Dispatches: a rainy spring

March 31:

1 train, 8 AM. In the station: me, drunk man swearing at the air, nineteen MTA construction workers slowly arguing. No one seems to know if the train is running or not.


April 20:

On the train uptown. Two older ladies, strangers to each other, in adjacent seats. One turns to the other and asks "Excuse me, can I just ask you a quick question?" Other nods. I see what's coming a mile away. "Do you have a relationship with God Our Father, and do you understand why we call him Father?"

This was at 59th street. We're at 125th now and she's switched to Spanish, but as far as I can tell she's recounting the entire story of Emperor Constantine's battlefield conversion.


April 22:

My building super, my hero who stopped an invasion of rats, is from somewhere in the remains of Yugoslavia. My neighborhood is highly Spanish-speaking. I'm at home at my desk, and amid the sounds of general puttering going on outside my window, comes an exhausted exclamation in a heavy Slavic accent: "Mucho dinero? Mucho trabajo!"


April 25:

A big, ugly fly was just buzzing around my room. I swatted at it with my hand in an attempt to just shoo it into the hallway and ended up sucker-punching the little bastard right out of the air. It sat there motionless on the floor for a few seconds until I smooshed it with my shoe and went to wash my hands for ten minutes straight, feeling equal parts disgusted and possessed of supernatural powers.


April 30, 1:30 AM:

Ok, that was a definite miscalculation of the amount of work one human can reasonably get done in one day.


May 1:

Either I'm having auditory hallucinations or my Yugoslavian building super has taught the all-purpose expletives "kurva" and "kurac" to the Mexican work crew next door.


May 26:

You would think, would you not, that an outdoor concert would be called off in case of a rainstorm.

And you would also think, would you not, that the event organizers would make sure there was enough space under the hastily-constructed tent for the entire band, without pushing one violinist into the danger zone of getting torrentially slopped upon any time the wind changed direction or the tarp of the tent disgorged an amount of accumulated rainwater.

But there are many things in heaven and earth, Horatio, undreamt of in your philosophy.....


May 28:

Staying in character, I've apparently joined a socialist community chorus.


June 3:

So my roommate has an adorable little son. The kid doesn't live here but visits often. One result of this is that every now and then I'll see a pair of tiny shoes by the door or a toy on the couch.
Today, I found two. A little stuffed hedgehog and a little stuffed fox. This in itself felt portentous - a clear reference to Isaiah Berlin's essay on the two modes of thought (after Aesop) - a fox knows many small things, a hedgehog knows one big thing. Generalist and specialist. It's a metaphor that has stuck with me all year, full of provocation and imagery as I try to figure out what kind of person I really am, how I exist in the world and what I really want to be when I grow up.
But the main issue was both these little plushies have had their faces chewed off by something. Ripped to shreds, fluffy stuffing spilling out everywhere, it's just gruesome. Remarkable symbolism: has El Ratón Gigante returned, gnawing through the boards under the kitchen sink again to claim his rightful kingdom - and in so doing, left a profoundly radical and anarcho-liberationist symbol of the tearing down of all binary modes of thought?