NORTHFIELD, VT -

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? - Eleanor Roosevelt

I was barely 20 when the 9/11 attacks happened. It was a bright fall day in the peaceful town of Northfield, Vermont on a military college campus 300 or so miles north of the Big Apple, and I wasn’t even awake when the first plane hit.

I didn’t have class until 10…I had at least another hour before I had to be awake and I was using the opportunity to sleep in, especially because my thesis work would begin in another week or so and sleep would be a thing of the past.

My mom called me that morning and even through the fogginess of exhaustion I could tell that something was off in her voice, that something terrible had happened.

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DENVER, CO-

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the need for Barack and Michelle Obama to properly introduce themselves to the wide swath of America that doesn’t yet feel that it knows who they are. There has been much talk about the need for the Obamas to present themselves in a way that America’s many undecided voters can relate to.

And let’s be honest: There has been plenty of discussion—much of it private—about the Obamas’ (desperate?) need to connect on a visceral, human level with America’s (white) older voters and (white) working class voters who still feel a bit leery about casting their vote for an African-American man in November. This is the subtext. This is the plain truth.

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DENVER, CO-

Sitting in a Starbucks on the 16th Street Mall, humming with caffeine and adrenaline. Randomly, I ran into my old friend Davo from childhood while on my way over here. He told me that I looked like I was on amphetamines. Sweating through my shirt, talking a mile a minute, trying to keep up with everything going on—in my head, on the streets, in the press, et cetera.

It’s pandemonium. But it’s fun pandemonium.

The scene here is pretty electric, pretty overstimulating, pretty unusual, pretty annoying, pretty exciting. A bit of everything. A bit chaotic. But so far essentially civilized. One minute you’re staring down a convivial chanting session, Obama supporters clapping in unison and singing the praises of their chosen leader. Then you turn around and some guy in a JESUS SAVES YOU FROM HELL T-shirt is holding a pro-life poster featuring a mutilated fetus in Technicolor.

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LOS ANGELES, CA -

My boyfriend and I were driving home from the movies the other night. Which movie is not the point, but for the sake of setting the mood, it was a comedy and we laughed and we laughed.

The point is he’s got satellite radio in his car and he was flipping around to find something decent for us to listen to.

We tend toward a channel called Deep Tracks (AKA excuse to play understandably forgotten Emerson, Lake, and Palmer tunes) or Top Tracks (AKA excuse to play “Won’t Get Fooled Again” again, but with the benefit of really crisp acoustics.)

One can also find some decent comedy from time to time. And a hardcore rap show hosted by Ludacris. He and his partner swear and everything. We never listen to indie rock on satellite. I don’t know why.

Sometimes Mark turns to Hank’s Place, a channel that usually plays fine and classic country tunes. This time around, we found ourselves in the midst of a ditty with lyrics about getting old, and likening the aging dilemma to having the value of a precious, antique violin.

For reason that are probably apparent, Mark kept hitting the satellite radio remote, scrolling through our many other options to see what else we might find.

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ATLANTA, GA-

In our room that morning as we changed into our bathing suits, stuffing towels and Coppertone into the souvenir Pan Am flight bags our father had gotten for us on a business trip, Glen told me how it would go.

“Answer her questions, but don’t start a conversation.”

“But Dad told us what to say last week. Remember? He said when we meet her to smile and say, ‘I’m state your name, very pleased to meet you, Kate.’ ”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Glen. “You can say it, but you don’t have to mean it.”

“Okay.” I watched him put a book into the bag and then slip a small white bottle of roll-on deodorant in after it. “Why are you taking that to the beach?”

“Don’t want my pits to stink.”

“You think girls from school will be there?”

Glen’s face went red as he zipped up the bag, then mumbled, “You never know.”

“I think she’ll be tall,” I said. “Taller than Mom, probably.”

“If you’re nice to her I’ll punch you,” Glen said, tucking the towel under his arm. “Hard.”
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ATLANTA, GA-

The snow was piling up outside, a white blanket six inches thick and gleaming in the moonlight, reflected up through Darla’s bedroom window. I had just finished reading a story to the girls from Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Treasury about sledding down a steep hill. Toad, the pessimist, is leery of such a dangerous undertaking, but the eternally optimistic Frog assures him they will be safe and have lots of fun.

Flying down the hill they hit a bump and Frog falls off. Toad keeps talking as if Frog were still on the sled, but a passing crow tells him he’s talking to himself. Toad looks back at the empty sled, freaks out and quickly crashes into a snow bank. Later, he tells Frog winter is fun, but staying in bed is much better. Safer too.

“I like that one, but it makes me cold,” says Emma, hugging her shoulders. “Can you tell us a Florida story?”

“Yeah, a Florida story!” Darla says, scrunching down under the covers.

So I begin as I always do.

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BROOKLYN, NY-

I am not cool.

I am, in fact, the antithesis of cool, which some would counter makes me cool on the flip side, but I’m not even anti-cool enough to make it there.

Externally, I might be perceived as cool.  I live in a cool neighborhood and I have a cool job and some of my clothes are cool some of the time, but by and large, I’m a product of an extremely white, sheltered, lower-to-middle-class upbringing so my default cool setting tends to remain at 78-degrees Fahrenheit: comfortable and efficient, but hardly refreshing.

So when I got the invite to hear TNB’s own Rich Ferguson and his spoken-word performance at the NYC Fringe Festival, I thought, “How cool!” and I leapt at the chance to up my cool-status.

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PHILADELPHIA, PA-

Let me begin by saying that YES, I am aware that what I’m about to say sounds crazy. And not just any kind of crazy. We’re talking Stephen King nuthouse crazy—a room with padded walls and a warden named Large Marge who goes about 6’6” and 250 and hasn’t smiled since the Reagan administration, partly because her moustache gets in the way and partly because that tick of hers prevents any form of facial expression. Nevertheless, here goes: I am being attacked by the Pillow People.

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DENVER, CO-

Rejection letters are always a drag; whether they are negative responses from job opportunities, university admissions boards or literary journals. However, there is nothing quite as spirit-crushing as a rejection letter received after submitting a poem. A short-story rejection slip is depressing, but not devastating. You manufacture a story in your head, create some characters and make them talk. Fine. So you didn’t like my characters. Their dialogue is unrealistic. Their motives are questionable. Fine. They aren’t me. But a rejection letter from a poem is, for me, the equivalent of standing out on a street corner naked and having passers-by hand you terse little notes reading, “Your penis is unconvincing,” or “You call those nipples?” or maybe, “You have an affected buttocks.” And that kind of stuff just breaks my heart. You pour it all into a poem: your skeleton, your bile, your oozing primordial remnant—your private parts. To be told that the fundamental you is not up to snuff—that’s hard murder.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

I was in a full panic before my mother said anything at all. I didn’t want to ask what was going on, because her face and her shaking hands were confusing me. Usually, when I was in trouble, my father looked at me a certain way, and then it was clear, I’d been caught. But Dad wasn’t there, and all I had to go by were my mother’s ambiguous signals.

Finally, she spoke. “Your grandmother tried to kill herself today. She put a bag over her head and tried to suffocate herself.”

God, I was so relieved.

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CHESTERTOWN, MD-

“Hold it together man!”

Shut up you. I’m getting there, so cut me some slack.

“Persevere!”

Look, don’t make me stick this pencil up my nose and take care of you Randle Patrick McMurphy style.

“Against all odds you shall prevail!”

This is my brain. My brain speaks to me, ad nauseum, typically in a British accent. It’s also a veritable movie quote machine. In fact, I figure that when my brain shuts up I’ll finally be hanging with Chief Bromden and we can talk about how hard it was to power lift that sink off the floor. At this very moment my brain is in full on battle- Braveheart-you’ll-take-my-life-but-never-take- my-freedom frenzy.

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GULF BREEZE, FL- 

Gulf Breeze, Florida, where I live, is basically a suburb of Pensacola.

Frequency with which Pensacola is brushed or hit by a hurricane: once every 2.98 years.

Frequency with which Pensacola is hit directly by a hurricane: once every 8.06 years. 

Statistically, when Pensacola should next be affected by a hurricane: before the end of the 2008 season.

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PARIS, FRANCE -

Raffaele says those home for the summer never order water at Il Fosso. Instead they ask for empty bottles and take them out to the spring where the water comes cold and sweet. He says it reminds them of their former lives.

He says in the evening serpents glide across the road, that there’s snow in winter, that here it’s not people you meet but characters.

Raffaele says that the village over there humbly glittering in the night, the one up at the end of the valley, is the town whose name no one will pronounce for fear of evil.

He says he doesn’t even know the name himself but I don’t believe him. It’s “that place” he says.

We stand quietly looking out across the dark at the glow of “that place” where once there lived a sorcerer.
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I’ve just moved.

Not just houses, but cities and entire lives. It’s exciting and new, a bit like the theme song from the Love Boat, but with no Gopher, no dancing girls and no stopover in Rio.

Bummer!

For posterity’s sake I kept a bit of a journal of my first week in San Francisco and have decided to share it as a peek into the inner sanctum of my life. I’d call you all voyeurs for reading, but in actuality I’m just a hideous narcissist who wants to show you photos of my closet.

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SAN FRANCISCO-

Hello, my name is Zoë Brock and I am a hopelessly hopeful romantic.

Love and I have a long and sordid relationship. We’re stuck to each other with that cheap, tacky glue that never dries properly and gets hairs and other bits of icky dirt and effluvia stuck in it and ends up looking like a coughed up owl pellet, minus the skeletal bits. It’s horrible, trust me.

Sometimes I feel as if I live my life adhered to the cheap pulpy paper bound between the flowery covers of a Harlequin romance novel.

Sometimes I wonder if some sticky-fingered house-wife isn’t pouring over the sordid details of my love-life, swooning, moaning and gasping at the more elaborately descriptive paragraphs as she takes a break between episodes of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and ‘Days of Our Lives’.

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