This Rogue’s Town . . .

I drew the Week that Made Everyone Cry to its auspicious close this past Wednesday, aware that it had lasted much longer than a week, that it failed to make everyone (namely, myself) cry, and at the end of this week, we shed our tears for something far more remote, but somehow equally devastating. 

People react differently to these sorts of things.  Having never been on the receiving end of this type of news, I would never be sure how I would do it.  Thomas offered words of comfort over the phone from Detroit.  The following night over IM, Gabrielle dropped what she was doing and called me up for the first time since law school ended, urging me to tell Mike about it as soon as possible.  Mac wrote that she was literally frozen.  Candice dispatched several sad-face emoticons.  Katie appeared to hold back tears, before donning her metaphorical minister’s frock and saying, "I need to know what you’re going to do about this".  Melissa welled up a little, let me carry on about it for a bit, then filled me up with margaritas and [ ].  I woke up the next morning with her pit bull trying to push me off the bed.

Following the empathy, came the forced introspection, which we all know is far less enjoyable than demonization.

"Hani", it began . . .

Mac: "You haven’t been happy for a while"

Hani: "I know, and I’ve tried . . . "

Mac: "That’s true, but I’ve seen you go these past three years from someone who was very lighthearted to . . . I dunno"

Hani: "I mean, I work on it, I do my best . . . "

Mac: "But Law School has worn you down"

Said: "I was reading through all the archives of your old Blog.  First of all, you can’t spell the word "susceptible" worth shit! Second of all, you always seem to have this very beleagured air about you"

Hani: "Really, that’s not what I was aiming for"

Said: "Maybe not, but I got the impression of someone who was just struggling in the face of such overwhelming burden to just . . . hold steady"

Hani: "I did initially.  I’ve come along way since . . ."

Mac: "And perhaps you tried but your bandwith . . . has slowed down . . . and I worry that news like this is the type of thing that might send you into a tailspin"

Hani: "A tailspin?"

Mac: "Yes"

Hani: "She thinks I’m depressed, and that’s got me bummed out"

Melissa: "Well, she’s just saying that as your friend.  I don’t think you’re depressed"

Hani: "She also said I can be cold"

Melissa: "Hani, I wouldn’t say that you’re cold.  But you give that impression.  At the very least, you can be intimidating, and I think that part of you is usually triggered by being outside your comfort zone."

Hani: "But she knows me alot better than you do in one crucial way.  She has the context to all of this"

Melissa: "The Context?"

Hani: "Pre-Law School, Pre-College"

Mac: "You’ve always seemed like very much your own person, but you’ve also always seemed very burdened by your parents"

Melissa: "Oh, that, well . . ."

Hani: "Well, she’s right about that . . ."

Mike: "But, Han, the thing you have to understand is knowledge of one’s imminent death rarely ever brings out the best in people.  In fact, it will probably aggravate alot of the sore points between yourself and your mother"

Hani: "True"

Mike: "But, the thing that i’ve observed over the past three years is that your relationship with your parents seems to be marked by alot of aloofness"

Hani: "Well, yes, THEY’D probably agree with that.  Though it’s rarely ever fair of them to say"

Mac: "Hani, I’ve been observing your for years.  You’re a specialist.  You have a very hard time engaging with things outside your areas of interest, which is fine because you have some pretty cool interests.  But, for example, at my birthday party . . .

Hani: "Oh god . . ."

Mac: "When you were in the Kitchen the whole time with Corey and Matthew . . .

Hani: "Well . . ."

Mac: "No, it was a great conversation you three appeared to be having, but it was very much apart from everything else that was going on"

Hani: "Well . . . I mean, I say it as no knock to your friends, but I will readily admit that in social situations where I feel overwhelmed, it’s my tendency to withdraw"

Mac: "That’s the most accurate thing you’ve ever said"

Katie: "There’s a pattern here.  They’re angry about the fact that you seem to be always doing things apart from them-running, photography, living in New York-it touches on a very real insecurity of theres.  And maybe these days, they direct the anger at you because you’re someplace they can put it"

Gosh, I wish I were Presbyterian

Mike: "And that’s what you have to overcome these next few months.  You’re not going to be able to confront anyone about anything"

Hani: "There’s nothing confrontable.  I don’t have a BAD relationship with my parents.  It’s actually quite warm, but there are barriers.  Too many barriers.  We’ve always engaged with the world in very different ways and we’ve let it get to one another too often"

Mike: "I understand that"

Hani: "It’s just stuff that I’ve come to enjoy as the ordinary course of being myself just seems to bother them to the core.  And I understand the insecurity that this relates to, but I would like to think if I were a parent I wouldn’t project so much of it on my kids"

Mike: "We’d all like to think that"

Hani: "I’ve decided I don’t want to be a parent. Evidentally, it makes you crazy"

Mike: "I’m scared shitless about it, Han"

Hani: "But, I guess what really gets me, is that I tried so hard throughout my life to make the world seem a little less scary for her.  She always seemed so sad, so angry, so tense.  I never understood it.  And I drew away from it.  And it makes me sad that I could never make her really feel better about things"

Mike: "It’s hard to deal with the fact that our parents are only human, now especially when you see them go through the most painfully human of stages

Mac: "True"

Hani: "This is really very confusing, you people don’t even know each other . . ."

With the flood gates of introspection (admittedly, a poor choice of words for a time such as this) pried open, I’m left wondering what good I can be to myself, let alone others, over the course of what promises to be several trying months.  Already, I’m seeing signs of panic.  My gait seems less steady when I run.  More cramped.  I’m more bothered by minor setbacks; denied admission at the pool because they’ve waited ’till now to enforce the "no pull-buoys" rule up at Lasker.  They close after Labor Day, one compulsion I’ll certainly miss, but could probably do without.  I’ll still have Harlem and its Hills.  I can stay calm for now

Because I’ve grown enamored of the word "TAGARISTA"

which means "Those things that are best" in greek

Because I’ve never had much interest in the Latin affirmations

Excelsior

Omnia Superat

Because Said and I went walking around Oak Park a few weeks back.  We visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio and gorged ourselves on samples at the Whole Foods in River Forest.  Because it rained. 

Because I’m steeping myself in friends and foreign movies

Because it’s bloody difficult to blog and read subtitles at the same time. 

Because it’s taken me nearly five days to come up with a new post

Because that Law of Averages on which I can usually count for aural comprehension of French, doesn’t carry me very far with Japanese

Hani: "So, have you ever heard of a Japanese pic called ‘After Life’?"

Mac: "No, what’s it about?"

Hani: "It’s about these people who have all died, and before they can go to heaven they have to spend a week at a counselling center so that they can choose one memory-their favorite memory-which will be reenacted for them.  And that will be the memory they carry with them for eternity.  In Heaven"

Mac: "THAT . . . would SUCK!"

Hani: "Well, I mean . . . it’s more complicated than that.  They had people who had only bad memories.  And people who couldn’t really remember anything.  Or refused to choose one"

Mac: "Which, one would you choose?"

Hani: "Well, you’re contradicting yourself now"

Mac: " I am?"

Hani: "If it would suck so much to choose a memory, how should I be able to pick one on the fly"

Mac: "Because this part of the conversation never actually happened and you’re just projecting your inner monologue on your retrospective view of what we actually spoke about"

Hani: "Which was?"

Mac: "I asked you what you would pick, and you got all withdrawn and mumbly"

Hani: "Oh"

Mac: "And then I asked you to pound that blue thing into that hole"

Hani: "I see"

Memories are a tricky thing, aren’t they?  Generally pleasant, but often destructive. But if we could isolate them, without any knowledge of what preceded or transpired, then yes, it would be a difficult choice, but I would feel blessed. I could even think of a shortlist on the fly:

1) A very simple day in Madison.  I biked around Lake Mendota for the first time.  22 miles.  It was amazing.  Later that night, there was a party at Andy’s, over on Mifflin.  We drank.  It rained.  I nearly lost my wallet in a storm gutter.  My outfit may or may not have come from Britches of Georgetowne.  Different times.  Playful times.  No knowledge of good or evil.  Eden. 

2) The Capital Limited . . . or is it the Cardinal . . . on the way home to Chicago after a summer in D.C. This pre-dates Memory #1 and is admittedly a much stronger one.  My mother had just been diagnosed a month or so earlier.  At no point in my life, did I ever need more distance from them and in walked lung cancer.  Not the kind that smokers get.  The kind everyone just found out about a few weeks ago.  Like Dana Reeves.  I learned alot about myself that summer.  About my dreams, hopes, fears, and limitations.  Perhaps several years later than usual.  Because now I had space.  Space that, for whatever reason, was never really a given.  But that’s not what this memory was about.  This memory was about a house burning down. In West Virginia.  Or the Shenandoahs.  A large mansion house, in a valley, though which the train passed.  It was completely engulfed in flames.  In late afternoon.  There were no firetrucks around.  Help had not been called yet.  There was nobody on the outside.  Perhaps they were trapped in? Or Perhaps it was intentional.  Fire-angry, destructive and defiantly beautiful-punctuated the soaring green hills, valleys, and blue skys.  We don’t have valleys in Illinois, it being so flat.  On the other side of the train, bubbling creeks and waterfalls.  Here I was, in between journeys, en route to Cairo via Chicago (the REAL story of my life, I’ll one day come to realize), sandwiched between nature’s two most powerful forces: fire and water.  But so very beautiful.  The train had stopped earlier in Charlottesville.  If my timeline is correct, you would’ve begun college that following semester.

3) A late Spring weekend evening.  2004.  Somewhere between Little West 12th Street and my sofa.  I put on that Common cd you said you liked. 

I can take any one of these I think. 

It made me think about my mother.

She asked the other day what the difference is between a levy and a dam.  Years ago, they’d go to New Orleans.  Maybe when my brother had just been born.  Maybe before then.  Day trips from Baton Rouge.  Some of the more subtler observances of Mardi Gras, I’d like to believe.  Though I always wondered why there was a bottle of Hennesy in the background of the picture taken at our house in Dallas when I was one? I never took my Dad for a cognac drinker.  Could it have been . . .

I wonder what she would pick? Would I be in it? I bet I would.  Not because I honestly think I should, but because even though she’s always projected her fears on me, she’s always projected alot of tenderness.  Like any mother would to . . . a child.  Not, an adolescent.  Or a young adult.  Or, god forbid, an attorney. But, a child.  And I’m not sure how it would make me feel if true.  I’ve always wanted them to have a happiness separate from my own.  Maybe this is part of the craziness that parenthood engenders.  I shudder to think. 

And then what would it involve if not myself? With my brother while she was getting her PhD? With my Dad before any of us came along? In Egypt? In Cairo, riding the tram across town to university with Safinas? Mervat? Zeinab? She lives in California now.  A real estate tycooness of sorts.  Would my aunts be in the picture? My grandmother? And then who would she be? Would she be the sometimes counterproductively focused and headstrong woman i know her to be? Or would she be the serious and perhaps insecure girl she might have been at one point? Would she be somewhere in between?   Her school portrait from her twenties, where her hair is in bangs and drawn out, in the mode of that era? Will it be in her 30’s, where she now has two kids, a career, and typically late 70’s ‘fro?  What about the 80’s and 90’s, when the black curls slowly ceded to salt and pepper and the voice faised more frequently? Against broken curfews, and girlfriends, and non-girlfriends, and going to dances, and god forbid having a beer? And our current time when it’s become silver, split and matted, but eminently fixable? Voice raised now against bachelorhood? Or that three day period where she tried covering it after having come back from the Hajj.  It upset me.  I have her hair.  Or at least I did.  When I had hair, I had her hair.  Curly.  Now, it’s gone.  We’re still here.  But her hair is gone from me.  She stopped covering it after three days.  Said she couldn’t think with a hijab on. 

Mike: "Han, I think you might be focusing on the wrong things"

Maybe he’s right.  It’s impossible to know, and not worth finding out.  Let the past sort itself out for those who so desire.  All I’m being asked right now is to be here in the present. 

An exceptionally tall order if expert opinion is to be believed. 

It’s not easy to talk about this.  This?.  Yes, this . . . this . . . what is this? This . . . situation? Nawh, bad choice . . .  too entrited . . . that even a word? It should be.  Things can certainly be made trite, can’t they? Like the word "situation".  Tucker Carlson.  Wolf Blitzer.  They destroyed it.  In tandem.  They did.  Summer Sweeps.  This is a situation, isn’t it? How about a milestone? TIME Magazine hails these things as "milestones"; watershed events.  I never understood why they reserved such distinctions for the ailing.  More for prospective self-satisfaction I suppose.  So the more supercilious amongst us can claim they weren’t surprised to hear the passing of Tony Randall.  Jerry Orbach.  Or worse yet, only learn about it come Memoriam time at the Oscars.  Like I did. 

It wasn’t broken to me quiet so formally.  It wasn’t even broken to me.  ON me more like it.  Forced out.  Elicited.  Goaded. 

-Mother is in her last months

Simple as that.  I wish I could take back the events that immediately led to this. I do. No to forstall having to find out.  But to know that I could’ve been a little more patient.  A little less defensive.  Always a tall order with those two.  With or without the context.  The fear.  The tension.  The anger.  The sadness.  I suppose it’s never been that bad, but it’s always been a little too heavy. 

Nine months, I’m told.  Nine months, of something that will be largely sight unseen.  High up above the lake, in a house that isn’t my home.  In a house that isn’t even schematically a house.  Where coughing will continue to punctuate seemingly every moment like it has for much of the past seven years.  It’s hard to listen to.  It is.  It’s unthinkable to witness.  It’s impossible to really feel.  It is. 

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this . . . this . . . situation.  This milestone.  This event, condition, or concern.  I don’t.  I wish I had some resolution with which to move forward.  A new creed.  A new outlook.   Something other than the ordinary.  The sore forearms. The strained right knee. The far-worse-than-expected half-marathon performance of yesterday.  These get one through the day.  But will they carry me, as I know will be needed.  Will it carry me through the pain I cannot know? Will it carry me into the next life? Not the one that allegedly follows this one, but the one inevitably waiting around every corner.  The one in which the person we were, or even still are, cannot be the person we now need to be. For ourselves and for others. 

Will it carry me far enough? Will it? And will I know when to stop? I don’t know.  I don’t.  And perhaps I won’t know.  I won’t. 

Took the fam tonight to P.F. Chang’s in Northbrook.  Never been before.  P.F. Chang’s.  Not Northbrook.  Been there a bunch of times.  Every Sunday.  Ate Mango Chicken.  Meb Kaflezighi.  He’s on the menu.  So too Fred Shorter.  You can’t order them.  But they’re on the menu.  They sponsor a marathon.  Brown Rice.  tasty.

"Feed the Tree" by Belly came on the sound system. Can honestly say I hadn’t heard it since high school.  Listened to that cd so much the jewel box cracked.  But that was years ago.  So too "Gepetto", "Slow Dog", "Untogether".  Not like I had a thing for Tanya Donnelly.  Kinda thought she looked like a guy.  Or worse yet, Lady Kier.  Gave me a tickle this evening.  Really.  Because back then I was young.  And because these days sometimes I still need convincing. 

Spiders, I’ve now learned, can climb terribly high.  Perhaps as high as 56 floors.  Maybe even further.  Of course, I’m still unsure just how they manage the climb.  56 floors below sits a drive, beneath it another drive, beneath that yet another, then what I can presume is earth.  There they have trees and other green things down below, carefully manicured with tennis courts and dog walks.  Splendid view of Navy Pier and the Harbor.  Is this were they came from? The grass? Do they ascend the exterior one floor at a time? Millimeter by millimeter up to the top? Do they burrow, as pests are wont to do, through interiors, cracks, and HVAC ducts? And then how do they hang on? Through the lake effects and the not-always-torrential downpours.  How? Do they like what they see? Do they think, "Look at me hanging on by a thread! Yes, a thread! And you, yes you, homo erecticus with the size 10.5 shoes . . . bet you’d like to one-off me with one of those . . . sheepishly surveying the drop below on that . . . what is that thing you’re on? An elliptical? Heh.  Knock yourself out, bucko!  I’m a spider.  A big, nasty, ugly one at that.  One I bet you think might kill you, because you strike me as the type that pass/failed AP Bio in high school.  You quiver where I conquer.  You desire a few inches recessed while I gingerly hang here half-a-stratosphere above the earth.  Who’s the higher being now?".

And I hazard he has a point.  There’s a Harvest Moon out tonight.  It began low and creamsicle.  Ascended to a pale yellow mid-sky.  Now, white as its wont, perched just atop the black edifice across the way.  At its low-flung peak, it shone a gorgeous white streak halfway across the Lake, the kind you can rarely see down below, it being so flat.  I think of the Atlantic, pitch black and eternal, because it reminds me of home.  I think of Gary, Indiana, sitting just beyond the streak, because it is what I can see.  Through the window.  On it perched a spider.

Truthfully, it knows nothing of what goes on inside, acting only by instinct.  It knows nothing about the cancer or the coughing, the seven-pound weight gain or the strep throat, the snoring and the bulk or the nagging dripping faucet.  It only knows the air around it and above as far as it can go.  It knows nothing about below, where it came from.  Not any more, it seems.  It knows the lake, it knows the moon, and the rain and the black edifice across the way. 

One could become accustomed to all this, I suppose.  But I wouldn’t.

Aware that horoscopes (especially of the Friendster variety) tend usually to the irrelevant or outlandish, I avoid putting too much stock in any of what they have to say.  This is why I was a little taken aback by today’s Friendster horoscope which (sadly) contrary to reality, makes me sound like (I should be) the town bicycle.  To wit:

Someone’s ordered up a side of you — extra spicy. You’re irresistible to all and sundry right now. Don’t spread yourself too thin, though — while you are one delicious dish, there may not be enough to go around.

. . . gosh, I don’t know whether to feel objectified or hungry. 

What oh what was Fred Schneider doing walking down Randolph Street this afternoon?

I recall in the hours following the 9/11 attacks, Elvis Duran, or one of those puds on Z-100, talking about how he’d heard that a firefighter had survived the collapse by literally sommersaulting in sync with floor after collapsing floor until he eventually reached the ground and was able to emerge from the rubble relatively unscathed. This story, of course, was proven false in a matter of hours, serving only in the end to give a brief glimmer of human interest-flavored hope in the middle of such overpowering calamity.  And yet, it was the only thing I could think of this morning, as I found myself separated not a foot from the 56th floor air over Harbor Drive, futily trying on the elliptical machine to make a dent on the past few days worth of damage.  So far as I can tell, the ParkShore condominiums are no one’s idea of a prime target, but a ground-dweller like myself could stand to have a few more inches placed between myself and even-entirely-speculative freefall. 

It’s raining outside today.  Couldn’t run.  Wouldn’t no where to out here.  My god, this place is flat. 

Sigh . . . why Why WHY am I doing this trip again? Do my parents really need two weeks worth of me in my (ironically now) unnatural habitat? I mean, no knock to my not-altogether-missed home state, but I was starting to settle into quite a nice post-bar exam groove out here.  Biking up to Lasker Pool; twice the length of my usual laps in twice as much time.  And the Harlem Hills; the Thomas Jefferson Houses peaking up just beyond the mighty elms and handsome edifices on 110th Street.  For all this, not minding the severe gross-ness of venturing into a public swimming pool sans protective footwear.  Coco Delicioso post-swim.  Cycling home down Broadway more routine than before.  Getting dark.  Getting real dark.  Getting "Oh my god, how come you got so dark" from my Mother as soon as I arrive in Chicago no doubt. Running 20 miles this morning.  20 miles.  that will get me as far as The Bronx this November.  20 miles . . . wow.  Hills are your friends, Shulman . . . they break up the monotony of the flat.  All this better be waiting for me when I get back; I’ve had just about enough transformation for one summer. 

Only here are you almost sure that you are careening on top of a big shiny globe, blurring spinning-you are never aware of these things in Chicago, it being so flat, so straight . . .

I anticipate food . . . of course, I always anticipate food.  I’m still not quite sure what it says about the present state of affairs in my life that all my trips home turn into protracted gorge-fests.  With my aunt and cousin visiting from Egypt, I also expect her superior-to-my-mother’s renditions of (q)ul-(q)as and (q)ataif-b’gibna.  I’m told to expect a meeting with a distinguish professor of laws at DePaul, a leading expert on war crimes and international human rights law as well as a known Egyptian.  I’m told to anticipate a possible viewing of Wicked at the Oriental, which I’ve somehow managed to not see out here yet.  I’m told to to entertain the possibility of a completely-unnecessary and counterproductive trip to Niagara Falls (long story to be explained later, should things so transpire).  I’m told to select restaurants for us to enjoy, again falling into the role I studiously try and avoid when around my parents-that of Julie, the Cruise Director.  I’ll set my expectations low.  I may be pleasantly surprised, provided they don’t try any funny stuff as is their wont. 

And so, I fly off to the Prairie State; iPod filled with Sufjan Stevens, a non-Illinoisan who somehow managed to capture the all-too-subtle eccentricity of the place in 24 glorious tracks.  Part of me wants so dearly to channel the historical lesson-gift-wrapped-as-sympatico that is "Come on! Feel the Illinoise! . . . ", but as I contemplate two weeks of living 48 floors above the earth with my cabin fever-enducing parentals, I can only ponder these much more austere musings tucked away hauntingly towards the end of the album:

In the tower above the earth,
There is a view that reaches far
Where we see the universe,
I see the fire, I see the end.
-The Seer’s Tower

Alright, Illinois.  I’m being extraordinarily generous with you this time.  I expect a little bit more effort on your part in return, even though the view from my window only reaches as far as Gary, Indiana. 

Without a doubt the most embarrassing thing to happen to me in five years of living in New York.  It happened today.  I’m sorry you missed it.  Ranch*1, Eighth Avenue and Forty-Fourth, a recently-acquired post-workout obsessive compulsion.  Having finished off yet another grilled chicken platter, with it its seven grams of fat, fifty-six grams of protein, and all its steamed broccoli, carrot, and baked potato-with-nary-a-dab-of-butter-in-sight glory, I got up and . . . well, I can’t adequately retrace the chain of causation here (sorry, folks, bar exam was less than a week ago) but I seem to remember losing my footing, and suddenly finding myself ass-thrusting downwards to the floor and, eventually, horizontal thereto.  On the floor I heard gasps, then silence, then a cacophonous din of "Omg, what just happened"’s before quickly taking stock of the situation and deciding it best to just play it cool, pick up my mess, and leave.  Miraculously, I remained untouched by the flying ice cubs and bits of potato innard that presumably would have achieved volation throughout this whole debacle.  The slight soreness in my left cheek was no doubt aggravated by what had to be a good 12 miles worth of biking today, but I’ll deal with that whenst I have to.  I honestly can’t remember I time where I did, in good faith, fall completely flat on my ass, and definitely not in full view of about a dozen people eating lunch.  Being tall and kinda uncoordinated, I’ve been more accustomed to the forward pratfall, often braced by my long-suffering palms.  But not this time.  All ass.  Almost seems like a right of passage in retrospect, and yet I’m left to wonder why this hadn’t happened sooner.