the guez

There’s something special about the place and time where I live, a feeling that is intensified by the speed it's all changing. My friends and I live now in this neighborhood as if there is an end date. One day we won’t belong here anymore. That knowledge colors all my experiences in Greenpoint. It was midnight on a Friday night and I was biking home from a dinner party. It had rained earlier in the evening, and my clothes were still damp from the ride out. I raced myself home, trying to build heat against the wind, hurtling past dark shapes on the late-night bike path, crossing invisible lines through neighborhoods, counting each crossing as a leg of a straight-line journey towards my bed and the promise of sleeping soft and warm. I swept past factories and more factories and the lone Hasidic man on his way home. Then glossy plastic condos, too-bright against the night. The smell of water, the river close but invisible. Other cyclists wizzed towards me and past again, all s...

Oh Brooklyn Coworking,oh place of many names, what words could I use to describe your edges, your curves, your science, your politics? Do I start with your quiet block of flowering trees, your white-washed exterior? Should I introduce you with your tangles of morning glories? Should I speak of activists, of collective art and theory, of debates long into the night with great minds from Italy and Queens? Do I start with the boys who live in back, the Havemeyer street boys, of warm soup on rainy days, the banjo yoga practicing on afternoons, the sharing of kindnesses. Do I talk of the way this place and the people in it fit me more than any other place has, more than any single lover? Do I talk of patriots and ex-patriots and sweaty lectures with people poured into the floor? Do I talk of dinner parties and dancing and standing silhouettes smoking outside windows? Do I talk of words and Not an Alternative and Zizek and Badiou? Of Germans and Italians and participation and design?...

         I am standing up in the old rowboat, surveying the situation: the trees between the heat of the sky and the shady spot of the lake, the water deep enough for swimming, the rocky outcropping tucked just out of sight of the No Swimming sign. We drift.           “What we need is a rope,” I say.          “I have a rope,” says M.           “You brought rope?”           “Yes, because I am a boy!” Triumphant, he buries his head into his backpack, and I sit back and think about the rhyme, about snails and puppydog tails and some other line that I can’t remember, and how most boys are so much more fun than most girls when it comes to adventures, except for maybe Ange who knows how to build a snowfort and can tell you what trees are safe to eat. I lose myself for a moment, running my hand through the water, thinking about how this boy is more fun than mos...

It makes sense, I guess, that the silences in one part of one's life would cause silences in others. Eight months since I last wrote one of these. Oh the tales I could tell if only I would. But I am moving on, skipping ahead into summer.