Night rain

Night-time rain is a dream. In that soft, deeply felt Murakami sort of way.

It is almost never something seen. If I happen to wake in the middle of the night, it is in some way present in the velvet dark of my bedroom, sensed but not palpable. There is the sound of it. Either the patient, monotone drone of it, or the shifting, moving cadence akin to waves on a lazy shore, as sheets of rain slip across the windows and the roof. I am always struck at the clarity of it, as if when the rain knocks down the dust from the air, it even cleans the sound traveling by it.

It is moody, in an introspective way. Perhaps, I am interrupting.

There are also the smells. Wet stone and cement. Water-logged wood. Leaves refreshed. Secretive night-time blooms. I sense a newfound gentleness in the air. Somehow, these always find the way into my room, despite shut windows, doors, and air-conditioning. Just like the sounds, the fragrance of the rain penetrates the century-old brick without an effort. Perhaps, it doesn’t know it’s not supposed to.

Yet these sensations are always brief, and in a way, indistinguishable from the dreams of my slumber. The rain is the same primordial stuff as the nocturnal visions. When I wake, for a minute or two, my dreams don’t go very far, just as far the the windowsill, and before long, I am submerged again.

In the morning, the world is not the same as it was left at sunset. Asphalt and soil of the flower bed are darker, and this puts the colors of everything else into a brighter relief. All hues are more saturated, thicker. The world is painted with a bolder brush.

Yet just as the dreams, this is an illusion soon evaporated by the rising sun. Puddles retreat, and with them, a gray patina returns to the world’s attenuated palette.

The Quartet

The pianist was late. The tables were set so tight, he had to turn his tall, lanky frame sideways to squeeze toward the stage. The band was already going, a few phrases into the first song. Upright base and drums were holding down a quick rhythm, and the leader was burning it up on the sax. They didn’t start easy, and the pianist had to find his spot in the melody on the fly, without any word or cue from anyone else. He jammed himself into the tiny space between the piano and the wall, fixed his eyes on the drummer, and started carefully picking his way in. He was in trouble for a short while, tense, jarring, clashing with the rest of the band, but settled down before too long, and then, well, he was quite alright. The youngest on that stage, he had the expression of a clever student acing a hard exam.

The sax player was old, grizzled, and joyously gruff. He played with abandon, trusting the younger guys carry the rhythm while he blew it all up and built it up again. But then he would carefully guide them into giving everyone a spotlight, making sure everyone got to get their kicks center stage. He always slouched, in a painfully permanent way, his shoulders uneven, and hands askew with arthritis. Though you’d never know if you closed your eyes. His instrument’s voice was fire. After handing off the solos, he would step back, close his eyes, bop along, and smile with the deepest grin.

The guy on the upright bass closed his eyes in concentration for most of the time. He and his instrument leaned on each other as he plucked and thumped the strings. I always imagine that people who close their eyes while listening to music interpret it visually in some ways, maybe that’s because how I experience it. So I felt for the bass guy. He would earnestly throw himself into this solos, everyone giving him all the room he needed. For all its power and weight, the upright bass has the least amount of flair, certainly with a piano and drums right there. Always clap harder for the bass solo.

The drummer rested on his instincts more than anyone else on stage, the foil to the piano player, who got on with a powerful, catlike intelligence. The drummer never strained, his head half-turned, his lips half-smiling, his play sure-handed and confident. On solos, his smile would get a little tighter, and his hands would get a lot faster.

A shadow upon oblivion

Written on: March 2, 2018
About: Philadelphia, February 19-20, 2018

     Monday night I drove to Philadelphia. I set out from my home in Adams Morgan in late afternoon, making my way through successive convulsions of traffic. As I drove North, the night advanced, bringing darkness, fog, and rain.
     Fog’s first appearance often goes unnoticed, I feel. At some point, I’m already surrounded by it, unsure as to when or how the fantastical transformation has occurred.  I find myself a bit like a character in some old folk tale – I have wandered down the usual path, lost in thought. When I looked up, all was changed, and I was in a realm far removed from anything I have ever known. When I turned around, but the path was gone, and even the country behind me was unrecognizable.
     And so it went. At some point, having passed Baltimore, I had noticed the wisps of fog already grown thick. I could not say when it befell the land. This was mist country and that simply was it.
     In Philadelphia, I had dinner with my friends, brief and served in plastic to-go containers on account of my much delayed arrival. Absence makes the shared meals grow more toothsome, and as I have not seen this pair in quite some time, it was a delight.
     Our plan for the evening was to go to a blues dance, where I was slated to play the closing DJ set. Going last I find much preferable. I myself function better as the hour grows late, able to tap into a sort of wakefulness only available in the unlit hours. The dancers, too, tend to have found their groove, gotten a bit more tired and a bit less self-conscious.
     The venue was a small art space in a stark and unglamorous neighborhood. A sliding garage door took up almost an entire wall, so the chilly night outside had a noted presence inside. A wood-burning stove near the dance did offset the frost a bit, but while my friend and I hung back as things got underway, jackets and scarves were still out.
     I feel a surge of nervous, erratic energy when getting ready to play in a new space and for a new crowd, still. Maybe, hopefully, always will. So I itched for a draw of whiskey to help even my keel. On the one hand, I regretted not bringing my flask. On the other, I would have been the only knocking back, and that feels like bad form. Anyway, I felt better a couple songs in. Nina Simone and Howlin’ Wolf will always set you straight.
     In the end, we filed out into the cold feeling light and perspiring – a room full of dancers will do as well as a furnace. The fog hung along the upper floors on the narrow streets, grim and orange from the sparse street lights. “Murder fog,” I joked, and we got into the car.
     Then, dreams.
     We all woke up early, ready for our respective working days. I found Philadelphia looking rather like the Great American Novel – gray and gritty, wet from a meaningful rain, all iron and brick, tragedy and triumph monumental in their anonymity. The low sky hung on to the slick rusted roofs. After breakfast, I got on the way and drove South.
     The fog was thin in the city, but grew thicker as the highway swung low toward the Chesapeake, ever more substantial as I dipped into the Susquehanna river valley. By the time I got out on the tall bridge, the mist blotted out everything.
     I could see the pavement and the railings, and the busy traffic tunneled a path of relative clarity, so I could see forward well enough. There was, simply, nothing else – no river beneath, no river shores, no sky, no horizon. Looking away from the cars directly in front of me, all was a perfectly even, featureless, colorless, woolen absence.
     A most delicate breeze must have been coming from the sea, up along the river. Motion of the fog, of course, could not be noticed, but that tunnel bored by the cars, the narrow absence of fog, was getting pulled and stretched away from the bridge. A line of sight launched in this direction found nothing by shapeless grayness.
     This ragged, tattered shadow extended up and away. Like some ancient ghost, its ash-colored corpus drifted against the flat white oblivion of the mist.

PS I now have a Facebook author page, to whatever end you all may use it.

The Wandering Postcards

Written (first draft): January 10, 2016

About: New Orleans, Dublin, Grunow …

I like sending people postcards. I love writing all sorts of letters, but postcards give me a very particular kind of satisfaction – perhaps as a way of reaching out to a friend in a meaningful way even as I am on the road, away from the comforts of my own home. And so while away, I pick up an occasional card, affix a memory and a stamp to it, and drop it in a box.

It is around Christmas that I get serious, though. With a list of addresses, I scour the gift shops of whatever city I happen to be in for a couple dozen cards, then roll into a pub and begin writing.

Of course writing the cards during the holidays themselves – and then sending them by international post – means they often don’t grace their addressees until after festivities have ended. At first, this was simply inherent to the idea of sending cards postmarked in some exotic location, where I myself would not arrive until Christmas was already in in full swing.

On one particular year, I was sitting in a river-side pub in Dublin, sheltered behind a few empty pints, an array of cards in front of me. I attempted to feel some guilt about sending out my Christmas cards well after Christmas itself, but the concern felt embellished and foreign. And somewhere in that Guinness fog I stumbled upon the idea that, perhaps, writing the cards “on time” would be a wholly different experience.

I would either be rushing to finish them between work and dinner and sleep, or squeezing them in between weekend tasks. Christmas might be a single day, but mentally it takes up the whole month – figuring out gifts, working out travel details.

Away from the trouble of the daily grind, swaddled, as I was, in the comforting drift of holiday nights, my mind is freer to wander. Solo travel in particular is an experience where time becomes elastic. With the ordinary constraints gone, it is easier to appreciate both the perspective and the instant.

In every city, you can find a small round table stained dark with a thousand drinks. The lights are what they are; there isn’t anything to be done about that, so I manage. There is someone to ferry me pints to fuel me through this lovely task – I’ve been through a myriad pubs, and this arrangement should seem ordinary, but here this feels like heavenly fortune. Everything is done with a smirk, a nod, and a hip-popping lean. Memories require unrushed leisure, and these places are built on it.

Memories – that is the stuff of Christmas cards.

I sit and think on my friends. However long we have known each other, and however often we speak, it all weaves into just one incredible tapestry. Writing these cards is a rare time when I get to unroll the whole thing and marvel at its expanse.

My mind – eased by the drink, the low lighting, the foreign setting – travels back to the spots of time spent with a particular person. Back to when we drove across the desert in the night, or inadvertently invaded a museum when it was closed, or climbed a mountain to watch the sun rise over the valley because the night had expired and it didn’t even occur to us to just go to sleep.

The anchor of time cut loose, I savor these moments over and over, these radiant mileposts of my life. When I measure the distance between them and now, it is not with a sense of loss or sadness, but with a sense of greater assurance of who I am.

With every new card, I feel taunted by its blank space. Have I really known this person? Have I been a half-decent friend? Is sending them a card an imposition, unwelcome and presumptuous? Yet almost every time, the last lines become cramped, reeling and squirreling from the page’s end. Apparently, there is always lots to remember about and say to everyone.

There is an arc to these cards. They start out neat and sensible, and end up odd and frazzled. For every coherent, intelligible recollection, there is a hand turkey, a dinosaur attacking the postcard scenery, or an absurd limerick. All, however, are heartfelt in equal measure.

I sometimes wonder if the cards form a sort of jagged extended narrative. If I laid them out end to end, perhaps they would make some sort of sense. After all, they are all borne of a singular mental movement, and occasionally thoughts spill form one card to the next.

I am glad I have you to write to, and to you all I raise this pint. And this one, and this one, and this one.

Impermanence of music

Written: August 16, 2016, in New Orleans, LA

About: New Orleans, LA

There is a certain bar in New Orleans. It is a hole-in-the-wall with a short bar, a few small tables, and a band crammed into a corner. In this respect, it is like many other bars in town. This one just happens to be among the best.

Yeah.

So come here. Squeeze onto a bar stool, or screw yourself into one of the diminutive tables. Order cheap drinks. Watch Frenchmen Street flow in and out of the bar. Listen to some of the best electric blues you will hear anywhere. And remember – you cannot take any of it with you.

Even though the guys playing this spot have been doing it for years, they do not really seem to think of themselves as a band. They do not have a stack of CDs out front. No Bandcamp or iTunes pages. The outfit that has got your heart and your throat in its cool hands does not even really tour outside these stained and peeling walls.

You can never listen to this music again, take it apart phrase by phrase and bar by bar, loop it over and over on your commute, or thrust the earbuds at your friends – “Take a listen to this!” The only way to share this music is to drag your friends to New Orleans, find this spot, and be there on the right night and at the right time.

Once the strings and drum skins are still, their music is gone forever.

Then again, maybe this music’s impermanence and immediacy are part of its power.

There is no divorcing yourself from the moment. If you miss a note, there is no chance of coming back for it. You have to be there, plugged into every instant. You cannot be listening to it with half an ear. This music will not compete for your attention with the glowing screen of your smartphone. No, you have to be right here, right now, so shake off your drunken haze. I know this whole place got your head spinning with a deluge of lights, alcohol, and music, a carnival of wide-grinning inebriated strangers looking for an experience.

So settle down. You have found the experience.

Midnight fog on Mississippi

Written: December 29, 2014, in Orlando, FL

About: New Orleans, the night of December 27

Fog rose up from the night-time Mississippi in tongues like ghostly flames. A low wind drove this fog, it slid over the levy and then lapped against the squat buildings of French Market. In places, the fog piled up, rising in a wispy columns. Gnarled and twisted, they rose up until they joined the low clouds, which themselves were held up by the glowing high-rises of the Central Business District.

The docks of Algiers, across the river, were but a disjointed collection of lights and angled roofs. Someone began to imagine them, but did not quite finish, and so they floated on, primeval and hypnotizing.

The wind picked up, and the fog grew into a shapeless behemoth that charged the shore. It moved fast, and almost instantly the levy disappeared, swallowed up. The lamps glowed weakly, like distant frozen comets. The massive wave of fog breached the flood wall, broke up into a legion of shadows and apparitions that rushed into the streets of French Quarter, growing ever more invisible with every step, every leap.

As the surge dissipated, it left behind a ragged sheath of fog, showing the water beneath. It looked taut, rough, grey, and wet, like the skin of some vast, languid animal dreaming under the fantastical cloak.

In all of this, Natchez, at her night dock, appeared as if behind a ward – completely free of the fog. The water around her sides was a pure, glistening black. Her light shone brightly, their clarity made more brilliant by the chaotic and unfocused world of the fog swirling around the ship.

All Souls 2014

Written: December 14, 2014 in Washington, DC

About: November 2, 2014, in Tucson, AZ

My mother called me late at night. My grandmother had passed away. She kept her composure, but the unusual raspness of her voice betrayed the grief. We spoke briefly. She made plans to fly back for the funeral. This was not possible for me.

You always hope that this call would come at a time when you are in a comfortable, safe place. It never does. You are at a birthday party, or eating breakfast, or pumping gas. I was at a laundromat. The phone call left me wiped out and numb, but I had to stay in this place until the spin and dry cycles all finished. It seemed absurd and grotesque that instead of profound, this moment was menial and full of strangers. So it goes.

At least it was in the middle of the night, and I could escape into the empty street for some relief.

A heaving loss was lumbering somewhere beneath the surface of my consciousness, but I could not quite figure out what it was that I had lost. My grandmother had drifted into the fog of Alzheimer’s long ago. Even then, she was left behind that brutal watershed, immigration. In my mind, she had become a fable, and her departure only confirmed her mythological status.

Next morning, compelled by childhood memories, I got up early, went into the kitchen and started cooking. The sun peeked over the roofs and found me with a tall stack of bliny, warmed by the gas stove, as it had often found her. The clouds were turning red and gold, a sight to share with my grandmother. I learned to make bliny by watching my grandmother do it thousands of times.

I have previously been considering going back to Tucson for this year’s All Souls Procession. Now this became an essential, vital need.

***

A mass of humanity – thousands of people – has arranged itself on Tucson’s 6^th Street as the desert sun rolled away. It had stoked the afternoon heat, but with the soft darkness drawing upon the city, everything and everyone felt unburdened and refreshed. Filling the streets as a vast flood, we have come for death and remembrance. We have come here not in sorrow, but in unity.

Many carried memories of those who passed away in the last year. Anything from a small pocket photo to costumes to large family gatherings carrying altars adorned with lights and icons. The Urn took up its place at the head of the Procession, filled with letters written to the departed.

Shared sadness turned into great joy. People formed a mad, often bizarre tapestry of costumes, masks, and painted faces. A mesh of music coming from stereos and musicians hung over the gathering. Yet friends still found each other in this chaos. Time passed in smiling conversations, punctuated with excited greetings and hugs. Then by some command, more felt than heard, the crowd shook, the drums kicked up, and we began to move. The sidewalks – the banks of this human river – were packed with onlookers, waving and cheering on those walking.

Somewhere in the thick of it, the pipers of the Tucson Highlanders blew their pipes, lofting that perfect sound of steady hearts and hallowed memories. We followed the thin ghost of their distant sound.

As we followed the pipers, the procession pulled into an underpass beneath a railroad. The entrance into narrow concrete tunnel was ringed with people hanging off the guardrails and the top of the bridge. It was a portal made of humans. The pipers drew themselves up, and launched into Amazing Grace as they descended.

The concrete underworld vibrated and bucked with the power of the music and of the people singing, cheering, whooping, dancing, stomping. The walls beat with our hearts and the lights shined brighter. Sorrow burned and evaporated away, leaving behind only the joy of remembering those we love.

The memories of my grandmother welled up in my chest, too compressed and entangled to pick them apart. Rather, I remembered her, and what it was like to be with her. This feeling pushed out against my bones, burst upward, roaring. I lifted my head and I howled. I howled and I howled I howled, with tears in my eyes, with all the sadness and the longing and the love, until it all emptied out of me, until the pipers led us out of the tunnel, back into this world, back into the crisp night, our river flowing steady between the human banks.

I was in a place removed infinitely far from grandmother. In a foreign country, in a strange desert, a small human in a giant ritual that was unabashedly grotesque and alien. Yet then I was as close to her as I have been in the hot summers of my childhood, on the cool riverbanks, in the green orchards heavy with cherries, in her small kitchen, watching her cook an endless feast for a gang of grandchildren.

Later, in the leery midnight hour, feeling fresh from a monsoon that passed through us, we found a street vendor serving up Sonoran hotdogs, in itself a small tradition. In this safe harbor, we stood around making cheery small talk with the woman while she prepared our food. On the other side of the cart, obscured by a shifting cloud of steam, a beautifully painted Katrina stood leaning on an old cab, another haunt, another apparition.

The Christmas Mass, in three acts

Written: December 25, 2014 in New Orleans, LA

One

The façade of the Spotted Cat has been torn down, replaced with a mesh of bare plywood and sagging tarp. The only way you’d even know the place was by rote memory and the crowd of people busily stuffing themselves through the door. Let us go, out of the cold and into this temple.

Inside was warm and drunk and merry. Drinks came easy, and the jazz was laid back and smiling. Everyone – from the stage, to the crowd, to the bartenders – was friendly, and the shots of whiskey grew larger with every order. The Spotted Cat is an institution so deeply steeped in the jazz and the ghosts of a myriad musicians and travelers, that even if they razed the place, you’d still get a headful of swing just standing in the rubble.

Another whiskey and a grin for the road, then back into the cold.

Two

This act was unexpected.

Wandering around Jackson Square, a beautiful voice drifted from the top of the steps across Decatur. Her hands nervously grappling the banister and leaning forward over the vacant street, she sang Ave Maria. Halting, barely audible and shy, but unyielding and powerful in its sincerity, she lofted the vibrant notes in the clarity of the Christmas night. It seemed the very wind had stopped to let the song go on.

I stood, transfixed, at street level beneath the singer until she let go of the last note and retreated. I climbed the stairs to thank her, and found her overcome and embraced by her friends. She sang for her grandmother, for the first Christmas without her.

I gave my brief and embarrassed words of gratitude and retreated.

Three

The hall of St. Louis Cathedral is large, pure, dressed in white, accented with gold and candlelight. The holiday crowd overfilled it, with every pew full and people standing along the walls, in the back, and even in the atrium. The people were silent, only daring to impinge on the choir with the politest of whispers.

The choir was on the balcony above the entrance, so it remained invisible for majority of the people in the cathedral. Its presence, however, was inseparable from the experience of the place. Its unassuming, unpretentious voice filled the hall with the potent, sourceless voice of the divine.

I find it very moving to see people of faith perform their rituals with simple, earnest genuineness. A countless number of people in the cathedral hall prayed and sang the hymns with expressions of genuine peace and quiet joy in their eyes, even those who found difficulty in the physical acts of standing and kneeling.

The sermon spoke for the need of peace, for the whole world, nations, cities, communities, and individuals, of the heartbreaking violence that takes people away from us daily. Peace means different things in different contexts, but there is an underlying desire for harmony and kindness. It also spoke of the need for silence and reflection.

Epilogue

I walked home feeling wonderfully, thinking on what I had seen and heard this night, and how it all fit together. Life is rarely if ever neat. Sometimes we need to get drunk on sin, and sometimes we need to pray for grace. Sometimes we need the humanity behind us, and sometimes we need the solitude of a cold night. Neither one makes sense without the other.

New Orleans is a city that looks in the dusty corners of your heart to find what you need, rather than what you want.

PS The sin link is NSFW. Of course.

California sun

June 11, 2014

San Jose, CA

The evening light change is gentle in Southern California. There is a sense of the sun rolling into the ocean even if you are miles from the coast. Everything is bathed in soft orange light. The sky is clean and taut, stretched like an aged cotton shirt.

I walked back to the hotel along the First, with the evening trains and buses occasionally trudging past. Elsewhere, the end of the day is hot and dusty, it feels done, a day that just wants to make it home, pull off the tight shoes and the strangling tie. This evening was wearing a linen suit, and it stopped by the cocktail lounge for a cool beer and to say hello.

The man on the other side of the night

Written: March 23, 2014

About: Charlottesville, VA

It is just past 4am. We are driving back from a late night dance. It has not actually stopped, so somewhere behind us the blues still draws and growls and bumps. Out here, the streets are dark and empty and silent. My girlfriend is asleep in the passenger seat but I am stark awake. Awake and alone.

I have been here countless times. Though this street is not always in Charlottesville, it is not always blues that warms me from a distance, and I am not always driving. Yet time and again I find myself alone with the night’s quiet, in the innumerably late hour. I drift past the inky side alleys, through the hazy spots of street lights, glance at an occasional insomniac neon sign. The street is slick, vast, and perfect.

Why am I here? Why am I here again?

Why push on through exhaustion. Why pour beer and whiskey into the night without a second thought. Why mock and dare the sunrise. Why forget food and sleep. Why measure out mile after mile of these deserted streets. Why peer into the dim, dissolving distance.

What am I looking for?

Driving along the night-time Charlottesville, it suddenly becomes clear. On the streets utterly devoid of people I am looking for a person. I am looking for a better me – the man on the other side of the night.

On the other side of the night, this man walks along with subtle and effortless swagger. He is confident in his plans, assured in situations that are uncharted. He is flawed in all the right and beautiful ways. Though he is not always right, he can find his way without hesitation or panic.

The man on the other side of the night has learned to let go of all the anxieties that I carry with me every day.

That is why I am out here once again. I am driven by the indelible belief that if I cruise through just enough nights, if I subject myself to just enough abandon, if I wade through just enough late-night strangeness I will finally cross the night and make it to the other side.

We pull up to a red light. The engine idles with a gentle purr. Pelican City, barely audible, moody, plays on the stereo. I look left, through the side window, with my ghostly reflection superimposed over a dark storefront. Same glasses, same haircut, it looks calmly from the sidewalk into the car. We sit there a second, the light turns green, and I pull away.

Of course the man on the other side of the night is a fantasy, a fevered dream of myself. The quest is pointless. The streets are as empty as they seem. The other side of the night is the immaculate fix.

But then, it is 4am, my brain is crackling, and the world is as illusory as I want it to be. The other side of the night is just around the corner somewhere.