It is February here in Babylon. In October, when the wardrobes turned tangerine and crimson and saffron and vermilion and amber, it was lovely, but within a few weeks everything was black. Black patent leather shoes; black pea coats; black, fleecy, skin-tight, zipper-down calf-length jackets from women's boutiques in Soho; black knit scarves. Excepting for the occasional ice-blue denim, it's been all black since November. But yesterday I saw a green glove. And today I saw a bright blue sock. Oh spring!
I think about you a lot. And I think about Dancing Rabbit a lot. A week ago, or so, I finished off another tube of Tom's of Maine toothpaste. You know. A little crinkled sleeve of tinny blue and white. It was quite heavy in my hand. I threw it away. The tubes come in little cardboard boxes, with a slip of paper inside advertising Tom's commitment to this-and that--I don't know what exactly. I stopped reading Tom's manifestos. I also buy Tom's of Maine deodorant. Every stick gives you 2.25 ounces of deodorant and maybe another two ounces of plastic g. There is also a cellophane sheathe on the back which holds a little paper manifesto in place. I don't read the deodorant manifestos either. Do you mind if I go on like this? I'm going to go on like this. Because this is why I spend so much time thinking about Dancing Rabbit.
I shop at the Park Slope Food Coop. I buy my walnuts there. The walnuts are sold in bulk, but they are bagged ahead of time. If you want, say, $7 of walnuts, but the produce department only set out $0.70 bags that day, you have to buy ten bags. Usually I buy about $3 worth of walnuts, which is enough to fill one Mason jar. (Oh, we shall come to my jars.) Usually this means buying one pre-weighed bag for $2 and another for $1. When I get home I empty the walnuts into my Mason jar and throw the bags away. I throw away the little red twisties which keep the bags closed, too. Golden Delicious apples reappeared in the Coop this week after a long hiatus. They are "minimally treated." How many gallons of water and gasoline do you suppose it takes to irrigate a bushel of minimally treated apples, then get them to Brooklyn from Ulster County? When I make gnocci, I use Millina's Finest Fat Free Organic Marinara With Herbs flavored pasta sauce. It costs $2.64 for 25.5 ounces. For a while I was saving the jars. Now I have a Millina's Finest jar for my dried apples, my prunes, my almonds, my dried cranberries, my Turkish figs, my Calamara figs, my raisins, my walnuts, my rice, my oatmeal, my sugar, my salt, my oregano, my rosemary, my left-over miso soup, my pens, and my spare change. I also have a few jars which I use to drink out of. It's hopeless. I can't find any further uses for Millina's Finest Mason jars. I have no choice now but to recycle them. How much coal does it take to recycle a Millina's Finest Mason jar? I worry about that.
In the subway station the lights are on all night. I worry about that. The trains move very quickly, but where do you suppose the electricity comes from, to move the D train? Or the steel which went into the train cars? How much coal, how much coke, go into a subway car? I worry about all that too. I stand on a street corner in midtown, and am overwhelmed. All that glass, held snugly in place by sixty stories of caulking and climate controlled air pressure. Concrete poured into slender and emphatic insults to gravity. Steel stilts. Asphalt and bubble gum. All that acrylic paint on all those signs. I can only gesture toward it all. Look! Rudy's poor hands gesture, wheeling. Look at all this! All the water and gasoline just to bring all of this here! Whole jupiters of gravel and grease! And to keep it in motion. Oh, I worry terribly about all of this. All that heat and light, shot into the air every night. Two hundred feet down and half a mile high. The wattage and the water pressure. The updrafts carrying plastic shopping bags quite into the clouds. It makes me dizzy. Rudy wheels. I am the Annie Dillard of Gotham City.
What about all the water that gets away before the shower gets hot? What about my new sweater? What about my Bowery Electric CD? How many BTUs in a Bowery Electric CD? or my Martin Amis novel? I wear the suede jacket my father bought when he was a graduate student in Munich, my grandfather's gingham shirt, my brother-in-laws old suede shoes, a "vintage" pair of wool pants. People tell me I'm a dandy. They mistake fear for style. I am mortified. What about these copies of the Village Voice? Where do they go when I recycle them? The heat in this cafè, the sugar in this coffee, the beautiful synthetic fabrics on that there dreamy girl, all these decibels of Radiohead. How long can Babylon last? And, can I stay for a little while longer? Lie under my blankets, listening to the traffic on Flatbush? Can I have another love affair like the one I had this winter? How much coal is a fashionable kiss downtown? How many BTUs?
Perhaps if you will have me, and if circumstances permit, I'll come out there for a year sometime. I can shovel well and can write excellent legal briefs, so maybe Dancing Rabbit can find a place for me to sleep for a few months, long about the autumn of 2003.
Intentional Community Bookstore