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is waking up half a year later feeling like you’ve been on an episode of Shipmates where someone forgot to yell “cut!”

In honor of my being 30–the only benefit of which I’ve noticed thus far being that I can blithely refer to “my twenties”–I decided to turn once more for guidance to the sticky black orb sitting on my kitchen counter near piles of stupid mail. Did I explain that the ball is sticky? It is. It’s a strange kind of only-in-new-york grime. Maybe it’s more tacky than sticky. I mean, it’s tacky, but you know. Maybe it’s some kind of prophetic slime. Anyone touched a soothsayer? Are they sticky?

Q: should I?
A: It is decidedly so

Q: will I?
A: It is certain

Hm.

but I can’t figure out which I care less about, this new pope hoo-ha or sports. It’s a draw. Also, I bet if you were to say “new pope hoo-ha” over and over eventually you’d say “new poop” or even “no poop.” A less mature person might laugh about that.

is the turnstile’s way of calling you a douchebag.

ok, survey time!

You are going to the movies, or collecting food stamps, or buying expensive lingerie. You arrive and there’s a whole bunch of people already there! Do you

a) get IN line
b) get ON line

please respond and include whether you’re from the east or west coast if you feel so inclined. thank you!

What cowpies and malarkey!* Except this article, by Nick Sylvester, whom I do not know, about the fascism** of the current 80s revival, is great. I wish I had written it.

*this is a joke. must I explain everything to you?
** not his words

I’m sorry I said that thing about how you should just crawl up my ass and die. I was angry and you were caught in the cross hairs. The truth is that you aren’t so bad and actually, I DO appreciate the extra hour to play hop scotch and catch rainbows in mason jars. So, guess you do know me better than I know myself! What say we hold hands and skip past the sun-dappled bums snoozing near the port authority area? ok then!

heart,
A

On the way to work I pass by a number of butcher shops on a little stretch of 9th I like to call “meat alley.” (not to be confused with a stretch of 38th b/w 9th and 10th that, as of this morning, I like to call “soiled underwear just sitting on the sidewalk alley”). Anyway, there was a sign in the window of one of the shops for “Frenched Rack of Kangaroo.”

you could say that my prose is a delightful blend of innocent, wide-eyed jouissance and joie de vivre, and cool timeworn wisdom/maturity. you could and you should. but maybe lay off the Frenchy crap, eh? but regardless, you may be wondering how old I am, and so you may be interested to know that in one month I will be 30. And how am I feeling about that? let’s ask the magic 8 ball:

q: how am I feeling about that?
a: most likely

pretty much sums it up.

also: kind of old-ish.

When I was a little kid my parents went away for a while and left my sister and me with a babysitter. I remember the whole weekend, or week (kids, like dogs, can’t really perceive duration of time, it’s all infinite and interminable) as being really sad and lonely. One night I walked into my parents room and saw all my dad’s junk on his nightstand and felt so relieved and comforted by it, as if suddenly remembering that if I sat among my parents’ things–in particular I’m remembering my dad’s stuffed koala with the dumb arms that velcroed into a “hug” around a coffee mug that was full of magic markers and pencils– it would be like they were there a little bit.

When my dad had a heart attack some years ago I drove to the hospital, following the ambulance, and my sister had a friend drive her down from school to meet us there. That night, when my dad was in the ICU, my mom stayed with him while my sister and I went home to take care of the dog and wait things out. Upon returning home I saw little puddles of wetness from where the paramedics had tried to start an IV and the wrappers and plastic caps from syringes near the chair where he’d been sitting when it happened. I think there was even one of those suction cup things they put on your chest. My mom called to say that she had been making hot chocolate for my dad and had left some milk in the microwave and could I remember to take it out. I remember thinking at the time that if my dad didn’t make it, the fucking milk from the hot chocolate that was left in the microwave would kill me.

Some years later we were all in Las Vegas and, included in the room service, was a tiny bottle of Tabasco. It was so cute that we decided to give it a name, as I’m wont to do with far too many inamimate objects. My dad chose Thad, short for Thaddeus. On the drive home he passed out from medication he was taking (referred to in the family as the Fake Heart Attack, or Fake HA, for short, as we thought he was having another heart attack.) He spent the night in the hospital in the desert and I spent the night thinking that you just can’t name a tiny bottle Thad and then die right away.

I’m really not ok with the way people can pass out of your life, or out of life in general, but their stuff remains. I could go on about pets and their collars and kennels and water bottles. About boyfriends and their phones and shirts and watches. About friends who died leaving whole houses of stuff behind.

People’s stuff makes them so human. And everything human seems to make me ache.

I was thinking about this in the subway station the other day. And I was thinking that I should write something about this someday, about the poetry of junk, and then I was thinking that in my current vocation there would never be a chance to do that, not even a little. And then the train came.