Facebook Glitch Accidentally Replaces Profile Pictures with Dollar Values

...is a hoax.

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The Common, Faithful Katydid

A friend came to visit this summer and we walked around outside after dinner to merge with the wall of sound that is the Hudson Valley on an August night. Results here.

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Close: NaBlurBloPa

Well. That approximate month of blog entries was the end of me not posting things to Exurbitude. Which is not to say that I've started writing here again -- just that I've stopped not writing here.

That said, I think "Exurbitude," as a concept, is over, given that it's been nearly ten years since we moved from New York, and more than five since I stopped working there. So the title only works on one level now; a journal of life in an exurb. Which, come on, without the dramatic motion of tearing oneself away from the city, is sort of, you know, like Newheart. Funny show, don't get me wrong. Less than instructive, though. One level? Too few by half.

THAT said, tonight I bought jeans that taper all the way down, which, as I understand it, is less a convention of farming and more one of the alleys and barrooms of the metropolis. So maybe my heart, or my ankles, or my pantsal region, still resides in Hell's Kitchen or Forest Hills or the Upper East Side, or wherever pants like that still count. (Possibly only here, from where I write -- a northern suburb of Baltimore. I haven't seen anyone else in these jeans today, though. I'll check tomorrow when we swing through Pennsylvania Dutch country, past the Shoe House, or at the Christkindlmarkt on our way home.)

I'm working on another experimental writing project, but am glad to've broken the seal on this blog. What have you been up to? Comments welcome.

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All I Wanna Do

Is listen to "Calamity Song" all the way through one time on my stupid cheap iPod dock in my own house, is that too much to ask (yes).


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Life's a Beach

After a funeral you keep on your black clothes and you get a coffee and you drive down, a caravan of cars, lights off now, to the shoreline south of Ocean Parkway, not the boardwalk fields, and not Zach's Bay, the pond-like kiddie pool of beaches, but east a little, Field 6, and you go down there and look across to England or the Cape Verdes or whatever's out that way and think about it.

Your metaphors are all gathered in one place, the wind, the waves, sand sifting along over the temporary dunes with their fragile rooted grasses holding the ocean back for a time but blowing on when their day is done.

And when the Leonids peak you all get into the car late at night and you grab a Thermos and put some hot cocoa in there and you bring a blanket and everyone has extra winter clothes, and you get to Field 6 and it's like a party, suddenly, half the population is out there and you realize that you don't have to be an astronomy freak to want to see magic happening in the heavens. So you lie down in a pile with woven goods stacked on you and you marvel at things you sort-of understand, watching fragments of comets snap and crackle overhead.

The first time you stay up all night with friends, there's only one way to be sure you've actually made it through till morning, and you go down to the beach and you watch as the sun explodes upward to mark your achievement.

It's not like the beach is gone away, exactly, but for something so shifting and changeable, it has a certain solidity in the life and mind of a Long Islander, and the damage from the recent storm is unsettling. Visiting yesterday and seeing the road east of the traffic circle, the road to Field 6, closed, and seeing chunks of boardwalk tilted up helter-skelter at Field 4, and walking past smashed dumpsters and cabanas and sheds at Field 2, over new tidal pools and marshes, it strikes home. Your metaphors have metaphors hidden within them. Even the fact that the sand moves is itself a slippery fact.

The ocean? The ocean is still there, as green and curling and cold as ever. But it's nothing without a beach.



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Is Weight Watchers a Cult?

No.





(I get that search a lot. Just thought I'd save everyone some time.)


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Guess what I watched

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