Nunu Chocolate, Brooklyn – The woman who just came in is in her fifties. She sports shiny black leggings, a black fur hat, and a red jacket that appears to be composed of red latex baggies filled with feathers. Shrink wrapped feathers. From this distance, the effect is not flattering. My first thought was that she might be trying to thwart a gruesome dermatological condition by trapping it in one of those toxic waste bags your see in hospitals. I catch myself staring. Where did the inspiration for this jacket come from? Is latex and feathers just a necessary permutation of material and filling that the fashion world need to survive before getting on to something that actually looks like clothing?

New York insists on distracting. Onward.

You, dear reader, might have noticed that this blog has stalled out over the past year. This is not due to the absence of things to write about, but rather an unfair invasion of extreme self consciousness brought on by the reappearance of reading in my daily schedule. With it comes a total (and long overdue) reassessment of what constitutes worthwhile writing, and – more important perhaps – what worthwhile writing should accomplish. On its own, this goes a long way towards stymieing my own attempts at putting pen to page, but that’s not all! The internet makes authorial opinions on the subject dangerously accessible (ie. totally irresistible) to boot. Opinions which, apart from confirming my various suspicions about the impossibility of mortals writing worthwhile prose, often include an extreme distaste for, suspicion of and occasional hostility towards blogging generally (and all this by writers who I hold in extremely high regard), which means writing an entry these days is absolutely fraught with a whole laundry list of insecurities I wasn’t even aware I had.

So anyways, I have this folder. It’s full of blog entries that I’ve started over the past six months only to stall out and fail to follow through with. These are the thought fragments that never really had a chance, even in the totally informal atmosphere of a personal blog. They are largely terrible. However, as happens during any spring cleaning, when I started scraping out the crusty crappy bits, I found a couple paragraphs that, despite being sorta loosey-goosey structurewise, I would be sad to see go. So instead of tossing them out, I’ll do the opposite and post them here, yanked from the housing of their original context and thus free to be the meaningless little set pieces they started out as and probably should have stayed.

Here goes:

1. From this summer’s trip.

“Rutland, Ohio. The ‘Three Acre Lake’ of Hidden Lake Campground is not, strictly speaking, a lake. It’s a low bulldozed area – roughly the size of two tennis courts – that has been filled with a mixture of water and toxic looking blue dye that was clearly dumped in to justify such a bucolic sounding name. The dye is a first for me, and as children begin trickling down to the beach (All of them armed with foam noodles and waterwings and body boards) I begin to wonder what sorts of chemical compounds it took to cook up such a stunning Caribbean cove in the middle of rural Ohio. I pay close attention. The water stays oddly clear as the kids charge in to the shallows. Thick almost. I swear the noodle has gone from red to purple. But after only a few minutes of fun, a staff member charges out from the office blowing his whistle to apologetically announce that there is absolutely NO swimming after the campground’s streetlights come on. “It’s getting dark” he explains “I’m afraid swimming just wouldn’t be safe.”

2. From a visit to Santa Cruz (this one was very possibly written drunk).

“We watched YouTube videos for an hour. Has YouTube bumped booze as the main lubricant for awkward college socializing? I remember the weird cachet one gained from knowing about the most recent viral clip during my college years, but what once was nerdy is now eerily normal. Progress, I guess. Urban base jumpers and back yard bomb tutorials; police brutality and clueless beauty queens are what seem to connect kids these days, and the trend deserves at least passing recognition as the new patch for tense social hurdles. It’s a convenient bridge over unfamiliar space I suppose, but in fabricating flimsy common ground (ie. shared experience) from footage of skateboarding dogs and hiccuping babies are you really any closer? I suspect that rickety structure is just as easy to collapse as it was to erect. That those first few minutes spent feeling out the rough borders of a new relationship have been refocused towards a screen seems extremely fucked up.”

3. A morning report from my regular coffee shop in Fort Greene.

“By eight, the fence outside Tillies (black and iron wrought, edges softened by layers of thick paint common to iron wrought fences around here) is so densely draped with leashes that the distance between the fence and the attached necks is a rippling web of expensive leather. Dogs of every size, shape and color are packed in so close that it is getting difficult for any of them to move, let alone engage in the worried pacing or neighborly ass sniffing you normally see outside of Tillies. Even that heartwarming little ‘please-don’t-forget-meeeeeeee!!!!’ front-foot prance in response someone (anyone) emerging from the front door is rendered impossible. Sardine tight. It’s gotten to the point where owners who feel guilty that their latte and muffin took so long to get are reluctant to bend down and engage in the nice wet mutual face lapping ritual that, say, a 9:30 dog would have received without hesitation.”

There. Three short paragraphs, from a folder that was overflowing with unsalvageable ones. Now it’s empty again. I’m not sure what’s next, but I doubt it will be another seven months before I post again.

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