Blogging, like walking a tightrope, is best done without looking down. Otherwise you glance down and have a second thought or two. You wonder what the hell made you think that tiptoeing over a canyon was such a bright idea, when the world is full of less ridiculous activities. You…well, this metaphor is running out of steam, so let’s drop kick it and move on.

Moving to another city solves certain problems. Going from 80 billion people to 700,000 is a move in the right direction, as far as I’m concerned. Getting my dog back. Buying a car with a moon roof and getting a pleasurable sunburn on my scalp. Also nature, which I sort of dig. While I was gone the landlord had my back deck redone, and now I wander the aisles of Bay Area garden centers at all hours of the day and night, simply because I can. A pot of lavender is going gangbusters below my bedroom window, next to something called Kangaroo’s Paw, which hails from Australia, in case you were wondering. They’ve taken up residence beside an assortment of cacti that the previous tenant (my Ex) left behind, a dozen neglected cacti which I refer to as the Bad News Bears of the succulent community. Their health and well-being have become my personal mission. Blame it on the two years I spent holed up in my Upper West Side cave. The pendulum, it swung. This is what happens when people move from the East Coast to San Francisco. Investment bankers turn into yoga instructors, art directors become dog walkers, software designers join a landscaping crew, and everyone turns a bit soft. Perhaps you might even call them ineffectual, in the grand machinations of capitalism and power, but then you’d be a cynic, and you’d get run out of town.

But certain problems are loyal companions, no matter the distance you cover. Tennessee Williams had what he called “the blue devils.” This was long before the days of Paxil and Zoloft, and I’ve come to prefer his term over the clinical term of depression. The blue devils suggest an active, almost supernatural force, dogging you despite your best efforts, a far more malicious and tenacious foe than depression, which only suggests an emotional wet blanket, one you could cast off with a little effort.

The blue devils dogged me in Manhattan, but surrounded by a billion overambitious people and faced with a hundred books to read, I could only give them the most cursory attention. Now, in the relative peace and quiet of Bay Area garden center aisles, without a job or academic routine to tether me to the ground, the blue devils are throwing me a party, sort of a Burning Man of the Endless Night. I wake up every morning thinking, “what’s the point?”

I’ve faced more mornings like that than I could count throughout my life, so by now it’s less troubling than, well, dull. It’s so boring, thinking “what’s the point?” Take it from me, it’s not the kind of mental attitude that gets you invited to parties or the social circles of the chronically content, the bastards who think they’re doing you a favor by suggesting that you “lighten up!” or advise you that, surprise, you could just “choose to be happy!!” Yes, folks like this deserve to be chased through the streets with a pellet gun, but what if they’re right? How much of the blue devil dance is genetics, how much of it is the result of two-hits-of-ecstasy-and-a-bump-of-tina-every-weekend-for-two-years, and how much of it is just the comfort of old routine, the soft flannel shirt you slip into on Sundays? How much of it is fueled by self-pity? Or a lack of purpose and routine, easily fixed by a daily schedule of cardio and scribbling the rest of your thesis on coffee shop napkins? Second thoughts followed by thirds, questions that bring you no closer to an answer, a spun-out, strung-out path of consciousness, a rocky, rambling road to paralysis.

Overcast light reflected off a hill full of pale houses through your bedroom window. The dread of an open, cloudless day. Offers of friendship that feel like threats. The staggering weight of a telephone. The hopelessness of an afternoon TV court show, the sassy black-robed judge weighing your slender contributions to life. The bitterness of a locker room, the tyranny of a perfect deltoid. Covering your body in shapeless clothes, repeating a mantra leave me alone leave me aloe. The exhaustion of a room filled with laughter. Wind spinning a soda can in the gutter. A whore in bunny slippers climbing out of a pick-up on 17th Street.

Do you really think you’re in control?

So I’m walking up Broadway today, beautiful afternoon, just Coinstarred some of the spare change I’ve gathered in my Manhattan phase, you know, crossing my t’s. And a few feet ahead an elderly Asian man is sweeping, with rather vigorous strokes, a broom in the doorway of a liquor store. And just as I’m about to pass him, he gives one final, violent sweep and something small and brown flies past my legs, brushing my kneecaps, and lands several feet away in the gutter. I turn, and there is a rat, stunned, its thick pink tail curled tightly around his body. I turn back to Little Mister Sweeper, and he looks back at me with wide eyes and cups a hand over his mouth. He looks both horrified and, well, amused.

When I start to eroticize Eastern European trapeze artists, it’s all over. I can only claim extreme mental and physical duress brought on by chronic sexual frustration. My Manhattan grad school life resembled not so much Sex and the City as it did a less successful episode of Monk. Let me cry you a river. Oh wait, I’ve been doing that here since 2001.

Of course I would appear far more Manhattan savvy if I actually called it Randall’s Island, and not Randall Island. But this merely proves my larger point; living in New York hasn’t made me any smarter, only given me a bigger mouth. San Franciso, I apologize to you in advance. But I will now use that mouth to promote a gay rugby tournament this coming weekend starring the scrappy (or scrummy) Jimbo, at Randall’s Island. You too can take the M35 bus, and thus reach the same rarified heights of cool as yours truly.

Speaking of cool, I saw the new Conor McPherson play, Shining City (which has a couple of great scenes involving escorts, always a crowd pleaser) last week, and any doubts that I had the city’s hottest ticket dissolved when I saw Frances McDormand out on the sidewalk after the show. I was like, this close to her. One of my fellow grad students works for her and her husband, Joel Coen (of the Coen Brothers) as a nanny to their four-year old son. She told me that once she was over at their place for breakfast, and the little boy, who obviously has grown up around many Hollywood types, drained the milk from his cereal bowl, wiped his mouth, turned to his mother and, apropos of nothing, said, “Fwances, I luv your work.”

How many of you New Yorkers have ever been to Randall Island? How many of you even know about Randall Island, at the northeastern tip of Manhattan? Or which bus to take? I am so fucking on top of things now, so in the know, now that I’ve been out there to see Cirque du Soleil. The new show was kind of an Italian-flavored dream; it reminded me of Fellini’s “8 1/2.” That’s the kind of piercing insight I have now that I’ve been through Columbia University. I can deconstruct circus narratives.

But yeah. Short European tumblers jumping around on brass beds. Girls twirling around on enormous spinning chandeliers. A flying bicycle. Even a pair of little people acrobats, which made me wonder. Being an acrobat is specialized enough. But a pair of little people acrobats? How does one find a job? Do they just scan the want ads endlessly until one day, “Oh my God, Agnes! Cirque du Soleil!”

We had crappy seats, at the very edge of house right. But this made for an interesting perspective. During the trapeze act the rest of the audience was focused on the lithe girls flung about, while I watched the flingers, especially one shirtless, muscular little guy, most likely from some obscure European country, who stood on a platform at the center pole, between the two side poles, and who acted as the flinging middleman. He had a casual, practiced air about him, particularly between bouts of flinging, where he’d lean back against the platform and nod his head to music he’d probably heard a thousand times. These casual moments were brief, a second or two, and then he’d straighten up, grab some chalk from a little bag, smack it against his thick forearms, rock back and forth on his feet, centering himself, reach down just at the moment where the next girl was flung to his waiting arms, and fling her forward. Then he’d lean back against the platform again, his chest gleaming with sweat and golden in the circus lights.

Turned in my last paper yesterday. I’ve finished my coursework at Columbia University. Can I get an “amen?”

In an email to a friend, Edmund White, who read from his new memoir here at school the other day, called me “studly.”

My work here is done.

Sweet Jesus, I am thirty-five fucking years old! And this morning, it snowed in New York.

I think Prince wrote a song about that, once.

I am no longer a part of the most highly desired marketplace demographic, which is a bit of a relief. Now I’m at the bottom of the next age range: a youngin’ once more.

There were so many things I was supposed to have done by the age of thirty. The tyranny of youth! There’s consolation in the fact that a chapter of my thesis will soon be published in an anthology (knock on wood). Details to follow. And you bitches better damn well buy it, and pay me back for all of my blood, sweat, and tears over the last four and a half years. I bleed, I tell you, I bleed for you.

In the meantime, I am working my way through book number 33, in order to make a short presentation for class in the morning. Thus, no celebrating for this milestone. But there’s a glimmer of light at the end of this academic tunnel, and soon you should be hearing from me a little more often. Whether that’s a promise or a threat, is your problem.

Thanks for the well-wishes, party people. Though I may act as distant as your cold father, inside I’m all love.

Oh my god, my last post was like two sentences about the Oscars: my blog is so BORING! Sorry kids, but I’m seriously burnt out on reading and writing, (I think I’m on book 25 or something) and have no energy left to string words together. I miss my LIFE. Just a couple of more months, then I’m back to SF, where I’m going to do nothing but walk Louie, watch reruns of Project Runway, play Halo, and have sex with men who will sleep with grown men who play Halo.

And yes, I totally owe about a hundred people emails. It’s that writing thing again. And I’ve somehow ended up on a spam list that floods my inbox every day with literary creations like the following, which I’m reprinting verbatim:

How are you Moze,

Just heard, ur GF’s still not satisfied about u in the bedroom. It’s sad
about that, but lucky for us, situations like this are why there’s,
www.xxx.com. Kevin and me both using them and have nothing but
praises for them.

evening to jungle ? up near water ? and ? an ash pile made by many fires ?.
ike a transfusion of drops of blood? (Winston Churchill – Schama – the
Churchilliad). These characteristi.
French, several native groups mixing with those of foreign origins. The
population .

reid

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with this whole writing thing, when faced with such competition. Somehow I just know they’re making more money than me.

My first paying gig in New York started this semester: I was awarded a fellowship through school to act as a research assistant to a local writer, who’s working on a biography of the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, she of the lupus and peacocks. The biographer himself was recently named by a local magazine one of New York’s “Fifty Most Beautiful People.” Rough, right? Yeah, keep feeling sorry for me.

I had one of those rare opportunities, the kind of errand that I suppose only a certain segment of the population would find thrilling. He asked me to go down to the Rare Manuscripts and Archives room at the main library, on 42nd Street, to check out some files on Flannery, and to write up a description of a certain document that he would like to discuss in a speech he’ll be giving soon at a conference on FOC (as I now call her. I’m like, all down with the biographer shorthand lingo. Yeah, step back.)

Access to this manuscript room is restricted; I had to bring two forms of identification down to the library, and then apply for two further forms of ID. Then I walked down the long middle aisle of the beautiful main reading room, to a little door at the end of the corridor, where I flashed my ID to get buzzed through the door. I had already followed the rules, and checked my coat, bag, and ink pens downstairs (only pencils allowed in the room.) Inside, I had to sign in, and check out, one at a time, boxes of files that I had paged and reserved in advance through email. The dim room was quiet, lined with two floors of glass-enclosed bookshelves, and a few dusty scholarly types bent over long desks bathed in lamp light, poring over brittle pages of manuscripts, handbills, and letters.

I chose a desk and settled in. Part of my research took me through some files from the offices of The New Yorker: mainly correspondence between editors and various authors about publication. Each box contained several folders, each folder labeled with a different author’s name, all arranged alphabetically.

Just before O’Connor was “Nabokov.” Uh, yeah, as in Vladimir Nabokov, as in Lolita, one of the greatest books ever written. As if I could resist poking through THAT folder. And inside was personal typewritten correspondence, from the fifties, between Nabokov and his editor, Katherine White, who was E.B. White’s wife. Along with various business correspondence, (“enclosed please find a check for your last story”) were actual rejection letters. Yes, my friends, Vladimir Nabokov was rejected from The New Yorker. Several times. In fact every folder I glanced through contained piles of rejection letters addressed to various authors, some more famous than others. Flannery herself had all four of the stories she sent to the magazine rejected. This is the kind of information I want to share with my fellow writers, as a twisted kind of encouragement.

Alright, maybe this isn’t such a turn-on to some of you. But then again, you don’t come here for pictures of shirtless twinks. Or at least I hope you don’t, because it would be a continual disappointment for you if you did. But the afternoon made me a bit euphoric, holding these pages in my hot little hands. Most thrilling to me were Nabokov’s little handwritten signatures: a single flourished “V”, with a small sketch of a butterfly (he had a thing about butterflies.) I think I was bitten with the biographer’s bug there. It was, for me, a quintessential New York moment, sitting in a remote corner of the main library, a room steeped in history and tradition, poring over documents that were decades old from authors whose books were on my own shelves back home. It was one of those moments that makes me a little wistful when I think about moving away, though lord knows there are manuscript collections at every university in the country.

Later, poking through some files in the collection of Yaddo, an artist colony where Flannery stayed while working on her first book, I came across some of her correspondence with Yaddo’s director. Many of the letters were written years after Flannery’s stay, as they became closer friends. In one letter Flannery describes current events in her small Georgia town: “Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. They are all excited now about electing themselves a governor for the state. It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.”

Later, shortly before her death at the age of 39, she writes in a fragment of a letter about her declining health, and her need to keep writing: “Something in me dies when I can’t work.”

I scratched this down on a piece of paper with the pencil they’d loaned me, thinking, girl, I know what you mean.