(UPDATED): hoping followers don't get slammed; I'm going to edit all my posts...

UPDATE:  It seems that if I "edit" a post and merely then "save" it (as opposed to "publish"), it sort of disappears from the blog until I do actually go back and "post."  So I am managing to go through and do some edits without my followers getting misleading emails notifying you of new stuff when really it's not going to be new stuff -- yet.  Eventually I will want to "publish" these again, though, so if any of my followers are reading this and know of a way to prevent me from making your life hell, please let me know.

In case you're wondering, this is not a New Year's resolution.  Rather, a piece of my prose is coming out in a journal in January, and when they asked me for "about the author"-type info, included was the opportunity to advertise my blog if I had one.  I've been anonymous all of this time, and I'm not gung-ho about changing that or anything, but I couldn't pass this up.  I just worry about cyber-stalkers/ what important people might think should they stumble across this work.

Why can't I just become famous or whatever (and rich) so I could be Jon Stewart or just steal him from his wife and none of this would matter? Why?

Cafe Imagination

http://mosleyart.blogspot.com/2008/01/village-cafe-click-here-to-bid-on-this.html
"Never a Day Without Painting," this artist calls his blog. I love that.  Please support him!

It's somewhere east of Avenue A, but not as far east as Brooklyn.  It's somewhere south of 4th Street, but not even as far south as Houston.  It's a little like Cafe Pick Me Up across from Tompkins Square Park -- or like Life Cafe at the other far corner of it.  Something like that.

But the tables face a different direction, if it's possible even to know such a thing.

To my right there's a wall of windows, and I always sit facing the door where the customers come strolling through for their late-morning cappuccinos or after-work glasses of pinot grigio.

There's no time there.

I go there to step out -- into the world -- with a book or my journal. Or just to sit and take in the sun and the bustle of New York City and the smell of fresh coffee and the fading color of the sky as the day ages. I can have soup; I can have sandwiches on thick, grainy bread -- but also floury  scones.  I always have a scone.  They're never out of scones.

A little farther east there's a thrift store, and sometimes I go in to look around.  It's spacious and well-organized, and somehow I know there are no bedbugs.  Sometimes my college friend Teresa is there (she often shows up in these types of dreams of mine, as if to say, See? Life is easy!)  Effortless -- the way she balances her latest baby on one hip of that impossibly tiny body of hers, wearing one of those magical wraparound baby slings while bending down to search enthusiastically through a box of scarves and purses and brassieres.  Teresa and I see each other about once every two years in real life, but she frequents these particular dreams.

How can it not be real? I've gone so many times -- more times than my one real-life visit ever to Sine.  I remember that being my first year in New York.  There were stone walls and wide, worn wooden floor boards.  I'd scraped together money (I was in school at the time) and ate Irish breakfast there and drank my coffee and wrote -- but I can't even tell you where it was on a map without cheating.

It was all new to me.  I was new to it.  I was lost.

Which is to say, from there I could have gone anywhere.

Give or Take a Mile

If my tenant had seemed like a good person, maybe I would have only felt bad for him when he told me all that time ago that he had bedbugs.  Bad for him and scared for myself.

But this was someone who played his music loudly enough at three a.m. to literally shake me out of a deep sleep two stories down.  Someone who, in exchange for his very, very cheap rent, felt he could treat me like a concierge when, right off the bat,  he locked himself out twice his first week here -- once at 3 a.m. and another time first thing in the morning on a Sunday.

Once, after my ex-husband had moved out, leaving me here to fend for myself, I noticed a water stain that hadn't been there before, under the staircase leading down from that top floor where the tenant was living.  That was odd, I thought; there was a whole story of house between that water stain and the roof, and there was certainly no plumbing anywhere nearby.

Then I figured out that, not only had my tenant taken cardboard storage boxes out of his infested bedroom to store in my insulation-filled crawl space (crawl space, not attic!), but he'd also opened up, from there, the hatch to the roof -- where I would then find coffee cups and ashtrays -- and left it open.  For God knows how long.  In the rain.

No, really, help yourself.  Make yourself right at home.

So I put a lock on not only the hatch but the door that opened onto the ladder leading there, past the crawl-space.

I didn't want to have to live like that.  To bolt every single thing in sight down because I had surrounded myself with selfish, immature (even at 30+) people with the kind of sense of entitlement that says, "ask for forgiveness, not permission."  And then would never even get around to the forgiveness. "Worse comes to worst, it doesn't hurt to ask."

For things you're not paying for.  For things you know you have no right to.  For things it's insulting to ask for.  ("Oh, you don't even use air conditioning in the summer -- because it's expensive?  Well, still -- I think 'utilities included' should mean I can use all the AC I want for no extra money.  What's that? New York City says a couple of hundred bucks a year is a reasonable flat fee? Tell you what:  how about I just  give you 50?"

Interesting.  So you're saying Mommy and Daddy taught you that the worst that can happen is that someone might say no?

Hmm.  Funny because my mother taught me to have some humility.  And to treat others as you would like to be treated.  Maybe "it never hurts to ask" actually does work for you sometimes.  But I'm here to tell you that I can't be the only one out there with whom it does not work.  For whom it sends up a red flag that says, "This person tries to get something for nothing --  and then will try to manipulate you into feeling guilty about it if you don't go along.  In the future, deal with this person as little as humanly possible."

Am I wrong about this? Just being uptight and narrow-minded? Lacking that ambitious attitude it takes to succeed? Maybe you're right.  Don't knock anything until you've tried it first, right?

Hey, Hipsterboy, I have an idea.  I was thinking that in addition to your rent, you give me 50% of the returns you're earning on that trust fund your daddy set up for you.  No, no, no -- no hurry; just give it some thought. I don't need an answer right away.  Oh, and when I came upstairs to see where the leak was coming from, I saw your new Mac sitting on the desk, so just a heads-up:  I took it.  You don't mind, right?

Prayer

The first time was in the Himalayas, and the air 
was hoarse; you were thinner even 
than before -- and on your knees more


than twice now, unable to will away
the thought even of water
with curry, of curried eggs and air, curried 




sleep. It is lucky to see the Dalai Lama; we didn't
know that -- it was just something to do far from the land
of camel safaris or running from thieving
monkeys  on the foggy  streets of Simla.  
A second visit, however, will leave your life


unresolved.  I needed to know that, years later,
and didn't.  And he was charming, wearing those
wire-framed glassed and amped up -- this time in Central Park --
cracking jokes in a language I did not speak.  We'd brought
malt liquor and a blanket.  But in the mountains, 
then, it had been much colder.


The hostels were full, and you were 
gagging in some restaurant's back yard outside
an outhouse.  Did an old man really come to us? 
Was that part real? He couldn't speak, but
his grandson said to us, "Come.  We go 
see God  tomorrow," and we slept
on an unpainted wooden floor by a fire.
And in the morning you'd never been sick


a day in your life.  You, Dalai Lama, little boy,
old man -- whoever the *** will
listen to me:  my passport 
has expired and there are things 
I cannot help.  Please, fix my life.