Fortune's Pawn

New York – 14 April 2010

“New York, I love it. New York and me.  I was born here, you know.  I left, moved away, when I was in high school.  But I came back, man, four years later.  You can leave New York, you know, but you can’t really.  There’s that thing, that bond.  You can’t leave that.

“New York, you love it and it loves you right back.  It’ll hold you tight and be all nice to you, treat you real good.  Then one day; you are down on your luck; you’re layin’ in the street, and New York?  New York’ll come up and kick you when you are down.  Kick you right in the balls.  It’ll taunt you and shit.

“Man!  New York; it can be like a woman.  All cuddly and close one minute and then all up in your face about shit the next.  It be all lovin’ you and helpful and accepting and then, BAM!, it’s kicking you in the ding-dong again.  Yellin’ and screamin’ and all down on you like you’re some piece of trash the dog dragged in.

“Shit!

“But you know, like that woman, you just can’t leave it.  You just can’t let it go even though you both know it would be for the best.  No, like the sick, poor, lovesick fool that you are you just keep trying and you keep getting back up after each indignity and you try to pretend.  The next time it shows you some lovin’, you just try to begin again.  Begin anew and…

“Yeah, you start all over.  Each time; each time you think that this time the city, it won’t let you down.  You’ll do what you set out for:  You’ll make that next audition, you’ll pass that interview, you’ll win that bet and you’ll win that woman back, and… You know what?  You know what?  I… Well, what can I say man.  I’ve had a rough ride with this bitch, but I’m not done yet.  Neither of us is done.”

James was our bartender at Clem’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and he had just explained his relationship to the city, and we did the only thing we could; we looked down at the bar, took a sip of our cocktails, and tried desperately to change the subject.

Actually, we sat back in awe, congratulated James on his flow, and recommended he reconsider the stage.

Ah, to be back in New York City again.  Pawn was last here almost exactly five years ago, and that is just too long.  Why are we, X and I, in Brooklyn?  Pawn has a well known predisposition towards Manhattan, so why Brooklyn?  Simple, we were waiting, killing time, between our inbound flight and our key pick up for the flat we’ve rented in Greenwich Village.  We had 3 hours to kill, so we started out with a prime rib lunch at Peter Luger’s.  Then came a long meandering through the Esplanade, the Lubavitcher realm, etc.  We were frankly getting a little parched when we crossed over into the more hipster zone, and finally to this innocent looking corner with an innocent looking corner bar, and we saw this nice young gentleman bring out chairs to place on the sidewalk.

“Are you open yet?” queried X.  “Yeah, go right on in, I’ll be right with you.” he replied.  “Hold on!” I exclaimed, spotting a familiar looking drawing on a chalkboard propped up in the window.  It was a chalkboard sketch titled “drunk girl has to pee” signed by one Carri Skoczek, 2009.  I know Carri Skoczek, I worked with Carri Skoczek, and this is indeed a genuine Carri Skoczek!

drunk girl has to pee - carri skoczek 2009

Carri did costumes and props for various shows Pawn lit, back in the olden days of doing lighting design in Milwaukee’s theatre scene.  She moved to Brooklyn about 10 or 15 years back, but what are the odds that the first bar we walk into is her old haunt.  “We all love her here.  We don’t see her so much anymore, but yeah, she used to come in here a lot.” James tells us.

Before the visit is over, James has bought us a drink and we have absorbed countless interesting bon-mot from Thomas, a visiting artist who just needs to take a little of the edge off before returning to his commission for the last few strokes of work.

We finally drag ourselves out of Clem’s and head back to the management office for our keys, and a black car ride into the city, into Greenwich Village, to commence our visit to Manhattan.  To our “Greenwich Village Love Nest” as the hosts chose to promote this two bedroom flat on Macdougal Street.

[X chimes in]
Our “love nest” is quite cozy – the beds divided by a new age frosted glass ‘bundling board’ and the toilet divided from the shower and sink in two separate rooms.  Accouterments carefully accounted for…i.e. 2 forks per bed; 2 wine glasses per bed.  How do they KNOW???  Went out to pick up the basics – fat, sugar and salt for me; wholesome items for Nic and booze for the both of us, then off to Kettle of Fish, Nic’s local here.  Met up with MKE Library colleague for drinks and 3-D movies of the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island, the Blessing of the Animals at Cathedral of St. John the Devine and ‘Return to the World’s Fair’ all dutifully watched with goofy glasses and full glasses of libations of choice.  The owner, Patrick, is from MKE and his wife Adrian indulges his foibles regarding the Packers, Brewers, and, apparently, thirsty visitors from the Heartland. Back to Macdougal abode and soon to bed – big day tomorrow!
[X drops back out]

It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that James Dean and Jack Kerouac used to drown their sorrows at the same bar where we bent many an elbow this evening past.  We met new friends tonight, and introduced old friends to even older ones.  The films were a blast, and a very studious audience was very glad that a venue exists which will show the New York Stereoscopic Society productions, all made by Messrs. Meredith and Smith, a careful duo with a canny eye and a dry editorial sensibility.  We all appreciated their efforts, and their keen eye for pathos in the otherwise banal events they covered.

Oh, and nudity, adds X.

Postilion mailbox view

Many years ago, around 1996, I wanted a better MUA, Mail User Agent — What most people would call an email client, or mail reader.  I ended up writing my own, and it was called Postilion.  I haven’t done anything with this program since some time in 2001, but was surprised to wake up this morning to a message from a user.  Here is that message, and my reply.

As a note, “curses” is a library for manipulating standard old text displays (not graphical programs) and OpenBSD is an operating system similar to Linux.

Here, then, is the original message, from Mayuresh:

Hello,

I used to use “Postilion” under Linux running WindowMaker.
I found your application to be quite well designed on the UI front.
I migrated over to OpenBSD 5 years back and found it to be exactly what the team claims it to be, simple, clean and secure.

The OpenBSD team has just delivered a SMTP daemon;
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=smtpd&sektion=8

It would be nice to have a well designed MUA too.
Would you be interested in designing and developing a curses based MUA?

Best.

Here is my reply:

Mayuresh,
Thanks for your kind words about Postilion.  I haven’t had a message about that software in years.  I stopped working on it in 2001, and haven’t even used it myself for years.

I don’t think I’m the one to handle making a new (text based) curses MUA.  I am not a C programmer (Postilion was mostly TCL/Tk) and I don’t really have any interest in using a curses MUA.  That’s really key — I can’t see developing a software project that I myself am not interested in using.

When I first started work on Postilion, I had just read Eric Raymond’s (esr) “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“.  I was impressed by the Mail.app program available from NeXT, which I could run on NeXT/Step on a Sun system I had.  Mail.app, however, did not support IMAP, and had other limitations.  I was itching to have an MUA which matched the elegance of Mail.app but with more modern features.  This being in 1996, that meant IMAP, ACAP, multiple folders open at once, multiple identities, etc.

After reading Cathedral, I decided to take esr’s words to heart.  He talked about how important it was that the development projects a programmer took on had to scratch his own itch, and my itch was for an elegant MUA.  Secondly, he talked about finding a program which is close to what you want, and using that as a starting point.  I had already found TkRat, and figured that was a good place to start — the interface was written in TCL/Tk, an interpreted language (I am more comfortable with interpreted languages than with compiled ones) and the interface was fairly close to what I wanted.  Also, the author, Martin Forssén, was friendly and helpful, had a really good, robust C language core for handling the messy parts of the protocols (thanks to Mark Crispin’s fabulous c-client) and he seemed flattered that I was basing my work on his.  Our two projects gained a sort of symbioses over time.

Sure enough, as I worked on the project, I found that the Bazaar part of the process kicked into gear.  I soon had hundreds, then thousands of users.  My community was helpful, providing translations, testing, etc.  One user, Marco van Hylckama Vlieg, contributed the entire set of custom made icons used in the GUI.  At its peak, Postilion was is use on every continent (except, perhaps, Antarctica), in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish.  It was favorably written up in a French computer journal and adopted as part of a civic computing infrastructure project in a German village.

I was honored by all of that.  It was exciting to get email messages from Abu Dabi or Moscow, Bucharest or Lima.  I sometimes got well over a hundred messages a day from people thanking me for my work, offering suggestions or requesting help.  I was hired by a call center management company to make custom additions to the core program, just to suit their environment.  My own employer at the time, an early ISP, paid me to add many of the features the software offered.

What made this all possible, however, was my own desire to use the software I was writing.  If you really want a good, curses based mail reader, Mayuresh, you should think about taking the journey I took!  Find something close to what you want, Mutt, say, or Alpine; something with a license you can abide; something in a language you’re either comfortable with, or feel you can learn, and have at it.  Take Eric Raymond’s advice — scratch your own itch, and start by building on the work of others.  I think you’ll find it a worthy mission.

I wish you well,
-nic

Just my little contribution to the Open Source world.  Not Postilion, that’s old news.  No, I mean prodding someone else to take the journey themselves.

Thanks to Kate Coe for turning me on to this upcoming auction of the humongous collection of Michael Epstein & Scott Schwimer:

The Michael H. Epstein & Scott E. Schwimer collected works of glamour photography, fine art photography and contemporary art is one of the world’s most unique. The compilations convey impeccable style and beauty that will stand the test of time.

In addition to owning the world’s largest privately held glamour photography archive, Epstein and Schwimer are also the publishers of various George Hurrell editions, as well as those of Mel Roberts and Harry Langdon.

Epstein and Schwimer Glamour Photography Auction

There are over 1300 lots in this auction, ranging from print ad shots to studio promotional shots, memorabilia, original negatives, etc.  Quite the exhaustive auction catalog, online, for all to peruse.  Check it out!

An angry man dismissed his muse
as nothing more than an elaborate ruse
and shoved her out the door
but despite this act which left him alone
he found he still couldn’t write a good poem.

Andrew Sullivan quotes Saharareporters on his blog over at The Atlantic, and then closes adeptly:

A classic Jihadist profile:

He is the son of the recently retired Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria, Dr. Umaru Abdul Mutallab. The Al-Qaida-linked Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab is an engineering student at University College London.  Saharareporters sources have revealed that prior to his sojourn in the UK, Farouk had studied at the prestigious British School of Lome, Togo. Where he passed his International Bacchalaureates Diploma before moving to UCL.

It sure isn’t poverty that forces these loons to do what they do. It’s religion.

Pawn just read this over at the Gray Lady:

Kristen Stewart, the 19-year-old co-star of the “Twilight” blockbusters, plays a New Orleans stripper in “Welcome to the Rileys,” which also stars James Gandolfini as a damaged businessman. Mr. Cooper noted that Ms. Stewart also has a noncompetition entry: in “The Runaways,” directed by Floria Sigismondi, Ms. Stewart plays a young Joan Jett.
Sundance, With a New Leader, Hones Its Indy Edge – NYTimes.com

Pawn has a warm place in his heart for Ms Jett.  Not only for her great contributions to Rock and Roll music, but for her stand up performance back in Iowa during the 2004 Presidential campaign.  As I journaled then…

Jeneane Garofalo is in town, as is Joan Jett. They are doing a show, kind of an Iowa Perfect Storm USO show to thank and bolster the Dean faithful. Seems that just one floor up is a meeting of the Young Republican’s Caucus Organizing Committee. You have to ask yourself if the facility scheduler had thought this through or not. Anyway, once the YRs find out that the Dean people are downstairs they take a vote of the organizing committee and have a unanimous vote of seven yeas (I’m not making this up, the head of the organizing committee boasted about it on TV) to go down to the Dean rally and do what they can to disrupt it!

Jeneane Garofalo addresses the crowd (photo courtesy RedPeg.com)

This is unreal, these guys have taken compassionate conservatism to a whole new level! They head down to the rally, armed with Bush/Cheney campaign signs (so there is no doubt who to blame…) and start trying to inspire a melee. The Dean folks simply block the B/C signs with their own, not a tough task given the numbers involved. There is a large contingent of Planned Parenthood folks and “Stand Up for Choice” there as well, which further skews the balance of power.

No one is taking the bait, however, no one is rising to fight, nor do anything other than try to block the B/C signs. Then, Joan Jett starts to play the National Anthem. This is apparently too much patriotism for the YRs and much like the effect of Slim Whitman music on the Martians in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, their heads simply start to explode.

Well, okay, not exactly, but it’s almost the same thing. One of the more compassionate conservatives decides to give Ms Jett a really good shove, while she is playing. Our portly protector of family values seemed to have misjudged his target, however, as Joan (about one third this guys size, and more than twice his age) shrugs off his shove and then comes back swinging. She manages to land a few good ones before Dean people separate the two.

Joan Jett immediately after the altercation (photo courtesy RedPeg.com)

This is all captured by several TV cameras, including that of Joe Jensen, the guy who trained us on Friday. This is a lead story on all of the local news. You just can’t make this stuff up!

Okay then, the gloves are off in the Republican camp at least.

I haven’t rushed out to see the Twilight films, but I can’t wait to see Miss Stewart in The Runaways.

Pawn recently withdrew from the social networking site Facebook following a year and a half involvement.  Friends, and “friends” will doubtless ask why (and indeed, some already have).  The answer is both simple and complex.

The simple answer is that I don’t like what the use of the site did to how I interact with people.  While “social” networking sites bring a lot of promise, they also present many pitfalls.  And these benefits and drawbacks have as much to do with you, the user, as with their own inherent dynamics.  This blog, and the mailing list which preceded it, going back five years now, is itself a sort of social network.  For while it is primarily a forum for me to express my thoughts, etc., it also permits a back and forth, a dialogue, and has even included direct, primary posts by others.  In addition to my personal rants or other writings, I have often featured links to articles and stories elsewhere which thought worthy of attention, posted photographs, music clips, etc.  In other words a lot of what one can do at Facebook, but without the large community surrounding it.

That community, however, can be a both a blessing and a curse.  Facebook, and sites like it (i.e. LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) provide extensive tools to build community in ways we have never seen before.  This is a godsend for organizers from local grass roots up to presidential campaigns, but works equally well for fear mongers as prophets, for hate groups as for charities.  My very first girlfriend tracked me down via LinkedIn after nearly thirty years, to share memories and catch up on two lives now very separate.  So, too, former lovers have tracked me down whom I would rather not have so done.

Therein lies one of the problems with a media which is at once both public and private.  Anyone who has spent any time at all on social networking sites has seen a friend or friends mistakenly post in a public way what was intended to be a private message.  I actually made it somewhat of a personal mission to help educate people about how to use Facebook with security and privacy in mind.  Just as one can rekindle old connections, so one must cope with the ramifications of doing so, in both the public and private realms.  An old schoolmate wants to be your friend, and has become friends with many people with whom you actually have kept up with since those old days.  If you don’t become friends are you being rude?  What will your other former classmates think of your standoffishness?  It’s the old peer pressure writ large and on the Internet.

Then there is the odd dynamic of “meeting” new people, a friend of a friend or just someone with common cause, say another member of a local political group.  They share your view, or a common link, and in the anonymous and yet connected world of social networking it is perfectly natural to “friend” each other.  In a real world setting there is much more context for such a situation.  A mutual friend can offer either a direct introduction or a muted aside, encouraging or discouraging such a friendship, or in the context of a local political meeting or other event, one may infer more about the other from the goings on.

Not so in the cyber world.  I was friended by a couple of people following a comment I made on the fan page for a long-defunct local punk band.  in 1981 I had done several shows with this band, and had gotten to know some of them quite well.  Following my comment, a few recollections from that era, I received friend requests from these two, one male one female, who were fans of the band and the nightclub where I had managed back then.  Turns out they both used to come there as underage gate crashers whose youth was well hidden by the combination of fake IDs and the heavy makeup and hair dye prevalent in that crowd.  I kept them as “friends” more because they posted interesting links to artworks, but never really interacted with them.

Interaction on social networking sites is another area of potential problems.  The forum provided on such sites can often serve to magnify the tendencies already present when in a group.  Pawn, believe it or not, was a class clown in his youth.  One standout characteristic of a class clown is the tendency to speak first and consider later.  This is bad enough in real life, where the words one utters are heard by a room full of people.  Put it on the Internet, and the potential for regret or embarrassment multiplies.  This is further compounded where one cannot remove, un-say or delete ones utterances.  Just such a situation developed for me in the recent past.

In making what was intended to be a witty, sarcastic comment to an acquaintance’s post, instead I managed to offend them.  My bungled wit came across, even to my own eyes, as mean and rude — and ill considered.  There being no way to retract the comment, no way to unring that bell, it instead hung in the air.  There are examples galore of ill considered public utterances abounding on the Internet, from sites like Overheard in New York to Texts From Last Night, and new terms in the public lexicon, such as Drunk Dialing and TMI.  In the cyber world, when you screw up, it is never just a room full of people who know, or may know.

So, what happened in this situation?  The offended party “unfriended” me, a term which has no real world equivalent.  Perhaps that’s because in the real world when we no longer wish to associate with someone we simply stop doing so.  Now, true enough, anyone who has been stalked can tell you that it is not necessarily so simple (this I know), but by and large if we no longer wish to know what so-and-so is up to, we stop asking, calling, visiting, etc. and our spheres of experience will disengage.  Not so on-line, where we must actively sever the link.  What can be accomplished passively in-life requires active intervention in on-line.

In the world of Facebook, such an action is silent.  It is not like calling someone up and sayng “We’re not friends anymore!” but rather you click a button and that person silently and without their direct knowledge is no longer your friend.  They may never know that this has happened, until they try to reach out to you and find you no longer in their list.  Or they go to a, formerly, mutual friend’s page and see you appear not in the list of mutual friends, but in the list of all friends.  This quiet rebuff is all that is needed to lower the boom of disapproval.

That is how I found that I had been unfriended, and it brought home to me just how absurdly this new media (for that is what it is, ultimately, is media) has wound itself into our lives in ways that are as destructive as they are constructive.  I was temporarily crushed to see that I had lost a friend, yes, but then reflected on the fact that I have only ever met this person a few times, have no history with them, and only really knew them on-line.  The lingering feeling, however, is the shame I felt at my embarrassing comment.  Much like that I still feel for a bad joke told too loudly at a public event over twenty years ago.

But more, I had allowed my interactions with this new media become so central to how I interacted with people I truly do know, love and relate to in-life and not just on-line.  I recognize my peevishness when someone wouldn’t react on-line to things I had posted, or when they failed to keep up their on-line counterpoint to their in-life reality.  And I realized that it was just too easy to pretend that since I was present in my friends lives on-line that I was present in-life, when, in fact, I was absent there.

Thanksgiving is in two days time, and soon after I will begin to make and send my holiday greeting cards.  This, too, is an act of make-believe social interaction, this annual ritual of pretending that we are still connected to all of our aunts and uncles, old schoolmates and neighbors.  I long ago switched to printing out address labels rather than hand addressing, but I still take the time to scrawl a line or two into each card, lending an air of authenticity to this otherwise artificial intercourse.  I will make an effort, this year, to be more present in that process, to be more personal in those wishes, to be more thoughtful as I lick those stamps.

Will I ever return to Facebook?  For now I cannot say.  Every year I make my own Christmas cards, using images I compose or photograph or cull from family archives.  I post those on Facebook, as well.  I am not sure I’ll update it this year.  We’ll see.

Lunch at the Chinese buffet around the corner, seated next to two men from India and one from Australia.  They are all co-workers, just getting to know each other.  One of the Indian men has a much thinker accent and the other one seems to be trying to help him with cultural acclimation.

One thing they have in common, aside from all being Unix geeks to one degree or another, is cricket.  The bulk of their table chatter was about the superiority of one or another team or captain or manager.

At the end of the meal the waitress brings fortune cookies.  The more seasoned Indian gentleman helpfully clues the other into the old trick, “When you read your fortune cookie you have to add ‘in bed’ to the end of whatever it says.”

The Aussie pipes up,  “The Austrailian National Team will best India in their next test match…in bed!”

After a round of chuckles the younger Indian reads his, “You can make that special someone happy with a gift of flowers…in bed.”

They leave, and I read my own fortune, “Your lucky number for this week is the number five…in bed.”

Some political races are getting more interesting for who’s not running than for who is.  In several races these past few days, prominent politicians have ended theior candidacies:

• In the New York 23rd Congressional race, to fill the seat vacated by Republican John McHugh, Dede Scozzafava, the Republican establishment candidate yesterday dropped out of the race after taking a drubbing in recent polls and suffering the indignity of several party leaders, such as Sarah Palin, endorsing her Conservative Party opponent, Doug Hoffman (who, interestingly enough, doesn’t even live in the district).  Today Scozzafava has gone a step further, endorsing her Democratic former competitor, Bill Owens.
• In the Wisconsin Governor’s race, wide open for the first time in over 30 years as sitting Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, has decided not to run, the latest person to make news for not running is Doyle’s Lieutenant Governor, Barbara Lawton.  She joins expected candidate Congressman Ron Kind  (D, La Crosse) in sitting this one out.  That leaves an unknown Jared Christiansen as the only declared candidate for the Democratic nomination, though many expect Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to jump into the race soon.
• In the California Governor’s race, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has dropped out, leaving no announced candidates for that state’s Democratic nomination for term limited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s seat.  Many expect that former Governor, former Oakland Mayor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown will run.  He has an exploratory commitee already up and running and has nearly $8 million in the bank already.  Some also suspect that Senator and former San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein may jump into the race to avoid a potentially pricey defense of her Senate seat against former Hewlett Packard CEO, and John McCain campaign surrogate, Carly Fiorino.
• In Afghanistan’s contentious Presidential runoffs, currently scheduled for next weekend, Hamid Karzai opponent and former Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, has stepped down, complaining that with no real electoral reforms instituted in the wake of August’s sham election (in which fully 30% of Karzai’s votes, 1.3 million ballots, were set aside due to fraud), and the electoral commission still being run by the same people, those appointed to their jobs by Karzai.  This leaves the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to continue to support a demonstrably undemocratic and corrupt regime.

All in all a bunch of interesting developments for the final week of October, 2009.

Harvest moon

The maps of our childhood are the maps we most easily forget, or so it seems to me, looking back.

When I was a kid I ran through the gulleys and ravines of Lake Park as though it were my own back yard, which it very nearly was. My best friend D and I knew those woods like the backs of our hands and we spent almost every afternoon there after school. My home was five blocks from the park, D’s was two. The amount of trouble that two young boys could get into in that park, without their parents ever knowing, was manifest.

A full moon in October, a Hunter’s Moon, meant forts made from great mounds of fallen leaves, reinforced with strategically placed tree limbs. While our friends might be attending Hallow e’en parties to which we were not invited, we were busy devising new strategies for conquering the world, or defending our Emperor’s hold upon it.

My father raised rose bushes, right at the front of our yard, hard up by the sidewalk. In autumn the leaves from the mountain ash in the yard, along with those from the silver maple on the verge, piled high behind the windbreak that the rose bushes provided. Behind that natural Maginot line we would build our forts, year after year. They were durable affairs, reinforced with fallen branches and cardboard boxes from Diet-Rite Cola or Friskies Cat Food or what have you. We would lay in repose with our clakety-clack toy rifles and Cub Scout canteens, ready for whichever invaders may try to lay waste to our hamlet.

One year D pilfered a pair of walkie-talkies from his older brother, Dan. We talked to each other in our fort as though we were but part of legion. The rest of the platoon were just around the corner, ready to aid us at a moment’s notice. We were both pacifists, I’ll have you know, but we were too young to realize that that meant we weren’t supposed to wield weapons. You know how confused things can be at that age.

I was still trying to sort out my feelings about Alfreda Leiderböhm kissing me at Carrie’s Hallow e’en party when D and I were torn apart by the exigencies of school and family and life. As an adult I have seen films about the Nazi era in France in which families are torn asunder and they never fail to make me think of how my leaving Mr. C’s 8^th grade classroom ultimately spelled the fatal turning point in D and my relationship. I went through high school in the next 3 years, while D slogged along, according to plan, and graduated high school about the same time I was dropping out of college.

Life was so simple back then. It may be a prosaic pronouncement, but it is also quite true that the world we face as 13 year old boys is nothing compared to what we will face the next time we have a chance to assess our self worth and place in the world, which may not come around until we’re 21 or 35. My epiphany came at 13, when my father passed away. D’s father took me under his wing and tried to fill a gaping hole in my life (something I didn’t realize for years) while, simultaneously, D’s parent’s marriage was falling apart.

When D ran away from home, a couple of years later, I didn’t really understand his complaint. He had two parents, after all, and they seemed nice enough to me. I lost a father to death and a mother to perpetual mourning, so what, exactly, was his beef?

Neglect, that was his beef. I only understand that now, with a wealth of history behind me.

Walk in the moonlight across empty roofs
Relish the moonlight’s embrace
sing the song of the sun to his face
fall down the drainpipe to the road
trip on the gutter
do as you’re told

Dance in the midnight, waltz in the dark
while others lay sleeping, serenade the park
have a mad affair, a tawdry rendezvous
long after twilight, a real lark
sing your song
mouth your words
pass silently abroad

We didn’t ever have words like those. We wrote, though, thoughtless little boy larks of prose which we would submit to our teachers as joint works of fiction. In fifth grade that was enough to win over our teacher. She could care less that we collaborated on our work, that she got only half as much work as we were supposed to turn in – it was of such high quality, and consistently so – that she graded us as though we had turned in two full, long assignments.