Matthew Gallaway

Stone Against My Palms (Week Sixteen)

I've never been a fan of the traditional blue hydrangea -- and I had to suppress an initial wave of nausea at the sight of patriotic colors at this juncture -- but like everything in the heather garden at Fort Tryon Park, these flowers quickly won me over. Plants that elsewhere would appear garish and suburban achieve a certain magnificence in a beautiful garden.   

This week, New York City passed its annual budget, which contained severe cuts for the Parks Department. (Specifically, a 14 percent cut to a budget that was already less than 1 percent of the overall city budget.) It was demoralizing to consider yet another way that the city's leadership has failed to acknowledge the importance of creating and maintaining outdoor space when we're being inundated by a virus that spreads indoors. Like everyone who's not a politician gets that, right? And yet here we are, still getting crumbs from the lavish buffets served up to cars and police. 

I'm not too worried about Fort Tryon, which like a handful of other parks around the city receives private funding, but I think it's a terrible precedent that only parks capable of generating their own funds should prosper. Obviously this impulse toward privatization and private funding is not limited to parks, and in all contexts represents a failure of the government to raise (via taxation) and allocate money in equitable ways. Usually parks are a metaphor for healthcare (or just 'care') in these posts; today, they continue in that role but sadly become more literal. 

For me, the one thing this lockdown has clarified is the concept of political choice. In normal times, it's easy to forget that so many of our policies are the result of choices made at some point by our political leaders, but which happened so long ago as to seem preordained (for example: we chose to build highways instead of railways; in New York City, we chose to give car owners a huge amount of public street space). But now, we can see these (bad) choices -- and the repercussions -- with unprecedented speed and clarity. Last week, our city leaders made a choice to fund police overtime the mayor's ferry system instead of allocating more money to the parks. (And to probably twenty other social services designed to help underserved people.) At the national level, it's a choice to 'open the economy' -- to force people back to work (often for punishingly low wages) and to open restaurants -- instead of paying people to stay home for a few months until the virus could be monitored and controlled, as they've done in other countries whose leaders have made different (better) choices than we have. There are so many choices being made right now at every level of government, and an astounding percentage of them are bad choices. When people are beaten down by these choices over years and decades, they forget that there was ever another option. My hope for Fourth of July 2020 is that, along with expressing regret about the horrendous choices, we've made, we can remind ourselves that, with regard to the laws and policies that affect so much of our lives, we can make better ones going forward. 

In this week's entertainment news, I made a less dire choice to record a new song :)

 

Here's a link if the video doesn't feed through. 

'Stone Against My Palms'

Down to the pines, into the sea

Stone against my palms, skinned at the knees

Pain is a salve, wire wraps around a heart

Dream away, dream away a life

The sun came out to kill, the air was still

What's a man to say? Shook his hand and paid

 

Cone Flowers and Astilbes and Gay Pride (Week Fifteen)

This week, the fifteenth of the lockdown, I was reminded that high humidity is the worst kind of running weather. Am I literally dying is a question that crossed my mind many times as I staggered up a hill that, in the past,* I would have glided up and over without a second thought. But it still felt good to reach the top, where I stopped to admire the cone flowers, just making their entrance onto the garden stage. I like how these flowers look like badminton birdies. Or maybe they're (also) called 'shuttlecocks' (?) as per an Amazon page I just found that had a 'Customer Question and Answer' that made me laugh. 

Q: May these be used in the pool?

A: Could give to your cat to play with.

By Amazon Customer June 14th, 2020.

*two weeks ago

Someone was apparently (heroically?) spending their lockdown providing hilarious, nonsensical answers to customer questions about obscure items on Amazon. I wondered if there were many people doing this, and if they traded the best answers with each other. It sounded like fun. (In theory.) Or maybe I could find some people to play badminton with. I had always loved playing badminton as a kid. Badminton would be a good Phase Two pandemic sport; you could play with a mask and keep physically distanced. I felt confident that our society would be a better place if we replaced our obsession with football/basketball/baseball/hockey/race-car driving/video games with badminton.  

Like wouldn't it be great if, in a hundred years, the history books said something along the lines of, 'In the course of emerging from the pandemic, the United States, after instituting a very progressive taxation system and outlawing professional sports leagues (and cruise ships), developed a national obsession for amateur badminton. As cities closed their streets to automobiles in lieu of more environmentally friendly forms of urban transportation, many cities -- in addition to replacing private automobile storage with trees and gardens and park benches -- erected badminton courts.' And maybe shuffleboard courts, too.  

Maybe this was the community I needed to find, but I knew I would never look. I didn't really care about badminton. Or shuffleboard. One of the things I've accepted about myself is that I'll never be a very social person. Most of my earliest memories involve being terrified of people, but I learned -- or was taught -- to overcome that fear. For a long time, I overcompensated: I went to parties, I lived in Brooklyn. In retrospect, being social was largely a disguise -- like another, more obvious disguise -- and, over time, I've learned to value my innate fear of other people, in the same way I've learned to embrace being gay.   

Here, in the empty park, I was grateful for the silence and for the astilbes, which were providing a different kind of fireworks than the ones everyone was complaining about. 

I felt grateful to be alone in the dawn, to have enough space to accept what the world was offering. 

 

Dancing On My Own (Week Fourteen)

This morning, after a long run through the park and -- after I returned home -- a shower, I went back to bed and drifted into a hypnagogic dream state. I saw a beautiful apple with unpolished skin, the kind you can only get at an orchard. Then a wasp appeared whose body seemed to be made out of amber-colored glass, so that I could see its organs pulsing and moving like the inside of a watch. Finally, I heard a voice speaking and I recognized it as belonging to a friend, except she wasn't speaking to me alone, she was speaking at a protest. She was holding a sign. As I listened, I was jostled by the crowd. It felt familiar and good and a little frightening in the way that things we used to take for granted are now forbidden but -- maybe? -- becoming less forbidden.  

Time this week continued to feel oddly elastic. There's so much news. Much of it is horrifying -- anything Trump & Co say or do, the ongoing toll of the virus, the utter failure of the mayor to prepare the city for the next phase of our existence -- and much of it is encouraging: the Black Lives Matter protests offer hope for a kind of reinvention that seems like the only antidote to the conservative/neoliberal nightmare we've been living for as long as I can remember.   

This week, I've been floating on a sea of questions. What will happen to the economy? What will happen to my job? (Is it selfish to worry about my job when 40 million others have lost theirs?) Why is the city not picking up any trash in the parks? What's going on with global warming? Who's going to win 'Top Chef'? Why are there so many motorcycles racing around the city at 110 mph? Is the virus 'over' or will there be more waves? How big does a protest need to be in order to not only defund the police, but also to defund chillingly obsolete and antidemocratic institutions like 1) the Senate, 2) the Supreme Court, and 3) the pro-parking community boards of New York City? I'm constantly worried and constantly trying not to worry, and these thoughts -- worrying and not worrying -- are amplified by the lockdown. I'm sure I'm not alone in this respect. I'm also sure there are a lot of people who want to escape this dynamic, which explains (in part) the rush to reopen, even though we don't seem to be much better prepared for another wave. 

I try to concentrate on good news. I don't know if you've noticed, but this was the week the oak-leaf hydrangeas reached full bloom. Sometimes they will surprise you. Like this morning on my run, on Riverside Drive, I saw something flash in the corner of my eye and realized it was a cluster of oak-leaf hydrangeas growing under the trees on the steep hillside that leads down to the river. I didn't know they were there until I saw the flowers shooting through the morning mist.  

In our garden this week, the jasmine is in bloom. For many years, Stephen dreamed about having a wall of jasmine but feared that it would never survive our winter. A few years ago, he discovered a cold-hardy variety; fast-forward and the dream has been (mostly) attained. The scent of the flower -- a sweet (but not too sweet) vanilla -- is intoxicating. Sometimes, when the wind is right, the cats will sit in front of the jasmine and sniff the air and look at each other, as if wondering what could have  created this miracle. 

This week, I recorded a cover of Robyn's 'Dancing on My Own.' I heard it on a television show the other day and I thought, 'I've always loved that song -- I should cover it!' not realizing that tons of others have already done the same thing. But it seemed like a good 'gay pride' song -- it perfectly captures gay longing in a straight world -- and is appropriate given that there are no parades this year :( Click through here if the embedded video doesn't feed through. 

"I'm right over here, why can't you see me?" -- Clio

 

The Ivory Silk Lilac Tree (Week Thirteen)

After all of the rain, the park this week -- the thirteenth of the lockdown -- was very lush. I've always loved this tree, which I *think* is an ivory silk lilac. Most of the year, it's very unassuming, but right now, with its small clouds of silver flowers, it hovers above the fray; or maybe, thanks to its beautiful branches, it controls the landscape. Like so much in the world right now, it's something I couldn't quite imagine if I didn't see it for myself. 

I was also struck by these oak-leaf hydrangeas and the skinny trunks of the sumacs.  

On the way to the park, a sign reminded me of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. I felt hopeful knowing that masses of people were taking to the streets and -- despite the risks -- standing up to the police. 

I wanted to believe that these protests would spark a wave of reform, but the tepid reaction of our political leaders was dismaying. Though quick to align themselves with the BLM slogans, they showed little interest in concrete reform; the mayor of New York City latched on to 'youth services' as a talking point and promised to divert from the NYPD budget a few thousand dollars to various programs around the city, as if that would address any of the systemic bloat and racism that brought us to this point. 

His reaction to BLM was not my only complaint about the mayor. After going on my first lockdown-era bike ride on Friday afternoon, I found myself stuck in rush-hour traffic on Riverside Drive, trying to avoid getting squeezed between two rows of gigantic, moving SUVs and a third row of parked SUVs. (I also found myself cursing the mayor.) I almost can't bring myself to think about the opportunity we -- New York City -- had to address transportation in the city, and how the mayor has completely squandered it. 

All of these problems -- racism, environmental degradation, infrastructure, labor -- are all related; it's exhilarating to read articles explaining these connections and proposing solutions, but demoralizing to consider the reactions of our political leaders. So few of them seem equipped to diagnose the extent of what needs to be done, much less have the power to do it. Is it possible for a progressive movement to set the political agenda in the United States?

There were so many people -- so many corporations and lobbyists -- who needed to step or be pushed out of the way. New York City can't even find the political will to put in a few bike lanes: how are we going to start taxing the rich? 

If nothing else, it was consoling to think about the lines -- lines of protest, lines of reform, lines of action/inaction -- becoming increasingly clear, which made the idea of crossing them feel almost possible, if not quite inevitable. 

Open Streets and Political Resistance (Week Twelve)

During the 12th week of the isolation, I started getting up earlier to go for my morning runs. Because of the curfew, I couldn't go too early. I waited until five o'clock to leave the house, as I didn't want to be assaulted by the roving bands of police that have been rioting all over the city against #blacklivesmatter. But even in a sea of unrest, five o'clock continues to be a very serene time; the streets are open to anyone who wants to use them. The park is even emptier than usual and that much more beautiful. 

As I considered the open streets and the ongoing protests, it occurred to me that the former had to some extent facilitated the latter. These protests, as many have noted, seem somehow 'different'; more spontaneous and decentralized, harder for the police to control. I was struck by the idea that today's streets, because of the virus and the greatly reduced traffic of the lockdown, more closely resemble streets that existed before the automobile, the kinds of (car-free) streets that hosted revolutionary uprisings in the biggest cities in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. When streets have less (car) traffic, police have a harder time controlling protesters: the streets lack the constant (and dangerous) barricade to which we are all accustomed, quartering the city with hundreds of miles of what might as well be electrified razor wire. To have this barrier removed, even partially, has provided an unprecedented (at least in this century) opportunity for protesters to move, to assemble, to challenge the (racist in so many ways) status quo. I also wondered if this connection between open streets and policing might also help to explain the mayor's maddening intransigence on both issues. He -- and others of his ilk, at once arrogant, feckless, and sinister under a guise of compassion -- clearly understand that traffic creates a kind of self-enforcing police state; if you remove traffic from the equation, the ability of protesters to maneuver increases dramatically, which in turns leads to increasingly desperate, violent policing (because they know they are losing). 

Like many ideas, this one was depressing and exciting to consider. The city was slated to begin opening on Monday: traffic was already increasing; as with so much in this administration, there was no plan. But as with Black Lives Matter, there seemed to be increasing recognition that a plan was needed. Would these protests lead to meaningful policy changes? I hoped so. Or I wanted to be hopeful, but I cautioned myself. I've spent most of my (increasingly long) life being disappointed with the outcome of protests (which is never a reason not to protest -- or to support them -- but just a reflection of my experience, or perhaps just the nature of history).  

The park -- which is managed by an agency that receives less than one percent of the city's budget (versus almost seven percent for the NYPD) -- did not prognosticate. 

On an unrelated note, I recorded a new Isolation Song. (Is anyone else still isolating? I know the answer is yes, but sometimes it feels like the world has already opened, notwithstanding the risks.) This song was inspired by a pair of cats/brothers I read about on Twitter, probably five or six months ago, who were surrendered at a shelter by their owner, who could no longer afford to care for them. To be on social media is to come across sad stories of abandoned pets all the time, but something about the expression of one of these cats (he and his brother had had been separated for some reason) -- fearful, uncomprehending -- haunted me. And what kind of name is Stepi? Some questions will never be answered. 

If the video doesn't feed through, here's the link.

But this week, as I recorded the song, I realized that it's the same expression you see on people all over the world who are being thrown in jail for the crime of being alive. 

The Case Against Normal (Week Eleven)

Yesterday morning, when I arrived at the park, I made a point of taking a picture of the street, which was closed a few weeks ago as part of the mayor's lackluster open-streets initiative. It wasn't much, of course -- this road through the middle of Fort Tryon Park should have been closed to private vehicles a long time ago -- but I felt like it was important to document something good, a policy response, that had arisen during the pandemic. I wanted to have evidence that this closed street had existed in the event the mayor opens it up again, as he has said he will do as soon as things get back to 'normal.' (I also admired the New York City Helvetica typeface of the sign, which is maybe a small example of something beautiful about the city that those leaving will never find in the suburbs.)  

I've also had a long relationship with this hill. I've run down it thousands of times. I've trained for marathons on this hill, running 400, 600, and 800-meter intervals on the way up before jogging down and repeating. (These are brutal workouts.) I did one of these workouts last summer in the very early hours of the morning on the day that Dante died, which means I sometimes think about Dante when I'm running down this hill. I've pulled my hamstring on this hill (and pretended that the injury wasn't as bad as it really was). Once, when I was running down this hill, my phone bounced out of my pocket and the screen broke when it hit the pavement. Another time, in the pre-dawn after a storm, I tripped on some fallen branches. If I'm running down this hill in the early morning, which is usually the case, the sun, rising in the east, will filter through the bank of leaves on the bushes that line the right side of the road, and the light is grainy and saturated like an old film, and for a few seconds I feel like I'm flying through time. I've had cars come very close to hitting me as they speed down the hill and follow the bend to the right. I don't blame them for speeding or being reckless; the road invites that kind of driving. As with so many other parts of the city, the park is not built for cars, but for people. Who thought it was ever a good idea to build what's effectively a race track through the park, where people walk and jog and bike? It's good to know that, for a little while, the mayor has acknowledged this basic fact about the park, even though he's done nothing for the rest of the city.  

Or in some cases, he's done worse than nothing. As I noted last week, or maybe two weeks ago, the NYPD -- looking for a sense of purpose in the pandemic -- have recently started to invade sidewalks and bike paths with their SUVs. Here's a shot of Riverside Drive at 150th that I took on Friday around 6:30 in the morning. It probably seems like a small thing, but it's yet another example of why the police are distrusted. They don't engage; they obstruct and intimidate. They hassle (black) people; they give off the edgy anger of someone looking for a fight. Like most who exude this kind of anger, when given the slightest pretext, they snap. 

This kind of policing is a (another) reason why there should be no talk of going back to 'normal' from anyone in a position to lead us away from normal. The old normal is police brutality and income inequality and environmental degradation, the effects of which are disproportionately shouldered by minority and working-class people. It's so obvious -- and so obviously unfair and immoral -- that it seems almost laughable to point it out, or to express surprise when an 'incident' boils over into the kinds of protests we have been seeing. One of the reasons I supported Bernie is that he was the only candidate (among the presidential nominees) who seemed capable of expressing the outrage that the situation in our country calls for. Democrats like Biden and de Blasio call for 'calm' without acknowledging that a return to calm has always meant a return to the immoral conditions that created the unrest.  

In addition to our leadership, there are a lot of people who are too insulated from the problems related to policing and inequality to understand why anyone would protest anything. We can imagine these people driving on a highway, admiring the vistas without realizing that the shoulder of the road is covered with the bones of those who built it. 

So far, this has been the year of asking what it will take for our leadership to change. The death, the unemployment, and the violence isn't prospective: it's here, killing us. How could there *not* be massive protests? 

What's equally dismaying is that the solutions to our many problems are equally apparent; but none of them involve 'going back to normal.' 

There's an ugly, dangerous road -- a superhighway, filled with speeding cars -- that has been built though the middle of our country. 

It's time to close it, permanently, or at least slow it down so that everyone has same opportunity to get from one place to another. 

 

Lamplight Keep On Burning (Week Ten)

This week, the tenth of the lockdown, was marked by beautiful spring weather and an ongoing hurricane of conflicting and often polarizing information. Deaths and cases were down in New York City, but the situation was less clear around the country and in the rest of the world, notwithstanding the fact that (at least as far as I can tell) we reached five million cases (from four million) in a shorter period than it took to get from three to four. Whatever the reality of the virus, there was a collective sense of having been through the worst of it. Everyone was getting excited to go out and get back to 'normal.' 

Well, maybe not everyone. 

I stayed home with Stephen and the cats except for an hour or so each morning when I went running. Waking up at dawn, I realized that one of my (many) problems is that I enjoy the hours of the early morning -- by which I mean anywhere between 5:00 and 7:45 am -- and also the late night, which starts at 11:00 pm and lasts through 1:00 or 1:30 am. Perhaps you can see the practical difficulty here, which is the reason why, if I don't take a nap during some portion of the worst period of the day -- 1:00 pm to 4:30 -- I find myself slipping into zombie territory. There's something about going to an office each day from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm that regulates behavior, which I'm sure is not a coincidence. I don't miss that kind of structure, but to be unfettered in a physical sense means that you have to compensate by working at all hours of the day and night (between periods of not working at all hours of the day and night).

One of the nice things about running is how songs will get stuck in your head, but in a way that's somehow less annoying or obtrusive than when you're not running. Last weekend, Stephen was rewiring some stereo components and we tested the turntable with a vintage copy of Odessa, the concept album by the Bee Gees (a double LP with a red velvet cover: classic). It's not a record I listened to a lot even at the height of my Bee Gees infatuation -- it's not a great record -- but the song we played (the first song on the third side) was 'Lamplight,' which is a relatively unheralded classic that belongs in the high pantheon of orchestrated pop masterpieces for which they will always be known. I love the unapologetic melodrama of the song; it's the reason I'll always choose the Bee Gees over the Beatles. I was immediately gripped by it; I sang it a million times as I ran through the streets and park. 

With apologies to Bee Gees purists, I decided to record my own version: 

Here's a link if the video doesn't feed through.  

At the park, I admired the wall, which along with the rest of the park's infrastructure was built by a WPA-type of program during the Depression. I wondered how bad things would have to get now before our government started helping its citizens in meaningful ways, which is to say with work, health, and the environment. You would think that 40 million unemployed and 100,000 dead would be enough, but apparently not.

I was relieved to be at the park early enough so that I didn't have to follow the physical-distancing arrows someone had chalked onto the pavement. 

The song played and the flowers glowed. 

Lamplight, keep on burning. 

Among Other Things, Let's End the 9/11 Police State (Week Nine)

This morning around 6:30, I was running on Riverside Drive when I passed two immense SUVs parked side by side, blocking most of the sidewalk. If you live in New York City -- and maybe anywhere else -- you probably won't be surprised to learn that these vehicles belonged to the police. For the past week or so, I've noticed these hulking cars idling in other odd, inappropriate places, such as on the bike path next to the river and at the entrance to the state park at 135th Street. For me, it wasn't a huge inconvenience: I ran around them and went on my way. But I still felt a little nervous seeing them, as if I were doing something wrong, which I'm sure is a feeling that must only be (hugely) magnified among those who aren't white and -- no coincidence -- receive a disproportionate share of unwanted and unnecessary attention from the police. I'm not sure the police have ever been benign or reassuring to anyone (at least uptown), but over the past few years, they -- and I understand I'm generalizing here -- seem to have become more belligerent, obnoxious, and aggressive. They go out of their way to create dangerous situations -- e.g., by always parking in bike lanes and (now) on sidewalks  -- to say nothing of the many incidents we've seen lately of police violently arresting for non-violent offenses, such as (pre-virus) jumping the turnstile or (now) not social distancing. There are many reasons one could point to for this state of affairs, but I've recently been struck by the idea that, in this current crisis, the police do not have an obvious role, which has created a kind of collective identity crisis and has led them to reassert themselves like an old, angry drunk walking around the end of a party (with a gun), not realizing or not wanting to admit that their time to shine has passed. After 9/11, the police had an obvious mission -- to stop terrorism or 'terrorism' -- and they embraced this mission with fervor (and almost unlimited funding); they were heroes, or 'heroes.' But against a virus -- the new enemy -- all of these counterterrorism units and equipment are useless. What we need are all of the things -- open space, better access to health and mental care, clean air and water -- that have been relentlessly neglected for the past few decades (or more), with the reasoning that those services were not 'life-and-death' in the same way that terrorism was (with 9/11 as the hovering threat of what would happen if such funding was not given to the police). Yet now, just in New York City, we've had six or seven times as many people die as on 9/11 and there's been no sign from the mayor that these outdated priorities will be realigned to reflect this new reality anytime soon. 

It's one of the many things I tried not to fixate on this week, the ninth of the lockdown, because I find it very depressing. Other items on this list include: 1) the surge in car traffic I'm already seeing at 6:00 in the morning on the West Side Highway and the ongoing failure of the mayor to do anything about it, even as more enlightened mayors around the world make daily announcements about opening up cities to bikers and pedestrians. I think about life in a month or two and whether -- if I need to go downtown -- I'll have to take the subway (risky) or a cab/Uber (maybe less risky, but yuck). Downtown is only five miles away from me: if there were a single (protected) bike lane the width of two car lanes on Broadway or Amsterdam or (my personal dream) the Westside Highway, I could easily ride my bike anywhere I need to go; 2) the way cable news has, for my father and many others of his generation (and others), become a kind of addiction, one that -- in my father's case -- has gradually replaced other activities like reading or (because of social distancing) even playing cards with his friends. What does he do now? He turns on Fox News and watches it for hours. It provides information and companionship and purpose (and paranoia). Which is depressing (and dangerous). Seeing my father, a member of the 'Greatest Generation' I think that he, like the police, has in his retirement lost a sense of purpose because so much of his working life was devoted to making money; but like so many others, the system used and discarded him, in the same way that it's now doing with 'essential' workers. The system, unfettered as it's become over the decades, is increasingly voracious and cruel. I'm confident that eventually it will be tamed -- history moves in cycles -- but I'm impatient for it to happen; 3) I'm not going to drone on about other depressing things because I've covered enough for this week and we are all inundated with depressing news/takes. 

On a happier note, the weather this week was cool and the park, which I visited several times, was beautiful. I love going early, when there are only a few other people around. Here, it's easy to remember a less harrowing past and conceive of a more hopeful future. At home, the days continued to fly. My job has kept me very busy: not a complaint but an observation! I am grateful to have a job and I am nervous about losing it. Jobs should not be as precious as they are, but -- as much as I would like the system to change -- this is where we are. 

In my ongoing pivot to electronic musician, I recorded another song this week, which I'm proud of because I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Cubasis, which is a more sophisticated DAW (Digital Audio Workstation aka 'recording studio') than GarageBand, and I've now managed to hook up a microphone, a guitar, and a MIDI keyboard to my phone. Here's the song: 

And below is the link and full list of Isolation Songs: 

DEATH CULTURE @ SEA // Isolation Songs 

Hours NEW! (Week 9)

Stars We Light (Week 7)

Bride (Week 6) 

April Come She Will (Week 4)

Hunting Grounds (Week 3)

Long Way To Fall (Week 2) 

See you next week :)

A Kind of Performance Also Known as the Park (Week Eight)

After receiving clearance from Stephen's doctor, we decided to leave the house. Wearing masks, we walked around the neighborhood, which though somewhat quieter and less crowded than usual in some ways hadn't changed. The storefronts were all there, though most (but not all) were closed. It almost felt like a holiday. Some people were milling around on the medians on Broadway, others walking up and down the sidewalks, still too small in relation to the amount of space given to parking and driving. Traffic, though lighter than what I associated with the pre-pandemic era was still not exactly light. Everyone in possession of an automobile or a motorcycle seemed to be in a rush, driving very fast, just like I had been reading about (specifically: car traffic was down but camera-issued speeding tickets were up, in both relative and absolute numbers). Ice cream trucks, scourge and delight of the summer streets, were everywhere, violating not only the lockdown but also the laws of humanity by refusing to turn off the jingle while idling at street corners. I recognized something familiar, a mix of exasperation and hope, that had always defined my understanding of life in this part of the city. It felt good to be back. 

The next morning, not long after dawn, when the streets and sidewalks were even quieter, I went on a run to Fort Tryon Park. I had been thinking about the park a lot. I look forward to seeing it every spring; this year, I felt bad about missing the forsythias, but was happy to see the clouds of azaleas and streams of phlox.

During the pandemic, the park had become an even more important symbol of what our government is -- or should be -- able to offer: namely, a resource that benefits all of us without any pressure to justify its existence in terms of profit or revenue or efficiency. That this particular park is in -- or adjacent to -- a relatively diverse, lower-income neighborhood makes it feel that much more valuable.*

*I understand that Fort Tryon, like many in the city, depends on funding from private/non-governmental sources (wealthy people), which is an unfortunate reality of the pre-pandemic (neoliberal) era, but shouldn't distract from the basic model.  

But I tried not to think too much about the outside world. One of the pleasures of living in a city is that it offers the chance to be immersed in different landscapes without belonging to (or acquiring) them. 

It's a feeling that I associate with the opera, and specifically going to performances, when the initial drowsiness falls away and you find yourself mesmerized but bifurcated by the music, fixated on what's unfolding in front of you while at the same time drifting away. 

 

Azalea Season (Week Seven)

This week, the seventh in isolation, was marked by rain and wind. A bamboo fence we put up to keep the cats from escaping our walled garden blew over and we had to retie it into place. Not everything was so arduous. Or tedious. The red azalea we bought a few years ago was covered in blossoms: miraculously, spring had not been cancelled. 

It was hard to know what was happening in the world. Or what was 'really' happening: was I wrong to think that we were still effectively in a kind of free fall, or was I being too pessimistic? Was it possible that we were through the worst of it -- however you wanted to define 'it' -- and that we just needed to soldier through a few more weeks? Both positions seemed plausible at different times of the day, depending on what I was reading. Or how frequent the sirens were. (In the seventh week, they still continued at a rate far higher than anything I remembered as normal.) In my heart, I felt that things were bad, and likely to get worse. But I wanted to be proved wrong. To scroll through Twitter is to understand that no figure is uncontested; everything has political implications. I read an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which she described how, in the early days of the pandemic, when it seemed like everyone was at risk, there was a whisper of cross-party solidarity on the Hill, a desire -- even among some notoriously conservative Republicans -- to give everyone enough money to weather the storm. But as soon the first wave unveiled the discrepancy in death rates between poor, urban, minority neighborhoods and the rest of the (less poor, whiter) country, a wall went up and it quickly became apparent that any funds for the urban poor would have to be wrung out of the federal government.   

I listened to another podcast (Know Your Enemy) that described the kinds of measures we're seeing now -- essentially forcing 'essential' workers to risk their lives for starvation wages -- as a 'politics of elimination.' It was disheartening to learn how the Republican (and neoliberal) response to the pandemic is only the latest in a series of similar measures, taken across pretty much every area (education, welfare, labor, housing, health, environment), designed to disenfranchise and marginalize the lower classes, always in the pursuit of economic efficiency or adapting to free-market principles, as if the value of such goals were self-evident. Fifty or sixty years ago, such ideas were associated with the Chicago School and specifically the economics and law departments -- and the right-wing predecessors to the Koch brothers who funded associated think tanks -- but now the association with the Chicago School seems antiquated, not because the ideas have dissipated, but because they are 'part of the air we breathe.' 

Being gay, I was reminded of how suffocating it had been to grow up in a straight world. Maybe I could understand our entire society as being somehow closeted, not in (or not only) in a sexual sense, but in the sense of living under one system that fills us with despair while understanding -- unconsciously at first, until the idea of escape seeps into our thoughts -- that there's a better way, that we need to summon the courage to switch from one path to another. I know it's not a perfect analogy, but it works for me. My hope is that people -- or some significant portion of us -- will not only become aware that the system in which we live is irrational and unhealthy, but also somehow understand that continuing is no only an option, that the only solution is to 'come out' -- to unveil the nature of our desires -- and to rearrange our lives according to a different and more humane set of rules and principles. This coming out will not be easy, however; we do not have educated, enlightened parents. We are the teenager whose parents will disown us and send us out to the streets before admitting that their view of the world is wrong, that their god is no better than ours. That, in fact, their god is worse. 

After days of sullen skies, the sun came out for a for a few minutes and the new leaves glowed. 

The evergreens were tipped with yellow chartreuse. 

In the garden, it had been a good spring.   

The smallest things, it seemed, were the most beautiful. 

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DEATH CULTURE @ SEA // Isolation Songs 

Stars We Light (Week 7) NEW!

Bride (Week 6) 

April Come She Will (Week 4)

Hunting Grounds (Week 3)

Long Way To Fall (Week 2)