Today I read a disturbing post on the NYT’s City Room blog about a pair of teenagers who broke into a vacant apartment in Brooklyn, doused a cat with lighter fluid and then set it on fire. According to the article, “[t]he cat was later ‘found outside crying, unable to move, but still alive’… It was taken to an animal hospital with severe burns, and was put to death.”

Coincidentally, I was reading Richard Rorty on the subway, who (via Judith Shklar) defines a ‘liberal’ — philosophically speaking — as one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing a person can do.

He also describes the role of fiction in our culture as a means to 1) empathize with those who are suffering and 2) understand our own capacity for cruelty.

It’s not difficult to imagine telling a story about two teenagers and their decision to torture a cat that fills both of these purposes: in terms of the kids, we might describe the bleak terrain of the neighborhood in which they were raised, the loveless existence they endured for the first ___ years of their lives, the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the hands of others; the slow escalation of mayhem and violence that led them on this particular day to hatch a plan for such a pointlessly repulsive act. We might even try to imagine them as they ignited the cat and listened to its terrified screams, and whether to witness this was as satisfying as they had hoped, or whether they looked at each other with a familiar expression of disappointment. What did they say as it happened? And later, did they laugh or cry or simply not acknowledge it at all, as if they had simply shared a bad dream?

I remember being in Paris 20 years ago, when I happened to go see A Short Film about Killing by Krzysztof Kieslowski; the story involves a young man who directs a taxi out into the countryside, where for no apparent reason he brutally murders the driver; he is quickly caught and sentenced to death, and throughout the proceedings shows absolutely no remorse or really any sign of ‘humanity,’ despite the best attempts of his defense lawyer. It is only near the end — after he shares a painful memory from his childhood — and as he is being led to his death, that we feel any compassion for him; in one miraculous shot he looks up at the lawyer, who is watching from the window above, and we understand from the prisoner’s expression that something has melted in him, that he no longer wants to die, and we — as the audience — no longer want him to die either.

In time, I may write a similar story about two teenagers from Brooklyn who torture animals and live to regret it.

But for now I would like to think about the cat, about how small and defenseless it was, and how the universe showed such little regard to its fate, and how in this sentence ‘cat’ is a metaphor for ‘any of us as individuals at any given moment.’

And how when we grieve, it is really for ourselves, and — finally — how we look to the sky with a certain anger and longing and forgiveness as we remember that despite everything — and this by turn cruel and comforting — we are still alive, at least for now.

Though undeniably bright, there is a stark quality to the March sun that makes the phlox (and the sempervivum) seem — oddly — both luminous and bedraggled.

The silver veins of the surrounding rocks add to this quality, and for a second I dreamed I was in the mountains of _____. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever visit a desert/mountain/rain forest and think: this place looks so familiar, I have seen it in a small garden in Washington Heights.

In this post, the garden is a metaphor for the city, while the plants and rocks are elements of the past that we may or may not recognize until we see them in the present (possibly while lost, driving around in the most labyrinthian sections of Queens/Riverdale/Lower East Side circa 1988).

*Since there seem to be a few new folks stopping by here, a note of explanation: I used to play in an indie-rock band called Saturnine, and this — i.e., Death Culture at Sea — is my new ‘band,’ consisting of me, myself and I.

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“Field High and Burning”

Let’s walk through this religion
Searching for the kind of things we know
We never really know

The streets so full of people
Had never looked so empty in the night
So empty in the night

Here beside you is something you can never really touch
Beside you is something you can never really touch

Fear has seen the morning, and he felt slightly wasted with the sense
Of being split in two

He asked if you were serious, and then he fell asleep inside your arms
Crushing him in you

His soul was rather jagged, but all he craved was feeling something new
Besides these waves between us

He woke beside you, and smiled in a light that turned to blue
A light that turned to blue

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“My Back for Thirds”

Here I looked around
In your dream I hit the ground
I was bringing something wrapped in silk around to you
But it was nearly cut in half
You cried as if he hated you

Here you made your plans
They might work I understand
We all want a second chance
To clear this haze from our eyes

Burning like the sun you seemed to sink away into the night
Watching this I almost died
And knew that I could never sleep
I’d rather know my dreams were clearly hated and despicable
Filled with clowns and Ponzi schemes
Cheating with your memories

According to Wikipedia, the rooftop of the Stephansdom in Vienna contains over 230,000 tiles. It was originally built in the Middle Ages and then — after it was destroyed by fire at the end of WWII — rebuilt in 1952 with the help of Google Images and Soviet robots.

One fear of the modern age is that we serve no purpose in life but to increase the profit margins on the spreadsheets of our superiors.

Of course in our modern jobs — for which we have attended college and sometimes even more than that — we are insulated from the occupational ravages of disease and prosecution and slavery.

But there is still a part of us that no matter what the risk longs to be one of ten thousand others toiling away for a five or six decades, despite the numbing cold and the slippery slope and the certainty that our name will never be attached to this work.

Only when observing the obsessive madness of such art do we feel anything close to hopeful about humanity.

But then we remember standing on the plaza, hating the hordes of tourists who (just like us) had come to gawk at this spectacle before returning home, where the image becomes — as much as a memory or hope — a bludgeon with which we beat ourselves, knowing what we can never be.

A new and improved version of this post can be found here.

I first met Leanne in the fall of tenth grade in the Kingswood dining hall.  This was my first year of boarding school and — residual fear from public school — I was still petrified at the thought of eating alone; I don’t remember if I circled the cavernous room looking for someone I knew (preferably from the boys’ dorm or the hockey team) or whether I went directly to the emptiest table on the edge, where she and her best friend Mary already sat, clearly not interested in the throngs who populated the middle of the space.

Leanne — who I think had skipped a grade or two by this point — was dressed waifishly in khaki pants and a man’s flannel shirt, and still possessed the androgynous charm of a precocious child; only her shoulder-length hair, wavy with bangs and indifferently styled, pushed her more toward the girl’s side of the equation. Mary, dressed similarly — and with short, shiny swimmer’s hair and broad shoulders — seemed even more ambivalent about adorning herself with the trappings of the more traditional — and popular — segments of the school, who chattered away en masse only a few feet from our table.  As it turned out, they were extremely conscious their separation from the “mainstream” of the student body, but — revelation to me — framed this in terms of class, not gender; though they were both “day students,” Leanne and Mary were not from the posh suburbs surrounding the school — Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham — but from further afield, although the exact names of these towns now escapes me. In this respect, they were more like the boarding students — who tended to come from more middle-class environs — but because the girls who boarded were a smaller and more insular group, it made sense that — at least at this juncture — Leanne and Mary were outsiders from almost every vantage point.

Although I — as a hockey player, book-smart, and with conventionally masculine good looks (which I say with no pride, and perhaps some shade of embarrassment) — was the opposite of an outsider, a fact that may have begged the question of exactly what I was doing each day eating lunch with self-professed “losers” like Leanne and Mary, they obviously appealed to the nascent dissatisfaction I felt for so many facets of my own life at fifteen. I think my presence egged them on, as if I had entered a private theater, a sort of performance of two in which I was the only audience member. Leanne was the ringleader and the wit; her down-turned eyes, along with a small bump on her nose and a strong chin, seemed to possess an inherent melancholy that made her observations — usually either an extreme form of self-mockery or just mockery, particularly when it came to money and what it bought for those around us — all the more outrageous; Mary would quietly gasp in agreement and laughter as Leanne threw her head back in hilarity and sometimes waved her thin arms around — almost daring the world to notice — as I watched paralyzed with awe at the urbane quality of what I had implausibly found in the suburbs of Detroit.

It would be fair to say that I fell in love with Leanne in every way except the one that mattered, or at least required some definition; it would probably also be fair to say that my feelings were reciprocated, but only for a little while, until it became apparent that I would remain cruelly aloof, no matter how inwardly charmed I was by the long letters she sent me over Thanksgiving break describing the horrors of a car trip to visit her grandparents in Florida.

We remained friends — and possibly even good friends — throughout high school, and I think she generally regarded me with a sense of stupefied affection, as she — and no doubt others — wondered what my problem was, when the answer was so obvious as to appear completely unlikely. For my part, I watched from of a distance as she gained popularity among an alternative crowd of “faculty brats” and assorted “boho” types with whom I was also loosely associated; more than anyone I met at Cranbrook, I had the sense that she was simply biding her time before being released to the world at large, which she would undoubtedly conquer.

As luck (or bad luck) would have it, we both went to Cornell; she was the first person I saw when I arrived on West Campus in a cloud of hopeless dread, knowing that I had made a huge mistake, compounded by my agreeing to live with a childhood friend in the freshman-football dorm (an arrangement made to please both sets of parents, predictably enough). But Leanne was nearby, and for one night — this during orientation — it was like we were in tenth grade again, and we walked through the teeming crowds, wondering openly how everyone could be so stupid, and yet at the same time so oblivious to their stupidity.

After this, we quickly lost contact. My academic career was marked by a program of laziness, subversion and ambivalence — i.e., I majored in “Government” — and for friends I sought out those whose aura appeased my own vague need for self-differentiation, but without ever forcing me to elucidate the underlying reasons for this; in short, I gradually attached myself to some of the fine-arts majors. Leanne by contrast quickly established herself as a “star” in the creative-writing program, and became popular in a way that seemed a thousand miles away from the person she had been in high school; when we saw each other, our conversations were brief and superficial, as if neither wanted to remember where we had come from while distrusting the other for knowing the truth.

After I moved to New York, I occasionally saw Leanne at parties in Brooklyn. By this point we were “adults,” and reflected somewhat more candidly about who we had been, although as someone who remained closeted, there were severely enforced limits on how far I would allow myself to go in this regard. Nevertheless, because she retained her brilliance I felt a little sad when she married a writer and seemed to give up her own aspirations, as if they were my own. After this, our friendship — if it could even be called that — became increasingly attenuated (not out of any malice) and at some point I learned she had gone to architecture school.

The last time I saw her, I was finally “out”; I remember feeling nervous, as if I should apologize for how dishonest I had been, yet at the same time searching in her eyes for some sign of the person who still lived in my memories, which was no doubt an unfair burden to place on both of us; for who could possibly live up to the naive, unformed expectations of a fifteen-year old? Though I would have liked to dwell on the past and exactly how it had contrived to push us to this point in the present, we were at a crowded art opening, and so talked aggressively for a few minutes about her job as an architect and my obsession for old bricks. (Only later did I realize this obsession was both literal and metaphorical.) Though understandably distant, she still seemed impossibly erudite — and even good-natured — as she pointed me in the direction of obscure artists and design theorists whose work might reinforce my own tendencies. We traded e-mail addresses, but neither followed up.

Although I knew she remained in the city, and it would be quite feasible to track her down, I preferred to think of her as elusive; and here my inclinations seemed to be reinforced when, the last I heard — via a friend — she was quitting her architecture job and going to Africa.

She recently appeared to me in a dream, and it took only a few seconds to locate her on a professional networking site on the internet. I made no effort to contact her, though; it wasn’t that I lacked the desire to see her again — the tug of nostalgia almost reduced me to tears as I remembered her laugh — but a sense of stinging remorse that I felt certain would descend upon me in the minutes after such a prospective meeting; but even as this occurred to me I realized that this, too, was an exaggeration, and in fact, I was more than prepared for either scenario (i.e., to meet or not to meet her). Then I felt redeemed by a greater certainty that what had appeared to me was a symbol of my own youth, and one to which I was more than ready to say goodbye.

As many of you may or may not know, last year we wrote an essay that was published by Gawker on Valentine’s Day as part of a “Gay Modern Love” contest sponsored by Sheila (miss u!) and inspired in part by our rants about the heternormativity of the Modern Love column in the Times.  We thought we’d take the opportunity to reprint the essay this year because a) we’re lazy, b) you never know if Gawker will have its archives up forever, c) we’re still kinda proud of it, and d) it reminds us that life is not always as difficult as it seems, or even when it is (and worse), there’s sometimes a silver lining worth holding on for.

It’s late November 1998. I’m 30 years old and a total closet-case: it’s past midnight and I’m scrolling through the men-seeking-men listings of Web Personals. During the day, I still like to tell myself that—although I’m not exactly a virgin in the same-sex department—whatever homo tendencies I have are basically a minor health problem; in short, as soon as I meet the right girl, I will be “cured” of the desire to say, head out to Prospect Park at 11:30 on a Tuesday night or—as I have been doing more and more as the days grow shorter—take a walk through the virtual hallways of the internet…” There are three categories to choose from: relationship, friends (“as if”) and sex. (Guess which one I go for.) Among the ads that catch my attention (and this being 1998, there are no photographs) is one from a 41 y.o. GWM, 6’3″, 240lbs and hairy. Although I’m somewhat deterred by the “G,” I imagine a strong and vaguely angry-looking man with a buzz-cut and receding hairline. Moreover, he doesn’t use the term “bear” but “linebacker,” which appeals to the hockey player in me. Why this gets me going is an unsolved mystery at this point, but it most certainly does; in an agitated state, I send off of a reply: 30 y.o. GWM 5’11″/175 looking for…(whatever the equivalent of NSA was in 1998). It’s the first time I’ve ever used a “G,” and while part of me doesn’t like it, I figure if it gets me what I want, nobody else will ever have to know.

A few days later, I get a response in my secret “Gay-O-L” account. Stephen suggests we meet at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen. For me, the intervening days and then hours are marked by repeated mental games of “what the fuck am I doing” and interludes of queasy anticipation. When I arrive and look for someone matching his description, I am nervous—what if he lied?—and generally relieved that it’s five o’clock and already completely dark outside. But to my astonishment, when we find each other, he is not only all of the above—as if molded from my dreams—but has the most intense green eyes; one glance leaves me more naked than I’ve felt in my entire life. My head is filled with an onslaught of distortion and melody; for once I am living one of my all-time favorite Hüsker Dü songs. My fingertips—the same ones that have memorized every note of Zen Arcade over the past decade—itch with anticipation. I try not to dwell on the implications of this, and think only of the night ahead.

Inside we order coffee and spend a few minutes talking. It turns out his “linebacker” description was a bit of a red herring; though he looks the part, his knowledge of sports is nil. Moreover he works as an opera director; not coincidentally, he has been out since the beginning of time. I don’t initially respond to this as we marvel at the power of technology, which has brought together such an unlikely pair. We ceremoniously thank the internet and imagine ourselves as circles on a Venn diagram with infinite degrees of separation.

“And what about you?” he finally asks, expressing (at least as I read it) a mix of real curiosity and—if not disdain—coy skepticism. I’m sure he knows that my “G” was a bit of a stretch. For the first time ever, I’m actually bothered by not being out. I feel ignorant to have worked in a record store for five years without knowing one thing about opera besides “Pavarotti.” (And worse, that I have done this in the wake of graduating from NYU Law School.) I think it might not be so cool to share an apartment with 1000 of my Brooklyn friends and cohorts, even if we did build a sound-proof rehearsal room in our basement that’s home to an equal number of indie-rock bands; or so impressive that my own band has five records and tours, or that we made the top-thirty on the CMJ radio charts last summer.

I finally decide to answer him directly: Nobody knows. (That is, except a few anonymous strangers.)

“Not even your mother?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What about your friends?”

“Nope—no one.”

He nods slowly and I try not to think how this must look. To my relief, his beautiful eyes remain placid, forgiving and even desirous. After all, I remind myself, it’s only sex. I change the subject. “Where did you say you live?”

“Uptown—Washington Heights.” Once again I have no idea what he’s talking about, but decide not to make my usual quip about never going above 14th Street.

I ask him what led him to move there.

“I’m a bit of a recluse,” he says, before explaining that it’s cheap and that he doesn’t mind being an outsider; sometimes he even prefers it. Unlike me, he has only a few friends he sees rarely and is not particularly “close” to his family. As I listen to this, my mind begins to race as I picture myself in his shoes. What would I do without my friends? (Where would I get drunk?) If I came out, would they forgive me for selling so many years of lies? And my family! All of my older brothers and sisters, married with children, what would they think if I ever described our relationship so perfunctorily, with such distance? Equally disgusted and intoxicated, I could suddenly see myself like Stephen—a recluse—obsessively devoted to the most queenly pursuits of silverware, mid-century modern, Schopenhauer and alpine gardening.

He laughs as he considers me, and seems to understand what he represents in terms of both yearning and doubt. “So—do you want to come over?” He places his hand over mine for a second and removes it.

“More than anything,” I say, and now—ten years later—his is a destiny I am happy to call our own.

(Image via Gawker).

It’s not hard to remember a phase we went through in elementary school, specifically fourth and fifth grade (and possibly sixth, although even now it pains us to think about this) when each Valentine’s Day, we took it upon ourselves to make increasingly elaborate boxes for the obligatory exchange of cards that occurred each year. My memory of this exchange process is that it was quite rigidly democratic (in the way the 1970s could sometimes be, and to their credit); if there were twenty-three kids in your class, you were obligated to present each with a card, regardless of gender or — more important — how ostracized a particular student was, in the case of _______ or _______ or _______ (one of whom, incidentally, kinda freaked us out by recently “friending” us on FB, though s/he seems to be leading a relatively “normal” life, while another one of these outcasts died at a very young age; for years in elementary school we had shunned him, after the fateful day our mother somehow arranged with his mother for us to walk to kindergarten together, which we later feared — i.e., once he had been established as an untouchable — would obligate us to be ‘nice’ to him at a political cost that seemed altogether unreasonable).

On Valentine’s Day, most students would simply bring in a shoe box with a few stickers or doilies attached to the outside, along with a few cut-out hearts of red construction paper. (Some of the girls made somewhat more elaborate designs.)

We dreaded Valentine’s Day, with its heterosexual implications and the horrible likelihood of receiving something “special” — given (and we don’t say this to brag) that we were intelligent, conventionally attractive and “good at sports” — from one or more of the suddenly cloying and detestable girls (who minutes earlier might have been a friend); it might have been something as simple as an extra sticker or a stylized signature  or a tiny piece of candy crushed into the envelope, but whatever the case, the end result was to inform us that we were officially “liked” by the girl in question, which filled our soul with a gloomy sense of obligation and doom that would later — in the cauldron of our adult depression — become the diamond of pessimism through which we would look so longingly at death.

A more rebellious child might have expressed disdain for the entire procedure, or ignored it like some of the other boys who just “went through the motions” without giving this dumb exercise a second thought. We were not inclined to such rebellion, however, and somehow — though without being at all conscious of this at the time — decided that the more subversive (and clearly the gheyest) option was to make a spectacle of the entire event, which in our case meant constructing an elaborate Valentine’s Day “skyscraper,” a six foot tower of intricately wrapped (in alternating shades of red and silver) boxes, complete with distinct inner passages that would allow a card pushed through a slot at the top to fall down and arrive in one of two containers: “Hot date!” or “No luck!” (Or something to that effect.)

We worked on this for a week or more with our best friend ____ (who didn’t even go our school) helping out on the weekend; he was a Lego/Star Wars geek, so the idea of building the “death star” of Valentine’s Day boxes held some appeal.

We brought it into class in a huge garbage bag — “huge” not an exaggeration either, given that it was procured from our father’s industrial supply company — and can still remember the shame and excitement we felt as we hauled it into the classroom and assembled the pieces to an audience of children (each in front of his or her pathetic little shoebox), a few of whom were genuinely excited and perhaps awestruck while most of the others were nonplussed or most likely ambivalent. As with so much in our unformed years (i.e., the first 30 of them, at least), we could often “get away” with even the most outlandishly ghey gestures because so much of the rest of our life was so hopelessly str8. In effect, this was our one day to really show everyone what we wanted to do — i.e., make something that had nothing to do with any of them — and for this reason we loved it and desperately wanted to prove ourselves somehow capable, but we also hated ourselves for possessing these compulsions that were odd and somehow self-destructive, if not quite self-destructive enough (speaking psychologically).

The disassembled boxes remained in our parents’ attic for quite a few years, probably at least until we left home in tenth grade for boarding school, by which point we had become more athletic and a lot more “straight,” to the extent that we “acted normal” and limited our non-heterosexual outlandish gestures to bedtime fantasies and the accompanying clouds of unfathomable guilt that hovered about us at all times. But we remember going home and seeing the silhouette of the garbage bag in the narrow crawl space, knowing that it was an indelible part of our past and praying that it would not be the key to our our future, which of course is one reason we are now happier not believing in a Christian god (except when we are feeling really sick and feverish).

When the February blues hit — and considering this winter, how could they not? — we like to immerse ourselves into dreams of spring, which entails many hours in the seed and plant catalogs. Though our garden is dominated by perennials, bushes and trees designed to draw forth the essence if not the reality (given our limitations) of an alpine garden, we like to reserve the pots for annuals  — sorry, purists! — because even though “friends don’t let friends buy annuals,” we find that they really do help add color when our garden tends to need it the most, i.e., through the drab period of late July and August. Last year we tried growing our annuals from seed with mixed results; some never got bigger than an inch or so, while others did eventually grow to the monstrous proportions we had anticipated. This year, we’re trying again, with an eye toward picking varieties that will all maybe actually thrive in the extremes of stultifying heat and humidity we seem to inevitably face each summer. Herewith our choices this year, with accompanying descriptions from the catalog:

Sunflower Sunny Smile (Helianthus annuus)
The big Sunflower you can grow in a small pot!

Flowering Tobacco (Nicotiana x sanderae)
If your summers are hot and humid, Flowering Tobacco is the annual you MUST grow.

Zinnia Profusion (Zinnia)
Winner of Gold Medals Galore, this is the Best Zinnia EVER!

Salvia Park’s Whopper Lighthouse (Salvia splendens)
So big, bright, and bold it could only be a Whopper, this annual Salvia takes the world by storm from the moment you sow the seed.

Do you know about any “must-have” annuals for 2k9? (Keep in mind we live in the swamplands of New York City.) Let us know, or send links/pix!

There are times when we cannot believe how long we’ve been alive, and concurrently, how long — assuming a regular life span — we still have to go. Though admittedly it’s a thought that most often arrives during an afternoon meeting at work, it also crosses our mind at random moments in the middle of winter, when everything seems frozen and permanent, or during an unpleasant commute, or waiting in the dentist’s office, or really any number of things we are required to do that offer nothing but the tedious certainty that life is really nothing more than a pit of quicksand in which we are slowly sinking. (Oddly this never happens when watching teevee — no matter how bad the show — which is both its gift and its curse.)

It goes without saying that as we get older and accept more “responsibility,” we worry more than when we were younger. Money, our health, the health of our children the cats, the fear of dying in Washington Heights, the fear of not dying in Washington Heights; all of this and more relentlessly plagues our thoughts with an intensity we could not have imagined even ten years ago, which makes our future seem like a mountain that gets steeper and icier with every step forward, but which offers no possibility of retreat.

During these moments of existential despair, we look back at the course of our life and it seems that every time we reached a fork in the road, we went in the wrong direction. Why did we do x, we wonder, when doing y — an option that would have been simpler — would have spared us so much hardship? Why — instead of using our natural talents — were we so intent on squandering every advantage? Why did we search out those who wished us nothing but harm and misery? (Why do we blog/Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook?) We think of others — lottery winners, acclaimed artists and writers, teevee stars, anyone who owns a 2br/2bth apt south of 96th Street on the west side — with seething jealousy, given what feels like a certainty that their lives are so much more pleasant and joyful than our own. How did it happen that so many people are younger and smarter (and richer) than us, when we used to be so good at math and scored in the 99th percentile on ever standardized test we ever took? Why did we spend 10 years in a band, when 1-2 would have more than sufficed?

But this passes as we acknowledge an (admittedly delicious and decadent) inability to really do anything about anything. It’s like when we were in law school; the first semester we couldn’t believe that our entire grade would be based on one three-hour test (no quizzes, no mid-terms, nada), but by the second semester, we could not imagine ever going back to a system in which we would be tested more than once a semester.

In this way only does life offer a common denominator: all memories (like dreams and perhaps even regrets) are created equal, and all paths lead to the same oblivion.