your cares set up do not pluck my cares down

yesterday sucked low key

Hello friends—

First, I was on BBC Radio reading an essay I wrote about visiting the grave of Langston Hughes on the day the Jordan Neely news broke.

Also, I will be in the UK next week for the publication of The Late Americans. Please come to some events if you can. There’s some tickets left for the launch event.

And, I wanted to shout out this incredible piece on the novel in Commweal. As many of you know, I love getting into Catholic business, so this was a real pleasure to be read this way.

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Monday was one of those days when everything was slightly wrong. I wish I could explain that feeling to you, but pointing to any particular thing would feel insufficient because this was one of those totalizing senses of wrongness. It was in the doctor’s office. It was on the street. It was in the weather. It was in the transit schedule.

For various reasons, I had to go to various parts of Manhattan. In the morning, I saw my endocrinologist and once again explained to his distracted PA that she had sent my prescription to the wrong pharmacy. He was mad. The PA was mad. The office was tense. Nobody was happy about the outcome. I did not get the test results of my last blood draw. But I did get a new prescription which could not be filled because my insurance said that the other prescription had already been filled and they wouldn’t pay for more. I could afford to pay it out of pocket, but then it seemed like a waste of money especially when the medicine is in short supply and I thought, well, I should just trek across town and go to this pharmacy I’ve never heard of. That’s what I ended up doing, but at the end of the day.

After I left the doctor’s office, I was supposed to go downtown to drop off my camera and some film, but I realized I had left my film on the floor instead of picking it up to put into my bag because I’d went to get my watch instead and had forgotten the film. So I had to walk back across Midtown to my apartment. As I walked, I called a friend, and we talked about how bad the weather was going to be and I considered staying home. The weather was so bad. So humid and warm. I had the feeling that I was going to be sick the next day because humidity always gives me agitated sinuses. Anyway, I got home and thought about staying home, but then I realized well, the camera store was next to Bryant Park which was next to the Cullman Center, so I could go in and clean out my desk.

On the platform, I sweated and felt myself getting ready to have a serious sinus inflammation on Tuesday. There was no air moving anywhere. People were fanning themselves futilely. A man played an electric keyboard very poorly. An indistinguishable genre of music came out of that desperate little machine. Then the train came, and it was cooler, but worse somehow. I got out at Bryant Park, climbed up the steps and tried to figure out where to go. The camera shop was down on 39^th. I went at first in the wrong direction then backtracked into the right direction.

Do you know this about New York? How the shops are just casually inside of buildings that could be apartment buildings? I find that one of the strangest aspects of city life. My doctor’s office is in a similar building. You walk into a lobby with gold plated walls and gorgeous marble floors, and a security guard who looks like a doorman calls the elevator for you and you go up and step out into a carpeted hall that is indistinguishable from a hotel or an apartment complex. The camera store was similar. I kept walking by it because it looked like an apartment building. Beautiful dark stone façade, gold plated number right on top of the door. I go in and look around the lobby and he asks me where I am going and I say, fourth floor, camera? And he says, okay, go up. So I go up. I am still stuck on this. I feel like in other places, there is a clear delineation in the way apartment buildings look and the way commercial buildings look. But in New York, those two things are the same. Can someone explain this?

The camera shop was very cute though. You go in and it’s like stepping back in time. They use a dot-matrix printer. The clerk was tall, handsome. He had broad hands and nice wrists. He was wearing a light sweatshirt in a taupe color, and he had a friendly face. He had this gesture when he talked of gently scratching each wrist with the opposite hand and then shaking his watch out a little. I could hear the metal band shiver with the motion. He gave me a list of numbers and dates and I just kept nodding, yeah, sure. Then he disappeared around a corner and asked someone in Japanese if they serviced the M4P. Which they did, lucky for me. The reason I was in the camera store was that my rangefinder had gotten out of alignment, both vertically and horizontally. The images no longer resolved into total clarity when I adjusted the lenses. The cause for this was not mysterious to me. I did the thing you’re not supposed to do and I did it out of sheer laziness. On tour, I put all of my camera supplies—lenses, camera, and film—into a gallon-size ziplock bag. This would have been fine. But by the third stop, I was tired of carrying it in my backpack. I was tired and cranky and over packing and repacking the bag and the suitcase with all the books so I decided I’d just toss the camera stuff into the checked bag. By the time I took the camera out in Madison toward the end of my tour, I noticed that the images no longer aligned when I tried to focus. Uh oh, I thought. When I got home, I tried one of my properly calibrated lenses and sure enough, still no alignment, so the issue was in the camera body, not the lenses though it could have also been the lenses.

This seemed like a good time to get another camera anyway. I was rewarding myself for surviving book tour and also for publishing a third book. And I wanted an M6 with TTL metering and a magnified eyepiece. There was one on eBay for not a ton of money and it even came with a 35mm lens. It would arrive before I left on my UK tour, so I thought, I will drop off the M4P to be serviced, upgrade to an M6, and then sell the very nice M4P when it is repaired. By the way, if you think you might want an M4P Leica, I will sell it to you for not a lot of money. It’s a wonderful camera. Fully mechanical, and I’ve made a lot of beautiful images with it. Let me know if that might interest you. I’ll give you a discount if you promise to use it.

The clerk took the camera and said very gently, almost apologetically, that they would email when it was ready. I was thinking about that clerk when I got back to the lobby. While he had gone around the corner to ask about the servicing of the M4P, I went to their bulletin board where photographers had pinned their business cards like stray specimen. I was reading those cards and thinking about how large his hands had seemed. On the street, I thought, I should write a story about a photography clerk. Then I realized that over the winter I had already started a novel about a photographer. So I then I thought, I should put the hot clerk in the novel.

I walked back to Bryant Park and gave some serious thought to going into my office. The sky was getting very dark then. The wind was changing direction. I thought about how it would rain in a couple hours and how sometimes it takes forever to get back uptown. So I elected to go downtown to drop off my film for developing. I got on the train and went to Broadway-Lafayette. I climbed to the street at Houston and went into SoHo. Near Jack’s Wife Freda, I noticed flashing lights and lots of orange cones set up. I thought it was something innocuous like falling glass or police doing whatever it is they do, so I passed the cones and walked to the film lab. That’s where I discovered that they were filming something right there on the street, right outside of my lab.  How embarrassing. I dropped off a roll I had shot on my book tour before realizing my rangefinder was out of alignment and then I went to Butler and hoped the weather would clear and by the weather, I meant the camera people.

There were terrifying brunettes with their hair in messy buns shouting at people to get off the street and to fucking move. I imagine all the culture industries require such women. I see a messy bun, an unbuttoned flannel, and high-waisted jeans, and I know that’s a woman who is about her business. They wield their clipboards and stamp in their white shoes, and the world snaps to attention. God’s Marines have nothing on those NYU gurlies. Anyway, I drank iced coffee and waited until one of the scary ladies with a bun said it was clear to move, then I sprinted out and walked in the direction of foot traffic which involved going around and then up, and then finally, backward so that I could cross the street. It added like five minutes to my walk, but it was better than getting on the wrong side of a woman with executive function, an Adderall prescription, and a memorized list of tasks to accomplish before the weather got bad.

I had a decision to make then. I could go home or I could go to McNally Jackson. I misremembered it as being closer than it actually was and even though it was only a ten, fifteen minute walk, it felt like half an hour. I kept running into things being filmed all around SoHo, and I kept thinking, how is this possible. At McNally Jackson, I bought this enormous book recommended to me by Jan at Prairie Lights called The Strudlhof Steps. She told me not to buy while I was still on tour because it is truly enormous and should not be carried around in a suitcase. She was correct. I also bought some stationery I don’t need, but that is an ongoing problem. While I was in McNally Jackson, someone asked me if I was Brandon Taylor, and I said yes, and then we chatted a bit. I made a recommendation of Lara Feigel’s The Group for one of their students. It’s like Cusk meets Mary McCarthy.

I walked for thirty years to get back to the D and took it up to my apartment. That’s when I called the unknown pharmacy to have them cancel my prescription so that I could have it filled by my actual pharmacy. They did not understand me. Or at least they refused to understand what I was asking because the man kept saying, “Yes, we have it for you. Yes, we will be waiting.” This is where you are probably wondering why I didn’t just go over there in the first place. What you need to understand is that even by train, this pharmacy is twenty minutes away from my apartment. Not only that, but it’s basically twenty-minutes away from every other point in my daily life. I simply do not go that far east in the city. But it was either that or wait even longer for the medicine, so I got a Lyft.

It took forever. Thirty minutes. But it still took forever because there is a film festival happening in New York right now, and for some reason, my driver elected to take us through Tribeca. The streets are blocked for famous people and also photoshoots and also the idling cars of the very rich. And once we got through, there were more blocked streets on the other side of town. Right by my pharmacy, they had blocked a street for something. That time, it might have actually have been an emergency situation. Anyway, it took me like an hour and a change to get there and back and then I was too tired to even think about taking the medicine.

Last night was hot. I sweated. My head hurt. My stomach hurt. The humidity was really beating my ass. No other way to say it. Humidity is…truly the worst of Satan’s soldiers. Nothing worse. It did rain in the night. Finally. After much threatening. It rained and I sweated and I tossed all night.

This morning, I woke up with the foretold inflamed sinuses and a headache and a sense that everything yesterday had gone fine but that the general backdrop of the day was one of quiet, miserable wrongness. I never quite felt like myself. Never quite felt okay. I don’t know. I just get cranky when it’s humid.

Anyway, see you around. Especially if you’re in the UK—in which case, see you next week!

b