The alarm went off too early this morning and I was jolted awake, bolting upward and silently gasping. I had the worst dream. Someone please tell me what this means:
I swiped my metrocard and walked down into the subway. There were a few scattered strangers underground, none of them paying attention to me. I felt sick and full and shaken, leaned over and vomited. But I couldn’t stop. It was violent, until I was on my hands and knees, shaking and wretching. The train came and the strangers got on. No one got off. I was all alone and gagging and throwing up bright red blood and spitting when the alarm went off.
I didn’t drink last night. I had a small cheese sandwich for dinner.
By all accounts, David Sedaris is a very good writer. He wrote one of my favorite pieces on This American Life a year or two ago, a lovely bit about romance and office politics, and continues to publish gems in the New Yorker. Of course, I read Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Overrated, yes. Enjoyable, certainly.
I saw Sedaris read during the British leg of his book tour in 2005. There were only about fifty of us. Mostly, I remember him talking about his bag of urine strapped to his leg, our polite giggles eventually giving way to hearty snorts.
He signed my book, too. He drew a picture of a horse and wrote “Don’t ever quit.” He meant smoking, but I told my friends he was talking about the novel I had been writing.
“Don’t ever quit,” he said aloud to me, and winked. I remember that wink. It was pure dry, cynical loathing. There he was in Nottingham at a crappy Waterstones signing a paperback for a dim-witted twenty something kid who had, for some stupid reason I will never remember, decided to tell him about her novel.
And then I coughed.
“Smoker?” he asked. I nodded.
Well. Don’t ever quit, says the cartoon horse. Don’t ever stop, I thought to myself. There was something incredibly grotesque about our exchange. If I didn’t quit smoking I would likely condemn myself to an early death. Fuck the piece of shit novel; Sedaris was full of bad advice. Instead of encouraging the fledging creativity of a bright-eyed kid, he had chosen to bitterly stab at her stupid post-adolescent posturing.
I seriously hate shoes. First of all, they never fit. If they fit in the store they are guaranteed not to fit on the street. Also, New York City eats up shoes and spits them out like cowboys and toothpicks. They’re expensive. They’re uncomfortable. They get ruined in the rain. They slide inconveniently and often painfully over snow.
Face it: Shoes suck. And if I had my way, I would walk barefoot all over the city, from the Upper East Side to Hells Kitchen and back. Bunions and diseases and dirty needles be damned
For further facts on feet, check out www.barefooters.org, a site that umm, tries to prove that standing in pee in the bathroom is a-okay, but also has the facts on driving barefoot (legal!) and the no shirt, no shoes, no service signs (bullshit!) you see in restaurants.
Funny, you don’t normally hear many warnings about feet in New York. I wish someone had held up a sign for me that time I decided to waltz down 137th and Broadway barefoot. My feet were fine, but the crackheads really perked up.
Like the fur of a chinchilla. Like the cleanest tooth. Yes, the fishes say, this is what it feels like. People always ask the fishes, ‘What does the water feel like to you?’ and the fishes are always happy to oblige. Like feathers are to other feathers, they say. Like powder touching ash. We smile and nod. When the fishes tell us these things, we begin to understand. We begin to think we know what the water feels like to the fishes. But it’s not always like fur and ash and the cleanest tooth. At night, they say, the water can be different. At night, when it’s very cold, it can be like the tongue of a cat. At night, when it’s very very cold, it’s like cracked glass. Or honey. Or forgiveness, they say, ha ha. When the fishes answer these questions – which they are happy to do – they also ask why. They are curious things, fish are, and thus they ask, ‘Why? Why do you want to know what the water feels like to the fishes?’ And we are never quite sure. The fishes press further. ‘Do you breathe air?’ they ask. The answer is yes. Well then, they say, ‘What does the air feel like to you?’ And we do not know. We think of air and we think of wind, but that’s another thing. Wind is air in action, air on the move, and the fishes know this. Well then, they ask again, ‘What does the air feel like?’ And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. ‘Think!’ they say. ‘Think,’ they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that air feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. ‘Do better, think harder,’ they say, encouraging us. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed. ‘Keep going,’ they say. It feels like blood, we say, and they say, ‘No, no, now you’re getting colder.’ The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like being pushed and pulled and yanked, punched and slapped and misunderstood and loved, we say, and the fishes sigh and touch our forearm sympathetically.
Originally published on January 8, 2005 in The Gaurdian.
I think we are drunk off of each other and the cool spring afternoon. Our lips may or may not feel like the prehistoric leaves I plucked unceremoniously off the low-slung trees. You shouldn’t use that word, inevitable, and I can barely see you in the blurred darkness. What happens between us is a chemical altercation in the air. What happens between us is my bed and the floor and the doorway and the sidewalk and the entire southern-bound direction of the FDR. And let me look at your fingers which may or may not feel unfair as we jerk around the back of a taxi. It is not nothing: It is a four-hour midnight and we are turning back.
Subway Philosophy is about New York, culture, sex, publishing, memories, alcohol, or a combination of the above. Originally taken from drunken musings on the subway, it has evolved into something extraordinarily similar to most young blogs: which is to say, redundant, romantic, and woefully introspective.
