on keeping my distance

Would rather be alone than where I was.

So I had to boil myself in the shower to figure it out. Lesson learned—and learned well.

Now we play a little game called risk.

When Planter guy asked last night, "what are you afraid of?" he was trying to get me on board the gravy train. His gravy train. What he accomplished was quite the opposite.

This evening, after a week of that thing called 'space,' I called him. (No, not him. Jesus, keep track, people, we're coming to the denouement here. Or we will do. Eventually.) The G.I.Q.

I was walking home and it was Spring and I thought, hell, if I'm going to build myself up for the inevitable bust, I might as well be rejected for being me. Maybe it hurts a little less, but where's the integrity in corners?

Time to get real, bitches. Time to get real.

ain't gonna sit, ain't gonna stay

Day two of this experiment in juror-dom. I remain aglow.

I made a friend yesterday who lives not eight blocks from me and generously offered to drive me home and back—no minor boon when our county courthouse is located in bum-effing Egypt. Of course, once I hopped into his nondescript finance-man's car, I realized that A) he could have been an axe murderer and B) abduction and violent mangling in the immediate aftermath of jury service would be a pretty damned ironic way to go.

No such problem arose. This whole business is overwhelmingly tolerable. You'll never convince me otherwise.

My new buddy was selected for a wrongful death case this morning, and I am on my own once more, parked on a vinyl bench with a view of the Q43s chugging down Sutphin Blvd, and the lawyers and drifters who orbit the building and constitute this little courthouse microsociety.

They've put on the afternoon movie, 13 Going On 30, but—plugged into my reverie—I'm reliving last night in a series of flipbook images, sore feet and stiff hips. I practiced, paying excruciating attention to torsion and balance. I danced.

Confused as I am, I'm starting to calm down. Allow myself to be amused. Because who could possibly predict the twists of this unnavigable nightmare? The flighty peaks and flesh-eating valleys have a life all their own; they ebb and they flow.

on civic duty

If jury duty means sitting in a big room like a bus station, clacking away at my laptop while two hundred would be jurors watch Mrs. Doubtfire on the flatscreens overhead, I don't see why people complain.

Seems to me, there's no better way to spend a shitty grey Spring day than in this human sea of Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the country, waiting for my name to be called.

This room is worthy of its reputation as a low-ceilinged government outpost, don't get me wrong, but it beats the hell out of the office. At least here I get a little humanity—and some natural light. The officer in charge of our motley herd is shockingly humane, and an aged and Honorable Judge Someone-or-Other gave us quite the momentous pep talk this morning about justice and the fulfillment of the American Dream. They showed a video of some poor medieval bastard being hog tied and thrown in a river, then told us how valuable we are, how much they appreciate our service. Talk about warm fuzzies; I've gotten more respect in six hours of jury duty than in two years at work.

I'm just waiting for Jerry Orbach to descend from the elevators to make my Law & Order fantasy complete.

This is no dead room of misery and tedium. I just witnessed the simultaneous cracking of two hundred eggs, bored-faced men and women erupting in a wave of uncontainable giggling at the antics of a man in a rubber boob suit. Women are wiping their eyes, old ladies are cackling, grown men are jiggling in their seats. There are no cool kids on jury duty. This is laughter which transcends race and age and color and demeanor. No one can help it. A shrimp flies through the air and it is infectious. They are daring us to bond.

As if this whole exercise in civil service, a jury of one's peers, is meant to remind us of and reinforce our own essential sameness. Flying shrimp are funny. Bureaucracy sucks—and so does sitting in a concrete lobby for eight hours. But we do it. Because it's the civilized thing to do.

got no future got no past

For now, kiss me on the street. Greasy rain tapping surface puddles lit with neon piss green and red. Kiss me just like that. Under the spit drizzle, dodging neat little piles of vomit.

Quote Melville and put me in a cab.

That'll do. That's enough.

Pavlov hits me with more bad news every time I answer the phone

I must have a romantic shelf life of about 48 hours.

Looks good in the window, fellas, but get her home and she'll start stinking up your fridge. Thank you, Non-date, thank you Planter man for this startling insight.

And thank you, G.I.Q.

I did not expect to see him Friday, nor did I expect a text at seven about chacarera class, nor the call at T minus forty minutes to say, "I'm freaking out again," "rethinking" (his word or mine?).

Knowing my insatiable, masochistic curiosity in matters of the heart, you should not be at all surprised that I went. That I met him in an Irish pub, chugged a Smithwick's and averted eye contact (both of us avoiding any mention of the immediate conversation), then made may way to the dance studio to humiliate myself attempting the finer figures of folklore.

What really surprised me was ending up in Koreatown, talking Dostoevsky over Bi Bim Bap with his friends (a couple seemingly under the impression that we are also a "couple"), getting dragged back to the milonga at midnight in grungy jeans, and—then later—sobbing into a pillar in the 34th St subway station at 2 am.

Perhaps, in my deer in headlights skittishness, I skipped a step. That's what my new shrink says. "What would the world look like, do you think, if you thought you were worth the time?" Because what kind of man breaks up like that?

(I changed my mind. I'm done. But, by all means, I would still really like it if you came and spent the evening with me... Please?)

Normal social dicta would recommend not communicating your whereabouts to the girl you're trying to slough off, let alone inviting her along. "It will make you happy," he said. "Come. Have a beer, feel better."

So maybe I missed a cry for help, maybe I failed the test of muster. Maybe I should have just said, "I'm scared too."

If a tree shows up in her own head, does anyone know where she stands?

when blossoms go flying

"This isn't working."

No shit, Sherlock, I'm thinking. And seething. All the while attempting to preserve an air of icy dignity and resignation. I came here tonight to break up. Or be broken up with. That is how any reasonable human would interpret the events preceding. And I would prefer to get this over with and go home to lick my wounds with a brownie (or twelve) in bed.

We begin to tenderly negotiate the terms of our talk. He admits to resistance. I admit to various tactics of self-preservation. He is not one to only "sort of" show up, he says. Sure fooled me, I say.

He continues to circumnavigate. I continue to steel myself for the inevitable. We are discussing the awkwardness of halfway, of half-assed, of flying half mast. It is too.... "Nebulous." I complete his sentence. Expediency is key. "Exactly," he says. Here it comes. "What we've been doing . . ." he starts, and I fire back with, "It's basically book club with semi-weekly sex."

For a second, I think I have offended him. But he laughs. And I laugh. We are laughing. The waitress comes and pours our chilled Cynar and we are still laughing when she plunks down a teapot and two saucers and goes back inside. Tender green leaves, damp from the evening drizzle, are waving over the wall of St. Pat's. It is chilly and we are outside the café, for the quiet. I must hear every word of this rejection.

I wrap my hands around the wrought iron teapot. It is too hot to hold, but the warm is good. I feel rooted now. My hands have someplace to be. "I guess what I'm saying is . . ." I turn to face him, my fingertips scalded, clutching the potful of chamomile rooibos and trying to look casual.

"I want to try and embrace this. For real."

Wait. Really? "I'm . . . surprised. That is not what I expected you to say."

"Me neither."

And—just like that—it's Spring.

(And the world is mud-luscious, puddle wonderful. At least for today.)

outer boroughs

When I come home at night from tango, my neighborhood smells like bread. Cinnamon raisin bread, from the bakery out-kitchen across the street. Lately, it also smells of lilacs. Wet, dewy, midnight lilacs that won't last very long, but—man, are they beautiful.