Seattle

Coming home again after a very long and really weird trip away.

Outstanding minds of the well traveled and overly clever

Up here in the the season is starting to turn. The slowest red flames engulf the trees and things under your feet begin to crunch. I was fifteen when I met my friend from Israel, in the breakfast line at our boarding school. Somebody came up and gave him a package from home which was addressed in squiggles. I looked up at him and said, "But you don't have an accent." It was the beginning of the semester, this time exactly, when the light travels from straight up to sideways.

And ten years later here he is to take in the last of summer with me. Yonton is a good boater and a good business man but even better, he knows books. He can read them backward and forward. Two years ago I had time to kill during a very stinging winter. In the mornings I waited tables and hid from the beer delivery man who would always try and bite me on the ear. In the evenings I'd sit in front of the wood stove, poking at the logs with an iron poker and listening to Yonton read out loud over the phone. We share a love for Foer, Helprin, Murakami, Keret. He introduced me to a book called The Nimrod Flip-Out and tries to explain Hebrew double-entendres as I scratch my head and say, "wait, what?"

On his recent trip to Vermont we fought over lyrics, dreamt of stardom, debated pop music and went over yet again what a bad speller I am. We went out to a movie and then sat at a bar and I got all woozy off a shirley temple, played it off like I was drunk. We scribbled down ideas and rhymes into my gold-lined notebook from Bar Harbor that I keep in the glove compartment. And, of course, we went outside and looked around.

Yonton lives in the searing, overly crowded, garbage strewn, crime ridden, run down, decrepit city of Asheville, North Carolina. I believe he needed this rural getaway just as much as I needed someone to play with.

When we hiked to the top of Dear's Leap near Killington, we looked across at Pico ski resort and spotted the curving alpine slide that runs down the entire face of the mountain. We sprinted down the trail and bought an endless pass and split the rest of the afternoon between chairlift riding and full throttle-ing it down the slide.

So here's to decade of friendship to the boy who has introduced me to: the chocolate lounge, The Mighty Boosh, extreme buoyancy, the sublimely botched English of Everything is Illuminated, Israeli short stories, central park bouldering, and much more.

No, maybe that's it.

I think of you every time I wet-exit or read.

The book of grey

they'll say we came out of nowhere

And as a side note, when our hit single "The Office Bonus" (our pop song about romance at the work place) goes platinum, I just want it out there that I was the one who thought of rhyming "bed sheets" with "spread sheets".

The Brain Saw

YM. Not just the name of a fabulous teen magazine anymore. So much more. Those two letters carry some real weight because they stand for Yonton & Melina. They also are Yonton's full initials but whatever.

Yonton and Melina, two minds that rotate around like holy rolling street smarting blades of miraculous wit and semi-fradulent soul. Give us a little gasoline, pull our engine start chord and we'll straight up level that spurious forest of the stiff and the studied, the pretentious, pretended, pompuous, precious and put-on, straight down to the deforested soil of roots and funk and that's where we lay down our fresh tracks. It's a phenomenon I like to call The Brain Saw.

Let me break it down a little. Yonton is visiting, and we're writing some music. And let me tell you that this little ditty: c= fl (speed of sound in meters per second = frequency in hertz times wavelength, the rule of sound, how could you not know that, do you not remember learning that in school, how come l stands for wavelength, why not W, wouldn't that make more sense)- well, sufficient to say, rules were meant to be broken. EVEN THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go slam another shirley temple and see what sort of clear-cut induced landslides of creativity I can cause.

feeding Seth

On Sunday evening, my friend Seth called me from upstate. He was standing in the driving rain beneath the awning of a Sunoco station in a town up North. I had not seen him for years. I knew him because I use to date his delightfully maniacal brother, but Seth and I were friends in our own right. And now he was biking across the country, from Seattle to the Atlantic, and his gear cable had broken outside of Montpelier. I put down the phone when I heard this, flew to the car and drove with the wipers slashing sheets of rain off of the windshield. It was completely dark, and in the rain the interstate felt like a tunnel. An hour North on the interstate and a few miles of state route and there he was, leaning against the wall of the closed up gas station with his bike beside him, my friend from another life. With a beard.

I spent the better part of his visit feeding him. Cooking for Seth was like an extreme sport. As I cooked him bacon and a dozen eggs for breakfast in the morning, he plowed through an entire huge loaf of bread, carefully toasting each piece and taking a jar of jam and a stick of butter down with it. We made chicken pot pie and corn chowder, thai peanut sauce with rice noodles, pasta with a sauce that cooked on the stove all day. We ate peach rhubarb pie and Ben and Jerry's ice cream, slices of caramel apple cheesecake, cream scones and pistachio sponge cake with chocolate centers. We ate huge plates of heirloom tomatoes from the garden- everything from the garden, chard, zucchini, cucumbers. We drank coffee and wine and Vermont beer and margaritas with crushed salt on the rim of the pint glass. And he was only here for two days.Seth told me that as he spun through North Dakota and the Upper Peninsula into Canada, he craved one thing -okay actually he probably craved many things but this was one of them- jumping off of high places into water. And after he got to Ottawa and saw an exhibit of elaborately balanced rocks by the river, he got it in his head that he wanted to stack rocks.

So that's what we did. We swam and balanced rocks on the riverbank, and when it rained we went to the cafe in town and played mancala and read the New York Times.




I took him on a long walk around the land, up to sugar house hill and through the upper field. We talked nonstop for two days and, I don't know, we just had a good time. I really like it when people come and visit me out here. I especially like it when they come hungry.

What's up Seattle

Guess who's coming back to you?