Archive | City Matters

There You Are

My routine this fall: Watch the sunrise with the seagulls and the seals, then walk into the dunes. For the rest of the morning, write. Afterward walk into the woods and sometimes go thrifting, naming my finds consolation prizes or rewards depending on the day’s work. From then, bid the sun farewell from a west-facing beach, and make dinner from fisheries and farmstands in the area. Star-gazing from the hammock beneath the birch trees, and asleep by 9:30, tucked in with a grey-gold permakitten purring at my feet. This has been my perfect life, and it has turned me into the space crone mermaid of my dreams.

Last night I was telling a dear friend in Brooklyn about how sad I’ll be to leave the Cape next week. “I’m running out of supplies,” I told her. “I’m on my last bag of Oslo Coffee beans and down to my last bottle of vitamins. I’m even running out of wine. But it’s so hard to imagine not being able to run to the sea as soon as I wake. And how will I get unstuck in my writing when I can’t walk in the woods to clear my head?” “Spend this last week just soaking it all up,” she said. “It will be the best week of your life.” She is an artist and knows how to be inside the moment while also storing it for her paintings and drawings. I was grateful for her glorious plan, and grateful for the reminder of why I love New York City so much. It is there–scratch that, it is here–that I find my people one way or another. What’s most beautiful: once you find kindred spirits, they’re inside you wherever you go, whether they be tree spirits or seal spirits or loudmouth millennial spirits. Love is love.

Art credit: Detail from a Marlene Frontera drawing. Photo: me.

They Shoot Jewish Witches, Don’t They?

Last night I had dinner at a Truro restaurant, and encountered the particular strain of New England xenophobia that inspired me to leave the region decades before.

It annoys me that I feel compelled to report on what occurred. Soon I must jump back into my ADHD life in New York, and expending precious writing time on this topic feels like a microcosm of how our predator-in-chief siphons our energy by making it all about his ugly heart rather than the huge issues he should be managing. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The hatred lurking everywhere in American life is leaping to the surface because it’s been endorsed at the top.

So here’s what happened. I had had an almost perfect day before that dinner. By 1 pm, I had written 3,000 words of a book section that had been giving me trouble. Then I’d headed over to the Provincelands, an extraordinary stretch of the Cape Cod National Seashore comprised of dunes and forests and ancient, still-inhabited shacks. I walked for miles in this extrarrestrial territory—all sand mountains, barreling blue sky, trees stubbornly growing sideways. I was dressed how I most like to dress—a loose skirt and trenchcoat, barefoot and pigtailed—and could not stop smiling. It was the first bright day all week, and I was fucking happy. Continue Reading →

Coffee Cockacracy

I went into the coffee shop this morning to find my usual morning crew–all male, mind you–hashing out the Weinstein revelations. One was calling Meryl Streep “a bitch” for not publicly denouncing Weinstein before (“she had to know!”); another was saying, “hey, men are disgusting; what do you expect?” I thought about where to position myself in the conversation since we normally debate everything. Should I expend precious energy by pointing out the painful hypocrisy of calling a woman a gendered, hateful insult for possibly doing what many, many men in Hollywood might have done as well–namely, not investigate rumors/allegations? Should I point out that the “boys will be boys” argument has been used to rationalize everything from mansplaining to stalking to rape? I grabbed my Americano, said, “Y’all are pathetic” and walked out, feeling nary an inch of remorse. I pray for a time when male entitlement–and this includes shooting your mouth off in public without assessing your audience’s receptivity–is in the rearview mirror.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy