I've Nothing New to Say

It is Saturday; always start with time. To follow: I am in my apartment. I've decided to make it a Sabbath. I worked Friday night and it was slow until friends and regulars stopped by and we all just gave up on making it exciting, which was strangely exciting. I taught one of my regulars about aquavit and told him a little about Egypt. I described Cairo as a city not need of a mayor, but rather a ringmaster (nothing new [and thefted from an Amichai poem about Jerusalem]), asked him to picture a city with 18 million people navigating their way through it with no stoplights. How people ran across four lane highways and how donkey-drawn carts cut off our speeding van.

I told him how we were pitched cigarettes and tea and batteries and trinkets and papyrus and cottons and linens at every stop. It was not beautiful, not even in the sad way. My one close Arab friend was in town last week and at lunch, he said the same thing; this makes me feel better about saying it openly. I censor myself too much (nothing new).

We stayed open late at the bar, drinking with my boss's friends and then with mine and I needed release and drank too much gin (not so new). I talked to strangers, smoked cigarettes, and on the way home, I tried to talk to my cab driver about politics of his home country (all things not new). The cabbie censored himself too in that not new way.

At 3:14 (representing both pi and metaphorical realization of my overactivity), I emptied my stomach of excess gin and Irish whiskey into my toilet (rare, but certainly not new) without making a mess, giggled at the paradox of being neurotic drunk, recognized it as not really paradoxical, possibly felt sad about it or just breathed heavy, and fell asleep in my clothes with one song on repeat all night and all the lights on.

It was 8:14 when I woke up, brushed my teeth again, drank a liter of water, took two advil, slept until 11 with the door open and the windy (newly) February gushing and myself needling myself further into the constitution of my comforter as the gin had filled the straw stirrer. I woke and felt relaxed. It was a peace and a gratitude. I ordered my breakfast online and went back to sleep and woke up just before it arrived. I spoke on the phone with a friend who marveled from Oregon about how I had the capacity to order a breakfast burrito to my door at my leisure. I told him that it might be the thing I like most about New York City.

Through a friend, I watched a movie that is still in the movie theaters about youth and pregnancy and love. I got choked up a little toward the end, not exactly knowing why, I thought it might be because nothing was new. I pulled a book off of my shelf and read it aloud while the gusty granite-shaded Saturday outside fomented no urgency in me to leave. The quote before the book (The Lice) was from Heraclitus, someone who is certainly not new.

All men are deceived by the appearances of things, even Homer himself, who was the wisest man in Greece; for he was deceived by boys catching lice, they said to him, "What we have caught and what we have killed we have left behind, but what has escaped us we bring with us."

I had read this book before and it wasn't new. The wonderment was new though. And like many times before, I read through it before I got tired of turning the words over and asking what it meant; I had my ideas already, none of which were new, but derivative of old ones; maybe the continuum was overrated. The book went to my nightstand, which means that sooner or later it will end up on my couch and then my floor and I will pick it up in a few weeks from now, not before I cut and stumble and trip over it like the others and finally pick it up again and either manage to put it back on the shelf again or read it one night not far from now and when I've had it, I'll put it on my nightstand again.