Matthew Gallaway

The Bronx 10 (Road Racing)

I felt a little nervous about signing up for the Bronx 10. I hadn't raced at all since 2018 and I barely ran in 2021 due to a series of injuries culminating in a torn meniscus. But after some physical therapy this spring, I put together some good weeks of training over the summer and decided that ten miles was feasible. I was still nervous about it, thought. 

In a way, it was nice to be nervous about something trivial, like a race, instead of fixating on death and the collapse of society. The worst thing that could happen in the Bronx 10 was that I would drop out and walk home. The start and finish line were at Yankee Stadium, which is only about a mile from my house. I told myself that I was nervous 'in a good way.' 

In addition to feeling nervous in a good way, I spent time in the garden, which has been unusually lush and colorful this year, thanks to our decision to mix in some calladium with the hellebores. Calladium isn't hardy, which is unfortunate, but it performs well in extreme shade and adds some relatively (by annual standards) un-garish highlights of pale green and pink at a time of year when we are thirsty for color. 

Here's another angle. 

We also have more hardy begonias in the garden this year, which flower in late August in white and pink. 

The flowers last a long time and the seed pods look very futuristic. Sometimes it's hard to believe that humans evolved from hardy begonias. 

Anyway, time passed in the garden and the day of the Bronx 10 approached. 

I talked over racing strategy with my coaches. 

'Go out fast and hang on' has always been my racing style, for better or -- often -- for worse. 

On Sunday morning, I jogged over to Yankee Stadium (not pictured, because I didn't bring my phone) and joined the throngs at the starting line. There were almost 12,000 runners, but the event was very well organized, and runners tend to be very polite. We started a little after eight, and I found myself in the middle of huge pack, everyone going about as fast as I was, which felt fairly but not excruciatingly fast. I remembered to pace myself. It felt good to be in the middle of a horde of runners. I imagined that we were being chased by zombies.  

A man on my right said to me: 'Isn't it strange how everyone's footsteps seem to sync up?' And I said, 'Yes, I was just thinking the same thing,' which was true, although it was also true that I wasn't in the mood to be having a conversation. Sometimes in races you end up feeling trapped running next to or behind someone who either talks too much or breathes very heavily or whose form is very distracting on account of heavily stomping feet or their wide, unmoving shoulders and huge head of curly hair compressed under a hat. 'Is that person running as fast as I am?' is a question you might ask yourself despite knowing that the answer is yes. I'll never forget running a marathon a few years ago when I was passed -- late in the race! -- by someone in a Gumby suit, and then by someone else dressed like a waiter carrying a tray and wine glasses, and of course by someone juggling :( 

Approaching the second mile, while cresting a hill, I passed a huge set of speakers that in the tradition of all races was pumping out 'Welcome to the Jungle' and the loud music reverberating through my body as I raced north on the Grand Concourse in a pack of runners on a mostly cloudless (but humid) morning in the Bronx made me feel more attuned to the stresses of my life. But I also felt oddly calm, like I was in the eye of a hurricane. 

I thought about my recent trip to Pittsburgh, where we had moved my father into the dementia unit of the facility where he and my mother live. 

Before and after moving my father, I had taken approximately ten thousand photographs of a patch of brown-eyed Susans in the garden outside of my parents' apartment. 

The flowers seemed to come alive at sunset. 

I remembered how I had also distracted myself with early-morning runs to prepare for the race I was now running. 

The forest had been an eerie but comforting place at this hour. 

There were landmarks, but I had still found myself getting lost and confused.  

But running through the Bronx, I was not confused or distracted. I felt immersed in the good and bad of life. I was running as fast as I could and getting passed by an enormous man with terrible form and frizzy hair. There was also sadness, almost as palpable as the music, but it was intensely peaceful to know that I was in the world even or despite all my problems with it. For now, my anxiety was gone, and I was still alive, which was already a kind of small miracle. This feeling didn't last for more than a few hundred yards before I remembered that I was running uncomfortably fast and I still had seven miles to go, which didn't seem like too much, but on this morning, in my condition, was more than enough.  

When I finished, I was relieved not to be running a marathon, although a few days later I thought, 'hmmm, maybe I should run another marathon.' 

Stephen, who was at the finish, managed to catch me right as I crossed the line.

Existential Heat Waves

As usual, July unfolded slowly and not without some fear. It began with the dentist, which wasn't too dreadful, before I moved into jury duty -- always a source of obsessive dread -- before landing in the present heat wave from hell. I tried to distract myself with small pleasures and observations to support the idea that despite the staggering denial in which we collectively exist, the end of world was not imminent; for example, I spent time watching the local spiders and admiring their intricate, gossamer webs.  

When we first moved here, the backyard was filled with flies, but as the trees and flowers took hold, the spiders somehow learned about it and moved in. They've been doing good work ever since. Was it too late for me to start a new career as a spider? 

Clio, who supervises the spiders, likes to patrol the garden two and ideally three times each day. She begins with an aerial view from the deck before she heads into the vegetation, looking for traces of her enemies: namely, rats (thankfully only in theory these days) and stray cats, who sometimes spend the night under the hellebores and ferns. 

Each morning before jury duty, I biked downtown on an electric Citi Bike or ebike, which was a good opportunity to think about how ebikes are easily the fastest way to get anywhere in Manhattan and to question why they are not subsidized when we (as a society) should be ramping up bike infrastructure and ridership, and doing everything possible to discourage driving (cars and especially SUVs). Also, the bike lanes -- even the protected ones -- in Manhattan are treacherous and basically wtf is wrong with our stupid city? In Paris, the Rue de Rivoli has been converted into two gigantic bikes lanes and New York City allocates about 18 inches of space for thousands of bikes. In short, biking around the city continues to be a source of exhilaration and bitterness. My one hope for Mayor Eric Adams when he entered office was that he might do something to improve the city's random, hazardous bike infrastructure -- he at least knows how to ride a bike, unlike de Blasio -- but Eric Adams has one item on his agenda, which is giving money to the police. (Actually two items if you count pretending that Covid doesn't exist.) (Actually three if you count partying.) 

I was surprised and not surprised to find the area around City Hall and the courthouses depopulated and militarized. Many commercial spaces were vacant. There were a lot of cops, SUVs, and metal barriers preventing pedestrians from walking across formerly public plazas. This is the future of the United States, I thought, and then corrected myself: No, this is the present. Small remnants of urban anarchy and chaos could be found, thanks to the neighborhood's proximity to Chinatown. As I waited in the security line, I longed to be doing high kicks and light calisthenics with these older women (i.e., my age) instead of participating in the prison-industrial complex. I would have taken more pictures of jury duty but my phone was confiscated even though the website said that 'jurors are permitted to bring one (1) cell phone to the courthouse.' When I queried this misinformation, I was told that they wanted jurors to bring the cell phones to the courthouse so that we could answer the Covid questions, but we were not allowed to have them in the courthouse. 'Why can't you explain that on the website?' I asked the jury clerk, who shrugged. I would have complained more, but I was worried that the clerk might take revenge and keep me for two weeks in a large room with 150-200 people. 

I went through voir dire (the questioning of potential jurors) twice and did not make the cut. When the judge asked if any of us had moral objections to serving, I thought, how could you not? I didn't actually say that, but other features of my background made me an unlikely selection for the jury. I felt sad watching the other jurors get questioned about their hobbies: so many of them answered 'shopping on Amazon.' One guy answered 'getting ordered around by my wife,' and everyone laughed like we were in a sit-com, even though an actual defendant was in the room awaiting trial for crimes that could land him in prison for many years. In contrast, I was released from jury duty after three days. 

Later that week, I went to Sandy Hook, which is a beach/state park in northern New Jersey (that looks like a hook). I had heard a lot of good things about it over the years, and a friend invited me to go for the day. Waiting for the ferry, I worried that we might end up in Ikea. But I remained full of complaints about our neoliberal infrastructure: seriously, why is the ferry to Ikea 'FREE' while the ferry to Sandy Hook is $47.00 USD? I dreamed of living in a different dimension where the government invested in public transit and made it accessible to all. (And where the planet wasn't overheating.)  

Sandy Hook used to be a military base, which meant there were a lot of decrepit houses to admire. It was also a pretty day, with bright skies and just enough cloud coverage to keep the sun from feeling oppressive (in contrast to now, for example). 

The beach grass was lovely. This is what the earth will look like in 10,000 years when the remains of our present civilization have been mostly buried by nature. 

A school bus ferried us across an enormous parking lot for private automobiles and dropped us at the path to the beach. Being gay, we selected the gay beach, which was also clothing optional. I had never been to a clothing-optional beach. I imagined something remote and windswept, dotted with naked beachgoers who would drift in and out of the waves like water naiads before disappearing back into the dunes.  

In fact, it looked like this. 

I wasn't deterred. I ate lunch and napped and swam for a few hours until it was time to go back to the bus: in short, I did everything I expected to do at the beach. It was relaxing and made me wish it were easier (and less expensive) to get to the beach from Washington Heights. Spending a day at a nude beach made me think that probably all beaches should be clothing optional, because nudity stops being titillating when it's everywhere. I mean, sure it's (sometimes) fun to look, but it's kind of like, okay, this person has a body, they are using it to move through time and space, welcome to the club.  

But somehow I don't think our country is ready to be more relaxed about nudity, given how unrelaxed we are about everything else that strays beyond the narrowest confines of proper sexual conduct and appearance as defined by the Christian right. Could our country be any worse right now? Sadly, I think we all know that the answer is yes. 

Back home, I spent time with Zephyr, who is turning sixteen in August. I hate to admit it, but he's getting old. 

He was not the only one, I realized, as I checked the forecast.  

 

Into the Trees

I recently went back to Pittsburgh, where the woods near my parents' apartment were dense with new leaves. When I had last visited, a month earlier, spring had still felt like a dream or a hallucination. Except for the tips of certain branches, the trees had been mostly bare; the ground had been coated with a faint sheen of green. Now the green was a carpet, a ceiling, and -- maybe -- a calling. 

In April, my father -- who last year was diagnosed with dementia -- still seemed like himself, but he had recently been going through a rough stretch. He now seemed more distant and disoriented, especially at night, and parts of his personality that I remembered would appear for a moment and then disappear. He was fading into and out of himself, the same way the leaves fade into and out of the forest.   

On this trip, when I spoke to him, he often met me with a blank stare. Did he understand? It was hard to say. But at other times, he revealed his trademark sense of humor. 'Is everything okay?' I asked him at one point as he was struggling to do something. 'What do you think?' he said. 'I'm old.' We both laughed a little. 

I knew he was still in there somewhere. 

According to the internet, dementia is 'a chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.' 

There are stages to the disease, beginning with benign symptoms -- forgetting how to button a shirt, sleeping more than usual -- and progressing to 'complete cognitive decline.' No two cases are exactly alike. 

It's not always obvious what stage a person has reached. It only becomes clear that they need help in ways they once did not. 

Like so many conditions in life, dementia is not apparent until you're in it, although in retrospect it's easy enough to see the warning signs. I remembered the fall of 2020, when my brother and I got into a fight with him on a Zoom call about his ongoing support of Trump. 

If you had asked me then if he had dementia, I would have said 'yes,' but in the same way I would have said our entire country has dementia. 

There can be plateaus, periods when you can believe that the end is not as close as you might have feared. 'You need to live in the moment,' said the hospice nurse who has been attending to my father. 'Appreciate the good days when you get them.'

It seemed like a good philosophy, even for those of us who don't have dementia. 

I've been running through these woods for several years now, but they are still big and unfamiliar. It's easy to get lost, which even with a smart phone can be unsettling. 

But this fear -- and the corresponding remoteness -- is what makes the woods enticing. As I thought about my father, I hoped that for him, getting lost -- leaving behind the life he has known -- also has its moments of beauty. 

These days, my father no longer seems interested in politics. Like me, he seems frightened of the news. 

It was nice not to have to worry about arguing with him anymore. I stopped thinking about him as a Republican and remembered that he was my father. 

Instead of the news, he now likes watching nature shows, or just turning off the television and watching nature. He loves to see the birds and other animals crossing the field outside of his window. 

Perhaps, I thought, when I saw him happily watching the wild turkey, he was not as lost as I thought. 

Forsythia Season

One of the things I look forward to every year is forsythia season at the park. I missed it two years ago during the most intense phase of the lockdown, and it's an ongoing source of grief. 

This year I was worried I wouldn't be able to make it because I was injured most of the fall, but I'm now running long-enough distances to get to the park and back. (Thank you physical therapy and Susan B, who turned me on to Solomon's Seal.) 

Most of the year the forsythias are unremarkable -- just the green understory -- but for these few weeks, they're like a fog bank of yellow flowers, hovering above the ground, spilling over the cliffs.

I'm already looking forward to next year. 

Life Is Short Opera Is Long

The house felt very subdued after Elektra's death, but outside the fall continued its very slow march across the garden. Somehow we didn't get around to buying mulch this year and instead decided to buy a leaf mulcher. (What's the expression: give someone a fish and they'll have dinner, give them a net and they'll have a fishing career.) I didn't want to sweep up all the leaves, though, until they had fallen off the trees, which may take another two or three weeks. 

Meanwhile, a single bellflower bloomed in a crevice between the bricks and the house. 

On Saturday, I went downtown to see Eurydice at the Metropolitan Opera. It was my first time attending a performance in the city since I went to see Torche at Saint Vitus at the beginning of 2020. (My ears are still ringing from that show.) I arrived early to the Met and took a walk through Central Park. It felt good to be outside in a different part of the city. 

It also felt good to be back at the Met. I felt like a teenager, just by virtue of being decades younger than most of the attendees. The opera was beautiful; the music was grand and modern as it moved between lush and melodic, crashing and playful. It took me into and out of myself, in the way that only opera can do. I thought about the differences between this version of the Eurydice myth -- which focuses on Eurydice's relationship with her dead father -- and the one I told in my novel #gods, in which Eurydice is a singer and Orpheus -- who is also gay -- is a musician who accompanies her. 

Back home, I saw the garden with new eyes. 

Our Most Beautiful Light: My Mother's Billerica

A few weeks ago, to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday -- which is also on September 11 and more fun to think about! -- my older sister and I took her to her hometown of North Billerica, Massachusetts. In some ways, it was like revisiting a lost world, one where my mother had grown up getting milk from a neighbor's cow and where she and her sisters had walked everywhere because their family didn't own a car. For me, it was especially interesting to hear her talk about what it was like growing up; not only the fun stuff she did with her sisters, but also the challenges of dealing with a depressive father and a mother who didn't quite fit in with her husband's family (she was from Canada, he was born and raised in Billerica), which instilled in my mother a desire to leave -- or escape -- that I found very familiar and relevant to the way I (and probably a lot of others) think about childhood. I recorded much of the trip -- along with some observations -- and edited the audio down into my first -- and possibly last :) -- podcast, which you can listen to below. 

Here's a link if you can't see the banner, and below are some pix. 

The Faulkner Mill. (Or maybe it's the Talbot -- I'm not sure!) 

The house on Mason Avenue in Garden City (a neighborhood in North Billerica that was originally built for union workers by the B&M Railroad) where my mother was born. 

Ninety years ago, my mother was a baby in the corner apartment of this house. 

Here she is at a house on Treble Cove Road, where she lived as a teenager (again, in an apartment on the side). 

My mother and her sister Linda at the North Billerica train station. 

The Middlesex Canal, where they used to go swimming and ice skating. 

The End of the Pandemic (Week Fifty-Two)

The fifty-second week of the pandemic, it seemed, was marked by an onslaught of optimism. Cases and deaths continued to fall, vaccinations were up, and the Biden administration had managed to pass a major recovery bill. By the Fourth of July, the president said, everything would be pretty much back to normal; maybe not quite to the point of congregating mask-free in your favorite Christian mega-church or corporate sports venue, but a backyard barbecue with friends and family was very much within reach. It was also the first week of spring weather; in the park, a new carpet of spring crocus had transformed the landscape into something out of a fairy tale. It had been a tough year, but life was again beautiful.  

As much I tried to summon the spirit of this optimism, I found it ephemeral. The recovery bill was obviously better than nothing, but it was still hard to believe that, after a year in which 500,000 people and counting (in the United States alone) had died from a largely preventable disease, we still lacked any form of universal health care, not even a public option. It begs the question of how many deaths it *would* take: a million, maybe two? Or is possible that no number is too great if it requires making fundamental changes to the 'market economy,' changes that might result in more resources being channeled in a systematic way to those scraping by in the lower percentiles of the wealth and income grids? Sadly, if the recovery bill is any indication, we still seem to be in death mode, with the primary objective to shovel as much money as possible -- via Cobra extensions and ACA premium subsidies -- into the insurance industry, which is already seeing record profits as a result of people foregoing regular medical care over the past year. The legislation gets cash to people who need it, which yes to that, but -- given the sunset provisions -- there's almost nothing about it that could be considered transformative in the long or even medium-term, with the result that -- my political fear -- it's going to lead to a lot of very dissatisfied voters, and we know how that story goes. 

I understand the desire to get back on the road, which in the context of the pandemic means the end of lockdown. It would be nice to make plans with (some) people, maybe even to have a barbecue on the Fourth of July. But for me, as I began to realize this week, I'm still ambivalent about returning to 'normal,' and not just because I fear that normal will feature the same structural inequities that have defined the last fifty (or more) years, but also because the distance I've created (or been given) during lockdown has allowed me to better envision a social structure that's less antagonistic to those (like me) who are less interested in a life defined by expectations of income, marriage, and children. When you're immersed in this structure, it doesn't seem so bad, and -- if you have a position of relative privilege -- better than so many other scenarios, a comparison that's easy to make because so many of these bad scenarios are perpetuated by the same system. We are trained to tell ourselves: 'Be grateful -- things could be so much worse!' Which, as long as you're in the system, is true. But when you're removed from it, there's an opportunity to assess the system with more distance, to understand the ways in which it effectively punishes you for not adhering to the norm. Much of this punishment is rooted in the material -- the threat that deviation will prevent you from earning the money necessary to survive -- but much is psychological to the extent that deviation from the norm is viewed as a moral failure. 

Is it wrong that I don't miss interacting with thousands of people every day, some percentage of whom can be counted on to make a homophobic remark that is reinforced by the barrage of advertising and mainstream news and entertainment to which we are constantly subjected? Yes, there's widespread acknowledgement, if not quite consensus, that homophobia (and racism, and misogyny) are wrong, and there is always discussion of making accommodations for those who don't quite fit the mold, although these accommodations are always premised on the idea that those who benefit must in turn conform to the prevailing model. But what if homophobia (like racism and misogyny) is built into the system itself, in the same way that sacrificing millions of lives for economic profit is also -- apparently -- built into the system? Is not reasonable to want to avoid such a system, to maintain even the small distance from it that lockdown has provided? This isn't a question with an easy answer, but it's one I find myself asking as we breathlessly anticipate getting back to normal. 

I used to think that the trajectory of my life could be framed from social butterfly to misanthrope, but what I've come to realize is that I have no problem with (most) people; in fact, (most) people are amazing. We make the best things. We are often hilarious. We are all (subjectively) sexy and talented. Some of us try to forget about the world by writing and recording cool, shoegaze-y songs like this one :)

Link.

Would I be writing songs if I hadn't been given some distance (in practical and psychological terms) during lockdown? Maybe, or maybe not. It's a question I could ask about many parts of my life as I compare it before and after the lockdown (and contemplate a new, post-lockdown routine). 

So yes, I'm looking forward to the end of the pandemic, but I also fear the end of this period of (relative) insulation from a system that, at the moment, is still ravenous and destructive. 

The Renewed Case for Queer Futurism (Week Forty-Nine)

This week, the 49th of the lockdown, one of our orchids bloomed, which was a welcome respite amid all the snow and ice and news about the ongoing failures of the neoliberal state in which we have been condemned to exist. 

Has anyone else been watching It's a Sin, a mini-series now airing on HBO? It's getting a lot of critical acclaim for its depiction of a group of young friends in London during the 1980s as they confront AIDS. There are things to like about the show: its unapologetic depiction/celebration of gay sex is always a welcome antidote to the paucity of such depictions/celebrations in all forms of entertainment these days, and the young cast is fun to watch as they move through cycles of joy, confusion, fear, and grief. I would recommend the show to anyone who's unfamiliar with the basic story of how AIDS swept through the 1980s and 1990s and eviscerated an entire generation of -- at least in the West -- gay men, leaving deep scars on society that are barely acknowledged or discussed. I would also recommend it to those who are familiar with the history, but with several caveats. 

First, there is the sex (and the men having it): is it possible that London in the 1980s did not have any gay men who weighed more than 135 pounds? It seems unlikely to me. Gay directors: please remember what it feels like to be inundated with images of straight people having sex and note that it's really not that much better to be inundated with images of skinny white boys having sex. It's 2021: MIX IT UP. Second, and more importantly, the emotional impact of the show -- despite confronting a most harrowing episode of history -- feels limited by its adherence to an era whose basic, historical truths, when presented in a fictional context, make it very difficult to offer a corresponding sense of fictional redemption. Characters become ciphers as they are rushed through the stages of AIDS as it unfolded in the 1980s: pre-AIDS partying/1970s nostalgia, disbelief, denial, acceptance (symptoms), political awakening, death or not death. Because I'm aware of the actual history, I don't feel like I'm watching people; instead, I'm watching a lottery in which the question is which of the gay characters are going to die. The show fails capture the true emotional weight of the actual death lottery that occurred because we don't know much about the inner lives of these characters, whose role is to represent the past more than to occupy it. So when the moment of fictional redemption arrives, it ironically enough feels trite, detached from the historical reality. 

I believe that one solution to this dilemma (of representing AIDS in fictional works that are both historically accurate and emotionally resonant) is queer futurism (which I've written about before). The creators of It's a Sin would have been well-served to watch and learn from the television show Pose, which used queer futurism to transcend the AIDS narrative. As with It's a Sin, the show depicts AIDS in ways that are historically accurate/expected -- symptoms, fear, denial, hospital scenes, funerals, political activism -- but also has its characters move through landscapes that are exaggerated or fantastical, either in glamorous Harlem ball scenes or in musical dream sequences (which is one of an unlimited number of option: I'm not saying every show needs a musical interlude, of course.) These scenes, which blur the lines between (fictional) life and death bind us to the characters (even, or especially, the ones who are dying) while offering us a sense of hope (and grief) that feels artistically satisfying in ways that so often are lacking in works of art that try to cleave too closely to a reality that for all intents and purposes is emotionally incomprehensible. Queer futurism offers us a way of acknowledging the horrors of the past without being constrained by these same horrors, which in addition to being artistically satisfying is politically potent at a time when our enemies are still trying to oppress us, and when too many works of art -- even when made with the opposite intention -- serve to unconsciously reinforce messages of futility and disempowerment. 

There is a path in Washington Heights, not far from where we live, that runs through the woods. It feels like you could be anywhere but New York City. 

If you take the path to the end, you learn that it is a temporary illusion. It opens up to a view of the city, which seems that much more harrowing and beautiful after being forgotten for a few minutes.  

 

 

A Landscape of Relative Calm (Week Forty-Five)

The weather, as it had done most of the month, continued to be cold and clear, with some morning haze (my favorite part). But this week the days felt lighter, more expansive. 

Nothing looked very different. Riverside Drive still curved to the south. 

The trees still bent toward the river.  

On Wednesday, the track was dusted with snow. 

The riverbank was striped with shadows from the tree branches. 

I had forgotten what it was like to feel calm, or even sort of calm, or even to have calm on the map of possibilities, even if you weren't feeling it at all. 

I had visions of lying in the grass for at least a year or two, feeling the shadows cross my body as the earth turned in circles and moved around the sun. 

The Year That Time Forgot (Week Forty-One)

I usually try to do a highlights post at the end of the year, and even though 2020 has obviously been more of a 'lowlights' kind of year, I decided to forge ahead. Below I've compiled a list of some of the things that occupied my thoughts (in a good way) as time went off the rails and left us in this strange world that somehow feels extremely normal -- by which I mean habitual, at least for those of us who have the ability (privilege) to work from home and prefer not to go anywhere in light of the pandemic -- and abnormal, given the pandemic and the political extremes we continue to collectively endure.   

THE CITY

This week, as I was putting my phone back into my pocket at the entrance of the park, a woman with a dog veered around me on her way out. Given that we were in the forty-first week of the lockdown, we were maybe a little close for comfort, but I didn't say anything: she (and her dog) were both very old, and she was muttering at it in a language that I guessed was Russian. She had a hunched back and a scarf over her head, while the dog, which seemed to be pulling her this way and that, was wearing a coat. As I watched, she surprised me by picking up the dog, which had a bit of a belly and seemed far heavier than her spindly arms could handle, and carried it across an icy patch, all the while talking to it in what sounded like a mix of admonishment and encouragement. Though I knew nothing about this woman except for what I had just observed, I imagined that she lived alone with her dog in a nearby apartment and that this year had been difficult for her, because -- as I'm beginning to learn myself -- age has a way of compounding problems. Seeing her interact with the dog induced a kind of pandemic-induced teariness that was offset or in some ways enhanced by an appreciation I felt for living in the city, which even at peak solitude and isolation gives us opportunities to envision lives that are very similar and different than our own. Later in the run, as I began my ascent up 158th Street, a very steep hill that extends from the river to Broadway, this sense of appreciation for the city continued as I saw in quick succession 1) a graffiti dick that someone had carved into the cement of the sidewalk (stupid but never not a little funny, as long at it's not on a sidewalk I paid for), and 2) two people talking in another language (some kind of Chinese, again guessing). I always like to hear people talking in languages I don't understand, because it reminds me that speaking English (like many things we associate with the lingua franca of capital, finance, and mainstream culture) shouldn't be a requirement for existing in 2020. I wasn't even bothered by the fact that these people had parked their car half in the sidewalk and half in the protected bike lane, which usually makes me furious (because seriously: cars are the worst, and especially in cities). I wasn't in the mood for rants. I ran the last half mile or so up Broadway and felt glad to be in New York, in Washington Heights, on my block. The media this year made a big deal about people fleeing the city for the suburbs or the country, and I can understand the appeal of leaving -- I think about it all the time, and I'm sure that, in many ways, life outside of the city, especially during a pandemic, is easier -- but even though my block was not at finest, thanks to the soot-covered snow and the mountains of uncollected trash, I knew that I would never be one of them.

CITY PARKS: Fort Tryon Park, as anyone who reads this blog knows, is my favorite park in the world, and was no less beautiful in 2020 than it has been every other year leading up to it. But also the Hudson River, where I spend a lot of time. Running through these urban oases is when I'm most optimistic, when I can believe in a higher power that so often seems implausible during the rest of the day. 

HIGHBRIDGE PARK: New York City has an unfortunate history of neglecting to maintain public services in lower-income/minority neighborhoods, which is why the renovation of Highbridge Park by the Parks Department (beyond being perfect unto itself) is noteworthy. Stephen has been walking past this park all year on his way to the pedestrian High Bridge to the Bronx (another landmark) and has been giving me glowing reports of the progress. Last week I went on a walk with him and was excited to note that they had even installed a parcourse, which always makes me think about the one we had in the park near my house in the 1970s, when they were popular (and generally more spread out than this one: the idea was to jog a few minutes between stations). 

CULTURE AND ENTERTAINMENT

TERRACE HOUSE: The show has been cancelled following the suicide of one the cast members, but it really helped to pull me (us, since Stephen is also a fan) through the earliest and most harrowing days of the pandemic. Even when contestants are fighting with one another, it's very calming to be immersed in a culture that is distinctly not American. 

DRAWING LINKS: Subscription newsletters have replaced blogs (so it goes), and one of my favorite subscriptions is Drawing Links by Edith Zimmerman. Edith draws comics about her life, sometimes veering into magical reality, often walking a delicate line between hilarity and melancholy and sometimes skipping between both. She likes to write about running (and its metaphysical appeal), which is a big draw for me, but I often find myself thinking (and laughing out loud to myself, like a maniac) about her observations of everyday life and the people she encounters -- like this one about a woman early in the pandemic wearing a salad container for a mask (and the imagined dialogue) -- which was a gift in 2020. 

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FATHER: This podcast features a range of guests who talk about their fathers (along with a couple of great episodes in which the podcasters breakdown the archetypal Don Draper of Mad Men). The podcast is lo-fi and thought-provoking, and sometimes very funny. Straight men in this world have a lot to answer for; this podcast takes them to task but in a surprisingly endearing way (surprising because the underlying stories can be quite harrowing and sad). 

MARNIE T: I watched a lot of television this year, but tbh nothing post-Terrace House has grabbed my attention as much as spiritual guide Marnie T on Twitter. Why watch two or more hours of a show when ninety seconds can deliver inspiration, mockery, political analysis, crass commercialism, and personal (drug-induced) enlightenment? Marnie T is the gay/post-gay entertainment we desperately need. I will always sign up for her class. 

MUSIC

Sometime around the beginning of the year, I finally decided to join Spotify (notwithstanding its horrible revenue model for artists), which has been miraculous (for the music) and depressing (because the music has in some ways never felt cheaper/more commodified). But in the interests of focusing on the miraculous, Spotify has helped to reinvigorate my interest in music -- and especially new (to me) music -- which has felt like waking up from a coma. 

WEYES BLOOD: I learned about Weyes Blood from reading Brooklyn Vegan (Titanic Rising was BV's 2019 Album of the Year) and quickly became obsessed with that record and some of her earlier albums, as you can see from my Spotify 2020 Wrap-Up. (Lol.)

INDIE ROCK: Here are some other bands/musicians I loved (and played the most in 2020). One of the last things I did before lockdown was to see Torche at St. Vitus, which was mindblowing (and ear-shattering, even with ear plugs!). 

DEATH CULTURE @ SEA: Being in lockdown turned out to be a good excuse to finally learn how to record music with my iPhone, first with GarageBand and now with Cubasis. It's been a steep learning curve, but I'm continually astounded by the technology. Here's my latest, which is an attempt to stretch into the synthier side of indie rock. 

Link: 

DCAS Playlist:  

LAW AND POLITICS

For reasons both professional and personal, I sift through a lot of legal (and political) writing (and tweets). Here are a few things I found most compelling in 2020: 

KNOW YOUR ENEMY: This podcast is designed to help listeners understand how the conservative/libertarian movement in this country has, over the past fifty or sixty years, and in the interests of corporate greed, private property, and white supremacy, engineered the ongoing assault on democracy that may or may not be relenting as we head into 2021. 

LAW AND POLITICAL ECONOMY: I spent a lot of time this year thinking about my own education, particularly at law school, where I, like most law students at the time, was indoctrinated into a belief that the law, generally speaking, was apolitical, objective, and best employed in the interests of market efficiency. Reading this article, which dispels this idea in favor of crafting laws that works for the people, was a revelation to me and a source of hope in a political landscape that can often feel very bleak. 

CATS

How can anyone survive a lockdown without pets? It's a mystery. 

ZEPHYR AND ELEKTRA: On a blue blanket, in front of a large pillow. 

CLIO: Our gray panther in the snow.  

2021

In some ways, thinking about 2021 was the best part of 2020. Let's hope we get our collective act together! 

See you next year :)