I dreamt last night of my late wife, Alison. I didn’t see or hear her, and I was in a mostly unfamiliar place, but her presence was unmistakable. I knew that we were somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, where we used to live. We were dating in the dream, not yet married, and it was late, so I’d decided to go back home. For some reason, I had to go across the street to a pay phone to call an Uber. It was midnight, but paradoxically enough both bright as noon and dark enough to obscure the way. I called the Uber guy, who was hard to hear, but he said he was coming, and there the dream ended. Continue reading
Category Archives: slices of life
Dreams of MacIntyre
I dreamt of Alasdair MacIntyre last night. He looked exactly like his Wikipedia photo, except that he was wearing the old blue jacket he always wore when I knew him, with a grey turtleneck underneath. I was sitting down, reading or writing something about Machiavelli: it was either a philosophy conference or a bus station, I’m not sure which.
He walked in, smiling this weird Mona Lisa smile. He seemed happy to see me, or maybe just happy to be back. My first impulse was to ask him what the Afterlife Dept was doing about the genocide in Gaza or ICE, but I didn’t. It somehow seemed inappropriate to ask, like those were my obsessions, not the afterlife’s. You might as well ask a retiree to solve problems at work. Gauche. I hugged him, something that neither of us would have done in real life. I was sort of shocked: bro was ripped. For a second I wondered what part of the afterlife they’d sent him to. Did Mac get misdirected to Hell and spend the last couple of months working out in the yard? Stuff you never expect. The dream ended there. He was inscrutably silent the whole time.
American Dreamscape
I rarely work on Sundays, but had to go in today. On my way in, I meet a friend, a Spanish-speaking migrant who, like so many, does landscaping work in town.
“I have to work today,” I complain. “I hate working Sundays.” It’s a tone-deaf comment. He has to work himself.
”I work every day,” he rejoins matter-of-factly. “I have no day of rest.”
Continue readingNo Such Thing as a Free Ride?
I’ve just worked a fifteen hour day. I want it all to end. I want to end it all.
I take the 8:54 train out of Metropark, hoping to get to Princeton Junction in time to catch the 9:25 bus into town. I’m in luck. We get in at 9:24.
Just as we get there, the son-of-a-bitch bus driver pulls away. In other words, he sees a whole trainload of commuters come in, then leaves a minute early. I curse as I watch him go, sympathizing briefly with every terrorist who’s ever lived. Continue reading
Just an Amtrak Away
I’m sitting on an Amtrak on my way home from Providence, Rhode Island. The guy sitting next to me, who works in marketing for a New York law firm, is reading the Greek text of Xenophon’s Anabasis “for fun.” I’m reading Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War, for leisure though not quite for fun. The woman to my right is reading Moby Dick; I hesitate to ask why, but she doesn’t look unhappy. Another woman just got on and sat next to us, reading Jenny Erpenbech’s Kairos. The two women are now having an animated literary conversation. It’s got to be one of the most literary rows on the train.
No STEM warriors in sight. No AI or ChatGPT, either. The demise of the humanities has been greatly exaggerated, at least on Amtrak train #149.
Capitalism Is Working
My Uber driver this morning was a 78-year-old Baptist preacher. We spent the ride comparing near-death car wreck experiences, led there by a conversation about Smokey Robinson.
My story involved a flood, his a fire. Mine took place after a day of revenue cycle management, his after a bout of drinking. My wreck put me in a hotel for the night, his in the hospital. My wreck ultimately led to a life on mass transit, his to a life with Jesus Christ.
Continue readingMy First Foreign Visit as Mayor
I was aimlessly surfing online when I happened on that now-famous clip of the New York City mayoral candidates being asked what foreign country they would visit first on being elected to office. It’s amusing to me that, put in that situation, I would truthfully have answered Israel. It’s even more amusing how uninformative that answer turns out to be. Funnier still is the number of people who, on hearing it, would confabulate their way to an explanation and get it wrong. But I would not have prefaced or explained what I said. Ask a stupid question? Get a cryptic answer. Under the circumstances, they should be grateful to get an answer at all. Continue reading
Valley of the Ghosts
Facebook does this thing where they exhume something you posted on this day, x years ago, just to remind you that you did: “You have memories on this day,” it helpfully intones. Sometimes you want to be reminded, sometimes not, and sometimes you can’t be sure. This one, I guess, falls into the third category. It was the midpoint of a long walk I took on June 10, 2016, which fell during Ramadan, when I was fasting. I was living at the time in Abu Dis in the West Bank, just east of Jerusalem. It was either a day off from teaching, or I was just done teaching, so I started walking, on a whim, from Abu Dis to the neighboring town of Eizariya. Continue reading
You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis
Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon.
“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading
How Still We See Thee Lie
I was at a Christmas Eve service last night where the Confession and Lament Sequence said: “Forgive us for following the logics of Empire and the violence of Herod. Lord have mercy.”
It’s an admirable sentiment, but I had to wonder: if mercy is to be sought, is this the proper addressee? Is mercy in fact the thing to be sought at all?
Policy of Truth 