11/11/11 Fall Fell

Overnight, the city has gone from the shabby end of summer to full blown fall. The ginko trees shed golden leaves in sheets as cold wind gusts down Brooklyn streets.

Katie and I walk west with clouds scudding overhead, past trees with brick-toned leaves. "Are they the same color as my hair?" she asks, knowing that, even in the fleeting sun, they couldn't possibly shine as bright as that.

10/30/11

We walk down the center of Ocean Parkway, a street designed by Olmstead and Vaux, in Gravesend. I'm doing research for the book I'm writing, part of which takes place right nearby here.

Katie and I try to process the monstrous houses that line the street, all of them fairly new, and wonder if the walking tour this book has sent us on is maybe a little too sanitized for my purposes. After yet another McMansion looms over our pathway, we agree they're a bit boring, and content ourselves with the glorious, perfect blue sky fall day we've been given in the wake of yesterday's bizarre snow.

10/29/11 In October?

We lie in bed and watch the news while the blond anchor with the bad hair smiles and tells us about the snow coming our way. It's almost eleven, and we have no real motivation to get up.

I only half-believe the blond anchor until I'm sitting down in the front of the house to do yoga, and it starts to come down. Katie runs up to the window in her PJ's and yells at the descending snow, "What the hell, nature?"

1/1/11 We ended up straightening up a little

"Pooks, I'm starting to feel like I'm wasting my life," I told Katie, as we sat watching "Sister Wives" while sitting around without pants on and trying to recover from the previous night.

"Well, do you want to try cleaning this place up a little?" She gestured to the piles of stuff, reminders of our guests from the past week, and of the blizzard that still clogs the streets.

When I demure at the immensity of the job, she says, "Well, it's not like we can really clean up, since Bloomberg won't let us throw out our garbage."

12/12/10 God doesn't mind if you have a good time

The spattering rain is gusting sideways at us as we walk to church, late (as usual), and a little hungover. The party went very late last night, but was one of those perfect parties where you recognize the joy of hanging out past the lightweights to connect with the few folks left over afterwards in a mildly worn out, pleasurable lassitude.

Now we're stumbling through a downpour to go to a later service, and I notice one of the joys of Catholicism is, contrary to my expectations, there's no indication of guilt for any supposed sin I might have committed just by having a good time last night.

Katie's bright yellow raincoat and orange parasol are no match for the deluge, and we slosh into mass, the choir singing, both of us soaked to the knees, and Katie leans over and whispers, "Let's sit close to the front."

12/9/10 late nights in the slope

The sidewalks of Park Slope roll up at about 11:30, so I walk down to the subway station to pick up Katie after her shift ends. Normally we hold hands, but the cold has us both shoving our hands in our pockets and striding along, hurrying to escape the freezing cold, chatting and laughing even as we keep it moving.

Finally inside the warm apartment building, standing outside our apartment door, I can hear the cat inside yowling in displeasure at our continued insistence on leaving the house instead of sitting on the couch where she can ignore us properly. I'm pretty sure she's going to wake up the entire building.

11/24/10 Who really runs this joint.

The cat wanders the rooms of our (to her) incomprehensibly huge apartment, yowling in her wailing-baby voice. When I finally make my way into the room where she normally sleeps, I discover the window has been left open, and a chill breeze blows over the perch where she keeps a bored eye on the street below.

She watches me reproachfully, legs curled up beneath her, from underneath the table, as I stumble over to the window and close it after only three attempts.

Her wishes granted, she stands, arches her back, and trots to the litter box, claws clicking contempt on the wood floor, to let me know exactly what she thinks of my shoddy management of the home where she is, obviously, an unwilling prisoner.

11/14/10 She's had a Cold

We walk down Union from the library on a beautiful fall day. The air smells of spice and woodsmoke, and the light is golden beneath a blue sky wisped with high, thin clouds.

I inhale deeply, and say to Katie, "Man, smell that?"

She shakes her head sadly, saying, "All I've been able to smell for the past week is too much Murphy's Oil Soap and the liquor on my maitre d's breath."

11/10/10 Contrasts

I sit on the mat in the half-light before the sun comes up, and breathe deeply. My mat faces roughly east, as it has in almost every apartment I've ever lived that suited me at all, and I can see out the windows on the front of our building clouds lit from below by the rising sun shading from a vivid pink to a brilliant gold against a gray sky.

My wedding ring clicks on the wood floor as I shift to a new position in my routine. I never take it off.

10-28-10 reminds me of the day I proposed

The stumps of downed trees still line the streets like broken teeth, reminders of the plagues God has visited on our borough this year (the hail that recently fell, while leaving no visible scars the way the tornado did, lingers more in the mind for me, as I was underground when the tornado struck).

I came up above ground from the subway yesterday only to find the remnants of a flood moving off east. One of the brightest rainbows I've ever seen shone strong and wide across a slate gray sky as the storm trundled off.

Traffic stopped, people stared, cameraphones cradled in their hands, smiles wide, and I said to my neighbor, "Looks like God won't flood us today."

10-22-10 Fall arrives - we fight off the chill

We come home late from our respective outings, she from work, and me from rehearsal, to find the kitchen a disaster and the sink stacked with dishes, courtesy our soon-to-move-back-to-where-he's-from roommate, but we still manage to find a clean cocktail glass for Katie and a beer for me. An amaretto sour and a hefeweizen later, and we're almost ready to go to bed, dishes be damned.

Fall creeps in around the corners of the windows and beneath the doors, his cold breath chilling us, and Katie, always more susceptible to the cold than I, hugs herself for a moment before proposing the perfect solution to the quandary of undressing for bed in our chilled room. "Want to fool around?" she asks innocently.

11/11/09 - Nicholson Baker's "Box of Matches" inspired me

Bicycling through Prospect Park on a mildly chilly Fall day, the leaves spin lazy whorls through the gray air like they just don't care. I taste that sour-spicy smell of decaying leaves, cold, and soil that is specifically fall, and nostalgia hits me so hard I almost start crying. So many good things that I had to destroy, so many things that I thought I could never have again, all coming back to me, and I am so grateful.

"I'm here," I say out loud, to remind myself that I am, and I put nostalgia aside for a minute so I don't miss a second, push the pedals again, watch the leaves gather into drifts on the side of the road.

7/31/09 - too hot, too humid, too crowded

Even the massive bulk of the trains hurtling by the platform can't stir the thick, tepid air. Sweat hangs on every passing face like a soaked veil.

The girl sitting next to me on the bench as we wait for the next Q to whisk us away to air-conditioned (albeit standing, crowded) nirvana arranges herself just so to avoid touching me accidentally, and I do likewise. We sit, simmering in the wet air, watching the trains come and go on the other, Brooklyn-bound platform, and pretending we don't notice each other at all.

7/26/09 - Weird ways we're connected

The sun continues to shine, despite the dire warnings of the Weather Channel et al. We wander down Bergen Street and look at the dogs and people, count the stores that have closed and the new ones that seem to spring up immediately to take the place of the fallen.

When I see Jai at the Chocolate Room (when did his hair begin to gray like that?) he is sweet and polite, and it's good to see him, but as usual, most people have someplace to be and I'll talk all day. He politely bids Katie and I good day, and extricates himself, and as we're walking away, Katie says, "He went to NC State, right?"

7/12/09 - on returning

We return to New York mid-day to find glorious weather, a perfect reminder of why we love this city, but New York is also instantly one of the most annoying cities in the world, with its ridiculous traffic and price-gouging cabbies and crowded sidewalks where no one seems to know how to walk without knocking somebody down.

We take a walk to enjoy the Brooklyn late-afternoon sunshine after we've had some dinner and a couple of drinks. On the corner, a man rummages in a garbage can singing quietly to himself, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere...."

Katie says, "Sir, might I suggest you try your luck elsewhere."

7/4/09 - gayest post yet

Stood in the dark outside beside my parent's pool in the rain, watching clouds part to reveal an almost full, incredibly bright moon. The rain fell softly and steadily, and I stood there and got wet. I was able to see almost as well as during the day, the moon was so bright.

Are there ever rainbows made from moonlight?

6/27/09 - Blessings

The Highline Park is packed on this mostly-sunny, unsettled day, and we are surrounded by hundreds of people, but no one seems to notice as I get on one knee and open the box with the ring to ask the question I've been waiting to ask. After the obligatory calls to the parents there's pictures on cell phones sent to friends without explanation in hopes of blowing their minds.

As we run to the subway, the clouds that have been gathering over Jersey finally begin their assault on Manhattan, but when we come above ground in Brooklyn, the sun shines bright through the pouring rain. I look East, following the path of the storm, to see a rainbow bending across the sky, and I get the feeling that we have been blessed.

6/21/09 - pop culture/the auto-tune wants what it wants

After spending most of the morning listening to this, Katie and I have some friends over at her house to watch "High School Musical" 1 and 2. I have obviously become extremely sensitive to auto-tune by this point, and after a few drinks to calm my reflexive squeamishness with both the subject matter and execution of these homosexual recruitment films, I spend most of the afternoon commenting on who's been "tuned" the most (hint: it's Ashley Tisdale, though Vanessa Hudgens (whom I've seen naked, thank you interwebs) comes in a close second) and marveling at the incestuous and gay sub-plots that permeate these wholsome, "family-oriented" movies.

After one of my semi-rants, Katie looks over at me calmly and says "Hey, the auto-tune wants what it wants."

Later on, after eating ourselves stupid through most of the day, we take a walk through her neighborhood during a break in the weather, but a sudden downpour catches us out in the open sans umbrella, and we dash through streets of haughty brownstones, and the rain washes all the pop-culture away.

6/18/09 - This damn rain

The rain buckets down disheartening amounts of wet and gray and chilly, until the drains swell up and choke and the gutters turn into tumbling muckish streams of street silt and rainwater.

I look up at the pissing sky from beneath the broken wing of my nickel-ninety-eight, dissolves-in-water umbrella, and shout, "Stop-stop-stop-stop raining!!", startling an older man attempting to light a soggy cigarette beneath his own umbrella.

His head snaps around and I realize how I look, sopping wet and cursing at the weather. "Sorry," I say, apologetically. "It's this damn rain."

5/30/09 - Everything must Go!

The sun, against all expectations, has come out to play today, and everyone seems to be out to greet it, wandering the streets in shorts and flip-flops, staring at all the stoop sales that have sprung up throughout Katie's neighborhood. It seems that the entire world has decided to sell off whatever they can this weekend, and we have quite the time negotiating the sidewalks, full as they are of blankets laid out with what will soon be someone else's treasures, but which, for the moment, are just somebody's trash with tags on it.

Katie and I sit on a bench and watch the dogs and their owners, babies and their parents, kids in sneakers and the invincible arrogance of youth jostling around in hysterical packs, and Katie talks about the winter turning into spring.

We've spent the winter, perhaps the last year, perhaps the last decade or so, accumulating poisons, fear, doubt, armor, anger, stuff we thought we needed but which now just holds us back and clutters our hearts and homes, and perhaps it's time to get rid of it, sell it on the street, bring it to the light, put it out with tomorrow's trash.