Matthew Gallaway

Notes on the Appalachians

1. The fog hung low over the hills.

2. The roads were flooding, cars drowning.

3. Everywhere I looked: green and silver.

4. I was home.

5. Western Pennsylvania: still haunted.

The Park Has Turned Me into a Morning Person

1. Somehow, I've joined the apparitions who wake up before dawn and drift over the mostly empty sidewalks and streets of the city.

2. I have no idea where everyone else is going, but it's not to the park. Besides the rocks, the trees, and the flowers, there's never anyone here. The humidity, usually so oppressive, gives the air a silver sheen. It's not exactly silent -- there are birds and the rustling of leaves -- but it's silent in a way that leaves room for thoughts and ideas that might otherwise be lost in the press of the working day.

3. At this hour, in this park, I can watch a parade of roses.

4. Here the path is easy to see, which I try to remember later on, when I'll be floundering to take a step.

I Stopped Being Cynical for a Few Hours So I Could Enjoy the Parade (Pride Recaps)

1. After putting aside my reservations about the corporate dilution of Pride, I went downtown for the parade. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be surrounded by a vast majority of nonheterosexuals that number in the hundreds of thousands? The clear answer: not enough!

2. It was a perfect summer day. I got out of the train on Eighth Avenue and managed to make my way through a very intricate system of police barricades across to Fifth, where I met my friend Thoma, who had commandeered a good spot on 18th Street. I was wearing my vintage "Out of the Mainstream Into the Revolution" t-shirt (slogan not pictured).

3. When Governor Cuomo passed, the crowd erupted in a spontaneous chant: "Fix the subways and reform New York State electoral politics!"

4. It was fun to be part of a crowd (of gay people).

5. With marchers and the spectators from all over the world.

6. So many youth with their wings.

7. I set aside my anti-balloon position for the day.

8. Orange has always been a good parade color.

9. Chartreuse was also popular this year.

10. It's hard to describe the feeling of being transported, even for a few hours, away from a society where so many of our actions are scrutinized and where so much of what we do -- the kinds of things that our nonhomosexual peers take for granted -- feels like such a battle.

11. The parade is an illusion, of course, but a necessary one.

Flight of the Purple Iris (Pride)

1. After a week of heavy rain, the park was lush but muted, a landscape that perfectly reflected my conflicted feelings about 'pride.' More than ever, the word seems too friendly, too easily coopted by corporations and politicians that wrap themselves in 'the rainbow flag' but continue to reinforce the most regressive tendencies of our society.

2. In the park, it was a relief to escape the branded experience of 'pride,' to think more somberly about the countless numbers who have been fired or beaten or killed merely for existing, as well as those who have resisted by marching or protesting or not hiding their/our existence in the many ways that happens. There is, I thought, a better word to capture the need to dismantle the institutions that have brought us to this point, and the word is _______.

3. But the park, I remembered, is also a place for celebrating a diversity of existence, fleeting and beautiful. I stopped to admire a gathering of yarrow, heather, iris, and a dogwood.

4. The ferns glistened. The astilbe gathered. The iris shook the water from its petals.

5. In our best world, we are all flowers of our own choosing.

Screams and Whispers (Coping Techniques)

1. On the way to the park, I passed a man who’s been wandering around screaming for at least as long as I’ve lived in the neighborhood (twenty years). I had heard him many times before; in my old apartment, which was on the eighth floor, his voice used to reverberate up the air shaft and echo through the hallways. It was louder in the middle of the night than during the day, although there was no pattern. I often tried to find him -- mostly out of curiosity, and maybe some admiration for his endurance -- but I could never seem to track him down. I would chase the voice to one corner only to hear it coming from a different one. Until now, I had never seen him on the street.

2. I used to wonder if the screams were in my head, but now I had my answer.

3. The late-spring park was perfect. The Siberian iris were on the march.

4. I thought about how, when I was younger, and angrier, I had less patience for the slowly changing landscape of a garden. I wanted to see 'the' world; now I'm more interested in 'a' world.

5. I‘m still angry about plenty of things, but the anger is less amorphous. I could easily give you a 'top ten' list (but I won’t).

6. This kind of delineation is important to me as I get older. It’s a way to acknowledge an emotion -- to 'release' it -- without being overwhelmed by it, consciously or -- worse -- unconsciously. I feel like a lot of people are seething with anger and don’t know exactly why. Despite everything I've just said, it’s possible that I’m one of them.

7. In the park, all the screams fade away and are replaced by whispers of a thousand flowers.

Peonies in the Park (Summer Vacation Ideas)

1. I went to the park, where I walked past a pair of peonies in the sun. For a fraction of a second, my mind stopped. All the complaints and rants that were festering evaporated and I was left with nothing. (In a good way.)

2. For me, seeing these flowers is like a short vacation from thinking, especially the practical or functional (or complaining) kind of thoughts that so often dominate as I navigate from one place to the next.

3. I've tried to achieve the same effect elsewhere -- sitting on the subway, at home watching television, on a more literal vacation -- but the erasure is never quite as potent as it is in the park.

4. It only took a few minutes to get here. (On foot.)

5. There were no fees or lines or security checkpoints or food courts. I didn't have to book my tickets 'six months in advance' or 'share my itinerary.' It was okay just to show up.

6. Here is a peony in the sun. Everything I thought was relevant to that point escapes me, leaving me with a sense of having seen something I will always love but can never quite describe.

Notes on Fraudulence and Beauty (DC)

1. Arriving in DC, I recognized a kind of dread I associated with meeting someone from my past with whom I had once been close but who now summoned only ambivalence. I felt mystified and perhaps a bit betrayed by the chasm -- political, social -- that had opened up between us in the intervening years since I had lived here.

2. Predictably, like so many in my generation, I coped by resorting to irreverence, mockery, and irony. I tweeted about how the building across from my corporate hotel perfectly epitomized the surveillance state/bureaucratic nightmare that our country had become.

3. I documented the hideous carpets of the corporate hotel.

4. I noted with sly approval the word STOP on the barricades in front of the Capitol.

5. The neoclassical architecture was still garish.

6. Underneath this armor of cynicism, I felt ashamed to be an American, or maybe human, at this juncture of history, when we are destroying everything. But it was also early morning of the second day of my trip, and I was beginning to feel more hopeful and forgiving. 'Don't be an asshole,' I reminded myself as I admired the art deco pattern on a grate covering the drain. Someone had designed this pattern and it was perfect. If the world is going to be saved, it will be accomplished not only through grand gestures, but through small, imperceptible -- and largely anonymous -- steps.

7. Such as this elegant wrought-iron bannister and lamppost.

8. And this manhole cover I one day hoped to acquire for a museum devoted to the form.

9. It felt good to run on a wide path, free of cars. In a few years, the Mall would be under water, but its wide paths could be implemented around the world as cities become more equitable and skeptical of private automobiles. 

10. But I didn't want to distract myself with politics. I wanted to think about when I lived in DC and how I had (and hadn't) changed since then. I remembered walking on this gravel path with one of my brothers who had come to march in one of the anti-war demonstrations with me. He asked if I was dating anyone and I said 'not really' and he had gone on to ask what kind of girls I liked, and I had come up with some bullshit answer, because the truth was that I didn't like any of them in the way he was asking about (and, to be fair to him, the way I had insisted that I should be asked about).

11. Just out of college, I was in my early twenties. In DC, I shared a one-bedroom apartment -- I believe it was $800/month (which had seemed like a fortune!) -- with three other people. I slept in a closet because my roommate snored. It was, I believe, a pretty typical life: I found a job, I went to shows and parties with my roommates and coworkers, I played a lot of chess (but never enough to feel comfortable squaring off against the pros in Dupont Circle). By most conventional measures, I was doing well. I appeared happy. Except for one thing, and I was still young enough to 'get away with it.'

12. But that, too, was a kind of mask, because secretly, I was always falling in love but never breathing a word of it to anyone. It was a hard way to live. I was living in a jail of my own creation (or, well, maybe not completely my own, but to some extent.) I could have been more honest; I just lacked the courage.

13. I was infatuated with one of my colleagues at the environmental nonprofit where I worked. He didn't have a girlfriend, though he had just gotten out of a 'serious relationship.' He was smart and funny -- his eyes were somehow impish and kind -- and he had a bit of a beer belly. He didn't 'read' particularly gay, but he didn't read as particularly non-gay, either. He was a good recipient for my projections.

14. We were also friends, both at and outside of work. We went to a lot of happy hours, a tradition in DC. On weekends, we got high and snuck into the pools of corporate hotels like the one I was staying in now. It wasn't that I lacked courage; it was just that I lacked a particular kind. Usually we did these things in groups, but not always. I remember one night when, somehow, we ended up at his apartment where, already very drunk, we tried and mostly failed to do 'flaming shots.' As time does when you're drunk, it passed very quickly, but, because of the circumstances -- and my intense awareness of being near to each other, and both of us in a relatively uninhibited state -- every second felt precious and fleeting. I trembled with the desire to say something, to cross that shifting boundary, but again, I couldn't do it. I had no experience; it felt too improbable, too momentous. I needed to take some smaller steps, not that I had any real idea how. Instead I lived for futile gestures, like the time a group of us went hiking and swimming in a state park in Virginia, and how, on the drive back, I sat next to him in the backseat of the car, where our sunburned legs were pressed together. For as long as that drive lasted -- and like the song, I never wanted it to end -- I felt sure that he would not only detect the intensity I felt, but also welcome it, which was why, after we arrived and he made no indication of having done so, my heart was broken a little, the way it always was back then.

15. This was also the summer Fugazi put out 'Repeater,' which was my favorite record at the time. The band were constantly playing shows and benefits around the city. That fall, they played in Lafayette Park after one of the anti-war marches. Many of these shows were barely announced, it seemed, but we somehow heard about them and always went. If you had to pay, it was never more than $5. Outside the venues, they always passed out fliers: how to start a band; how to make a record, how to organize a protest. (They did not have one called 'How to come out.') These shows were intense but respectful: Ian MacKaye always asked people to stop with the moshing, which by that point, like so much that initially seems revolutionary, had become very old and dominated by young men who were angry for the wrong reasons or expressing this anger in the wrong ways. Fugazi played in high school gyms and community centers where fans passed out from the heat and had to be carried out to be revived in the night air. Listening to them I felt released for a few minutes, which in retrospect was a form of hope, not that I would have expressed it in such terms at the time.

16. As I walked around DC, I was often reminded of imperial power, but I was also reminded of the constant resistance to this power, and how this dance has always been highly choreographed in DC.

17. Another constant: there were still so many beautiful things in the world.

18. And signs of natural resilience.

19. I would never be nostalgic for that period of my life, but I still felt grateful to the city for resurrecting these memories. I felt like I had put something to rest; a kind of grief, perhaps.

20. The reconciliation of our past, it seems, is a kind of legislative process, filled with motions and compromises and vetoes.

21. We live by one law until, outdated, it is supplanted by another.

Ferns Are Also Part of the Resistance

1. Everyone had been complaining about the rain, but I was secretly happy about it.

2. Anything is better than heat, and so far, the spring had been blessedly cool.

3. Nobody in the park was complaining, either, and by 'nobody' I mean none of the plants.

4. I wondered if they were nervous about the news from outside of the park.

5. Some of them seemed to be mobilizing.

6. Standing tall, demanding accountability from those whose actions needed to be accounted for, expressing dismay for those who refused to listen.

7. Welcoming light where it has been forgotten.

Hudson Yards Is a Bracing Example of Late-Capitalism Despair (Architecture)

1. The park had grown lush after all the rain.

2. I turned to stone waiting for waters to recede.

3. Meanwhile, I went to Hudson Yards. Even though it was right in front of me, it felt inaccessible, a perfect monument for the internet era. We were all here, but we all wanted to be somewhere -- or someone -- else.

4. In the adjacent shopping mall, the glum women were covered in candy wrappers, flowers, and frosting. I remembered growing up in the suburbs, where shopping malls felt like a kaleidoscope offering views into a more interesting future, one that could be obtained with a little money. We went as tweens to immerse ourselves in the chaotic grid that replicated the urban one where we hoped to one day live, after we had escaped the boring towns in which we were trapped. Hudson Yards, however, offers something very similar and very different. Even more than the shopping mall at the Oculus or at Columbus Circle, Hudson Yards delivers a 'post-mall' experience in which, by virtue of being in a city, we are offered views of late-capitalism despair. To spend even a few seconds in Hudson Yards is to feel a sense of suffocation that triggers an instinctual desire to escape. It's like being in an airport except worse because it's the destination. There are two questions you constantly ask yourself at Hudson Yards: Why am I here? and How do I get out?

5. 'I thought this $25 million view would make me happier.'

6. Outside, the strong winds seemed to foreshadow or possibly deliver an escape.

7. Still in a state of shock, I took a 'selfie' on the High Line.

8. Like most New Yorkers, I had complained about the High Line -- tOo CrOwDEd -- but I felt better here. I was no longer in the Mall of Hell. The trees and flowers had grown so much over the years.

9. Everything glowed in the western sun. It was beautiful. I didn't care if this escape was illusory.

10. It felt good to believe that the trees might win.

Light and Fog Are the New Seasons

1. For a long time, there was fog.

2. Every morning, it rolled down the hills and covered the river.

3. The city and its problems felt very far away, even though we were in the city.

4. We saw the things people built but we never saw the people.

5. Eventually the sun returned.

6. There was relief and skepticism.

7. The moss covered the bricks.

8. The park was exuberant.

9. We fell into a kind of delirium.

10. The beauty was surreal.

11. But we also remembered the fog.

12. We turned to the silhouettes for relief.

13. Until we found the relief we wanted, and returned the color.

15. There was a spot in the dappled light.

16. A place to be still, to sit and watch.

17. It was a time of great migrations.

18. We thought that, like the fog, this new era would last forever, but eventually the flowers began to fade.

19. And the waters began to rise.

20. The light turned harsh and terrifying. (But it was still beautiful.)

21. When we thought of the past, it was not with regret for what we were, but for what we were not.