What's your excuse?
weather report
You (you!) are invited to Breath Door Show the day after tomorrow! @ Brooklyn Coop Credit Union 1308 Myrtle ave — stand up comedy & liberatory economics at your service….or for your nyc friend who could use a serious bout of laughter.
New York is covered in snow, almost two feet of it. The flakes were in no rush. Out my window the other morning I couldn’t say for certain whether they were hovering or falling. They made their way down to the earth, eventually; at gravity’s beck but not completely. We know they landed, we are surrounded on all sides.
With the snow a hush falls. The city grinds to a halt. The atmosphere feels more still, the air full of moisture and silence. There’s more light in the air. Light isn’t noise but it sure does reverberate off all the white. This water dusts. The sky falls. The sky is in piles on the ground.
This quiet weather has a way of getting our attention, scratching the record, creating openings. In Nothing Personal (G.O.A.T. essay), James Baldwin writes:
“Some rare days, often in the winter, when New York is cheerfully immobilized by snow—cheerfully, because the snow gives people an excuse to talk to each other, and they need, God help us, an excuse—or sometimes when the frozen New York spring is approaching, I walk out of my house toward no particular destination, and watch the faces that pass me. Where do they come from? how did they become—these faces—so cruel and so sterile? they are related to whom? they are related to what?”
The cruelty and sterility are as threatening as the freeze, watch the ice there, don’t slip. All the while, excuses to talk pile up, just as fluffy, just as giving-you-the-chills, just as alert.
We are cheerfully immobilized by each other, we take the long way down. We tarry on our way, sorry little snowflakes that we are, indistinguishable from each other from a distance, and each of us one of a kind, unprecedented, impossible to follow.