entirely possible and real

There will never be more of summer
than there is now. 

The end of June, now. What I mostly want to say is that I have been thinking about writing this for weeks now and it did not happen. Even now, when I want to write it, what I think is: who wants to read a blog post circa 2003 of my life? I don’t, I think, but I’m also feeling tired of myself and long essays. I somehow managed to finish one and felt in some ways proud of the calisthenics of it, but the pitch went nowhere. If you want to read or publish 2000~ words on the rebuilding of a bicycle and the spiral of the industry, hit me up.

Mostly May was about eleventy years long, and then over and now, somehow, we are done with June. Summer through my fingers and I have still not managed to say the things or do the things I need to do yet.

So: my book is published! Spuyten Duyvil published it. I wrote a book and it’s there. You can buy my book, actually, now. 

I needed to share this. There hasn’t been much of a plan to do so. Each time I gathered up the excitement to share the news, I felt wildly embarrassed at how much energy I spent which made me not want to do any of this.

I want people to read this book and also to go around selling it as the shambling slump of a person I am. If you have a bookstore you love, please tell them to order it. I would love to come there and maybe read from this book! If you are in Chicago, I will share information about Book Happenings very soon. California, I am coming for my Book Party (I think). I would like to be in places maybe where YOU are to read and share this book!

The book is called hotspur (or: these riots and honors). I have a lot more to say about it and want to say it, even though it feels hard and weird and bad and sometimes interesting. It’s strange to say, I wrote a book, because I wrote this originally over fifteen years ago. And I’ve written a number of books, sort of, in the years I just didn’t stop writing. The truth is of course I have not really known how to do any of this for so many reasons. Because I have never done it before, because this is indie publishing, because there’s no anything in poetry, because I just don’t. And of course because it must be said I am finding it very difficult to put this out there with, well, fascism.

We’ll have to find a new name for this newsletter. #teamhotspur is dead, long live #teamhotspur.

+

Most of my time the past two months was spent doing what is pretty standard in this mining salt of fundraising game in nonprofits, which was the execution of a shade-to-the-left-of-a-gala fundraising event. Seated dinner, passed appetizers, weekend work, embarrassing tears on the platform of the Orange Line. One night working late I shuffled to the bus full of bags of nametags or votives or some other bullshit, too tired to notice the phalanx of CPD officers on the corner, then startled by the ones in riot gear on the actual bus. That day people ran down to the courts where fascist agents hauled people away, and the police ended up beating up our alderpeople.

Two days later the wine flowed and people in suit jackets talked of whatever they talked about and mostly I moved around quickly and can mostly remember nothing - there is the pure drive of making things go I would not recommend but is absolutely incredible. The type of drugged hunger when you don’t stop moving for eight hours and smile placidly at every request and josh along with caterers.

I will remain grateful for the speaker, because for months I could not quite get over the instructions from my superiors about the need for a neutral, cheerful and optimistic event. He decried the uselessness of the Democratic Party, its gerontocracy. He said it was not going to get better, not now, not soon, but that’s not the point. The point is to do it anyway. Nobody in the Roman Empire thought there’d be anything afterwards, either. The world is always ending. I stood still listening to him, then the next day it was over.

If anything, that was worth it.

+

A week or so ago the weather turned overnight on Lake Superior. On my way up I slept outside for the first time in over a year, in the long dusk, three days until the solstice. Light remnants escaped Lake Michigan. It was probably the first real day of summer and I’d sat my ass on the Kennedy in a crawl for a couple hours, windows down and simmering over some stupid work microaggression I didn’t think would get under my skin like it used to.

The tent went up easy. I sat back and stared off into the night. Still light out. The wind came over the brush around me and I wondered about the open branches of trees everywhere, their lack of leaves. I leaned on my elbows and with the revelatory and stupid thoughts of someone in the woods, mildly stoned, drinking Miller Lite from Kwik Trip. They felt good. Drifted off with the rainfly open, the fireflies scattered around me, almost unbelievable how good it felt with the woods about me, my back on the earth, the air on my skin.

+

I misspeak. The first day of real summer was the week before I lit out for Lake Superior. Hot at the rally at Federal Plaza with my lawyer pal and I casting our eyes about warily.

A car drove into the march on Monroe, where I walked along the end next to a small child, the mother, two elders with one cane between them. There was screaming first, then running, then panic breathing. The crowd outside the Palmer House coalesced around everyone who bolted for the sidewalk. In the footage the driver looks slow and maybe even looks concerned. I can tell you this wasn’t true, and the reporter scream-narrated into his phone and the news copter gave chase per his instruction.

What to do? Nowhere to go, and so we remained under the Wabash tracks. Bike cops vibrated as they attempted to block it, then failed. The march lunged. Hey D how are you? I asked an organizer next to me.

Fine just almost got run over by a car, he said.

Me, too, I said. Down the street we went anyway until I found the opening to go South, rode back and did not stop once until I stood in front of my door and dumbly stared into the alley.

Amidst the rally, someone I’d been fooling around with last year approached me out of the blue and wandered with me a bit. He disappeared by the time the car appeared and for one moment I saw Jenny Holzer clear as day across my vision.

MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE

+

None of this is very profound, but it seemed the easiest to detail the things of life (which I have never really wanted to do in this, nor in any venue I write in) and also to offer some explanation of where I went. It’s hot out and I took SSRI’s and antipsychotics for years and that shit doesn’t leave your system instantaneously so I’m tired a lot, although less tired than I was and sometimes I think about all my bike travels and am pretty proud of myself.

Pride now over and I feel maybe more neutered in my queerness than I’ve felt, well, ever, despite the blessed cold of Bernice’s Dyke Night and my presence in the two-by-twos. Light shrinks each day and although it seems lately I’ve come to something interesting about my own mortality, there’s only daylight to lose. More than ever I wish I wrote like I did when I was young: into the night, slipping out for a cigarette, back in, all the way up until I collapsed into bed and back up for work the next day.

But I don’t. I don’t really know how I write, right now. What else to do when each week, each day maybe you think, I should write a newsletter, and, also, Who gives a fuck about ANY of this?. At some point it wasn’t worth it to try and ask where that came from. Some point of it was to do it anyway.

+

It is hot where I have returned to, which is Chicago, but I think it is hot everywhere. You live through the 1995 Heat Wave, though, and complaining about it feels stupid. At 23 I lived in brick walk up after walkup with not any air conditioning and seemed to make it. But I worked a later shift and when it wouldn’t dip below 85, mostly I moved my body between lake and pool.

I got back from the North and drove around the past two Saturdays with my hatchback full of groceries for the elders in Grand Crossing and Englewood mostly, who gave me water and said take care and we’ll see you soon, Queen, and my goodness, you’re sweaty!, and thank you and be safe out there. You’re welcome I said and stay cool and yes ma’am I am and you be safe too and mostly all the eggs stayed cold. Pretty, compact houses and wind chimes and dark, decorated living rooms. Video doorbells. Streets some people who have never gone south of Roosevelt have no idea exist. Pity for them, I could say, and also fear avarice.

+

A week ago, though, we awoke to the longest day. In the evenings we walked around the small town beyond the Ore Dock and I marveled: could it be 4 PM or 10 PM or Midnight. On the evening of the solstice we sat in jeans watching a fire, ran down to the water at the long, loud call of a ship’s horn, only to discover it was a Cruise Ship headed back to Chicago.

What else would it have been? War declared? A great wave to take us all? There would’ve been worse places to die.

By five hours of bare dark the Peninsula had warmed and we stripped to bathing suits and went to the beach. I played horseshoes for the first time and hooked a couple, elated. Better to be lucky than smart. The last galley of my book sat on the blanket. I made it into the cold, cold water and dropped to my knees, let the water crest over me, summer already on its way to the end.

June, by Alex Dimitriov.

There will never be more of summer
than there is now. Walking alone
through Union Square I am carrying flowers
and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected.
It’s Sunday and the trains run on time
but today death feels so far, it’s impossible
to go underground. I would like to say
something to everyone I see (an entire
city) but I’m unsure what it is yet.
Each time I leave my apartment
there’s at least one person crying,
reading, or shouting after a stranger
anywhere along my commute.
It’s possible to be happy alone,
I say out loud and to no one
so it’s obvious, and now here
in the middle of this poem.
Rarely have I felt more charmed
than on Ninth Street, watching a woman
stop in the middle of the sidewalk
to pull up her hair like it’s
an emergency—and it is.
People do know they’re alive.
They hardly know what to do with themselves.
I almost want to invite her with me
but I’ve passed and yes it’d be crazy
like trying to be a poet, trying to be anyone here.
How do you continue to love New York,
my friend who left for California asks me.
It’s awful in the summer and winter,
and spring and fall last maybe two weeks.
This is true. It’s all true, of course,
like my preference for difficult men
which I had until recently
because at last, for one summer
the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine
is walking through this first humid day
with my hands full, not at all peaceful
but entirely possible and real.