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part 3: paris to florence

we have fifty minutes from the time we land in paris to the time our connecting flight leaves for florence, and the terminal we have to get to is, naturally, at the other end of the world. i'm so grossed out by the trappings of modern convenience by now that i refuse to set foot on the automatic walkways and instead shuffle my suitcase from raw palm to raw palm as i half-jog through the habitrail that is charles de gaulle. as we scoot along i look out the floor-to-ceiling window at the hill that slopes down from the edge of the parking lot to the ground floor of the building. it's beautiful, covered not in grass but with ivy, the entire thing a rippling sheet of reaching vines, though marred by the occasional bit of trapped rubbish or snagged plastic bag. i wonder if there's one hundred-foot square on the planet that doesn't have any plastic in it at all. toadie, despite being a good six inches shorter than me, very gamely trots alongside me, even though, unbeknownst to me, the woman at the check-in desk told her we were in danger of missing our plane. she doesn't reveal this to me until we get to the metal detectors and she is pulled aside and told to open her bag, at which point she recommends that i go on ahead of her. i tell her i'd rather die, and besides, i don't know what we're supposed to do once we get to florence. so i wait and watch a guard spend several minutes rooting through toadie's delicates, only to then decide that that thing he saw must have been the metal clip on the outside of the bag. what i decide is that it's apropos that "douche" is a french word, but i rapidly change my mind about blaming the entire nation for one man's reeking jerkiness. that would be wrong, and i know this because i am so deeply wounded when people from other countries assume that being american means supporting every decision made by the current american government. not so, my international readers, not so, but we can delve into that some other time.

the boarding gate leads us to a cement-walled spiral staircase instead of an airplane, and we think for a moment that we've either somehow made a drastically wrong turn (even though we never turned) or that we are going to be abducted and tortured, but in reality we only board a shuttle bus that takes us to our very tiny plane—it seats about 96 (yes, i am dorky enough to have counted). i feel better this time, going up in this very tiny plane—better, but not good. it taxis around for what i think must be at least 30 minutes. i'm so drowsy and dimwitted that i can't pay a whole lot of attention to the goings-on of the aircraft, but i am shocked when i suddenly realize, maybe ten minutes after my groggy brain assumed we must have taken off, that we are still lazily meandering around the lot. i start to wonder how much gas we've used up doing so, but my mind won't have it and instead tells me a story about my left butt cheek and the wonderful dream it's been having since it fell asleep, something about tempur-pedic foam and NAP panties, i don't really know. it was far more comforting than my original thought, though, and i give my mind credit for that.

when we do finally leave the ground, i find the take-off far more captivating than the one from logan. because the plane is so small, you can actually feel its speed and trajectory as they change. the sensation is more honestly of flying now; before, it was like an extra-cramped ride on the subway. i don't have a window, but the seats are much more comfortable than on the last flight. toadie's sleeping, and i'm glad, because it means in have an excuse to make her drive the rental car.

the steward hands me a cold wet-nap in a foil pouch, and for some reason it's the most amazing thing i've ever held. i clutch it in my grimy fist instead of using it and think i might finally be able to drift off. lo and behold, it's true.

i come to toward the end of the ride. toadie awakens briefly to devour what she has apparently deemed a finer-quality shrink-wrapped danish, but she flinches at what she tells me is a tub of sour cream. other people are eating theirs with spoons, and i wonder if it isn't plain yogurt, but i'm in no mood to debate it with her. to offer you a point of reference, toadie, a born-and-bred irish-catholic bostonian, has never eaten mashed potatoes because she thinks they smell funny; if you would care to sit next to her in a snug airplane cabin and convince her to eat a mystery dairy product, i will do my best to arrange it for you—but i will not help you.

and we land. this descent is much harder on my ears, for whatever reason, but i can't chew gum because of my screwy jaw, so i suck it up, because, well, because i have no option. there is no security at the florence airport—no metal detectors, no one checking passports, nothing. i guess they assume those things will have been sufficiently covered at the other end. we're surprised but relieved, as we've tired of being handled. toadie's friend, our soon-to-be hostess, supposedly instructed us to take a train from the airport (i never spoke directly to her, as i don't directly know her), so we head outside and look for something that might be a train station. after about five minutes we head back inside to ask someone to direct us to something that might be a train station, and a high-strung man with dark-blonde hair and a crazy, crazy mustache points us toward the bus stop. "no, that's the bus stop," we say. "yes, bus to train, you take, it goes," he says. this leads to what will be the first of many, many narrowings of the eyes on my part re our hostess and her tendency to misinform, but we'll cover those as we come to them. for now, bus to train it is.

sunday best-of blogging: the moment of silence issue

best last bit of advice: in the note she sent me before i left for italy, my grandmother told me to "remember everything!!" she sent me three disposable cameras and a notebook, and though i've been not so diligent about relaying my memoirs to all of you, i took her seriously. my most mundane moment might turn out to be someone else's favorite story, but i have to keep it long enough to talk about it in order for that to happen, and anyway, no experience is without some sort of significance. now, anyone who spent any time with my grandmother over the last five years or so knows very well that she did not remember everything, but she remembered to want to, and i think that might count a little bit more.

best way to spend christmas: with the people you love most, even if you have to be together in a hospital room, even if one of those people you love most can't be with you at the end of the day.

best three songs to hear later on as you're driving home in the rain: "night swimming," rem; "long december," counting crows; "today," smashing pumpkins

and that's all i'm going to say about that.

tag has always been my worst athletic event . . .

. . . as i'm a poor distance runner and relatively unenthusiastic about any sport that doesn't involve hitting things rather hard. (in my experience, while tag can potentially involve a decent amount of force, most people would prefer it didn't. sallies.) so i started off at a disadvantage, and when you add to that the fact that i was practically asleep when the rest of the players started darting around you'll understand how unfairly fish-in-a-barrel things were. anyhow, i've been snagged by phila and drawn into one of these never-ending web webs of getting-to-know-you goodness, and while i'm touched that he would choose me, especially since he's one of my favorite faceless friends, i don't exactly live for the spotlight. but he asked nicely, and i didn't have too much better to do, so i'll suck it up and talk all about me for a minute or two.

seven things to do before i die

1. have a job i love every aspect of
2. scuba dive with sharks—maybe in a cage, maybe not
3. finish the life-sucking story i've been trying to write for the past six years, and feel good about it when i'm done
4. remember and acknowledge the birthdays of every person i care about for an entire year
5. move to some place where i won't feel guilty about having a big, goofy, boisterous labrador retriever, and then get three of them
6. convince one person that homeostasis is inevitably more important than self-gratification, no matter what the situation
7. find out where my recycling actually goes

seven things i can not do

1. ride a bicycle
2. play the piano with both hands
3. think about milk without making a face
4. not gasp (at best) or shriek (at worst) at the sight of a centipede or millipede, even when they're only cartoons
5. envision the amount of trash produced worldwide in a single day
6. stop wanting to wallop bush, cheney, santorum, stevens, etc. with orange-filled socks (see, phila, i'm not so even-tempered as you thought)
7. abide hypocrisy

seven things that attract me to . . . chester

1. his musical talent
2. his deep thoughts about solitude
3. his absolute freedom from self-consciousness
4. the snail costume he wears to his job at the pet store, where he cleans the fish tanks from the inside with his great suction
5. his boundless, ecstatic enthusiasm
6. his disarming lack of any and all ulterior motives
7. the cereal in his pocket

seven things i say most often

1. "hello, babies!"—spoken every time i walk into the nuclear medicine cat ward at work, and every time i come home to the psychiatric cat ward in my bedroom
2. "fucking w."
3. "who watches this crap?"
4. "who eats this crap?"
5. "no, no, don't! don't wake up with the king! he'll eat your soul!"
6. "juniper! you're my enemy."
7. "coffee . . ."

seven books that i love

1. the little prince – antoine de saint-exupéry
2. the sound and the fury – william faulkner
3. everything is illuminated – jonathan safran foer
4. the world of pooh – a. a. milne
5. fillerbunny – jhonen vasquez
6. alice's adventures in wonderland – lewis carroll
7. jesus saves – darcey steinke, and because i'm a sucky cheater i can't not include lolita. there.

seven movies that i watch over and over again

1. i *heart* huckabees
2. swimming to cambodia
3. the purple rose of cairo
4. the princess and the warrior
5. happiness
6. bloodsucking freaks
7. ponette

seven people i want to join in, too

are you kidding me? i don't think i even know seven people. here, i'll tell you what: i'll leave this one open, and anyone who wants to play can go ahead and do so. i know we're not all big on the games.

i made you a card!

like everything else hal found himself missing, his christmas spirit turned up in the most unlikely place.

happy solstice from the lobster trap third from the left.

a different sort of blues explosion

i didn't hear until today that john spencer, the actor who has been best known recently for portraying leo mcgarry on the west wing, died of a heart attack this past friday. i guess that's what happens when you run away and refuse to interact with other human beings—you sometimes miss important pieces of information. i've had a long-standing soft spot for mr. spencer, and i'm awfully sad for his friends and family. losing a loved one unexpectedly is probably the worst thing that can happen to a person, regardless of the circumstances, but it's especially hard, i think, when it happens this time of year. one of the most tolling parts of mourning is keeping yourself together around the general public, and when the general public is throwing parties and handing out presents and hanging stars and mistletoe … i don't know. nothing makes it easier, but that sort of disparity makes it extra difficult, and my heart goes out in a massive way to everyone who's missing him.

i hope everyone you love is safe and happy tonight. maybe you should call and let them know that you were wondering.

sunday best-of blogging: the "i drove to new york city by myself because i'm a lovesick groupie" issue

Best. Musician. Ever.: evan dando! yay! yay, evan dando! you're so the love of my life i can't even stand myself. evan dando, for those of you who do not know, has been my #1 rock star crush since i was 13 years old. that's a long time—and he's earned every second of it. he ties with jon stewart, who is only not my #1 rock star crush because he can't play guitar*, unless he can and i just don't know it, in which case i might never be able to decide. for some reason, everyone everywhere on the planet is not obsessed with evan dando, and some people haven't even heard of him. i can't understand this at all, but i'm also foggy on calculus and people's fanaticism for excessively manicured lawns.

awwwwww! i wuv my boys. and so do their respective wives, but let's not think about them.

best fan at the 12/17 lemonheads show: a lovely 19-year-old boy from toronto, who took a train all the way to new york by himself and stayed in a room at a hostel with four strangers. that's devotion. i thought i was pretty hardcore, but this kid takes the cake, the serving platter and all the silverware. i was so impressed by his devotion that i bought him a beer, but that was before i knew he was nineteen. in my defense, he was already drinking when he started talking to me, and the bowery ballroom swore that it wasn't letting anyone under twenty-one inside. what can you do? whatever, he earned it; he had gone to see the lemonheads in providence a few weeks before, which i did not do, and i only live an hour away. i didn't ask him his name, but whoever he is, he's fantastic. way to go, young man.

best secret-boyfriend synchronicity: i only spoke to two people in the two days i spent in the city; one of them was the aforementioned boy from toronto, and the other was a guy from dorchester named mike, who introduced himself to me at the friday show and, in the course of our conversation and with zero mention from me of anything of the sort, told me the last book he read was the tipping point. while he's from dorchester, he works half the week in manhattan, and when i said, "i have such a crush on malcolm gladwell," he said, "let's go get him, he lives in columbus circle." he agreed with me that malcolm and i would be a smashing duo, but i declined, for no good reason that i can think of today. no matter; now i know which corners to stake out once i've hoarded enough candy and kix to stalk with my all, which malcolm certainly doesn't deserve less than.

most jarring disappointment: i got up early saturday and walked to 12 harrison street, the address given on ken brown's web page, assuming it was his home-base store and that i'd score bushels of bizarro swag. NO! 12 harrison street is an apartment building, where, presumably, ken brown lives and fills orders from. now, i could have buzzed him and demanded that he load me up with booty, since i'd come all that way, but i was so thrown by the situation that i just turned around and headed back the way i'd come. *sigh* it was a pleasant walk, anyhow, and i did get a cup of great coffee.

best catharsis of all lingering romantic demons: before now i have only ever been to new york city once in my life; that one time was five and a half years ago, and i made the trip to visit a boy. i met him in boston in february and liked him lots, and at the end of may he moved to the east village and invited me out, and i'd never been so excited about anything in my life. so i drove down, and we sat on his couch for an hour and a half and had a wonderful chat, and then his girlfriend came home. i did not know about the girlfriend, and he became somewhat agitated, which led me to believe that i was not supposed to know about the girlfriend. bastard. anyway, she didn't seem too terribly flustered, so i tried to make the best of it and asked her if she could recommend anything interesting for me to do while i was there, since i was a first-timer. the girl looked me dead in the eye and said, "interesting? interesting, interesting… gosh, i don't know, mostly i just shop." i sat very still and prayed for a punch line, but all i got was, "soho has the best shops, that's my favorite. they have so many beautiful things." i looked around and saw that the boy was across the room with his head in a drawer, not acknowledging anything that was taking place. i felt rather unwell. i left a short while later and wandered for a while without paying any attention to where i was going, and i wound up at union square, where i sat down under a tree and was promptly kicked off the grass (they close the grass in new york city. what the hell is that?). so i moved to a bench on the perimeter of the park and sat there for two hours, thinking dark thoughts and throwing bits of cinnamon bun at pigeons. every time i thought about new york after that day, i thought about that sequence of events, and so the city was a hideous place in my crazy, cloudy head.

but yesterday i retraced all my steps and buried my sad, ashy ghosts under that tree. to think i let one no-good punk and one shopaholic bubblehead ruin this entire place for me… but that's the end, i've had a lovely time here, and i hope to have many more lovely times here in the future. perhaps even in the very near future, but i won't get ahead of myself.

best sign: "ENDLESS FLAX." really, that's all it said, with a phone number beneath it. it was a fairly large sign, too, not something handmade or slapdash. i like flax, it's in my cereal and my crackers, it's tasty and good in its way, but endless? i can't imagine what else the sign's makers might have been trying to say, though; if you have suggestions, please, tell me. lest i be plagued by it all the rest of my days.

best horoscope to read the morning of a five-hour drive: "all signs indicate that you should not stray too far from home today, if you can possibly help it. you are easily distracted, making you prone to accidents. behind the wheel of a car is not the place for you to be right now. stay home and tackle all those little chores you've been meaning to get to." thanks, earthlink! if i hadn't been easily distracted before, i sure will be now. it's my own fault, i suppose, for choosing to read my horoscope even though i know i'm a superstitious neurotic.

most un-bad news about my grandmother's health: she hasn't gotten worse. that's all the information i've been able to obtain, and it comes second-hand from my mother, who has been forced to wrench it out of doctors and hospital staff, since my paternal relatives are insane and only hear every eighth word in a sentence. god knows what i would think if i were listening to them. thank you, everyone, for wishing us well. it truly is tremendously appreciated.




* jon stewart has earned semi-rock-star status, definitely in my heart just for being himself, but also on a more general scale, because he let marilyn manson burn things while playing "lunchbox" on his talk show and he once lit his farts on fire on trent reznor's tour bus. but still, as it stands, evan wins.

my holiday season, or Why I Won't Listen to You Whine About the Difficulty of Sticking to Your Diet With All These Holiday Cookies Around

my grandmother (the zippy irish-catholic one, not the portuguese teenage-mother one) was admitted to the hospital tuesday for reasons no one has been able to pry out of my hysterically shrieking aunt or my belligerent brute of an uncle. we knew she'd been sick since october, and while she claimed it was just a nagging cold, my grandfather told us a few weeks ago that she secretly felt like hell and was getting worse all the time. we're pretty sure she has pneumonia, and we're completely sure she was supposed to have surgery today for an aortic stenosis. she had multiple bypass surgery over a decade ago, and she's been mostly well since then, but it's tough to take perfect care of your body when you're a short, round woman in her seventies with no income and a husband who can't walk from one end of the house to the other without at least a little assistance. i have no idea who'll take care of him while she's recovering. more troubling to me at this point is that i have no idea whether or not she actually is recovering; i didn't hear from anyone this afternoon and couldn't get a hold of anyone this evening. my poor sister called me yesterday while i was at work, crying so hard she couldn't even breathe to speak. when she came back into her body she told me she was sure our grandmother had died, because of the hysterical and/or belligerent messages, all bereft of actual information, left by our relatives. she kept asking me to call our dad (it's his mom), but since he switched jobs a year and a half ago i don't even know what town he works in. i, here in boston, didn't know anything had happened at all until i was knocked on my ass by my desperate, breathless baby sister and was busy fretting over my tiny cat, who had x-rays tuesday that revealed a left kidney the size of a malnourished grape and an airway pattern consistent with chronic allergic bronchitis. i'm not fretting over her just now, as she's sleeping sweetly in my lap and not feeling badly about anything. i am, in fact, not fretting at all. i'm completely calm. i'm packed for manhattan, i'm leaving my phone on, i'll take what comes as it comes.

but i do not care how much chocolate you've eaten this week (i see it too, you know, i pass all the same counters and tables you do and i don't eat it, IT ISN'T THAT BLOODY DIFFICULT) or how fancy the electric razor you bought for your boyfriend is, and i was not moved by that awful diamond commercial, and i haven't played a video game since my atari 600 crapped the bed back in 1992, so i'm not impressed by whatever thingy with the guns and the cars and the secret lap dance, i just . . .

i have things on my mind. it doesn't mean you can't talk to me, but it does mean you have to say something.

so. as there's nothing i can do for anyone by staying, and no one seems to desire my assistance anyway, i'm looking forward to wandering around nyc and not speaking to anyone for the next three days. i hope you all have a pleasant weekend. try to do a genuine thing, if an opportunity presents itself. i'll thank you for it when i get home.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to listen to over and over for five hours as you hurtle blank-faced down an unfamiliar highway while coming to the eviscerating understanding that that future you kept having visions of is never going to be yours: "makin' pies," patty griffin.

best explanation for that pointed, shooting pain just behind and slightly above your left eyeball, which you assume is the result of a stroke, or perhaps an aneurysm: you have just finished reading this passage from david grann's september 19 new yorker article on his experience in the brazilian rainforest, where he attempted to retrace the steps of the early-20th-century explorer colonel percy harrison fawcett, who disappeared searching for the remains of a primitive civilization:

as we passed the manso river, where fawcett had got lost . . . , i kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. instead, the terrain looked like nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. when i asked taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, "gone."

a moment later, he pointed to a truck heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.

"only the indians respect the forest," pinage said. "the white people cut it all down." the mato grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. between august, 2003, and august, 2004, ten thousand square miles of the amazon, an area the size of massachusetts, were cleared away—and, in the past year, at least another five thousand square miles were lost. the state governor, blairo maggi, who is one of the largest soybean producers in the world, told the times, "i don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. we're talking about an area larger than europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."

ow. ouch. why do people say things like "barely been touched" as though it's a state of sin, as though human beings are failures for having let things go on that way? what size would it have to be for it to be worth worrying about? that of the united kingdom? of japan? of fucking rhode island? when will there be so little left that everyone will agree that we ought to back down? here and there up crops a lorax who cries out for the trees, but all around him are blairo maggis (even in his heart the devil has to know the water level) and the small earnest voices are lost in the din of buzzsaws and bulldozers and the jangling of cash tills, and i'm ready to start carrying that book around and soap-boxing on street corners—but books are made of paper. i suppose i'll just have to commit it to memory, but after all that my small voice won't be heard any better than the rest. it seems like common sense, doesn't it, to never let there be only one last anything? to not allow the earth to become so changed that we would not recognize it? and even david grann, i'd bet, went home and did nothing differently.

ow. ouch. but i have to keep reading the hurtful words, so i don't forget to speak other ones. i'll just never understand, that's all.

best addition to the season's first significant snowfall: thunder and lightning. i hear this combination only forms in new england. you folks are fairly well spread out, though, and probably better traveled than myself, so if you know something to the contrary please correct me. even here in new england, i've only seen it happen in december. i know nothing about weather patterns or fronts or atmospheric pressure, nor do i care to, so i'm free to sit on the radiator with my forehead pressed against the ice-crackled window and whisper "thank you, sky" over and over and over as if i were two and hadn't yet thought to understand anything. if it doesn't happen anywhere else, i suggest you all spend one month in or around boston every winter, because it's spectacular.

best drawing to use as a logo on a business card:



my ultra-fabulous best friend of fourteen years made this, and i've claimed it, because after sticking by him for that long i've earned dibs on just about everything. you can see more of his sketches here. he was putting lots of drawings up on his flickr page for a while, but lately he's been a bit of a monkey and replaced the drawings with lots and lots of pictures of himself without a shirt on, which you also may enjoy, depending upon your personal tastes. i see more of him in the artwork than the photographic self-portraits, but that's how we work; i'm a writer and a storyteller, and he always hears more of me in the anecdotes i tell about other people, or sometimes even in the pauses. we're lucky that way. if you're interested, he's working on a swell series of pictures of the abandoned mill in the center of our home town. i do love me some abandoned buildings. forgive their frequent photoshoppiness, the application is new to him and he's still pretty excited over it. if you have negative things to say about his work, don't say them here; he's been my partner in crime since he was a skinny weirdo in bike shorts and oversized hypercolor t-shirts, and i'm anything but objective about him.

most visually entertaining anti-smoking campaign: the charming antics of the baby-faced bobbleheads at ashtray mouth. (thanks, spine, for bringing them to my attention.) the tv spots combine so many of my favorite things—creepy children, garbage-pail-kid aesthetics, macabre humor, disjointed music-box melodies—that i forgive them for being, well, not all that effective. cigarette mouth tastes bad, it's true, but you'll get over it if you like the person you're kissing enough. i mean, i've never tasted cat vomit, but i doubt it's truly similar, and some people eat fish heads on purpose. do i want to kiss them? probably not. but if i found out franka potente and john cameron mitchell smoked, it wouldn't stop me from aiming for them in a tequila-infused round of spin-the-bottle. i think these folks are better suited to back an anti-morning-breath campaign. now, that shit's nasty.

best animated short featuring a bug being buggered by a bug: spoilsbury toast boy 2. i couldn't adore david firth more if he were a tiny floating moose with bubbly eyes and a platter of tuna sandwiches on his head, and believe me, my feelings for that moose are intense. every cartoon david makes lately twists the tarnished, pock-edged blade in my amygdala another third of an inch to the left. that's love.

best patient history: written on a request for lumbar-spine radiographs: "past history disco, current recurrence of signs; check for damage."

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part 2: the mid-atlantic to paris, in which our narrator is too overtired to see any good in the world

somewhere over ireland the cabin lights are turned back on, after having been off for not quite three hours, so the crew can give us our breakfast. i think it's about 1:30 am eastern standard time, so i'm not all that happy, and i'm definitely not hungry. this is a good thing, as i'm not willing to eat any of the food i'm handed. my left eyelid is fluttering like an angel-dusted moth at a candlelight vigil, but i've scored two brand-new tiny spoons, so while i feel i would be justified in complaining, i bite my tongue. i accept my 3 oz. of minute maid orange juice and shot glass of dingy coffee with a smile. toadie discards her shrink-wrapped, ice-cold danish with a slightly different expression. i point to her spoons; she softens.

outside the plane there's nothing but cobalt fog. i notice a small ice cube has formed between the inner and outer panes of my window. i lean toward it and look out again at the wing, which appears to be moving so slowly through the mist that i could out-stroll it. i look down for a more honest representation. the air below us looks like a radiograph of a diseased lung—a dark grey field blotted over with fibrous white blooms of pneumonic infiltrates or metastatic lesions. i hate myself. the sky progressively lightens as i watch, and the mets change to a dense patch of snow-frosted broccoli, and then to clots of slush stranded in a puddle on the side of a road. we/the earth turn(s) enough for the sun to tint the clouds, the same shades of gold and blue that the boston lights were beaming in a few hours before, are still lit up in however many time zones behind us. even colored, the clouds evoke nothing but water, in a way that they never manage to do from the ground, ice and mist and snapping, stinging purity so simple i can smell it. for a while when i was young, between the ages of nine and fourteen, i went skiing every week in the winter, and sometimes i would find myself completely alone on a trail. when that happened i always had to stop and disappear into all of the things that didn't exist at the bottom of the slope, like the hush of the motion of distant, speechless bodies being absorbed by powder drifts and pine needles, or the the way i could feel the air moving along the linings of my lungs as i inhaled. the best thing about an empty winter mountain, though, is the smell of the snow, which is the most perfect encapsulation of whole, tranquil nothingness in all the world. the smell of the air inside the plane is nondescript, not really worth describing, the same as all air that has been breathed and rebreathed by a crowd that is anonymous to itself. i try to remember the last time i smelled nothing but snow, and can't. i wonder if someday no one will know. all the way back in to ground i imagine hurling myself off into those cold, clean, absolving drifts, the layers of my smog-deadened skin peeling, disintegrating, dissolving into vapor over the course of my reentry.

the land, once it becomes visible, is nothing like land. it's pink and blue and cantaloupe-colored and partitioned off into tight geometric segments, all of the borders straight, all of the corners sharp. here and there the colors are broken by clumps of uniform houses in tidy rows. we descend a bit. as the wing tilts 45º against the now familiarly sky-colored horizon i hope, just for a second, not even a second, that we'll roll and barrel down into one of those perfect pastel squares. toadie pinches my elbow and points at an expanse off to our left, tells me it looks just like a skirt her mother made for her when she was a kid. she says she wouldn't wear it then, because it was so uncool, but she'd give anything for it now. i start mentally stabbing myself in the eye for wishing any harm on a plane she was in, even if it was for not quite a second.

this is the knot i find eternally the most impossible to untie.

every individual has a story that deserves to be told. every person on the planet can say something to you that will make you hope that he or she lives forever. when i think of them as individuals, i want to save them all. but i know that the earth won't be saved by preserving the people on it; i can have one or the other, a planet in good holistic health or all of those individuals, who collectively are smothering that planet. i can't decide.

i can't decide. i let the pressure build up in my head until my eyes water. one of the babies is crying again. when we drop onto the tarmac i look across the ashy expanse of pavement and see a second array of smokestacks, the twin to that i saw as we were taking off, belching dispassionately. i lose count of the planes on the ground before i think to count the ones leaving it. this is one airport in one city.

in this moment, given the chance to choose, i'd forget everyone's face.

blogitalia!

part 1: boston to the mid-atlantic, in which our narrator experiences the technological marvel of flight for the first time and becomes somewhat discouraged

i have to leave for logan straight from work, where i've been x-raying (that is, wrestling) dogs for eight hours, so i'm not daisy fresh to start with; this may be an important fact for you readers to keep in mind as things progress. i've never been in an airport before, but toadie knows her way around plenty well, so i follow her wherever she goes and take advantage of my being mindlessly led, as it gives me a greater chance to observe the decor. the place is generally a madhouse, naturally, but the air-france corner is calm and organized, if more crowded than we'd expected. above the check-in desk there are enormous christmas wreaths, easily ten feet in diameter, decorated with frost-finished red glass baubles the size of human heads. because it is the day before thanksgiving, i resent the wreaths initially because i think they've gotten ahead of themselves; if the airport feels compelled to hang ten-foot anythings the day before thanksgiving it should be turkeys—huge, plucked, raw, headless turkeys, strung up by their vestigial wings, with their carefully packed baggies of innards dangling down between their drumsticks. as the line oozes forward i continue to stare at the wreaths and realize i have no idea what they have to do with the birth of the christian savior. i assume that, like the tree, the christmas wreath is a tradition wrenched from the burning hands of persecuted pagans, and now i resent them for their smug indifference to their own irrelevance. if we are going to celebrate an event we should celebrate the brutal honesty of that event. i begin to feel very strongly that the terminal should be festooned with monstrous, fully dilated vaginas with pointy, goopy, corona-ringed infant scalps bulging out of them. i'm also suddenly immensely pleased to be leaving the united states for thanksgiving and think next year i'll try to be absent from columbus day until january 14. the decorations are hung at regular intervals farther down than i can see, and presumably their path continues around the corner and throughout the entire airport, which i have no sense of the full size of. the corner i'm in is about a dozen times the size of my parents' house, its unjustifiably high ceilings filled with fluorescent-lighted nothing. i start wondering how many airplanes will take off from logan that night, or how many will take off from the east coast, or from every airport in the united states over the next hour, or the next fifteen minutes. i wonder how many passengers glanced at gargantuan christmas decorations on their way to those planes and thought, isn't that nice. i wonder how many didn't notice them at all.

i loathe the wreaths and am shamed by the ridiculous opulence of my people.

on board, two children are already crying as i squeeze myself into my window seat, which i'm able to do only after i retract my head into the space between my shoulder blades and curve my body into a compact s-shaped coil. this is fine with me; i'm comforted by the snugness. there's no room in the compartment above us for our bags, so toadie follows a very pretty stewardess (she looks like she could be the child of mary-louise parker and a twenty-something stockard channing) six rows up and forces an indignant couple in their late fifties to hold their coats in their laps like the rest of us. i look across what from this point of view is an edgeless expanse of lights as we taxi around for a long, long time. at the far end of the lot a cluster of smokestacks is chuffing placidly, their exhalations absorbing the golds and blues of the city's bulbs as they stretch and thin out over it. my seat is directly above the right wing, and when the larger engines fire up i smell a blast of fuel so strong it's like someone spilled butane on my shirt. we gain altitude and the lights coagulate into a beaded fabric inlaid with chintzy drugstore topaz. we rise and rise and rise, and until the angle makes it impossible for me to lean far enough to keep it in my line of sight, there is no end to it. i remember this:



this is a new kind of shame, the one that dries my mouth when i realize that i am, just by being on this plane that averages a fifth of a mile to the gallon, multiplying my personal contribution to the selfish decimation of my planet by about 100,000. i feel sick and terribly sad. i wonder if my roommate will water my lemon tree. i miss my cat. there's nothing to be done at this point about these things, so i close the window and put on my hat. i notice the children have stopped crying.

it's close to nine p.m. now, and since i woke up i've eaten a granola bar, a bowl of soup and two tangerines, so i'm hungry. to distract myself i watch toadie play shanghai on her tiny inset monitor for 35 minutes and never figure out what the hell she's doing. i'm relieved when she quits and takes up chess, which i already know i don't understand. i have zero motivation to attempt to play a game on my own, or even plug in my headphones. when my meal comes, i am so enchanted by the tiny silverware and cups that i don't even notice that my entrée is missing. the stewardess does, though, and when she returns with it i push things around to make room for it and then ignore it in favor of the applesauce i am gleefully slurping from my miniature spoon, which i stash in my bag after i'm finished. toadie's meal comes with a pinkie-sized wedge of foil-wrapped brie (mine was vegan), and we coo over it for an unnatural length of time. we *heart* tiny. she tastes everything on her tray and ultimately eats nothing but the small cheese. she doesn't complain, because that isn't her style, but i'm sad for her and regret not thinking to save her some of my rice and curried lentils, just in case. when they take her tray i offer her my spoon. all is right in her world, and she goes to sleep.

the lights go off in the cabin, but enough people turn on their overhead reading lights that the difference is negligible. i dig my right knee into the inconsiderately slanted seat in front of me and listen to malcolm gladwell tell me my new favorite bedtime story. as i wriggle impotently in my no-longer-comforting slot of a space, i wonder if some version of the aeron chair could be fitted into jet cabins. i don't sleep, but that isn't uncommon, and i feel okay about it.

stop toying with me.

twice now i have received emails notifying me of cryptic, subjectless comments having been left on my blog, and when i come to look for them so that i may potentially figure out what the hell they're all about, there are no such comments to be found. today's said simply, "i do not think so." what, raphael muszynski? what do you not think? that the squash soup is tasty? that it's mean to kick little dogs? that seahorses go to heaven for being exceptional spouses? what? help me help you, darling. together we can come to a happy compromise, i'm sure. i won't yell at you, i swear it; sometimes i do not think things, too. like, just this morning, i did not think that it was fun to wake up unexpectedly at 5:30 a.m. on my day off, and when i got your murky comment i did not think i had any idea what you were saying. see? we could be friends, if you would only open up to me. take your time; i'll be here if you change your mind.


update, 12/9/05, 3:33 pm: these brief, ennui-saturated non-comments are a bit of a habit for mr. muszynski. see here and here for more lasting examples of his stinging wit. still, though, i would like to know what opinion of mine prompted his dissent, 'cause i'm an overly sensitive narcissist. perhaps he'll tell me some day, if i'm very, very good. in the meantime, i'm having fun guessing. do you not think there could ever be another z-man? because i don't really think so, either, i just got swept up in the prettiness of cillian's moment.

sunday best-of blogging: the travel issue

best song to wake up over the atlantic ocean to: "pure imagination," as sung by gene wilder, the one true willy wonka.

best reason to pinch malcolm gladwell rather hard on the arm: here's malcolm during the q & a after a speech made for the commonwealth club on january 20, 2005:

the word "intuition" does not appear in blink for a very deliberate reason, and that is i intensely dislike that word. i dislike the connotations that are associated with it, i dislike its fuzziness, i dislike the fact that it's, among many people, synonymous with something that is irrational, and, you know, it's called women's intuition—why is it called women's intuition? not as a way of honoring it, but as a way of degrading it, right? of dismissing it. but my biggest problem with that word is that it suggests that what is going on in an instant is not thinking, it's feeling; i'm sorry, it's thinking, it's just a different kind of thinking, and it may manifest itself as a feeling, but it didn't start out that way. it didn't start in your heart, it starts in your head ….

if you listen to the audio (this part starts around 8:55 of the q & a), you'll notice how emphatic he gets about all of this; by the end he's nearly yelling. you'd believe that he really, really hates that word, the way my high school english teacher hated it when people described things like weather and paintings as "nice," or the way i hate it when people put unnecessary and inappropriate quotation marks around words they want to emphasize. i listened to this on the plane heading in to paris (lsz, if you're wondering, the ums [which i've omitted in my transcript] worked like a charm) and thought to myself, malcolm, aren't you a cheeky little monkey, because here he is in his september 12 new yorker article on rick warren and the saddleback church:

"The Purpose-Driven Life" is meant to be read in groups. If the vision of faith sometimes seems skimpy, that's because the book is supposed to be supplemented by a layer of discussion and reflection and debate. It is a testament to Warren's intuitive understanding of how small groups work that this is precisely how "The Purpose-Driven Life" has been used.

cheeky! it's okay, malcolm, i still love you, but you need to remember that the world is watching, and there's always going to be one crazy person who'll remember everything you say and call you out. you're lucky, because today it's me, and i'm pretty swell for a crazy person. next time, though, it might be zp, and you won't be in for a paltry pinching then—she'll just beat you like a redheaded stepchild. for the record, though, if anyone asks, you are officially my bitch. you may decide how you feel about that in either your heart or your head, i'm not fussy.

most satisfying combination of elements in a return-flight movie: christian bale, cillian murphy playing an evil madman, ninjas, and, of course, batman, in batman begins. now, all of these perfectly blended spices were still not enough to mask the slimy, dirty-nickel-flavored core of the movie's banal and one-linery dialogue (i think the actual comic books took more care with their writing), and katie holmes is positively vampiric in her ability to drain a scene of any and all vitality, but she's not in that many scenes, and the boys atone for her almost every time. i'll tell you, though, when even the batmobile kicked it ninja style and went invisible without moving from the middle of a three-lane highway, i did the happiest dance i could do without rising from my cramped non-aisle seat, and i think cillian might be the new ronnie "z-man" barzell. it wasn't good the way i tend to want my movies to be good, but i liked it better than charlie and the chocolate factory, which came on after it, and some rainy weekday when i didn't have anything pressing to tend to, i'd be happy to watch it again. in a roomier space, mind you.

best location for a children's birthday party and/or easter egg hunt: il parco dei mostri di bomarzo, the one place we visited in italy that i never wanted to leave. i thought perhaps i would live here, and it would be sort of like living on a boat, which i've also always wanted to do. but my friends said, no, juniper, you can't live in the sacred wood of bomarzo, and i said, why not? i can forage in the woods for acorns and berries, and i can use the giant ashtray by the gift shop for a toilet, just like those stray cats, and they said, put your soggy ass in the fiat, juniper, we're going home. and i did, and we got there and it was cold and on the kitchen table there was a plate full of gnawed chicken parts that our hostess's roommate had left congealing in its horrible fats, and i didn't say it, but i thought, i knew i should have stayed.

best translator: renaissance le corbeau, who handled the site for the parco dei mostri and offers us this delightful bit of slain grammar: "The sculpture represents the descent into hell (but where did the soul of the beloved wife?) of Baccus."

friendliest stray cat: the suave gray tabby we encountered on our way back to our car after exploring the largely abandoned mountain village of casteluccio, on the eastern edge of umbria. he was such a charmer that i didn't even mind when he covered my thighs with tiny muddy pawprints as he worked his sly, stealthy way into my lap. i should have minded, because i only packed two pairs of pants, but what the hell. i may never be loved by another italian tomcat, and that outboard-motor purr went straight to my head. i know, i know, i'm easy.

best random search: the blue ribbon goes to montreal's trudeau airport, where i was made to remove all of my jewelry after passing through the metal detector and being given the once-over with the handheld. a stocky woman with hairspray-crunchy curls asked me if it would be all right if she went through my bags; i assume that i had the right to say no, collect my things, and hitchhike back to massachusetts, but i had nothing to hide except one box of matchsticks that i got in a restaurant in florence, and i could live without them. she rifled through my dirty socks forever, but in the main part of my suitcase she glanced at the folded clothes for a fraction of a second and moved on to the inner pocket, where she became obsessed with my soap. i had packed it in its original cardboard box, which she turned over and over and over, stopping occasionally to sniff at it with great suspicion. at long last she worked up the nerve to open it, and when she saw that it was indeed soap and not an incense-scented wad of plastique, she tucked it back in its place and waved me off. she never looked into any of the three small bags that i had packed inside of my larger book bag, which, of course, are where i would have stashed the explosive i had tidily tamped into eyeshadow compacts so i could then light it in the airplane bathroom somewhere over the nothingness between montreal and boston with the firenzian matches she had failed to find, were i the sort of awful person who wanted to use my genius for ill. but i'm not, and don't any of you be, either. random acts of destruction are wrong, unless they're committed by nature, who tends to have an excellent reason. i'm a good girl, and that's why i'm so annoyed with the impotent renditions of safeguarding we're supposed to feel protected by. if you're going to search me, for pete's sake, do it well. otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.

best job of rearranging an entire apartment in a single free afternoon: that done by my bad, bad roommate, who: removed all of my and toadie's belongings from the shower and hid my little waterproof radio under the towels; threw away all of our sponges and replaced them with one wedge of pepto-bismol-pink foam; threw away half of our food and moved what was left to the back of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; set a nauseating mango candle on the kitchen stove, where it was free to compete for air space with the even more revolting chocolate-mint candle burning in her bedroom; took all of the kitchen chairs away from the kitchen table and stacked them in a corner of the living room; put toadie's cat's empty dishes next to the sink after, presumably, failing to locate her food (and the faucet?); dumped an entire box of scoopable cat litter into the litter box in the bathroom on what we think must have been the day we got home, because under the layer of bright new litter was much more than a day's worth of unpleasantness; threw away whatever mail had been left by us on the front hall table, because if we had deemed it too unimportant to open before we left then it couldn't possibly have been worth keeping around; threw away the cardboard boxes by the living room windows that the cats like to sleep in; and came into my room and turned on my laptop, which i had shut off and removed the power cord from. many months ago, when i started coming home and finding every application on my computer open because bad roommate doesn't know how to operate a mac, and after twice having to reload my internet software, i implemented a password. i know she didn't give up hope that maybe it was a phase i was going through, or even a mistake, because she kept sneaking in while i was out. you can't shut the computer down once it's up until you've logged in, you see, so she had to just walk away from it with the log-in screen up and do what she could to act like nothing had happened. one time i came home and the computer wouldn't turn on, and it was because she, in her desperation to get online and buy more hideous crap from old navy, had turned it over and seen a little dial with a picture of a locked padlock at nine o'clock and an unlocked one at twelve, and had turned it towards the unlocked one, thinking this would, of course, be the solution. but all it had done was pop the battery out, and she just left it that way, set the computer back down on its table and walked out of the room. it's like living with a three-year-old. anyway, since she had so much time with the place all to herself she must have decided to try to crack the code, because when i got home monday night the computer's sleep light was winking at me, and when i opened it up i saw that she had tried and guessed incorrectly so many times that the computer had offered her a hint. all of this computer business would be sort of funny if she didn't consistently deny having anything to do with it. THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE HERE. the hint now reads, "give it up, you sneaky rat," and that mango candle is in her closet where it belongs.

best thing to come home to: my little cat curled up on my bed, and no trace of anxiety-induced regurgitation anywhere in the house. i expected her to be prissy and snub me for a bit, but she didn't even, she just ran on over and started up her engine, and she's been pasted to my body ever since. i'm a crazy cat lady and that's fine with me, i've embraced it, and i have no qualms about admitting to you that i was in knots about leaving her with a fairly lousy person and not having any way of being reached. it led to some unsettling dreams, in fact, and i'll tell you about them later on. but she's healthy and lovely and didn't pull out any fur, and we're both pleased as punch that she's back on my shoulders.

best future jaunt already in the works: mine to nyc to see the lemonheads in two weeks. yay! and i won't even have to worry about scraping cheese off of things, because my hotel room has a full kitchen, so i can pack a little cooler with two days' worth of nummies and nosh with an easy grin. double yay! i wuv my toadie, but everyone needs a little alone time now and again, and i haven't taken a trip on my own since i moved to boston almost four years ago. that's too damn long. and anyway, any road trip that ends in two consecutive nights of evan dando is a mighty fine road trip. how long do you think it takes to walk from the bowery to central park? i say i can do it in an hour and a half, if i get onto park avenue at union square and don't have to wait too long at intersections. you all place your bets now, and we can divvy up the pool in time for you to spend your winnings on last-minute holiday gifts.

there's going to be a disgusting amount of in-depth travel narrative over the next few weeks, and eventually some (hopefully attractive) photographs, but i'll try to break it up with more universal material. thanks to all of you who have been checking in, and i'm sorry if my procrastination in announcing my safe return made any of you nervous. i'm sure you understand if i needed some silence.

i missed you.