Bursting into my apartment, fresh from caffeination at Peet's, it is the most natural thing in the world. Turn on the email, see what's what. And it is a subtle thing, and a necessary one, that I tune into that other small something that grabs at the chest. The feeling that it is too much. What is too much...well, it may be impossible to say. But there is this impulse, something that says 'overload.' Enough. Enough with the email. Don't go there, it says. Stay here, it also says. Here being a Read more [...]

I am certain it was a Sunday, and it was summer. My first summer, and my first months in Britain, 1969. My father's cousin and her husband – relations who seem so distant on a family tree that that I could hardly imagine being grafted onto the trunk – had a modern townhouse in Kensington, across the street from London's Holland Park. I had been around just enough to sense that this was a leafy, affluent part of town. But being from a leafy affluent part of America, I thought little of it. Holland Read more [...]

Loss of vitality. Loss of stamina. Not to mention energy energy. As well as options. And of time itself. My preoccupations with age, with time's passing, with my own passing. It seems that I have to sink into all this before sheer buoyancy boosts me out of it. Out of it, that is the very essence of so-called jet lag. Actually, I question the concept. I am not lagging behind any jet. I am not lagging behind any thing. It's just like the French guys say, I am crevé. A nuanced difference? No. The Read more [...]

For the disabled person, it is composed of several odd parts. Naturally, there is the peeing. Fact is, almost any toilet built into the curved hull of an aircraft makes it hard for me to get my hips forward enough to, well, hit the target. That, coupled with the fact of a variable quadriplegic stream, makes the whole experience rather fraught. Not to mention sordid. For I miss, that is the essential fact. Honestly, I do my best, but there is no way to achieve the objective. No way. So, what do I Read more [...]

What a relief to learn that Woody Allen's new film marks a 'return to form,' according to the Guardian. I haven't seen the film, but certainly intend to. Thus my relationship with one of the world's last true newspapers. And, beneath it all, my relationship with what to me is the only true city. My experience being very limited, I acknowledge. Not that it seemed that way yesterday. Hard to say why, but when I wandered into our hotel straight off the train from Wales, it seemed pointless being Read more [...]

This is not our last full day in Pembrokeshire, but the day before that, the penultimate, almost. Erev penultimate. And there is a subtle shift. The sense that this is the day before the shift begins. Tomorrow, our last full day in the rented cottage out on Wales' most extreme southwestern corner, we can count on a certain amount of rushing around. No, not rushing, just finishing. There is hardly any time pressure. And, in the end, probably there is not that much to do. We need to pack our own stuff. Read more [...]