thirty minutes. I got back and smoked weed secretly with my friend’s dad. I think the rest of the people there had a great time. I honestly wouldn’t know.

I repeated my actions, albeit in a calmer manner, during my recent trip north of the border. I am not the most motivated when I travel, not in a bad way, I just want to walk around unbothered and read my magazines. The first day in Montreal, I abandoned the group to amble around the neighborhood. The whole time feeling guilty. And then I did it again on our last evening together. The trouble is I don’t regret it. I went to a phenomenal dive (which to me means the seediest possible venue I can find) frequented by some of the strangest people I’ve ever met. Accompanied in my imbibing by a friend I’d met that day, I sang karaoke with the aid of a quinquagenarian who gave me a huge kiss on the cheek after each butchered rendition of a song likely from her youth and played pool with increasingly odd and off-putting men. I’m sure all my friends who separately went club hopping had a great time too. I’m again not sure. And again, I feel guilty for it.

I’m back in New York. I know people look down at talking about the weather with callous indifference as the lowest form of conversation but sometimes it feels all I know in life is how to amicably complain about if the weather was too hot or cold for me today compared to yesterday. And sometimes it feels like that’s all I need anyways.

Over the course of my life, I have lived in many homes. And all of them will be occupied by someone after I pass through. I am anxious to see the before, look how the previous residents spruced up the rooms, imagine what type of people they were, think of the ash-laden history stored in the walls. Seeing the after is akin to Eve eating the apple. We imagine the place, our places, frozen in time. But they’ve moved on. No one ever buys postcards of their childhood haunts at present day. Only the faux-sepia toned film showing it before you came. Before you made it your own. 

The Manhattan Bridge is only an enjoyable ride at night. The blue barriers seem to fade into the East River in rhythm with the setting sun and perhaps you are a child again. Or a teenager. But only returning as a specter, looking back at what you once had. Like watching a stranger opening a door for another stranger. You’ve done that. You’ve smiled kindly and they’ve smiled back. The interaction both immediately forgettable and somehow sustaining. It’s a connection, a beautiful one, and all there is to do is watch. Forever a stranger to them, a stranger to the world.

I saw a high school friend for the first time in seven years. I told her what I thought was a joke about how I’ve fallen in love with every bartender remotely close to my age I’ve come across but don’t know why. She disagreed immediately, calling my bluff that I’m somehow not privy to my own truth. But I’ve never bothered to dig very deep. I don’t think there’s a way in which I win there, and I’m not keen to test that hypothesis. In the context of a suburban night, crickets are the loudest thing in the world and sitting with my thoughts for an hour feels like sending every small text with the iMessage Slam Effect, the blue bubbles rattling around my brain til it bursts. I both know myself and would prefer not to.

I hate the last two weeks in August the way I hate when my best friend gets a girlfriend. I hate change and anything that marks the passage of time. The days leave me grasping for the halcyon of youth as it drifts away in a summer breeze like the saccharine humidity of a summer day melted by the streetlights when the sun finally sets. The future looks like the nine pm skies, just a palate of deep blues hiding pockets of a future you may never get to explore. How can you enjoy wasting away – thinking only of if you’ll brown or redden – when September and the rest of your life is just around the corner?

I guess with July coming I should harp on the best parts of the season. The window left wide open so you can hear the sounds of kids playing, yelling late into the night. Arguments are lackadaisical, not bitter and grating like in winter, just a way to pass the time. Most importantly walking around freely gives me the ability to see my friends when they aren’t there. A park bench, a Guinness 0.0, a certain record I once spun that you pretended to like just for me. The boardwalk from the 7 to the US Open sears the memory of my late grandmother into my vision as if I had just stared at a car headlight far too long. Everything reminds me of someone. I understand why people think sending two dogs canoodling to your significant other is corny but to be thought of is to be loved and this way no one ever leaves me. I hate finality. I can’t start relationships for fear of them ending. I worry when something is gone it’s forever. But only in summer does everyone return, and I’m not talking about the nasty habit of texting exes which seems to surge in tandem with the heat. The other seasons don’t allow the mind to wander too far from reality, there’s no meandering pointless walks where you’re accompanied by everyone you’ve ever loved keeping to themselves besides you like having parallel play with a longtime friend at a café. And the other seasons certainly don’t allow you to lay sweaty in bed together unable to sleep not because of the heat but from the knowledge the conversation you’re having will never happen again.

No matter how many times I go up or down air travel is a revelation. Man’s final affront to God. Being on top of the clouds we are supposed to strain our necks skyward to witness changes what was never possible from ground. Seeing up close the vast white expanse and its rumpled terrain, how the tops appear as smoke billowing up from an exploded nuke. Across a never ending blue stretches a dotted canvas which comes alive in the form of ship fragmentations, flotsam that floated up for a bit too long. Sometimes a particularly detailed stretch forms an apparitional pack of boars roaming a vast tundra.

They were never supposed to be seen this way. Unlike from below, there is no constantly shifting form. Their ephemeral existences rendered permanent and still as we soar faster than they can scroll across the sky. Only upon their sudden disappearance from beneath the wings do I understand just how high ambition can go. 

I am flying home from Paris, a city perfect in almost every conceivable way, at least when judging a city using my standards. A robust bike and train network, vastly reduced cars usage, bustling parks and outdoor space fitted for youths. I spent my last day in the city with a friend who moved there a year prior sitting by the canals cosplaying as locals (me not him). It’s about a good a send off as I could’ve asked for, a genuinely perfect twenty hour hours. There are times when I wish I could move out of New York and start the same life in another sprawling metropolis – not because I need any major change – it would just be a lovely conversation for the rest of my life. I would be able to maintain an obnoxious cultural superiority by some metric I alone can personally formulate. Despite its existence only being internally known I am constantly referencing it, seeing how I match up with friends, foe, or other in any setting. 

But I cannot leave the city not for Los Angeles, not for Paris, certainly not for Boston or anywhere else. I do not believe the center of the world exists elsewhere and I have primed myself to believe I need to be as close to that nucleus as possible. Other places cannot produce the awe of the towers stacked high upon the collage of lesser roofs around every corner and yes this is corny but it is both how I truly feel and also all I have ever have. The clouds in the distance have bled with the sun forming the periphery of an arctic lake at dawn. I am descending through the mountains of white, their vapors keen to provide turbulence, a proof of existence. A new day emerges at 2pm. I will not begin again but it’s nice to know it’s an option.

It genuinely seems like a prerequisite to obtaining a liquor license in the City of Angels is proof of ownership over at least two pinball tables. Further proof of an isolationist society enforced at every stage of daily life. Almost every other city in the country has their bar backrooms décored with a rapidly deteriorating pool table retrofitted with unidentifiable stains across the baize. Despite their blithe maintenance, or maybe because of it, they function as wonderful ways to meet new people, make friends, etc. In fact, my entire current social life stems from hanging around East Village dives and doing just that. In Los Angeles this does not seem like an avenue available for increased connection. I am not even sure what the other options are besides Scientology. There is no arguing and jouissance, winning and losing, that comes with social games. They are instead replaced by assiduously maintained ball whacking machines. I do love a game of physical solitaire, but I do not suppose one can meet others so easily through its encased flippers. I digress.

I am not sure how one survives becoming an Angelino without first enacting a strict isolationist policy. Driving around the city on the way to my favorite watering hole I found myself in search of a parking spot. Initially thrilled at the rare occurrence – I seldom drive in New York and when I do so, I am remarkably liable to bank a ticket (which occurs, I am not joking, half the time) – I figure I’ll have fun. I try to embracing what I find to be the most odious part of an already cantankerous culture stretched thin over the endless low-rise expansion, which is to say embracing a murderous state against one’s neighbors search of a free place to leave a two-ton hunk of metal. It is a ridiculous mental façade I concocted and within ninety seconds I am no longer jovial in my pursuits.

It is remarkably hard to induce change in one’s life, especially mine. As I snake through side streets where a three-story building might as well be the Burj Khalifa its clear why. The grass is not always greener, but I am so deeply unwilling to look that the grass might as well not exist. I have given serious thought to having a girlfriend in New York perhaps less times than I can count on one hand. So set in my ways that I have almost completely rejected the concept of an elevated relationship. I really don’t know what to do about this. Some would suggest therapy, but I feel I graduated from that years ago and have no desire to reopen wounds long since epithelialized.

I have the power to break up clouds I don’t like and let beautiful ones wither away. My life in the sky. A heart shaped floating ball of white fluff will have always been something alien to me first and continue on in an amorphic form from which someone else may find meaning. Until I can tap, bottle and keep that perfect middle, or at least not find myself thinking of change as decay, I do not know how to proceed in life, and in all likelihood won’t.

I’m sure at one point the stars shown bright over LA, not anymore. But from any hill at night the long runways of flickers below do the trick, as long as you don’t think too hard.

Somehow they forgot to turn the lights on (I hate using the same word twice) on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge. A perfect scenario as my two greatest fears are bridges and darkness in that order. I wish there wasn’t a metaphor here but as I stopped climbing uphill and glided back into Manhattan the stars suddenly reappeared over my head as the bulbs remembered how to illuminate the path forward. I hated it. But I think my loathe originated from the sour taste I hold for my sanitized life. I haven’t really experienced much by design and it’s remarkably hard to purposefully induce pain into one’s life. I am no masochist.

A few weeks ago I had a successful beer launch. I’m just writing about it now because I got the pictures. It was done at a nice bar and many of my friends came. The week following I received plenty of compliments about how well it went, how much we sold, the people there, etc. For me, this was wonderful. Being praised, no matter how small, is my favorite form of conversation. It’s nice to think about how lucky I am tho. As an incredibly jealous person I suppose I am lucky to have chosen a secondary skill in a field that’s not terribly hard, but more importantly, one that no one I know already does. It bothers me immensely to not be the best in something. Even in skills where I have no desire to top the table. Being around a good deal of young people who may or may not make a name for themselves, but certainly not because they are bereft of skill, is a remarkably difficult thing to do. Makes me understand why people live in places like Connecticut. 

Through the clouds the Sun appears as the Moon and the Moon ceases entirely. No plane glides nor a star shine, the awe-invoking powers of man and nature extinguished like a match in the sea. To live under such conditions – where birds no longer soar, but circle – is unproductive, but the feeling microdosed is more powerful than any drug, perhaps self-prescribed, meant to remedy it.

I have forgotten feelings. I once had a crush. I still have them. Often I don’t even want them to progress past that stage. Opportunity is more enticing than the real. Some time ago I went to a bartender’s last day on the job – I’ll fall in love with just about any front of house service worker so its easy to find new sources of infatuation – but finales are just that for a reason. I sat there taking in the strongest emotion I could, which is any feeling at the time you’re feeling it. I longed, for what I don’t know, I just knew I wouldn’t see her anymore. Whether that’s my fault or fate is anecdotal to the heart, and I don’t know regardless. The next morning I woke up feeling stoic, longing for the feeling to return. Moving through life with such sudden fluctuations in one’s mental state leaves a void when there’s nothing and the walls break and collapse during it’s the opposite.

The bluest skies come only after the grey and eventually the clouds clear up. But everyone likes sitting at home listening to the rain for a reason.

I sat on a park bench at 1:30am watching sixteen-year-olds play a loose adaptation of basketball, arguing with each other like only high schoolers can by saying “bruh” in varying intonations. I’d drank so many Hamms I could’ve been a butcher. They looked at me as if I were a specter and didn’t utter a word in my direction. In a sense I was. A warm sadness for something I can never experience again shown only by wearing a soft smile with a pained look. I asked them for a shot when we left which I shouldn’t’ve done. It wasn’t my role to play. It wasn’t my role to talk with them breaching the cosmic lines defined by the concrete ends of the court.

I kept sniffing the flowers right outside the park. Every time I bent down to smell a few more petals fluttered to the ground until the only the stem remained. Maybe we only have so many opportunities for brilliance. I airballed the shot.

Sometimes when I’m drunk and I bike back over the Williamsburg Bridge home I will think, and occasionally scream, that I am the luckiest boy in the world. Because I am. And I imagine that at some point in the future I will not be in a position to be behaving in the manner I am now. And I will think back to when I biked back into Manhattan as the luckiest boy in the world. Maybe when I’m 35 at 4pm. And all that warmth will come rushing straight back to me.

I biked ten minutes in the wrong direction and only realized because I passed the Bed Stuy pool, which I got to bike by every Wednesday morning last summer on the way back to the city after sleeping on the couch of my friend’s nearby apartment. I always liked the pool and I’m still the luckiest boy in the world.

Just played my post movie one dollar lotto scratcher twice instead of only once like normal. Because I thought I’d be lucky the second time. I lost both but I think l’m just actually lucky every day. And maybe I already used all of mine up today.