#meanwhile the beloved western just sort of lives in my head at all times without me writing it basically

[theragamuffininitiative]

WIP Tag Game Heads Up Seven Up

Hi! @kanerallels tagged me in this game to post the last seven sentences of my current wip. Since I am a bad, bad writer, I have not written in months and made my followers pick an open wip for me to write in. This resulted in a tie because the universe is punishing me for not writing:

Without further adieu, here are seven fresh lines from my scifi wip Air Jumper and my western wip Lasater, Kansas.

Air Jumper

Once I have arced around the city and hit the three contact points there, I can maintain a more relaxed pace back, hitting another quarter of the necessary contacts along the way and gaining altitude again with every jump until I’m already at the Spire’s midpoint level by the time I reach it. The last part will be the hardest, as I must touch all the remaining contact points on the unknown variable of the Spire as I make for the top. My mother’s plan depends mostly on being able to map out the Spire during my initial drop so that the rest of the race is spent plotting out my ascent in advance. But my mother dreamed of jumping in the Crown on a small rainy planet with small cities and never took into account the sheer chaos of Hyperion, the flashing of lights and signs and traffic and drones that will be rushing up at me. It will be almost all I can do to just hit the necessary contacts on my first jump, let alone mapping the Spire as I go. My mother also saw Air Jumping for what it was supposed to be: a sport, a challenge, a game, and an exciting world in which she could spin stories to tell her wide-eyed daughter before bed. With all that planning and dreaming, she never left Charybdis, and she never participated in a jump with the hopes of three planets riding on her.

Lasater, Kansas

Sonny cut his own impromptu song off abruptly to ask, "You got any other names I can use? Kinda hard to find rhymes for Lasater." "Just Lasater." He tilted his hat forward over his eyes, indicating sleep. "What if I just shorten it to Las? Easier to find rhymes for Las." Lasater didn't respond, but he grinned from beneath his hat.

Crying bc idk who is a writer around here anymore but trying my best: @scarvenartist, @rose-red-ink, @ablatheringblatherskite, @cairistiona7, and uh anyone else who sees this and/or is offended I don't remember them/that they're a writer, ily I promise and I would love to see some of your beautiful writing. 💛

[lettersfromleslie]

SUMMER HEAT / EMPTY STREETS / JUSTICE NOR PEACE IN SIGHT / BUT STEP RIGHT THIS WAY FOR THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN

Hello again from the belly of the beast!

It’s been a weird, hot, bittersweet summer. The new abnormal has made itself at home, the phases of the ‘rona have been swimming by, and one way or another life’s gone on living… Just wanted to put down a quickish sketch of what that’s been like in our lovable ol meatgrinder N.Y.C.

The lil lady and I spent the three months from mid-March to June in lockdown. I talked about all that plenty in my last post. It was a very surreal and foggy phase for us and looking back it’s hard to form a clear picture of what we did or how we felt. I think that fogginess has a lot to do with the mood swings, the phases of the news cycle, the ever-evolving picture we had of the world and our place in it… I kept my sanity by working on the album. It was good to have a mission in that. It was good too that I’d done the crowdfund and people had already paid for the damn thing, which kept me from slacking off too much. When I wrote my last post on May 2nd I was feeling quite blocked-up and discouraged because I wasn’t getting my takes, but then towards the end of May things started falling into place and before I knew it I had the whole album on tape. And whaddaya know, I think it’s a pretty good one! Probably the best one I’ve done. It was the first time I deliberately set out to write and deliver an album on a schedule, setting my dates without having the material in place, and I think that led to it being a very tight, compact statement. Of course the songs wound up being a bit more introspective and quarantine-y than planned, but that’s just how she goes, eh?

I wrapped up recording work around the beginning of June. That coincided with the period that Ariel and I started really venturing out again - starting on May 29th when we first joined the BLM protests against police brutality. I have to admit it doesn’t come naturally to me to talk about the protests online - not because it’s not important, but because I’m unsure if my voice would be as meaningful or articulate as the voices of those who are speaking from a lifetime of experience. Everyone’s feeds are already flooded with this stuff, and being a vaguely foreign white boy with an escapist bent there seems so little use in me going up and taking the mic. I'd just be repeating what I'd had to learn from others.

But that said - taking part in the protests was absolutely eye-opening. The energy and anger and emotion were relentless, and the demands for fairness and justice were so obvious, so simple to understand, and just so plainly the right thing to do. Which made it all the more incredible that it didn’t seem to affect those we were protesting in the slightest. I naively thought that the NYPD would at the very least be eager to put it out there that they, too, were against the indiscriminate killing of unarmed people, black or otherwise. I thought they’d take a knee with us. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, necessarily - but still, maybe just for the sake of PR. Intead we got to watch them go out of their way to perform live demonstrations of what we were protesting against over and over again… That’s to say my skinny white ass got a real crash-course in the harsh realities. We got kettled, intimidated with helicopters, we watched people get rounded up and beaten with batons for violating the 8PM curfew, we were there when that cop car rammed into a group of protesters on Flatbush Avenue… We also saw the looting, and the cop cars on fire, and the trash fires all along Broadway and on Union Square.

What can I say about it? It was fucked. It’s fucked. To be treated as an enemy by the police for protesting police violence. What else to assume than that they were taking the side of violence? They acted more like heavily-armed counter-protesters than peacekeepers. And of course it all led me to examine my own life and the advantages I’ve had. If you’ve been following me over the years you know I’ve always made a point of organizing my life in such a way that I have room to kinda detach from modern life and dream. And I used to think everyone could just do that. I was always proselytizing about it when I was a kid. “Just go live it!” All the while unthinkingly accepting the free passes that society would give me. Playing the free-spirited ragamuffin, simply expecting the world to recognize me in my role - and the world did! - while in a different body I wouldn’t have been recognized. That’s clear enough. So what kind of hypocrite would I be if I wasn’t out shouting for the same freedoms for my fellow humans? It’s something of a karmic debt at this point.


While all this was going on I also had to be dealing with my money situation, which was getting pretty bad. For reasons you can imagine I wasn’t in a place where I could apply for unemployment or any other kind of government assistance. My album crowdfund, the livestreams, and a little help from family and friends had seen me through the worst of the lockdown, but by the end of June I really had to start busking again. Sink or swim.

So, back to old Wash Square. That park has been through some phases in 2020, lemme tell you. It started out seriously mad. When I first started busking again the protests were still going full blast. March after march would weave in and out of the park, speeches were held, kneel-ins, sit-ins, you name it. I’d play the lulls. Around mid-July that righteous energy started making way for some seriously weird craziness. The NYPD had by this point stopped enforcing any of the usual small stuff and the Weird Ones had taken note. A squatter who called himself Jesus built a permanent home for himself and his followers in the fountain. Noise complaints were a thing of the past. Fights and brawls galore. Drugs, nudity, raves, and a riotous fuckitall feeling in the air, masks off, hands on, summer of mad recklessness. Me and my quarantine brain weren’t quite equipped to join the fray. I just kinda nervously skitted around the edges of it, yodeling here and there. Bit absent I was, maybe, but how can you go carefree gonzo when doing so means constantly risking killing someone’s granny by accident? I kept my social distance. There were some bad encounters. Bottles thrown at me while playing. Got assualted by some nut outside the W4st subway station, yanking me by the hair, punching me in the noggin. It was clear to anyone out there that the police had thrown their hands up at the situation and were letting people find out what life was like without them. As far as I could make out this unofficial police strike emboldened both the bad guys and the protesters without getting the cops anything. They might’ve been hoping the resident bougies would put their foot down one way or another, bark up the food chain some, but forget about it. There wasn’t much backlash or pushback from these upstanding, tax-paying pillars of society - they all just skipped town and headed for greener pastures. This mass exodus of wealth which had seemed temporary back in April started really accelerating around this point and by now the absence has started to feel permanent. If there’s any force of NIMBYism left in the Village I haven’t seen it. Those who have stayed on seem to have adopted a live-and-let-die approach. Aside from the fairy-lighted open-air restaurant patios with their potted plants and plexiglass dividers the streets belong to the people again, for better or for worse.

Personally, I don’t mind at all. Why should I? The money’s tough, but hell. I’ve always been broke. I’ve spent all my seven years in this city staring up at the rungless ladder which is Manhattan. If it can stop being a playground for the rich, it might become a place where I could actually hope to live someday.

Anyway, the last month has seen a sort of stabilization of the status quo. Some of the park regulars are back. R&B Lee, who used to be stuck down underground in the W4st subway station, has made a permanent place for himself and his giant PA on the western corner of the fountain. Jimmy the drummer is out all the time with a revolving cast of players. There are DJ sets on weekends and they get loud as all hell. So music’s back, but it’s a different world, and a much louder one. I’ve taken to playing in the small circle of benches on the western side of the park. There’s really not much space for unamplified music; the regular acoustic jam sessions have moved to other, more private locations and Colin Huggins, the park’s much-beloved pianist-in-residence, has more or less given up for the time being. Johan the living statue is out again much of the time. The portrait artists and street art sellers and fortune tellers are back, but the park poets are still in absence, probably conferring with their muses. Check out this article by Charlie Crespo with photos of some of the characters who are out and about.

Meanwhile the atmosphere out there is weird, anarchic, and sorta wonderful if you’re into that sort of thing. I guess I am. You won’t get bored hanging out on Washington Square in the summer of 2020, that’s for sure. Different threads of activism and action going on in every corner, friendships forged, love-ins, creativity, occasional bad chaos and ill energy, along with a good helping of just regular old hedonism in radical trappings. For a while there were great crowds of activist kids sleeping on the lawns and yakking all night about the revolution… The cops put a stop to that one, started clearing everyone out of the park again at midnight. Honestly a lot of it feels like what I always imagined the sixties might’ve been like. I’ve often looked at it a wee bit wistfully wishing I could be twenty again for it, with a head full of hot air and a fabulous tolerance for risk, instead of with bills to pay, dwindling resources, and a partner & a cat to look after. Oh, but I’ll be alright.

To everyone who’s still in NYC and has been worried about going out in public: if your health & conscience permit, come to the park sometime & let me sing a song for ya. I mean, do it responsibly - don that mask, bring your hand sanitizer, observe that distance - but New Yorkers have been knocking it out of the park when it comes to beating the virus, and that means the risks are lower and going out is almost as safe as it used to be. The park has plenty of room to socially distance. No one will bother you about it if you bring a picnic blanket and a bottle of something. The subway is safer to travel on than you might expect. The nights are hot and humid and saturated with all the great unknown we’re traveling through together.

And as far as I can make out, it’s the only show in town!