cutting great neck

i am an accumulation of missing.

i can miss by request. ask me to miss the apartment on maklis in kfar ganim, where i took my first steps and looked out the windows and saw a city (a view i don't, can't remember), i will; ask me to miss my first house in america, the dinosaur chicken nuggets, the bar stools, the wallpapers that glossed like wet skin from the wall, i will; ask me to miss new york, san diego, palo alto, san jose, neve oz, and i will.

missing places is my forte. madrid, athens, yerushalaim: i miss you all with the fervency of an abandoned ghost, yearning to reach back to its home but trapped haunting its own haunted house.

i am really supposed to sleep at this moment

but i know that sleep will not come, for a long time

out of fear, of excitement, of nervousness

of this yearning to remember what i once wished i forgot

and thinking about knowing about thinking

makes me think about death

and i think about it

and sometimes it feels like a mini-quake in my rib cage

this thought that one day i will never be.

i feel like that now.

not dead. not not alive.

but not there. not being. not seeing, and feeling.

i remember the summer of moving.

i miss it.

turning 15; being 15; being new to a beautiful world.

i wanted to save this title for when i will be visiting you.


i couldn't resist.

oh, how i miss you: new york!

those black buildings. the rain's vicious pounding like blood as it surges up to the ears, each angry drop like another long string of muscle in a clenched, bitter fist waiting to pounce. night in the city. being alone in the city. living in the city--

but that's from so long ago.

i've downloaded so many new york city songs today.

so many songs about you, new york. and yet you've let the bay dig me a hole--a three-week-wide hole, a yawning gape deep enough to make me choke on lifetimes of air--so black and so permanent that i will never be able to wash the ennui from my skin.

now at least i'll have both hands on the wheels, like teeth punching through the ear of a corn.




at times when the at&t net coverage falters and i have nothing to do, i find myself reading old word documents. and i found a poem i wrote that i forgot about.

how i miss being able to write poems.

catchtwentytwo
1
i’ve been wondering
how to start this poem
for a while now.

i knew a capital i would be too vague. or may
be too specific.

my limbs are tired. worn-out.
i feel like a bag of arms, and legs,
and fingers and toes,
and tired old eyes. i never thought
the word catch-22 could be applied
to life—
especially to my
life.

but now I know.

2
it’s funny.
truth is cliché. “be careful of what you wish for”

i went to manhattan.

my mistake: dark, quixotic night, skies
that fall on tall, metal buildings like rain,
human beings like puzzle pieces, fit together, and
the sweet salt smell of coal-hot nuts in
aluminum, yellow cabs and rainy streets:

yes. november—i fell in love.

3
don’t look up, and don’t look down,
is how the song goes. mother came to me
and asked me: up or down?

sometimes, i told her, it’s better to keep straight.
i have a world waiting for me here: friends,
word documents. but she has worked. worked hard.

up or down? east or west?
and, you know. i was in love.

4
today the skies were gloomy blue.
the sun was muck yellow.
the sunset was curly, muddy,
like my footprint in the sand.

this is why it’s a catch 22, a cruel
circle: it’s either past, present, future.
and i am stuck deciding.

5
you can say that a catch 22 is a triangle
but i have to disagree.

you can say:
one vertex is where i am right now
and the two others are interchangeable,
one decapitation, another cyanide, and i
only have to choose.

but i think that a catch 22 comes in six round numbers:
which ones, i don’t know.
i am only on number 4.

6
the light in my room is yellow.
jazz music.

i feel stupid. but i know
that this is as profound as it will, can go;
that there is misery, and implausible skepticism here
(about my poem, about my life)

and that the light at the end
is only another tunnel

but at the end of the day the world is just a matter
of atoms—of metal, of plastic, of skin,
and one home or another doesn’t count.
one me or another doesn’t count.
one poem. one ending or another.

it has been a beautiful two-year experience.



i guess moving has become more of a ritual for me now. i am not in disbelief; i am not a child ripped out of its mother’s womb. more like a child whose head has been pulled gradually over a seven-month period out of the opening in his mother’s body at an increasing rate, until he knows the world and the world knows him, until he’s ripped out, however gently.

this almost feels natural, moving: this room is home, or at least a home, already.



i miss nothing, almost. i miss you, my friends; i miss the city. i have thoughts of missing my house, but only surface thoughts, superficial. i don’t miss middle neck road, and i don’t miss the LIE or the LIRR. i don’t miss walking down the street wrapped up in utter blackness all alone towards home; i don’t miss the best teachers i’ve ever had; i don’t miss the library (okay, i might, because the dvd section here stinks); i don’t miss memorial field, grace avenue or allenwood; i don’t miss fireflies, mosquitoes, cicada; i don’t miss being able to see the empire state building’s jutting rib of an antenna poking out from behind a field of houses from baker; i don’t miss walking ginger up and down the same corner so many times, each one so different than the others (the time i stole a newsday to pick up ginger’s shit; the time she hid in the bushes and i searched for five minutes all panicked); i don’t miss bagel hut, amal, sushi palace, starbucks; i don’t miss the trips to new jersey; i don’t miss the snow; i don’t miss missing; i don’t miss the u.s. open, watching the sun set from behind the profile of epic structures; i don’t miss studying on the swing; i don’t miss the wooden den; i don’t miss the stars, the tall trees, kings point, biking to the point, cheese bagels, extra-large ice coffee after fours hours of sleep, rotten apples in my backpack, writing on the drama room whiteboard, screwing nails, eating caviar from 108th street, dripping rainstorm rain, tanned skins after winter break, the way a wall of heat packs into you as you step into those doors and blows you backwards and the day just seems to open up like a (very warm) flower, pajamas to school, free movie tuesdays, metacognition, ap world history exam, deli on the green, cuttinggreatneck.blogspot.com, dreaming about israel and wanting to move there, listening to the last summer, philly washington d.c. or boston, guide post, yctiwy mattress crucible, coming home and puking all over the office floor because you’re so sick and tired of working, coming home and puking all over the living room floor because of a virus, swine flu, morning swim, brittle rain, holocaust books, listening to indie music at night, athens 2008, pretending to care about the 2008 elections just so people would know me, looking out and look it’s snowing, snow days, cousins coming to visit, tuesday evening journalism, ordering a whole pizza pie and feeding journalism, going with the stream, masterswarm, thinking at first that i missed san diego.




i miss the idea of them. i wish i could relive them quickly so i would know what i did and where, just like everything and everywhere in life. remembering unremembered memories. i wish i would’ve known two years ago where i am today so that i could have understood it more. who i am today.

funny, how we miss missing. how we yearn for those moments when we felt so miserably in need of something, how we yearn for yearning beyond yearning. how we miss being alone in the darkness. we miss reminiscing, remembering old, patched-up visions of an alternate future and a better past.

again in one of those moods, longing for israel, reminiscing, engulfed by music, wanting to know what type of person i would have been had we stayed.

would i have listened to this music? stayed up hours trying to listen to it? to remember it? to remember the roughly pouring words that fit into one another like wooden blocks. to remember: the night, blacker than black, the white plastic chairs on the balcony, the balcony, the 90s, crumbling apartment structures immersed in age spots.

i know where i’m doinga my semester abroad.

fade into you mazzy star.



i remember driving around in the mountains in the desert somewhere, east of san diego, perhaps driving back from death valley or utah or big bear. a long black valley expands forward as you drive on the edges of its bulky red mountain borders, the road like some kind of ribbon that seems to slide into the mountain valley and the car just an infinitesimal speck riding on it.

it was sunset and the wavering maroon shadows of the sky pooled across the valley. we were alone on the road, the solitary witnesses of the purple dying fizzle of the sun. sometimes a car curved out into the road ahead of us from beyond a mountain; white orbs danced from behind us once in a while.

i love the desert, the mountains, the valleys for that reason. the pine trees glowed like embers. streaks of orange light corralled along the cliffs and died down into a blue obscurity.



and fade into you comes up on my zune.

--how can i say it? listen to the song for a moment: torched strings that peel away in the rural night, when only the cowboys hear 'em--the way they seem to fade infinitely away into the melody, into the clattering bells and into the hounding voice, the one that seems so, so resolved, so resigned, and yet it persists, it sings, it--it reverberates and echoes.

it's beautiful.

and the combination of me in the car, from this polarized window, all alone with the music looking out into the dying rays of the sun in this lonesome, empty green valley, with the haunting solitariness of this song...



---

i remember this because my zune broke apart very recently and i was just reminded of it after the song came up on itunes. and this memory has remained with me for no reason at all, one of those insignificant details of life that accidentally leaves a mark.

when old songs revisit me, so do old feelings, feelings that rise up in me and crash inside like a great big blue wave.



i am writing this at 12 am on saturday, june 13, 2010; classical gas by vannessa-mae is on itunes; i’m about to read the nytimes mag and atlas shrugged; on a word document because my internet’s down, i have no plans to revive it till i wake up.

i wait incessantly for the right darkness to settle into this room.

i already miss the winter. my first real snowy winter. i miss waking up in the night and letting the raw cold fill up the room, filtered by this window and kept away at arm's length by these walls. i miss the piano songs that ring in the ice. the way the blackness seemed to swallow one small yellow streetlight that blinked in the distance from my window like a star and made me miss summer.

i am isolated and insulated all at once. maybe this is why the words sound so similar?

these green trees greenest than green pour around my house like an insulating blanket. they're one solid dark green color that packs into this window like a thick liquid grime.




---



an old french song comes up on my itunes.

i miss a world i forget. i miss being five, traveling through europe with my family, those auburn stone-laden alleys, the blue july noons, so clear and distinctly airy, light.



i miss what i would never be able to do and be and have again. i miss those moments that seemed to wash away from me like water. i miss old friends, old houses, old lives; and the new ones that never came to be.

funny how beautiful life is.

how nauseatingly repetitive, and yet beautiful.



it's autumn. the cold is a snake and its fangs are slowly swooping into my flesh.

snow: can't wait for you.



i miss airplanes. europe and israel. beirut on itunes; nostalgia from last winter's vacation, athens, petach tikva.



i'm going back home for a week in the start of november.



i miss the feeling of being somewhere else, not nyc, not great neck, somewhere fresh and different and foreign, somewhere with a different language, a mediterranean city with enticing cuisine and riveting architecture and irresistable culture.



romania...

oh romania.



i want to visit you.

i want to visit the streets of my spectral childhood, the place where i never grew up, where i never lived. where my mother was raised.

grandmother, cousin left today.

to israel. to home.

how i miss israel. we listened to this zionist noami shemer cd today in the car on the way back from a horrible day in the city and i felt so much deep, harkings nostalgia, so much longing and so much remembering.

i'm all alone in the house. dad and sharon are driving back from the airport; it's dark, silent. the radio is possibly on. they discuss the past--the distant, distant past of our infancy, and even before--and science and history, even though in a sense everything that has to do with science or with the past is history. the radio plays softly against the thundering of the wheels against the wet highway asphalt, which sounds like a tree breaking against a violent waterfall in the middle of an empty forest. the window’s rolled down. rain—the smell of it, the cold plummeting drops—blows in.




speaking of the devil: keys jingle downstairs, voices from outside seep in.

they just came in. the keys in the door. it turns. i say hello. shalom, dad says. sharon goes to play with ginger, and giggles, and ginger’s collar clinks.



i celebrated cousin’s departure. he's sweet, but extremely obnoxious and ignorant and acts like a 7-year-old, even though he’s 12. we love each other, but it's almost impossible to live with him. how he has to sleep with the lights and the a/c on; how he always had to have two+ eggs every day; how he always watched the most abhorrent channels, and played the most abhorrent games on the computer; how he feared ghosts and darkness and unclosed closets; how he had to have everything, play with every single electronic device our family owned, especially while we were using it; how he asked me to repeat the same song on itunes over and over again; how he was still a child, an undeveloped, exasperating child.




they all left, and i stayed home to walk ginger. after i hugged and kissed said cousin goodbye, i came back in and closed the door and looked through the small window in the foyer, and saw grandma's bulky, familiar form, her hands reaching for the seatbelt--she always asks for my help when it gets jammed—and then i turned away, and petted ginger.

i was sad.



now i'm listening to cat power. i'm thinking about, thrilled for the canada trip.

i'm... i don't know. i guess i miss learning french. i miss living in israel. i miss school, guide post, history. the english book we have to read is so infinitely dull and horribly stoic. "all the king's men"--brrrrrrrrrrr!....

~~~



i dined alone. in the horrid rain and wind, i stumbled and hopped across puddled pavements to a shawarma and hummus dish, and then i walked back in the darkness, thinking.

~~~


i'm excited to meet the broders again. i just went through a photo album from when i was 6, or 5. and i saw several pictures with them in it.

and i'm feelin' melancholy.

not horribly though. not really. i'm feeling... poetic, almost. no. i'm feeling... absent-minded. bare. jaded. and yet, in some strange way, refreshed almost. new.

it's been almost a year since we moved to great neck. july 30th.


i'm free!

i smell like poop.

my eyes are locking shut by themselves. i'm about to faint. i have to memorize 350 vocab words for tomorrow english. i'm too tired. i want to nap a little.

had a snowday last monday.

no pictures.

am too lazy.

play, guide post.

i realized today how useless, dull life is. i realized how there's nothing for us to live for. that we'll have to work and fight for nothing, for the most meager of prizes. children, money, sex. and i know i'm being so freudian right now, but it's truth and that's what matters.

how relationships change in the blink of an eye.

i've been listening to the idan raichel project lately. and i've--i've realized that he truly embodies the israeli spirit, the israeli identity.

i wish i could live there for a year or so. i wish i could see what i missed out on. i wish i could understand what my old friends are going through, what the world seems like to them. i want to be able to stay up till two in the morning and walk into a cafe--somewhat, cafes in israel are different than here... i don't know how to explain it--or just to wake up in the morning and look outside into the red dunes, sands, harsh white sun, cold marble floors, hot summer nights outside...

i don't know. i don't think i remember summer in israel. i don't think i remember much... from a lot of places.

my dad's been making dvds from old videotapes of us, and so sometimes we'd gather around the computer and watch... the past. and i find that i don't remember much of anything. sure, i can recall madrid or dancing and singing in the backyard in palo alto--but i don't remember so many of the places we've gone to, in san francisco, in san diego, in israel, and i feel so secluded and frightened... i feel like i've been swallowed up by my memory, by my lack of memory.

i miss it, a lot. sometimes.

but would i like to move there? oh, i'm not so sure now. i remember in september, how lonely and wretched i felt, how much i yearned to live in israel again... but now... i'm not so sure. i'm not so sure.

manhattan on saturday february 28



sometimes i feel like life is... is like a long, roatating journey packed with ennui and fatigue, at times spotted with good points that sooner or later become strenuous bores, unneeded chores--a life filled with things from a life that has been lived before, a life... i don't know.



manhattan on saturday,
manhattan on sunday,
manhattan on saturday,
great neck the rest of the week,
cold air,
same people, same activities.

sometimes i feel like there's only history to look forward to; the past, the intriguing, beautiful past, jam-packed with death, violence, peace, love, hope, fury.



we went with the shapiras to south side seaport, that tourist hole near wall street, and then we went up towards chinatown but never made it, so then we just returned and dined at the same turkish place we ate at in june.

hmm.

we have guests now and i want to tell ya'll how nice life is and how normal and how ordinary and how strange my life is still and how dark night is outside, how dangerous, how enchanting like a movie.

ohh and yes, i did see two grand movies this weekend: "all about eve" (such a screenplay, such actors) and "la strada" (a bizarre connection to the glorious "nights of cabiria.")



i want to live in europe when i grow older; not new york, not san diego, not san francisco, not israel. europe: france, england, ireland, spain, greece, italy, germany romania russia. i want to live in a place where not everything revolves around you, when society has a social aspect and does not only consist of statistics.




i've been listening to a bunch of israeli songs lately

and i want to be in israel again

just to be there, alone, independent, in a small mediterranean apartment

with some girl, just locked up

and go to clubs, and listen to music and eat watermelons in the summer:

is it all that bad?

there is something like you
in me; something capricious
and sickly, a long shadow
inside my eye that expands
and contracts with the wind,
black and vile. i see you, the
vicarious creature, the untenable
wolf; vexing and peeling away
scars that have dried long ago,
drawing blood that has poured
long ago. you extend a drooling
arm, like a curtain, waving in
the wind and rain. the and needs
to be smaller, because we all
know that wind and rain
always go together, don’t we?
like harold and maude? and
porgy and bess? and sometimes,
i think, you and me—but not in
the small and sort of way, more like
in two voices that fall into place,
red and rose, chanting hymns together
like twirling snakes. sometimes,
i think, you and me need
smaller ands, like wind & rain,
wood & fire, dark & light.
you & the and is as little as
the light at the end of the tunnel.

my favorite smell in the world is the linden trees as they flower.



which is fucking horrible because that only happens during a 3-4 week period from late june to july.

i'm listening to "new york i love you but you're bringing me down" again and i miss summer. summer in the city. summer--biking in manhattan, the linden trees in june when i came to visit and search for houses, the green leafy things giving off a sweet, compassionate scent, an almost erotic pulsing aura that intoxicates you, and especially near the ocean as it is in manhattan, all along the downtown west side, that little park where all the sunbathers go behind the huge hole that used to be the world trade center.



and that's why i miss summer. that, and great neck is summer is just so... so tropical, so heavy and yet, i would guess sentimental in a light, airy sort of way.





and now it's caught in the rain by october fall.

san diego summer song. oh dear.

i miss summer.

yep, i said it.

i really, really miss summer.

you know how you always want to like something, and then suddenly you realize that you don't really like it and that you miss something or someone else? and you feel like you cheated yourself? and it's horrible?

that's how i feel about summer and winter.

i thought i was this quixotic, wintry kinda guy. cynical. cold.

but i guess it's that san diego influenza. beach, towel, cold salty water. grass. sun, sunburn. balboa park. oh jeez. summer? where the fuck are you?

so yes, i guess summer is my favorite season.

yes. my confession.

these pictures are all from june, so don't go thinking that this is new york in february. because it's not and it will never be.


though there is no snow nowadays and the weather is getting a little warmer. like i can go outside now with two layers on without dying. though i'm still cold.

incense... mmm. homework... shittt.