Change

The old man was hoary, no other word for it. Hoary, like a Christmas scene, an old carol, a washed up blue-collar New Yorker reading The Post and stinking of nicotine. He glanced up at me with blurred eyes and smiled indistinctly, then went back to The Post and something rattled in his chest, something living and malevolent, something that shouldn't be there, but was more alive than him. I got in a cab and the trip through Long Island was fast, clean, and the cab driver, Haitian, laughed like a jelly at some joke I just didn't get, and only three weeks away and New York felt new again. It always feels new coming back, even though little changes in three weeks, little of perceptible value anyhow. New York keeps to herself sometimes, and I do the same, and I think we understand each other because of it. Once I wrote my life down, detailed it day by day editing as desired, wetnursed this suckling Mimi until she grew too big, and then I stopped. I don't write here anymore, because I have no interest in feeding Mimi anymore, in turning my own creation into some grotesque caricature, in starting some revolting cult by pimping out parts of my life for public consumption. I've had my share of that, enough for a lifetime.

The book should be out in the UK in May 2007, I'll post any updates here. A piece of mine is also in the Norton Anthology for Creative Non-Fiction being printed in Summer 2007, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, I'm leaving New York temporarily and will be in India and Palestine for a few months. I will be writing about it, but not here I'm afraid, and if you discover any new sites with prose like mine, perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps not.

There's an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry. I love, more than is healthy perhaps, to leave at the right time.