Pocket Dispatch from the Fire Lane
I am racing out the door to take my three-year-old son to school. Everything is breaking and nothing is quite right. Toys are everywhere. They don’t dot the landscape, they are the landscape. The floor crackles with food and dust. The robot vacuum has a dead battery, as always, because its docking station too is another loose gadget that scoots around the floor instead of having a fixed home of its own. I curse, reinstall the vacuum on it to charge, and return to the kitchen, where the dishes pile up on every surface and the dishwasher is broken.
I had intended to deal with some of these things while my son slept this morning, but he did not sleep. He opened the bathroom door while I was on the toilet to tell me this. “Can today be a short nap?” He hadn’t slept at all. My morning work was canceled and would inevitably replace some or all of my more important afternoon work, if I let it.
Normally I would look forward to clearing my mind with the long walk to and from my son’s school, even with the intensely cold weather. But I’ve had a persistent dull pain in my leg for a week, so walking now makes me miserable. Without the mile-long walk to each school where I drop off and pick up our children, I am left to use our car. Navigating big city traffic at rush hour with two children talking at once is stressful, and driving a walkable distance causes me existential guilt. Then there is the likelihood of losing my parking spot at home.
In these moments, when minor annoyances have pushed me to the end of my rope, my negative emotional arousal causes me to rehearse imaginary arguments. I become impatient and irritable to real people in real life, and to those in my mind. For years this madness would catch me by surprise and accelerate a cycle of negative emotion. But now, with time and experience, medication and therapy, I am able to recognize shouting matches in my inner monologue as simply a symptom of stress. I can observe the symptom from a healthy distance, even as it’s affecting me negatively, and often I can remind myself that I can choose what to think about.
In these moments, my jaw clenching for no reason, I say to myself, “Relax.” I say it out loud, if necessary. Or, “I get to choose how I feel.” This is mostly true, most of the time. “I can go to the office right now and just make art if I want. I can put down this dish and this brush, ignore this mess, and go pick up an instrument.”
I drive my son to school, walk him inside, collect a kiss, then walk back to the car. Next I will drive to the busiest intersection in the center of the busiest part of my neighborhood and pay too much to park the car for an hour. I’ll go inside a cafe to write, even though I have a perfectly good work environment and a better keyboard in my home office. At least in the cafe the dishes are someone else’s problem, and the chaos outside, in full view from my seat at the counter, is a play I could watch forever.
It’s easy, I now realize, to recognize radiating rage as a symptom of mental unwellness. How else can I resent so much about an active, urban existence I have so carefully cultivated? But everyone’s biggest problem is their biggest problem, and it is our divine right to be miserable.
Pocket Dispatch from The Big Intersection at Happy Hour
Photo by Levi Jackson
The beating heart of my neighborhood is a six-way intersection where a number of flatiron buildings are arranged like a sun dial. Below their loft dance studios and hair salons, their ground floors contain establishments with drink specials and views of the ceaseless activity outside.
Photo by the author.
Each time the traffic lights change, new chaos begins, accelerating throughout the traffic cycle, often to the point of actual danger when the green lights turn yellow and drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists make a final, desperate dash to avoid more waiting.
Photo by the author.
I come here for the waiting.
There is a railing next to an accessible ramp on one corner where I like to perch with my camera when the weather is nice, shooting photos of fashionable and interesting strangers. The rest of the time, I take a window seat at the counter in the posh bodega on the adjacent corner and just watch the action unfold.
The people around me paw their phones or take Zoom meetings and phone calls, talking more loudly than they realize while sipping lattes. I could drown them out with headphones, but they are in fact part of the scenery I’ve come to observe.
Sometimes it takes a strange kind of discipline to waste my precious free moments here between dropping off my three-year-old at preschool and picking him up three hours later. Most days, that’s all the time I really have to get things done. But I also have to stop and breathe sometime, and remember to enjoy the place I live and the other humans who inhabit it beside me.
Pocket Dispatch from the School Yard
Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash
On the school yard, at drop-off and pick-up, I meet more like-minded adults at once than anywhere else. The last time I met so many people around my age and at my same stage of life, I was a freshman in college.
I am an extrovert, and I crave social interaction at this scale. Especially after two years of pandemic.
But this mass networking mixer is different from most. The parents at school don’t enjoy the anonymity that marks similar occasions and affords a person the opportunity of reinventing oneself. Normally, entering a new context and meeting a lot of new people at once allows us to roll all the hard lessons and heartbreak of our life, combined with our bitter compromises and character aspirations into the silhouette of a new, better self.
Instead, at the school yard, our banal daily struggle is laid bare. We benefit from instant camaraderie among other parents of children the same age, but at the price of any opportunity to reinvent ourselves. The context of school drop-off on a gray morning, where we shiver in the damp air, sober and under-caffeinated, shows us publicly struggling to cajole our children into clothing and shoes on time for school. Struggling to grasp our careers while milking every waking minute for productivity, or spending it caring for others, always weighing the costs of working and often concluding we pay a premium for the privilege.
How can we be expected to talk about the best new albums, or our own art, when someone has forgotten a backpack, a lunch, a pair of gloves? Now someone is crying. Is that one of mine? No. Wait, where are my kids? Shit. It’s time to line up.
I’m not ungrateful to have so much company who can relate to my most taxing moments of the day. We form a supportive community, we commiserate, we make friends alongside our kids.
But this is the kind of kinship I crave elsewhere, at a different hour. I want to meet people at this rate and form bonds this deep with musicians at shows, in bars and clubs, artists at galleries, writers and poets in bookstores. I want to relate to artists as artists and en masse.
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
Take, for example, a recent evening at Cafe Mustache. A friend interviews bands in front of a live audience there every month for her podcast on mental health in the music industry. I’ve wanted to go for years but only made it for the first time this week. I scanned the audience and saw young and queer creatives everywhere. I doubt I can relate to any of them over much in the realm of traditional life topics. But we all struggle to balance those lives with making things and putting them out into the world. I’m confident we could talk for a long time about wondering if we’re good enough to carry on bothering sometimes, or whether there’s still any point to making anything when we live on such a noisy internet.
There are the people I want to find. I just have to keep burning the candle at both ends, and melting it at a few spots in the middle, to meet them where they are.
Pocket Dispatch from Downtown Cincinnati
Leisure for parents can be defined as simply as spending time away from structured time. For a significant wedding anniversary, or even a visit without special occasions, children stay with grandparents and the generation in the middle goes out to remind themselves what it’s like to do nothing in particular on purpose.
On this latest occasion, we booked a night in a hotel in Cincinnati, a city of biographical significance to my in-laws and to my wife in her infancy, but otherwise foreign to me. We explored on foot through a hillside neighborhood called Mount Adams that overlooks the Ohio River and evokes San Francisco via New England. Skinny rowhouses with bold pastel accents reach three or four floors but look just large enough for a family of four, like trippy Easter baskets crowded on a clearance shelf.
After drinking coffee and meandering for an hour or so, we drove downtown, shopped garages for reasonable overnight parking, and walked through an attached complex of office, retail, and another hotel before reaching the street and rounding a couple corners to our own.
The air was damp and unseasonably warm for late December. The ground was wet and gritty from melting snow and ice mixed with dirt from the construction happening everywhere. Cincinnati is an American downtown whose blight rubs shoulders with renewal everywhere. Modern public transit and high concept art spaces wind through blocks of vacant storefronts and the occasional deserted department store. But everywhere there are people turning its wheels, even between two winter holidays.
After check in, we walked up a flight of stairs to our room, a large corner suite with low ceilings, blue-white CFL lighting, and locks on the window shades to keep you from getting too much sunlight. It was bizarre, but large, and most importantly, easy to get to from the entrance without a lot of social interaction at the front desk or on a late night elevator ride.
We changed for an evening out and left as quickly as we could to sit quietly and contemplate cocktails at the first bar, the clock never far from our minds. Precious boredom is not to be wasted.