R.I.P. Erwin

Have you ever walked down W44th Street during rush hour without a purpose?  Not going home, not going to eat or work, just making right turns, so now you're on 5th Avenue and then its W43rd.  Have you ever thought as you walked, "All these people will die."?  And when someone meets your eyes - and a surprising majority do - you think, "You will die." or "I will die."  And suddenly everyone around you becomes more precious.  There is no room for wondering about beards or handbags, dieting secrets or destinations. 

I did this today.  In response to an email I read in between giving chair massages at an underground poker club.  It's not really underground.  It's actually the 8th floor, but wives and police officers pretend it doesn't exist so it's underground in that way.  I asked the players - there were 9 at the table - if anyone wanted anything from the deli because I was going there.  Junior said he wanted two slices of pizza. 

I wasn't really going to the deli.  I wanted to walk around the block.  I had just read an email informing me an old man I didn't know very well, an old man full of stories, had died the night before. 

Have you ever wanted to yell something in a crowd of people?  Ever wanted to yell about something you feel is profound and grossly under acknowledged?  I have.  But I didn't today.  In the muggy evening which has sticky air so clouds of cigar smoke, perfume, halal food keep their shape longer than usual and people walk a little more slowly in the thickened setting, I felt quiet.  I didn't want to tell anyone anything.

I just kept thinking, "You will die."

And then another though arrived.  "Maybe you won't."

"Maybe nobody here will die.  Maybe a great cloud of magic freeze will descend and hold each person in a state of forever now and no one will ever die."

"Because I can't know the future," I thought, "Only guess at it based on my experience in the past.  And now, all of these people are alive.   Maybe nobody will die.  And I never will too." 

And I came back to work.  Have you ever returned from one place to another, and it felt like entering another world?  Then you realize the places didn't really matter, it was what you had to do in them or maybe how you felt about what you had to do that made the places seem so different.

I Want To Snuggle Up Against Your Tongue

The dark chocolate dissolves on my tongue.  It smooths out under the pressure of the flexible muscle.  It spreads, deflowering my palate with the musk of vanilla and cacao nibs.  It has been carefully crafted so that it can rest and unmake itself in my mouth.  That is its purpose.  To be lovingly consumed…

What if the same were true for me?  I would love to crawl into some one's mouth and melt.  To dissolve the fear that prevents me from being anything other than what I am.  I look around me, I look within and I see a constant attempt at keeping form.  People pressed into frozen expressions by the freezing of their respective physiognomies.  They pay for surgical paralysis, dipping themselves - like m&ms - in colorful candy shells that don't melt.  I put on my makeup, dab a bit of concealer in the corners of my eyes to brighten the expression.  I don't want anyone to see me melting.  I don't want people to see that I haven't been sleeping, I drank too much last night, I've been lost in the stressful indecision of what to do next...

I'm performing myself, performing Kat Pratt.  The stage name that smiles and flirts, that dances in her candy coating.  But I dress up to be undressed.  I want a real tongue on my real body.  I want someone to enjoy me, not the packaged version.  I don't eat this chocolate just because of the way it looks.  I need to explore its complexity, its depth.  The most enticing flavors go beyond sweet.  They curl like fiddleheads at the bottom of my brain.  They ripple in the language of jellyfish, nesting where my dimples meet my teeth. 

So even though it is a terrifying proposition, please taste me fully.  I want to snuggle up against your tongue, move through the tears of my insecurities and shed the candy shell.

I want you to explore my physical spirit like you might a rare honey or the bloom of a feral cheese.  I want you to pay attention to the secret places - the roof of my belly button, the scent of my inner thigh, the shape of my eyebrows when I am captured by a sonata, the curious hair that grows underneath my left nipple.  I want you to discover parts of me I don't even know about.  The thoughts, macabre and devastating; ideas like diving loons; the self destruction, the creative healing.  Taste me as a hungry gourmand would a truffled pheasant, untie the kitchen twine binding my ankles.  Consume me so that I might look into your sated eyes and finally see myself.

Is that why I so crave coupling?  To experience my body though yours.  I want to smell and wrap myself in your savor.  Eating is the tickling of our own sensual bodies.  Making love is to share that corporeal feast.  I am no longer looking for a sugar fix.  m&ms will not do.  I want a slow cooked meal.  I want the tobacco depth of Senegalese honey.  I want the unapologetic oozing of camembert.  I want to brave rejection.  Anyone can eat an m&m.  It takes an adventurous epicure to explore the intricate flavor of a real human.

One Fart at a Time

Sometimes my mind takes over. It becomes consumptive and crazy.  It goes to work in a million directions.  I think of this, of that, of this.  Frantic attempts at grabbing those ideas, overwhelmed with their force and abundance.  Like a small child gifted a thousand helium balloons at once on a windy beach - each color more striking and attractive than the one before.  I scramble to catch them and just before panic...

I save myself with flatulence.  The pungent smell rescues me from mania and inspires a curious inhale.  The pause… depth like pork with notes of fresh corn.  The aroma is followed by a simple, refreshingly lonely question: why do I like to smell my own farts?

There is something humanly satisfying about the whole thing.  Reminds me that I am breathing my own lucky poison.  That the maddening head I have resting on my shoulders has to shut up sometimes with the stink of my digestive system.  I am not only brain. In truth, the farts coming out of my other end are just as valid as any thought, any realization, any profound moment of insight that seems a product of my mind.  I get so attached to the brain's ideas.  But the farts are important too.  They invite attention to the uncomfortable.  Above all, they remind me that I am breathing. 

Of course, when I am in the company of others, I am praying for innocuous gas.  I search for the scent, expanding my nostrils, shifting my eyes from side to side, laughing a little louder than necessary, making hollow statements to reassure my company that I couldn't possibly be expecting anything unpleasant to suddenly fill the room, "Oh look at that interesting person over there.  Um, no that one."  Watch me gesticulate, watch me agree to whatever you said that I wasn't paying attention to, but please disregard the casual wave of hand behind my rear or the forceful exhale directed at my lower half. 

I call out to the random breeze that might sweep in and save me from the embarrassing admittance of human physiology, heroically carrying away the gaseous faux pas to another place and perhaps planting it on the face of some unsuspecting stranger, one who cannot connect the smell with anyone in particular, most importantly me. 

Yet when I don't have to protect myself from the discomfort of shared stink, I indeed look forward to the brief company of my own miasma. 

I like to smell my farts.  Why?  Because something inside me gets to acknowledge, Hey, I made that.  I made something that changed the environment.  I didn't even have to try. I am affecting this space without having to try...

Yes, smelling my farts reminds me that I am breathing.  It reminds me that I am in this body, alive.  I am breathing and affecting, even when the effect is not aromatically noticeable.

I spoke to Scott MacInnis the other day in a moment of brainy exasperation, "There is just so much I want to do and see!  So many ideas!  I don't know where to start!"

"Kat, take a deep breath," he said.  "Now think about all the air you have breathed until this point.  Think about all the air you will ever breath and picture its volume."

"That's a lot of air," I said.

"Yes, but it happens, it can only happen, one breath at a time."

Later in the week, when I was again spinning in mental circles, eventually brought back to his statement by the aforementioned stink, I relaxed.  Letting one rip is just a louder (and often smellier) exhale.  We all have a lot of gas to pass in this life, but we can only do it one fart at a time.

I'm Not Suicidal, Except When I'm Really Happy

Here is an excerpt from the book I'm writing.  Hopefully sharing this will put a little more fire under my ass!

Sometimes I imagine myself at the edge of that building - arms outstretched.  I have been there.  I have stood before, looking out at the land spreading before me, opening like a flower or a bee hive - above it all is the buzz of everyone trying, in a million languages, to say something.  

There I am listening to the collective music, pulling from the wind specific aromas, threads from the woven melange that rides the air.  Here is the ocean and then the Hudson, a muddied cousin to our beloved Atlantic, swishing around, the inspiration for many great bridges.  I stand taller, breathe more deeply.  There is a loaf of Polish bread sitting on a counter top, baked this morning.  There is the smell of plastic and waste - diapers set out the previous evening, not yet collected by the trash man.  Here is a passing grandfather, coat impregnated with the aroma of mothballs and basement hiding places.  It takes me away for a moment.

 I smell traffic fumes, the mushroomy wash of false fruit blossoms, the city's attempt at decoration without the mess of arboreal ovaries.  I have been in this place, listening, smelling, looking and feeling separate from it all.  The seduction of an easy step, the dizzying pull to finally, finally become part of this world.  Perhaps I would not die, but simply atomize into it all, float with the wind until it was time to stop and rain on a swampy patch along a river.  I have been close to convincing myself of these things.  But it's always a flirtation.  Nothing more serious.  When Luna told me her mother jumped from the roof of this building, I felt every cell in my body turn itself inside out.  My own coquetry with life became childish.  My heart ached and I reached out to my friend.  I wanted to hold her, but it was not just to offer comfort, I wanted to remind my body of the importance of connection.  Why haven't I jumped before?  This is why:  so that I might sit closer to another human, feel myself in her.  Opening myself to real connection is another way of leaping, the unbearably beautiful pain of looking at someone and recognizing myself.

You Need Ear Holes for Spaghetti Music

This morning I rode the subway.  I thought about how my friend has stopped talking to me because I stole her hair style.  I thought about seeing that celebrity on the train last week and I secretly hoped he would ride again.  I considered the line between stalking and soul-mate searching… was it not fate that this actor - one of few about whom I have fantasized - took a nonchalant seat directly in front of me?  Would it be considered fate if I found out where he was working and casually hung around there for the next week or two?  Or fate could move through me in such a way, impelling me to investigate the neighborhood near his train stop (I heard from a friend, he's living off of Graham Ave) and wait until some serendipitous morning when he happens to be braving public transit again.  Right? 

I felt my face furrow with serious consideration.  I took a deep breath and unstuck the expression.  The man next to me shifted uncomfortably as I took interest in his worn tweed pants.  The young woman in front of me pointed her eyes to ground when I looked at her face.  Finding real estate where our eyes can rest in a swollen subway car can take some effort, but the ground is usually available.  She went there.  I followed.  She wore blue suede sandals that wrapped snugly around her feet and showcased mint green toe-nail polish.  She too shifted uncomfortably with my attention. 

A mother and her daughter boarded.  The little girl's hair was alive with static electricity.  A large black man sat next to them on the one side, pretending to read a book, but I could tell he was sleeping.  He didn't fidget when I looked at him.  He just stayed on the same page forever.

Nearly everybody wears earplugs with spaghetti wires traveling to pocket-hidden or hand-held devices.  I realize I can hear it, the collective noise produced by these objects of convenience.  It's like being in a room full of preschoolers who each have their own musical instrument and are all playing fantastic sociopathic solos.  In these public spaces, the discordant song is quiet, but it's the same.

Green toe nails, big sleeping man, small girl with sea anemone hair.  Her mother stands over her, holding onto the support bar with one hand and cradling the large bag on her shoulder with the other, preventing it from sliding and swinging into the sleeping giant.  A young, bearded, bespectacled (thick, dark rims, flannel shirt, tight pants… maybe you know the style), chubby-faced man sits on the other side of the little girl, who I have noticed is carrying a headless barbie doll.  No private theme songs for headless characters.  You need ear holes for spaghetti music.  The girl is half asleep.  The young man is visibly bothered by the arrangement.  I can hear his thoughts above the hum of his headphones - he knows he should give up his seat to the mother, but goddamn it!  There are so many families here nowadays, and it's so soccer mom...Williamsburg.  It was way better like 10 years ago, or so he heard because he was a sophomore at Dover High School back then.  For some reason he talks with a valley girl accent, rolling his eyes and sighing inside.  He wants to sit and who cares if she has a tired kid, this is New York.  Everyone is struggling and he was here first, right?  His asshole is clenched.  I see it in his face.  He gets up, but not until he has to - the very last moment before the door closes on his stop.  He huffs away with the imagined pressure inflicted on him by the mother who softly slips into the space after his departure.  The little girl hugs her headless doll.  Her hair reaches in a multitude of directions and I smile - even though I might look crazy - because I love the one-act plays that regularly materialize before me in the underground mise en scene of New York.

Follow the Pleasure

After hearing all that is wrong with the world, why it's wrong, the historical context that produced the wrongness in the way we do things, the last bit shared is always the most difficult to convey:  what can you do?  What can I do?  Here's all this information and now you can tell people righteously that GMOs are bad, that soy products may contribute to infertility and perpetuate monoculture and are not easily digested, that bees are migrant workers.  There is always a problem, always some noble cause that can inspire a rant or even a manifesto, but when does actual change happen?

The small steps taken to make the world a better place are good, they are important and they clearly affect the immediate community.  This is wonderful.  But it will not change the world.  In order to do that there needs to be a greater paradigm shift.  As of now, the majority of solutions offered to people today in the humdrum world of capitalism, still rely on consumerism (just a more responsible version) for their effect.  Again, we live in a consumerist culture, so responsible consumption will make a difference, but it is an allopathic solution.  We offer stevia and agave substitutes to quell our sugar cravings without asking the question, what are we lacking in our lives that impels the need for such concentrated sweetness?

But these are hard questions and the bigger changes - the radical ones - are just that, too radical for most people to embrace.  I am no exception.  I can rant (as you have probably figured out) with the best of them, but I am an absolute hypocrite in my diatribes.  I see the need for extreme change, but I have not the will nor desire to cut myself off of everything I love - and that's often how it sounds to me.  Revolution requires some kind of sacrifice greater than I can imagine, so instead I choose to close my eyes to reality and wait for apocalypse to kick my ass.  Until recently.

Through beautiful conversations and the privilege of travel, I have realized that the most satisfying moments are often the most revolutionary ones.  What does that mean?

Maybe revolution does not have to begin with a bloody fight or construction of a  martyry.  Perhaps it can grow out of a far more enjoyable experience.  That's real sustainability.  It is not a new idea, but the more I interact with different ways of doing life, the more I realize that change must happen first in the individual before it can be played out effectively on the stage of society.  Here is the possibility:  that by getting in touch with those things that really make us feel good, by reconnecting with our bodies without the burden of intended weightloss or as part of an "antiaging" program, but really just feeling good, we can begin to shift the power dynamic that puts people at the end of consumerism's marionette strings. 

If we follow the pleasure, we may just discover that it feels better to eat good food.  That is feels better to live in a healthy space, a vibrant community.  It feels better to connect with people in real, unpretentious ways.  It feels better not to have to obsess about image, but play creatively with style.  There will always be pain, we don't have to create it.  It will come.  In the words of Brillat-Savarin, "Good living is an act of intelligence, by which we choose things which have an agreeable taste rather than those which do not." 

A Love Letter, or Temporary Marriage Certificate

New York.  It wants me.  It longs for me, has for some time now.  It has been seducing me with its intensity, its charm, its poetic fervor.  Apocalyptic buildings and menstruum of narcissism.  Oh New York.  You are such a cad.  How did you know I would come back?  I thought I was finished with your icy stares, your warm surprises.  I thought we were through.  And yet, this affair presents itself once again.  I am going to be with you.  Risking poverty and comfort, because I have always loved you.  I did in high school and was afraid.  Again in college.  Too scared to break up with Colorado.  Easy Colorado, so sunny and bright.  But I don't get wet in that mountainous state.  I need an island city for that.

Dublin almost did it.  There was a man there - Ireland man.  He held my heart for a while, so that the green country, wrapped in mist would be my object of pining.  A year passed and New York, your stable chaos waited.  You are a patient and tenacious place.  Extreme cool, extreme autonomy, extreme diversity.  You are the hero of my story right now.  Will you break my heart?  We'll find out. 

You, New York, incubator of ideas and edges, you keep calling.  What will you do with me?  Have I become strong enough for you these past few years.  Am I resilient enough to bear the force of crashing dreams?  Dreams that, like the ocean wrapped around you, swell and crash with reassuring predictability.  I find comfort in your brutal honesty.  I exist alongside your furious temper, your open arms.  What was it about the land where you have grown that called such a clever city?  What demanded I return for a hearty period? 

So I will confess my current position.  I will speak it to my camera and pull it together in time for you to really know what you're getting in to.  Because New York,  I am a force to be reckoned with.  I am a powerful woman, wrought with inspiration, tormented by addiction, excited about life.  I am not a faithful lover in the tradition sense.  I cannot promise monogamy.  I will have affairs with other cities.  I can't help but fall in love with the warm romance of Latin countries, the dusty magic of an unsanitary meat market, the Spanish idiom, or Portuguese.  But you call me nonetheless.  I have until this point resisted your flirtations.  Now I am giving in, surrendering my body to your dirty streets and perfect sunsets.  New York, for now, I'm yours.