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.

Steel City Blues 2012

Written: April 2, 2012, in DC

About: Pittsburgh, March 2012

I have recently taken an extended break from blues dancing. It was not for the lack of love for the dance, or an injury. In months prior, I have found myself drifting along a bland trajectory through the dances, often feeling powerless to change my direction. This experience was even more frustrating because I had been feeling more connected to the art and the music. Yet the dancing itself seemed to be slipping away.

I had also wanted to get to know the people with whom I had been spending all this time. In the midst of a dance party, when the music flows thick and loud until you are too tired to stay on your feet, it is all too easy to just slip from dance to dance. You get to know the beautiful intricacies of someone’s body, but hardly see the elegant folds of their mind.

I dubbed it my blues fast and intentionally went to dance events and did not dance. It was excruciating at first. I did not realize just how ingrained this routine has become. Sitting at home on a Thursday night as the clock ticked past the hours of Backroom Blues felt surreal. Then came the meditative acceptance. I would sip whiskey at the bar and chat with the dancers taking a short break. The last couple weeks were filled with practically childish excitement.

I decide I should come back with an overload, and so I decided to return to blues at the Steel City blues exchange. Two days of practically nothing but dancing, drinking, and friends, all else optional.

And Blues, she took me back without a moment’s thought. The draw was instantaneous. When I got to the first dance, the air was already thick and heavy. The walls were dripping with music and low lighting. I went up to the bar and asked for a shot of vodka. The old man on the other side looked around, picked up a wine glass and filled it half-full. She must have missed me, she really did.

I closed my eyes for a dance and the swirling time took me into the late midnight hours. It was all rhythm rhythm sway. It seemed like all it took to get through the evening dance was a single breath and a single pull on that vodka. Then it was off for the blues late night.

The place was pulsing. It was hot and sweaty and alive as hell in there, and no one would stop. Everyone was submerged in the music and the dancing even when they were not on the dance floor. The blues pooled and coiled on the floor, drawing everyone into the deep end. You could sit on a sofa with your feet drawn up, but the blues would snake up the furniture legs, wrap around your waist and shoulders and pull you back in, pull your head under into the sweet dream.

I switched to the whiskey flask in my back pocket. Beads of sweat roll over my eyes and my lips. I lean out the window and timidly kiss the dark beyond. She is cool and coy and lovely. Runs her fingers up my spine and through my hair. Before I can blurt out something about love and immortality, she silences me with a single finger tip on my lips and then slowly, deliberately, pushes me back on the dance floor, pushes me back under the swelling tide of blues.

Blues, that sweet junk, it flows into a familiar vein freely and easily. It never left. All along, I have been right here, in this embrace, on this breath, on this beat.

The heat and fire of the dance floor are hard to bear and I escape into the soft blanket of the deep night to cool off. We sit on the sidewalk and blissfully talk for what seems like hours. Or maybe just a few minutes. It is hard to tell the time. The mind wanders off in the company of someone close. Another dancer comes out of the building and starts playing a harmonica while meandering about place, between cars and people. Everything is framed by flashing marquee lights.

I have rearranged the time.

The trip does not end on the drive home. It does not end on the sweet goodbyes, or the midnight kiss, or the dinosaur Mr. Rogers. The breakfast of Elvis and pancakes is not the finale. Neither are the arresting Catholic cathedrals. These are all at the center of what happened. Warm layers wrapped tightly around the core, where all is good and peaceful and I am not alone.

I rearrange the time so that everything ends with me taking a rest on a shaded lawn on a clear afternoon. The grass is soft and cool and a perfect compliment to the flawless blue sky. A gentle conversation floats over us like a lazy balloon. The sun is enjoying its afternoon stroll through the clouds as much as anyone. We lay and we talk.

And then I am home.

A house jam

Written: June 19, 2011, in DC

About: Tucson, Spring and Summer 2005

On a cool spring evening, I’m walking half a block to a friend’s house. It’s dark. No good party starts until at least eleven anyway. I’m practically bounding down the street and up the stairs. There is a bottle of Jack in my hand. A cloud of tobacco smoke already occupies the porch. Someone, swimming in the cloud, is talking loudly and drinking cheap beer.

This isn’t a regular college party. Some of the city’s best improvisers are gathering under this roof, along with their fortunate friends. It’s a night for a house jam. A few hours ago the word had gone out over texts, and now we are converging. With all the right people, the right time and energy and place the event runs itself. Somewhere there’s a hat with people’s names. We are supposed to be picking teams and setting the show order. None of it matters – everyone brought booze, and everyone knows what’s supposed to happen. No need for rules. Too many people here are practically anarchists anyway.

There is no subtlety in the night’s acceleration. Cigarettes out front, weed in the back, alcohol everywhere. These are the nights when I would drink close to a bottle of whiskey, and others wouldn’t be far behind. But everyone is riding such a powerful wave of spiritual intoxication that all these psychoactives barely touch anyone.

The crowd is around. People standing at the ready, waiting for the moment when everything starts. Eventually, someone gets things rolling, but it’s hardly that person’s decision. The night simply reaches the right point. Some critical mass is found, and everyone collapses into the large living room. There is a pile of chairs and couches. Everything is quickly lined with bottles and cups. Someone leans in through the doorway to watch, holding the cigarette outside.

Improv is feverish and uncompromising. No one merely says “Yes.” We scream it, fling ourselves into agreement. Few teams manage to stick to a structure. Everything slides into montages and freeform. No one stops or interrupts their indulgences. People bring cups of liquor right into the scenes, sometimes shooting straight from the bottles just off-stage. Energy pours out of us like a wildfire. There is no controlling this storm. There is divine focus and precision in this play of wicked abandon.

The house is a deliriously storming sea. Waves of energy crash from wall to wall. Lines and scenes come effortlessly. All is love and brilliance. It goes until the cups run dry, the scenes hit all the buttons, and there is a post-coital smoke on the porch. The night winks out and we glide home.

This was our Woodstock. This was our Paris of the twenties.

Dear x

Written: April 26, 2011

About: a book

dear x
i love you
y

The words appeared on a small slip of weathered paper, neatly torn from a larger sheet, and tucked away between the pages of a book I am reading. They weren’t addressed to me. An old love note in an old book. A tender moment lost in a time long past.

The discovery made me stop and pace around the room for a while. Such simple words. So filled with honesty and truthful desire. Gentle care had gone into so carefully separating the little piece of paper, deliberately inking the words, and inserting the note between the pages of a book shared.

I readily admit my love for words, and this loves frequently leads me to use too many of them. I often put great effort into describing things and emotions effusively and at length, with detours and side stories, always hunting for the perfect metaphor, that unique angle, that awe-inspiring perspective that will strike the reader with its brilliance. Perhaps, too often, too much effort. I am struck by the beauty and the elegance of expression that is so brief yet so potent. That which is true needs no embellishment.

Our paths seem to be littered with mementos of great passions. Not always the positive ones. This admission comes on the heels of another recent find of mine, a sorrowful lover’s letter. Anger rarely leaves anything quite so coherent; its memories come in shards and scars, but no less evocative. Or perhaps a variation on the classic, something along the lines of “D + S = forever 1987,” scrawled into a sidewalk.

It doesn’t take much to reconnect with those emotions, even if they are not yours. If our own lives have such artifacts throughout, imagine the thick layers of memories wrapped around our cities, where generations of millions of people have loved and suffered and remembered. And then imagine all the moments that didn’t leave a trace.

Exit, Stage West

Written: April 3, 2011

About: Tucson

I have lived in Tucson for about seven and a half years. That’s the second longest I’ve lived anywhere, and now I’m having the strange realization that Tucson is a place on the road, and no longer home. Well, perhaps it is a bit more than a place on the road. After all, having spent so much time here, I know how Tucson lives. I’ve seen it change. I have stores and stores of memories from here – from heartbreaking to euphoric to simply strange. Still, even though I can never be a tourist here, I’m not quite a local either.

The end of my stay here is not without its poetic moments. Since my new job is not covering my moving expenses, I’ve had to get rid of almost everything I own since I can’t afford to move it. All of my furniture, a lot of my clothes, much of my kitchenware, my computes. The only things which I have pretty much refused to give up are books and music. I have boxes full of volumes and CDs. An attachment that is sure to cost me in the near future.

My dance shoes have finally been worn through. These shoes have survived for about six years – an incredible feat for the kind of abuse that these shoes have taken. And my final weeks in Tucson is when they have finally started showing holes. Another chapter, another chapter, right?

The train of things leaving my hands has been enlightening. It’s been nice to realize that even though I haven’t had all that much, I actually need even less. Whether it’s something I’ve given away, or threw away, or sold, I’ve felt lighter and more empowered with each bit. It is a good feeling, knowing that I will rocket into a new life minimally encumbered. I want to carry memories and experiences, not items.

There is a beautiful and serene view of the Tucson sunrise from the A Mountain, just around the corner from the smoked-through, piss- and beer-stained Buffet. The cool Tucson night, bearing within it the improv and dancing madness – hours and hours of idealists imbibing and sweating their passions. So many stars in this night, an endless field of golden flickers so vast and deep. Cross the Gates Pass and get lost in this infinity, spend a good hour conversing with the distant worlds. Or if you want someone closer, there is Broadway Café and the Grill, always open and always up for a good conversation. What’s better than a milkshake and some hashbrowns to grease your mind and tongue, anyway. I’m walking down a street, bottle of Jack in my hand (my girlfriend), grinning, feeling punk, bounding up the stairs and into the house for an improv jam that will blow everything into the stratosphere. How much liquor have I poured into myself in these years? Enough to keep this burn alive. There’s blues on, and it’s blues like I’ve never heard before. There’s blues on. Someone is so very close, moving with me in comfort and perfection. The tiniest of movements like the loudest of words. My hands are covered in dark oil and tiny specks of aluminum and steel, a sharp and reassuring smell of the cutting fluid. The sun is out, wrapping everything in its fiery embrace. And then there is the sunset under a gradient sky, with the burning red mountains as the backdrop. And all the while, the saguaro whistle their quiet songs in the wind.

I’ve gone through so much here, and I miss you already, Tucson.

Are you into fun stuff?

Written: February 26, 2011, in Tucson

About: mid-January, in San Francisco

I was walking through the cool air of San Francisco winter, a few feet along the sloped sidewalk, smiling bright. The music was still in my ears, and the beat was in my step. My friend had just dropped me off near my hotel after a wonderful evening of swing, late-night pizza, and conversation. Always a late-night conversation, like a cherry at the bottom of a shake. It is that comforting light, the safe harbor at the end of the night that I always look forward to, that point where we are sitting somewhere, exhausted, and just talking. The splendor of the evening was still clinging to me; it made me warm and pleasant all over.

A crowd of drunks filled the sidewalk right in front of my hotel. The crowd was a bit older than me, and well-dressed. The sort of drunken crowd you encounter with zero apprehension. No one here is belligerent and in the mood for a fight. No one is drunk enough to spray you with vomit. Safe, but still obnoxious. I quickly glide past them and duck into the hotel.

As I am jogging up the stairs, I hear it. The late-night mating call. The drunken swipe at my serenity.

“Hey there handsome!”

I quicken my step, hop multiple stairs, and circle toward the elevators, pretending, hoping the call was not addressed to me. It was. I knew it was. A refined and beautiful evening is about to be invaded.

The hotel is quite old, and the elevators are slow. As I wait, the drunk stumbles onto the scene completely obliterated. Her sentences are short and slurred. Her gaze is unfocused. In fact, she has trouble looking at me directly, instead focusing on a spot that misses me by a few inches. A licentious smile floats on her lips. The ruin of my peace is upon me.

She introduces herself, “Shannon.” (Removed in time, I do not recall her actual name.) I politely shake her hand, and reply with my own name. My smile is conservative and strictly friendly, the hand contact brief and formal, but the subtlety is lost on her. In the alcoholic haze, she recognizes that my name is Russian, and produces a few words in my native tongue. An impressive feat, especially given her state, and I curtly compliment her knowledge. Again, my brevity and lack of enthusiasm are ignored.

The elevator arrives, but provides no relief. The lady follows me in, albeit with some difficulty. In the close confines, physical proximity cannot be avoided. Fifteen floors is suddenly a very long ride.

The ride is tense. I am keeping a polite distance, and it is finally beginning to dawn on Shannon that whatever she had imagined is not coming to pass. The realization is slowly coming to her foggy mind. She grasps something has gone wrong here. Reality and her intentions have diverged in a terrible way. Her eyes still fail to focus on me.

“So are you into fun stuff?” This is the desperate last stand. The last cards are tossed ungracefully onto the table.

“Not tonight,” I say. The universe gives the scene a screen-perfect beat of silence, then the elevator doors slide open on my floor and I step out. Shannon is left behind, confused  and regrettably disappointed.