When it starts falling, on Friday afternoon, for the first few hours everything melts.  Nothing sticks. When it stops on Saturday evening, it’s given birth to a different world.  Everyone is helpless, everyone is kind.  The streets are deserted and blank.  The only way to get around is ingenuity and desperation.  It feels like I’m back in Africa. But we have such important lives!  So many things to do! Walking to the coffeeshop is like crossing a mindfield.  You dance from clear path to clear path, dodge random vehicles that come barreling down the half-plowed lane, hope you don’t...

Eight years ago today my girlfriend (and destined to be fiancé, wife, ex-wife, stranger) woke me with a shake.  She’d arrived to the city the night before on a late flight from Paris where she had been performing a modern dance piece in her underwear for a month.  I picked her up at JFK and we stayed up until well past midnight talking, mapping the distances that had formed during our separation and formulating plans to overcome them.  Our love was troubled and we thought, incorrectly but understandably, that it could be saved with good plans and honest toil. She shook me hard.  I looked...

Some days it is clear that everything in the world is a reflection of everything else. That is, the worry you feel is shared by every flower and tree you pass and by that dog panting on the porch across the street that just said goodbye to its master and now waits for him as you wait for the future — full of agony and anxiety, but forever hopeful that he/it will arrive safe. The numbers are not in your favor. Temperatures rise, bank account balances fall, the roads are dangerous. The course of love begins somewhere and so inevitably, in accordance with the laws of energy, must end. ...

My housemate brought home a dog from the shelter this afternoon. A beagle mutt, Oscar had been relegated, by his previous owners, to a cage for twenty hours a day. Understandably, this new cage free world is enormous and frightening for him. There are people everywhere. There are trees that reach higher than a dog can imagine. There is the litter of yesterday’s community fireworks extravaganza; piles of cardboard with angry scorched rims. We walk past the elementary school. The moon, wreathed in a cloud, is full as all of June. This is too much, too much Oscar says. Otis nudges him with...

There’s a long, heartfelt feature on my good friend Rebecca Alexander in this week’s New York Magazine. Enjoy — she’s the shiznit. And in the pic on page four, I am about to turn her into a frog. Update: She’s as beautiful as she is awesome.

The day is whole, completeThe day is not lacking in any way, shape or formSeven birds trail across a gray cloud The day is grace animatedThe day is love given breathThis moment, you are held,What more can you ever possibly need?

The other day I had dinner with a group of people including a young man whom, while on patrol in Abu Ghairab, was blown up by an IED. He was clinically dead for three minutes, and then discovered, when he was revived, that his memories of high school had stayed behind. They were gone forever. Two weeks later he was back on patrol. Two weeks after that, he was blown up again. “Some days,” he says, “All I want is to go back.” I drove to New York late that night. It was after midnight, Otis slept soundly and the roads were clear through southern Jersey. As I drove I had the thought,...

If you’re in town Monday the 17th…this could be fun. Stop on by. UPDATE: The time on the Poster is wrong. The festivities start at 7, not 8. Also, I’m first up, so get there early if you’re coming.

I teach at a University for the Deaf. The University for the Deaf, I should say, because there isn’t another one. The school is on a hill in Northeastern DC, surrounded by a neighborhood that has long been almost entirely African-American and brutally poor. Hemmed in by such a neighborhood, by spiked iron fences and patrolling police and 24hr hour security cameras, by their own sense-lack, the student community has become as cloistered and isolated as a fundamentalist compound. The fence is high and the world outside, ah, the world outside, we’re never really going to understand each...

This is our moment. There is so much to be done. The mess is large and growing, the hour is growing short. Our children… Got an email from my old trail boss in California. He wrote: It’s a good day. Let’s get to work.