In my dream I’ve decided that my turn in the talent show will be to sing a ditty while trying to balance an absurdly large cap and bells on my head. I need to run out and buy a leotard and a pair of dance flats to complete the look and then get back in time. Obstacles keep popping up.

In my dream I feel the tension roll through my shoulders. The light comes on over a table at the back of the room.

In my dream I’m carrying a friend’s cat in my arms and trying to make my way across an overgrown garden. I see several aggressive foxes hiss at each other and make short leaps. I worry about rabies and how I will keep them away if they discover the animal I’m holding.

In my dream a haughty young woman flounces into my publishers’ office, sure that they are going to take on her new lifestyle book, and demanding to speak to their media “rehearsal coach” . Disinterested, the actual staff wander off to lunch, leaving me there deal with her.

In my dream I am moving towards a kind of peace. I feel how heavy the handle is in my hand.

In my dream I am walking my dog, a Boston terrier, on the block outside of my childhood apartment. The pleasure of being with him is so great that I set off towards Central Park. It’s then that I notice how thin his haunches are and rember his age. It comes upon me that I can’t bear his death again.

In my dream the vender sells chuncks of chicken in sauce. I come back to the room to pack all the photos into a leather sleeve.

In my dream there is a hedge.

In my dream I am trying to convince myself to hold a dog.

In my dream the yellow files are plastered across the walls and furniture.

In my dream I find an entire second trunk stuffed with notebooks, board games and other miscellaneous stuff in the living room of the apartment I’m moving out of. I feel hopeful that it might contain some toys and books iveissed for years.

In my dream I’m about to take the elevator down to change the access code on the the front door when my Mom steps out of it. She is walking someone else’s dog.

In my dream I debate picking up a magazine from the food stand that sits next to the concrete harbor. I don’t know if I have the right currency.

In my dream there are just two yellow levels and some cruelty.

In my dream he grips a sparking cable in one hand and smiles as he turns to kiss the steel scaffolding, setting himself alight.

In my dream I see K for the first time in ages and joke with him about when we used to be roommates. He smirks and acts like he doesn’t remember me. He’s still the same.

In my dream there is a creature something like a dog in my arms.

In my dream I pass a piece of bright blue fluff on the sidewalk and realize that is is the wig of a small elderly woman, who is about five inches tall. The wig has blown off in the wind and I return it to her, slipping it down over her head before continuing on my way. She’s headed in the same direction, and I wonder if I should have scooped her up and carried her, but then I think that this would have been disrespectful and presumptuous.

Today I was invited to participate in an event at the Park Avenue Armory where artists and writers read manifestos, either ones they had written or those written by others. Here’s what I wrote and read:

As the great Madeline Kahn once sang:

I am tired

Tired of waking every day to the thrashing and bellowing of the massive unsatisfied beasts that presume to rule us.

Tired of the unimaginative, repetitive horrors that they race to inflict on the only home they have ever known.

Tired of their lusts that will not allow them to be tender. Tired of their appetite for oblivion.

Tired of these men (and isn’t it always men?) who can’t get through the day without the feeling that they have punched somebody, anybody.

Tired of my own flinching, Tired of the threats to those I know and love. Tired of the technology that I use to remind myself of all of the suffering I have failed to alleviate.

I have had the luxury to conceive and construct my self, to have a certain kind of selfhood because I was born into a particular moment in a particular empire. As that empire convulses and dies, I am here before you wondering what to do with that luxury.

Every empire ends up the same; as a heap of ruins. As a subsidence. None has lasted and none will. The towers fall, the statues crack, the mirrors haze over , the names are garbled and cease to be heard.


When you are my age most things look like they are behind you, because most of your life is undeniably behind you. I am sixty-six, and I will not live another sixty-seven years.  I am winding down. I hope I live to see these creeps buried deep, but it’s uncertain.

So what do I want in the time I have left?

I want to leave this place better than I found it. I don’t think I can do that by haraunging you. I can tell you that I am grateful for your presence here in this room with me. And hopeful that for today I can hold that presence lightly and with care.

In a time obsessed with memory and debilitating industries profiting off of the price of digital memory, Under a regime headed by a babbling demented tyrant desperate to be remembered even as his own ability to remember slips away, I am happy to be forgotten.

In time of repressive identification and definition, i would love for all of us to be unrecognized, indefinable, beautifully blurred. Melding into some new thing.

I want to be a worm and make loam, I want to be a stream and erode their banal monuments.

I want to be a drizzle and speed their rust.

I want to be soft and dirty like a mud pie, molded by loving hands.

I want us to find community in our mingling, to rest together. To make the bed for what will grow next. To be part of the home for the surviors.

I want to feel their feet as they stride over me into the future.

In my dream the adult raccoon won’t stop trying to clamp its teeth around my hand , so I have to keep cramming things between their jaws while I carry it from room to room.