SORE AFRAID

stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses

I recently bought a t-shirt with the dates "1162 - 1227" written across the chest.  These are the birth and death years of the founder of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan.  Apart from the fact that I shouldn't really be wearing t-shirts at my current age, this seems like a very nerdy purchase, appropriate for a role-playing game enthusiast or the kind who frequents Renaissance Fayres.  However, it was a totally random choice.  Despite pretending that I wholeheartedly reject throw-away, consumer-junk, late-capitalist, American-crap culture, I find it difficult to be seen at a public event wearing the same t-shirt more than once.  I had an event to attend; I thought this t-shirt was cute; it wasn't expensive.  So I bought it.

I have no special interest in Genghis Khan, although I did recently see the movie Mongol with Asaph and his mother, who was visiting from Israel.  It was a tad too long, but the battle scenes were exciting, and I enjoyed hearing the sound of the Mongolian language.  Like Turkish and Swedish, Mongolian is one of those languages that would be nice to just play in the background, like music.  I could lie on a couch and listen to people in the same room having conversations in Swedish or Turkish (or, now, Mongolian) for hours, although it might be difficult to arrange this, what with the fall in the value of the US dollar.  Genghis Khan was played by a Japanese actor, so I assume that his voice was dubbed, unless they had Tadanobu Asano learn Mongolian for the role, and then passed off his accent as the way the Mongols talked back in 1162.

After seeing the movie, I researched Genghis Khan on the internet, since I like to check for historical inaccuracies.  I came across this odd quote attributed to him:

If there is no means to prevent drunkenness, a man may become drunk thrice a month; if he oversteps this limit he makes himself guilty of a punishable offence. If he is drunk only twice a month, that is better — if only once, that is more praiseworthy. What could be better than that he should not drink at all? But where shall we find a man who never drinks? If, however, such a man is found, he deserves every respect.

I wonder if I get drunk thrice a month and am therefore guilty of a punishable offense?  I'm sure any punishment meted out by Genghis Khan wouldn't be fun.

I have very mixed feelings about alcohol consumption, although, to be fair, I have very mixed feelings about pretty much everything.  (Except for berries.  I am unequivocally pro-berry.  One of the saddest things I remember reading when I was doing internet research about the Khmer Rouge was learning that picking your own berries could lead to execution, since that was considered private enterprise.)

A boring variant of alcoholism runs in my family, so I have always compulsively monitored other people's drinking.  Then, when I finally started drinking in my late 20's, I had to compulsively monitor my own drinking as well, which was and is exhausting.  That being said, I find myself feeling suspicious of those who don't drink.  As the humorist Julie Hecht, whose style I often attempt to copy, writes in one of her short stories:

Suddenly the bottles appeared. Some requested wine, others whiskey. The moment of asking for bottled water was coming up. People don't like the one who asks for water. There's always the split second when they wonder if you're a former alcoholic. They can't imagine any other reason for declining alcohol. For example, it's a drug and it causes a drugged feeling.

For many years I was afraid of having a drugged feeling, so I didn't drink.  Also, I thought I was too good for drunkenness; I felt it was beneath me.  But then I was about to turn 30, and I realized that life was meaningless, and that I was careening towards its inevitable end, so I started.  So all of my throwing up from excessive alcohol use occurred not in high school or college, but while I was employed with my current employer.  It's really shameful, although, to be fair, I have been working here for 10 years.

The variant of alcoholism that runs in my family is not the spectacular form that many non-heterosexual men and celebrities and non-heterosexual celebrities succumb to, with really messy scenes and running into traffic and waking up in other people's children's beds.  It's the kind where those afflicted just drink every day and it seems somehow wrong, but there are only occasional upsetting incidents caused by the near-constant drugged feeling.  How do you tell someone in their 80's that drinking is going to ruin them, when they've already had a pretty successful and fulfilling life?  It seems a bit silly by then.  Although I read that the Right Reverend Gene Robinson checked himself into a rehab center in early 2006, after deciding that he was relying too much on drinking wine to deal with the stress of being hated by the conservative members of the Anglican Communion, after his ordination as Bishop of New Hampshire.  But I guess he was only 59 and also had to set an example of extreme virtue, to give that angry Nigerian bishop less ammunition.

I know that alcohol use and/or abuse wrecks a lot of lives.  I stole a magazine from a friend's vacation house that had a profile of some writer in Arkansas who had stopped drinking at age 40 and had completely changed her life for the better.  She was not afflicted with the boring form of alcoholism; she had many crazy stories.  The article was accompanied by a list of questions to help you determine if you were also an alcoholic, so I cut that out to put on my refrigerator, next to a photo of young man with an Apollo's belt that I use to make myself feel bad for eating.  But based on the list of questions, I couldn't imagine anyone was not an alcoholic, since they included: "can you drink more now than you could when you first started drinking?" and "do you ever regret anything you say or do when you drink?" and "do you enjoy drinking?"  I did notice last Lent when I limited my alcohol consumption to up to two glasses of red wine on Saturdays and Sundays only (with a few days excepted, since you can't keep every day of a Christian fast, or you get too proud) that I said and did as many embarrassing things as ever, but I couldn't use drunkenness as an excuse, so in a way it was worse.

I know that many people are helped by 12-step, total-abstinence programs, although they have enormous failure rates.  It's hard to imagine that our society couldn't come up with a better solution to this issue, but I guess we are good at not coming up with good solutions to problems.

But, then again, what's wrong with drinking to numb the pain of our miserable existence?  Life can be awful.  Some things are very hard to face with an unclouded eye, as I learned recently while attending a very crowded outdoor dance party held on a pier with no trash receptacles while as sober as a Muslim convert from Mormonism.  I don't think I will have the strength to do that again, what with the sight of many men over 25 who were shirtless and smoking and sometimes also even chewing gum.  Who can be expected to remain sober in such circumstances, even though I allowed myself the luxury of inappropriate attire for a man my age, in the form of gym shorts that were criticized by my Turkish friend, who comes from a good family?

Then there is the whole in vino veritas issue.  One time I said to my therapist that I needed to stop drinking so that I could make sure I never say what I really think or feel, but this triggered a broader conversation.

One thing I have noticed is that non-heterosexual men who do not drink alcohol and who are not recovered alcoholics tend to be sexual compulsives.

Asaph doesn't really drink.  But this is common among persons from the Middle East.  I read in a travel book about Tel Aviv that it was a sign of the city's cultural sophistication that one rarely saw a drunk person on the street.  Of course, one could easily say the same about Riyadh (الرياض‎, literally "gardens") or Baghdad or Tehran.  I've argued before that interest in drinking alcohol declines the closer you get to the equator.  If Muhammad had been born in Iceland, I imagine that Islamic law might be a bit different.  My Arabic teacher reiterated how alcohol consumption is expressly forbidden in Islam the day we learned how to write the letter ح, which is another Arabic sound that is very difficult to pronounce (the Israelis pronounce their version of this letter -- ח -- as a  "voiceless uvular fricative, due to European influence" as I read on the internet, and this is another of the millions of reasons why Israeli Hebrew is so much easier than Arabic, a voiceless uvular fricative being the sound you make to clear the skin of a popcorn kernel from the back of your throat, while ح is pronounced like the sound you make while suddenly being interrupted during Lamaze class).  In any case, one of the example words we had for ح was حشيش, or "grass" but also "hashish", and my teacher, who I always assumed was extremely puritanical in all respects, stated that some Islamic scholars think that hashish consumption is not forbidden, although he made it clear that he had never even smelled the odor of hashish smoke.  I wanted to say, "So Islam is like the Rastafari movement in this respect," but I knew that would only be seen as needless provocation, and as the Rastafari movement is a misunderstanding of Christianity, I could have started a discussion that I would have really regretted.

At the end of a recent visit with my parents in Ohio, I was riding to the airport with my mother and father, and my nephew Zack, who we brought along for added cuteness.  We were discussing the fact that Munich had fallen from number one to number two on Monocle magazine's quality-of-life index.  From the back seat, Zack yelled, "Munich?"  My mother then explained, "It's a city far away in Germany, and your daddy has been there."  Indeed, one of two times my brother crossed the Atlantic involved a visit to Munich, in 1987.  Then my mother added, "They have a lot of beer there."  "Do they have milk?" asked Zack, concerned.

Oh how the sweet innocence of his question pierced my heart!  The purity that comes out of the mouth of babes and sucklings!  Yes, poor Zack, they have milk!  How could my mother have tainted his ears with talk of beer, that wicked beverage which befogs the mind?

Then again, Zack's father, my brother, my mother's son, is of such substantial presence that he could drink beer all day long without any evidence of intoxication.  Also, German beer is delicious.

Damn alcohol!  Damn mixed feelings!!

Berry?

 

beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger

Although I could be accused of being a hypocrite for a large number of reasons, my ranting about proper and appropriate clothing really earns me a spot in the Eighth Circle of Hell.  I dress, more or less, like a hobo.  Or worse, like a hobo who listens to National Public Radio and who carries his belongings in a Whole Foods canvas tote-bag.  I knew things were bad when Asaph, a vegetarian Israeli who does yoga and works in real-estate finance, started criticizing my clothes.  How could that not be rock bottom?

The Israelis are not known for their fashion sense.  When not in their military uniforms (which, admittedly, are pretty great, style-wise), Israelis of European descent seem to look to Germany for fashion inspiration (and by that I mean Birkenstocks, not Heidi Klum), and the Tel Aviv-Goa-Ko Pha Ngan axis ensures that you will see many Israeli men wearing sarongs and bindis.  As for the Sephardi and Mizrahi Israelis, one can find an elegant variant of the ערס, the Israeli version of a guido, with less muscle and hair product than its New Jersey analog.  The inelegant form tends to dress like Ali G., or to wear white tank tops and חי necklaces while smoking and yelling into their mobile phones (one can also see this masculinity-feigning style among certain Jews on Fire Island, in the same way that I will wear a tank top and a crucifix necklace). 

My guess is that Palestinians have better fashion sense, since Arabs, like Slavs, have a tragic glamour about them, when not excessively Muslim.  One time when Asaph and I were walking down Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, a convertible full of attractive young guys in tight t-shirts and coiffed hair pulled up beside us to ask directions.  At first I assumed that they were just borderline-elegant ערסים, but even with my very minimal knowledge of Hebrew, I could detect that they were native Arabic speakers.  The word ערס itself comes from the Arabic عرص, a slang word meaning pimp.  The first letter of this word is ع, which is the sound that has caused me so much grief in my Arabic class.  My Arabic teacher's instructions on how to make this sound were: "try to throw up, but then don't".  (My textbook says: "sing the lowest note possible, then go one note lower", which is basically the same thing.)  This is the consonant that also begins the Arabic words for "Iraq" and "Arab" and is how I could tell that the group of tight-t-shirted guys in the convertible were Arabs.  Even in their Hebrew you could hear it.  This letter also exists in Hebrew -- ע, the distant ancestor of the Latin letter O -- but in modern Israeli Hebrew it's either a silent letter or pronounced as a vowel.  I am afraid of actually throwing up when I try to say this letter in Arabic, since that could only exacerbate our tensions with the Arab world.

So, why, despite all of the talk, do I fail to dress like Alain Delon in L'eclisse?  There are a number of reasons.  One: I am lazy.  Two: I have a quasi-autistic hysteria about certain fabrics touching my skin, especially around my neck and wrists.  Three: my economic special period is still in effect, making it hard to buy clothes of the quality required not to trigger my quasi-autistic hysteria about certain fabrics touching my skin.  And four (Arabic أربعة, Hebrew ארבע; both words containing the cursed letter ע/ع): I have gotten too fat, so not only do many of my things no longer fit, it is a depressing endeavor to shop for ever-increasing sizes.  If I had been anorexic, not only would I be thinner, but I would probably be better at pronouncing Arabic, what with all the vomiting.

Of course, I'm not fat fat.  But it's all relative.  A friend of mine from my notorious gym had experienced some dramatic weight gain as a result of antidepressant usage, and he went to consult an endocrinologist.  While in the waiting room, he witnessed a morbidly obese woman leaving her appointment.  He then realized that the doctor would be unsympathetic to his relatively minor concerns.  He had to explain to the doctor the differing standards imposed by our special sub-community, and how a size 36 waist at our notorious gym basically puts one into an untouchable caste where one is invisible, and this makes it hard to work in on popular weight machines.

One thing I've learned since becoming a member of my notorious gym is that the members of the A-list non-heterosexual male community really work out a lot.  All of those muscles don't just appear automatically, except for maybe some of the African Americans.  It is the ability to metabolize food that varies dramatically in the population.  Some people can eat whatever they want, and they still retain a fat-free set of bulletproof-vest abs.  Others need to eat all of the time, lest they revert to the pipsqueak status of their traumatic high-school days.  And then there are those like me.  My body desperately wants to be fat, so I have to fight back with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Obviously some of my ancestors went through some pretty terrible famines, perhaps during the Thirty Years' War or the Plantation of Ulster, and so I am designed to store every possible extra calorie in lipid-rich layers of blubber.  I heard Deirdre Barrett, a professor at Harvard Medical School, talking on NPR about her book in which she argues that all of our instincts about eating are completely inappropriate for our current age of corn-syrup bounty, and that we should never listen to our body when it comes to eating, since we evolved those instincts during millennia of starvation (she also argues that beauty standards haven't really changed over the ages).  Like the poor moths bonking into lampposts, we keep being drawn back to the buffet table, eating and drinking our own damnation.  I bought Mireille Guiliano's book French Women Don't Get Fat for my mother (failing to consider that this might not be the most considerate gift), in which she basically argues that French women don't get fat because they eat less.  (It's only slightly more complicated than that.)  But it's true that eating less is the only way to lose weight -- the calories burned in one hour of running can be easily replaced by one delicious frozen pomegranate margarita.

So I've been eating less.  But it's not easy.  One day on Fire Island, I ate a sensible breakfast, waited a few hours, and then went for a run up and down Fire Island Boulevard.  Since I have had stomach problems in the past from eating immediately after a run, I went back to my house, showered, and then set out to look for Asaph.  By the time I found him at a friend's house, I was faint and shaking from hunger.  For around 20 minutes I huddled over a bowl of cashews and took sips from a glass of water, using both hands, until I was able to function normally again.  I had to listen to my instincts, or otherwise I would have passed out on the boardwalk, and then I can only imagine what people would have thought.  I can guarantee that no one in the Pines would have been charitable enough to think, "Oh, he passed out from hunger; the poor child!"  One positive outcome from this experience was that I discovered that I really like cashews.

When I told this story to a friend of mine from my notorious gym, he was alarmed.  "Cashews?  Are you serious?  Those are so fattening!"  This kind of response is typical in my demographic.  I will describe what I think was a very wholesome breakfast, and then someone will say "Where was the protein!?"  "You ate a whole avocado?  They have so much fat!"  "You only had a protein shake for dinner?  Your body will think it's starving, and you will gain even more weight?!"  But don't those who are actually starving end up losing weight?  These nutritional critics often advise me to eat a salad with a can of tuna on it.  But I have serious misgivings about canned fishes.  Also: the mercury!

I have started replacing my dinner five nights a week with a homemade protein shake, using chocolate whey protein from Whole Foods (carried home in my canvas tote-bag!) and rice milk.  I can't stand to put the artificial pastes, gels, ointments, and unguents that are sold in gyms and health-food stores into my body.  I can attribute three years of diarrhea to one of those products.  Plus: the terrible graphic design on the packaging!!  That alone makes me feel ashamed to buy those things, let alone the use of words like "power" and "blast" and "extreme" on the label.  I went to see The 39 Steps on Broadway with the friend who was so upset about the cashews, and he pulled out a little test tube filled with some protein drink that had a radioactive glow about it and drank it during intermission.  I can't eat that way!  I'd rather be fat.

Or I'd rather starve.  It's so hard to eat well in New York if you aren't rich, but I guess it's harder everywhere else in the United States, except for in San Francisco, maybe, but there you have to deal with being in San Francisco.  We have so much crap food in this country.  I guess the options are getting better, despite the global commodities crisis.  I want slow food!  I want deep-red tomatoes only in season!  I want to split a goat-cheese tartlet with Mireille Guiliano and wash it down with a half glass of wine!  But these options are only available to the rich in New York.  Especially the part about eating with Mireille Guiliano, who I've heard is not nice to her employees, but no surprise there.

Speaking of the tragedies of eating in New York, I went to have my final meal at Florent before it closes this Sunday.  I'm afraid of going to the Meatpacking District at night, because of all of the terrible people, and also I hate crowds and noise, so I decided to go at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning.  My Turkish friend agreed to meet me there, despite the fact that I've been studying Arabic.  There was a handwritten sign posted near the entrance listing all of the foods they were out of.  They had no eggs, so I had a bowl of granola with yoghurt and fruit (but where's the protein?!).  I bought two t-shirts and then left, forever.

likely to transgress local customs against staring or praising beauty

I recently had the extreme good fortune to spend the night at a picturesque, old-fashioned resort in the Shawangunks, a mountain ridge once known for simple activities like huckleberry picking that is now -- in today's dignity-free, ruined world -- known as a good destination for extreme sports like rock climbing and other pastimes popular with very young, high-income men.  I was there for a work retreat, and even though once several years ago I walked through the resort property with Centfocs, his mother, and his cousin, I was still pleasantly surprised several times during my recent short stay.  The large main building looked like a crazy Victorian castle, with a touch of Swiss chalet, despite having been built by Quakers, whom I had thought were a simple people.  Every room had a balcony, with two rocking chairs, a reminder of a time when sitting and rocking back and forth provided adequate stimulation -- back before energy drinks and extreme sports.  There were nice English style gardens, and scattered throughout the property were small wooden structures where people could sit in the shade.  I was informed by a staff person that these were called "summerhouses" and not "gazebos", which was fine with me, since I never cared for the word "gazebo", as it has a trashy ring to it.  There was a lake where we went canoeing and row-boating, and my boss and I even went swimming, despite my fears of contracting an unpalatable malady from the lake water, although it is less embarrassing to contract such a malady from healthy outdoor activity than from something unhealthy and indoor.

The interior of the main building had been recently renovated, and it was only partially ruined -- another pleasant surprise!  The rooms had fireplaces instead of televisions, although I was slightly disappointed not to have a lake view from my balcony.  Even though I looked out over a green expanse of woods and distant fields, I also overlooked the main road.  But my firm commitment to lowered expectations kept me from being too upset about this.

Some of the interior was decorated in that late 1800's style so popular in the Midwest and in Hungary, which I don't really care for, since it reminds me of ice cream parlors and Nellie Oleson, a character from a television show of my youth who caused me a lot of emotional damage. 

I did have one unpleasant surprise: the dumpy state of most of the other resort guests.  Maybe the Midwestern flavor of the interior decoration attracted them, but I was surprised that such an expensive resort would be filled with a large number of poorly dressed, quasi-obese vacationers.  Shorts and cut-off t-shirts were not uncommon on 50-year-old men.  I had felt a bit sheepish for wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants, but I, along with the color-coded staff, was among the more dressed-up persons in the whole place.  I was wishing for some very young, high-income extreme sports enthusiasts, who would at least have been fashionable.  I had read that the resort had only recently put in a bar, so maybe they hadn't had time to attract the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic that they had neglected for a century.  (Centfocs's mother's family were in such a demographic -- American quasi-aristocrats -- and they would not have gone to a resort that didn't have a bar.  As the old joke goes, for every four Episcopalians, you're sure to find a fifth.  Except Centfocs's family weren't Episcopalians, but Presbyterians.  Also, even though Centfocs's claim to aristocracy came through his mother, he was more of a Spanish hidalgo, preferring to starve to death than to do something beneath his station.  Despite my secular Puritan upbringing, I am somewhat sympathetic to this world-view.)

In any case, there was much complaining among my colleagues about the dress code for the dining room: gentlemen age 12 and over are required to wear jackets and ladies should dress accordingly.  But seeing how the guests were dressed outside of the dining room, I was glad for this rule.  Although people didn't seem to follow it anyway: many gentlemen over 12, or even over 40, did not wear jackets, and few ladies dressed accordingly.  I wore a suit to dinner.

After dinner, a co-worker and I sat in rocking chairs on a large porch overlooking the lake, sweating in our regulation jackets.  The resort grounds were a bit too well-lit; I was disappointed that light pollution wasn't a main concern of the environmentally minded management.  Then my co-worker told me a very sad story.  Moths evidently evolved to navigate by the moon, so when humans started lighting fires, and then oil lamps, and then gas lamps, and now electric lights, the poor moths didn't know what to do and started flying straight into the light source.  There hasn't been enough time for them to evolve a correct response to artificial light -- although this is also the case for humans.  This news filled me with sadness, and I realized again that there really are so many things that one should try to avoid thinking about.

We moved to a darker porch, and more co-workers arrived, and a Central European co-worker started telling real-life ghost stories.  I have never seen a ghost, despite having worked in a supposedly haunted inn when I was in college.  My Central European co-worker and another were sharing ghost stories as if they were talking about seeing deer or raccoons in their back yards.  This made me forget about the moths.  I'm not sure what to think about the ghost issue.  Christianity has angels and demons, but I never really understood where ghosts were supposed to fit in.  It would really not be so great if, after we die, we wander around our old houses or apartments, dressed in some outfit that presumably wasn't what we were wearing at the moment of our death, scaring people.  That's not my hope for the afterlife.  Dante's Inferno would be preferable; at least the sodomites got to walk around in groups through the flaming sand.

In one class, my Arabic teacher warned us about genies, who are evidently not cute like Barbara Eden.  He told us we needed to watch out for them, since they can cause all sorts of trouble.  I was curious to see how genies fit into Islamic cosmology, but I have learned not to start conversations like this with my Arabic teacher, for fear that they end up with a lecture on the many punishments awaiting non-heterosexuals, or those who have consumed alcohol.  Interestingly, the topic of genies segued into the topic of the evil eye, and how it was considered very impolite in Arabic culture to give excessive compliments, since this would lead to fears of a catastrophe, brought about by the evil eye.  I thought about how the owners of luxury condominium residence homes in Manhattan have no fear of the evil eye, since they are constantly seeking excessive compliments.  I also wondered if complimenting someone's abdominal muscles could trigger the growth of excess belly fat, and therefore accusations of the evil eye.  I need to be careful about coveting the abdominal muscles of friends like Tony, lest this lead to his becoming flabby.  (In another Arabic class, we learned the word كروش, which means "belly", as in a fat one.  My teacher is fat -- not in an American obese way, but in an old-fashioned, normal fat way -- but he then scanned the class for another example of a fat belly and pointed at me.)

I had plenty of chance to covet abdominal muscles this past weekend, since I went back out to the Fire Island Pines.  I had fun on Friday night, at various parties that my Arabic teacher would not approve of (since he mentioned that even belly dancers would be burning in hell, in the Islamic view).  On Saturday night I fell into a funk from which I was unable to recover, and attending the high and low tea dances, jammed with smiling and snarling young persons in various states of inebriation, only made me imagine homicide-bomber scenarios.  Maybe I was still sad about the poor moths.

On Sunday my spirits recovered, and I enjoyed the much less crowded and older tea dances (most young persons had to go back to the city to do work believed to be beneath them), especially since I finally noticed that there is a blue whale on the floor of the Blue Whale.

cast down their looks and guard their private parts and do not display their ornaments

Last weekend I went to a nude beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey.  I went for a number of reasons.  One, it was very hot.  Two, I was pressured to go by friends and loved ones.  And three, I think that "Sandy Hook" is a cute name for a place to go.  It's much better than "Jones Beach", which sounds irreparably down-market.

I had very weird attitudes towards my body as a child, and especially as an adolescent, and I remember that during one of my early coming-out conversations as a freshman in college, the wiser and worldlier female friend with whom I was talking pointed out that I was wearing a long beige trench coat, buttoned up to the top, on a beautiful sunny spring day.  I had been very proud of this trench coat, as I had bought it in Paris, France during a visit in 1987, and thought it gave me some sophisticated, Gallic flair, to compensate for being from suburban Columbus, Ohio.

The point was: I had body issues.  I was not someone who would be found throwing something back and forth on the North Quad, shirtless and barefoot.  I didn't even wear t-shirts very often.  One of my best friends was a girl who dressed like Helena Bonham Carter's character in A Room With a View, with long skirts and hair tied up in a bun.  She later became a temporary lesbian, shaved her head and started wearing spandex tank tops.

My transformation was a bit more subtle.  I started swimming on a regular basis and then working out with weight machines that would now seem very quaint.  That, coupled with a growing acceptance of my sexuality, allowed me to stop thinking that I needed to cover up my body all of the time, although I remained sympathetic to the Buddhist description of the body as a vase overflowing with excrement.  I spent a summer living in Seattle and started wearing t-shirts and shorts with hiking boots, in the style of the activist groups of the time.  Then, I moved to San Francisco, and despite uncooperative weather, sleeveless shirts found their way into my wardrobe.  After moving to New York in 1998, I regularly went out in white wifebeaters, and then when those went horribly out of style, t-shirts whose sleeves I had cut off at the armpit.  I even had a brief flirtation with the long shorts that resemble something that only women are supposed to wear.

It was only after I turned 31 that my good friend and critic Christopher let me know that it really wasn't appropriate for someone my age to wear shorts.  Once you are aware that someone disapproves of something, it's hard to look at things the same way again.  At first I dismissed him, and then, filled with retroactive shame and horror, I became a convert to the anti-shorts cause, despite global warming.  I felt especially proud of myself when I weathered a two-week trip to Japan and Thailand in August of 2002, never once putting on a pair of shorts, despite hotter weather than I had ever experienced in my life.  It was all worth it when the concierge at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok came out from behind his desk to inspect us before my mother and I left to visit the Grand Palace.  He saw that I was wearing long pants, and I don't think I imagined the look of surprised approval on his face.  I was vindicated again last year when I was allowed to visit the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem, while Asaph was blocked by the Israeli guards who enforce the dress code for the Muslim Waqf. A coworker once showed me photos he had taken on the beach in Senegal, and even though there were men doing strenuous exercises everywhere, not one had his shirt off.  I thought this was great, even though I go running with my shirt off all of the time, and even have been known to remove my shirt in certain bar and/or nightclub contexts.

So, despite my belief that I should dress like the characters in "Mad Men", or like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita at all times (which, by the way, I do not), I have no problem with nude beaches, since there is something Germanic and healthy-seeming and between-the-wars about naturism.  So I am fine with nude beaches.

But I imagine that my Arabic teacher isn't fine with nude beaches, especially since I went with a group of non-heterosexuals, including two Israelis, and one other Jew.  Plus someone from Texas, the land that brought us our idiot failed Crusader President.  Although I didn't get naked, even though I ran into a friend who is an ardent nudist and ex-Mormon on the ferry to Sandy Hook, and he made a crack that the "A list" never gets naked, and then I ended up sitting with a group of guys near this friend, and none of the persons I was with got naked, and my ex-Mormon friend made a comment that this meant I was on the "A list", but this didn't make me feel good about myself, and luckily Asaph and my friend from Texas finally took off their trunks and went on a walk.  I remained in a swimsuit, however, but I justified it in my mind since I had had an unfortunate gastrointestinal incident before setting out for the ferry, yet after I had showered.

But this wouldn't have comforted my Arabic teacher, who has prayed during class twice so far, much to the obvious unease of the other students.  I like my Arabic teacher, even though I live in fear that he will discover that I am not a heterosexual, and that I consort with Zionists, even though I snapped at my friend from Texas when he didn't understand the evolutionary biology behind the complexion of the modern Israeli, and my blunt explanation that Israel was filled with immigrants from Europe who hadn't had time to evolve darker skin might have pleased my Arabic teacher.  Or maybe not.

I was very afraid in my first few Arabic classes that I would accidentally say something in Hebrew, even though most of the Hebrew I learned last summer has been lost, except for the alphabet.  On the first day, he wrote down some basic words for members of the family, and when he asked if anyone knew what the word أخ meant, I screamed out "brother!", since it sounded just like the word אח in Hebrew, which I somehow remembered.  I looked down so that I wouldn't reveal my dirty little Zionist secret.  He has asked several times if anyone in the class knows any Hebrew, and I never respond.  One time, a possibly Jewish woman in the class asked if سلام wasn't almost the same as שלום, and I braced myself in my seat, although he answered yes, and then made a can't-we-all-just-get-along comment.

While my main inspirations for studying Arabic were the Anglican Hanan Ashrawi, nominal Christian filmmakers Nadine Labaki and Elia Suleiman, and Tyler Brûlé's interview with Lebanese aristocrat Lady Yvonne Cochrane (not a very Arabic name, I admit), it's pretty much impossible to study Arabic without a good dose of Islam.  I've learned the word for the pilgrimage to Mecca, for someone who has completed that pilgrimage, for modest head-covering for women, for "God is great!", for "in the name of God, most gracious, most merciful", and for being buried alive (one oddly short word, by the way).  To be fair, I've also learned the word "hashish", which can just mean "grass".

But I like my teacher, even though I had a hunch of what was coming the day he asked which way was east and then left to go to the bathroom.  I had a flashback to the time I saw an African man in a Heathrow Airport restroom splashing water from the sink onto his penis.  When my teacher returned from the toilet, he spread his jacket on the floor and got down on his knees, while we were supposedly copying something from the board.  He always tells us the two words for blackboard, one being preferable because it comes from the Qur'an.  He reiterates that the only good love is "with your wife", states that alcohol is very bad, expresses his disdain for Algerian raï music (just a bunch of guys "jumping around like monkeys"), and goes on long tangents about various Islamic topics, admittedly usually in response to a question from an annoying African-American woman in the class (I mention her ethnicity only because I am making the unfair assumption that it is somehow related to her sycophantic Islamophilia), who is constantly confusing every word we learn with some word related to Islam and feels the need to demonstrate this confusion, and therefore her religious knowledge, to the class.  I should sympathize, since I do stuff like that, but I don't in this case. 

There was a fair amount of religion mentioned in one of the modern Israeli Hebrew classes I took last summer, but my teacher never started praying in front of us, or asked us to chant prayers or passages from the Bible.  In my Arabic class, we have been asked to recite prayers and Koranic verses.  I have toyed with the idea of bringing up the so-called Satanic verses ("these are the exalted Gharaniq, whose intercession is hoped for"), but I know that would end up getting me expelled, or killed.  Maybe one day I will ask about باسباسم الآب والابن والروح القدس, which just means "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit", but that will likely trigger the standard Muslim anti-Trinitarian exasperated lecture.

However, one day my teacher showed a clip from CNN in which he was interviewed in a humorous manner by Jeanne Moos about the American mispronunciation of القاعدة‎, the terrorist organization headed by أسامة بن لادن.  He lamented the mispronunciation of both this terrorist organization (whose name means "the base") and its leader by Americans.  This upset me more than all of the praying.  One of my longstanding pet peeves is the expectation -- mostly but not exclusively on the west coast -- that Americans should be able to pronounce Spanish names and words in the correct manner, and I would put the word correct in quotes were it not guaranteed to trigger some angry e-mails from the anti-scare quotes faction.  The absurdity of this idea is clear to me, so I refuse to play that game, and I say words like Nicaragua and Argentina using my Midland American accent.  Spanish pronunciation is hard enough, but the idea that Americans who did not learn Arabic before age 12 would ever be able to pronounce القاعدة‎ in an Arabic manner is idiotic.  An unintended consequence of my Arabic class is that I have more sympathy for our President's pronunciation of the country we have occupied and destroyed -- العراق -- since, trust me, you will never be able to say it.  I almost wish we didn't spell it with a "q" at the end, because now I see that as a reminder that I will never be able to pronounce the letter that it stands for. Once you have that knowledge, you can't take it away.  You don't want to know.

Narcissus gave him a sword, which Ameinias used to kill himself

Several years ago someone forwarded me a “you know you’re a New Yorker when…” list; this was back before I ended friendships with anyone who forwarded me lists, jokes, chain-letters, or disturbing videos, such as one showing what I would later learn was a fatal sexual act, the memory of which continues to traumatize me.  I was young and desperate, and I still allowed myself to have friends like this, back then.  On this list, one of the distinctive characteristics of being a New Yorker was: “unlike the rest of the country, you dread the arrival of summer”.

Interestingly, I don’t entirely dread the arrival of summer, even though I should.  Summer reminds me to be very worried about global warming, and I developed a hysterical fear of drought back when I was a teenager.  Also, I inherited my Germanic grandmother’s tendency to sweat profusely, and life in New York requires one to pass through un-air-conditioned spaces several times a day, like the inferno of the subway system.  And who can use a home air conditioner with a clean conscience these days?  Maybe a sociopath.  Also, there are terrible smells emanating from the sewers and the piles of garbage that line the streets, as no satisfactory waste disposal system was ever developed for New York. Also, inappropriate clothing.

But I don’t mind it that much.  Partly because one is compensated for the sight of hideous fashion decisions by the sight of young athletic persons in various stages of exercise, or the sight of those who resemble young athletic persons in various stages of exercise.  And partly because I have made a determined effort to try to get out of the city as much as possible during the summer.

A few weeks ago, when it wasn't even that hot yet, I went out again to the charming Fire Island hamlet of Atlantique, to visit friends of Asaph who own a one-eyed dog, along with a house there.

I had attended Faruq’s going-away party on a Friday night (he has since moved to the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, where life is infinitely better, cheaper, and hipper, one hears constantly), so I dragged myself Saturday morning, hung-over and exhausted, to Penn Station to take the Long Island Rail Road to Bay Shore.  I sat next to a prominent party promoter on the train, who was obviously going on to Sayville to take the ferry to Fire Island Pines.  He gave me critical look, and then opened up his laptop.  At one point I looked over at his screen and saw the word “investors”, and this filled me with dread, so I quickly looked away again.

Anyway, the ferry terminal at Bay Shore is not like the terminal at Sayville.  It’s much more chaotic, with children and animals and lots of large bags of potting soil.  There is no line up of nearly identical sunglassed men, alternately judging and ignoring one another. 

In any case, I had a very relaxing weekend, although we did do a lot of work around these friends' house, since they were preparing it for renters for the summer.  We did some weeding, and I accidentally pulled up some poison ivy with my bare hands, which allowed me to take a break from work while I washed my hands with a special soap for 30 minutes.  We also put down some decorative tile over a concrete patch in their yard. 

This was fun, although it was overcast, so I ignored warnings about the sun, and I ended up getting a blister from sunburn on my head, which is very bad, in terms of future melanomas and death.  I tried to quietly and non-judgmentally bring up the topic of overprotective parenting, since these friends had neighbors with a three-year-old child who was heavily monitored, as most middle-class children are these days.  At one point his father yelled at him in sheer terror as the boy ran ahead of him on the boardwalk towards the beach, even though the worst thing that I could have imagined happening was him falling into a sand dune.  When my brother was three, we spent summers in the Chautauqua Institution where my mother choreographed musical theater productions, and even though it was also a very safe environment with few cars and a turn-of-the-last-century ambiance, there were still old rickety houses with multiple floors, as well as a Finger Lake to fall into, and yet my three-year old brother often woke up before the rest of us and went next door by himself to eat breakfast with the neighbors.  This child in Atlantique would not have been able to escape the netted and locked compound in which he was imprisoned, even though there were even fewer dangers than my brother faced back in upstate New York in 1978.  A few weeks ago I attended a party celebrating the arrival of a new baby to my high-school friend Brian and his wife, and he laughed in a somewhat embarrassed manner about how all middle-class parents are forced to be wildly overprotective nowadays, and how when he was a kid in 1980s Detroit, there was a serial killer stalking young boys, chopping them up, and then dumping their dismembered bodies in trash bags, and yet his parents never thought to keep him from walking to school by himself.

Asaph has a theory that children are worth more these days, since parents wait longer to have them, and so there is less time left to replace any that one might lose.

The following weekend I headed out to the Pines, which, although it's on the same island as Atlantique, feels as if it could be six to eight miles away!  That's how great the differences are between the two hamlets!

The house in which I have a quarter-share is pleasant, despite being located in the swampy area to the west.  At one point during the weekend the lining of the swimming pool was accidentally shredded by a Spaniel who fell into it, giving the patio a glamorous, war-torn appearance.

All in all, the weekend was very pleasant and had a happy ending, getting to spend time with some good friends and to attend a very extravagant cooking competition between two houses of financially well-endowed acquaintances, which then necessitated a lay down to minimize gastric discomfort, as well a several-mile run the next day, to fight off new fat.

I did attend two parties, however, that triggered a fair amount of reflection.  Or maybe I was just sweaty. I referred to these parties as "ab parties", since, instead of a costume or formal or other theme, those invited were apparently asked to come equipped with a set of rock-hard, fat-free abdominal muscles  (interestingly, "ab" sounds like the word أب which means "father" in Arabic; or perhaps this is not interesting).  The first party was a birthday party for someone whom I have admired from afar at my notorious gym.  He looks like everyone else at my notorious gym -- dark hair, perfect body, stubble, vaguely Mediterranean/Caribbean/Adriatic/Caspian, unfriendly -- he is just a somewhat better version of that.

This birthday party was held in a house on the Boulevard with a large front yard filled with small trees spaced widely apart from each other.  Walking on the long elevated boardwalk to the house, one felt as if one were in a high-end zoo.

The crowd was filled with familiar faces and abdominal muscles from my notorious gym, although there were few guys I've actually spoken to.  The attitude (that is, a mildly hostile, snobbish attitude) was palpable.  The only smiles were naughty smiles. When I first moved to New York, I remember noticing two things about non-heterosexual men here: 1) they all seemed to be wearing facial moisturizer, and 2) they never smiled in an innocent manner.  They either scowled, or kept their faces expressionless, or looked angry, or smiled in a devilish or mischievous way, as if they had just admitted their latest debauchery to an approving audience of equally debauched friends.  If one got close enough to someone with one of these roguish smiles to overhear his conversation, one was usually not disappointed.  It's amazing what people do.

Asaph's friends from Atlantique were with us, and when one of them tried to get a drink from the bar area, he was refused.  I wondered if perhaps it was a private party, but then I remembered that we had been invited by Asaph's accountant, who was a friend of the celebrant.  Perhaps he had not been authorized to extend such an invitation.  In any case, I didn't go get a drink myself, since I had been trying not to drink before three in the afternoon, and also I had already done a shot of tequila.  I stood in the area on the edge of the deck where people were smoking, so I could judge them, although many of them were in their twenties and therefore eligible to smoke, in my book.

I did manage to find one or two people to chat with, although, unsurprisingly, I didn't make too many new friends in the beautiful crowd, although I responded to a few sneers with as innocent a smile as I could muster.  I could detect no reactions behind the identical sets of sunglasses.

The second ab party was held in a house on the beach.  This party had even more attitude (mildly hostile, snobbish) than the first, although Asaph and I had definitely been invited to this one.  There was a special Very Important Person area above the pool, presumably for the residents and their friends, so they could observe the rest of the party, fiercely.  When I had a house on the beach in 2006, we also had a party, but we did not create a Very Important Person area, and some items were stolen from my room.

Somehow, drinks were obtained at this event from the tattooed and excessively muscled bartenders, and I even ended up having a good time, since a prominent person and his boyfriend came to talk to me, as they were in their forties.  But most of the crowd consisted of the same gorgeous young persons from my notorious gym, and few new friends were made.

I can totally understand attitude (mildly hostile, snobbish) in the City (the cool way to refer to Manhattan), since one needs to put up a protective front in light of the millions of other residents competing for resources.  And one needs to create sub-communities in order not to feel completely lost in this sea of souls.  Snobbishness is a way of indicating that you are part of a sub-community, and therefore you have some importance and some power, or at least you think you do.  I totally understand this.  It does seem somewhat less necessary in a beach resort community, but, oh well.

Although I may be envious of their perfect, sculpted, meaty, glistening, nubile bodies, I don't really want to be included in these guys' circles.  I have made some efforts in the past to befriend people like this, and it never works out.  We have little in common.  They never want to talk about impure abjads, Japanese signage, the Armenian Apostolic Church, or intestinal parasites, although judging from the sounds coming from the toilet area of the locker room at my notorious gym, a fair number of them are familiar with this last subject or topic or issue.

As for beauty, well, even if it is mostly in the eye of the beholder, it's still nice to behold, and it doesn't really require much interaction with the object.  When I was in college, one of the worst things one could do was to objectify someone.  Twenty years later, I don't get what all the fuss was about.  Beautiful people may not necessarily be nice or smart or kind or interesting, but they are beautiful.  As I head full-speed towards my terminal decline, until my eyes go, I can continue to appreciate the beautiful without needing to talk to them, much less be friends with them.  Still, I need to keep getting invited to their parties.

to be a seer, a revelator, a translator, and a prophet

On the first day of my Arabic class (held in a grim high-rise building used as a public high school; one is confronted with a large sign that reads "JUST SAY NO TO THE N-WORD" upon entry), my teacher, a hefty Egyptian man in his early 50's, wrote the following phrase on the scuffed blackboard, to illustrate the more calligraphic style of Arabic handwriting:

"In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful," he said.  "We Muslims say this before we do anything: before we eat, before we sleep, before we do any task, even making love.  And I mean the good kind of love -- with our wives."

I flinched a bit in my seat and mentally prepared my response for the day I'm asked if I'm married: not yet.

After four classes, I've become pretty familiar with most of the Arabic alphabet, even if I can only really write seven or so letters with confidence.

Last night, after dinner with good company at yet another restaurant that is now awful and ruined, like most things, walking up 9th Avenue slightly too close to the Meatpacking District for my taste, past the Maritime Hotel with all of its horrifying patrons, I passed one of those carts selling chicken and rice in a Middle Eastern manner.  I stopped to try to read the Arabic on the side of the cart.  I had always assumed it was the menu.

Apart from the word حلال, which meant that the food was permissible under Islamic dietary laws, the rest of the writing was prayers.  I was surprised.

practice with a lit match in front of your mouth until you can pronounce them without making the flame flicker

 

Despite having been warned several times by several different persons, I made a decision that I will almost certainly come to regret: I signed up for an introductory course in “Modern Standard Arabic”.  A good friend of mine from high school and his wife spent a year in Tunisia on a Fulbright and afterwards lamented the fact that they had now obtained knowledge that they weren’t sure they wanted to have obtained.  “My life was much simpler before being introduced to the Arab world, but there is no going back,” my friend said. Their year was marked by constant suspicion and paranoia.  Women would approach my friend on the street when he wasn’t with his wife and ask if he would marry them and take them out of the country.  At the same time, he encountered German and Swiss converts to fundamentalist Islam, who claimed that they were searching for something “more authentic” in life.  Despite having been told that people would open their homes to them for meals and long conversations, this never happened.  There was a massive terrorist attack against a synagogue while they were there that was quickly censored in the media, and everyone they knew denied that anything serious had happened.  They briefly took refuge in France when things got too weird in the university in which they were working.  Of course, this was partly because of the Tunisian specifics: a quasi-police state where everyone acts as if nothing is wrong, and no one says what they are really thinking.  This can’t be the case throughout the Arab world, or can it?  I recall Candela’s line from Mujeres al Borde de Un Ataque de Nervios: "El mundo árabe cómo se ha portado conmigo, y yo eso no me lo merezco."

Of course there is also the fact that Modern Standard Arabic, despite not being a language spoken by any actual persons, is extremely hard, grammatically, pronunciation-wise, and then: the writing.  And, at age 38, whom am I kidding?  My attempt to learn another very difficult language, Japanese, began at age 16 and ended around age 21, all of that time spent making flash cards to memorize kanji wasted.  On a family trip to Japan five years ago, I could barely remember anything, although I was filled with joy and pride after being handed a cup of tea by the woman who ran our inn in Tokyo and understanding that she had just said “it’s hot”.  It was indeed hot!

But, as for Arabic, I couldn’t help myself.  I had taken two “Modern Israeli Hebrew” classes last summer, because I had begun to consort with Israelis and their ilk, and because I wanted to study something totally different, after years of Spanish, Catalan, French, and German (excepting the failed experiment with Japanese).  And Modern Israeli Hebrew seemed manageable at least – a language spoken by relatively few people, with virtually no dialects, and with a very limited body of literature.  And it is a real man’s language – not like that pansy French, Spanish, or Italian.  But they stopped offering classes in Modern Israeli Hebrew at the 92nd Street Y, and I had zero interest in a class in Hebrew prayers, of course, not being Jewish or at all interested in Judaism. 

After my trip to Israel last fall, I found myself becoming obsessed with Middle Eastern politics, history, and that ambiguous concept known as “culture”.  The moment I knew I just had to study Arabic came in early spring after going to see a mediocre Arab-language film: Caramel.  A Lebanese Steel Magnolias or Venus Beauty Institute, with very little original about it (although it was quite enjoyable in a charmingly subtle way), it featured one thing guaranteed to get and hold my attention: very attractive men.  And since the majority of the characters in this film were Christians, it had none of the austere rage one usually must endure in films about Muslims, who are generally very angry.  With flirtatious policemen, muscle-bound delivery guys in tight t-shirts, tons of obvious French loan words, priests and acolytes marching through dilapidated Beirut neighborhoods with statues and incense, and old ladies arguing while praying the rosary in bed, I was ready to sign up for classes immediately.

Still, I was scared on my first day of class, when my intimidating Egyptian teacher yelled, “I will prepare you for the Arab future!”

I guess I’m fine with the idea of the Arab future.  I mean: why not?

I don’t have much optimism about any other future at this point, especially not in New York.  "Sex and the City" reenactors, hedge-fund managers, the young and extremely wealthy, and European tourists – especially the worst variant of these populations, who are often called by a term that means “shower” in several European languages but refers to an unnecessary feminine hygiene procedure in American English – have remade the city in their image.  And restaurant Florent is closing.  As the wonderful, beehived hostess at Florent, Darinka Chase, said in an article in the New York Times: “For me when the mac ’n’ cheese went on the menu, that was when I thought maybe we’re living on borrowed time. Because that’s got nothing to do with anything except that young people who are out want mac ’n’ cheese. I mean, it’s the lowest common denominator sort of thing.”

I feel so stupid that I didn’t see that mac ‘n’ cheese was a sign of the coming Apocalypse.  It seems so obvious now.

I have no right to complain.  I moved to New York in 1998.  By most measures, everything cool and interesting was already long over.  Although I did go to Florent a few times before I moved here when visiting a former friend who is now an arch-enemy, I’m sure in Darinka Chase’s mind I was lumped together with the mac ‘n’ cheese “New People” she noticed at the end of the 90’s, although I always tried to be very polite to her.

But nostalgia for the crime-ridden, chaotic old New York seems morally suspect, since that prosperity has allowed for improvements in services and rehabilitation of parks and public spaces that were probably inconceivable back when New York was interesting.  When I look around now at overflowing garbage cans and the rats swimming through trash-strewn streams flowing between the subway tracks, I can only imagine how much worse it must have been back in the old days.

Pining for a past New York is very unoriginal.  Back in 1967, Joan Didion wrote: “It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.”  By many international standards, I should be taking care of my grandchildren by now.  I’m confident that there are groups of twenty-somethings who are much more interesting and creative than I ever was or could hope to be congregating in spaces in Bushwick and Red Hook and Jackson Heights and Inwood, wondering why anyone would ever mourn what has happened to the Meatpacking District and the West Village, which they have probably never seen as anything other than tourist areas like Times Square.

Still, it’s hard for me to be stoic.  On Pentecost in my smoky little church in the West Village, to commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit (PBUH) upon the apostles, baptisms were performed.  A set of twins named Linus and Loyalty were among the privileged children baptized at the 11:15 service.  After they were anointed with chrism, their prosperous and stylish parents handed them off to two nannies, who removed them from the church.  They were returned to their parents’ arms for communion, and then removed again.  I had to reprimand myself for muttering the Song of Mary under my breath.

I find myself wondering why New York’s prosperity couldn’t have progressed more gently.  Why do so many of these New-rich People seem so angry?  Why does everything have to be replaced by a bank branch, or a high-end clothing store, or a restaurant or club featuring “bottle service”?  Why can’t we have cafes where people can sit and talk for hours?  Why can’t we have housing for the middle class, and why can’t we have a reasonable definition of middle class?  And why does everything have to be “luxury”?  Aren’t there limits to luxury?

But, as several close friends and acquaintances have pointed out, what am I doing about it?  Nothing but complaining.

But New York has been all about money since the first Dutch fur traders bought Manhattan, right?  Part of the problem, for me, is that New York is all about money, and then it’s all about achievement and success, and then finally, in conjunction with those things, it’s about sex; and these are all things that I would prefer not be discussed in public.  Many years ago, at a ceremony in central Ohio where my mother was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the small liberal arts college where she taught dance and drama for many years, the contrarian author and commentator Richard Rodriguez said to me, in response to my complaining about the high cost of life in New York, that perhaps I had something to offer that those with money might be interested in purchasing.  I was horrified, yet reassured.  This was back when I was young and still had some assets; before I had to pay for it myself.  We all lose our charms in the end, though.  Men grow cold as boys grow old and all of that.

“All civilizations are as transitory as the people now in cemeteries.  And just as we must die, so too must we accept that there is no return to a civilization whose time has come and gone.”  Everyone knows this quote from Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar.  Yet I know I will end up regretting when oil is $2000 a barrel, and the global economic collapse comes, and I am wading through waist-high piles of garbage and fighting off feral puggles and rabid Jack Russell terriers to get to my apartment.  Then the joke will be on me. 

In the meantime, I guess I will just prepare for the Arab future.

  

heroically taking action against demons or engaging in a range of contemporary situations

For around seven days I have been carrying around an envelope containing around $1.80 for the Hindu deity Ganesha; I keep forgetting that I have it in my gym bag. About a week ago I noticed some change and a dollar bill underneath and next to a small wooden statue of Ganesha in Asaph's apartment. I find money to be distasteful, so the sight of it makes me uncomfortable. Money feels the same way about me, which is why it is rarely in my presence.  Oddly -- or ironically, although who knows what that word really means -- some of that change had been left there by me; the rest was put there by Faruq. One day Faruq and I went to the Asia Society to see an exhibition on the Art of Sasanian Iran, and as we were leaving, Faruq insisted on placing some money on the base of a statue of Ganesha near the Garden Court Café, which is evidently known for its tasty lunch selections. He said that by making this offering of money to the god, he would be rewarded with new money, presumably in excess of the amount offered. I was skeptical. "The cleaning person is just going to take it," I said, but Faruq insisted. I believe he claimed to have received around $1000 later that week, by wire transfer. Months later, Asaph was having guests over to his apartment, before heading out to a birthday party that was being held in a filthy indoor pool in a Times Square Hotel. This was during Lent, and I was restricting my alcohol consumption to no more than two glasses of red wine only on Saturdays and Sundays, so I remember this gathering and pool party all too well, having no alcohol-induced memory loss (although I did allow myself to get slightly mellow and Canadian before this party, so I was kind of confused throughout, and I lost my keys there, which, in a turn of events that almost restored my faith in humanity, were returned to me by a young man who lived in an expensive apartment -- I had assumed that anyone attending the party in the filthy pool of a Times Square Hotel would not think to engage in such a charitable act).  Before leaving for the hotel party, Faruq spied the statue of Ganesha on Asaph's interreligious altar, and he took out some money to leave there. Since I am chronically underendowed, I was convinced to leave some money there as well, despite not being a fan of paganistic synchretism and despite not having much alcohol in my system to convince me to try new things (although I was feeling somewhat Canadian and mellow and confused).

The money just sat there for months.  Ganesha never took it, and, for the record, I received no noticeable financial reward. Every time I went over to Asaph's I saw it. There was no cleaning person like at the Asia Society to take it away; even if Asaph started hiring a maid, she (forgive the sexism) would probably just leave the money there. So I finally suggested that I take the money and give it to the homeless or someone asking or begging for money on the streets of New York. I knew that in the primitive religions, that is, the ones before Christianity, offerings to God or gods were often consumed by the offerers or the poor, since God or the gods rarely came down to physically consume what had been offered. (I know you could argue that in Christianity we consume the offering as well, but since we are offering the God himself to God, it is much more meta.) Taking back the money seemed to completely violate the spirit of the offering, so giving it to the poor seemed the only option, other than letting it sit there while inflation and the fall of the US dollar eroded its value.

Asaph had turned me on to a practice which is apparently known in Hebrew as שליח מצוה -- giving money to a traveller to give to charity so that his trip becomes a charitable one, and is therefore worthy of divine protection.  He gave me $10 before our trip to Israel last summer and asked that I do the same to him. But, in a twist that reminded me of something I'd once heard during a tour of one of the few interesting historic houses in Dublin, Ireland about how young boys were dressed like girls to trick evil spirits into leaving them alone (since evil spirits were only interested in boys and were unable to see through clothing), we kept the money for our entire trip, only giving it to charity once we were back in New York. Although the money still went to charity, the part about the entire trip being charitable seemed a bit of a sham, and I wondered how God would fall for this trick. In any case, I started demanding money to be given to me for charity before any travel involving airplanes, and my father was really annoyed once when I ripped a $5 bill out of his hand by the security checkpoint at the Columbus, Ohio airport before flying back to New York. Several homeless persons have been at least momentarily pleased with this practice, although I generally put the money in a sealed envelope and run away before I can be thanked, since the money isn't mine and I would feel guilty about being thanked for it. Once I ended up giving $20 to a homeless man who was so mentally out of it that he was unable to form words and was only wearing a blanket and no shoes, and I worried that he wouldn't know what to do with it but had resolved to give the envelope to the first person who asked for money, so there it went.

So I gathered up the Ganesha money and put it in an envelope, and it is now losing value in a bag along with my gym clothes. I am slightly worried that I will incur the god's wrath, even though I don't practice any religion that involves worship or even acceptance of Ganesha's existence. I was moved to tears by the second act of Phillip Glass's Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera, where Ganesha makes a very brief appearance in puppet form, but this movement to tears was undone by the extremely long and relatively boring third act, which moved me to fatigue.

As I've said, I have nothing against a bit of religious synchretism, even though I am very brand-loyal to the Anglican Church, but I do think that leaving money to a statue of Ganesha borders on superstition, especially if one is not a practicing Hindu. I imagine that those who have completely given themselves over to generic spirituality would find no problem with this practice, since it doesn't involve any dogmas or rules or thought. I wonder what the author of Eat, Pray, Love would think about leaving money for Ganesha. I imagine she would probably like it, although she might have to consult with her guru.

I have no guru, or even a "spiritual advisor", which is something I have been told I need to have, and who might be able to help sort out these things for me. I have become a tad obsessed with the Archbishop of Canterbury recently, printing out his sermons, speeches and articles from his website and sometimes taking these to my notorious gym, where I will read them between weight-lifting sets. Although reading these articles while surrounded by steroid-enhanced muscle and pounding dance music might seem strange, or almost annoyingly contrarian, I know of at least two other persons who go to my notorious gym AND my smoky little church, and one of these persons is a former model and current writer and professor, and the other person is just another person. And no one ever notices what I'm reading anyway, when there are quasi-suicidal pornographic actors and formerly drug-addicted fashion designers and television news and entertainment personalities to watch working out. Sometimes I can't even notice what I'm reading, the other spectacle being much more alluring than the dense words of Dr. Rowan Williams.

Despite the fact that liberals no longer Iike him, since he is anti-abortion and hasn't really supported clergy in same-sex relationships, I find the Archbishop of Canterbury totally fascinating, but it might be because I can't really understand anything he says. For example, in a speech that is meant to show why traditional religion provides something that post-religious spirituality can't, he states:

Religious traditions that speak about an active divine presence thus maintain that my responsible action is in some way a reflection or even continuation of the foundational act which initiates everything we perceive. And that act may be discerned vaguely and generally in some aspects of the world; but it is not given precise shape in terms of freedom and initiative without some more specific story that can be told about the free self-communication of the sacred which makes this act visible. Morality becomes not a matter of compliance with arbitrary rules enforced by threat but the struggle to identify and move with the direction of fundamental creative action as it has shown itself to us. Freedom is indeed the freedom to be in union with this act; anything less is going to be ultimately frustrating and self-destructive. But freedom in this sense, a freedom that allows for radical change, is triggered only by the clear representation or realisation of an unconditional divine gift within the world's own story. And this at once involves us in claims about uniquely revelatory or transforming events, in dealing with questions about where we can best stand in order to see, with some measure of authoritative clarity, the direction, the 'flow' of things with which we seek harmony.

I can now use this argument against friends and family who don't understand why I cling to institutional Christianity, although I would have to flee right after saying it, since follow-up questions could not be taken.

It is so hard to have anyone to look up to anymore, since their faults and failures and foibles are so easily broadcast, and maybe people are worse than they used to be anyway.  But who else other than the Archbishop of Canterbury can I look up to? Barack Obama? George Clooney? Anderson Cooper? Hamid Karzai? Maybe for clothes, which do need more of my attention.

Julie Hecht, my favorite writer and the person whose style I blatantly attempt to copy, always writes about the persons she (or her narrator) tries to model her behavior upon: John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Thoreau, Emerson, and even Elvis Presley. She also likes Martha Stewart, but as a vegan and animal-rights enthusiast, she can't watch her cooking segments:

I'd heard her say the words "baby lamb chops." Is she bad, is she good, what is she really?

I find myself thinking this about nearly everyone: are they bad, are they good, what are they really?

the slippery slope of elegant degradation

This discussion of my affliction has already bored me to tears, even though that expression doesn’t really make sense, since I can’t imagine feeling “bored” while crying.  In any case, the end of this tiresome story is that my affliction has mostly gone away, but not entirely.  I still get the occasional patch of baldness, but then it grows back, sometimes quite quickly.  I have stopped seeing my dreamy dermatologist on a regular basis, partly because I wasn’t convinced that the corticosteroid injections were doing any good, and partly because one time he gave an injection into a persistent bald patch in my lower neck and struck a vein or artery or some sort of blood vessel, and my neck swelled up as if I had a goiter, and I was left with a slowly expanding bruise that spread all the way down to my chest.  That seemed worse than a small patch of baldness.  Also, I was starting to feel comparatively inferior, seeing this dreamy dermatologist who was so successful, despite being slightly younger than I, once every month, as he reported newer levels of success to me as we “caught up” (my success to report was confined to hair regrowth).  But this is something that one needs to get used to, since there is only more of it every year that one lives.  “Just wait until the President is younger than you,” a family friend, who has since died of cancer, once said to me, after I had rototilled her yard and laid new sod, in a freak masculine episode in my early twenties.  Recently I was in a car driving to the Florida Keys with a young friend who had spent the night with an extremely good-looking guy who was roughly my age and who in those years had already had a career as a Navy SEAL and was now a medical doctor.  I have really wasted my life, I remember thinking while staring out the car window at some bleak, mostly abandoned housing development.  I would never be a Navy SEAL or medical doctor, or even a nurse practitioner or physician's assistant.

Anyway, I have gained some perspective on the whole spot baldness thing, which is something I prayed for more fervently than for the bald patches to go away.  Although losing all of the hair on my head, face, body, and inside my nose seems pretty unlikely at this point, I have come to view the affliction with less dread than I had in the past.  Once, back when I was still in the early or mid stages of dealing with my affliction, I saw a man in a running store in the Time Warner Center with a shaved head who was obviously being ravaged by extreme spot baldness, as there were just a few dark spots left on his head where the hair had not been entirely eaten up.  I was shocked that he would walk around like that without a hat, and I felt sick and depressed for a few days after seeing this person walking around so openly and shamelessly.  Now I am pretty relaxed about the whole thing, although I do sometimes get a bit annoyed at the discovery of a new spot.  I poke around the back of my head every once in a while to check, but I don’t spend 45 minutes feeling the back of my head while refusing to just look in the mirror, as I did once, possibly.

In the time since I killed We, Like Sheep, I have gone back to Ohio a few times, to see my cute nephew Zach, and my less cute, newer nephew Nick.  Zach remains heartbreakingly adorable, and now is able to speak English, albeit with a strange babyish accent.  I also went to San Francisco and northern California with Asaph, where I tried to eat as many burritos as logistically and gastro-intestinally possible and visited my college roommate and his wife and their two curly-haired children, one of whom has a Hebrew name.  Asaph and I went on a drive through the so-called wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties, where we took a tour of a winery and ran into a very fancy friend of his who was with a group of even fancier friends from Los Angeles, who were all dressed identically and you couldn’t tell who was gay and who was straight, and there were also two beautiful women with perfect white teeth, and Asaph and I looked and felt like hobos in comparison.

I went to Budapest and Istanbul for work, which was very fun, since I love leaving the Indo-European world.

Budapest is slightly depressing, but I got to see a British friend of mine who just moved (back) there with her American husband and her precocious daughter, and I ate pasta in their extremely large apartment while their daughter tried to come up with different excuses not to go to bed.  The work I was doing in Budapest was not very interesting, and instead of eating dinner most nights I would go to a cafe and drink a beer while reading The Dud Avocado, a book by Elaine Dundy published in 1958.  I almost went to a gay bar, but I lost interest when I realized after walking almost all the way there that I had run out of Hungarian currency and would have to go to a bank machine that accepted my business credit card.  I lost a good amount of weight during my trip to Budapest.

I then got to take a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, which was probably the highlight of my life.

The seats were made of a powder-blue fake leather, and there was the amazingest flight map being shown on a monitor that kept zooming in from a view of the entire globe, then displaying a three-dimensional depiction of the aircraft with various Romanian and Bulgarian attractions pointed out beneath by little bouncing arrows, then providing a fast-forwarded view the remainder of our trip to Istanbul, which was depicted as a swirling target. 

I could have watched that flight map for hours and hours. When the plane landed in Istanbul in the rain, they started playing selections from the soundtrack to Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, making it even harder to disembark.

I didn’t spend much time in Istanbul, but I decided that it is my third favorite city in the world, after Barcelona and Paris.  I kept thinking about whether or not I should move there, but since it is such a comparatively young country, I might feel like some aging homosexual western orientalist, like William S. Burroughs or Paul Bowles or Jean Genet or Lawrence of Arabia, but without the talent or success.  I decided to smoke cigarettes during my short stay in Turkey, despite the negative health effects and my general disapproval of smoking in persons over age 25 and weighing over 150 pounds, so that I wouldn’t be identified as an American and killed or kidnapped by Muslim extremists.  I managed to pass pretty well, as I was generally greeted with a merhaba when I went into stores or cafes, even in relatively touristy areas, although one time while walking on İstiklal Caddesi I was approached by a somewhat unsavory character who asked me for a light and then proceeded to talk to me about something I didn’t understand or want to understand, so I pretended I didn’t really speak English and walked away at a brisk pace, or as brisk as I could manage after having smoked several cigarettes.  I also went to an internet café that was populated almost entirely by male Turks under age 21, and I was handed an ashtray immediately after being directed to a computer, where I was unable to access a Youtube link sent to me by a friend with vitiligo, since Youtube had been blocked by the Turkish government in response to a posted video that was determined to have insulted Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic.

The only negative thing that happened to me during my stay in Turkey was that I went to buy some sort of sesame bread thing relatively late at night after being in the smoking internet café, and there was a drunk American woman in Islamically inappropriate dress arguing with the people working behind the counter.  She was demanding to pay in British pounds or dollars, as she had no Turkish new lira or Euros.  She had a big, fat, blonde American head and talked like she was from somewhere vaguely Southern, like Houston or St. Louis.  She was with a less drunk, somewhat more dignified British guy, who was evidently the source of the British pounds.  As I had a handful of Turkish new lira coins and was leaving the next morning, and as their purchase amounted to something like US$5, despite the worthlessness of the US dollar, I offered to give them some money, but the drunk American woman refused to acknowledge my offer or indeed my existence and kept shouting at the poor Turkish men behind the counter, in her terrible, slurred, quasi-southern accent.  Looking at her giant blonde head and her skimpy clothes barely covering her corn-syrup-fed body, I felt ready to join an Islamic jihad against the United States and its degenerate inhabitants.  I lit a cigarette in disgust, despite the negative health effects, as I walked away in as un-American a fashion as possible.

Also, I was forced to take off my shirt and pull down my pants by airport security before boarding my flight back to New York, but that made me love Turkey even more.  It was like Midnight Express, with a happier, more boring plot and ending.

I also went to Chicago for a business conference, where I got to visit the younger sister and husband of a good friend from graduate school, and they were very cute and midwestern and own their own house, despite not being multi-millionaires, which is what would be required to own even a small apartment in New York.  I also watched a very tall friend play in a gay basketball tournament, which reminded me of my one-time resolution to decide to become interested in any sport.  I decided that Chicago remains in the top three most beautiful cities in the United States, along with Boston and San Francisco, although the United States is not really known for its beautiful cities.

The only other thing I’ve done of interest was to go to Miami Beach for a few days, which was very relaxing.

I took a trip to the Florida Keys with Asaph and a young friend of mine who has a tattoo on his upper back of Hokusai’s “Great Wave off Kanagawa” from the “36 Views of Mt. Fuji” series.

 

We all drove down to the so-called Keys, where we were frequently mistaken for heterosexuals by the poor white natives, who were often very unattractive. We went snorkeling, which was great, despite the degraded state of the reef and the degraded state of the other passengers and crew on the small boat we took out to the snorkeling area.

Miami Beach was also very fine, despite the trashiness of much of the people and the actual trash on the beach and floating in the water, and despite witnessing a man with what appeared to be tricep implants, and also the sight of a group of young, whorishly dressed women having a birthday party with "bottle service" in what was supposed to have been a gay bar.  Once the group of prostitutine women enjoying their "bottle service" was noticed, my young friend and I left the bar as quickly as possible.

One night in a different bar a 22-year-old guy involved in the international diamond trade expressed interest in me, but I naturally assumed that it was some sort of prank.

 

the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts as self

Despite my supposed religiosity, I have always been skeptical of the idea that things happen for some sort of “reason”. Of course things happen for a reason – I meet someone I end up falling in love with because they are at a party a mutual friend is having; I get a job because I apply for it and someone I went to college with works in the department; I contract gonorrhea because I forget to urinate and shower after spending time with someone who is a skanky disgusting whore.

But the idea that events happen for some mystical reason or because of “fate” or even “karma” has always struck me as superstition or idiocy.

I have also been skeptical of the idea that we should “listen to our bodies”. Our society has advanced much more rapidly than evolution, so, for example, eating what we crave when we are hungry is a good way to become obese, since our bodies did not develop in the corn-syrup abundance in which we now live. Likewise, we can’t trust our feelings of fear or panic, since reflexes to save us from lions or from falling off cliffs are not very useful when sleeping alone in a dark house or boarding a transatlantic flight.

That being said: becoming afflicted with spot baldness was a signal from God, from my body, from the universe, from whom- or whatever that I needed to make some big changes in my life. And for that I am very thankful.

I had ignored other signals: the creeping depression, the disproportionate anxiety, the headaches, the nightly crying, the fatigue and the lethargy. In fact, I was feeling so guilty about recent events in which I had played a pivotal role, I not only felt that I deserved to suffer but went out of my way to remind myself to feel as crappy as possible. I set aside dedicated time in the day to wallow in misery. Since I had caused pain, not only did I need to feel guilty about that, but I also needed to personally experience the pain that I had caused. I gave myself additional punishment for doing anything pleasurable, with the exception of the most wholesome of activities like running or doing my Hebrew or Spanish homework.

It took a threat to my vanity – patches of hair falling out – to make me wake up and stop this destructive behavior that really wasn’t doing anyone any good. It wasn’t making up for the pain I had caused, and it sure wasn’t helping me. I, who had been a big mocker of gay bears, now had an affliction that threatened to strip me of my hair. I could be expelled from one of the only communities interested in having me as a member! When I told Jimbo (an ardent “scruff” enthusiast) that I had a disease that was destroying my beard, he expressed alarm that such an affliction even existed, and promised to raise awareness.

The other interesting thing about my affliction was that it was an autoimmune disease. There are plenty of autoimmune diseases, like Crohn’s Disease or Diabetes mellitus type 1, where metaphoric interpretations are possibly unhelpful. But it was telling to me that I had an affliction characterized by my body eating itself up. Lacking an external enemy, my body’s defenses were attacking its own tissues. It was hard not to think that I had somehow put them up to it. I had to figure out how to call them off.