SORE AFRAID

the sea is the sweat of the earth

I was excited to go to Sicily, even though I knew almost nothing about it.  I hadn't even seen the Godfather films.  I had seen Cinema Paradiso though, and had heard Tony Rizzuto describe how his grandmother sprinkled cinnamon on cauliflower and chucked raisins into her pasta sauce, so I imagined a dusty, hot, vaguely North African place where there was a lot of dramatic religiosity, repressed-yet-seething sexuality, and fruit mixed into the food.  I am a big fan of the first two, so I was mostly looking forward to the visit.

We had developed a very illogical itinerary, because our destinations were modified after my parents had already locked in some accommodation (I finally started to research what I wanted to see in Sicily a few weeks before the trip).  We would fly from Rome to Catania, located in the middle of the eastern side of the island, then drive to Agrigento, in the middle of the southern coast, then drive all the way back to Taormina at the northeastern corner right by where the toe of the Italian peninsula kicks the island, then drive past Catania down to Syracuse on the southeastern corner (because of its ancient history, this was the only place we visited with an alternate English name, but my mother insisted on always calling it Siracusa), then back up to Catania.  At one point, my father envisioned us doing all of this crazy crisscrossing by train.  Luckily, that plan was jettisoned after my mother and I started screaming.  We preferred to take our chances with hotheaded drivers on the motorways rather than to be subjected to the capricci of the Sicilian rail network and what I imagined to be grubby and menacing train stations filled with grubby and menacing Sicilians.

We had asked the owners of the apartment we rented in Rome to arrange a taxi to the airport.  After my father paid an exorbitant amount of Euros to the husband for our four-hour tour of obscure Roman sites, we decided we shouldn't feel guilty about treating them like a concierge service.  Because my parents are hysterical about travel, we had arranged for the taxi to come three hours before the scheduled departure of our domestic flight.  The airport was about 40 minutes away.

We went down to the street 10 minutes early.  After about 20 minutes, we started to worry.  My mother called the wife to see what was going on.  She said she would check with the taxi company and then call us back.  About 10 minutes later she did, and I could hear disbelief in my mother's voice.  After hanging up, my mother said, "The taxi company had our pick-up scheduled for 2010."

This reminded me of something that I had read in a column written by Tyler Brûlé (né Brule) in the Financial TImes, regarding Italy:

When things derail, it’s because the simplest procedures can become ridiculously complicated. A recent attempt to purchase a pre-paid wireless card took on the same level of difficulty as applying for a visa to North Korea as it involved passports, photocopies and multiple signatures. Why the cumbersome procedure? “It’s part of the fight against terrorism,” the hotel clerk explained. “I know it doesn’t make much sense but this is Italy.”

For better or worse, “This Is Italy” has become something of a universal slogan for all that’s both wonderful and shocking about the country. While I haven’t yet seen it plastered on any national tourism campaigns, it’s a perfect tagline that bundles all the nation’s pride and frustrations into three neat words. When the sun is high, the wine is perfectly chilled, the lunch perfectly prepared and the handsome skipper has already charted a course for a secluded little cove, it’s quite likely that your Italian hostess will at some point blurt out, “This Is Italy”.

Some hours later when the traffic on the highway to Rome isn’t moving because roadworks that have been going on for years have reduced six lanes of two-way traffic down to half a lane on a Sunday evening, your hostess will slam the palm of one hand against the dashboard and make some gesture with the other and shout, “This Is Italy!” In that simple outburst is a weary resignation that there’s little she can do as an Italian to change the system – an apology for the pathetic state of the roads and an effective catch-all curse.

Still, we arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare.  As had been predicted, our plane was an Alitalia one, and not the budget airline with the terrible logo and the multilingual pun for a name.  Despite the terrible stories I had heard about Alitalia, our 50-minute flight was fine.

The programming on the video monitors seemed appropriate.  This is Italy, I thought.

We had great views of Mount Etna as we descended.

The Catania airport was nicer than I had expected, although we passed the abandoned hull of the old terminal as we went out to the car rental.  My mother and I stood around with a bunch of grumpy Germans as my father filled out paperwork.  We somehow managed to find our way onto the correct motorway for our drive to Agrigento.  It started to rain.  The countryside was beautiful -- surprisingly green and lush.  My Mediterranean experiences in the past 10 or so years have involved Croatia, Spain, and Israel, which were dry, arid, and parched, respectively, so this was new and exciting.

Once we turned off the main road at Caltanissetta, to head south to Agrigento, we got lost.  We drove around in the pouring rain for around 30 minutes until finally finding the right road.  Once we got close to Agrigento, we got lost again.  We consulted the maps we had, but the rain, and by then the dark, and also the Italian road signage, caused us to drive in circles for about an hour.

Thanks, undoubtedly, to the intervention of Anthony of Padua, we finally found our hotel.  It wasn't located in the historic center, and resembled an American motel from the 1950s.  We checked in and headed to our (one) room.  The carpeting was dingy and stained.  There was a wad of hair next to my bed.  It was only for one night, and I was exhausted, so I didn't really care.

There was a restaurant in the hotel.  The woman at the desk had told us that they had a fixed price menu, and that wine was included.  We entered the bright, silent, and empty dining room.  A stock Italian waiter came out to describe the selections.  "Will you be having the wine?" he asked.  We nodded yes, and a bottle of Sicilian white was produced.  We were offered no options.

The meal was tasty, if unremarkable for Italy.  I was so tired I went up to go to sleep immediately after we finished.

The next morning when we checked out, there was an additional charge on the dinner bill.  "What is this for?" asked my father.

"That was for the wine you had with the dinner," said the woman at the desk.

"You told us the wine was free," said my father.

"You didn't have the free wine," she answered.

This is Italy.

We had only come to Agrigento to see the Valley of the Temples, a collection of ancient Greek temples not located in a valley.

There was a hint of a rainbow as we approached.

We were forced to purchase parking from a nearby landowner, as the site, despite having a large parking lot, did not open it for public parking.  (This is Italy.)   I bought an audio guide, which I would listen to and then simultaneously repeat for my parents as we viewed the various ruins.

The sun came out vengefully as we examined the Temple of Concordia, which was the best preserved, as it had spent some time as a church before being deconsecrated and re-ruined.

 

We overlooked the Mediterranean as we walked around the Temple of Heracles, which was evidently never a temple to Heracles.

 

I could hear gunshots coming from a nearby hill.

The sky started to darken again as I examined the replica of a fallen atlas from the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

 

I then walked by myself to the museum, where I saw the actual fallen atlas, restored upright.

I didn't have much time to look at all of the Greek relics. 

 

There was a large group in the museum receiving a tour in English.  I overheard their guide say, "They were all bisexual."  This was followed by some uncomfortable murmuring from the group.

When the Romans conquered ancient Greek Ἀκράγας, they sold all of the inhabitants into slavery.

My parents picked me up, and we tried to go eat at a recommended restaurant in the old part of Agrigento (although, arguably, the Valley of the Temples was really the old part of Agrigento).  It was closed, owing to Sunday.  My parents sat in a cafe while I took a look around the town.  It was relatively deserted, although occasionally I would pass a pastry shop crowded with people waiting in line.  Interestingly, while Rome was ethnically homogeneous (to the naked eye), I saw many North and Sub-Saharan Africans walking around Agrigento.  They were clearly new arrivals, judging from their dress and language.  I wondered if it was just because we were so close to Africa; I couldn't imagine that there were many economic opportunities in this small Sicilian town.

After lunch we started our drive all the way back to Catania and then up to the resort town of Taormina.  I fell asleep the minute we got in the car.  When I woke up we were speeding on good roads with the sea to our right.  You could see Calabria in mainland Italy across the water.

"You missed some amazing views of the volcano," said my father, annoyed.  We had rounded Mount Etna on the east.

We went through a series of tunnels and began to climb up to Taormina.  Day visitors were directed to an underground parking lot, but we continued our ascent.  We located the name of our hotel on a sign with tiny lettering.  We were able to drive right up in front of it.

The hotel was simple and also dated from the 1950s, but it was better than the charmless dump in Agrigento.  I even had my own room and bathroom, which I could close off from my parents with a vinyl concertina partition.

We walked along the main pedestrian street.  It was very touristy, but quite upscale.  T-shirt shops were outnumbered by stores selling antiques, traditional ceramics, wines, and other artisanal products.  I saw the logo for the Slow Food movement, which was founded in the north of Italy, on several signs.  I remembered how I had always wanted to somehow join the Slow Food movement, even though I am prone to gulping my food and have been afflicted by intermittent aerophagia.

I saw many attractive young Sicilian men.  I noted that there were many well-heeled tourists, as I thought about whether the blisters on my own poor heel were healing.  I heard some American accents and instantly assumed that they were wealthy New Jerseyans with ties to the mafia.  We sat and had a drink overlooking a piazza that was overlooking the sea.  I decided to delay purchasing any artisanal ceramics, even though I had been specifically asked to bring some back, assuming that there would always be more time and additional opportunities to purchase artisanal ceramics.

We always assume that there will be more time and additional opportunities.  We are fools.

We had dinner at the first and last restaurant we would eat at in Italy that did not have bright lighting.  It seemed almost indecent to be eating by candlelight.  I had something called pasta alla Norma, named after a tragic opera by the Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini, with whom I was not familiar.  It was made with tomato sauce, eggplant, ricotta salata and basil, the herb whose name is related to the word basilica, as I explained on our tour of obscure sites in Rome.  This plate of pasta alla Norma was so incredibly, indescribably delicious, I briefly felt like I had succumbed to some sort of of madness...as if I were mad!  It seemed like the answer to all of my questions about the purpose and meaning of life.  I had found the reason for everything: pasta alla Norma.  Tears welled up in my eyes.  How could I never have eaten pasta alla Norma before?  I was demented.

Then I realized that I was having very unoriginal and hackneyed thoughts, as I remembered a section from Eat, Pray, Love in which the author eats pizza in the best pizzeria in Naples.

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return.

This extreme response to an ingested substance more resembles drug addiction than spiritual enlightenment, I thought.

Still under the influence, I walked around the streets of Taormina after dinner. 

 

How can I score some more pasta alla Norma, I wondered.

The next morning we craned our heads out on our minuscule balcony for a glimpse of the sea.

 

After a basic breakfast, we decided to go back out and walk around again.  This was not a libertarian community, I noticed.

I do agree that people shouldn't eat in public, although I don't mind seeing some people bare-chested, even if they are in a inappropriate place.  But only a very small number of persons can be granted permission to do this, and they are all between the ages of 17 and 26.

We walked up a hill towards the Greek theater, which was possibly more Roman than Greek.  We had a lovely view on the way.

There was a group of Americans from a cruise ship there, receiving their own private tour.  I tried to eavesdrop, but got bored and gave up.

 

I stood for a while staring out at the sea and inhaling the sweet-scented breeze.  This is Italy, I thought, even though Sicily only became part of Italy in 1860.

We walked back down to the main pedestrian street and looked up at the medieval Corvaja Palace, built by Arabs.

 

Built under Arab rule, I mean.  I admired what appeared to be a Byzantine mosaic.

I then walked to the cathedral, where there was a disturbing Baroque fountain.

Clearly, this creature would not have been able to stand upright.

I took a photo for Faruq.

 

I bought some t-shirts.  Feeling dirty and ashamed, I walked back, passing a bar that had been popular with film stars in more glamorous times.

We ate lunch at a place that was accidentally fancier than we had expected.  Our waiter was gorgeous, but a bit of a snot.  I could see tattoos peaking out from underneath his shirt.  I hated him, and yet wanted him.

This was the first and last meal where we were served balsamic vinegar with a salad.  Everywhere else we had been (and would be) given red wine vinegar.  It seemed funny, since nowadays in the United States, especially in an Italian restaurant, one is only served balsamic vinegar.  I didn't mind the red wine vinegar (I love vinegar -- sipped out of a sponge it makes a wonderful Lenten refreshment), but I thought it was interesting how the practice in Italy differed from the Italianate practice elsewhere.  Also interesting was how we were never given olive oil poured into a plate for our bread.  My parents, who have traveled extensively throughout the country, said that they have never, ever been given olive oil with bread in Italy.  But this is standard in Italian restaurants in the US.  Once, at an extremely provincial Italian restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, our waitress (after introducing herself, naturally) dramatically filled a bowl with olive oil and said, "This is Italian butter".  It was not.

As we left, I spied our waiter smoking and laughing in that smug European way with the guys working in the kitchen.  I wanted to kiss him and then slap him.  Or vice versa.  Or the other way around: I'm versatile.

I still hadn't purchased any artisanal ceramics, but I had all the time in the world, I thought.

I was a fool.

We left Taormina and began to drive south to Syracuse.  We got in a terrible traffic jam after Catania, although, this having been our third time driving past Catania, we were not surprised.  My mother had booked an apartment in Syracuse through an agency that she and my father had used to book an apartment in Poistano, where they had stayed before I flew to Rome.  Their experience in Positano had been fine.

"I have to call Sonia," said my mother, as we waited in traffic.  Sonia was the woman who ran the tourist apartment rental agency.  I looked out the window to see if there was anyone attractive stopped near us.

"Sonia, we are almost in Siracusa, please call me back with the instructions for how we get the keys to the apartment," said my mother, using a slightly foreign accent.  We had an address but needed to meet someone to get the keys.  The phone rang after barely a minute.

"She gave me the number of a Mr. Baldini who I have to call.  She said that he speaks English."  My mother dialed the phone again.  "Is this Mr. Baldini?  Mr. Baldini?  Is Mr. Baldini there?"  My mother got agitated.  "I am coming to the apartment and need the keys.  Can I speak to Mr. Baldini?"

My mother shut her phone.  "Whoever that was did NOT speak English.  I'm calling Sonia back."

After a heated exchange, my mother seemed somewhat satisfied.  "She said that Mr. Baldini will meet us at the apartment."

I looked at the map of Syracuse, and accurately predicted that it would be very difficult for us to drive to where we needed to go.  We entered the town.  There was a gigantic structure, obviously built in the 1960s, visible in the distance.  "What is that?" asked my dad.  I looked in the guidebook.

"It's the Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Tears," I read.  "There is some sort of weeping statue or painting of Mary there."

"Oh, brother.  Do you believe in that?" said my father, in an attempt to mock the Christian faith, like a non-alcoholic Christopher Hitchens.

"It sounds improbable," I said.

Our apartment was on the island called Ortygia, where the oldest part of the city was located.  We drove past the grubby and menacing train station, and then passed over a bridge.

"Turn on this street!" my mother screamed.  Then we looked without success for the next step in the directions she had printed out.  We drove around in circles for a while, never finding the street we wanted.  We decided to park near the water -- we knew that our apartment overlooked the sea -- and I volunteered to walk around until I found our address.

The surroundings were a little bleak, in the way that places right by the sea or ocean can be.  There was a graffiti-tagged parking garage right by the shore.  There were many dilapidated buildings, as well as two large construction projects covered in scaffolding.  I had a sudden fear that they were casinos, and that perhaps Russians would appear.  There were few people anywhere, other than some African men wearing sub-Saharan dress.  I realized that we had parked near a building marked Ufficio Immigrazione.

I walked down a street.  There was one old woman looking out of a window.  I saw a dog and wondered if it was beaten regularly.

I passed a stylish boutique hotel amidst the relative poverty and then found our street and address.  It looked fine from the outside, but there was no sign of Mr. Baldini.  I went to get my parents.  We waited another twenty or so minutes (my mother called Sonia twice), and finally a man pulled up in a small car.  He had a child with him.

Mr. Baldini spoke no English, but I understood everything he said.  The catch was that I couldn't say anything back to him.  I would translate for my parents, but then they would want me to ask him a question, and I couldn't.

After Mr. Baldini left, we took a look around the apartment.  My room was a plain child's room, with bunk beds.  My bathroom had a sloping ceiling so low I couldn't stand up in it.  The curtains had clowns on them.  My parents room was in a loft-like space; they had to climb some shallow wooden stairs to get to it.  There was no living room, just a kitchen table.  We had no balcony, only a window with a view out on the sea.  I went to take a shower; the flow of water was slightly more than a trickle.

"We can't stay here," said my mother.  "I'm calling Sonia."

"You already paid," I said.

The flow of water strengthened a tiny bit, and my father convinced my mother to wait until we had thought some more about what to do.  After freshening up a bit (albeit with minimal water), we walked around the town.  It was run down in a picturesque way, although it seemed a bit deserted.  We did encounter many German tourists. What is this place? I thought.  I missed Taormina.  I didn't see any shops selling artisanal ceramics.  I saw no attractive young Sicilian men. I felt unhappy and disoriented.  I felt dépaysé, as the more civilized French people would say.

We went to have dinner at a pizza place by the water near our apartment.  I ordered pizza alla Norma, and even though it didn't inspire a rhapsody, it was quite tasty.  My spirits lifted. The arrival of a group of forty or so university students carrying large portfolios made the surroundings seem even less sinister, although my last glass of wine was filled with large amounts of sediment.

I slept quite badly, however.  I woke up when my parents did.  The sun hadn't even come up yet.  I recalled my favorite passage from The Sheltering Sky:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless.

I decided to stay up and watch the sunrise over the Mediterranean.

 

 

 

 

I could probably count the number of sunrises I have witnessed on one hand.

We got up to find breakfast and to explore more of the town.  I looked down into the sea.  My mother said that she saw trash bobbing around in the gentle waves, but I saw none.

The town seemed less bleak. 

Still, my parents decided that we would only stay two nights in Syracuse.  We would spend our last night in Catania, which would also make it easier for us to catch our afternoon flight back to Rome.  My mother called Sonia to ask for a refund.  She was told that Mr. Baldini would come by with some money.  I was surprised.

We walked to the cathedral square.  The cathedral was built into a Greek temple and the temple columns were clearly visible.

 

The church had also served as a mosque, temporarily.  And may serve so again, I thought.  I went inside to look for evidence of the Norman conquest.  Normans ruled Sicily after the Arabs.

There was a coat of arms on the Baroque façade from one of Sicily's many foreign rulers.

 

The town hall had a nice coat of arms as well, although I hoped they had a more modern, less detailed version for daily use.

There was another church nearby where the castles and lions of Castilla y León were clearly visible on the façade.  Spaniards ruled Sicily as well.  Who didn't rule Sicily? was the question.

We walked to the Arethuse, the fountain where the nymph Arethusa was transformed into a spring by Artemis. 

Papyrus plants were growing in the fresh water.

It was right next to the sea.  Ducks took advantage of the lack of salt. 

 

I left my parents and walked to the Maniace Castle, named after the Byzantine general who conquered the city from the Arabs, with the help of Normans.  There was an inscription in Spanish.

 

I looked up at the flag of Sicily (known as the trinacria).

Even though it violates some vexillological principles, I liked it.

I had not seen any stores selling artisanal ceramics anywhere in Syracuse, so I feared that all was lost.  Finally, while walking back to meet my parents, I ran into one.  Unlike the many stores in Taormina that were overflowing with wares, this place had a tiny, overpriced selection.  I went ahead and bought several bowls anyway.

My parents and I went to an old-fashioned, bright restaurant that was facing the canal that separated Ortygia from the mainland.  It had many recommendations and commendations.  There were businessmen and other well-dressed persons eating lunch, so I felt like we looked dumpy.

I had a view of a beautiful, exotic-looking woman and her two beautiful, exotic-looking children.  She looked like a model or movie star and was dressed in elegant designer clothes.  Her children played on the floor as she ate and drank.  She was with a man, but my view of him was blocked by a partition, so I could only see his hand.  She would occasionally lean over to kiss him, and they clinked their wine glasses together in a toast many times.  Given the age of the children (one was probably four and the other two), I couldn't imagine that he was the father.  How would this couple have kept up such a level of love and affection after raising kids for four or so years?  She must be cheating on her husband, I thought.  Still, she looked fabulous.  This is Italy.

I was served a pasta dish made with squash and swordfish and covered in ground pistachios.  It was amazing.  This is Italy.

I never saw the face of the beautiful woman's male companion.

After lunch I walked to the Regional Archeological Museum.  I took the only acceptable photo of the Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Tears.

 

Part of the museum was closed.  I wandered through the collections, looking at the fragments of Greek statues and vases.  Looking at the beautiful, stylized, mysterious red and black figures, I felt that I understood why the militaristic Romans had had such an inferiority complex towards the Greeks they had conquered.  Of course, there was also all of the literature and democracy and philosophy and religion and such.

That night we walked back to the cathedral square.  The stone of the piazza looked so beautiful.  I just wanted to lie down and press my face to it, but I didn't.

We ate at the same pizzeria again, where I believe that we were served wine from the same bottle as the night before.  I recognized a small rip on the label.  It had not been opened in our presence.

I had grown quite fond of Syracuse and now felt that we were leaving too soon.

The sky was ominous the next morning.

We headed over to the Neapolis Archaeological Zone.  A man extorted money from us when we parked.  This is Italy, I thought.  Later, from a distance, I saw an Italian man refuse to pay him money.  I wondered if his car would be damaged.

We walked by an altar on which as many as 400 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus. 

 

Faruq would have been happy.

We walked around another Greek theater.

 

We then went to a cave called the Ear of Dionysius.  It was not named after the god of wine, but rather after Dionysius the Elder, a Greek tyrant of the city, who supposedly could hear the whispers of the people he had imprisoned in this cave.  There is a story that this tyrant drank himself to death when celebrating a prize he won for a play he wrote.

We headed north to Catania, stopping at a gas station for lunch.  I was glad to see Catania, since friends of Pierluigi had told me that it was a city with very interesting architecture. The city was destroyed by Mt. Etna in 1693 and rebuilt in the Baroque style, using black lava stone.

We had a terrible time finding our hotel, of course.  We eventually ended up driving across a piazza where cars were not permitted, but no one stopped us.  We found an illegal parking spot and walked to our hotel.  The desk clerk confirmed that our parking spot was illegal but said that we had a few more hours because all of the police were at lunch.  This is Italy.

The hotel was a very old-fashioned European hotel that reminded me of my previous trip to Italy in 1987.  The room keys were the giant metal kind that one returns to the front desk each time one leaves the hotel.  The towels in the bathroom were basically sheets with minimal ability to absorb water.  I felt very nostalgic for my lost youth.

I took a walk around to admire the black lava buildings.

 

 

Our rooms looked out onto the cathedral square.  My dad caught me walking around taking photos.

The city seemed somewhat militarized.  There were police and soldiers everywhere.

I caught sight of one soldier with a mustache who nearly caused me to swoon, like Lucy Honeychurch in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, although I felt more like Aschenbach in Venice.

I was out of underwear, since we had been counting on washing clothes in the apartment in Syracuse.  "I have to buy some underwear," I announced.

"Let me buy it for you," pleaded my mother.

Good grief, I thought.  I argued with her, but she insisted.

"There's a store that sells underwear," she said.  She pointed at a lingerie store that had a pair of men's briefs in the window.  Good grief, I thought again.  We walked in.

"Per uomo?" I asked, embarrassed.  A young woman pointed to a corner of the store.  I grabbed the first pair I thought would fit me.

"Let me pay," pleaded my mother.  Why can't I submit receipts, and she can just reimburse me? I wondered.  I stood there, horrified, as a 70-year-old woman bought underwear for her 40-year-old son.

We went back to the hotel to recover before heading out for dinner.

There was an elephant supporting an obelisk in the cathedral square, but this elephant was much older than the one I loved in Rome, and was made of black lava.

 

The Arabs called Catania the City of the Elephant during their rule. 

All of these elephants made me remember a scene from John Adams's opera Nixon in China, during which Pat Nixon is given a small glass miniature of an elephant while touring a factory.  She sings:

This little elephant in glass brings back so many memories. The symbol of our party, prize of our success...our sacred cow surrounded by blind Brahmins!  Slow, musclebound, well-dressed, half-awake! With Liberty upon her back. Tell me, is it one of a kind?

The workers reply:

It has been carefully designed by workers at this factory.  They can make hundreds every day.

My father forced us to eat at a very touristy restaurant.  I was annoyed, since it was our last night together, and I also found it odd, since I didn't see many tourists in Catania.  I had walked a little bit outside the very center of the city, and things got rough quickly.  (An elderly prostitute had yelled "ciao bello" to me.)

As we were eating, a woman approached our table.

"I heard English and I had to come talk to you."  She was American, with that unfortunate hairstyle that looks like a wet mullet without actually being either.  She was wearing high-waisted, acid-washed jeans and bright, white sneakers.

"I am here on my honeymoon," she said, as she gestured to her table.  Her husband waved at us.  They were dressed identically.  I would have guessed that they were both pushing 50.  I wondered about the circumstances of their late marriage.

"We are having a terrible time," she said.  "We have been here for a week, and we leave in two days.  If I could pay $1000 and be instantly transported back home, I would."

She and her not-young husband were from Florida.  My mother smiled politely, as did my father, although I was unable to show any compassion or empathy to this unfortunately haired woman.  They had driven all around the island but had been continually upset about getting lost and the fact that their global navigation satellite system was unable to help them very much.  Had they been to Taormina? we asked.  They had not, since the drive looked too difficult on their map (even though one can get there entirely on limited access divided highways).  Did they like the food? we asked.  They did not.  It was not what they had expected.  She was looking forward to getting back to the food in Florida.

We wished them the best of luck in their new marriage and a happy remainder of their trip.  I was relieved when they left.

I walked around a bit in the dark, and then went back to my old-fashioned room.  On television, I caught a glimpse of Italian actor Raoul Bova, who is nearly two years younger than I am.  I was shocked at how old he looked, although of course he was still gorgeous.  I slept fitfully.

The next morning I went to my window and pulled open the curtains.  This is Italy, I thought.

My mother and I took a walk.  There were many monuments in memory of the composer Vincenzo Bellini, with whom I was not familiar.

 

We walked by a fish market.

I had not had enough fish in Sicily, I thought.

I hadn't even had one single calamaro.

We found the car and started to drive to the airport for our flight back to Rome.  My parents were flying back to the United States the next day, while I was going to stay in Rome for a few more days by myself, to complete Faruq's list of required sights.  We tried to follow the small signs indicating the way to the airport.  Each time we spotted one, we were required to quickly cross several lanes of traffic or to make a sudden exit from a traffic circle.  It was like a very boring car chase scene from an uninteresting action movie.  Finally, after nearly missing the next required turn several times, we arrived at the airport.  We saw the car rental return, but the signage was unclear, so we went the wrong way and had to reverse back along a long driveway.  This is Italy.

We sat in the airport for awhile (we were over two hours early).  It was in the airport gift shop -- on a t-shirt -- that I finally saw an example of the Sicilian language.  Unlike Spain, regional languages are apparently not in official use anywhere in Italy.  I know there are parts of Italy where German, French, and Slovenian are used, but the regional languages that are unique to Italy don't get much recognition.

This is what Sicilian looks like:

Nunnu nostru, ca inta lu celu siti, mu santificatu esti lu nomu vostru: Mu veni lu regnu vostru. Mu si faci la vuluntati vostra comu esti inta lu celu, accussì incapu la terra Dunàtini ogghi lu nostru panuzzu. E pirdunàtini li nostri dèbbiti, comu nuautri li pirdunamu a li nostri dibbitura. E nun lassàtini cascari inta la tintazziuni; ma scanzàtini di lu mali. Ammèn.

Our flight was uneventful.  I walked my parents to where they needed to catch a shuttle to the airport hotel where they would be spending the night.  My parents love staying in airport hotels.  Once when we went to Barcelona together, they spent our last night at an airport hotel, while I stayed in a snotty non-heterosexual hotel in the city center and spent the entire night carousing in a decadent and debauched manner.  I got to the airport in plenty of time and ran into my parents, whose flight had been canceled.  They ended up spending a second night at the airport hotel, while I flew home, still aglow from my night of shameless licentiousness.  The universe is often unjust.

I was sad to say good-bye to them.  I hadn't gone on this trip purely out of filial piety.  I was trying to take advantage of all the time we have left together.  How many more times will I get to travel with my parents?  Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.

I went to buy a ticket for the slow express train into Rome, to creep and crawl back into the Eternal City.

ils sont fous ces Romains!

When I returned from my trip, a very highly educated colleague of mine, a person who is a polyglot and a polymath and an expert in the history of New York City fire escape design, said to me, "Rome is a city of palimpsests, isn't it?"

I couldn't remember what "palimpsest" meant, so I just said, "In a way, yes."

Later I looked up the word.

I booked my flight on Lufthansa, since I didn't like any of the direct-flight options available for travel from New York to Rome.  This drove Asaph crazy, since my flight was quite expensive and I was unable to add any miles to my primary frequent-flier program.  But I have never used frequent-flier miles, except for one time when I went to visit a dying friend in San Francisco, so I am very skeptical about the possibility of their redemption.  (This begets the question: am I so cheap I can't pay for a flight to visit a dying friend?)  Ever since the unexpected and unexplained descent of the small plane on which I was flying from Ohio back to New York this summer, I have relapsed into the terrible fear of flying that plagued me in my twenties.  I didn't want to fly Alitalia, because of its mediocre reputation, and I couldn't bear the thought of flying on some dismal American carrier that didn't even have a screen in the seat back or free drinks.

My Lufthansa flight was fine, although I was alarmed when I first went to use the lavatory to see that I had to go down a flight of stairs.  I was a little worried about that last step.

I landed at the bright, airy, and modern Munich airport.  Unfortunately, I exhausted its charms during my five-hour stay.

I looked down out of the window on my flight to Rome as the continuous cloudiness that blankets the German-speaking world broke up over the Alps and gave way to more spotty and dramatic formations.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, from the air, Italian villages and towns look just like they do on the programs shown on American public television during fundraising drives.

Fiumicino Airport was unsurprisingly grubby.  I followed the signs to the train station and bought a ticket for the express train to Roma Termini station.  I boarded the very 1990s train and sat next to two neat and tidy Germans who had their Roma Pass booklets laid out on their laps in a very orderly and disciplined fashion.

If "express" means "not coming to a complete stop at stations other than the destination", then the express train lived up to its name.  But it was not fast.  I was surprised by how green the surroundings were as we creeped through the Latian countryside.  No one ever came to check our tickets.

We emerged in the relatively Third World conditions of Termini station.  The platform was totally packed with people trying to get on the train from which I was disembarking.  I used the pushing skills I had honed over 11 years in New York and made my way to the metro, where I somehow managed to buy a ticket from a machine.  The metro was totally packed, but almost no one was Italian.  Everyone seemed to be a tourist traveling in a large group.  It was early evening on a Sunday, so I guess this made sense, but I had never seen such a high tourist-to-resident ratio in a large city.

I was not impressed with the quality of the metro train, but it safely delivered me to the Colosseo station.  I saw that my hysterical mother had called my phone with the Italian mobile she had acquired for the trip, even though I had experienced no delays and was making my way to the apartment my parents had rented exactly on schedule.  I refused to pay the huge sum it would have cost to call her back.

I came out of the station.  There was the Colosseum, just like in the movies.  Our apartment was on a drab section of Via Labicana, and I was amazed that I found it very quickly.  I buzzed the buzzer marked FOGGINI.  "Where have you been?" asked my mother, in a plaintive and desperate manner.  Traveling 4,300 miles to get here, I thought.

I thought about a recent speech I had seen on the internet by former Roman Catholic nun and current freelance monotheist Karen Armstrong, in which she said that religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate.  I think that's true of all people, regardless of religiosity.  Many times with my parents, I feel an icy hand gripping my heart when I hear them saying something crazy.  But what is the harm in simply comforting them?  It's not like I can somehow train them to behave differently, at this point: they are in their 70s.  And, in any case, I inherited hysterical panic and pessimistic mistrust from my mother and emotional coldness and crippling self-doubt from my father -- I'm certainly no better, and probably a lot worse, than they are.

After reassuring everyone that I was indeed there, safe and gesund, we went out to a pizzeria where I had the first of many bresaola, parmesan and arugula dishes and struggles with my mother over the wine carafe that I would enjoy during the trip.

As I was exhausted, we came back right after dinner so I could go to bed.  The apartment was simple, but cute.  It was on two levels, connected with an iron spiral staircase.  My parents had a balcony off their room with a view of the Colosseum and what I would later learn was the infamous Monument of Victor Emmanuel II.  My room had a less dramatic view.

My bathroom was equipped with a copper bathtub, which my mother thought was wonderful.

There was a computer in my room.  I checked some of my various accounts, received a call from Asaph, and then went to sleep.

The next morning my parents went out to have coffee and brought me back pastries before I woke up.  I decided that the Italian version of French pastries was better than the Spanish version of French pastries, but certainly not as good as actual French pastries. (The Germans have their own pastries.)

I had received many recommendations for things to see in Rome.  My friend Vince, a former Jesuit, told me to "treat Rome as three different cities: Classical Rome, Catholic Rome, and Renaissance/Baroque Rome."  Another Italophile friend had given me the name of a bathhouse and told me that it was "important to go to all the bathhouses everywhere you travel, if one wants to be a dissolute in the Somerset Maugham/W.H. Auden/Christopher Isherwood tradition of elderly [non-heterosexual] men."  My friend Aaron Hamburger, a former breakout author who was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, forwarded me a guide to Rome he had written.  (It was a tad too mainstream for me, however.)

And then there was Faruq.  Just as many persons do whatever American media personality, actress, television producer, literary critic and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey tells them to do, I pretty much do whatever Faruq tells me to do, with the exception of a few things that I thought were probably violations of federal anti-terrorism statutes.  Faruq saw my trip to Rome as an important component in fighting what he called the "Judaizing process" that I am apparently undergoing.  Seeing himself as a weird cross between John Chrysostom and Julian the Apostate, Faruq hoped that massive exposure to Classical and Christian monuments would destroy any interest I had in Israel or the Hebrew language.  He provided me with a long list of obligatory sights.

I was mostly interested in seeing the links between the civilization of Ancient Rome and the development of Christian Europe.  I decided to finish reading a book that Faruq had given me, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, during this trip.  Faruq had given me this book in the hope that I would be impressed by the superior Roman civilization, but I was shocked to read the details of the brutality of Ancient Rome and the cruel repression of the Jews after the destruction of their temple, including banishing them from the renamed Jerusalem and the imposition of a tax on all Jewish men, women, and children in the Empire to pay to support the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

Judea Capta. 

Our first stop was the Basilica of Saint Clement, which my Italophile friend had recommended, as it contains the tomb of Saints Cyril and Methodius, evangelists to the Slavs.  The church also contains the ruins of a temple to Mithras in its crypt.  I overheard some moronic Roman Catholic American tourists saying stupid things as I tried to examine the Mithraic ruins.  I realized that I would encounter a lot of religious tourists of the worst kind on this trip.

We then walked over to the Basilica of St. John Lateran.  I was drawn to the obelisk placed nearby.  My guidebook had a whole section on the obelisks of Rome, and I decided I would make a special effort to see as many as possible.  The Lateran obelisk was finished in the 14th century BC by Pharaoh Thutmose IV.  I examined the hieroglyphs.

 

The cross affixed to the top of it seemed gratuitous, but there is a lot of gratuity in Rome.  It then started pouring, so we entered the basilica.

The nearby Scala Sancta was closed for lunch, so we went to eat something before heading over to the Roman Forum.  The sun came out for a bit as we made our way.  Nothing funny happened.

My parents had remembered that the Forum was free of charge, and our guidebooks confirmed this, but when we arrived at the Arch of Constantine, we found that we would have to pay.  Dark clouds quickly filled the sky, so we decided to take shelter in a cafe until the sun came out again.

 

We then walked along Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali and looked at a bronze copy of the statue of Augustus of Prima Porta that was erected under Fascism.

Viewing Trajan's Column did not require an admission fee.

 

We walked past the massive Monument of Victor Emmanuel II.  It looked like something that might be more appropriate in Washington. 

 

I don't go to the gym enough, I thought.  I would have this thought many times during my trip, owing to statuary.

We headed over to the Capitoline Hill.  We examined the replica of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.  The original statue escaped destruction by Christians because they mistakenly thought it was Constantine.

 

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you, wrote Marcus Aurelius.

I gazed at the fountain featuring depictions of the river gods of the Tiber and the Nile.

I started to feel a bit flustered.  This is a great fountain, I thought.

We went to have dinner at a restaurant that had been recommended to us.  It had a certificate posted on the wall that indicated some sort of special designation as provider of typical Roman dishes.  Unfortunately, many typical Roman dishes involve parts of the animal that I am not overly enthusiastic about eating.  I ordered an artichoke frittata, which was marked as typical, along with a chicken dish.  The chicken required a lot of work to eat, owing to the cut, and I started to think that the gigantic boneless, skinless chicken breasts beloved by non-heterosexual men in Chelsea are grotesque, grown on genetically manipulated creatures that can barely be called chickens anymore.

I looked over at the kitchen.  It was one older woman surrounded by pots and pans.  The restaurant was brightly lit and no music was playing.  I would learn that this was standard in Roman restaurants.  In New York, you can rarely see what you are eating, owing to the dim lighting, or hear the person across from you, owing to the din of music and the screaming of young, drunk women.

The next morning we had reservations at the Borghese Gallery.  We took a nicer metro line and then the bus.  I admired the pines of Rome.

Photography was not allowed in the Borghese Gallery, as there were many amazing things worth hiding.  The Venus Victrix sculpture by Antonio Canova, depicting Napoleon's sister Pauline as Venus, was impressive enough, but then I saw two museum employees lead an elderly blind woman past the ropes surrounding it.  She was fitted with latex gloves and allowed to run her hands over the sculpture while one employee described what she was touching.  I started to cry a bit.  This would not be the last time I would cry in the presence of art on my trip to Rome.

In fact, I cried in the next room, looking at Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, which depicts Daphne being transformed into a tree as Apollo chases after her.  It was hard to think of anything more beautifully sculpted than Daphne's hands metamorphosing into branches and leaves.  In another room stood The Rape of Proserpina, and I noted how attempted kidnapping and sexual assault are popular themes in Baroque art.

There were many Caravaggios as well, including several on loan as part of a special exhibition featuring Caravaggio and a recent Irish-born British figurative painter for whom I do not care.  There was even Judith Beheading Holofernes!

I decided to walk through the Villa.  My parents agreed to meet me later at the so-called Spanish Steps. There was some sort of children's athletic event on the grounds of the Villa Borghese.  I had read somewhere that Italian children were now as overweight as American children, but I saw no evidence of this in a brief glance.

I finally arrived at Piazza di Spagna.

 

There was another obelisk, although I learned that the hieroglyphs on this one were Roman copies.

We ate a delicious lunch at another recommended restaurant, where there were many distractingly attractive waiters.  

We headed to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which my parents wanted to see, since it is featured in the opera Tosca.  

We had a clear view of that monarchical statelet that I was apprehensive about visiting.

 

I left my parents and walked across the Ponte Sant'Angelo.  I paused at the angel with Veronica's veil.

 

I admired the coat of arms of the Medici family.

I need a coat of arms, I thought.  Also, I need a new coat for fall.

Faruq had told me to go the the Palazzo Spada, to see a false perspective by Francesco Borromini.  I walked down Via Giulia, a famous straight street created during the reign of Julius II, the Terrible Pope.  I hesitantly entered the palazzo.  There were a lot of signs announcing that something was closed, but I wasn't sure what it was.  "I am here to see the perspective," I said, timidly.  

"Yes, it is five Euros," said a young woman behind a cash register.  I paid and was handed a ticket.  I walked about ten feet and handed it to another, cuter young women who then led me into a courtyard.

"Now I will demonstrate the perspective," she said.  I was not allowed to approach it.  She walked over to what appeared to be a long column-lined hallway with a statue at the end of it.  She stepped up, extended her arms, and started to walk.  As she did, her hands got closer and closer to the columns.  When she arrived at the statue, she put her hand on top of it to indicate that it was tiny.

Photography was not permitted.

 

"Thank you," I said, and then left.  

I walked through the crowds of tourists back to the apartment.  It was weird to see so many young, white priests and nuns everywhere.  I didn't think there were any more young, white Roman Catholic priests and nuns, but there are.

I went up to the balcony of my parents' room and engaged in Rome-viewing.

Later that night I met up with an Italian friend of a friend named Pierluigi.  We went to a non-heterosexual bar that was located right next to the apartment.  He was very nice and funny and, of course, had a beard.  He apologized for the mediocre quality of non-heterosexual nightlife in Rome and then complained about the current state of Italian politics and society.  I asked about Italy's plummeting birth rate.  "Everything is blocked here now," he said.  "I want to move to New York."  Really? I thought.

The next day we were to be shown around Rome by the owner of the apartment we were renting.  "Isn't it so nice of him to show us his favorite sights around Rome?" said my mother.  I didn't think to question my parents, but I felt like there was a chance they didn't realize what we were getting into.  They had arrived at the apartment while I was still flying down from Munich, so they had already met with the married couple who owned it.  The father of the husband had been some sort of slightly famous Italian artist.

He arrived in a van with a driver.  I couldn't imagine that this experience wouldn't cost us.

We drove to the Porta Maggiore, where we looked at the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces the baker.

 

The remains of an ancient road (I don't remember which one), were pointed out.

 

The husband, Paolo, was very nice, and quite interesting, although my inner insecure American couldn't help but think that he was just a little bit of a blowhard, as many Americans find educated Europeans.  I found myself trying to impress him with bits of information that I had recently learned in the book I was reading.  When my father asked about taxes in ancient Rome, I chimed in with "weren't the residents of the city of Rome exempt from taxation?"  As Paolo tried to give the history of the title pontifex maximus, I interrupted him and explained it instead.  When he talked about the etymology of "basilica", I pointed out its link to the name of the herb "basil".  As he was describing the history of the Colosseum, I started talking about my visit to the Roman theater in Caesarea. (I had to pretend not to be amazed when he described the etymology of "amphitheater" -- amphi- meaning "both", as in two theaters put together so that the seating is arranged in an oval: why had I not realized this before?)

This American is an annoying blowhard, he thought, I thought.  But it seemed better than being perceived as an ignorant American.

We headed over to the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, built inside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian (Thermae Diocletiani -- I also had to pretend that I already knew the etymology of Rome Termini station, which I certainly had not, having assumed that termini was related to "terminal" and never guessing that it was related to "thermal").

The church contained a kind of sundial called a meridian line.  The sun shines through a small hole once a day.

 

The light hits a point along a line on the floor, depending upon the date.  There were symbols from the zodiac along the line, in the appropriate place.

We got back in the van after briefly looking at how the Piazza della Repubblica reflected the outline of the Baths of Diocletian.  In the van, Paolo asked my parents if they wanted to go to an unusual museum he knew about.

"Well, how much time do you have to spend with us?" asked my father.

"Well, it depends upon what you want -- you got the description of the prices from my wife, yes?" said Paolo.

My father and mother shook their heads to show that they had not.

"Well, it's 60 Euros per hour, plus the cost of the driver, of course," said Paolo.  We had already been with him for three hours.  I could tell that my father was silently going into shock.

Not wanting to make a scene, and figuring that a few more hours wouldn't make much difference at this point, we continued on, although we skipped the museum.  We drove to Saint Peter in Chains to look at Michelangelo's Moses.

 

We drove to the Porta San Paolo, where we stopped at a high-quality cafe that served excellent gelato.

 

I had some slightly racist cappuccino, even though it was around one in the afternoon.

 

I realized that I had been offered cappuccino after every dinner I had had in Rome, even though everyone who goes to Italy always reminds you that Italians don't have cappuccino after noon.  I was offended that I was being so blatantly mocked by the waiters of Rome.

My father paid for everyone's gelato and coffee (my mother, surprisingly, had not tried to order wine), and then we went to look at the Pyramid of Cestius.

As we drove around Monte Testaccio (which he claimed was related to our English word "test"; I had assumed that "test" was related to "testicle"), we stopped a sculpture that Paolo's father had sculpted many years ago for which Paolo was the model.

 

 

Plans were made to have lunch with Paolo and his wife, and I couldn't bear the thought of that, especially the awkward discussion of the payment for the tour.  Also, I had more sights I had to see from Faruq's list.  They let me off at the Palatine Hill, where I bought a Roma Pass and went in to look at the ruins.

I tried to figure things out with my guidebook, but I had some trouble.

I then walked into the Forum, where I saw Faruq's favorite scene from the Arch of Titus.

I examined the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, into which was built the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.  It reminded me of that church plunked into the middle of the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

Even though I do not consider myself a fan of religious syncretism, I liked the reuse of pagan structures for Christian churches, even if the results were sometimes quite ugly, aesthetically.  But I loved the continuity of religious practice, even if the specifics changed.  Rome is a city of palimpsests.

I examined a winged victory (Νίκη) -- not a Judeo-Christian angel -- on the Arch of Septimius Severus.

 

I stopped in the Colosseum on my way back to the apartment.  It seemed gratuitous that it had been made a Christian site, owing to all of the martyrs.  It has become common for non-heterosexual New Atheists to make jokes about Christians with punchlines like "too few lions!" or "bring back the lions!"  I learned in the book I was reading that Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire because of their refusal to worship the official Roman gods, and that they were branded "atheists" because of this.  This seemed funny and ironic, for all involved.

I thought of my upcoming birthday.

 

When I got back to the apartment I asked how the lunch had gone.

"Well, I told him I didn't have enough cash on hand to pay him yet, but I paid the driver, and I paid for lunch.  He's already called here once asking about his money again."

Great, a blowhard and money-grubbing, I thought, unfairly.  I contacted Faruq, who said that 60 Euros an hour was what he charged for tours of Berlin.  I went to tell my parents that they should pay right away.  If Faruq was worth this rate, then certainly this distinguished gentleman was worth it.

Later that night, after a meal of more bresaola, parmesan, arugula and wine-carafe tug-of-war with my mother, my father and I got into a fight about the tip.  I had received conflicting information about tipping practices in Italy, and when I tried to hand a tip to our waiter, he refused it.  My father insisted that we just leave, and that tipping wasn't necessary.  I wondered if we had somehow offended our waiter in the way we had presented it and thought we should just leave it on the table.  Somehow this whole exchange ended up greatly upsetting my mother, although I think it was related to a preexisting condition. I tried to remember to be compassionate instead of trying to be right, especially since my father displayed no interest in comforting her and pulled out a road map of Sicily.

(For the record, I hate the American practice of tipping, especially its extreme manifestation in New York.  Of course, I tip very generously, out of guilt, but I think that people should be paid a living wage and that we shouldn't have to add an extra amount at our discretion.  Of course, we are helpless to back out of this custom without penalizing the workers, although the large numbers of non-tipping tourists in Miami Beach eventually forced most restaurants there to automatically add a non-optional service charge, which is a step in the right direction.  Another reason that I hate tipping is that I am bad at doing arithmetic under pressure.)

The next day we went to the Trevi Fountain.

 

 

Unoriginally, I thought of La dolce vita, and also its blasphemous remaking by that Russian-born, Jewish, non-heterosexual, anti-Muslim pornographer who used to be a member of my former infamous gym.

Have I been eating too much pasta? I wondered.

We walked to the Pantheon, another pagan structure that was Christianized as the unoriginal Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs.  I took the standard photo.

I examined another obelisk, this one from the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis, brought to Rome by Domitian for a temple of Isis.

 

We then walked to Campo dei Fiori, where we looked at but did not touch the agricultural goods.

 

I didn't like the looks of the restaurants around this piazza, although and because they were crowded with tourists.  I abandoned my parents as they sat down to eat because I had many things from Faruq's list left to see.

I admired the coat of arms of the Della Rovere family on the Palazzo della Cancelleria.

 

Again, I thought that I needed a coat of arms.

I arrived at Piazza Navona.

 

I examined the obelisk that was custom-made in Egypt for the Emperor Domitian.  The hieroglyphs describe Domitian as a pharaoh.

I was awed by Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers.

 

The Nile was hiding his face.

 

I need to find a gym, I thought.

I ran to the Basilica of Saint Mary Above Minerva, another church built on a pagan temple, to see the 15th-century frescoes by Filippino Lippi about which Faruq wrote a thesis.

 

There was also the statue of Christ the Redeemer by Michelangelo.

The bronze loincloth covering Christ's genitals was not Michelangelo's idea.  There was a large group of Slavic tourists having their photos taken one-by-one in front of this statue, for some idiotic reason.

I went outside to appreciate another obelisk from a temple to Isis.

 

But this obelisk was resting on an adorable sculpture of an elephant carved by Bernini.

 

My guidebook said that elephants were beloved by the Church, since they were believed to be monogamous and to mate only once every five years.  I thought about the circumstances of my relationship and what the Church would think.

I walked by the Tiber Island, on my way to the Mouth of Truth in the Basilica of Saint Mary in Cosmedin.

 

I passed the Temple of Hercules Victor, also converted into a church.

 

I was happy to see an old-fashioned pedestrian crossing signal, in spite of my disapproval of the quasi-Italian word "alt".

People were posing for photos with their hand inside the Mouth of Truth, but as I was alone, that would have been weird.

I headed to the Capitoline Museums.  I passed Castor and or Pollux.

I examined Constantine's foot.

 

Inside I saw an inscription on a tomb that read: "Whoever shall violate or injure this tomb, may he share the fate of Judas!"

 

Faruq is a bit obsessed with Judas, for unhealthy reasons.

I emerged into a courtyard where I was stunned by the presence of Marforio, a former so-called talking statue of Rome, onto which people used to post anonymous political commentary.  I loved this statue.

 

 

I just wanted to climb up in his lap.  This depiction of a river god made me think that professional contrarian Camille Paglia was correct in her observations regarding the subculture of masculine-identified non-heterosexual men who tend to sport facial and body hair.

In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's Angel but the capacious bosom of the primal earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.

The Greek-style pretty ephebe is a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable. The bear, however, offers warm, soothing regression to what Freud calls the polymorphous perverse, the whole-body tactility of early childhood. My working theory is that the gay bear as a sexual persona is a mythic father-mother, a parental fusion like the androgynous Egyptian river god Hapi or the Roman Father Tiber, bearded and jovially recumbent amid his swarm of rollicking cherubs.

I walked through the museums, overwhelmed by the collections.

 

There was a special hall for the original equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius not destroyed by Christians.

 

I was moved by a sculpture of the satyr Marsyas, who was flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a contest.

 

 

I read that this myth was intended to indicate that the Greek pantheon had supplanted the earlier worship of nature spirits, just as building a church in a temple to Minerva showed that Christianity had supplanted paganism.

As I walked back to the apartment, I saw that the National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II was open, so I climbed up for a view from this gigantic structure.

 

I had been putting off going to the Vatican, out of fear of being overwhelmed and succumbing to an art-related delirium.  Faruq had told me that I would need to eat a large lunch beforehand, for strength.  My parents had already visited the Vatican many years back and had no interest in going again, but the next day we all had a hearty meal of fried stuffed pumpkin flowers and pasta at a restaurant in Trastevere before I headed out on my own.

I had been told to go to the Vatican in the afternoon, to avoid the crowds from tour buses.  Although there were a lot of people, there was no real line to get into the Vatican museums.  I could overhear some Irish people commenting about how they had waited for several hours on a pervious visit.

Luckily I was not wearing a fashion singlet, as two young men at my former infamous gym liked to do, so I was admitted without incident.

 

I tried to prepare myself mentally for the visit, by focusing on my breath and trying to calm down.  I rented an audio guide and headed in.

I liked the giant pine cone, also taken from a temple to Isis.

 

I admired the hairstyle on the colossal head of Augustus.

I entered the museum, along with hundreds of others.  There were signs with arrows marked "Sistine Chapel", but I knew that there were miles to walk before that destination was reached.  I felt bad for the many other visitors who assumed it was just in the next room.

I stared at either Creugas or Damoxenos, by Canova.

 

 

There was a large statue of Antinous, Emperor Hadrian's boyfriend who drowned in the Nile and was then deified.  Here he was depicted as the god Bacchus.

 

I took a detour into the Egyptian collection, stepping out of the river of people on their way to the Sistine Chapel.

I found the combination of the Egyptian god Anubis and the Greek god Hermes to be very interesting.

 

There was another statue of Hadrian's boyfriend, this time as Osiris.  He had many outfits, apparently.

 

I thought of Faruq, and his worship of she-who-meows.

 

The exit from Egyptian collection dumped me back at the entrance to the museums, so I had to go through the crowds yet again.

I finally made it to Raphael's Rooms.  There I saw the The Baptism of Constantine, probably by Gianfrancesco Penni.

 

That was the beginning of the end, I thought, as did Julian the Apostate.

Raphael's The School of Athens was incredible.  I took a photo of Plato and Aristotle.  Later I noticed that this was the image on my admission ticket.

Evidently Raphael was very promiscuous and died at age 37 from excessive sex.

I visited the restroom before finally entering the Sistine Chapel.  Despite the huge crowds and a continuous hexilingual announcement telling us to be quiet and not to take photographs, I was more moved by the Sistine Chapel than anything else I had previously seen in Rome.  So unoriginal of me!  It was at this point that the audio guide, which had been providing extremely thorough information about each work of art (delivered in a crisp British accent), started to get religious in content.  And I, possibly because of exhaustion, less probably because of the Holy Spirit, started crying as I stared up at The Last Judgment.

It was very beautiful.

I limped out of the chapel and headed back around to St. Peter's.

I should have just gone home, but I wanted to get it over with.  I went and rented another audio guide.

This time I mean it: it was much bigger than I had expected.

 

I barely made it past Michelangelo's Pietà and the Queen Christina monument before nearly collapsing on the floor.  There was a mass going on, and I wandered around in a dazed and incoherent stupor, neglecting my audio guide.

I failed to see everything.  It was too much.

I went outside and stared up at the obelisk that Caligula had brought from Alexandria.

I staggered back to the apartment, overwhelmed by what I had seen.  I insisted on walking everywhere in Rome, even when it would take over one hour, and therefore developed many blisters on my feet during the trip.

We had dinner with some friends or acquaintances of my parents from Ohio, who were in Italy to go on a bike tour.  They were secular Puritans of my father's ilk.  The wife had short hair and wore no makeup, giving her a German or lesbian appearance.  The husband was funny in a wholesome, Midwestern way, and I liked how he would refill my wine glass while leaving my mother's empty.  We were flying to Sicily the next morning, and, as they had traveled extensively throughout Italy, we asked them what to expect.

"It is very beautiful, but there is a lot of litter, and I didn't like how they treat their animals," said the wife.  I got a horrible image of a Sicilian man beating his dog on top of a pile of garbage.

Later that night Pierluigi invited me to go to the 40th birthday party of a friend of his.  He called a taxi to pick me up and take me there.  "Do I have to tip?" I asked him over the phone, terrified of having to do math in Italian.  Luckily, I did not.

The party was full of Pierluigi's friends from school, and, with a few exceptions, everyone was between 37 and 43 years old.  This was unusual for me, since I am friends with a crowd of non-heterosexual men ranging in age from 25 to 55.  It was strange to be in a group of non-homosexual men and women who were almost all my age; I evaluated everyone for fine lines and wrinkles.  I couldn't imagine my non-homosexual peers staying up and drinking and smoking at a party like this: most have children around whom their lives revolve, and they generally consider staying up past 10:30 and having a half glass of wine to be the height of sybaritic decadence.

Because it was Italy, most people did not have children.

The birthday boy was very charming and funny, like a cuter, non-annoying Roberto Benigni.  He was carrying around his own ashtray.  I talked about the pollution levels in the Mediterranean with a very nice woman who was an oceanographer; she told me the water off Sicily was quite clean.  I admired a obviously non-homosexual man with Florentine curls who was smoking a small cigar and looking mean and beautiful.  "Happy Birthday" was sung, with Italian lyrics, as cakes were brought out.  At one point I was standing by the food table, talking with Pierluigi, when a pretty, young (37-43 years old) woman asked for the chestnuts.  I understood her Italian and handed them to her.

"How could you understand?" asked Pierluigi.

"The word in Italian is like the word in Spanish: castagna is like castaña.  And it's kind of like the French châtaigne," I said, pompously.

"Tu parles français, alors?" he asked.

"Oui, un peu," I replied.

"Les Français sont le peuple le plus civilisé du monde," he said.

Really? I thought.

I mentioned that I was going to Sicily the next day on a budget airline whose name is a multilingual pun on the Italian word for "heron", airone.  I asked if I should be worried about this airline and was told that it had merged with Alitalia.

"Don't worry, Italian pilots are the best in the world, because we have the world's worst airports," said Pierluigi.  This didn't reassure me.

When I got back to the apartment I had a message from Faruq:

"Don't forget to visit San Luigi dei Franchesi, San Andrea della Valle, San Ignazio, Santa Maria della Vitoria, Santa Maria della Pace, Santa Sabina, Santa Costanza, Santa Prassede, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Villa Farnesina, San Andrea al Quirnale, San Andrea alle Quattro Fontane, Sant' Agnese, Sant'Agostino and Sant' Ivo."

Good grief, I thought.

ogni abuso sarà punito

I realize that it is completely unoriginal to fall in love with Italy.  I was just as annoyed by that smug San Francisco Bay Area poet who wrote that book about renovating an abandoned villa in the Tuscan countryside as the next envious, bitter person (although I liked the memoir of the depressed woman who went to Italy to eat for six months before alliteratively moving on to India and Indonesia).  But what is to be done?  Sometimes things are popular for legitimate reasons.  I can't pretend that I spent my entire vacation wishing I was in Malawi or Nepal or Bolivia, travel destinations that mark one as more enlightened than the drooling hordes who descend upon Italy in search of a blessing from the Pontifex Maximus and a sweet life filled with gelato and pizza.

 

Pizze is Italian for "pizzas".  I had some really good pizze while I was in Italy.

 

One of my favorite things about being in Italy was the opportunity to be surrounded by the Italian language.  I made a list a few years back of what I thought were the most beautiful languages in the world.  I can't remember the winner (maybe it was Swedish or Icelandic; I know I listed Thai and Danish as the ugliest languages), but right now I can't think of anything lovelier than the look, feel, and sound of Italian.  I used to be a bit put off by its slightly robotic cadence, but I've learned to like that too.

 

I complained this past summer about how the Semitic and Turkic languages don't seem appropriate for a Mediterranean setting.  Greek and Latin should be the languages heard when gazing out at that clear blue sea. (I realize I am being very unfair to the Phoenicians, who spoke a language related to Hebrew, but it seems somehow wrong to be speaking in the tongues of the hordes of the treeless, grassy steppes and the nomads of Arabia Deserta while drinking a Negroni.  I accept and except the Maltese.)

 

Since Latin is hard to come by these days, especially since the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, French is acceptable, even if it is probably the most Germanic of the major Romance languages (I remember thinking that the signs inside Paris Metro cars that read tout abus sera puni seemed especially Latin, though).  Castilian is fine, although, along with Portuguese, it seems more Oceanic than Mediterranean, and then there are also all those Arabic borrowings, which explain why the Spanish word for "oil" looks like the Italian word for "vinegar".  Catalan is better: merda is merda.  Of course, Italian is by far the best.  (Don't even ask me about Romanian.  I have nothing to say about a supposed Romance language where the word for "yes" is da.)

 

You can imagine my delight when I learned that salve is a word in modern Italian.  (My mother dislikes this word, since she associates it with the long graduation ceremonies at the small liberal arts college in central Ohio where she taught for many years.)  A hotel desk clerk in Sicily said it to me when I came down one morning.  At first I thought it might just be a Sicilian dialectical feature.  I couldn't believe that the greeting of the Romans was still in use.  Then I heard the word dubbed into Australian actor Simon Baker's mouth on television that night.  Salve!  I wanted to salve everyone I saw.

 

I realize that I sound like a total nerd and lunatic. 

 

I would sound better if I were writing in Italian, although probably just as crazy and nerdish. 

 

(I never even studied Latin.  All I know comes from musical numbers performed during the service at my church.)

With the exception of a few prepositions and other small words ending in "r" or "l" or "n" (and borrowed words that haven't been Italianized, like the Germanic cardinal directions, which appear to have been taken through French: nord, sud, est, and ovest; I'm not sure why they couldn't have kept settentrione, meridione, oriente, and occidente), every word in Italian ends in a vowel! 

 

This guarantees a very beautiful sound, even when saying unpleasant things.

 

Like yelling and screaming in traffic when someone, like my dad, for example, is only going 160 km/h in the left lane on the autostrada.

 

Just walking down the street and hearing and seeing this language is enough of a reason to visit Italy.

Selections from Le nozze di Figaro kept playing in my head throughout my trip, but, since I don't speak Italian, the singing consisted mostly of nonsensical words that I made up.

 

Even though I can't speak it, I was amazed at how much I understood.  On a few occasions, I had to listen to instructions in Italian, and I knew exactly what to do.  I am generally good at following instructions and doing what I am told.

 

Why did I never study this language before? I kept asking myself.

 

Why have I wasted so much time studying ugly, joyless languages?

I read recently about studies that show that facial expressions can affect one's mood.  The sexy (non-Italian) New York Times science writer Olivia Judson speculated that the implication of this is that the language you speak must also affect your outlook on life.

Yet the Danes are among the world's happiest peoples, so I'm not so sure about this theory.

 

I had thought it might be nice to spend the evening with two attractive Italian men who would speak to each other in their mellifluous language while I just passively participated (in the conversation).  Perhaps I could even follow some simple instructions.  Or commands.

 

Unfortunately I was unable to arrange that.

Still, I wonder who decided that French is the so-called language of love?

the knee alone is worth the price demanded

I just returned from a vacation in Rome and Sicily with my parents.  My parents had been planning this trip since we came back from Argentina and Chile last November.  They wanted me to come with them, but I was reluctant.  I couldn't really afford it (actually, by all sane accounts, I couldn't afford it at all); I was planning to have a very busy fall, owing to my upcoming major birthday and the concomitant changes of life expected; and my parents and I usually end up fueling the flames of each other's anxiety when we spend time together -- every concern or worry expressed is affirmed and magnified by the others -- and this makes our trips a bit stressful.  But this summer, while I was in Israel and my father had an ominous medical incident from which he nevertheless completely recovered, I was reminded that all of my omphaloskeptic fretting about my own mortality really serves no purpose, but that I really need to take advantage of every opportunity to spend so-called quality time with my parents, whom I love dearly, despite their having cursed me with their anxious genes, while I still can.

Also: Italy!  My one trip to Italy had been in 1987, also with my parents.  We were doing a European tour of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy.  I was a convinced Francophile back then (which is extremely embarrassing in retrospect -- not that France doesn't have many amazing attributes, but how awful is the concept of an adolescent male American Francophile: la honte), and I got a little depressed during our time in the German-speaking countries, with their overcast skies and charmless natives.  Then we went through the Brenner Pass, and cloudy and orderly Austria gave way to sunny and chaotic Italy.  I was stunned.  I remember the rusty guardrails along the highway and stopping in a filthy rest area, where a man held his child up to drink from a faucet clearly marked "acqua non potabile".  Then we drove through the small streets of our first destination, the city of Padua, and I fell in love.  It was more like lust, actually.  I had spent the Paris portion of our trip staying up all night looking out our hotel window in adoration and wonder, but my feelings about Italy were much rawer.  The beautiful woman at the reception desk of our Paduan hotel seemed to have dropped from another, heavenlier planet; even my Puritan father got flustered as she described the breakfast hours.  As we ventured outside in late afternoon, the empty, unkempt squares suddenly filled with people, and, at age 17, I suddenly came face to face with something I had never really encountered before: the young Italian male.  (Even Italian Americans were very rare in Central Ohio; my classmate Charles Rizzuti stood out almost as much as the Japanese families who were brought over to manage the nearby Honda factory.)  I had never seen anything like these beautiful guys, with their effortless style and swagger: zipping around on motorbikes in leather jacket and sunglasses, cigarette in mouth; strolling around in suit and tie, sometimes arm in arm; and standing around yelling and laughing with each other, using all of the requisite hand gestures I had read about in anthropological texts.

My family did a short loop in the far north of Italy that summer: Padua, Venice, Milan, Verona, and the Lombard town of Bergamo.  I don't remember any of the historical or artistic sights; I only remember the food, the elegance, and the beautiful people, specifically the men (but, notably, also the women).

 

Of course, that was back when I was 17, and I was so excited to be anywhere outside of the United States, even the sight of a red tile roof was enough to induce tachycardia, dizziness, and fainting.  And my hormone levels were at their peak then; now I am firmly in andropause.  And men of Italian descent are certainly no novelty anymore: you can't throw spaghetti at the wall in the New York metropolitan area without hitting an Italian.  I've certainly hit more than my fair share.  My father also confirmed that things are just not as exciting as you get older, and an Italian friend I acquired on my trip told me that Italy was, in fact, much better back in the 1980s, and the declining birth rates there show that most Italians agree with him.

Still, it was absolutely wonderful.  I never got Jerusalem Syndrome in Jerusalem, but I came close to suffering from Stendhal Syndrome in Italy (even though I did not visit Florence).

I have a few friends and acquaintances who think that Italy is the only suitable destination for any vacation.  I am on the verge of agreement.

a living dog is better than a dead lion

I've been plagued by silly, selfish hypochondria for most of my life.  I can remember my pediatrician (who was a smoker!  I'm old enough to have had a pediatrician who was a smoker!) grimacing and calling me 'Mr. Flinch' to my mother, since I generally jumped up off the exam table in fright when he opened the door.  After sending me to the emergency room when what I thought was strep throat turned out to be a peritonsillar abscess, I started coming in all of the time with vague complaints and fears.  'He needs to learn to calm down,' I remember him saying to my mother, right in front of me.  Dr. Park (despite the name, he was not Korean or any kind of Asian at all) had no bedside manner, or any manner.  But 30 years later, calming down is still a struggle. Being extremely aware of the inevitability of human suffering hasn't worked out very well for me.  It is common now to remind people who attempt to take risks with unprotected sex that you can only be completely sure of your antibody status if you have been tested and retested over a period of up to six months with no new sexual activity.  Your only honest answers to questions about your infection status are: yes, or I don't know.  But I think that about all diseases.  Do I have a viral hemorrhagic fever? I don't know.  Do I have monkey-pox? I don't know.  Do I have bubonic plague? I don't know.  How can you ever be sure?  You can step out of the magnetic resonance imaging machine and be given a clean bill of health, and who knows what sinister things might begin to transpire in your body on the drive home?  At least, that's how I think.

And even though I think that unhealthy living makes one sick, I don't think that a sound diet, moderate exercise, and wholesome behavior is any guarantee that you still won't get a terrible affliction of some kind.  Examples: radon, Chernobyl, pesticides in drinking water, bad genes, bad ground beef, bad luck.  It's always the innocent who have the worst things happen to them, right?  Only the good die young.  Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur.  This belief is why I am not very sympathetic to people who argue against national health insurance by saying that they don't want to pay for the care of smokers and the obese, who brought it all on themselves.  Doesn't it all even out?  Did the medical care of the television news anchor Peter Jennings, who died quite quickly of lung cancer, really cost that much more overall than that of my grandmother, who lived well into her 90s and only died after a long and painful battle against nothing in particular?  Should I refuse to pay social security for those whose good health keeps them alive for years and years?

I've noticed another trend in the popular theism/atheism debates: atheists use the existence of terrible diseases, especially if they are disfiguring or otherwise grotesque, as proof of the non-existence of God.  It's interesting, since horrible deformities and gruesome diseases have probably never been less common than they are now.  Atheism is most popular in countries with excellent health care where diseases are usually caught and treated before they can reach their most physically hideous extremes.  Fetuses are frequently aborted before children with birth defects can be born (I remember reading an article by a woman whose child had Down's Syndrome and who was sad that her son could find no playmates like himself).  Many of us in the so called coastal elites are barely in contact with persons outside of a narrow band around our age, apart from our relatives (who we don't usually live with) so we don't even have to witness natural aging and death until it's our turn.  But throughout most of human history, things were pretty messy.  Lepers played a big supporting role in the early history of Christianity.  But nowadays people can barely deal with wrinkles, let alone the really gory stuff.  Why did lepers convince Francis of Assisi to become devoutly religious, while now they would be given as obvious examples of the randomness and indifference of the cosmos?

I read an interesting article by (and heard an interview with) the Roman Catholic geologist Xavier Le Pichon, who claims that archaeological evidence demonstrates that we truly became human when our Neanderthal ancestors started taking care of injured, deformed and diseased members of their communities, even though this left the community more vulnerable to predators and the elements. 

The most extraordinary example is probably the one hundred thousand years old Shanidar 1 skeleton. This skeleton belonged to a Neanderthal man about forty years old discovered by Ralph Solecki in the 1950’s in a cave of the Zagros mountains in Iraq . This man was so severely handicapped that he could not have lived to this age without the support of the group to which he belonged.

...

Since then, it has been well established that Shanidar 1 was not an exception and that Neanderthalers “fed and looked after severely handicapped members of their communities who were too disabled to contribute to the food quest.” Actually the skepticism of the scientists appears to me to be a demonstration of how difficult it is for us to face this apparent contradiction with straightforward Darwinian theory. In order to be able to continue to live for many years (as the healed bones show) it would have been necessary for him to be entirely taken care of by his community. What was this community? It would have consisted of perhaps twenty or thirty people living by hunting and gathering, without a permanent camp. Every day the community would have moved on in search of new resources. We can only imagine the considerable effort, which this group had to make for many years in order to transport this person from camp to camp, in order to feed him and in order to simply allow him to live. Why did a small group of nomads, having each day to look for their food through hunting and plant gathering decide to radically reorganize their life so that a severely handicapped man would become the center of their efforts and attention?

...

We are therefore faced with a phenomenon as old as man himself: in the face of the utilitarian logic which dominates the world of living things, man came up with a way to put someone who no longer had any “utility” at the center of his community thus allowing him to live and to continue to occupy his place in society. This choice inevitably leads to a reorganization of society. As soon as this seemingly foolish choice is made, everything must be reorganized around the person who suffers the most, who is the most wounded and handicapped. It is the only way. That person becomes the center of everyone’s attention.

Christianity has been accused of fetishizing suffering, since Christians believe that God himself lived, suffered, and died as a human.  So the experiences that we all must go through are somehow made divine, as we can at least feel that God has suffered and is suffering with us.  But this doesn't make sense for a lot of people, who would just ask: why do we have to suffer at all?  It's a good question.  Atheism has the best answer to this, I think: it's all meaningless.

I was examining the columbarium niches at my church the other day while I was serving as an acolyte (we have some down time during the offertory hymn).  Although I was annoyed at the format in which the birth and death dates were presented (double digit month-day-year is confusing), I was brutally reminded of the effects of the plague that devastated my parish in the 1980s and 1990s.  So many of the dead did not reach 30 or 40, let alone 50.  During that time, the community of which I am a member -- non-heterosexual, male New York -- pulled together and took care of the sick and the dying.  This society was reorganized around its weakest members.  When I look around at non-heterosexual, male New York now, it's hard to imagine.

tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ

My pessimistic fatalism doesn't serve anyone well, least of all myself.  How I wish I could be a cheerful atheist (now that I have lost my faith, owing to the mating plug), untroubled by the meaningless of the cosmos, undaunted by the guaranteed path towards total oblivion, unconcerned that the love we feel towards others is nothing more than a biochemical instinct equivalent to the flight-or-fight response that makes one want to bolt out of a piano recital before one's turn to play "Greensleeves", and unperturbed that our understanding of concepts like "good" and "evil" are group-level evolutionary adaptations at best, arbitrary cultural constructs at worst.

From the sidelines (owing to sperm competition) I've noticed a few trends in the theism/atheism debates (these debates only really seem to occur at the popular level, so the quality of the conversation is quite insipid, as is my contribution).  One has been going on for a while: atheists who only accept the fundamentalist form of religion as the valid one, and who then attack all religious persons for their (apparently crypto-)fundamentalist beliefs.  For example, I don't know of any non-fundamentalist Christian denomination  -- including the Romans -- that believes that the entire Bible is literally true (whatever that would mean, anyway), but it has become standard for atheist activists to hold moderate or liberal Christians responsible for every sentence in the Book of Deuteronomy, even though adherence to the Deuteronomic Code is not part of the religion of these persons.  This is somewhat akin to criticizing President Obama for the failures of Marxism-Leninism.  I assume this is done because it is easier to attack religion if you assert that there is no real difference between Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gene Robinson on the one hand, and Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, and Osama bin Laden (أسامة بن لادن) on the other.  But, in fact, the right hand doesn't really know what the left hand is doing.

The other trend is to claim that liberal and moderate religious people are really just atheists themselves.  Fair enough, I guess.

Anyway, those happy atheists seem to have all of the fun, at least until they get sick and die terrible deaths like everyone else.  But why get a head start on that?

Accordingly, I went to have brunch with my good friend Christopher, his fashion journalist boyfriend, and a Southern friend of Christopher's who is a scientist living in Singapore.  I asked many questions about life in Singapore, a place I imagine must be very relaxing, owing to the lack of litter.  He said that he liked living there, although it wasn't the most exciting place in the world, especially for a non-heterosexual.  I asked him who were the main opponents of non-heterosexual rights in Singapore, assuming that it couldn't possibly be Christians, given the Asian location.  But he said it was Christians.

Later I walked around.

I went to church the next morning, in spite of having learned disturbing facts about the mating habits of many different animals from Isabella Rossellini.  The sex life of the limpet, with its sequential hermaphroditism, seemed to be the most convincing argument against the existence of God, although the existence of Isabella Rossellini is a fairly good counter-argument.  The sex life of our friends the bees is pretty brutal too.  At one point Ms. Rossellini expressed wonder at the unique compatibility of penises and vaginas, and I wondered if non-heterosexuals would find that offensive. 

I also remembered another good example of how meaningless our modern lives are in light of the indifference of natural selection: in the story "Cramp Bark" by my beloved Julie Hecht (usually I think that reading fiction written after 1980 is a waste of time, but I make some exceptions), she explains that women have menstrual cramps because they were designed to be pregnant from adolescence until they finally died in childbirth in their early 40s.

In any case, church was fine.  Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.

I took a walk after church, finally visiting the High Line park.  It was slightly disappointing, but nice enough.

It was hard not to feel contempt for the other persons walking around the park.  Walking though Central Park always makes me feel great about the city and my fellow New Yorkers, but something about this park -- possibly its location -- made me full of hate.  La haine, c'est la colère des faibles!

 

Later I went with Asaph and my extremely upbeat friend from Texas (he is so optimistic and happy despite having had a life filled with much more adversity than mine that I often wonder why such a wonderful person is interested in being friends with me -- one theory is that I am some sort of challenging project, like in Emma) to Governors Island to a dance party where an apparently famous dance/house/electronica production team from England would be spinning, and a number of friends and acquaintances would be twirling and rolling.

It was fun to take a small ferry there from the tip of Manhattan, although an elderly non-homosexual couple who was traveling to the island to attend a festival to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage from Amsterdam to New York Harbor seemed somewhat alarmed by all of the non-heterosexual revelry, and rivalry.

Poor Henry Hudson.

 

We were led to the party area by persons with a sweet but sad misestimation of their own power.

It was colder than expected, since I was still in denial about the end of summer, among other things.

 

I brought a book, just in case.

 

It was an enjoyable time, despite some low-grade social anxiety.  Other persons seemed to be influenced by something more pharmaceutical-grade.  I talked to a young man for whom I have carried a torch, or equivalent, for some time.  He was twisting and fidgeting a bit in his sobriety.

I liked the music, despite not knowing enough to dare to have an opinion on such a subject.

 

It was nice to have a view of office buildings with lights on in the windows while dancing around.  Many removed their shirts, in spite of the chill.  It is an interesting custom.

 As we left I noticed a sign that served as a stern reminder, for all of us.

 

I didn't take it literally, however.

We were herded into a pen to wait for our boat back.  I thought my boat was already there.

 

The ferry ride back was quite crowded and convivial.  We walked past the Staten Island Ferry terminal, and I was reminded of the mistaken etymology that caused an "s" to be inserted into the word "island" (because of the erroneous belief that the word was related to "isle").  Our word should really be "iland" or "eyland".  The Dutch word for an area of land completely surrounded by water is eiland.  The Danish word is even better: ø.

 

I thought about the legacy of the Dutch in New York, and then about Rip Van Winkle.

It is a common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle's flagon.

Asaph isn't quite that bad.

The next weekend was the Jewish Day of Atonement.  I had to serve as an acolyte at church on the morning of the day that would end in atonement, in spite of sexual cannibalism.  Asaph had decided that we would be keeping an orthodox home on this day, so we switched the lights in his apartment to an acceptable all-night setting.

The service was fine; it was my third time attending it.  I still don't really know what's going on, and it makes it harder to appreciate the three hours of prayers.  Thankfully, the non-heterosexual service, held at the gigantic and decaying 1980s convention center named after a Jewish Senator, employs instrumental music and other non-traditional liturgical features.  Friends from Israel -- the Irish Hebrew-speaking Gentile and his Israeli boyfriend -- came with us.  They dressed informally, which is what people do in Israel, and they were somewhat shocked by all of the New York non-heterosexual Jews wearing suits.  They were also shocked by the music and other non-traditional liturgical features.  In Israel, everyone would be wearing sandals and shorts but there would certainly be no orchestra, since they only really have religious orthodoxy there.

I ran into an old friend.  "I didn't know you were Jewish!" he said.

"Oh, I'm not!  I'm not!" I said.  Later I told this story to Faruq, who was horrified and disappointed.

We walked home from the convention center after the service.  I lay in the dark bedroom, reading by the light of the bathroom.  In the middle of the night I went into the bathroom and made myself a bowl of muesli while running the shower, so Asaph wouldn't hear what I was doing.  I had to wash all of the dishes so he wouldn't see any evidence the next morning.

Later that week I went to have my six-month follow-up visit with my laser eye surgeon.  The upper punctal plugs had long since fallen out, but my vision was extremely clear and crisp.  Since everything was going well with my eyes, she found some additional warts around my eyelid to chop off.  I told her about my summer.  "Even though I am a math and science person," she said, in her New York-New Jersey-Connecticut tri-state accent, "I believe everything happens for a reason."  I didn't tell her that I thought the world was random and meaningless, if not purposefully brutal and cruel.

I told her about my plans for changing my life after my upcoming birthday.  "Why don't you start right now?" she asked.  I had no answer.  Today is the first day of the rest of my life, I thought.

I walked across Central Park and felt no hate.

 

How could you?

 

Although owls are associated with death in many cultures.

The following Sunday we heard about Adam's rib from the second creation story in Genesis and then Jesus' quoting of the first creation story: God made them male and female.  Then Jesus goes on to forbid divorce.

The sermon was about the rights of the transgendered, mostly.  The preacher pointed out that it doesn't say "God made them male or female".  After reflecting again on how you can pretty much make the Bible say anything you want, I thought about how the words "male" and "female" are not etymologically related -- "female" got the same treatment as "island".  Female has nothing to do with male.

Later we heard Psalm 8 sung in German, containing my favorite German word Säugling, sadly mostly replaced in modern German by the terrible das Baby.

Aus dem Munde der jungen Kinder und Säuglinge hast du eine Macht zugerichtet um deiner Feinde willen, dass du vertilgest den Feind und den Rachgierigen.

Out of the mouths of infants and children you have set up a stronghold against your adversaries, to quell the enemy and the avenger.

My acquaintance who I refer to as my Doppelgänger was visiting from San Francisco and was supposed to meet me at church (where we met in 2001), but he didn't arrive until after the Liturgy of the Word was over, since he had been out carousing the night before.  I tried to remember the rule about how late you are allowed to waltz into a service and still be permitted to take communion, but it wasn't my place to judge, especially considering sexually antagonistic co-evolution.

Afterwards we went to get coffee at a chain restaurant named after a phrase in the Lord's Prayer.  The young African-American woman behind the counter looked at us and smiled.  "You two are like twins," she said.

Later that night I went to Tony Rizzuto's apartment where he was hosting an event in honor of the Doppelgänger.  We went to the roof of his building.  The moon rose dramatically.

Later we went to the Eagle bar, where my Doppelgänger had arranged to greet his many friends and fans.  A person from Venezuela told me that I had skin like a baby, and that I was like a "giant baby".  This is a term I have used to describe the appearance of American tourists abroad, with their white sneakers, high-waisted blue jeans, belt packs, and neotonous levels of body fat.

I asked someone to take a photo of me and my Doppelgänger, just to prove that we really look like twins.  The photo did just that, but, sadly, it was a bit unflattering to both of us.

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

I had to go to Washington (the capital) for work before my boss returned from his sabbatical, so I booked a ticket for what passes for high-speed rail on the United States-government-owned corporation that provides inter-city passenger train service, the name of which I find vulgar.  I also object to the name of the high-speed service, since its pronunciation is not obvious, and that's ridiculous for a new word.  I would have named the high-speed train that goes between Washington and Boston HST-Atlantic.

The train did not resemble the trains depicted in the above photo, which I did not take.  Those Japanese high-speed trains (whose name is fine: 新幹線) are better than the train I took to Washington.  When I took a high-speed train in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto, it was like being in the most wonderful dream, as I hurtled through mist-shrouded green hills with giant Buddha-heads poking thereoutof while being served by attendants -- or were they fox spirits? -- in pink and blue uniforms who bowed as they retreated into the distance, possibly back to the Pure Land.  Orientalist, I realize.

Nothing like that happened on my high-speed train to Washington, depicted in the photo below, which I also did not take, although it was fine, except for the extremely loud noise made by the latch on the door to the overhead baggage compartments.

Also, I don't understand why the high-speed trains here in the United States don't have assigned seats.  When I arrived at the boringly named Pennsylvania Station (how a French tourist is supposed to hear the difference between "Penn Station, Newark" and "Penn Station, New York" is anybody's guess), people were nervously watching the departure-and-arrival board for the track of our train to Washington, so that they could ensure that they were first on the train to get a seat they wanted.  If there had been assigned seats, no one would need to worry or rush.  When I went to Japan, my parents and I had assigned seats on the train from the airport to downtown Tokyo.  But in New York, stress and competition must be maximized!  Maybe that's the only way people feel alive, when fighting with someone else for inadequate resources.  Maybe it's the only time some lonely people have any human interaction at all.  I have friends and family, and also a trainer, for now at least.

My train ride was uneventful.  I did some work and read a celebrity gossip magazine that someone -- probably a Bostonian -- had left in my seat pocket.  My neighbor was an African-American man who kept working on complicated scientific spreadsheets on his computer -- something about climate and temperature and precipitation and the impending destruction of our planet.  Even though he seemed friendly, I was afraid to ask.  I have enough worries, I thought.

We arrived in Washington, and I took the underground rapid-transit train to work.  I stopped paying attention -- I was thinking about my time in graduate school in Washington from 1995 through 1997 and how I once bought the columnist and pundit Andrew Sullivan a a German digestif made with herbs and spices, and also how I then thought that 27 was very old  --  and missed my stop, so I had to walk a bit through the Dupont Circle neighborhood.

After work I walked along Rhode Island Avenue to the hotel that I had booked.  Asaph's mother was coming to Washington, and Asaph was going to come down the next day to join me for the weekend, so we picked a fun hotel that wasn't entirely convenient for work.  Asaph loves Washington, even though I once read that Los Angeles is New York for dumb people, and Washington is New York for ugly people.

I walked by a monument to the inventor of homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine that has no basis in science.  But I see people buying these faith-based remedies all of the time, like idiots.

I checked in to the fun hotel.  I went to my room to unravel.  I noticed the setting sun on the sheer curtains.

I am somewhat obsessed with the setting sun lately, for metaphoric reasons.

I sat looking at my curtains for a while.

I had arranged to have dinner with a friend I had not seen since 1987.  She was coming with her nine-year-old daughter.  She was a distinguished primatologist who had spent the last eight years supervising an island of monkeys off the coast of Puerto Rico.  She was now working for some government agency involved in monkey management.  I was afraid I might be exposed to a viral hemorrhagic fever during the meal.

My friend was wonderful and funny, as I had remembered, and her daughter was adorable and precocious, like the young actress Abigail Breslin.  My friend did not seem to subscribe to the Last Emperor style of parenting (extreme overprotection with no discipline), and allowed her antsy daughter to go to the toilet by herself and even to go outside for a second to review the dessert menu posted on the door while we talked about old times.  Her daughter could have been kidnapped!  I've seen it happen on television!

Her daughter wasn't kidnapped, however.  We arranged to see each other again during the weekend.

Asaph arrived in the afternoon the next day.  We had plans to meet his mother and some of her American coworkers -- all ultra-liberal (some Marxist, actually) Jews, except for Asaph's mother, who isn't ultra-liberal at all -- at a fancy Indian restaurant for dinner.  I felt a bit self-conscious, especially when Asaph's mother asked me when my family had come to the United States from Europe.

"Well, some of my father's ancestors came from Ulster in the north of Ireland in the mid to late 1700s," I said.

"That is so long ago for Jews!" said Asaph's mother.

I couldn't tell if she had forgotten that I wasn't a Jew, or if she was saying, "for us Jews, that seems like so long ago!"  I don't know if there were any Jews in Ulster in the 1700s.  I casually played with the crucifix around my neck.  Later she referred to me as the "poster girl" at the organization where she works, since I had had very passive -- almost submissive -- role in facilitating a grant to her organization.  I wondered if she had forgotten that I wasn't a girl.

We went back to the hotel to change for some outgoing to bars and clubs, since it is more fun to do that in a foreign city.

The hotel was jammed with various kinds of revelers, some of them German.  "Where is the party?" asked Asaph of two handsome young bellhops as we got in the elevator.

"There's one on pretty much every floor here," said a blond bellhop, smiling wickedly.  He appeared drugged.  I suppose the wallpaper in the elevator should have clued me in to the type of place this was.

Later I learned that it was a popular location for what are commonly called "sex parties", a term I wince upon hearing.  It seems so undignified.  The word "party" by itself is bad enough.

We went out with a masculine, muscular, and military friend of ours, and his muscular and military friend.  I kept being handed drinks, yet again.  I realize that I am intolerable to be around in my normal state, but still.  Soon this won't be an issue, I thought.

We ended up at Washington's extremely well-ventilated and handicap-accessible dance club.  Only when I was told that I couldn't buy two drinks at one time did I realize that persons under 21 were being admitted into the club.

We had a lot of fun, although, while looking at at all of the young shirtless dancers, none of whom gave me a second look, I thought of an article I had not yet read about New York’s new Roman archbishop, Timothy Dolan, in which he stated that sexual activity is not a human right.  I'm not sure about that, but since sex must be provided by another person or persons, you can't guarantee access to it at all, and there are restrictions even when both parties are willing, and at my college, it was expected that consent would be given throughout any sexual activity at regular intervals, or else it would convert to rape.  God forbid that consent was withdrawn at the point of no return.

I thought of how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.  I'm not sure that open triad homosexual relationships are included yet, but I'm sure they will be soon.  I hope, at least.

Later, in the article, the Most Reverend Timothy Dolan says:

“The church—this hopeless romantic that she is—holds that sexual love is so exalted that it is the very mirror of the passion and the intimate excitement that God has for us and our relationship. We actually believe that when a man and a woman say ‘I do’ forever, that our love will be faithful, forever freeing, liberating, life-giving. We believe they mean it and they can do it! That’s exciting, that’s enriching, that’s ennobling."

I'm not so sure about all that.

We went to get our friend's muscular and military friend, who had fallen asleep on a couch, and our friend drove us back to the hotel.

The next day I had a headache.  We went to meet Asaph's mother at a street fair.  I was starving.

I had not realized that there was going to be an ultraconservative and or ultralibertarian march on Washington the weekend I was there.  We walked by a wine tasting tent at the street fair, and I heard a woman protester say "I don't want to taste it, I want to drink it" in a strong Appalachian or related accent.  Many people wore shirts decorated with a variation of a cartoon done by the polymath and statesman Benjamin Franklin:

Later I learned that Benjamin Franklin made a list of 13 virtues, one of which was chastity, about which he said: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

I'm not so sure about all that.  Franklin was quite young when he wrote that.  I was a prude up to age 29.

In any case, these marchers did not shatter any stereotypes.  Misspelled signs, Southern accents, bad fashion decisions (I saw a guy in a kilt), paranoid personality disorder, whiteness, and quasi-morbid obesity abounded.  I took some photos that I later felt guilty about.  Finally I saw an adolescent girl who reminded me of my cousins, who were once adolescents, holding a sign that said "you have to stand for something".  I wondered if there was any value in having strong opinions, regardless of the content of those opinions.

I wouldn't know.

We took taxis to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where a festival for children was being held.

It was a bit like the opposite of the protests we had seen near the Capitol.  No one was protesting anything.  There were many races and religions represented.  Most people were quite thin and well dressed.  If anything, narcissistic personality disorder was overrepresented.

We found my primatologist friend and her adorable daughter.  They were eating next to a large area where children and their guardians were encouraged to build structures out of cardboard boxes. 

My friend's adorable daughter was a bit upset that other children always destroyed what she had created.  I wholeheartedly endorsed her response to the situation.

Later we watched a physical comedian perform an elaborate and frustrating routine involving an early 1980s French phone booth.

I wandered around taking photos.  There was another French or Francoid person writhing around in the air.

We stayed for quite a while.  Asaph summoned me over to an escapologist who was not French.

He writhed around on the ground for a while, but I didn't doubt how it would all turn out.

He thanked the assistant he had summoned from the crowd.

We said goodbye to my primatologist friend and walked past the famous Watergate complex to the Foggy Bottom metro stop.

As might be imagined, I can't stand the affixation of "-gate" to words to describe a scandal.  It's almost as bad as adding "-aholic" to create terms describing addictions or compulsions or manias.  The word "alcoholic" comes from the word "alcohol" plus the suffix "-ic", and refers to an addiction to that substance.

We took the metro back near the White House.  I spied more protesters.

"My Savior is a Carpenter not a President"?  Oh brother, I thought.

Later we went to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner.  I think the name of the restaurant meant "sun" in Amharic, but I was not and am not sure.

Asaph's mother complained throughout the meal.  "If I had wanted Ethiopian food I could have stayed in Israel," she said.  I couldn't remember ever seeing an Ethiopian restaurant in Israel, despite having seen many Israelis of Ethiopian descent.

Asaph and I went out to a bar to meet Jimbo and Durban, and Durban's boyfriend, with whom he has been for over 10 years, despite the United Nations' ambivalence about their relationship.  We talked about bedbugs, mostly.  Also about how sex is not a human right, although often one wants it quite badly, even more than food.  But the bar was too crowded to meet potential new partners.

The next morning I walked from Dupont Circle across Rock Creek and through Georgetown, where I then frantically had to hail a cab to get to the National Cathedral in time for a service, even though I had lost my faith, owing to traumatic insemination.  We were briefly stalled in traffic at the intersection where, in October 1995, I learned of a noteworthy criminal trial verdict while listening to a portable radio.

We made it to the cathedral just in time.  "This church was made without metal," said my cab driver.  But with mettle, I thought.

I always assume that most of the others in attendance are not Episcopalians, since the cathedral attracts many pious Protestant Christian tourists.  I made the sign of the cross in an exaggerated and Romish manner, in order to make the people next to me uncomfortable.  I was also wearing slightly torn blue jeans.

The celebrant was a woman with a National Public Radio accent.  She seemed painfully earnest.  The preacher was a man with a slight speech impediment, but his sermon was quite fiery.  It was about compassion, and he used a controversial example: the release of the convicted terrorist conspirator Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi (عبد الباسط محمد علي المقرحي) by the Scottish government.

I didn't understand why people got so upset about his release.  I thought of the 2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner swap, in which Hezbollah transferred the coffins of two captured Israeli soldiers in exchange for incarcerated Lebanese Druze Palestine Liberation Front militant and convicted child murderer Samir Kuntar (سمير القنطار‎), four Hezbollah (حزب الله‎) militants, and bodies of about 200 other Lebanese and Palestinian militants captured by Israel.  This was not a very equal exchange, but the Lebanese ended up looking like barbarians in their celebration, and the Israelis looked very noble in their suffering, I thought.

The rest of the service was fine.  The celebrant made a very dramatic gesture for the sursum corda.  I noticed that most of the communicants opted for intinction.  Such pansies, I thought.

I love the National Cathedral.  Its beauty is marred only by the awful state flags lining the nave.

I walked around admiring the statuary.

Many stained glass windows depicted Biblical scenes, but not all of them.

Our Presiding Bishop has a doctorate in oceanography.

There is no conflict between science and religion in the Episcopal Church.  Mostly.

As I was taking a photo of the so-called Space Window, someone came over to me to tell me that there was a moon rock embedded in it.  I am obsessed with the moon lately.

The sunlight was transformed by the glass, just as our spirits are transformed by the Church.  Supposedly.

There were many interesting statues nestled throughout the building.

I didn't know if Eleanor Roosevelt was an Episcopalian or not.  I love the name "Eleanor", but it's mostly transference from my love for the name "Aquitaine".  Eleanor said: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.

This was a surprise as I headed to the restroom.

I need to go to Rome, I thought.

This was one of the Gospel stories that struck me before I converted to Christianity from non-practicing Unitarianism.  She of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.  A new or old atheist would probably just say that this was another example of how religion manipulates the poor and deprives them of their money.

I took an elevator to a view.  I was slightly disappointed that there was an elevator, but I realize that being able-bodied is only a temporary condition.  Although women like looking at a view, and men do not, I enjoyed it.

I left the building and inspected the vaguely erotic tympana.

My finger pointing at the moon was not the moon.

I did not see, nor did I photograph, the Darth Vader grotesque.

I went out into the Bishop's Garden.  I thought of Scotland.

I saw a mockingbird.  I remember seeing them every day when I lived in Washington.  It was a reminder that I was somewhat in the South.

I decided to walk to Dupont Circle.  I passed a Greek church.

And a Russian church.

And the British embassy.

And a mosque.

Eventually I had to get in the metro to meet Asaph and his mother near the National Archives.  Asaph's mother asked why I was always taking so many photos.

We said goodbye to Asaph's mother, who was flying back to Israel.  We headed to the National Gallery.  We saw posters for their special exhibitions, including one on Spanish armor.

And another on Venetian Renaissance sculpture.

Asaph insisted on taking a tour.  The next possible option was "French Collection: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century".  I was afraid that this would mean Impressionism.  Of course, I loved Impressionism when I was in high school, but then I went to college and learned it was middlebrow.  I remember feeling so ashamed.

Our tour guide resembled the current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, although she had a much more pleasant voice.  She covered all of the relevant themes: the Enlightenment, the nationalist revolutions, the rise of the bourgeoisie, urbanization, the Haussmannisation of Paris, and the changing role of painting after the invention of photography.  We first looked at a landscape painting by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.  It was of the Forest of Fontainebleau, although this detail was supposedly Mary Magdalene.

We then looked at an Edouard Manet painting called Gare-Saint-Lazare.  This is an appropriate name for a train station.

Then Van Gogh.  I have a second cousin from Canada with whom I went to college.  Once he pronounced "Van Gogh" in a Dutch manner while talking to a group of my friends, and most of my friends started giggling and had to run away.  This cousin once wrote a very clever poem about global warming.  And that was back in 1989, when we still called in the "Greenhouse Effect".

We looked at this unfinished painting for quite a while, although I can't remember who painted it.  Cézanne?  Probably.

After it ended, Asaph went on another tour where he learned that the juniper bush is a symbol of chastity.  I learned this too, since I accidentally walked into a room during his tour, although I didn't notice Asaph.

Then I went to look at the Venetian statuary.

Then I just wandered about.  I saw a depiction of a Medici.

And Daniel in the lion's den. 

And Adam and Eve.

And Mary, Queen of Heaven.

And the death of Saint Claire.

And a woman.

And a painting from 1640 of The Repentant Magdalene.

I met Asaph in the rotunda.  He was looking at a loaned work from somewhere in Italy where there had been an earthquake.  It was a depiction of the Nativity.  "Joseph looks like he doesn't know what the hell is happening!" Asaph laughed. 

This theme must be surprising and amusing to Jews.

We walked to the metro to go back to our hotel.  We saw a pile of signs from the anti-government protests the day before lying in and around a garbage can.  One made me feel sad, it seemed so desperate.

Our society is truly divided, I thought.  What has the President even done yet? I wondered.  Barely anything.  I was certainly no fan of the previous President, and I cringed whenever I heard him spoke, and I felt very sad when he was elected, but I never felt the sense of visceral fury that these protesters seemed to.  I knew this was going to happen, though.  It happened in the 1990s, and that President was a white Southern man with an unpretentious and convivial manner.

Our ride back to New York was on a normal, low-speed train.  I was still feeling some melancholy about the end of summer, and the passage of time in general.  Looking at beautiful things had cheered me up a bit, however.

cold and creaky, dark and damp, full of ghosts and failure

The tenth anniversary of my hire date at my job passed recently, and I was asked to attend two presentations about extra benefits that would now be available to me.  One was related to life insurance and possible supplementary retirement income, while the other involved long-term care insurance.  At that second presentation, I learned that "to toilet" is now a verb, and that I shouldn't be worried that insurance only pays for three years of care in a nursing home, since most people die before three years pass anyway.  I asked what would happen if our society devolved into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the US dollar no longer had any value and armed gangs of bloodthirsty warlords ruled the streets by the time we needed to access these benefits. I was told by the presenter that she would look into that and get back to me.

Of course these are amazing benefits, and the presenters (who didn't work for the companies that sold these benefits) emphasized that few employers provide them and told us we should be very grateful. And, of course, I am grateful. I am very lucky to work for such a benevolent employer, and even though it is hard to get by living in New York if you aren't a multi-millionaire, I have no reason to complain about anything.

Still, since I tend to notice that the glass needs refilling, especially if it is a gin and tonic (the juniper bush represented chastity in late-medieval and Renaissance times), I felt that these benefits were yet another tightening of the so-called golden handcuffs that have kept me at my job for 10 years.  Aspects of these benefits won't be guaranteed until I stay for five more years, while others won't be fully funded for ten years -- when I am fifty, God willing.  Again, I know I am very lucky to have my job, but it's not exactly what I had always dreamed of doing, or dream of doing.  I had plans!  Am I now, on the threshold of 40, just working so that I can be cared for at the end of life?  Should I get up in the morning knowing that I'm doing it all so that I will be able to have someone spoon-feed me gelatin before I slide into the tomb?  It's a little depressing.

Of course, there are other ways to look at this situation, but I inquired at my church about the costs of purchasing a columbarium niche anyway.  A friend of mine told me about a person who started attending church in his small town in Texas, not because of any belief in God, but because he wanted to make sure that someone came to his funeral.

I recently saw that great scene in Hannah and Her Sisters again where Woody Allen finds out that he doesn't have a brain tumor and runs jumping and dancing out of the hospital, only to stop halfway down the sidewalk when he realizes that it's only a matter of time before the diagnosis won't be so happy.  He goes and watches the joggers around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir (although it was not named this at the time), and thinks, Look at all these people, trying to stave off the inevitable decay of their bodies.

I often think about this when I go running, especially when I consider the injuries I have suffered because of running, like plantar fasciitis, or the time I popped a blood vessel in my bladder and urinated copious amounts of blood.

With these morbid thoughts in my head, and with the final summer of my 30s coming to an end, it was hard not to feel a bit melancholic during Labor Day weekend on Fire Island. 

I had never seen Fire Island Pinès so crowded.  Asaph and I refused to follow our normal schedule of falling asleep after dinner and went out on Friday night, paying the $20 to go to the so-called underwear party (I wore a swim brief) without complaint.  Time was running out!

I don't remember anything interesting happening.

The next day was spent doing the regular routine of going running (although I twisted my ankle in some sand on the road), sitting by the pool, and doing laundry.  I sometimes forget to go to the beach.  I prefer to sit by the pool, since you have easy access to the toilet and kitchen, and I am not the biggest fan of swimming in the ocean off of Long Island, since I assume the water is contaminated with sewage.

We were planning to have dinner with a good friend who we hadn't seen all summer, because of opposing share schedules.  He owns a very nice house in the Pinès, as well as a beautiful apartment in the city.  Once Faruq bitterly challenged me to name an affluent friend of mine who wasn't Jewish, and I was able to refer to this friend right away.  Faruq was vexed.

We had to go over to this friend's house before Low Tea, since Asaph, as a vegetarian, was bringing his own food, and didn't want to have to go back to our house after High and or Middle Tea.

I thought of the story of Judith, and specifically the homily thereabout of Ælfric of Eynsham:

Ac heo nolde swa þeah his sanda brucan / for his hædenscipe ac heo hæfde gebroht / on hire þinene fætelse hire fercunge.

(She would not enjoy his meal / because of his paganism but she had brought / in her handmaid's bag her food.)

I asked my Hebrew teacher about the story of Judith, a Jewish story that is not accepted by Jews or Protestant Christians as part of the Bible.  He said that many know the story, but that some rabbinic sources say that it should not be read.  I love it, though.

 

Outside of our friend's house we saw a stag.  I thought it was beautiful, in spite of the generally low regard in which deer are held on Fire Island.

 

A few weeks earlier I had discovered a strange bump on my arm, and I thought it might be the first sign of Lyme disease, even though it did not have the distinctive bull's-eye pattern.  Eventually I noticed that there was a dark center to the bump, so I dug into it with a pair of tweezers.  It was an ingrown hair.  Then I worried that I might have given myself tetanus.

We deposited Asaph's food in their refrigerator and then paused to observe the sunset.

 

 

It was lovely.

We went to Low, and then High, and then Middle Tea.  It was fun, but I don't remember anything interesting happening. I did see a beautiful young man whom I had noticed before dancing nearby. He was so confident of his youth and beauty that he left his shirt on for a long time before finally removing it to display his chisled and tattooed torso to the crowd.  Later I learned that he was the sultan in a triad homosexual relationship, in which he has sex with up to five additional partners per week, while forbidding his male concubines from speaking with other men.  I calculated that he could have 262 sexual partners each year, and then thought of the juniper bush.

We went back to our friends house for a delicious dinner, and then we watched the muscial comedy and drama television series that everyone is talking about.  It was cute.

Everyone else was either too tired or too drunk to do anything more that night.  Asaph, our affluent Gentile friend and I went up to the roof.  The house has simultaneous views of the ocean and the small bay between Fire Island and Long Island.  I got into the hot tub and looked up at the moon.  It was beautiful.

 

My camera revealed a shockingly high level of detail.

Not wanting to waste any of the weekend, Asaph and I decided to go out that night as well, to the Pavilion, which is just where Middle Tea is held.

 

It was fine.  I had a good time, but one can end up with a fair amount of social anxiety in those settings, since lots of pretty people were present, including someone from my old infamous gym who I think is one of the prettiest guys in all of New York.  I don't remember anything especially interesting happening, though.

The next morning I had arranged to meet a friend and correspondent to walk to Cherry Grove to attend an Episcopal Church service, even though I had lost my faith, owing to bedbugs.  We walked on the beach, as there would be fewer deer ticks.

We arrived a bit late to the extremely short service, which was held in an old-fashioned theater.  I was sweating profusely, which is normal and embarrassing.

Afterwards, as promised, I was taken to the home of a non-homosexual couple with a last name that made me think of adultery among the Puritans.  They are very involved with the church in Cherry Grove and were specifically thanked during the Prayers of the People.  They seemed like sturdy and kind people -- almost Midwestern, although they had slight tri-state accents.  We were accompanied by the celebrant from the service, who had driven up the day before from Virginia or somewhere Southern and who may have been African-American, their strong-jawed son, who seemed to be about my age, and also their young granddaughter, who was wearing a bright blue-green dress.  We walked past the colorful and slightly ramshackle cottages the hamlet is known for and finally arrived at their charming home.  The young girl asked her strong-jawed father why we were there, and he answered "for some drinks and fellowship".  The word "fellowship" sounded Methodist to me.

We sat down in the small front room that also included the kitchen and a toilet with no door, just a hanging curtain.  I thanked God that I didn't have to use it, since I have problems in that setting.  The patriarch got a bag filled with reddish crushed ice out of the freezer and proceeded to spoon it into glasses for us.  He topped each one with a preserved, sweetened cherry.  So this is a whiskey sour, I thought.  I didn't realize it would be frozen.  An elaborate assortment of cheeses, crackers, nuts, and olives was placed before us on a small table.  The young granddaughter looked at me and at my friend and correspondent and said, "You two look like boy twins."

The strong-jawed son's wife arrived.  Although this family mostly lived in Sayville, they had lived year-round in Cherry Grove for a number of years, and the strong-jawed son had gone to primary school in the fascist Fire Island village of Ocean Beach.  He said that there had been a map of Fire Island in the school, but that Cherry Grove was omitted, since it was the non-heterosexual community, and was best not talked about.  The matriarch said that she had tried to get them to add Cherry Grove to the map.  I tried to imagine living in such a small cottage on a thin strip of sand in the ocean in the middle of winter as a child.  It seemed quite exotic and pioneering.

I don't normally feel envy for non-homosexuals, especially in New York, but, sitting there looking at three generations of a charming family, all of whom seemed very all-American and clean-cut yet obviously liberal enough to live in a fairly zany non-heterosexual community, I wondered if I would ever be as happy as they were.  Probably not, I thought.  They were very active in the community and in numerous civic organizations, the strong-jawed son had a distinguished career in the military, and the young granddaughter was very talkative and smart and pretty and was dressed in an adorable manner.  They did not seem to be living lives of quiet desperation, but I obviously was only getting a snapshot.

I thought about how Woody Allen's character in Hannah and Her Sisters eventually decides that the simple pleasures of daily life make it worth living:

What if there is no God and you only go around once and that's it. Well, ya know, don't you wanna be part of the experience? You know, what the hell, it's not all a drag. And I'm thinking to myself, geeze I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And after who knows, I mean maybe there is something, nobody really knows. I know maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that's the best we have. And then I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.

But it is finally the prospect of becoming a father that seems to give Allen's character a reason to live.

The celebrant had to be getting back to Virginia or wherever Southern, so we got up and said our thanks and farewells.

We walked back along the beach, where someone had constructed a whimsical installation with the tape and poles used to protect endangered shorebirds.

Asaph made lunch while I admired a housemate's footwear and thought of Rome.

 

I did some more sitting around the pool and reading.  I didn't go running, owing to the ankle.

 

One of my housemates is an English literature professor, but I caught him at a weak moment.

 

It has happened to the best of us.  I love this housemate, however.

I did some laundry.

The next day I went out to the beach for a bit, but it was already starting to get cloudy.

 

 

It was the last day of the cultural summer.  The melancholy was fueled by the clouds and the cool wind.  Asaph wrapped himself up in a shroud and napped.

 

I did some more laundry.  "This is my twenty load weekend," I said, to anyone who would listen.  You could hear roller bags on the boardwalk all day, as people fled the island for the city.  The pangs of melancholy jabbed at my heart.

I made frozen blended drinks, despite the creeping chill.  I tried to get everyone to go out to one more Tea.  My Hungarian housemate was hard to convince.

 

After a blended drink, I made a list of all of the Hungarian words I could remember and showed it to him: tej, étterem, sör, bor, kijárat, arany, pók, csütörtök, szálloda.  He pretended to be impressed.

We headed out to the Teas.  They were not very crowded.  I decided that I really liked the Madonna song of the summer, although the lyrics seemed to be mocking me on such a sad day.  Everybody wants to party with you?  It's a celebration?  No more.

The wistfulness intensified with each parting ferry.  I wanted to stand atop the day and yell "stop"!

 

We headed back home through the frightening grass.  My dear friend Josh scared me so much with his very scary talk about this path, I had trouble walking home thereafter.  It was even more terrifying with so few people around.

The next morning on the ferry back to the mainland, I thought of the short story "In September, the Light Changes" by Andrew Holleran:

In September, the light changes -- as he crossed the bay, it was once more beginning to break, in long, beautiful shafts, through the clearing sky -- but not the human heart.

That story also contains this passage:

He had a friend who went home with lovers the way a bee attaches itself to a flower; it was the love between them his friend fed on, and wanted, it was their intimacy he wanted to witness, when, after feeding on the stranger, they inevitably turned to each other, and, their fantasies spent, they renewed their commitment in view of this third party.  "That's why lovers go home with third parties," he said.  "To make them remember they want each other more than anyone else."

I'm not so sure about that part.

religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation

 

I hadn't been staying in my apartment much recently, but after we returned from Israel, Asaph, his British step-step-sister (I still don't understand who this person was), and I all slept there for a week, since Asaph had loaned out his apartment to the Israeli family we had visited in Cincinnati last fall, who were in the process of moving back to Israel, through New York.  Asaph can never be accused of being a Sodomite: Now this was the sin of Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.

Well, I suppose he is overfed on occasion.

It was a bit cramped, but it was nice to be back in my place.  A few days after we had been there, I noticed a strange set of red bumps on my forehead.  At first I thought they were just acne pimples, but I very quickly had an ominous feeling about them.  I get ominous feelings about my body all of the time, of course, but this kind of rash was not in my regular set of revolving symptoms.  I examined the rest of my body and found more red bumps on my hands, and a group of them on my back.

I quickly got down to panicking.  My first thought was shingles, although I knew that the way this rash was presenting, as those of us who pretend to be in the medical field would say, was not at all consistent with shingles.  But shingles would be a good, dramatic, terrifying illness.  I thought I had remembered having some unexplained sensitivity of the skin on one of my arms at some point in the past few years, and that might have been a symptom of shingles too.

I examined the bumps more closely.  They seemed to come in groups of three.  I knew that this could mean two things: fleas or bedbugs, since these insects seem to need three meals a day, just like us, although I try to avoid eating dinner.  However, I had been around no furry animals (other than Asaph) and my apartment has no carpeting, and Centfocs and I had been warned that our building was infested with bedbugs when we moved in back in 2003, so bedbugs were the obvious suspects.  Also, I have a wooden bed, which is something that no one in 2009 New York (City) should have.

The problem was that Asaph and I had had a fight about my complaining about my non-stop ailments, and he had asked me to stop sharing them with him, unless I was calling from a hospital and had received a confirmed diagnosis from at least two doctors.  But a bedbug infestation would involve him too, and also his British step-step-sister, who was still staying in my place.  I managed to keep quiet for about 90 minutes, then I had to say something.

"So, you know how you'd like me to stop telling you about new illnesses I might have every five minutes?  Well, it's funny: I think I found some bedbug bites on me.  But bedbugs are technically not an illness, so this doesn't violate our agreement, although I also think I might have a new intestinal parasite, possibly from the hot tub at our Fire Island house, but we don't have to talk about that.  Yet."

He rolled his eyes.  I decided not to press the matter.

The next day, I got a call from Asaph in the afternoon.

"I know how you like it when you're right, so I thought I should tell you that my sister says she is covered in little bites."

We arranged to meet for dinner.

It was much worse than what I had.

 

It was terrible.  If I had been affected like that, I would have probably already dropped dead from fright and disgust.  It was like smallpox, or monkeypox, which has a much worse name, despite being a milder illness.  When I discovered that I had chickenpox at age 15, I woke up screaming (I somehow realized in my sleep, and my father was totally unsympathetic to me from that point on) and spent the next week in a dark room wearing sweatpants and sweatshirt and listening to Madonna's new hit single about how all phenomena are the result of material interactions and how maybe free will is an illusion, since everything is causally physically determined.  I looked at my pocked body only once, and then spent three hours crying and hiccuping while eating cookies composed of two chocolate wafers separated by cream filling.  I gained a considerable amount of weight from the chickenpox, an atypical symptom of the disease.

I called my landlord the next day.  Coincidentally, I had just received my renewal lease.  The rent remained the same as the previous year, but Asaph was insisting that I try to get it lowered, given the economic situation.  I was very reluctant to do this, since I have lost all ability to be assertive in financial matters, for no reason that I can identify.  When I first moved to New York, I would buy clothes, wear them for several weeks, and then return them for a full refund.  Now I would have trouble taking back a defective product.  I thought one was supposed to get braver with age.

The bedbug issue gave me some courage to ask about the rent reduction, although I did it in a half-hearted manner.  He told me that he would have to get back to me on that but that he would send an exterminator the next day.

I went to my apartment (the British step-step-sister found somewhere else to stay) and started to clean up a little bit, removing things from under my bed.  I found many bedbug skins, and then suddenly a live one appeared and tried to run from me.  I grabbed a pair of tweezers and put him in a little vial that I had but didn't remember acquiring.  I wanted to collect proof.  Also, I wanted to make sure he didn't come back to life and escape.

The exterminator arrived and had a look around.

"You shouldn't have cleaned up like this, and taken the mattresses off of the frames.  You scared them away."

He put on a World War I type fetishistic gas mask and went into the bedroom to start spraying poison.  I puttered around in the kitchen, trying to remove more clutter.  Then he came out and went to work on the day bed that I use as a couch, and also as the place where I sleep, since I avoid sleeping in the bedroom when I am home alone, since it seems sad.

"We need to leave now," said the exterminator.  "You should not inhale this.  But you scared them away, and I'm afraid they won't get exposed to the poison.  You should come back here and sleep, and they will come out of hiding, attracted by your breath.  Then they will walk through the poison on the floor."

"So I'm supposed to let them come and bite me, so they will die?"  I felt that it was like using a virgin to lure a vampire, although I'm not sure that vampires care about whether or not their victims are virgins, and I'm also not very virginal, at this point.  I am almost 40; I did the calculations.

"You can put the legs of the bed in metal bowls, that way they won't be able to climb up into the bed.  They can't climb on metal.  But they will at least walk through the poison."

Still, I couldn't imagine being able to sleep with the thought of an army of bedbugs marching towards me during the night.  I can barely sleep anyway, with everything.  How could I ever sleep again, thinking about those bugs crawling all over us and taking little bites of blood? 

I did some research on bedbugs.  It was horrifying.  They can live for over a year without a -- this term is bone-chilling -- blood meal.  They practice something called traumatic insemination, in which the male just pierces the female's abdomen and ejaculates directly into the abdominal cavity.  The female is left injured by this, and may die.  Evidently evolutionary biologists theorize that this practice evolved in response to something called the mating plug.

Nature is awful and there is no God, I thought.  Seriously, if the underwhelming Christian sites of the Galilee didn't trigger a crisis of faith, the terrible reality of the natural world and the meaninglessness of the struggle for survival for the sake of survival was enough to make me want to chop my head off.

Luckily, I had a distraction.  I did not renew my membership at my infamous gym, the gym that was a steamy romp of non-heterosexual sexuality, with a disc jockey.  I decided to join a gym near my apartment, and, coincidentally, near Asaph's apartment.  And, not coincidentally, Asaph decided to join it too.  And also it is near our jobs.  And this gym is cheaper, slightly, than my infamous gym.

Still, I was sad at first.  At my old gym, guys walked hand in hand through the locker room.  There were people working out in one-strap camouflage fashion singlets.  There were celebrities, including a Vanderbilt and a tragic quasi-suicidal/homicidal pornographic actor and plenty of other pornographic actors and fashion designers and transsexual nightlife hostesses.  The locker rooms were so dark you couldn't see inside the lockers.  The music was so loud you could barely talk.  There was a constant parade of beautiful guys talking and laughing and sometimes dancing on the gym floor, which I often accidentally referred to as the "dance floor".  The staff -- with the exception of the trainers -- were always surprisingly friendly.  The cleaning crew were cheerful, as if they had possibly been given methylenedioxymethamphetamine at the beginning of their shifts.  One male janitor routinely addressed other male gym-goers as papi, sometimes with an ay before.

My new gym was named after the town in which it began, a town in the state of New Jersey that is now full of former members of college fraternities.  It is clean and bright, and often quite empty.  The music is quiet and uninteresting.  I routinely see guys change in the locker room with a towel wrapped around their waist, to avoid stolen glances.  The janitorial staff appears to be quite angry and unhappy, which seems more normal.  The mouthwash provided in the locker room is not alcohol-based, which may reduce the risk of oral cancer, but which is more likely to be contaminated by bacteria and doesn't provide guaranteed fresh breath.  The median age of the membership is lower than at my infamous gym, probably because of the slightly lower price, although there are several refugees from the infamous gym, including someone who is renowned for his sensuality and charm and extensive artistic tatouage.

Still, it seemed a bit uninsipring compared to my previous infamy.  I was happy to be able to work out the body part of my choice, since trips to my infamous gym often ended in the frustrated decision to just do forearms or lower back or knees, since no other equipment was available.  But going to the gym no longer seemed very fun.  I had no excuse to leave the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, since now I lived, worked, and worked out there.  My infamous gym was the only place where I saw many friends and acquaintances, so an easy, regular social activity was now gone.

So Asaph suggested that we get a trainer.  We had two free training sessions, but he was interested in purchasing a package of sessions and getting a trainer to do the two of us at the same time.  He prefers when someone does the two of us at the same time.

Asaph looked around the gym and chose a trainer.  Talking to the trainer first was not necessary; Asaph knew what he wanted when he saw it.

 

(Please note that neither Asaph nor I took this photo of our trainer.)

It turned out that this trainer is Israeli.  I've been in situations where I had to deal with two Israelis at once, but I never had to pay for it.

Luckily, he is very, very nice -- maybe too nice, for a trainer.  He has had us do all sort of crazy things: not weights, not cardio, but odd exercises involving jumping and balancing and kettlebells -- weird Russian cast iron objects that look like cannonballs with handles.  Since I have terrible balance -- probably from some sort of chronic and slow-progressing neurological ailment -- I sometimes have to hold his arm, or his hand, to steady myself when jumping up onto tables or doing one-legged squats or whatever.  By the end of these training sessions I am exhausted, yet curiously left wanting more.  It lessens the pain felt from the loss of international disc jockeys and medium-end hair care products.

There has also been Fire Island. 

(This photo is atypically clothed and non-homosexual.)

The weekend after the extermination Asaph and I went to Fire Island, for the misnamed Ascension Party.  Modifying Nora Ephron's advice for young women regarding bikinis, I took my shirt off on the ferry ride over and didn't put it back on until the ferry ride back.  But I also went one step further, and wore swim briefs by the pool, on the beach, and at the Ascension Party itself.  I realize that this was taking things a bit too far.  Photographic documentation of the event has not been kind to me -- I still need to lose a good 40 or so vanity pounds.  But time is running out to do things like that -- indeed, it probably already has run out.  The only other person I saw wearing swim briefs was a notorious Brazilian nightlife personality, who later came up to me and whispered the word "whore" into my ear.

Still, I am a defender of the swim brief.  Even though I think that men over 30 shouldn't wear shorts in public, I think that men of nearly all ages can and should wear swim briefs at the beach and the pool.  I am not a fan of board shorts -- if anything, those should be worn by children and the young.

I enjoyed the Ascension Party, although it was relatively unremarkable.  The set design resembled an Egyptian tomb, perhaps to keep mortality on everyone's mind.  I had recently learned an obvious thing that I had never thought of: evolutionary biologists theorize that an organism's natural lifespan is roughly determined by the amount of time it would take for accidents or predators or other natural forces to kill it anyway.  So people can only live for 70-90 years because something will always kill them by then anyway -- genes favoring a longer life don't have any advantage if you're bound to fall off a cliff.

Someone known by Asaph a few years back had brought his 21-year-old non-homosexual nephew from Nebraska to the Ascension Party.  The nephew had never been to New York and had never been to a non-heterosexual event, but he fit right in.  He was shirtless and tattooed and had at least one piercing.  He was adorable, really, and made me think of the quote by Francis Bacon: Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

I took a day off from work and stayed on the island for most of Monday.  I walked over to where Tony Rizzuto was staying for the week.  I like my house, but it is relatively ramshackle and is in the process of biodegrading into the dunes.  But Tony's house was another world -- a world of contemporary housewares, sliced heirloom tomatoes, prestige linens, and a signature shoegaze indie surf pop rock soundtrack.  Tony showed me the printed menu for the week and invited me to stay for lunch.  I was concerned that my presence would throw off the delicate balance of the house, so I made sure to take very small portions and to help clean up as much as possible.  Still, with the sun shining onto the plunge pool as we enjoyed post-lunch coffee in cups with mandatory saucers and the cream decanted into an 19th century milk bottle, chill-out music tootling in the background, I realized how aesthetically inferior my life was, and once again resolved to drink only sparkling water with sliced Meyer lemons served in Aino Aalto glassware with bespoke ice cubing from first-melt glacial sources.

As I reshirted on the ferry ride back to Long Island, I thought of something that I had read by Portuguese behavioral neurologist  António Damásio:

Pain and pleasure are not twins or mirror images of each other, at least not as far as their roles in leveraging survival. Somehow, more often than not, it is the pain related signal that steers us away from impending trouble, both at the moment and in the anticipated future. It is difficult to imagine that individuals and societies governed by the seeking of pleasure, as much as or more than by the avoidance of pain, can survive at all.

It was a Monday afternoon, and the ferry was packed, since many others had decided to sleep in on the day after the misnamed Ascension party.  When we arrived at the dock, there was only one bus to take people to the station, so 75% of those present missed the train connection.  New York never disappoints: supply always understrips demand, no matter what you do.  Markets remain in perfect disequilibrium.

What's the point of New York? I thought, again.  Maybe the lessons learned from having one's blood sucked.

I returned to my apartment a week after the extermination.  I felt like William Tecumseh Sherman surveying the battlefield after a bloody victory.  There was a lot of collateral damage: cockroaches, wood lice (!?), centipedes, and other unidentified arthropods lay dead on the floor, on the counter, and in the sink.  I went into the bedroom.  Although the exterminator had not found any live bedbugs and advised me to come back there to sleep to lure them to death, I found over ten corpses near the headboard, which I had detached from the frame.  I started to examine the mattress, gradually lifting up one of the folds.  There was a live one!  It tried to make a run for it, but I forgot all vows to show compassion for all living beings, and I sprayed it with the chlorine bleach-based cleaning fluid I was holding in my hand.  It reared up angrily on its little legs, and I grabbed in and plopped it into the vial where I was collecting all of the bedbug corpses.

How can there be a God? I wondered.

Asaph's attractive accountant (Asaph picks accountants the same way he picks personal trainers) and boyfriend came out to Fire Island for a working weekend.

 

The weather was bad on Saturday, owing to a passing hurricane, so I compulsively cleaned the house while the others worked.  It was a bit challenging; I felt like The Woman in the Dunes (砂の女).  During my freshman year in college, I left a note for my roommates telling them that I was not a heterosexual and then went to see that movie.  I don't recommend this combination of activities.

We went to Low and Middle Teas.  It was like a less crowded version of my infamous gym.

We didn't go out that night, we just made dinner and sat in the hot tub.  We had promised people that we would walk to Cherry Grove to attend a Fire Island version of the fashion bear party that I used to attend, but by the time we looked at the clock, it was 2:00.  Soon it will be the case that no one wants me at their special fashion bear parties, and I will look back with regret at all of the lost opportunities.

The next day the weather was much better.

The surf was still rough.  If one just observes non-living natural processes, like waves and tides and hurricanes, their elegance can lead one to speculate that God is still a possibility.  But when you look deeper and observe the living world, it's a total bloodbath.  The message of a movie like Ponyo (崖の上のポニョ) is sweet, but a total lie: the balance of nature is a constant state of war.  At least there was one brief scene in that movie where Ponyo, in fish form, ate another cute little swimming critter.

I wondered what grotesque slithering vermin were hiding in these holes.

 

I couldn't tell if this nightmarish froth was natural or the result of man-made pollution.

We walked to Tea.  You could already see that the light had changed.

We decided to stay Sunday night, but as the summer was nearly over, I couldn't help but be overcome by melancholy as I sat watching the lights swirl on the floor of the Blue Whale.

I was reminded of the very excellent logo of the Icelandic national television channel Sjónvarpið. 

If we hadn't drawn on the Greek, maybe we would call television seewarp, like the Icelanders.

At least I still have the consolation of etymology, I thought. 

Luckily Jimbo, from Washington (the capital), was still on the Island.

We spoke with a friend, a university professor, who was in the process of producing children through gestational surrogacy.  He told us that it cost $120,000.  I thought of Ricky Martin and the recent photos I had seen  of him and his bespoke children.  If only I had gotten a woman pregnant as a youth, I thought, although that would have required that I be an entirely different person.

The island was relatively quiet.  I had always assumed that I was missing out on a lot by going home Sunday night.

We woke up early the next morning, probably my least favorite thing to do in the world, apart from eating undercooked ground meat.

There were deer scavenging through the garbage as we walked to the ferry.  I felt an overwhelming urge to shoot them.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a dead deer with an arrow sticking out of it lying on the boardwalk? I thought.  That would help reset the balance of nature and keep the moon from crashing into the ocean, as it almost did in Ponyo.

 

I looked at the framed sign from the days when the residents of Fire Island Pinès were trying to defend themselves from the non-heterosexual invasion.

"The bikini type bathing apparel tends to lower the moral standard of a community."

I thought it was interesting that there was no need to resort to religion to attack non-heterosexuals back in the olden days.  Now it's the only reason anyone can think of.

this world is the prison of the believers and the paradise of the unbelievers

For the remainder of the trip, I just wanted to lie on the beach, swim in the Mediterranean, go on an occasional run, eat in outdoor cafes, dance in crowded clubs, take naps, and watch the beautiful people go by.  In short, I wanted a Semitic Spain: una España sin carne de cerdo.

Unfortunately, Asaph had a schedule!  We woke up late the next day (around 10:30), and I only had time to run and get an ice coffee and a croissant before we had to head out for a tour of Israeli Army Radio (גלי צה"ל).  Asaph had arranged this tour because I routinely listen to their popular music station, Galgalatz (גלגל"צ -- an acronym, because they absolutely love acronyms in Hebrew) over the internet while I am at work.  One of Asaph's sisters had worked for this radio station during her obligatory military service, and she made history by being the first person to transfer out of the station to another job.  Normally, working at Israeli Army Radio is extremely desirable.  But Asaph's sister is quite special.

We drove to Jaffa.

There was an archaeological dig in the middle of the street as we walked to the station.

 

There was a banner in Arabic that said something about Jerusalem.  I thought it might say something like "One Jerusalem" or "United Jerusalem" or "Jerusalem First" or something.  I couldn't imagine Arabs having put up a sign promoting Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, and I couldn't imagine a sign promoting Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem being allowed to remain on the fence around an archaeological dig being conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority.  So the sign was a mystery.

 

Maybe in a few years I will be able to read it.  I was afraid to ask any Arab friends what it said, since it would probably upset them.

There are still some Arabs left in Jaffa, although it is getting gentrified and therefore increasingly Jewish.

The street where Israeli Army Radio is located is not gentrified, however.

 

We called the person who had been arranged to guide us, and he came out to let us in.  He was very tall and fair, although his last name implied Moroccan ancestry.

 

He led us inside.  The overwhelming majority of persons were very young and were wearing olive-drab uniforms.  Some had guns.  It was our guide's last day in the army, so he was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and backless sandals.  We sat in an office while he got some last-minute signatures for his discharge.  There were several serious girls in uniforms making phone calls in an exasperated manner.  I thought about the global problem of child soldiers.

Our guide was finally ready to give us a tour.  He was very friendly and funny.  It seemed like he had done these tours often, since he was very well prepared.  He went into a lot of detail; Asaph interrupted him and told him that we didn't need so much information.  I did learn that the only other country with a similar military radio station is South Korea, a fact that I will have limited opportunities to share.

He led us through the building.  It was quite chaotic and messy.  He joked about this, and about how the most popular radio station in Israel is basically run by children.  Occasionally one saw an un-uniformed adult, however.

We went into the studios of the popular music station, where the presenter was saying farewell to her listeners, as it was her last day in the army as well.

  

I recognized her voice.

Asaph noted that there were some religious soldiers -- that is, soldiers wearing skullcaps.  Our guide told us that there had been efforts to bring in more minorities: religious, Druze, etc.  I thought about how angry many New York non-heterosexual new atheists would be to hear religious people described as a minority worthy of affirmative action.  They would rant about invisible sky monsters or whatever term they are now using to mock religious belief and practice.

We went to the room where the music was digitized.  There were some soldiers sitting at computers doing the work.  A very young man in uniform, who we learned was in charge of music programming, talked to us about how the station can only play so-called hits but is also in the position of deciding which songs become so-called hits.  He noted that some recording artists resent the fact that a bunch of kids decide what becomes a hit in Israel.  The young man in uniform kept staring at the cross around my neck as he talked to me.  He was very friendly and kept talking to us for some time, showing us the racks of compact discs and answering questions we hadn't asked. 

As we left, Asaph provided some sordid speculation on the motivation for this young man's friendliness.  I though he was just being a nice boy.

Our guide led us outside.  He pointed to my crucifix necklace.  "I can see that you are not Jewish.  Why do you listen to [Israeli Army Radio]?" he asked.  I didn't have a satisfactory answer, other than "it's interesting".  I also said that I liked Israeli pop music, even though it is a bit on the sad side.  He agreed.  We thanked him and wished him well on his upcoming year of travel in India, a typical path for young Israelis.  India is one of the few countries that is slightly friendly to Israel, using a the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend calculation.

We decided to go to the Jaffa flea market (שוק פשפשים) to have lunch at a cutesy restaurant.  We took a seat outdoors.  Asaph ordered us a large pitcher of lemonade.

 

He found it to be too sour.

 

I ordered a gentrified version of sabih (סביח‎).

 

We walked around the stalls but didn't buy anything.  I am a very picky shopper, and also cannot bargain, so it wasn't the place for me to be buying anything.

Asaph had some business to do, so I was on my own for the rest of the day.  It was already Thursday, the last day in the Israeli workweek.  I had already been to Tel Aviv so many times that I started noticing and making comments about the progress of public works projects.  I was happy that they were finally renovating the Habima Theater complex, and that they had finally finished redoing our section of Ibn Gvirol Street, the street that Israelis don't pronounce correctly, since the dagesh is not generally used in writing, so בּ looks like ב, and the ibn (ابن) which is Arabic for ben (בן) ends up coming out as evan.  It's a real problem.

 

I never learned how to pronounce the street on which we were actually staying, however.

 

I have never acquired a taste for the Slavic languages, despite some half-hearted attempts at Croatian, like learning the word they invented in the 1990s for airplane: zrakoplov.

I liked our apartment.

 

It had a large balcony.

  

I called my friend Paul, with whom I went to college, who was living in Tel Aviv for the summer.  We arranged to go to the beach.  The non-heterosexual beach is right next to the sex-segregated religious beach.

 

We waited until it was later in the day and a little bit cooler.  It was still sweltering hot.  The non-heterosexual beach in Tel Aviv is pretty filthy.  Cigarette butts emerge from the sand to jump up onto your towel.  It's quite disgusting.  Still, I love the Med, which is the fancy, Tyler-Brule way to refer to the Mediterranean.  There were some attractive beach-goers, although the crowd is always a bit trashy there, like the sand.  It's nice to be able to walk straight into the warm water, unlike in Fire Island, where the water is much colder, yet the beach much cleaner.

You could hear the lifeguard at the religious beach screaming orders and warnings at the bathers.  I noted that it was a women's day, but that the lifeguard was male.  Later I learned that the lifeguards' union in Tel Aviv is extremely powerful, and they would never let the religious dictate the sex of the lifeguard on duty.  I also learned that many of the women bathers, despite being in an all-female environment, go into the water fully clothed, so they end up drowning a lot.  Or, almost drowning, until saved by a male lifeguard who is a member of the powerful Tel Aviv lifeguards' union.

Later that night Asaph and I went to Asaph Ben-Artzi's place.  We were greeted by his bomb-sniffing ferret.  We gave him the cheese we had bought in Safed, and he offered us wine and the narghile.  I declined, even though I am not anti-smoking (although I am fervently anti-littering), since it was apple-flavored tobacco.  Even though flavored tobaccos have a long history in the Middle East, I am so disgusted by fruit-flavoring in general (see my one-man crusade against the abomination called raspberry vinaigrette), that I was afraid to try it, lest I vomit.  I just had wine.  Asaph Ben-Artzi had another non-heterosexual male guest, who was expecting a child with a non-heterosexual woman.  He couldn't drink the wine because it wasn't kosher, so he smoked the narghile and drank a beer.

Asaph Ben-Artzi told us many stories from his extensive military service.  He is a complicated person, since he is extremely pro-Israel yet sometimes identifies as a Bedouin.

He had a humorous shirt from his military unit that I couldn't understand.  I wondered if the stories about Jägermeister's Nazi origins were true.

The friend who was expecting a child left, and a friend who was moving to New York to get an advanced law degree arrived.  He and Asaph Ben-Artzi cuddled on the sofa. 

Asaph Ben-Artzi told us a story about how his unit had rescued a group of Palestinian non-heterosexuals who were about to be executed by Muslim fundamentalists.  I wondered if it was true.

Asaph the Younger brought up the subject of moving to Israel with a non-Jewish spouse, for some reason.  Asaph Ben-Artzi said that the non-Jewish same-sex partners of Israelis were given residency rights if they moved to Israel.  I asked what would happen if the partner was from Syria, Iran, or Lebanon.

"Well, if it was an opposite-sex partner, no, since we have a law that prevents spouses from enemy states from getting residency rights, but if it was a same-sex partner, they could apply for asylum," said Asaph the Older.  I wondered why Asaph the Younger had brought up this odd topic.

We left and went out a bit, since it was Thursday night.  We ran into a guy who we had met last year.  He was a bit of an ars (عرص/ערס‎), Israeli slang for a lower-class male of Mizrahi/Sephardic origin who wears tight clothing and prominent jewelry.  They resemble the people we call New Jerseyans, although it is hard to tell in the non-heterosexual context, as these cultural characteristics are associated with masculinity, and most non-heterosexuals try to exaggerate their masculinity as much as they can, when they aren't exaggerating their femininity.  For example, I wear a crucifix necklace and have a tattoo, things that would make my Presbyterian ancestors commit ritual suicide, and possibly homicide too.

His pectoral muscles were bursting out of his button-front shirt, and I could see several chains nestled amidst his thick chest hair.

"What's up, man!" he screamed, punching me.

Later he asked me how old I was.  "Wow, we are 20 years apart, that's incredible, man," he said, shaking his head.

"I said 39!  Did you really think I was 49?!"  I was alarmed.

"I don't know, man," he said.

I found out that his mother was Tunisian and his father was Dacian.  This seemed correct.

The next morning Asaph went to take a yoga class with some of his siblings.  I puttered around, and then foolishly tried to go for a run in the mid-day heat.  It was a disaster.  I barely made it to the Yarkon River.  Later I learned that there had been a terrible tragedy in 1997 when four Australian athletes who were in Israel for the Maccabiah Games fell into the river and died, not from drowning, but from exposure to toxic chemicals in the water.  This river continues to flow into the Mediterranean, not far from the non-heterosexual beach.

Coincidentally, the Maccabiah Games were going on while we were in Israel.

Asaph's brother Amos came to pick me up on his motorcycle.  I thought he was picking me up in a car, so I was not dressed appropriately.  Luckily, my backless sandals did not fall off.

He had a sticker on his bike that related to motorcyclist rights.  I recognized the word for "enough".  Israelis combine the Hebrew words for "enough" and "already" in an obvious Yiddishism.

Asaph's oldest sister had abandoned the yoga class early, so Amos, she, and I went to get something to drink.  I had a delicious icy lemonade with mint.

Asaph and the other brother finished their yoga class.  I presented the other brother with a bottle of alcohol-based antiseptic mouthwash, since he had given me one from his car the first night we were in Jerusalem.  "You have such a Polish mother for a boyfriend," said the other brother to Asaph.  I never learned what that meant.

We walked around in the heat for a while until we found somewhere to eat.  Finally, a satisfactory option was located.  We waited for Asaph's youngest sister to arrive.  She was driving the car that had been hit by the bus.  Amos and Asaph's oldest sister stayed outside in the sweltering heat for a while, to smoke.

I wondered if Amos was hungover.  It was probable.

As we were eating, I realized that we were next to the Eden Cinema, the first cinema in Tel Aviv.  I believed that I had read about this cinema in the book, One Palestine, Complete, a book I recommend for understanding everything about Israel.  I stole this book from the wife of my college roommate.

It was sad to see it empty.  Signs of the new Tel Aviv were visible sprouting up behind it. 

"In the 1980s, we didn't even really have restaurants in Israel," said Asaph's oldest sister, who is my age.  "When you wanted to go out for a special occasion, you had to go to a Chinese restaurant located in a gas station.  That's where you went on your birthday."   It sounded awful.

We all got in the damaged car and drove back to the apartment.  "You should try to get some money out of the bus company because of the accident," said Asaph's older brother, to me.

"He won't, and doesn't know how to do things like that anyway," said Asaph.

"No, I'm a Christian," I said.  "I don't know how to make money.  I only know how to give money away.  To the poor." 

Asaph had to go meet his father for sabbath dinner.  He had to drive a bit up north, where, coincidentally, our friend Alfred Pasha, who was spending several months in Israel and who had a friend (Jewish, with family in an illegal-according-to-the-United-Nations settlement in the West Bank) visiting from New York, needed to go for sabbath dinner.  Asaph picked them up and then dropped me off by our place.  I watched the three of them drive away.  I thought about the concept of freedom, and what it meant to me.

I called my friend Paul, who agreed to meet me by the sea.  He was going to attend a very touchy-feely Reform sabbath service held on the new boardwalk along the Med.

I walked over to Mare Nostrum.

I watched the sun set and thought of Phoebus Apollo.  And Aten.

 

He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.  Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.  The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.

I saw Paul's group.  They made me think of penguins on an ice floe.

Things were ending as I arrived.  It was the only place in Israel where I saw women wearing skullcaps, something you see all of the time at the non-heterosexual synagogue (συναγωγή) in New York.  When a Turkish friend who went to graduate school at Brandeis saw women wearing skullcaps, he couldn't believe it.

Paul was wearing a shirt that I had to think about for a while until I got the joke.

We ate dinner at one of the new restaurants by the water.  We were served an absurd Israeli version of a mojito.

Later we walked along the new boardwalk.  We saw an Arab family, something unusual in Tel Aviv.  "It's nice that they've come out to see what we did with their country," said Paul.  I love Paul.

There were new glowing panels in the walkway.

I think you were supposed to go to a website or type something into your mobile phone or something.

You could see the lights of ships far out in the sea, spaced at regular intervals.  "That's the navy, just making sure we don't get any more uninvited visitors from Lebanon," he said.

Later Asaph and I went out to a bar with Alfred's friend from New York (Alfred would not go out on the sabbath) and Boaz, who borrowed a communal kibbutz vehicle to come down to Tel Aviv, according to his needs.   A young person with a botched eyebrow piercing started talking to me when the others went outside to smoke marijuana, something I can't do, since it is very confusing.  I would later regret being friendly to this person, since he was an annoying presence for the entire night.

We decided to go on to a big non-heterosexual dance club.  "Can I come with you?" said the irritating young person with the bleeding eyebrow.

It's a free country, I thought, unless you are Palestinian or from an enemy state.

The club was extremely packed with shirtless young non-heterosexual Israelis, many in extreme stages of drunkenness.  Asaph unwisely decided to order us drinks.  I learned two years ago never to attempt to order drinks in an Israeli club, unless you have 90 minutes to spare, or more.

There was an outdoor area, where people went to smoke cigarettes.  There were drunk young things staggering around everywhere.  Alfred's friend from New York commented on this.  "It's the Middle East," I said.  "They have low tolerance."

Later we ran into an Israeli intellectual who is my age who we had met in New York while he was teaching at an Ivy League school.

"What do you think of this?" he asked. 

"It's fine," I said.  "It's interesting."

"This atmosphere must rankle Asaph's upper-class sensibilities," he said.

Asaph is upper class? I thought.  This was news to me.  His family wasn't rich.

"I don't really understand the class structure here in Israel," I told the intellectual.  "In the same way I wouldn't be able to discern the castes in a group of Indians, or the social hierarchy if I was visiting the Maasai of Kenya."

I knew that the original Zionist founders were from Russia but that now the newish Russian arrivals were quite looked-down-upon.  Their Jewishness was often called into question, and they were seen as being involved in organized crime and prostitution.  When someone once mentioned that they had gone to a strip club in Israel, I had asked where they were able to get Israeli strippers, and the response was: Russians.  Another person told me that there hadn't been crime in Israel until the Ethiopians and the new Russians had arrived.  Someone had once told me that the Moroccans were stereotyped as arsim, although I had met many people of Moroccan descent who were very proper and educated and not at all like people from New Jersey.  Like our friend Nadav, although he looks as if he would be a rowdy tough.  I think he is only rough and tough in certain specific situations.

Asaph's family was mostly of German background, so maybe this was what put him on the top of the social order, despite middle-class incomes.  Since money is pretty much the sole determinant of class in the United States at this point (see: reality television), it's hard to orient oneself to other systems.  I would have a lot of trouble in medieval Japan, for example, where farmers were supposedly on top.

The young person with the botched eyebrow piercing had been hovering in the background all of this time.  I had been politely ignoring him, occasionally flashing him a smile but not bringing him into any conversations, since he was obviously awful.

He leaned in to me.  "You don't have to be afraid; I'm not going to rape you," he said.  No you are most certainly not, I thought.  I smiled politely again.

Someone to whom I had been introduced earlier came up to me.  "I wish I had some [gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid]," he said.  I was sure the botched-eyebrow kid did as well, for raping purposes.

Even later we went to a mostly deserted other club where I was introduced to a non-Jewish German who had moved to Israel for a boyfriend.  He told me that he was drunk for the first time in many months.

"I am very anti-Israel," he said.  "I'm a real Nazi.  Everything happens for a reason."  He gave me a knowing smile.

I was surprised and nonplussed.

The next morning we were supposed to have Saturday brunch (which is like Sunday brunch, for us, unless you are religious) with an Israeli friend of Asaph's and his non-Jewish boyfriend who had moved to Israel.  "I really want you to meet and talk to this boyfriend," said Asaph, for some strange reason.

I was slightly woozy from the night before, but we managed to make it back to the area by the sea where I had had dinner with Paul.  It was boiling hot.

We greeted the Israeli and his foreign Gentile boyfriend, who were sitting outdoors with their two dogs.  They had bred their bitch to have puppies, and kept one.  We discussed the care of the dogs.

"It's easy in the first few weeks after they are born, since you don't even have to clean up after them.  The mother licks their anus and they poop into her mouth, and she licks their penis and they pee into her mouth," said the Gentile boyfriend.  Suddenly, I was in love with this guy.

I couldn't place his accent.  He spoke like a native speaker of English, yet there was an unrecognizable layer of foreignness.  "Where are you from?" I asked.

"Ireland," he said.

Ireland!  I love the Irish accent.  It is pretty much the best accent in the English-speaking world, if you exclude the few Irish who speak in the stereotypical leprechaunish manner.  When I went to Ireland with Centfocs and his mother back in 2003, I was surprised by the accent of the majority of the people.  It was clean and crisp and clear.  I can't really stand the accent of most Americans, with the possible exception of Diane Sawyer.  Apart from a few posh English persons like Joanna Lumley and those with extreme regional accents, I also can't stand to listen to English people -- the so-called Estuary English of Victoria Beckham and her ilk is absolutely nauseous.  The Scottish accent is fine, but it's like listening to non-native speakers -- it's like hearing Swedes or Latvians speak English.  And despite my love of quasi-antipodean actresses like Naomi (נעמי) Watts and Nicole Kidman, I don't really care for the way they talk, except in certain specific situations.

The way this Gentile spoke was wonderful.

Several us ordered something on the menu that was listed as "eggs with tomatoes", even in Hebrew, and we were all annoyed when it ended up just being shakshouka (שקשוקה‎).  We got more information about this Israeli guy and his amazing Irish boyfriend.  They had met in New York, but Israel was the only place where they could legally be together.  The Irish guy said he had arrived in Israel, and after four months in an ulpan (אולפן), paid for by the State of Israel, he could speak Hebrew fluently.  He had a job in financial services where he spoke Hebrew all day long, and he even spoke Hebrew at home with the boyfriend.  I was shocked.  Although he was in his twenties, I was still amazed that he had learned Hebrew so quickly.  And I couldn't believe that he and his boyfriend had switched the language of their relationship.  I thought of the Japanese violist and the Greek Cypriot soprano whom I had known as a child: they lived in Ohio and spoke Italian at home, since they had met in Rome.

After brunch we all walked over to the non-heterosexual beach with their dogs.  The dogs loved swimming.  Asaph kept telling me to ask the Gentile about life in Israel, for some reason.  The Gentile said that he had had some problems -- during a time when he was unemployed, he arrived at the government-run employment center one day to be told that, since he was registered as a Christian, they couldn't help him that day, as it was a Christian holiday.  I thought of how furious an American or British new atheist would be to be registered as a Christian against their will.  I remembered an exercise we had done in my Arabic class: we had to fill out a scholarship application from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  You had to list your religion.  "None" was not an option, just as you couldn't leave your nationality blank.

Their dogs loved to roll in the sand after being in the water.

 

When we were ready to leave, they went to wash the seawater off their dogs.

As I looked over at the Gentile, I thought: that dog is so cute.

 

That's what I thought.

Asaph told me that later that night we would be having dinner with the most famous person in Israel.  Tzipi Livni? Benjamin Netanyahu? Shimon Peres? I asked.

"No, the most famous person inside of Israel," Asaph said, correcting himself.

It was a famous non-heterosexual popular music singer.  Asaph had known him several years ago.  In spite of my interest in Israeli pop music, I wasn't much of a fan of this singer, as his music was a bit too melancholy, even for me.  He had one slightly electronic song that I liked.

As the time for dinner approached, I got increasingly nervous, since I am very intimidated by celebrity.  What if he doesn't show up?  What if I make a fool of myself?  What will we talk about?  I was a wreck.

"Drink some wine," said Asaph.

We had arranged to meet him at a slightly fancy restaurant named after the first Jewish High Commissioner of Palestine.  He was supposedly bringing his new American boyfriend.

"He's not going to show up," I said as we sat down at the bar.  "I bet this is just a prank."

"Order another drink," said Asaph.

Amazingly, he really showed up.  We ended up having a pleasant dinner, although the non-heterosexual popular music celebrity and his American boyfriend both seemed very tired and didn't talk much.  Asaph and I spoke continuously and nervously throughout the meal.  The non-heterosexual popular music celebrity nodded and smiled politely.  I wondered if he was interested in anything I had to say.  Many say that celebrities are only interested in themselves, and, since I didn't know enough about him to make him the subject of the conversation, perhaps he found the conversation quite tedious.  However, he did laugh when I told him about the time that Asaph asked me to "lower the restaurant" when he wanted me to move a suitcase out of the way of the air conditioner vent.  It is evidently quite funny if you speak Hebrew better than I do.

I didn't like my food.   The American boyfriend and I both ordered an anti-Semitic dish: lobster ravioli in a light cream sauce, with chestnuts.

Occasionally people would come up to the table to speak with the non-heterosexual popular music celebrity in a familiar manner, ignoring the rest of us.  This is what it's like to eat with celebrities, I thought.  I wondered if we would be photographed for an Israeli celebrity gossip magazine, but we weren't.

The meal finished relatively successfully.  We said our goodbyes, and Asaph and I decided to walk to a non-heterosexual party held every Saturday night (which is like Sunday night, for us) at a bar on the beach.  We were going to meet Alfred Pasha there.

As we walked by a mosque, the sleeve of the shirt I had purchased at the Muji store and to which I had developed an unhealthy attachment, in the Buddhist sense, got caught on a palm tree and tore.  The shirt was ruined.

I wondered if this was a message from the God of the Muslims.  In any case, I was wearing a tank top underneath, so I just said goodbye to my lovely Japanese shirt and tossed it in a trash can.

We arrived at the beach party.  There were arsim galore. 

We had a great time.  As we walked back to the apartment, I saw a bat. 

I hoped that I hadn't brought any of the fungus that is killing all of the bats in the United States with me to Israel.

The next day, our last, we went back to the beach again.  More cigarette butts popped up out of the sand to cover my towel.  I tried to analyze the class structure of the beach-goers.  An obese older man started to talk to me.  He was from Greece, and he had been teaching Greek history and classical literature at Hebrew University.  "I am sorry that I have let my body go," he apologized to me.  "I used to be very fit."  I nodded in sympathy, although this struck me as a very odd and sad thing to say to a stranger on a non-heterosexual beach.

Asaph was talking with a group of his friends some distance away.  He bellowed for me to come join them, since he doesn't like for me to talk to people he doesn't find attractive.  "I saw that you needed to be rescued," he said.  Did I?

We stood in the water near a group of swarthy, muscular men who were having an animated conversation.  Asaph was listening intently.  "They just said, 'Sometimes Ashkenazi guys are good in bed, but not usually,'" he told me.  I guess this was the same as in the United States: everyone wants to have sex with the guido, and not the white so-called Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

At the non-heterosexual beach, people usually stood around or floated in groups in the water, talking and laughing, or shouting and cackling.  Sometimes they had inflatable rafts, something I always identified with the lower classes.  I liked to swim out as far as possible, by myself.  The water was deep and clean.  I loved the feeling of being enveloped and rocked by the cool sea.  I imagined myself floating off to some Greek island, away from the cigarette butts and the screaming, away to a peaceful place of clear blue water and sky and hot white sun and sand, and no sound but the gentle lapping of the waves. 

Then I was called back to the shore.

I looked wistfully at the beach as we left.

We returned to New York that night.