Entries in Personal Essays (5)
What D.C. Does to an American
is there a traitor inside me?I know I should get back to regular blogging. I was thinking just that when I tried to go to sleep last night. It was an uneasy night. Some ancient nightmare ran through my bones and rattled my guts. I saw feverish, ugly things happening in D.C.: ghosts heckling men in suits, think tanks erupting in purple flames, my friends calling out my name but I couldn't help them. Awful things. Then a light grew in the middle of it, blotting out that vision and and a child's voice said "Get out!" My alarm clock woke me and I found a paper, slightly torn, and on the edges, wet. It had my handwriting on it, but not my current handwriting. More like the script the nuns taught my class in Sacred Heart in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Yes, in red ink in my childhood imitation of the Palmer method was this:
I want to drink cold sarsaparilla from a glass bottle and cheer my favorite third baseman. I want to read Edith Wharton’s jazz-age novels, and dance salsa at Cuba Libre in the city of brotherly love. I want to pretend I can see the rock shores of the Aran islands from a small beach town in New Jersey then eat a grotesquely large slice of pizza and throw a frisbee underneath the next day’s sunrise. On Friday I want to escape from this imperial city, from the bureaucrats and bloodless public philosophers, the empire-builders, the card-issuers and policy geeks, and I want to drive the backroads south and west all night and try on cowboy hats at truck stops, and dance with a pretty girl - on the edge of a wheat field under the Tennessee starlights, (she follows my lead by standing on my shoes)– to get drunk and yell my throat sore at the moon, then make it back in time for work on Monday. I want to shuck this business casual wardrobe, get in the ring and take a frozen jab to my eye– and remind myself that if Norman Mailer could box on Friday nights into his sixties I can sure as hell sock this brute in his ugly WASP chin. I want to laugh with the guys from my neighborhood as we walk the Brooklyn bridge. I want to drink sangrias and flirt over a table on the sidewalks of the East Village, and hear a country singer coo a song of heartbreak then kick over the mic stand in a low lit club on the Upper West Side. I want a sweet girl to use my grandmother’s recipe for blueberry muffins on a Sunday afternoon. I want to silently thank God for all that is good and then pull her to the couch. I want her to be close, to shake and sputter and I want the breath in her laughter on my neck.
It is probably a sign. I need to pay my taxes and turn this paper and myself over to Homeland Security for screening.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Happy Birthday Marissa (Ladyfriend)!!!
Beautiful Girl and the Luckiest Young Man I KnowI used to write poetry, and so I wrote Marissa poetry. I started writing short stories and so I wrote short stories based on events surrounding Marissa and I.Well lately I've been writing blog posts. If you haven't guessed, Marissa is the girl in this picture, and the putative ladyfriend in several blog posts.
How does one pay adequate birthday tribute to a girl like Marissa? What do you do for a young woman who not only puts up with your elocutions about "Anarcho-Tyranny" from the passenger side of her Honda - but also has the decency not to encourage more of them? What is a blog post to one who regularly gives you things of incalculable value- surprise grilled cheese sandwiches or the ability to laugh at yourself.
Read On for fulsome and effusive praise for my girlfriend of over five years.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Friday, 23, Maker's Mark, DeSales
It begins like any Friday night: I'm invited to come down to Stamford.
It seems my ladyfriend and her co-workers are partying it up tonight at
Houla Hanks. Houla Hanks is both the best and worst bar in Stamford.
Best because the drinks are strong (most of the time) and it is very
close to a cheap parking garage - worst because it pretends to be a
beach party even on a night where it seems we are suffering a
Nor'easter. Oh Well.
So, I throw on my lizard shoes (tres fasionable!). Unfortunately most
of my good button down shirts are at the cleaners until tomorrow
morning. Drat! Well there's a white one in my closet and an iron. But
without starch it will still be wrinkled and unsightly by the time I
get down to Stamford. Hmm. Well, I'll wear a jacket with it. The gray
one has lapels too large to wear with jeans, the brown one doesn't
match the shoes and is too warm. Okay- I'll go with my Dior jacket -
the one with the subtle striped pattern. Magnifique! So - a white shirt
- with a dark jacket and jeans. Hmm- needs something else. A Tie? The
dark blue paisley pattern just isn't working - so no tie tonight. Aha!
A pocket square. Seems I have a purple one with dark purple stripes and
a bluish border. Luckily instead of fluffing it for an hour it falls at
a daringly rakish poof in two tries. All set. I reach for the Dunhill
cologne. Second thoughts. My ladyfriend says it gives her a headache.
Fine! I'll go with the Drakkar Noir which we both like so much- but I
am embarrassed to wear of late since I've seen it ridiculed in at least
two fashion magazines. I'm all set.
Showing up to pick up my ladyfried's sister twenty minutes late. (i..e
rakishly on time.) we head to Stamford. Ladyfriend will arrive from
NYC to Stamford by train. Ladyfriend's sister's boyfriend will
arrive by car. Check, check, check. Lots of small talk about
ladyfriend's little brother and a car with a dying battery.
Ladyfriend's sister seems unduly afraid of not having conversation -
when she runs out, she enjoins me to talk. I prefer to draw the
attention to the Ryan Adams C.D. I've been playing at too low a volume
the past thirty minutes. I point out the over-the-top imagery:
When you moved they cut down the maple tree
I carved your name into The tree became a boat,
I christened it your name
And when the water turned to salt
From your tears it hit the bottom of the ocean
Where I go when I hear your name
And I sink like a stone- "Meadowlake Street" by Ryan Adams
Wow! She says. We laugh, but I think it is so beautiful I want her and I both to cry. But sobbing is not the appropriate thing to be doing while entering Houla Hank's, so we just laugh.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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The Surfeited Temperament
I had occasion today, to speak to a classmate, after our long Saturday class. She was a political science major. She was articulate, well dressed (a giant Marc Jacobs bag!), and had an easy going, yet mildly prickly disposition. The class had tired us both out.
We discussed politics: she is of the disillusioned left, I of the disillusioned right. Sigh. We agreed on most everything. Tarrytown, NY was gorgeous that hour and a half ago. Double sigh.
We connected on a host of disillusionments. Soon, also, we discovered out mutual boredom with school. Our similar academic profile. A shared passion for our political and moral convictions. Then I remarked on her bag. She admitted it was Marc Jacobs. We then discovered out mutual love of fashion. Our lack of funds to feed that beast. Our studied answers to the contradictions of being shallow and not shallow about it.
I suggested we have similar temperaments - a combination of the melancholic and the sanguine. This is perhaps the ideal temperament of the Bobo that David Brooks described so well. Literate superficiality. Feigned aristocrats. Elegant and hip professorial types.
She said she would look up these four temperaments on the internet. I shall save you all the trouble. A treatment of them can be found here - in a long book length scroll. How many of you share this temperament? If you find your contemplation of one of Dante's hellish circles to be interrupted by an admiration for the stitching on a Dunhill blazer (or in the case of women, perhaps, the symmetry of Gucci shoes) - then you are in the melancholic/sanguine club. Welcome.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Dinner At Telluride (Capitalism, Communism- Gramsci and accounting)
Stamford Connecticut is a not a real place. The city is really a corporate park, hardly anything else. Being too close to New York City it has little local culture at all- the talent slithers down the Metro North New Haven line into the Big Apple. What is left are corporate offices and those institutions needed to sustain them- restaurants and bars. Luckily being in Ct. it benefits from some of the WASPy snobbery found throughout the south and east of that fine state.
On one fair night last week, I took the same New Haven line train from Grand Central to Stamford. My lovely ladyfriend picked me up to join her and her coworkers for dinner. If they were merely the stereotype of their job it would have been a boring evening, for I was to be dining with five accountants from Ernst and Young. It was a multi-ethnic dinner at one of the finer Stamford establishments Telluride. I sat with my aforementioned gorgeous ladyfriend, a stunning blonde American girl (Jackie), a South African woman of Indian descent (Aneesa), an exchange program worker from China (Libby) and another from Italy (Mossimo) - the only other man at the table - who made a point of kissing the cheeks of Jackie twice before dinner - in the "I can get away with it because I am form Italy" fasion.
I was still "dressed for work". In the city, on a casual day, that meant bootcut jeans atop my black Chelsea boots, a dress shirt and a grey suit jacket. Jeans were formerly considered the workwear of the proletariat, the gray jacket that of the organization man. Although I looked like all the other swans in the NYC pond, conceptually my outfit was ridiculous.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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