^Bruce Lee
Acknowledging: apparently I’ve been on a one-post-per-couple-years schedule since the Pandy hit. I make no premature promises, but will nonetheless imply that things are likely changing. That is: I’m freed up from some of my tethers, and expect to be back for as long as I’m still having fun with y’all.
Fall’s yielded unexpected pitfalls, plot twists, and treats. Not least of which: perhaps my favorite session that I’ve ever had to date. A further affirmation that I do this job if and only if it feeds me [physically and psychologically, not just monetarily]. I ain’t telling which session it was, Tantalus! But I invite anyone reading to try and top it. ;)
Also some travel…
Michigan: “Empty your cup…”
A bucolic change-up from what’d lately been my usual. Tubed down the Huron, got peed on by a toad, lunged after a frisbee waist-deep in minnows, quested for fairy doors, carved pumpkins, grilled steaks, read a fabulous novel on loan from a friend, went to a corn maze and cider mill for the first time [an autumnal childhood experience that’d completely skipped me till now].
Also: Baby goats, spider collectives, warm Studio Ghibli rain, target practice [not bad of a first attempt at left-hand-only], Frita Batitos, a car-less horse-laden island, roaming the Grand Hotel [The Shining meets Wes Anderson, with a dash of mad tea party], a widening of perspective and relaxing of strongly held assumptions, some existential dread anesthetized by pervasive sweetness.
New York: “…so that it can be filled.”
Spent a morning shaping a fresh mouthguard to my teeth, choking down rotisserie chicken and creatine, in preparation for the long-awaited showdown that would ultimately fall through. Definitely a letdown; hopefully recoverable. So it goes.
Nonetheless: did 100 calf raises, 100 squats, and so on, with a 200-lb man on my back—a delightful human being whose offer to treat me to Korean barbecue was happily accepted. For my first lift-and-carry in years, I felt pretty damn good [and discovered an excellent less-than-a-dollar-a-minute massage place the following day].
Other vignettes: my first tastes of sparkling red wine and salted butter coffee; a Javanese feast; talking to strangers on a subway platform; running around with other very lost strangers on a different subway platform; an acute slapstick [semi-musical] Lord-of-the-Flies train-car stranding between yet different subway platforms; uni and bone marrow gnocchi; a house glutted in anachronistic science oddities, movie set offloads, Jetsons basement stages, stairs with eyes; a knee-jerk decision to ditch froo-froo kitsch in favor of the shadowy corner of a dive [in retrospect: contextually essential]; tonics that tasted like "wringing out a wet movie theater seat" and "a watered-down apology", cocktails that taste like "your dad is proud of you"; an all-nighter pre-red-eye packing-up in the cozy familiar atmosphere of one of my very oldest friends.
And—in what is probably a first over a span of sixteen-ish years of periodic Big Apple visits—didn’t manage to see a single rat.
Watching:
The Pitt
Chernobyl
Any talks by Benjamin Bratton that I come across
Reading:
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
An excessive quantity of Python code