f's courtroom win of the new year:

me: Are you sleeping with your necklace on?
f: Yes, why?
me: Well, it looks like a choking hazard.....
f: Have you ever heard of anyone choking on their own necklace in their sleep?
me: Well...... no.
f: I rest my case!

In honour of all who lost their lives, all who mourn, all who fume and suffer and despair
Yesterday and every day of the past 70 years

Ligamentum

I pray for boredom.

You bored people: You don't know how lucky you are.

Let this year be remembered as the year of cancer, I once wrote.

This year, then, is the year of broken lives... the year of the survivors--

Behrang, a patchwork image of calamity pieced together through friends, loved ones, through the empty corners of that slowly emptying apartment, through the practical trivialities we waded through together following the sudden death of his wife...

Tahmaseb, who escaped the executions of post-Revolution Iran only to lose his wife to cancer, a lifetime, a grandchild later, in their beloved Berlin; who wrote of nothing but his Iran and his Farzaneh; whose short stay with us left a long mark on my life and my memory... whose kind, smiling eyes are unimaginable in grief...
.
.
.
Raheleh, for whom I have no words--none--to express how sorry, how heartbroken, how hurt for you... how vividly I can imagine... how I can't bring myself to... how every letter trips over itself, sinks, implodes before it gets to the page
.
.
.
Lost to us, now, but at peace

Shadi
Farzaneh
Gino

May you rest in the warmest, most golden calm

May your memory be blessed

i'll miss you(r laugh)
it won't be the same
don't be a stranger

all that.

If, by chance, I've missed somebody... if a reader here is not connected to me on one of the many channels I've now shared this, please visit our GoFundMe campaign for family friends who have suffered a terrible loss.

Please donate
Please share

...and to those who already have: Beyond words, thank you.

What do I need to write right now
How should I write it

... earlier this week, i awoke in an actual sweat from (what felt like) one million dreams:

we spent a long time searching for the cottage we rented--and, when we finally found it, it was a mess. the owners were still around, still tidying up, and one was not in a hurry to leave.

i was a professional football/soccer player in a team of 4. although i was as good as the others, my teammates didn't take me seriously. i never got the ball during practice; nobody even looked at me. the frustration was unbearable...

in the end, after i'd thrown a fit, we all lay down in the grass to watch the clear, blue sky and the passing day

... the moment a literary journal replies to your submission, and your heart stops, and you can't open it right away because at that moment everything is a real-life Schrödinger's cat, and when you finally gather the courage and find yet another rejection

... and you manage, somehow, a weak it's ok, there will be others

The Russian in me trembles when I hear it... this cadence.. this tone.. each word like fallen raindrops..

Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Vysotsky, unlikely twin spirits, were born on the same day, 56 years apart

the length of a life between them
and the simmering fury of one
and the quiet grief of the other

Of all the bus rides

A screaming homeless woman; a screaming child; a woman next to the woman with the screaming child muttering (fairly audible) profanities; a man playing unusual music (Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers) aloud for his quiet toddler--a toddler who, occasionally, reaches across the aisle with outstretched hands to scream in unison with his compatriot; a terrible bus driver; an impatient, pushy crowd.

The end.

But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works 
of last year's 
man

for the first time it wasn't a wolf or a bear. it was a lion, and my heart was a tight ball in my throat. but as it came toward me it bowed its head and circled gently around my legs and accepted my outstretched hand in friendship.

we walked together a long time in the dark and darkening forest.

as we approached the cement, the streetlights, the curious onlookers, i panicked. you can't come with me here, i thought, it's not safe. and as it turned back, slowly, reluctantly, my heart was a million fragments of relief and loneliness and terror.

During a reading of The New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs":

F: "I don’t want to worry you, since I know you are having a hard time with weevils..." Darling, what are "weevils"?
Me: Hmm, I don't remember. Maybe a kind of illness?
F: No, "...in your garden."

terror, last night, as i was stalked around my own home by the masked creature from the Scream movies. my alarm woke me as i hid in the shadows, waiting for it to turn around..

Suzanne takes you down...

...to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her

among the irritating crowds, the streetcar announcements

And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there

the racket, the rocking, the shaking, the jostling

And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover

the multitude of voices, frustrations, annoyances

And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

Cohen.

even if, even if i'd actually interrupted your meeting with a totally trivial matter (and it most certainly wasn't), would that face have been necessary?

jesus. christ. as if someone had insulted your entire family while burning your $2M car...

This was not supposed to be an emotional trip, but there it was. There it was: unexpected heartache, nostalgia, loss.

***

Everything began and ended in Vienna with a constant flurry of activity, crowds of tourists, stunning (and perfectly maintained) historic architecture on (literally) every corner, wonderfully engaging Mozart at the Musikverein Concert Hall, and Klimt (KLIMT!) at the Belvedere Museum. This is a city where you need not wait to be seated (they just know, like magic); a city that takes its dessert seriously, as it should; a city where I discovered that I’ve rarely encountered anything as vulgar as a selfie stick held up in a church. A city that gave us, also, the gorgeous Danube River tour to the Abbey of Melk, where we stood in the presence of hundreds of thousands of ancient books, where all within us dipped and fluttered at the thought of following in Umberto Ecco's quiet footsteps... where we fondly remembered our readings and rereadings of The Name of the Rose and its cleverness and its beauty.

Where our twin hearts leafed through every page again in tenderness and admiration.

***

The first of countless surreal moments flitting through this journey fell upon me on the train ride to the airport, where I looked up from the quiet delirium of Cormac McCarthy's Depression-era Mexico to face the Viennese dawn through a thick fog, a darkened tunnel, my own reflection; when, for a moment, I couldn't remember where I was or where I was going...

Outside in the abandoned village the profoundest silence.
(McCarthy, The Crossing)

***

This continued on the flight to Vilnius, with the passengers behind me--one of them possibly Mexican--discussing Roman Catholic religious practices as I read of a dispirited priest in the desolate Mexican town of Caborca and his Mennonite roots and his undefined selfhood.

This continued as I walked through the Old Town with my mother's difficult childhood in mind and stumbled on the Museum of Genocide Victims before all else. As I witnessed everywhere a country slowly coming to terms with its (extensive) role in the Holocaust. Felt everywhere a large and wholly absent population: plaques commemorating prominent Jews like Jascha Heifetz and Theodor Herzl; plaques commemorating prominent Lithuanians who saved many from certain death; plaques commemorating the Big and Little Jewish ghettos where, in what felt to me like the final insult, a now-trendy/gentrified area still bears the street name Žydų ("Jewish").

This continued when the hardest thing, the hardest thing happened as I panicked: How is it that I haven't sent Emma any photos of her beloved Vilnius? How the day after this we heard "Nah Neh Nah" on the radio--one of Emma’s favourites, I learned; the song she and my grandfather danced to over and over at their wedding. How the same day, during a night at the symphony arranged by Sonata's husband, we heard Beethoven's 7th--another one of Emma's favourites.

This continued as my father waved at me from every one of the million bookstores... as Sonata's youngest casually philosophized at the kitchen table: Everyone doesn't understand something (he, Russian; I, Lithuanian; Sonata, English)... as I noticed the insane difficulty of being a full workday ahead of home.

All continued as I observed this strange new connection to this half-empty city... this accidental city of my birth.

It took Cormac McCarthy and an 8-hour flight to snap me out of years of reading paralysis and terror and paralysis ... and that seemingly endless cycle possibly broken by a man who reads like Faulkner, who demands full attention and every word chewed, swallowed, digested, making its way into your blood stream..