April Showers (Time Passes)

04/26/2025

April Showers (Time Passes)

I ran to the park this morning in a light rain that was perfect for April.

The new growth on the plants vibrated with color and life under the gray skies.

Not everyone made it through the winter, sadly, including this clump of heather.

I was a little bit hungover from a pre-reunion party I went to at my friend Jessica's house in Park Slope. It's been thirty years since we graduated from law school.

We talked about professors we liked and didn't like, as well as fellow classmates. Some of them are powerful Republicans now. I wondered if they were all convening at a different house in a different neighborhood. Maybe they were gloating about Trump.

Jessica and I talked about how relatively clueless we were in law school at NYU, specifically with regard to a kind of 'elite track' for certain students who are either very good at taking law-school exams or very good at networking with the right people to line them up for prestigious legal careers. We speculated that some of this knowledge comes from families. I described a law professor I know who told me that as a child, her parents -- both professors -- used to sit around the dinner table gossiping about who was going to get a job at which university. Neither Jessica nor I grew up in what would be considered an 'intellectual environment,' which we understood put us at a bit of a disadvantage with those who did. It's almost like growing up in a family that speaks a second language; you are going to be more fluent in that language than most other speakers.

Being closeted in my twenties added to my overall naivete about many things in the world.

It was good to see people from thirty years ago and to realize how much in some ways that I've changed. (And how much in other ways that I've not changed.)

Standing in the park and mulling over the passage of time, I realized, is a great pleasure of being old enough to stand in the park and mull over the passage of time.

Posted at 11:29 AM in Expression, Science Projects | Permalink

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

#gods

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

The Metropolis Case

'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.

Subscribe to this blog's feed

Search

Matthew Gallaway

Expression//Reaction//ScienceProjects

04/26/2025