 People are basically friendly everywhere I go. Even Dallas — where I once had such a good time on Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs Road in a leather bar that I briefly considered never coming back. My heart still belonged to San Francisco then, though, and to a blond then named Paul who’d already escaped back to Texas. He’s more or less the blueprint for Travis Weatherford in Painted People, if I ever finish the thing before I’m ninety.
San Francisco still tugs at me, but if you stay anywhere long enough — even the backwoods of South Carolina — you eventually start liking the place. Your heart adjusts. It’s very adaptable, like a houseplant that refuses to die. I spent most of today being a tourist. Bought a chunk of turkey breast at I & J Fresh Market. The woman at the counter told me their Bronx store is “complicated and insane,” which is exactly how I remember the Bronx when I almost moved there. Peekskill took me first, and here I am. I’m reading Five Brothers by Penelope Douglas — a book so wild it makes Jacqueline Susann look like a church pamphlet. I read Susann as a teenager and thought I was learning about adulthood. Turns out I was just learning how dramatic people can be. Later I walked down shady Requa Street toward the train station and sat by the water watching Canadian geese conduct whatever business geese conduct. A fisherman and his daughter tried their luck. A man with a cart blasted music. More men arrived with boats and launched them into a river that had spilled into the parking lot like it paid rent there. A simple Friday. A little chaos, a little nostalgia, and the geese judging everyone.
2 Comments
 There are mornings when the world feels heavier, not because anything catastrophic has happened, but because the mind has been busy wandering through the deep corridors — the ones philosophers spend their whole lives pacing. Today is one of those mornings. I keep circling this idea: there has to be a creator. Not in the neat, packaged way religion sometimes tries to hand us, but in the simple, unavoidable logic of existence. Something started this. Something set the conditions. Something — or some process — brought forth the chain that led to me, sitting here, thinking about beginnings. We know our parents created us. And their parents created them. And so on, back through time, through migrations, through accidents, through choices, through love, through pain. A chain of origins stretching so far back it becomes mythic. At some point, you have to ask: Does the chain ever end? Or is the idea of a “first beginning” just another human attempt to make mystery manageable. Maybe there was a beginning. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe “beginning” is the wrong word for whatever happened. The book I’m reading dropped a sentence that’s been echoing in me: “We experience ourselves as posited, yet also as independent.” That’s the tension, isn’t it? We are placed here — posited — by forces we didn’t choose. Yet we also walk around with this fierce sense of independence, free will, autonomy, the ability to shape our days and our futures. We are both authored and self‑authored. Both dependent and defiantly free. And maybe that’s why life feels like a permanent tug‑of‑war. We’re always pulled back toward our origin — not just biologically, but existentially. The origin bears us, shapes us, whispers through us. Even when we rebel against it, we’re still tethered to it. Just by being born, we become involved with having to die. And death, in its strange way, is the return — the closing of the loop, the necessary step back toward whatever that origin really is. Not in a morbid way, but in a structural way. Birth and death are the two ends of the same doorway. This morning, I’m sitting with that tension. The weight of being both created and free. The mystery of beginnings that may not be beginnings at all. The quiet truth that we are always returning, even as we move forward. And somehow, that makes the day feel a little more meaningful — heavy, yes, but meaningful.   “Where one place fades, another grows — regeneration in all its uses.” I’ve been studying socialism — not because I’m a socialist, but because Democratic Socialists keep showing up in the news. I want to understand what they actually believe, how they differ from traditional socialism, and where the overlap is. One more book is on its way from another library; Field Library says it should arrive today or Saturday. As always, I remind myself to confirm political information with trusted sources. The nights have finally cooled again — temperatures back in the 50s. I sleep better when the air is cold. It matches my warm heart, I suppose. No tossing, no sweating, no sticky dreams. Though my dreams have been strange lately: Joel, the Jewish man I once loved who lived under Mt. Davidson; my mother making chicken salad and me telling her it was good because the way she made it is better than anyone else's since she's your mother; my San Francisco dog, Jackson, staring at me; my cats, Jake and Etta McGee, greeting me in a living room that doesn’t exist anymore. Today feels important. Don’t ask me why. I just have that sense — that something meaningful will happen, directly or indirectly, for all of us. Peekskill Regeneration Farm was lush in the early sunlight. Lettuce crisp and bright. Kale and cabbage standing proud. Jalapeños shining like little green bullets. Squash blossoms everywhere. Green tomatoes plump and almost ready. Apples filling the trees. Sunflowers rising with the day. The workers have done an outstanding job — the kind of work my grandfather would have admired. He loved farming more than anyone I’ve ever known. Before the sun came up, he was already in the field tending to his gardens and cash crops, moving through the rows like a man in prayer. Walking through the farm this morning, I realized the name is perfect: regeneration. Not just for the soil, but for the mind. For the uses we make of our days. Studying political systems, revisiting old dreams, watching new growth push through the earth — it’s all the same cycle. Something ends, something begins, something returns in a different form. It’s Friday the 24th — just three days before the end of Birdsall House and its beautiful beer garden. One place fading, another place rising. Uses shifting. Regeneration everywhere.  Peekskill Regeneration Farm at Lapore Park on John /Street between Decatur Avenue and Hadden Street  Sometimes I don’t want to write anymore. It’s embarrassing to admit, given how much of my life is built around the ritual of sitting down and shaping words, but there it is. My editor tore apart a long, grueling chapter I’d written — a chapter I thought had marrow in it — and the critique sucked whatever life I believed I had right out of me. On mornings like that, watching a maintenance worker water flowers feels far more exciting than anything happening on the page.
And then, as it always does, memory arrives uninvited. This time last year was heavy with a sadness I still don’t like to look at directly. The heart aches in its own stubborn way, especially when the person you cared for most — your own mother — dies and leaves you standing in the world a little more alone than you expected to be. But today, after wandering around town in the AM, I felt something shift. Maybe not dramatically, but enough. Enough to think: Alright. Enough daily logs. Enough picture-taking. Enough Monology Go! Let’s get back to fiction. Something has to give, and maybe it’s time for Painted People to stop waiting for me to feel brave. Still, the morning had its small pleasures. I needed to mail a letter and had only one stamp, so I walked up the steps from Central to Peekskill’s impressive post office — that 1930–1931 neoclassical brick beauty with its arches and limestone trim. I thought I’d breeze in, hand the letter to the postmaster, and be done. Instead, there were six people ahead of me and only one window open. The rest were closed, as usual, casualties of staff shortages and budget cuts. A typical American post office scene, but somehow still comforting in its predictability. Back down South Street, I browsed a few books at Field Bookstore, then hurried off to my next appointment. A typical day, I suppose, for a person who writes and procrastinates but eventually writes — wandering through “Our Town of Peekskill” as it slowly woke up. People going about their business. School kids waiting for buses. The quiet choreography of a town stretching into its morning. I ran into Patrick from Whiskey River, walking with his daughter. He wished me a good day. I wished him one back. Then I moved along to meet the guy I was supposed to meet, and that was my boring morning. Though strangely enough, I was happy — happy to be free of so many things, even if only for a few hours. Happy to feel the faint tug of fiction calling me back. Happy to remember that even a day of “nothing happening” can still be a day worth writing down.  The storm rolled through like a reset button — drove out the heat, the humidity, the smoke, and whatever sluggishness had been sitting in my head. When it passed, the air felt rinsed, and I found myself back at the desk, ready to work again. Lately I’ve been drawn to independent political commentators — the YouTube truth‑tellers. I can’t pretend I’m not gullible enough to believe too much, but something about their voices feels more honest than the corporate polish of mainstream news. They talk straight. They talk human. Still, I remind myself to confirm political information with trusted sources. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when Walter Cronkite anchored the country, then Dan Rather carried that weight. A different era, a different 60 Minutes — when investigative reporters stood up to power without worrying about lawsuits or pleasing the wrong people. The courts felt different then too. Less eager to bend toward a tainted leader. Fox News never plays in this house. Broadcast news barely does either, not since the days when Dan Rather succeeded Cronkite. I liked his style — the way he spoke, the way he delivered the news. You couldn’t help but watch. Now I find myself feeling that way about a handful of YouTube voices: Keith Edwards, Brian Tyler Cohen, Luke Beasley, Jack Cocchiarella, iHip News with Jennifer Walsh. They deliver even when a part of me doesn’t want to know. There’s always that alert notification. I could turn it off. I don’t. I hit the button and fall into whatever delicious clickbait they’ve cooked up. Maybe it’s not Cronkite. Maybe it’s not Rather. But it’s something — a new kind of truth‑telling in a world that keeps shifting under our feet.  Birdsall House, Main Street at N. Division, Peekskill, NY Less smoke in the air this early afternoon. After two days of breathing through that burning‑forest haze, I hid out at Peekskill Coffee House for a long stretch — coffee, quiet, the Flatiron’s old bones holding the day steady. I didn’t plan on going anywhere else. Birdsall House was a spur‑of‑the‑moment drift. When I got there, I ran into a good friend from Whiskey — someone who always lifts the day a little, though I’ve never said that plainly until now. Birdsall is closing at the end of the month, which feels wrong for a place with that much history. Washington’s old tavern stood across the street; the marker mentions him, Benedict Arnold, and the old Birdsall Tavern. Peekskill keeps its ghosts close. The artwork inside is all for sale now. I didn’t realize the guy with the big beard and tattooed biceps was the painter until my friend pointed him out. I kept staring at that big blue sun‑like piece. If I had $750 lying around, maybe I’d join the crowd and go into debt like everyone else. Met Tyler for the first time — a native Peekskillian. I hate introductions. Everyone wants to know where you’re from, and my answer is always a small civil war. I’m tied to California, especially San Francisco, but I was born in South Carolina. Not Charleston, though that used to be the lie I told in the Bay Area. Sometimes I wish Charleston could secede from South Carolina and join Georgia or North Carolina — anything but the deep red state. We talked about New Orleans, that city layered with culture on culture. It reminded me of the old quip: There are only three great cities in America — New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Except maybe not Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta. All of this unfolded over a smash burger, fries, a Goose Island IPA, and Birdsall’s mustard — so good it ruined every other mustard for me. Rock music rising, more people drifting in. We helped a couple from out of town figure out how to get to Central Avenue and back to the train. Told them to take the stairs by the new apartment building on Main for the best view of Peekskill. Then we laughed after they left, imagining them accidentally wandering toward Bohlmann Towers — the tall project perched over MacGregory Brook, the little stream that runs from the high hills, under downtown, and downhill toward the Hudson — and thinking they’d get mugged. Unlikely, but the joke sealed the moment into a good memory. I need to go back for the final hour before it’s all gone. Hurricane CaNNoNs  A Persian Man. The air is still cool and pleasant this morning, a small mercy before the heat arrives. According to the forecast, temperatures are supposed to soar into the mid‑90s today — a sharp turn after a week of weather so marvelous it felt like a gift. It’s a reminder that good things, or anything for that matter, don’t last forever. Except maybe Persia. Iran — historically known as Persia — is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, with roots stretching back more than 7,000 years. Empires have risen and fallen, borders have shifted, cultures have transformed, but Persia has endured in one form or another across millennia. And here’s the part that struck me this morning: in certain periods of Persian history, homoerotic themes were openly present in poetry. From the early centuries of Persian verse all the way into the modern era, love poems — ghazals, those short, lyrical sonnet-like pieces — often centered on same‑sex desire. Not hidden. Not forbidden. Simply part of the artistic and emotional landscape of the time. It’s a reminder of how cultures change, how norms shift, how the world reshapes itself again and again. What feels fixed today may be fluid tomorrow. What seems eternal may be temporary. And yet, in contrast, God — in the way I understand Him — does not change. The same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So whatever shape the world takes today, don’t expect it to hold. Weather changes. Empires change. People change. Poetry changes. But Persia, somehow, keeps living on — and God remains constant.  Persian Men,  New York City.  When I lived in South Carolina as a mature adult for about five years to be closer to my mother, I voted every time with the intention of supporting whoever might unseat Lindsey Graham. Nikki Haley was governor then, and I didn’t think much of her either — not until she removed the Confederate flag after the Charleston Emanuel Church shooting. That moment mattered. It shifted something. We came so close that one year — 2020 — closer than I ever imagined. Analysts described it as the political fight of Graham’s life. Jamie Harrison raised record-breaking money and blanketed the state with ads. Polls showed Graham slipping or tied. Harrison’s message — Medicaid expansion, COVID relief, and a moderate, empathetic tone — resonated across racial and political lines. His background made him a formidable challenger. In the end, Harrison lost by about ten points. Still, it was historic — the closest a Democrat had come to beating Graham. And I remember thinking, as I often do, that God has the ultimate say and the ultimate plan. When it’s time for a thing to be gone — a season, a tenure, a chapter — it goes, no matter how long it lasted or how deeply it shaped the people who lived under it. I don’t celebrate anyone’s passing. I don’t rewrite history either. I simply acknowledge what I lived: the years of voting, the hope, the disappointment, the closeness of that race, and now the quiet finality of a chapter closing in a place that no longer holds me.  A cotton field has grown and is ready for harvest in South Carolina.  Buzz Bar, E. 42nd Street at Park Avenue Midtown Manhattan, E. 42nd Street Buzz Bar sits inside Pershing Square like a little glass box of tourists — a holding pen for people on their way to a show, a dinner, a night out. Cocktails start at twenty bucks, which means forty for those of us who can’t have just one. It’s not a neighborhood bar, not a place with lore, but I’ve been there enough that the bartenders know me. We joke about what it would be like if this place suddenly became a nightclub, or better yet a dive bar — something with neon rot and character, like Billymark’s West before it folded. I sit there sometimes and think about the wildest bar I ever found — somewhere near the Bowery, Chinatown-adjacent, a place so chaotic I spilled my martini out of sheer nerves and knocked the whole glass to the floor. A crash so loud everyone turned to look at me like, Who the hell is he? They forgave me. Gave me another. But I was sweating because earlier that day I’d made the mistake of eating a gummy on Canal Street that tasted too much like candy. That gummy carried me all the way onto a Chinese bus headed to Florence, South Carolina — the second-worst bus ride of my life, rivaled only by the one from LA to SC where the bathroom was so bad you held it until Phoenix or Atlanta. Louisiana was strange. Birmingham, Alabama, surprised me — rolling hills, a beautiful train station, a city far more graceful than I ever imagined. El Paso was the only station I actually enjoyed. But that Canal Street gummy — it hit like a trapdoor. Suddenly I couldn’t feel my feet. I thought the bus was going too fast. I thought they were taking me to a mental institution. A man kept talking to me and I begged him to stop because something in my head insisted he was racist. And when he went to the restroom, my mind took another turn — I decided he was an assassin, that when he came back I’d be his first target because I was gay. The paranoia had teeth. It reminded me of the Buffalo shooting — how violence can come from nowhere, how a stranger’s silence or chatter can suddenly feel like a threat. In the darkness, rolling down the highway, everyone’s phone screens looked like they were lit up with the most disgusting pornography. My mind was inventing horrors. At some stop — North Carolina, maybe Virginia — the driver made us all get off. I begged him to let me stay because I couldn’t walk, but he said no. Somehow, I managed. Hours later, I finally slept, relieved I hadn’t been institutionalized after all. All of us, people of color — Black, Latino — standing outside a restaurant full of white folks who went quiet at that stop when they saw us. Fear in their eyes. And when you’re stoned out of your mind, there’s nothing you can do but take it. Take it like a man. Don’t break. Don’t cry. In Florence, I ditched the gummies. Days later, I lost my wallet — cards, cash, everything. That trip was a mess. A true mess. And now, years later, I sit at Buzz Bar on 42nd Street, sipping a martini, watching tourists, and all of it comes back — the Chinatown bar crash, the Canal Street candy, the paranoia, the bus stations, the silence of that restaurant, the long ride into the South. Memory is wild. It doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives.    Friends gather on the porch at Peekskill Public Bar & Grill. Sometimes you tell yourself—out loud, so the walls can witness it—that your wild days are over. You are finished with nonsense. You are going to sit down, complete your work, behave like a civilized citizen, and forget all the hoop-hola that leads you straight into distractions and that terrible after-effect where you can’t do much of anything because your brain cells have been used up like loose change at a carnival. Then you see two attractive men on the Waterfront and every decent thought you had gets tossed out the window like yesterday’s newspaper. Next thing you know, off you go to a bar, this one close by on Washington Street called Peekskill Public Bar & Grill. You’ve been there before when there was hardly anyone there—nobody, really, in the middle of the day except a girl bartender, one other man, and you with your beer on the sundeck, looking out at the mountains over the river and the house tops sinking downhill toward the water. When you returned for one last beer, another man had come in for lunch. A sports game was on the television, though it is rare I ever look at it, not like the fun old days when the Jets were always playing to win on the TV at Whiskey River and everybody was watching, everybody was hoping, and we yelled in union when the Jets scored, then cried and laughed in the end when they lost. The Jets will forever be hopeless until they build them a stadium back in the City, and then, I tell you, they will be as great as they were with Joe Namath. A long shot, yes. I’d call it my own prediction. This day was overcast, which is to say the sky had put on its gray thinking cap. The temperature was cool but not cold, and certainly not hot and sticky like the miserable weather we’d had for several days and nights. Yes, I sleep better when the weather is this way. In fact, everything works better for me when the temperatures are in the 70s or the 60s. I can take a few 80s too, as long as they stay in daylight and have the decency to fall back into the 60s at night for sleeping, dreaming, and not sweating like a sinner in church. This time, Peekskill Public Bar & Grill was not empty because it was that hour of day approaching the edge of night, when people begin to believe anything is possible if the lighting is forgiving enough. The place had a decent amount of people and two girl bartenders this time, one with a derriere to match that Kim Kardashian woman. Only this bartender, with raven hair, was much taller—a big kind of woman with a pretty face and the authority of someone who could remove you from the premises using only one eyebrow. She sat me straight a few times when I got out of line. You know, by then I was on my fourth Manhattan, a journey that had started at the river and had not shown any interest in stopping. I bought drinks for two friends I hardly paid any attention to because I was too busy meeting a new acquaintance: a cowboy from the Poconos who works in Peekskill Monday through Friday, then drives back home to his peaceful valley. Or that’s the way he explained it to me, how peaceful it was down there in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, so peaceful that now I am tempted to go find out for myself and possibly misbehave quietly among the trees. On the sundeck, a gang of people sat under one umbrella, smoking and drinking as I stared at the view. It wasn’t the Poconos the Cowboy bragged about, but I liked it anyway—the river, the cloudy sky, the hush of the hills pretending not to listen. I watched him and talked with him as he ate steak, potatoes, and vegetables like a real man, the sort of meal that says, I have chopped wood in a previous life and may do it again after dessert. And there I was, suddenly wanting to know him, while the Manhattan in my glass kept nodding like an accomplice. Quietly Among the Trees |
AuthorCHARLES PEARSON 
Archives
August 2026
Categories |
RSS Feed