Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1845
Peanut butter but no jelly; moldy potatoes, no mustard. No coffee, no cheese, one broken egg, a dwindling loaf of bread. A hard lime and six stolen oranges. Garbanzo beans. I used one of my paychecks to pay off angry utility providers and am now a thousand dollars short on rent. Ha! Some part of me believes I can come up with the money in two weeks, by hook or by crook. A permanent solution is so simple: a cheaper apartment or a better paying job. So simple. I put a potato on to boil and google ‘eviction laws in NY state.’
An Ecovillager suggested we swap apartments because she can’t keep up with the shared work requirements. I became overwrought with excitement believing I’d finally achieve my dream—at the start of the growing season to boot. But when I revealed the amount of my rent, she withdrew her offer.
Susan announces she got a job—two, actually—and I hug her so hard her hat falls off. She says she’ll probably choose the one in Texas because the climate more closely resembles that of South India. Her final application count was eight hundred.
Jun tells me Americans are lazy. I stop vigorously scouring a surface to glare at him. “Okay, not lazy, per se,” he expounds, “but not willing to go the extra mile.” I can’t disagree.
Indeed, today is Tuesday, my Saturday, and I should be applying for jobs and reading political tracts, but that’s exactly what I’m not doing. I’m a bone-tired American unwilling to go the extra mile on this bonny spring day. I sit splayed in the sunshine planting seeds in pots, slowly, so slowly my shoulders burn, and reading novels, slowly.
“I like to wander, zigzagging between one block and another, turning to avoid stopping at traffic lights, crossing to avoid rats or broken glass, to see a funny crumbling cornice or fresh playground or industrial mystery until I find myself deep in the heart of the borough, landlocked and quite alone, and I turn myself around and walk home.”1
This is from a book my friend wrote that I’m just now getting around to reading. I knew it would be good in a formal way, because she’s smart, but I didn’t know it would be good in an intimate way. “Industrial mystery” keeps pulling me back to the beginning, having captured the montage of whole afternoons, weekends of urban drifting. I put it down over a tiny scorpion-like bug in a crack of the sidewalk and pick up Sleepless Nights. “The wind is so strong a beer bottle rolls in the gutter.” For a moment I feel like a gifted curator of life reading these books simultaneously: works of subtle brilliance by and about perambulating New Yorkers.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6f0c6de-fb5f-4aac-b459-3a30a7878f41_1280x1280.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1e21ed9e-875a-4539-91ce-301cf3fb9cab_2016x1512.jpeg)
“Ferocious battles with repetition, with the sloth of others, the crumbs and dust, the adhesion of eggs, burnt pans and blackened ovens. At some point in the day, finally things in place, for a moment.”2
Would you believe I read the above aloud to my paramour as he prepared an intoxicating stew from expired pantry staples? What a gift to love a person who can cook. Like all modest geniuses, he clowns about, describing himself as ‘illiterate,’ then makes ambrosia out of ashes, finds raccoon and deer tracks, generates dazzling ideas I rush to write down and steal, makes me swoon a dozen different ways. Love is really nice.
Love is really nice, but it would be nicer without the stress of impossibly and chronically strained finances. In fact, one wonders how much time anyone has before chronically strained finances result in the breakdown of tender feelings, or even the breakdown of domestic safety that keeps one ensconced in personhood.
Spotify recommends a 2016 song by Canadian electropop band, Austra, aptly titled “Utopia.” I’m transfixed—the lyrics are a direct transcription from my heart:
“I live in a city full of people I don’t know
People riding highways from the workplace to the home....”“I only want to hold your hand
My hold in life....”“I can picture a place
Where everybody feels it too
It might be fiction but I see it ahead
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do....”“Cut me a slice of the apple that I grow
My work is valid—I can’t prove it, but I know....”
The city, commute, hand-holding, resplendent vision, apple orchard. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.
Our work is valid! I can’t prove it, but I know.
I dreamed I lived next door to one of my favorite living artists, and woke to find he’d posted about a movie in which laborers are expelled from church by a priest—and the music follows them. That is, the organ music leaves the church and follows the workers in their exile to the streets.3 Is there any lovelier fantasy? Drinking our bosses’ blood out of goblets carved from their skulls? Cheers!
˚ · . ig: mjbuffett
˚ · . my favorite books: bookshop
˚ · . digital letters to the editor: thelaboringheart@gmail.com
˚ · . analog letters: 459 Boiceville Rd., Brooktondale, NY 14817
Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street
Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
this might be inaccurate or embellished, but it doesn’t matter—I only care about the idea of music knowing true devotion