In an earlier draft of this post, I opened up by saying that I felt my posts about us meeting in New York didn't quite do the job in getting across how I felt about it. Since having reread them, I'm happy to find that I wound up getting most of my feelings across. But there's still work to be done, and where it'll get done. Hopefully you have some questions answered, if there's still any left.
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[EDIT: We lost. Before I knew that, it made a lot more sense to begin this post with a tangent about a sport I don't really give a shit about. But it's not that bad a paragraph. They tell you kill your darlings, but I'm keeping them around this time.]
I write to you as the Edmonton Oilers play the Florida Panthers in the last game of the Stanley Cup Final. The province is electric. It's like Halloween. You literally can't go anywhere without hearing someone talking about it or shouting "Go Oilers, go!" to complete strangers - indoors or out. I'm serious. Even my parents, who proudly "do not give a fuck" about hockey, are acutely interested. Yes, I am bandwagon-jumping, but that shit is very fun to do, especially on the motherfucking computer. It's the first time the Oilers have had a shot at winning the Stanley Cup since 1990, marking the end of the dynasty as a team (thank you, Google Search). My mom lived in Edmonton in those years. Thinking about that next to the fact that I semi-live there now gives me this immensely beautiful feeling of synchronicity, that all the world is this infinite song. So, with Canadiana nonmetaphorically taking to the streets in uniforms, marching, and public chanting, it's hard not to think about it. And I am, clearly. I just wrote exactly 250 words about it (a single page double-spaced in 12-point font), but my heart, if you will, is kind of elsewhere. I mean, sure, I'm a Prairie boy 'til the grave. This is well-known. But I'm also thinking of New York Shitty, baby.
Today, I read half of this article in the fucking Christian Science Monitor about Dimes Square. Very late to the party, as to be expected, but that was to the article's advantage. The author only being able to understand what something like a Hegelian e-girl is from a vulture-y journalistic distance made the whole universe of New York impossibly exciting to me again, a universe which now starts definitively with you. Sorry to lump you in with the fascists or whatever. What a fucking place, man. Every American knows this, but New York City is too fucking well-documented. There's a billion novels about it, a hundred billion movies, a who-gives-a-shit-ion photobooks. The reason there's such a thing as flyover states is partially because of it. Give it the fuck up already. It's one of the most self-mythologizing places on earth, so I completely get being tired of the thought of it. I'm not even mentioning that the place is a generally gross, definitively evil shithole. The city don't care if you live or you die. But, if you and I could cough up the bare minimum amount of money it would take to shack up together in Brooklyn or wherever (along with the much needed help of other Internet micro-celebrities), I would go there in a heartbeat. We would own that town. There's this interview with the photographer Daniel Arnold where he talks about New York being so attractive to him because it doesn't think of anything as sacred. The fact that we are all lying to each other is as apparent as it would be if there were signage everywhere about it. I feel like that's our kind of place. There's a few things I need to get in order up here in Canada first, but I'll try my best to be quick. Don't worry.
My family was in New York for a day short of a full week before I met up with you, but I was thinking today about how my New York trip feels like it truly began then. It's funny that we mostly stuck to the bank of the East River, as if just we washed up on a boat from the Atlantic, in search of paths through the concrete jungle. This pioneer metaphor is fun, but we were just hanging out, and that's what was so incredible about it. We were hanging out for real at the very edge of Brooklyn. Holy shit! Obviously, it would eventually feel natural. We have known each other for too long not to just pick up after where we left off.
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I'm self-conscious to a fault, as you know too well. But even so, I kept wondering if you would find me weird, with my obsessive note-taking and uneasy speaking. What I really want to say is I kept wondering if you would find me 'autistic' because that word packs a more self-deprecating punch, in no small part due to its open-air ableism. But I probably am just overthinking it. You said I seem "sexier" in person, as is often for "men". Don't worry, I'm not reading into it. I'll take your word for it. But I clearly was nervous. You wrote about me being nervous. Which is so strange, isn't it? I fucking know you. What am I thinking will go wrong? I guess it's literally just the shock of the new. I also wrote about me being nervous.
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You mentioned the bruise I left you. It's one of the sweetest things I've ever read you write. I might as well have gift-wrapped that perfect opportunity for a metaphor. It reminds me of the issue #1 of Al Burian's Burn Collector, where he writes about staying in Brooklyn with his then girlfriend. "This is the essential burn of New York City, I ventured, sitting there explaining the variety and shades and textures of the many burns I had been feeling in the past few weeks. 'You really like to just kind of go around checking out the burns of various places, don't you?' Elizabeth said. 'You're kind of a burn collector.' I thought that was pretty funny." Who the fuck has ever meant that life isn't worth living?
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Seeing you for the first time was like watching a ship sail in from the horizon. It was that same kind of quality your vision has when you make out something besides the ocean on top of it from a distance, where the slightest change of colour prompt your closest attention. This is a strange comparison, given that we were in a thick crowd of tourists.
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I kept singing Wilco's "Pot Kettle Black" to myself. I don't know if you noticed that.
Wilco is for assholes, but I like them. The chorus is what I kept cycling through:
It's become so obvious
You are so oblivious to yourself
In a more perfect world, this would bear some narrative significance to whatever we were doing by the Manhattan Bridge. But I can't think of anything. Instead, it just rings out in my mind, reminding me of nothing, but reminding me nevertheless.
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In the nearly two months since we met, my days are slightly less eventful. Nowadays, I just push carts and shovel garbage into trash compactors, occasionally bracketing that time with muscle-pulling bike rides and drinking with my friends around fires. It's a very witness protection program kind of life, and whatever we did across the border feels dreamlike, like a deoxygenates vision incurred by nearly drowning in broad daylight as the darkness of the bottom of a lake slowly takes you in. Bars. I think of you and the city every so often, but I haven't cried about it yet. I haven't cried about nearly anything in a while. I've stopped waiting for it. Maybe there's nothing to cry about. Perhaps that's a sign. I don't know what of. Probably nothing. Possibly everything. You know the deal. The Road calls my name, y'know.
