1. One day it was summer, the next it was fall. Feeling overwhelmed as usual by the ongoing passage of time, I went to the park, where I discovered that leaves had started falling and were gathering on the path.
2. The cool air was a relief. I had enjoyed the ‘zombie summer’ of the previous few weeks, but I had been feeling a lot of pressure as I confronted unusual weather, especially when it was the opposite of catastrophic. Were the warm days evidence of climate change? I knew it was wrong to conflate weather and climate, but whatever, I was doing it: how could I not, given that we were enduring one of the hottest years on record. In any event, I felt guilty, but maybe not that guilty. I couldn’t hold myself responsible for the weather (or climate), but at the same time, I was an American during an unprecedented era of material consumption and greenhouse-gas emission, which made me relatively guilty (even if I didn’t own a car).
3. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen these orange flowers before, but they looked amazing against the perfect blue sky (and brought to mind the Huysmans passage about blue and orange — in stripes — being the perfect color combination to reflect alternating states of mania and reflection).
4. Or even if I wasn’t guilty, to ponder the question added to the white noise of denial-and-admit (or reckon) that I think is required to participate in today’s society. It’s hard to live a peaceful, contemplative life if, whenever you step back and consider the state of the world, you have no choice, after taking all of the variable into account, but to conclude that we’re seriously fucking things up. I’m not saying we are or we aren’t (actually, I’m saying we are), but in either case, we’ve arrived at a point when there’s a need to admit (or reckon) or deny, the former accompanied by either a demoralizing, party-killing futility (hi!) or nauseating optimism (anyone who decides to have biological children or devote themselves 24/7 to political activism), the latter (meaning those in denial) by a bottomless fury at those perceived to be admitting (or reckoning), seeking to lift the curtains on your denial and change the way things operate, which if you’re already in denial about how fucked up things are seems like a lot of unnecessary hassle and risk (this camp’s permanent members include Republicans and, increasingly, the liberal NIMBYs who protest things like high-density housing and bike lanes). My point is that there’s no frame of reference these days that isn’t accompanied by a lot of trauma, and that it’s not really possible to exist between these extremes, although it is possible to flip from one to the other depending on the time of day and the context in which the calculus is unfolding.
5. There are moments when I feel like I can escape the admit/reckon/denial dilemma: most of them occur when I’m watching Terrace House walking through the park.
6. I will always love standing in front of the heather and thinking about Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors.
7. It’s not that time stops at the park, but while I’m here, the pressure to define myself in relation to the rest of the world — and the corresponding need ‘to do something about it’ — relents.
8. For example, I stopped thinking about how the NYFD has recently started using the sidewalks on my block as a parking lot and, how, if I wanted to stop this illegal parking (or make the attempt), I would have to endure hours and hours of community board and police precinct meetings, discussions and lobbying with my neighbors, and fighting with trolls on social media. And that’s just ten parking spaces that could easily be reassigned to the street. And how, despite all this effort, I would probably fail unless/until we have a new mayor and city council who decides to enforce laws about not parking on sidewalks.
9. Or maybe it’s not that I’ve stopped thinking about it; it’s that, for a few minutes, I’d rather watch the shadows of the clouds as they ripple over the hammered steel of the river.
