Matthew Gallaway

Impeach Most of the World (Except City Parks and Terrace House)

1. After arriving from the train station, my cousin and I discussed things she might like to do while visiting the city. She asked if I had ever been to Fort Tryon Park, which apparently wasn't too far away. It's where the Cloisters are, she said. I told her that I was vaguely familiar with it :)  

2. It was a little disorienting to walk through the park with someone else. We found places that seemed completely new to me. Some were completely untamed, like this hillside smothered in vines. I feared for some of the smaller conifers, whose branches were wrapped in tendrils. Another symptom (or symbol) of climate change.  

3. My cousin confided to me that she was reckoning with life in her early forties, when so many of the opportunities she had taken for granted in her twenties and thirties seemed to be on the verge of disappearing (and not just the biological ones). Imagine what it's like being fifty, I said, unhelpfully, although in fact it had been a relief to let go of just about everything I had once envisioned doing twenty or thirty or forty years ago. I never saw myself aimlessly walking through the park, for example, and here I was, doing something I now consider the apex of a good life. 

4. We spent a few seconds talking about impeachment and our wish that the process could be expanded to cover so much more that was unsatisfactory if not in all cases criminal. In the political realm, it meant every member of the Republican party and everyone who had voted for them (starting with Nixon or maybe Goldwater or even Eisenhower for his administration's shameful and largely forgotten persecution of homosexuals), along with many of the Democrats, too. Maybe we should impeach the two-party system, my cousin suggested, to which I added dysfunctional parliament and the many forms of autocracy to the list. Actually, my cousin said, we could include every major governmental system in the world right now. Would we impeach the U.N.? Probably. Why not. Could we impeach time? What about periods of our lives that, as we reflect upon them now, fill us with regret? Could we impeach ourselves? It seemed like a good idea, and one that many religions had engrained into their rituals, which did not spare them from the impeachment tribunal we were planning to convene. How about obnoxious emails and robocalls? My cousin, who had already described heterosexuality as her 'cross to bear,' added straight men to the list. Impeach all of them, basically. Had we gone too far? Really, what or who wouldn't we impeach if given the power? 

5. For starters, we agreed on the park, and whatever forces of nature and humanity had miraculously aligned to bring it into existence. Libraries (in theory) would not be impeached, though some of them could surely benefit from some critical self-examination. I had been agitated for the past few weeks since I had looked up gay literature on the NYPL ebook app and had failed to find 'Dancer from the Dance' on the list, while noting several other titles that would be good candidates for impeachment. I remembered Terrace House, the one television show that I would never impeach. What other show spends entire episodes with two people discussing self-actualization and cascading emotions? My only regret watching Terrace House is that I don't speak Japanese. 

6. And then we were done speculating about the condition of the real world, because a magical one had already taken its place. 

In the Time of the Butterflies

1. Yesterday afternoon, in a gesture of solidarity with the climate-change strikers, I rode my bike to the park. 

2.   It was a little unnerving at first. I recognized most of the plants but the light was very different that what I'm used to in the morning. Somehow I had been dropped into a parallel universe. 

3. I thought about something I read not too long ago about why time seems to speed up as we age, which is that we tend to do the same thing over and over. Our minds become acclimated to this pattern and less attuned to the passage of time. I think this is probably true, and not necessarily always bad, either. Habit is comforting, and it's good to be comforted, particularly when -- another thing about aging -- we are increasingly exposed to the problems of the world and increasingly aware of our impotence to do much to solve them, or at least in a timeframe where we can expect to see the results. 

4. One thing about the afternoon is that the butterflies were awake. I'm pretty sure this is a 'painted lady' or via Wikipedia: 'Vanessa cardui is a well-known colorful butterfly, known as the painted lady, or formerly in North America as the cosmopolitan.' If I were a butterfly I would prefer the gender neutral 'cosmopolitan.' (But that's a different protest.) 

5. The autumn crocus were lining up for a demonstration. 

6. As I contemplated the state of the world, it was hard to feel optimistic. I thought about a tweet I read by a local bike advocate in response to the mayor's statements about the uncompromising need for 'profound change' to fight global warming. In the tweet, the bike advocate talked about how it took him two years of advocacy and fighting to get one parking spot removed in front of his kid's school so that they could install a bike rack. New York City has something like three million parking spots, which means it would take six million years of community board meetings to get rid of them. Where to even begin? 

7. I couldn't worry about it right now. Here, with the painted ladies glowing in the sun, I felt like time had stopped. 

 

Night Running

1. For most of my life, the night -- and specifically its final hours -- has been the most neglected part of my day, a time when, if given the choice, I always wanted to be sleeping.

2. But lately, I've been waking up restless, almost with a sense of being summoned. It seems a little ridiculous -- it's still dark and it would be easy to get back under the covers -- but sleep feels too far away. There's no point fighting the impulse. I get up and go outside, where the air is cool and the block is calm. At this hour, the city is familiar -- I know where I am -- and foreign, as if I'm seeing it for the first time.

3. Over by the river, I pass the new billboard erected by Amtrak in the face of community opposition. It does ruin the view, but I guess it's worth it to line the pockets of an Amtrak executive help the trains run better.

4. The early morning is a time of quiet optimism -- there are no people -- and quiet despair, because so much of the landscape feels like the aftermath of something destructive. Still, the mind is flexible and permeable at this hour and in this light. I'm running through a dream and a nightmare.

5. The path through the park is hilly and uneven. It feels dangerous to let myself go, to run fast down the hill -- and I have fallen in the past (and probably will again in the future) -- but it's also difficult to resist. To fly down a hill releases the mind, an effect that's compounded by the night.

6. I find money on the steps.

7. The stairs from Riverside Drive lead me into an abyss.

8. Here is Manhattanville, the new campus of Columbia. The enormous scope of the construction site makes me feel like I'm on the moon.

9. The path on the river is my reward after navigating the hills, the steps, and the construction. Here I can run as fast as I want without fear of tripping.

10. Moving north, the path transitions from post-industrial wasteland to Victorian-park fantasy.

11. The bridge, always beckoning, reflects against the river.

12. Stone sentries guard the riverbank, some facing south.

13. And others facing north, wondering as the sky brightens what what they might find on the other side.

September Dreams and Nightmares

1. The kids went back to school and the high winds from the hurricane blew the caterpillars out of their tents, so they were crawling around everywhere (replacing the kids). I went to the park, where the cool temperatures felt like a resurrection. I was thankful not to be going back to school (or at least any of the schools I attended).

2. I ran laps around the park, which was relaxing until I passed someone (not pictured) who appeared to be staggering down the hill toward me on a pitch-black section of the path where the lights had gone out in the predawn. Having watched my fair share of The Walking Dead (miss u Seasons 2-5), it occurred to me that the zombie apocalypse had arrived; in a way, I thought, it might be a relief to have a new and literal apocalypse to replace the political one that has been unfolding. As it turned out, it was just an older (than me) man who appeared to be a bit stiff. Or maybe it was a zombie: I didn't stop to figure it out.

3. I was still thinking about a dream I had the previous night where I was sitting next to Elizabeth Warren and asking her about lightbulbs. Clearly, I was reading too many political blogs. I was also thinking about someone from my high school who responded to a very friendly group email from the class secretary asking for updates -- kids and/or life achievements -- for the alumni newsletter; this classmate was not pleased to have received the email and screamed back to the entire group IN ALL CAPS that he wanted nothing to do with our high school and had repeatedly asked to be taken off this list. He referred to the email as SPAM. (I get maybe one such email every two years or so to give you an idea of the frequency.) I didn't know him well in high school but I remembered him playing drums in a talent show. It was hard to reconcile that memory with this email. Had I already reached an age where my classmates were suffering from dementia? It seemed possible, maybe inevitable. Still, I thought it was a testament to our class that nobody responded and, as a result, the risk of a 'reply allpocalypse' was averted. I wondered if I should send an update to the class secretary but all I could think about in terms of children and/or life achievements was the fact that we had recently replaced the sidewalk in front of our house, which didn't seem like the right kind of news to share with the rest of my class (although I did take pictures and amused myself by visualizing the usual shots of children or exotic vacations juxtaposed with my new sidewalk). These are a few of the things that occupied my thoughts as the sky turned from black to silver to blue.

4. Meanwhile, Dante's ashes had arrived in the mail. They were placed in a small, wooden box that Zephyr -- who had taken to wandering around in the middle of the night and yowling -- immediately curled up next to and fell asleep. Maybe, I thought (not for the first time) animals know more than we think they do. A friend asked if we were going to scatter Dante's ashes in the garden and we said no; for now, they will live on a shelf next to Beatrice's, until I can figure out how to achieve my dream, which is to have a big family crypt, ideally overlooking the Hudson River, and ideally falling apart and covered in moss, like the ones at Trinity Church Cemetery in Harlem. My wish was to be forever associated with the eternal beauty of ruination.

5. Like most dreams, however, I'm not so sure how realistic this one is.

6. For now, I'll continue to enjoy the living dreams of the park, still the best place to escape the nightmares of the world.