I watched The Bicycle Thief this weekend. (Here’s a summary, if you need the plot spoiled.)

Nobody warned me. I was so upset I didn’t even cry. When I woke up the next morning, all I could think of was the plucky little boy walking off with his handsome, devastated father, and FINE in big letters. No! It’s not fine! Split your wages with one of the guys who does have a bicycle!

You’re a good little American, said Jason approvingly.

Marija, the yoga teacher, demonstrates the headstand. Kneel on all fours. Make a little basket with your hands keeping your elbows close together and your forearms on the floor. Then place the crown of your head on the floor, cupping the back of your head in your hand-basket. Now, straighten your knees in a short downward dog pose. Walk towards your face, trying to raise your sit-bones over your shoulders. Press hard on your forearms; they support you, not your head. Slowly raise one foot to touch your seat. If it feels okay, raise it over your head and slowly lift the other leg.

Marija is on the doughy side. Standing around, she looks neither strong nor graceful, but her movements are beautiful as she slides from one asana to another. Sometimes it makes me petulant to watch her, knowing I still can’t touch my own toes. I rolled my eyes at the guy beside me as she carefully explained the pose upside down. I’d tried a headstand before and jammed my neck. It was daft, just a stunt pose for the Jivamukti ads in Time Out.

With bad grace I knelt down and stuck my head on the floor. I was still making beet-faced faces at the chap opposite when Marija coaxed me to put one foot up, and then the other. And there I was, standing on my head.

“Holy shit!” I said, truly surprised. I burst out laughing. Marija looked slightly pained at my lack of yoga decorum.

I am standing on my head.

It is so wonderful to turn your notions of yourself upside down once in a while.

It’s raining miserably in Manhattan. I feel burdened by my right to pursue happiness.

It’s raining miserably in Manhattan. I feel burdened by my right to pursue happiness.

Finished The Artist’s Wife. It was quite wonderful. Alma is odious, but I empathized with her to a shameful degree. I winced as my own flaws were voiced in a fin-de-siecle Viennese drawl by a lazy, arrogant trollop.

Max points out that the gold standard in empathy-for-the-odious is Lolita, of which his friend once said: “The genius of that book is you find yourself rooting for this creep to fuck this 12-year-old!”

I think I’m going to have to read TAW again, though I haven’t reread a book in years. That’s one of the drearinesses of being grown-up. Well, I won’t stand for it any more. I shall drink Benedictine and read nothing new unless I want to.

I went to an Eviction Extravaganza for a company I used to work for. At their first holiday party two years ago, they’d had a live reindeer in a corner and cases of company-branded wine, most of which was swigged by Silicon Alley liggers. We drank the rest of it on Friday; it had sat in the supply closet all that time.

I hadn’t been to the office in a year. It’s a beautiful loft with a clear view of the Empire State Building (green and red for the holidays). All the desks were gone, so it looked just as it had when we moved in. We took pictures of the empty server racks, then we danced and told stories. People eyed the remaining furniture. We saw guests wheeling chairs into the freight elevators. My friends who’d been laid off looked sad and worried; no severance, and nobody’s hiring.

All that money spent on parties for strangers, on fancy office space and plasma screens, on first-class airline tickets for a startup CEO. As Tim said when accosted by a film crew while stumbling drunk outside yet another dotcom party in early 2000, “It’s like fucking Rome before the fall.”

Reindeer are surprisingly large. I won’t mention the smell in case this blog gets to seem obsessive.

My sister Claire is flying back to Ireland tonight. I’ll miss her.

One of the joys of our national airline is the unending supply of smelly old men we get as seatmates. Hers was from Antrim last time, mine was from Co. Clare. They wear old, tobacco-colored suits. “Turty five years in New York,” said my last one, and shook his head. I wished he’d washed. Every stretch to the overhead bins was vinegary. He kept leaning across me to look out the window as we approached Shannon, saying he’d love to go home for good. As Claire says:

“My heart aches for them. But my nose hurts too.”

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
“I was once your father.”

It has come to my attention that no one clicks on links any more, or at least not on mine. So, back to ferret legging (see 12/7/2001).

From the November 1992 Harpers:

“Basically, ferret-legging involves the tying of a competitor’s trousers at the ankles and the insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets.

The brave contestant’s belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damnedest to get out.”

It’s grim up north.

My tree is decorated, the weather is finally cold, and our silly little office lights are on. Time for another Patrick Kavanagh poem:

A Christmas Childhood
My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon – the Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
“Can’t he make it talk” –
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

The full poem is actually longer; I can’t find the first four stanzas online. I copied the whole thing into five or six of my Christmas cards on Saturday night. Then I got bored and far too inky to continue.

Under favorable conditions and in the presence of a man a bicycle can turn into a woman and offer herself to a suitably qualified cyclist for the tactile felicities of love:

I passed my hand with unintended tenderness—sensuously, indeed—across the saddle. Inexplicably, it reminded me of a human face, not by any simple resemblance of shape of feature but by some association of textures, some incomprehensible familiarity at the fingertips….I knew that I liked this bicycle more than I had ever liked any other bicycle, better even than I had liked some people with two legs….How desirable her seat was, how charming the invitation of her slim encircling handle-arms, how unaccountably competent and reassuring her pump resting warmly against her rear thigh!

From The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

My damn saddle was stolen again last Thursday. I wheeled the bike up to a pro-store in Park Slope to buy yet another replacement. Felix, the Puerto Rican fitter decided I was a good customer. “You didn’t argue with me. You took my advice. That’s what I like.” He lovingly serviced my bone-shaker, lectured me on proper riding angle, scoffed at my request for toe-clips.

“You want to have the ball of your feet on the pedals. The toe-clips don’t let you do that. See, like this. What’s wrong with your balance? Why does she sit like that? Where are your sit-bones? Back, back, I tell you! “

He stayed for half an hour past closing, clicking his teeth at my untrue wheels and half-broken axle. Told me about his best friend the world champion of something and his girlfriend the state champion. He’d had his own bike shop, but closed it to join this one because he wasn’t getting enough customers to do what he really wanted.

“I’m not a mechanic or a sales guy. I’m a fitter. We don’t do the mechanics. I make sure the bike fit is perfect for the rider.”

I nodded, passed the allen keys, and admired his curly hair. I like people who love what they do.