Thank you, 19th century vegetarianism.

Who knows if this is what it’s really like, Fire Island in the winter, but something about the idea of that eerie solitude speaks volumes to me.

I want to feel that ghost-town triumph, the bubbling sensation that, 4 months in either direction, the spot you’re standing in crawls with flesh and heat, a perennial congregation of naked bodies and self-deprecation.

I want to feel above that for just a second, a minute, a day, a weekend – a victory over the body dysmorphia and the emotionally stunted mind of every gay boy who doesn’t look like an Abercrombie model.

To take a stand in desolation and claim one’s existence. Nora Helmer would be proud of me.

Fire Island in the winter. It sounds like a frozen paradise.

I don’t know who I am, but you know,

Life is for Learning…

And I dreamed I saw the bombers riding shotgun in the sky,

And they were turning into Butterflies above our nation.

Old habits from childhood die hard, especially since childhood dies soft.

Robitussin still makes you want to vomit, and cream cheese still makes the phlegm in your throat worse.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

I know a woman who was in an earthquake. It was the biggest earthquake anyone had seen in over 50 years, and yet miraculously nobody died. I like to think nobody died because it also happened to be the most beautiful day of the year, but I think more than that, strong happenings affect strong people, and the folks put in the most danger by this earthquake seemed to have an incredible will to live. My friend was in the lobby of an office building staffing the front desk when the earthquake struck.

The place where she worked was recently built, and the architecture was a kind of Mendelian birthing of the union between log-cabin and mod. Giant oak armchairs sat in the lobby facing a stainless, brushed steel fireplace. The entire place was a beautifully unexpected battle of curves and angles. Trees were the subject of new industry, nailed to the floors as chairs, desks, and coat racks. Tables featured small, manicured lawns that served as pillows for hard-cover books and back-issues of “Time” and “The New Yorker.” The fire in the fire place had already begun to turn the steel frame black, though, and as the earth roared through the lobby that day, it became clear that the battle between industry and nature had not yet been settled.

When the building first started shaking, my friend did not immediately know how to react. We try our best over the course of our lives to condition ourselves to react in accordance with convention when certain things happen to us. More often than not, though, there is a split second lapse between when our emotional instincts begin to take control and when our carefully conditioned intellects can compensate for the mistakes we’ve already begun to make. My friend, initially startled by the great grumblings beneath her feet, jumped up in alarm, following the algorithm of reaction to which every cogitating human being is subject. As soon as the feelings in her legs passed from her spine to her brain, though, she was able to fight reflex. As fast as she had leapt from her seat, she was heading for duck-and-cover under the very desk that just 5 minutes ago had been under her careful protection. As she executed this peripeteia of self and desk, she remained unaware that the light fixture above her had swung loose. She drew herself quickly under the desk, but the laws of gravity had already staged their coup, and her foot fell victim to over one hundred pounds of falling mahogany and halogen bulbs, which shattered her foot into hundred of small shards.

My friend was then faced with the reality that a part of her had suddenly become humpty-dumpty, and while she sat in a half-committed fetal position under her desk she decided it was a fate she had no intention of accepting passively.