1. The park, unlike the internet, was a refuge from anything related to Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, or Donald Trump. I had my phone with me, but I didn't have the Twitter app open. (And I didn't appear to be dead or dying in the immediate sense of the term.)
2. It was my third consecutive day running here, which I'm able to do now that my leg is no longer injured. Or at least nothing like it was for most of the summer, when I was limping around and gritting my teeth. Over the past few weeks, as my leg (miraculously) began to feel better, my state of mind about running the Boston Marathon next April went from "impossible" to "possible."
3. Having an injury -- like being sick -- can, if/when you recover (fingers crossed), make you appreciate things you might otherwise take for granted but for the injury or the sickness.
4. From what I've heard, for example, our country is very sick right now.
5. This sickness, I've also heard, is reflected not only in our country's political discourse, but also in (so much of) its mainstream/corporate entertainment and the vapid, relentless yelling that brainwashes us into supporting it. According to what I've heard, we have become the worst kind of nihilists and junkies, seemingly incapable of stopping even as we mock our inability to stop. It is said by those with more insight than me into our collective condition that there's a point in the course of any sickness when possibility -- which I take to mean the possibility of not being sick -- seems pointless and naive, and that maybe we've reached that point. Or maybe not. (I spend 95 percent of my free time watching "Terrace House" and running through the park, so I wouldn't know.)
6. But apparently there are some people who now maintain a hope that we can make it to where so much of what we want to accomplish in the future -- things that now seem impossible -- will become possible. When the sickness becomes a memory and, for this reason, a source of relief. Sort of like what happened with my leg and running the Boston Marathon next April. Here, in the park, these hopes don't seem too farfetched.
7. It has occurred to another group of people, however, that the park, like any kind of faith or ideal, represents an illusion or a state of denial. That it doesn't offer us much in the way of practical advice about how to live. That it's no more pointless than Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Donald Trump. Or Terrace House :(
8. I'm not sure who's right, but I like the park and would miss it if it were gone.
9. Somehow, when I'm here, it tells me everything I want to know.
PLEASE PURCHASE MY NEW NOVEL (#gods) HERE. IF YOU'VE ALREADY CONSUMED ITS MANY (MANY) PAGES OF MAGICAL/POST-MARXIST/MYTHOLOGICAL/HOMOSEXUAL PROPAGANDA, I HOPE YOU'LL CONSIDER WRITING/POSTING/REACTING IN THE USUAL PLACES. FOR THOSE KIND SOULS WHO HAVE ALREADY DONE SO, MILLE GRAZIE. <3 <3
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08/26/2017
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.