Jun 03

Great horned owl postcard from the wildlife park today….

Candice’s bachelorette party was lovely. We embarked upon a wilderness expedition to encounter animals like this.

What I learned from this owl: Party tricks like perfectly timed head rotation is where it’s at.

What I learned from the American wolf: Appear domestic, but bite through steel every chance you get.

What I learned from the buffalo: Be the guy who stands yards away from the pack and make the golf cart come to you.

What I learned from the cougar: Stealth. Pick a lookout spot where you can enjoy watching others search and search for you.

The slide. Wildlife Prairie, Peoria IL (Taken with Instagram at Wildlife Prairie State Park)

Wildlife prairie park (Taken with instagram)

There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home. (Taken with Instagram at Wildlife Prairie State Park)

Jun 01

I booked our tickets for my birthday trip back to NYC for a few days. I’m far too excited about showing Steven my beloved city. I think this makes him nervous, knowing full well I will want to pack far too much into our short stay. But I’m pretty confident I can slip him through the portal with me unchecked. This is to say, we’ll just wander where I like to wander and I’ll paint the most convincing out-of-era portrait of New York for him, with carefully selected pitstops along our tour that, in their very existence, insist I am correct: New York City is the same as it ever was and we are both seeing it again, for the first time, each sunny block & shadowed nook of it.

Sometimes I wonder about what ties me to New York. If I had a logical mind, I’d assume it may be powerful associations made through literature and film, or the impact of those private, ecstatic moments inside, experienced the first couple of times I visited. Living there, I was most at home wandering the East Village— which I could never completely damn or abandon for it’s insistence to make itself something it’s not— or in the Upper West Side, where I’d nearly throw up, internalizing some bizarre residual energy (think Rosemary’s tortured womb) until exhausted with strange pleasure. But I think something is woven into my subconscious having to do with the very Lower East Side as well.

One time, in my closet of a bedroom in LIC, Grace and I did a past life regression based on an isntructional we listened to while drinking bodega beer. At first, I couldn’t settle my mind into the process. The man in the instructional was Australian, and his voice was much too close to me— too intimate for being so professional. I kept getting distracted visualzing his surroundings. Was he sitting in a leather office chair? Did he have blonde, beachy hair and a sunburnt nose? Was he leaning on his desk, holding a pen to his temple and squinting into his own visualization of the gullible masses, targeting us specifically because our minds were crickets back then (this is what I had said to Grace one day, hanging round the cemetery. Spring had planted crickets in my head. It was a big, otherwise silent night of them and it was more disturbing than any other mental state I’d experienced.) and too wide open? Did he know we were waiting for something startling to happen?

Grace’s experience was stunning. I was absolutely enamored of her past life. It took place, I’d say maybe in the 1200s (from what I remember) and perhaps somewhere in Northern Europe. She was an elderly man, heaving his last breath on a stone slab, in a very small hut. (Grace, if I’m wrong on this, correct me. But I think this is how it goes.) And she had the most exquisite details to recall, including minute details concerning the texture of a makeshift shoe to an almost omnipotent perspective— placement of the horizon above a forest filled with a very specific kind of tree. I was awestruck. And jealous.

My past life had been a young woman with blond hair feathered like Farrah Fawcett. I lived below Delancey street on the Lower East Side. I was thin, tomboyish and worked as a waitress somewhere, bringing home money to an ailing mother. I belonged to a tight-knit family. I saw myself walking home. But that’s all. Just walking home.

I felt the need to speculate sensational things about myself. All of my neuro-networks started shooting off toward places I’d stored very specific details of anything I might have absorbed about seventies-era New York City. Immediately, I thought of a book of short stories I read about multi-cultural co-existence on the Lower East Side in the 1960s. I thought, “Maybe I was Irish. I had an Italian boyfriend. It was a real mess.” Or maybe I stripped for cash on the weekends. Maybe I frequented swingers bars and got Mr. Dunbar-ed somewhere near Times Square, and it was in all the papers: Beautiful, innocent daughter of New York slaughtered on blind date with troubled swinger. Maybe he was a serial killer, and went after pretty blonds in the swelter of summer 1976. That’s the ticket. I was a Berkowitz victim! ….. But no. I was just a young woman with a small, unimpressive face, looking absolutely at peace and happy with her chewing gum and apron full of one dollar bills, heading home from work at dusk. It was a poorly timed peek into the keyhole of my past life, I assumed, and never thought of it again.

But I thought of it now, booking those tickets for a three day romp around the City, end of June. Why would visiting New York feel like returning home every time, even the first I stepped foot there? Maybe the girl with the bell bottom jeans. Maybe the Woody Allen films or the Paul Auster stories. Maybe it feels like home to anyone whose ancestors glimpsed Ellis Island and shuffled through shit piles on cobblestone. Alls-I-know-is, it is absolutely essential to my being to come back again and again, asking for more stimulation than I can physically handle, a block or ten of heavy psychic energy, sidewalk commiseration with strangers, and a yearning I will never quite be able to place.