Archive | Travel Matters

Lilacs Twice and Desert Sun

Lately I keep whispering to myself: “You saw lilacs twice this year.” And it’s true. I saw them bloom in Brooklyn in early May, and then again when I traveled up to Provincetown and Greater Boston later that month. It was a shock, really. I’d been driving up terrible old Route 6 of Cape Cod when this heady fragrance started supplanting the gas fumes. It took a hot minute to realize the smell was not me having a stroke but lilacs. Again.

These last few months have been like a magic hour that just hasn’t ended.

I had so dreaded this year. Had seen the writing on the wall about the demise of my NY1 show and labor journal job; had been waging a legal battle of the sort that few long-time New Yorkers elude (housing-related); had regarded the second half of my forties as–oh, I’ll just say it–the beginning of the end. The boobs falling, the hair greying, the eyesight fading. You get the picture. Not pretty. Continue Reading →

Grateful to be Grateful: Thanksgiving 2015

For as long as I can remember, Thanksgiving weekend has been difficult—often the most trying time of the year. In general, I have never been much for official holidays. Valentine’s Day is drek; the “parent holidays” are the emotional equivalent of an emergency root canal; New Year’s Day is amateur hour layered upon the fake birthday of Jesus. I even find Groundhog’s Day to be unhappily charged, though this stems from a personal coincidence.

But Thanksgiving has always loomed as the worst.

It’s not just that it is a blithe celebration of the worst strain of colonialism. It’s not just that a yearly gratitude practice rings as false as a Hallmark sympathy card. (Gratitude is a daily—hourly!—value in my cosmology.) It’s that no other day is so much about biological/nuclear family, and I became a conscientious objector to these institutions for very real, very painful reasons. Continue Reading →

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