You are currently browsing the Writing category.
They walked into the red and orange pastry shop, him leading the way through the labyrinth of customers, legs, and old, damaged furniture. Finding a spot in the centre of the hubbub he pulled back a chair and offered his hand. She paused for a second, looking at it in front of her, noticing a small cut on the palm.
Continue Reading…
Three minutes and forty five seconds is the average time you’re trapped between stops on the A train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. There isn’t a huge amount that can happen in that time, but, for example, it is enough time to get attacked by a drunk, homeless, drug-ridden, disease-ridden, defecating, lonely, sixty year old. For example. Of course, you’d never really expect that to happen to you, but as I felt my palm slip down the now sweaty handrail, and counted the seconds I had left, I wasn’t thinking about the likelihood of it all. When you see someone like that coming at you, “likelihood” never really enters it.
A complete cross-section of the American population can be found in pool rooms. My local hall, Eastside Billiards, had a plaque which stated “Pool and Sex: two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy.” True. Any of our regulars would agree. They included a divorce judge, an opera singer, a plumber, teachers, immigrants, lawyers, CEOs, artists, construction workers, and my favorite, J.V., a computer analyst from Nebraska. He once invented a data encryption method that he sent to the FBI, and his uncle was a “cleaner” for the Hells Angels. “Let’s just say he carries a wood-chipper around in his truck,” J.V. told me, “and he don’t know much about tree surgery.”
I went to the New School and did a poetry class (my first ever). We were asked to write a concrete poem (one where the positioning of the words on the page mean something). I did the following, and it got me reported. I understand the writing isn’t great, but was it really worth an official complaint from my teacher?
Fed up upon a midnight dreary, I labored with eyes red and bleary,
O’er an epic tome of aging prose and poems bound to bore—
While I noodled, nearly napping, suddenly an inner clapping!
Rhyme, no less, had found a way of slapping me awake once more.
“’Tis a happenstance,” I muttered, “a weary chance mistake I’m sure—
Only this and nothing more.”
I just got fired. It’s not the economy—after all, this was the third time I was fired from the same job. But it was probably deserved.
To begin with, the job was beyond me. Starting off behind the bar at Eastside Billiards I had the honor of being able to call myself “the worst bartender in Manhattan.” Until the day I left I still never learned what goes into a cosmo or a martini. My customers couldn’t complain, as any time they asked for a cocktail I couldn’t handle I’d glance at a cheat sheet and give them a heavy pour.
Barack Obama was not the only African American running for president in the 2008 elections. But few knew of Cynthia McKinney, Georgia’s first African-American Congresswoman and this year’s Green Party Candidate.
In a plurality-takes-all political climate, little knowledge of the third-party candidates is understandable. Many believe that voting for a third party is a waste of your vote, for they will never get elected. In 2000 Ralph Nader allegedly spoiled the Democrats’ chances by taking many of his 2.9 million votes from people who would otherwise have supported Al Gore. In Florida, with a mere 537 votes separating the Republicans and Democrats, this could have been decisive. George Bush got in because of Nader! In 2004, Michael Moore got down on his knees on national television and begged Nader not to run. The sentiment was clear; running against the Democrats in swing states is immoral.
- Written on Nov 15th 06.
It was as if I’d appeared in the foyer of an airport. It was as impressive as it was empty. Huge window arches, sweeping swathes of light reflecting off the walls, the floor a collage of grey and brown patterns, the faint sounds of jet engines echoing around an otherwise silent shell. I stood there with my father, and we were afraid.
We nodded at each other. It started.
We began to run. Looking to my left I saw men in black raincoats with automatic weapons break out through a hinged entrance through the marble carapace. My father pushed me. Get out of here! He shouted, unnecessarily. Then I realized he meant I was supposed to leave him behind. I looked over my shoulder at his broad, heavy frame nimbly darting around a heavy door, followed closely by the men. I heard gunfire. He had died.
- This was the title of an essay I had been set for class, which reminded me of the first time I went out for a drink with my soon-to-be girlfriend (and now ex-girlfriend), AK. The boss, JWS, was also along, trying to get lucky.
Monsters in our Midst
We’ll get underway at a locals’ bar on the Upper-East Side, a dark room with an open front, an ill-used jukebox, and three of us—AK (the new bartender), JWS (my boss, who you already know) and myself—nestled around a small, circular table. On it lie our beers in various states of repose; mine worriedly contemplating its end; AK’s enjoying enthusiastic attention; and JWS’s replete with an obnoxious calm after several dull, untouched minutes, its owner too busy to sip as he talks, and talks, and talks…about himself.
Dear Staff of the Basin Harbor Club,
I am writing this from the edge of the long concrete pier next to the harbor office, last night’s shirt rippling in the breeze, the morning sun just about to break a little warmth through the fog over the lake.
Over the last day or so I’ve been wondering how I could sum up the service in this hotel for my friends. Possessing neither the clarity nor brevity in my current state to narrow this experience to just a few words, I will instead write a letter of humble thanks to you, the staff, for the amazing services you have provided. Names are omitted here, not only because your bosses need not know what credit is due where, but also because I’ll surely forget some of the many names of those to whom I owe this great thanks.
The fine array of amenities this hotel offers still pales in comparison with the approachability of the Basin Harbor staff. To the maid that I woke up next to on my first morning, I must say your enthusiastic customer service certainly distracts one from your lack of professionalism. However, I do worry that regardless of how attentive you may be to your customers, you should strive to make sure that the sheets will be cleaner once you have finished your tasks, rather than unusable. It was quite uncomfortable to only realize the importance of staff cleanliness once I had already sat down for breakfast with four generations of my family. Of course, it was also quite a surprise to have had you at hand in the first place.
Dear future bosses,
from my experience, this information should help you along. Please, don’t
1. a) Take coke with one of your staff. b) Also, don’t buy coke off her boyfriend in the toilets. More importantly, if you are going to take steps a and b, do not fire her because she is taking coke or because her boyfriend is selling coke in the toilets. Check first: are you the only person who has bought coke off her boyfriend in the toilets?
-About the homeless guy who lives on my block
Sitting on the steps between a pastry shop and a nail salon, James seems to have little to do with the Upper East Side. It’s his 49th birthday, and although his appearance—grey mixed with the black on his head, weathering of the face, sunken eyes—shows his age, his quick movements and endless energy suggest he’s younger. His eyes dart back and forth, picking out people as they pass, never missing anything. They, too, call to him by his first name, smiling, and often slip him a dollar. He speaks in short, sharp sentences, every now and again pushing longer ones indecipherably through the gaps of his six-toothed gums.
- Written after watching a segment about soldier risk in Iraq
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Main and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” ––Henry David Thoreau
History of our demise:
The telegraph gave us context-free information; information about which we knew nothing of before, and which came in the form of headlines we could understand little of, for they offered no depth. The value of information no longer needed to be tied to social function, but instead became attached to curiosity, novelty, and interest.
Halallelujah
One busy corner, a shiny metal cart, and the best Halal food in the city.
With an estimated 10,000 of them spewing out the smell of burning chicken and day-old hotdogs, you might be forgiven for thinking New York’s street vendors are all the same. Also, with a plethora of warm and cozy restaurants to choose from, streets swarming with “can’t you see I’m walking here?” civilians, and an official 172 violent crimes a day, why risk a meal outdoors in this city? The answer, from 11:30 a.m. until 4 a.m., is on the corner of 53rd and 6th.
- Fuck and leave babies in the street. Awesome.
Oh my god, I’m sitting around a bunch of sentimental idiots. Fortune and family; the main flaws of humankind. Gone should be all the contraceptions, gone should be the cellophane wrap, the pills, the family planning videos! We should all fuck and leave the babies in the street, and let the strongest survive. If we’d been through that we’d not be such fucking imbeciles. Imbeciles need culling worse than mad cow disease. Focus, talent, rubbish.
- I wrote this on the 24th December, 2007, while coming down with a fever. Completely inspired by Frederick Crews’ book The Follies of the Wise, this book seemed to prove to me that all this bullshit I’d been learning in my literature classes, although it may, in the end, be correct, has no evidence to back it up, and was the fancy or a crazed, coked-up…you’ll have to read it yourself. For me, here are the best bits:
Dear all,
The idea that Freud’s theories are proven by the extent to which we find them in literature is wrong; he stole many of his theories (repression, the super-ego, guilt feelings, the paternal image, the maternal image, and so on and so forth) from literary giants of his time and before. Nietzsche, for example, pre-empted Freud in that all actions and intellectual choices are egoistic, that we remain unconscious of the motives of our actions, that forgetting is an active step taken to preserve psychic order, that dreams use symbols to express our primeval selves, that comedy results from a sudden release of anxiety and that laughter entails being malicious with a good conscience.
These were not designed with user interface in mind. Had they been invented after the turn of the nineteenth century, their creator would have been institutionalized for not realizing the gravity of his failure. To begin with, J, upon seeing her first French toilet, shrugged and said “like India.”
Whoever says that the French nation is chic has never gone to take a dump there. Imagine all those beautiful, graceful, immaculately dressed, heartless French women, cigarette in hand, red lipstick on the butt, smoke spinning up into the ceiling fan above, squatting over a hole in the ground to do a shit.
- I don’t understand it either, but rhythmically it’s good. I guess this was an experiment.
If it were I who bore the stupid seed, perhaps the flowers would wilt all the same, this time in pity, and not because of the torrential rain. Poetic herecy, heretic postulate, postmortem hatred, it is all the same. Not one sense in it all, but every sense in but a little of it. No need to divulge the means or the method, but leave all to the sense and senility of the peers all too keen to read on and on and on and on and on. My outpourings, now held aloft upon the backs of the weary, the final burst of passion before this world succumbs to the second coming of Christendom, now that is the reason I’m here. But you, why are you here? Why wait upon life for just that next moment when you could be living, as I failed to do?
There’s no way of stating the obvious. I am not a happy man. Linda, however, her charm and grace a memory too horrible to forget, seems just as full of life as in her youth, but perhaps I am wrong. She had loved me then, when I was full of the hopeful cynicism only the innocent know, and she still does, although now that cynicism is hardened to a crisp, and needless to say hope has long since said its merry goodbyes. That is no surprise, really. The Second Coming hit us hard: the both of us. We had assumed, naturally, we were protected in view of all the favours we had done for Him in the past, the prayers we chanted for His forgiveness, and the gentle, sweet offerings to His name, not to mention the bringing of a new life into His domain. We were separated from Henry — that is what we had called him — too soon for reason; before we had a chance to get to know the little kid.
Writing Feed