It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
Category: Nonfiction
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
What is it about jazz that grabs me, calms my spirit, focuses my mind? I enjoy jazz almost every evening. It is my tranquilizer after the cares of the day. It provokes memory and imagination and relaxation. It shows that there is no monopoly on joy.
For no reason I can remember I happened to glance uphill to my left.
Tell jokes about “miorities” to “minorities” to show you’re “down.”
More and more, in late winter especially, I have the feeling that I am dying—or, to put it more accurately, that the best of my life has happened and my decline has begun. And this is a bitter feeling—wrong, too, I hope.
“These shows, and others like them, pulse with near-pornographic magnetism. It’s hard to pull your gaze away.”
“I’ve only been to France a handful of times since I moved away…and each time it gets into me with weird intensity.”
Her words were tender, but raw in intonation and contained the kind of truth you can come to only after having lived through something.
We recited vows as poems, while our hippie rabbi strummed his guitar and hummed nigun that…
“I wonder if my father would condemn these words if he could read them.”
“When I testified and spoke out publicly in Germany … I felt lightened. The world was finally listening.”
“The thing about the Metropolitan-American Weekend Dad is, he has a relatively brief shelf life.”
“Leaving is believing. Believing that you can come back.”
“These are the kinds of life lessons we learn as children. The nights will just keep going till you die.”
“The German was very, very nice … He paid extra special attention to my life when I wasn’t.”
