God Bless Texas!

I am soon embarking on Couch by Couchwest, a summer tour of America....and the couches of my friends.

Should you wish to reserve a cushion to be blessed by my fulsome derrière, please hit the "Contact the Trust Fund Reporter" avatar and your offer may be considered.

Through June 30: New York
June 30/July 1: Washington, D.C.
July 5: New York
July 8: Houston
July 12: Austin
July 14: Houston
July 22: San Francisco/Los Angeles
July 31: Chicago
August 5: Houston
August 7: New York

Tune in for correspondence from the road....

In New York when I sleep with the window
open I do it with the feeling of also being
ajar. The noises carom through the
apartment canyons and arise in me
a distrust of what I'll never fathom:
my neighbors are all strangers.

I grew up in three houses
in Houston. We never opened
windows, not even to shout.
We had central air. Outside
there were no noises to dread
only cicadas.

Other pains are left closed
for being wasteful of sleep. In France
the bats would come in, in Prague,
you'd never rest, hearing the
trains going and coming. I don't
know which scared me more.

In Jerusalem there is no air
-- so we hold our breaths --
is that not the narrative?

The windows never close
and at dawn when the minarets
sound, the ceilings warm with prayers
and held breaths.

I take an advanced boxing class at the gym on Sunday mornings when I have the wherewithal (read: gastrointestinal equilibrium) to make it there for the abuse. Picture fifteen gay men, four trophy wives, and me taking marching orders from a brohawked martinet at eleven on Sunday mornings: push-ups, punching drills, squats, et al. The class is designed to make the participants fail and it usually works.

On Sunday, it was exceptionally difficult. We were lagging during the last fifteen minutes as the task was to repeat jab/cross combinations with our version of Mick screaming at us (pretend like you're fucking somebody up!).

There was a tension in the room as we stalled until one of the most effete men in the class shouted FUCK FATHER'S DAY!!! and the class responded with laughter both uncomfortable and concordant and then finished the set strong, sweating in agony.

I got home and had no calls because everyone local had plans. I turned on the Astros game. It's rare that I get to see my hometown team play on television but this weekend they were facing the Yankees (a rarity of interleague play). New York versus Houston. Home versus home.

There was my stadium on television, all the local ads still made sense, the Texas flags, and all the players wore blue ribbons for Father's Day. The Yankees have an entire television station dedicated to the glory of their baseball team. Each Yankee game is broadcast and the games are replayed at least three times before the next game comes on and then there are special shows that commemorate past championships (the Yankees have won 26 World Series, the Astros have won none). The rest of the line-up includes Yankee analysis and interviews with players and coaches.

Since I am too tired from punching the air to type, here are some very scattered notes on the game:

One of the only heroes left on the Astros is Roy Oswalt, a pitcher from Mississippi whose tiny physical volume requires him to just gun the ball in at high speeds instead of letting his weight and momentum carry him through his pitches. He is wiry short, Southern tough. The only remaining joy of my team is watching him play.

The announcer announces that Roy Oswalt's father is ironically named Houston. I wonder if Houston Oswalt knows the difference between coincidences and irony.

A few years ago, the owner of the Astros offered to buy Oswalt a tractor if he pitched the Astros into the World Series and Oswalt was so excited that he threw one of the best games in the team's playoff history. He got the tractor but the Astros got swept out of the World Series. Since then, Oswalt (like the 'Stros) has been troubled.

In the first inning the announcer tells us that Yankees outfielder Johnny Damon recently switched baseball bats from ash bats to maple, fearing that ash bats will be discontinued; the only problem with maple bats is that Damon shatters them. On the next pitch, Damon shatters his bat.

While the staff cleans up the shards, the producers show a video tribute from Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain to his father Harlan who lives on an Indian reservation and once had polio. The announcers refrain from making comments about irony.

Damon eventually gets on base only to get thrown out while stealing second by the catcher. The catcher for the Astros is Brad Ausmus, a Jew who graduated from Dartmouth. Somehow that's ironic, right guys?

The camera pans to father/daughter combinations, including a dad in a Yankees cap holding the hand of a girl with an Astros hat on. The announcer says something stupid.

Alex Rodriguez (the reigning American League MVP who will redeem all of baseball's tainted records when he breaks them) steps up to the plate and takes a hack at an Oswalt pitch and it carries into the outfield.

Even in flying out and failing, he still looks unassailable.

He later makes a stabbing grab at a ball hit to the third base corner by Miguel Tejada. The hit would have easily been a double, but Rodriguez somehow reaches beyond himself and pulls it off the grass, saving two runs for the Yankees (Tejada was so stunned by the catch that he slid into first base in disbelief while attempting to beat the throw).

A-Rod then proceeds to hit a three-run blast into the stands at his next at-bat.

This is how nonchalant A-Rod appears after knocking a home run against the best pitcher in Astros history. With the Astros now losing 9-0, I shut off the game.

New York wins big, 13-0.

I could likely devote an entire website to the subject of Sundays.

I ran four miles, down the Westside Highway to Battery Park where a lot of Europeans and Asians were shuttling between Ground Zero and the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. They walked with maps open, the angle of their collective forward leaning matched the weather, somewhere close to 75 degrees.

On the run down, I passed the parks that are slivered out of the highway like almonds and dressed in grass. A Manhattan microcosm: there is barely enough room to do anything between the Hudson and the highway but locals crowd the yards to make the most of them, girls tan beside the road in bras, men read the Journal shirtless.

Every ten blocks is a pier but everyone seems distrustful of them. They are fragments of recreation, mere cement garnishes where only the kids seem not to notice their lacking. The ferry is my turnaround point, a man is playing Louis Armstrong on a horn for money (we all know which song but it sounds like taps). I am drenched in not belonging, I start back.

Above the Century 21 department store there is a boldly fonted sign that says REMEMBER FATHER'S DAY; I would not have been able to see the sign from the pathway if the towers hadn't been knocked down. My running mix goes from Mystery Train to The Eraser, Elvis to England and I get home in time for brunch at the French cafe down the street where I am a regular.

The prix fixe comes with steak and oeufs, frites, salad, mimosa, cafe au lait, pain, fruit, and crepe, which for $20 seems like a deal. Business is slow my waiter confides, the Hamptons have called, the weather is good.

I am at a place called Le Petit Bistro and people pass it by and marvel to each other about how small it is. I am reading a haunting short story about abortion and the universe before my steak arrives and a man stops to tell me how wonderful the book is. I've said I've read it before and it's a favorite and he seems all ready to join me until I share that a old girlfriend had originally given it to me and then he leaves shortly after I give over this lie (the truth is that if a girl had actually given me this book I wouldn't have let her go).

That's Chelsea. It's driven by carnal motivations, it's like everywhere else in this country but simply more honest.

From my chair I can see two American flags on my block. One is blowing twisted at the top of the bank on west fifteen street and eighth avenue. The other is faded like Jasper John, hanging from a fire escape above a graffitied mailbox.

A man of letters with a garish hat grabs the other outside table. He has red shoes and a cane. I furtively take his picture and then erase it. I look down at find spots where the grease from my steak has Pollacked my white polo shirt.

Right away I know they are stains that are not going to wash out. Immediately I find this comforting. Whenever I wear the shirt I am going to remember what I did on the first day of June.

A brief TFR shout-out to Michael Maze for bringing this wonderful piece to my attention.

This is pretty special, everyone should read this...as I'm learning...this means me.

Selfishly, I'd like to connect it to a post I recently wrote about a visit to Central Park which I feel embodies the malady and the cure.

Adam

P.S. If you're looking for the column Wieseltier is referencing in the column below, I am almost sure it's this one.

Emptiness
from The New Republic

I'm empty. No, not really empty; I was trained not to be that. The battle of ideas is never over, is it? The responsible citizen, the responsible critic: they are sleepless creatures. Last week I was in Jerusalem for a few days, and I am brimming with impressions and ideas. Obama and Clinton and McCain continue to inspire thoughts, and of course witticisms. A few days ago a friend of mine published a miserable piece on a matter about which I care deeply, and I am of a mind to be withering about it. The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film. But for now I am refusing to play. I am in the mood not to be smart.

The gladiatorial combat of opinion, of transient things importantly stated, leaves me cold. It is not transience at its best. Recent joys and sorrows have shaken me loose, temporarily, from the frenzy of applied intelligence, from the bait of the hum and the buzz. Nothing is more enlivening than private experience, not even a primary in a major state.

So I prefer, as Barthes once said in a lecture, to entrust myself to the banality within me, and thereby be restored to the sort of reflection that does not await the evening news to find its subject. Compared to the mad rush of fine minds to satisfy the appetites of the world, to rise in the world by interpreting it, there is nothing at all parochial about the confinements of interiority; turning away from what passes for history, turning inward, hitting the "off" switches, is a kind of reverse cosmopolitanism.

And mawkishly I must admit also that the catastrophes in Burma and China have had the distant consequence of shutting me up: I cannot quite work myself into a consideration of those children from a policy standpoint, though I am grateful that others will do so, and punditry is no place for the agonies of philosophy. (That is a minority opinion, of course. It is remarkable how many of the ultimate questions can now be answered in 750 words.) So my problem is that I am not empty enough. The habit of discourse is hard to break. One way to elide reality is to keep talking about it.

A decade ago I used to worry that the new technologies of communication would irreparably damage writing, and therefore reading, and therefore the life of language. Email is more than typing but less than writing, and the brevity that is decreed by its speed has produced all sorts of degradations of informality and inarticulateness. That, as I say, was a decade ago. But now there is nothing more dazzling on the web, and hence in the galaxy, than video, and every newspaper, every magazine, every bedroom, is a television studio, and so it is the end of significant speech that I anxiously envision. It is being usurped by talkativeness. All those prattling heads--how can people spend so much time watching other people speak? Is conversation a sport? Is all this chin music really conversation? Are we witnessing the process of opinionformation in a wired democracy, or is this just the voyeurism of the educated, a kind of high-end eavesdropping--a silly fantasy of PartisanReview.com?

Whatever it is, the American fear of silence may finally be retired, because silence, like oblivion, is no more. Everybody will now be heard from, even if it will be hard to hear anybody. As for the jabberers themselves: they do not look their best, and often they demonstrate that there are few activities less effortful than speech. The more substantial the theme, the more ludicrous is its dispatch in a few minutes of earnest chatter.

Go to a dreary website called Bigthink.com and "browse big ideas"--"identity," "life and death, " "truth and justice"--and you will see what I mean. Here is the false promise of the end of obscurity; profundity for busy people, delivered by people with time on their hands; an electronic gospel of relaxation; a slick hoax upon real thinking. And back in the material world, there are journals that sometimes look like the print-versions of their loquacious festivals and conferences. The rabbis in antiquity--B.C., or before connectedness--created a voluntary institution of personal mortification called a "speech fast," in which an individual would refrain from talking for a day so as to recover his moral and mental bearings. Life was never as overwhelming as it is now, but it was always overwhelming; and verbal abstention was regarded as a reliable instrument for stopping the madness. But in a logorrheic society, in which obtrusiveness confers ontology and you are what you say, such an act of inner renovation, such a spiritual exercise, is almost unimaginable. If you are what you say, you are nothing when you say nothing.

TFR Note: Stop here if you're tired, otherwise, it's onto abstractville.

The road from Farragut Square to Dupont Circle was once a grand and lovely boulevard. Where arid office buildings now stand noble dwellings once stood. A photograph from 1890 shows the elegant mansions of Shepherd's Row on the northeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street, in one of whose ballrooms a party once concluded with the release of thousands of butterflies, and across the street a quiet grove of trees. For the past few weeks a wrecking ball has been destroying a severe Alphaville-like structure on that same corner. Every day the violence brought more of the building down, exposing more of its steel and cement entrails. It was a splendid emblem of the lucky freakishness of this country: the ruins so familiar from photographs of terrorism here signify (but alas, no longer always) prosperity. Finally there stood only a twisting nine- story gyre of scheduled devastation, with dirtied white doors opening into nothingness, and in the middle of a moonless night it, too, was crushed. The spectacle of this wound in the city was irresistible, and not only for the historical irony that it suggested. It was a gash in the local order, a glimpse of the desolation that lives beneath the noisy organizations of existence, and therefore it pleased me: it confirmed my impatience with the patina, and ratified the collapse of my pride in my own sophistication. The eruption of chaos in the heart of one of the world capitals of instrumental rationality made me glad. Even here some darkness may be detected. The tranquility of the rubble held me. This time the call of brilliant argument would have to wait, and yield to more fundamental reveries in which brilliance has no place. And so my confused friend, the one who perpetrated that op-ed piece, got away. He knows who he is.

I go to Central Park three times a week now that school is out and I'm also slightly unemployed. Pardon the dust, we are renovating here.

My friend Mike calls and asks where I am. It had been raining off-and-on all day but it was finally clear so I told him to come to Central Park where I was being a cliche, some Lou Reed that my big sister gave me in my headphones, a paper cup of Earl Grey, and the newest New Yorker. I walked with it hanging out of my backpocket so that people would see. I've got to be special.

There was a man skating at the Mall, east of the Ramble and south of the Bethesda angel and he could balance two Nalgenes on his head and everyone stood in awe of someone who had made a talent out of nothing...he's got to be special.

a different skater fell flat and his girlfriend laughed at him, I thought he did it for her. I can relate. On second or third dates I like to go for sushi and handle my chopsticks badly so I can be nice and vulnerable seeming; the reality is that I don't handle my chopsticks well regardless of the company.

It was a normal day in the park in the way that it's normal when it's not the weekend. As always a movie was being filmed; I've reached the point where I've stopped being curious about those things...someone better will tell me about it even if I was there. As always, by the Ramble there was an Asian bride posing for pictures in her wedding dress.

At the Bow Bridge there were couples posing for pictures and making out. They were happy and European. They made their way down by the water, furtively passed some baby strollers, and fed the ducks bread because they were much cuter than the pigeons.

I don't know if I read this somewhere or heard it in a dream, but I remember a voice telling me not to write eulogies for people you don't know. It was the same voice that told me that everyone does the right thing in the end; they have no choice but to.

Being weeks shy of a birthday hollows out those corridors so the voices come through. It sounded like a poet I studied with in Prague. Marvin Bell; in a poem to his wife he wrote a child said it, and it seemed true: 'things that are lost are all equal.' The rest of the poem was that good too.

Some things I didn't write down, especially watching the boys play baseball, which is good because who wants to live with his pen always out, it's like a person who brings a camera everywhere and doesn't actually live in moments, only in the mise en scene. I don't know what I am trying to say here.

Two girls in a rowboat passed by, they were taking pictures of each other rowing and almost falling out; pictures that were invariably bound for the facebook. We are being a country of individuals on display, we have to differentiate ourselves, we have no common causes. I am a major offender.

I hadn't aimed to go emo but I am writing this late at night...and the three poems in the New Yorker were about recycling in Santa Fe, love and geese, and movies that feature rain. But then, what weren't they about?

FRANKFURT, Germany, May 16 (UPI) -- A German scientist has proved that people forced to smile and take on-the-job insults suffer more and longer-lasting stress that may harm their health.

Dieter Zapf of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt studied 4,000 volunteers working in a fake call center. Half were allowed to respond in kind to abuse on the other end of the line while the other half had to suck it up, The Telegraph reports.

He found that those able to answer back had a brief increase in heart rate. Those who could not had stress symptoms that lasted much longer.

"Every time a person is forced to repress his true feelings there are negative consequences," Zapf said. "We are all able to rein in our emotions but it becomes difficult to do this over a protracted period."

In an interview with the German healthcare magazine Apotheken Umschau, Zapf suggested that people who must keep smiling on the job should get regular breaks to let it out.

The next day
I started reading
Goodbye, Columbus.

The End

It's hardly credible how
it's 3 A.M. again on Sunday
-- Mother's Day May --
and I've put my flask on a
stranger's sill and bared my chest
getting smaller by the year.

The blinds are down
in the Upper West Side
and in the morning I will
go blocks from her
for the Sunday Times
and a deli in the lower 80s:
pastrami eggs and a latke base,
tricolor slaw that leaks to
the pickles, my fingers
reek of half-sours
until Wednesday
afternoon.

Columbus Circle
I switched A to C train,
a pivot foot cresting
express to local,
first initial to last
and there you were,
also waiting,
my never-friend.

I'm still living at home you say,
like home was an old friend we used to share
-- some place that was broken into --
we overlook the color
always inside subway cars
(elephant gray)
and we watch the walls pass.

It's hardly credible how
on days built for running away,
discoveries always collide
with the old disciples
of dead religions.

I tell you how good you have it,
to still live at home;
good memory you tell me back.