On Friday night after yoga I sat on my roof until I figured out how my book was going to end. (I think it might end with a girl sitting on a roof in Brooklyn.)
On Saturday I biked from Williamsburg to Brighton Beach, taking, for the first time, Bedford Ave. (I usually take Ocean Parkway to the water, a more direct route.) So I passed Brooklyn College which was empty on this summer weekend, and surprisingly pretty with its ivy-covered buildings and impeccable lawns, and I also biked through block after block of big, suburban-sized homes, which I guess must have been inhabited by some serious Jews because again the streets were empty and quiet, so either its tenants were at the beach or off praying somewhere, or at the very least not driving anywhere. (I hoped they were at the beach because it was really sunny on Saturday.) The bike path was flat and pot-hole free and I cruised effortlessly and gratefully. I felt like I owned the streets that day.
At Brighton Beach I was the surprise guest at the celebration party for my niece, who had just gotten her cast off. (She broke her arm a month ago; she was running and she tripped and fell. “A clean break,” everyone said so much that I finally just wrote it into my book, except in that case it is a 13-year-old girl falling from the second story of her house in an effort to escape just for a night, her parents consoling themselves by repeatedly telling themselves the one piece of good news out of it all, that it was a clean break.) The two of us jumped the waves together. She got braver with every wave, dragging me out by my arm even further. I was trying to remember what it was like when I was her age and I couldn’t, it was too far away. If there were faint memories hovering at the fringes of my brain they have now been replaced by this one, of a little girl testing her newly-freed arm in the ocean air, giggling as the waves crash higher and higher against her chest, until finally, when she has tasted too much salt water, she is done.
Later I biked to Park Slope and went to Emily Flake’s birthday party at a bar called High Dive, where we sat out back and ate red velvet cake balls that were covered in chocolate and I talked to an improv comic who explained in a completely intellectual and fascinating way why he loved what he did for a living, even if it wasn’t much of a living at all. I stayed at the party until I very suddenly and urgently remembered I had biked for hours in the sun and that if I didn’t get home immediately I was going to have to take a nap under one of the tables.
On Sunday I got up early and biked to the cafe where I reconfigured my list of chapters I have to write (each chapter is simply the name of a character; this is the closest I get to an outline) and read some more from The Corrections. I sat next to an attractive man who wrote in his moleskine with a pencil, which made a strong impression on me because no one writes with a pencil anymore and also no one writes with any sort of writing utensil anymore because they are too busy pressing buttons with their fingertips. When I sneezed he blessed me and looked me in the eye and smiled at me kindly, as if I were a real actual person that existed on this planet and he were a real actual person that existed on this planet and if we all work together we can acknowledge each other’s existence and make everyone’s lives a little bit sweeter. I can’t tell if my mind is just on high alert right now and everything feels big and important, or if indeed this person just understood exactly how to be in the world.
Later I went to yoga and a man stopped me on the street on the edge of Soho to tell me I was beautiful and it made me laugh and I kept on walking.
Even later than that I went to Lowlands, a bar in Gowanus, to meet up with Catherine, and when I walked out to the back patio for a moment, another man came up to me and told me I was beautiful and again it made me laugh and I kept on walking. Catherine and I hung out there for a few hours while Catherine’s husband Carl spun records, and I chatted with a woman who had followed my tour adventures via status updates on Facebook and she said very nice things about how engaged she was in the journey and I said, “If I can make one Facebook friend happy than my work is complete,” and everyone laughed but I think I might have actually meant it.
Then we went to the Bell House to see the New Pornographers and they announced a few songs in that they were going to play a bunch of “deep cuts,” so if you had liked this particular band for a very long time, say ten years or so, and you were at this show, then you were pretty fucking happy last night in Brooklyn.
