Harris Sockel

Summer is when we realize all of a sudden that we have always had too much skin.

I’m an adult now, alone in New York City, and flowers are what adults do.

Twitter manifests that, makes it feel real, like a cross-section of all the wild blood flows that happen in our brains when bad things go down.

Yes, writers’ headshots are beautiful and carefully curated, but when you see these people called Writers in person, they’re not the most attractive. I know I’m not. My pores = face constellations.

When everything becomes a metaphor. Walking down a long sidewalk becomes a big juicy Choice that makes you stand there in the middle of the sidewalk with your eyes watering.

There’s the I’ll-Live-Here-Forever apartment, filled with the same faces and pierced bellies you kissed in college.

I’d imagine myself a mogul, walking down a grand staircase toward big vats of money while oompa loompas grin like presenters and do those Fosse hand movements from Pippin on either side.

You never find out how large of a hole you’re going to leave until you keep hearing the word “transition” as a verb and the subject is you, and someone asks you to give them all your knowledge and you do it through a series of e-mails forwarded with the subject “FYI” or “thx.”

In 2013, I shouldn’t feel ashamed to be Jewish, but I do, especially when that part of me announces itself in a thick Yiddish accent on my Mac.

Who would I have been if it weren’t for that house of paperwork? Would I pray to Jesus everyday? Would I be a famous entrepreneur-singer-writer-everything I want? Or that white kid with brown teeth you see on your way to work, holding his dog and the cardboard sign and the can?

I don’t want to “like” everything, don’t want to go to business school, don’t want to go to the new restaurant in Williamsburg where they bake olive oil shortbread daily, on the premises.

Song is lazy. Instinctive and cerebellar rather than cerebral. It’s in your larynx, a kind of no man’s land between your heart and head, and it’s basically unalterable. Singers are born with a singing-shaped larynx just like you and I are born with a head and a brain.