Everyone sat around the small bar and didn’t look at each other. They sang strange, obscure songs in warbly, coked-up voices and no one performed for anyone else. No one smiled or laughed or hit a wrong note to be funny. It was like prison in that everyone seemed to know each other but not by choice. The No Exit Karaoke Bar. A begrudging acknowledgment that there were other people there but they would get no attention, this was a night to be endured, like every night to be endured. Twenty people in a karaoke bar, the same people every single night they had probably sung every song in that catalog. There was no joy.

When our number, Total Eclipse of the Heart, finally came up, after about one billion years of solitude in a crowded bar, Derick and I got the two mikes and belted. We caterwauled. There were two extra verses that don’t exist in the real song. It was like “Turn around, bright eyes, Every now and then there’s an adorable little boy and now he’s grown up to be a man. Turn around….” What? We sang it anyway. We went for drama. As much as we could in a room full of stoics. I’d forgotten Derick is a real rock and roll singer, rock and roll star, so he could actually harmonize but I was wailing so hoarsely that his sophisticated stylings were mostly lost. The crowd didn’t love us. The crowd was possibly secretly handcuffed to its stools with its jaws wired shut.

Earlier, we ate hamburgers at the Sunburnt Pig that had beets, eggs, pineapple and bacon on them. That’s where we first heard the Bonnie Tyler classic on the sound system and decided it was important that we go sing (sing) karaoke. They also played “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry which damn I still love, that’s a love song, it’s so damn earnest I love it . I had a big crush on SP in that video, singing to Sherrie on the steps of like a courthouse (?), so deeply yearning and passionate and then flinging himself around a stairwell, squinting a lot with pain, the exquisite pain of ardor and Sherry and the world too much with him. I also looked a little like Steve Perry when I was a child so I think there was something there–long stringy black hair, middle part…I felt like we were kind of meant for each other. I think I need to find that video.

Not only is Anthony a magician, but this Wordpress “dashboard” is actually friendly and comprehensible. It feels like a new lease on life. I can’t believe I suffered through that weird interface for so long and then spent hours cleaning up the hacked crapfest. You mean to tell me I can audio and video with no problem whatsoever? I can add images and it will align the image? This is a very fancy Wordpress. And it appears to be saving the draft every two seconds.

WYSIWYG editing! It’s like the 20th century all over again.

I’d like to live in a world as clean as this page is right now.

The work is coming very slowly, refracted, refractory. I hear my name like it’s coming through water. I left the blank page and went uptown.

I looked up “refractory” after I typed it because I didn’t want to confuse it with “refectory.” OS X’s Oxford American Dictionary offers the example his refractory pony. I love this.

I hadn’t been to the Cloisters before. Almost one year ago Ben & I rode bikes over the George Washington Bridge and back and then went to Fort Tryon Park. It’s one of those memories that’s still very present, I see the day crisply, it felt like leaving New York. I wanted to get away from this and go to that.

Really I wanted my own cloister. The Cloisters themselves are lovely, but they’re a museum, and filled with people, babies, shovers. The atrophy of experience: digital cameras trained on pietas, dry fountains, unicorn tapestries. There is a terrace that wraps around the building from which you can see the Hudson and I guess New Jersey. I was looking for quiet. I found it in the Heather Garden of the park outside.

In the grass on the hill I read the The Last Life by Claire Messud, and the gears slowed. I didn’t have any expectations for clarity. Vague hopes that The Project (there’s always a project, but this time it’s a large looming one) would crystallize or stand down or make a tenuous promise to stop confounding, but I read and looked at the river and thought some about my block, where I would have been had I not caught the train.

Something broke. I had one of the tiny Field Notes books with me and things started to make sense. I diagrammed ideas, wrote myself notes for later concerning the manageability of the work in case I was seized by anything resembling doubt masquerading as procrastination.

Oh! The last time I scribbled about museum-going, Lynn & I went to the Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley. I took these pictures on our trip, which I’m honored to report are featured in the latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, accompanying Lawrence Wechsler’s (one of my favorite writers) article on Robert Irwin. You can’t see the photos on the VQR site, but you should consider checking out the hard copy for Wechsler’s always riveting prose. Here are the photos:

Now I’ve got spring fever. I’m a mess of allergies and sunlight and already mourning summer’s passing. This winter was kind of the pits. Better things are drawn to summer, they want to happen then. When I finished a perfect 70-degree run last weekend, Lance Armstrong’s voice came eerily on via my Nike+ iPod thingy and congratulated me on my longest run to date. Which is not true, since I’ve only had this gadget for about a year or so and I just recently allowed it to talk to me. Am I inclined to run farther to win Lance’s love again? Yes. Yes I am. Why am I so easily seduced?

I think it’s spring. The construction has abated, the days are long and therefore manageable. There is enough space in them for coffee on the corner and walking to the cleaners in Gramercy and getting A Moveable Feast from the library and seeing a movie about people who won’t feel whole until they’re paralyzed. Yeah, I saw that movie, Quid Pro Quo, tonight. Nick Stahl is aging strangely but attractively. Vera Farmiga is several varieties of troubling. The movie’s got some moments. But then it’s got some moments and you’re just like who greenlit that.

Days wide and warm, in which I wander listening to back episodes of the Fresh Air podcast. Springtime, you count. I will wear a daisy in my hair.