yeah all right. i been talking this shit up for like five years--"when i turn 30, it won't bother me at all. or 40 or 90, for that matter. birthday, who cares, old as you feel old as you are, etc." at long last here it is, the witching hour of my birthday, the 30th one, when (as those funny sixties people used to say) you can no longer be trusted. and i have to admit, there is a certain taste in the air. despite my best intentions, it's feeling a little funny in here.

for the past year i've been telling people i'm thirty anyway. which of course made me a liar, but my real intention was to get used to it. by now, that young, naive 29-year-old version of myself figured, i would not even notice because i had already been saying it for a year. like, i'll just be thirty twice, so why would the second time matter?

it is so unjoshlike to care about such a thing. but here it comes. here comes thirty. oh wait, is that a raven on my shoulder? the staring black bird of middle age is starting to hang out around me and wait. i'll make him a pet i guess. call him gumdrops.

yesterday i spent half an hour stuck on the 2 train, in the tunnel between stations. after about ten minutes, there was mutiny in the air. my favorite was when this woman pushed the button to talk to the conductor and demanded that he "pull this thing over and let us out."

Mr. Rendziak owned the pink house on Soniat Street. Rather than live there, he rented it, mostly to young people, often artists, who could afford no better. The neighborhood was safe but gruff. His hysterical wife insisted it teemed with sickness, sloth, and rats, and that around any corner a bent needle slid up into a bruised arm. Being a more composed onlooker, Rendziak himself considered it only a luckless place, trash piled in doorways, and many of the people unfortunately damned.

More or less the color of a sliced-open salmon, the house stood before a crumpled section of sidewalk, ruined by oak roots. A tired construction of old splendor, the house was at one time a fern-covered mansion. Of late, the tall windows had flowed into ripples. A nameless man across the street spent his days gulping from bottles of malt liquor and watching the stately pink and white house slowly decay. The scrollwork fell from the second-storey porch one day, and he hooted his approval and applauded.

Erin, Rendziak’s daughter, was a thin girl with a fine neck and humorous eyes, who never failed to arrive at the pink house with her father. Even as a child, its crowned, proud face facinated her, so different from the short, ground-hugging house she slept in.

On her seventeenth birthday--a clouded, drab day--she took a pursed-lipped interest in a tenent named Rubin, a young man who called himself a sculptor, who she found pounding and grunting over a block of wood on the porch. While her father repaired a window pane, she stared into Rubin’s amber, spartan back while he rocked with each stroke at the sculpture. Frustrated, he blew a shaving from his nose, and turned and nodded, frowning at the girl. He was working on a goblin. Everything he ever made was ugly.

For a year Erin thought about the sinewy back and hands of the sculptor. He had the watery blue eyes of a dolt: eyes with no choice but to display his every raw thought nakedly. But his sexual shoving away of each thin curl of wood seemed a noble act. Each morning at six-thirty he arrived on the porch, caring no more for money than for one of those curls of unnecessary wood, and for this Erin could never quite forget about him. Even as her downlooking father repeated no, she coerced him into letting her an apartment there after graduation. Then she would enter Loyola’s fine arts program.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rendziak’s strewn roof leaked. There would always be problems, and this was only one. For this, he called it the goddam roof. At night he would often sit on the goddam roof in a still, warm silence and listen to the deep signals of the boats on the river. The land was flat, and over the dark canopy of trees he could see the glittering of yellow diamonds and mist he knew to be the refinery where he worked. Here on his roof there was peace for a fair man. Certainly he was a fair man. For his poor wife, the world was one of thieves and monsters, but he understood people, or tried to, and was fair, and shortly he would climb down through the musty attic, and work at a dripping pipe that softened the ceiling of one apartment or another.

From the dark street arose a voice, a grumbling one. The voice thought it was alone, but clearly wished someone to hear nonetheless. “My home,” it said. “A pitiful, rented home for an old man.”

It’s just Adam, Rendziak thought. Just Adam.

last night sleeping and i did not get along, so i did that thing where insomnia just becomes getting up for work. the early train ride into the city is always something i like, because you get to watch the sunrise--not in the east, but reflected in the skyline.

this morning there was a guy across from me in sneakers with a knitted hat pulled way down to his eyebrows, and he was reading an issue of Mustangs and Fast Fords. that makes me feel good in the same way the sun on the buildings does, because in my galaxy we're all obsessed with our novel, our research, our play, our career, or our engagement. all that shit. he's obsessed with mustangs and fast fords.

i really did desperately want to move my car for alternate side parking yesterday. it's been a snowy icy mess here for about two weeks, so i haven't had to move for street cleaning, because what were they going to clean? would they shine the ice? no, so you turn on the radio in the morning and hear "alternate side parking is cancelled today," some of the most beautiful words one can be treated to. but yesterday, they decided to go for it.

there wasn't much snow left on the street, because it's been warmer, and it was sort of raining, sort of spitting sleety things. so i go to move the car, and i am frozen to the street. everyone else moves, though. that's when i notice i'm parked in a dip in the road. yes, all the runoff probably comes down the street, pools around my car, and freezes. i tried to force it out, and it would not budge.

so i got a ticket. most people who heard this story said, why didn't you leave a note that you were frozen in? because: these are meter maids, and they do not respect weakness or whining. if i offered an excuse, they might have given me two tickets and shot out my tires as punishment.

once i was hanging up signs around cleveland, and was near a bus stop on the far west side in a residential sort of area. this woman came up to me and asked what i was doing. you know those people who are not really old old, but rather they look sort of weatherbeaten or wizened or just like they might have had a weird life--crooked teeth, deep wrinkles, etc. she looked like that. and she was french--spoke good english but with an accent.

she asked what kind of area i wanted to hang signs up in. (okay, they were nader signs.) i sort of told her my criteria. i was trying to be nice and engaged, but also keep her at a distance. but she would have none of it, and told me she knew the greatest area. so i end up in the car with her, driving to this great area. and we drive and drive, all the way out of the city. we're out in rolling hills and farmland, and are going though little towns. we go for forty minutes, and she takes me through this little sleepy town (that looks like maybe they shoot people who hang up ralph nader signs), and she directs me to a side road, and then a dirt road, and then we're at this huge horse stable.

the sun's getting low, now. we walk in to the stable, and she is telling me about her horse. apparently this is a place where people rent out a stable for their horse if they don't have their own. and we walk through this dark, huge barn full of horses and she takes me to her horse, and opens up the big wooden door and makes me go in with her and pet the horse. i've never really been around horses before, and i thought it was really interesting, because the horse was bashful about me, i swear to god. she says, "he's shy," and the horse is putting his face in the corner of the stall, not wanting to look at scary old me. so we take the horse outside and he eats grass. she starts telling me about politics in france, and says what i should do is get my own radio station and tell people about ralph nader.

so it's all weird and inconvenient that she tricked me into driving her out here, but it was also kind of cool, because i got to pet the horse, and talk to this odd woman. i asked her if she wanted me to drive her back (because why not, i have to go back anyway), and she says no, she's going to stay for a while and she'll call a cab (cab?) when she's ready. she gave me her phone number, and i probably stuck it someplace never to be seen again.