Deeply hopeful for the new year

Backyard of the dream house


Corner of the kitchen of the dream house


Cherry-red chaise velvet chaise lounge for the living room of the dream house

Great reading I missed but shouldn't have


Gary Allen, Tamara Watson and Phillip Levine read at the MUDDY CUP/INQUIRING MINDS coffeehouse and bookstore in Saugerties, part of a great series put together by Teresa Giordano. And unfortunately and stupidly I had to miss it. I had written, in this sam post, a kind of luminous excuse: the sky was so many colors, the dogs had to be fed, the pages of the book would not stop turning on their own, and so I lost my place, and so I lost track of time while I was looking for the place, and then it was late, and the drive is long and the roads were winding, and windy, and I didn't go. The excuse itself was inspired by Phillip, who seems to be able to make verse, sweet, human verse, out of nearly everything. There was actually a concrete reason why I couldn't go. All the same, it was a — loss. One thing: the bookstore has a myspace page, where it describes itself as a swinger and an 18 year old male.

Merry Surviving

(about a woman who survived for 3 days under the snow, and was found by a search & rescue dog.)

It's Christmas, I'm looking at a paper bag printed with reindeers wearing scarves, watching the dogs chase each other outside. The power went out for a few hours around 3 a.m., which led to a dream of being old and marooned. But I'm not. Is there an equivalent to 3 days under the snow? A domestic equivalent? And why is life constantly permeated — or perforated — with a sense of connection, whereby the story I picked last month as Chronogram's fiction winner was about a man obsessed with a Ford Aerostar, the car that took me to graduate and into the first vestige of a new life, and why was it the best story, and how did it come to be that it was written by Mimi Lipson, who just happens to be with Luc Sante, who just happens to also be on Verse Chorus, etc.?

I blacked out the names of all the authors when I read the stories. But I wouldn't have known anyway. A blind spot which led right back into the small tidy circle of life. I'd been meaning to mention this.

And my father just told me this, his advice to a friend who was having trouble (his words) with her son: One of the first things I learned as a parent is how to make my children feel guilty.

Xavier and Cato, early December, before the snow.




Slam after the snow.

ran turned away.
what? he said. did I do something wrong?
he's staring at me, she said. she was referring to Old Big Guy, who was laying on his pile of clothes, his giant shovel-head resting on the edge of the bed, yellow eyes shining as they went at it.
what, never had sex with a 140 pound wolf staring at you?

Because most of the time in the cabin there were at least 2 if not 3 of the wolves, usually because Big Old Guy was there, and he had taken a fancy to one of the females, or a rank young male was injured trying to climb up the ladder, or they'd found yet another, wounded or hurt, or just too weak to be outside.

The other night in the city of Kingston the only other people on the same block were drunk coming out of the pub. A man insisted I should come out of the cold and at least get a hot cider. He was making a big deal about the cider. I said, "What's the big deal about the cider?" Asked this of a perfect stranger. He was unphased. "It's so good," he said. "You never know — you might like it." He seemed to be trying to wink at me.

I was dressed in double hats, double jackets, insulated boots, holding the dog toy. The dog toy would be given to the dog when she found me in the dark, in this mostly empty city. Because I was out there, waiting for a trailing dog to find me during an urban trail. "Well who are you waiting for, then" he wanted to know. I didn't want to tell him I was waiting for a dog. And I'd forgotten, really, what it meant to be considered a possibility. So I thanked him.

On the way back to the truck after everything, I saw the deer in the window. Further proof of the shorthand darling heart of faith in the odd world. For you.

Things We Talk About When We Talk About Love

1. whether or not to buy the yellow house
2. whether or not to get cable
3. whether the mud will melt off the dogs in the kitchen
4. where to put all the sweaters
5. how that is the best title for a book ever.
6. when the actual divorce will be fina ...

There, I said it.

Another design column I wrote for the fancy company in Palm Beach and then stole from the halls of the fancy company in Palm Beach when they laid us all off

Bird's Nest

The Beijing National Stadium as morning coffee

I dreamt about Angelina and Brad again last night. Brad, he likes to build. He believes architecture has redemptive, noble qualities. To be honest, my dream was probably inspired by the fact that I'm looking into building a Katrina Cottage, and, rightly or wrongly, his name will forever be associated with the push to rebuild New Orleans and create architecture that has meaning and value as well, including the Katrina Cottages, a great example of pastel-sided, front-porch vernacular that's done so well, Lowe's has developed it into a national product.

But since it's also the opening day of the Olympics, I flashed on the National Stadium in Beijing, another example of architecture so interesting (even to a layperson), you can recognize it as an attempt to build meaning and value into the structure. It exemplifies another kind of vernacular here: humans thinking about space and governments and tensions in a society, a vernacular of the individual and the national and how they work together.

Okay, turn away if you want to. Meaning? Value? Oy vey. It's 8 a.m. on a Friday and you'd rather think about Michael Phelps, or Dara Torres, with her 24-pack abdomen and whip-slim, age-defying hips on the cover of TIME. Or not about the Olympics at all. Or you're thinking, China, they are so BAD. They are so mean to their people. Look at all the people who were displaced by this huge nasty commie effort! Look at the what they did to poor Tibet!

But the I.O.C. voted to have the Olympics in Beijing. The I.O.C. decided they'd had enough of the postwar Jim McKay-voiced red-, white- and-blue de facto dominance on the world stage of international athletics. China knows how to put on a show, after all. What culture gives better banquets? So instead of leary-eyed U.S. of Hey Patriotism that grated on the rest of the world, we'll have a giant banquet of hundreds of marchers in color-blocked formation, and great swaths of red and gold, and those adorable little gymnasts, and sure, the back stories.

So bear with me. The stadium's nickname is the Bird's Nest. It was designed by a team of Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, assisted by the British engineering firm Arup.

It is actually remarkable. Architecture always means something, which is why, so often, it's maligned. An over-intellectualizing of something really simple: Put up a roof and walls. But we are human and we have brains and sometimes, we're going to use them and get it right. I keep grabbing you, dear reader, by your collar and saying, listen. Listen to Brad, at least. And here, Herzon and de Meuron did something noble and great. They created this elliptical, asymmetrical, porous thing that seats 91,000 people, and even in photographs, even in video, even in Google maps I can't stop looking at it.

There it sits, up on a manmade ridge in the northern part of the city that looks at once open and closed, stressed and flowing, rigid and soft. It's like a giant doughnut in a maze of steel trusses, held down like the giant in the fairy tale. The tensions between its beams and all that steel latticework, the way the roll of the roof is kept in check by the network of trusses over it, has an emotional effect: on the one hand, a sense of being held tight (and there, if you must, consider China's immensely repressive stance and force with its own people), and on the other, a sense of swelling, of growing right up against the very forces that would contain it. (Hello, 21st century, have you met China? 'Cause it owns you.)

There's so much more to say, but in the confines of a blog, I'll be spatially appropriate. One more thing, however, about its asymmetry: In the way it's higher on one side than the other, it seems to be tipping its hat.

To what, we'll have to see.

One dog was there because his owner went to jail. One dog was there because his owner was too worried she couldn't take good care of him. One dog was there because his owner kept him in jail. This is fiction.

One wolf lived on the porch because she couldn't see the steps anymore to climb down. She lived inside a plastic igloo an heiress had donated. One wolf liked to sleep between the refrigerator and the wall, which they thought was because the vibrations of the old compressor were like the sound of other wolves sleeping. One wolf, the biggest wolf of all, lived on the mound of clothes next to the bed, which prevented them from ever doing all the laundry. But there was always too much laundry to ever be all done. This is fiction too.

Sometimes I think the connection we have between us all is fiction. We make it up. Sometimes we're so good at the story we forget it's a story. Then something happens, breaks the skin apart, and we see what's underneath. Not fiction, then.

What is the difference between a hero and a nut? I'm thinking of Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man: he's brilliant and stupid at the same time, and knows it, and everyone else in the movie is sensible enough to leave him alone and just let him be that. But what is the line between not a nut and a nut? It might be the same as the line between the person who rushes into the road to save the cat and the person who holds back.

I watched a cat get run over from my kitchen window; by the time I got out there, it was twitching, blood doing bloody things, life ebbing out. All on a lovely autumn afternoon. And noone around her has claimed the cat as their own, perhaps because you don't own a dead cat; noone owns a dead cat, and yet here we all are, owning our dead mothers, our fathers, in the sense that we remain connected, attached, for all it's worth; we pin their memory onto our lapels; we wear their hats in the parade.