★★★★ The day announced itself with a flush of pink light on the gray-brown apartment building across the way, brightening to gold. High clouds marbled the dome of the sky with thin whites and intermediate blues. People walking away from the diffused sun, crossing the street, had glowing edges on them. All day long, the passing airplanes stood out against the backdrop — tiny and solid, coming and going.

“A car wash attendant in New Jersey claims to have seen an image of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus on the window of his car wash, reports the Times of Trenton. Alex Leiva attempted to take photos of the window image, but he dropped the phone. In the amount of time it took Levia to pick the phone up and try and snap another photo, the image had almost disappeared.”

Robert Hall Weir, co-founder of the first band to prove that extended drum solos could be just as annoying when played by hippies rather than rockers, turns 65 today [UPDATE: if today were the 16th, which, as it turns out, it is not]. God, that generation is going to be with us forever, isn’t it?

Football Pick Haikus For Week 7

Thursday, October 18

At San Francisco -7 Seattle

Lose back-to-back games
at home and Jim Harbaugh will
go Supernova. PICK: SEAHAWKS

Sunday, October 21

At Buffalo -3 Tennessee

Bills are 3 and 3!
Tied for First Place in the East!
Enjoy, Buffalo! PICK: TITANS

At Minnesota -6 Arizona

Lose three in a row
and Arizonans might build
fence around players. PICK: VIKINGS

At Indianapolis -2.5 Cleveland

Battle of Rookie
Quarterbacks! Expect fifty-
eight interceptions. PICK: BROWNS

At Houston -6.5 Baltimore

Bad loss last week for
the Texans but Ravens D
is AARP. PICK: TEXANS

Green Bay -5.5 At St. Louis

Rams coach Jeff Fisher
pulls big home upsets out of
his awesome mustache. PICK: RAMS

Dallas -2 At Carolina

For better Cowboy
time-management decisions
Get Fake Rolexes! PICK: PANTHERS

At NY Giants -5.5 Washington

There’s no reason in
the world the Giants should lose.
Which is why they will. PICK: REDSKINS

New Orleans -3 At Tampa Bay

The Bye Week allowed
Saints to meet with their banished
coach at a Starbucks. PICK: SAINTS

At New England -10.5 NY Jets

If the Pats lose to
the Jets, Basketball Season
begins in New England. PICK: PATRIOTS

At Oakland -4 Jacksonville

They call the Raiders’
Stadium the Black Hole because
crowd will rip you one. PICK: JAGS

Pittsburgh -1.5 At Cincinnati

The Steelers stink on
the road, but be sure to try
delicious Chili PICK: BENGALS

Monday, October 22

At Chicago -6 Detroit

Verlander should start
for Lions at QB Sunday
on regular rest. PICK: BEARS

Last week’s haiku picks went 6–9. That’s 41–50–1. We need a rally.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

There is an “aesthetic problem” in San Francisco, right now. Men, naked, outside, in the Castro! “Most people just don’t think older men look good naked,” says a newspaper reporter on KQED’s public nudity program, Forum. Also, it’s so cold sometimes. Mark Twain has a famous quote about being naked in the Castro, because it’s so chilly. And county supervisor Scott Wiener (come on) has proposed a new law that would make most people have to wear clothes outside, most of the time.

There are exceptions, of course. There are the famous parades! A San Francisco parade without thousands of naked people who do not need to look like 14-year-old anorexic models, thank you very much, well that isn’t a parade at all. And what about the nudist festivals, which are a kind of parade without moving? So, these will be fine, but those old naked dudes in Jane Warner Plaza in the Castro, some citizens say they are tired of it, which is not very tolerant!

“Very rarely do people ask me why I do this,” [54-year-old Woody] Miller said. “I like the way it feels. I like the feel of the sun and air on my skin. I think it puts me closer in contact with who I am.

“A lot of people say we are too fat, too old, too hairy. But I consider my body to be a record of my lived experiences,” Miller said, noting a dramatic scar from a heart operation that plunges down his chest and ends in a dimpled cross just above his abdomen.

Why are San Francisco’s prudes against basic sexiness?

Flickr creative commons photo by Tom Stovak.

A Pee Grows In Brooklyn

“It smells up the block. It’s been noticeably worse since the arena opened. It was just totally disgusting. In New York City you don’t accept that kind of uncivilized behavior.”
 — A Brooklyn resident who seems, let’s say, a little naive on what kind of uncivilized behavior New York City will accept, is one of the many people registering his displeasure over the fact that “patrons at the newly opened Barclays Center are using local sidewalks as urinals, even peeing on a community garden across from the new arena.”

Here’s the thing to know about Sam Zeiger — the curly-haired, fifty-something hippie who owns the last sensory deprivation tank in New York: he’s not going to murder you. At least he didn’t murder me. Unless he did, and blogging forever is just one brand of newfangled, bespoke afterlife torments you can qualify for now (versus pushing a rock up a hill or getting your liver pecked out by birds).

Still, even if it’s sort of embarrassing to cop to having made an appointment for an hour of isolation, you should still tell someone where you’re going and where dude lives. The fear of getting murdered can be a distraction and when you’re floating naked in some man’s house, distractions are dead weight.

Blue Light Floatation, Sam’s operation, is near Steel Gym and across the street from TekServe and the school for blind people on West 23rd Street. He’s easy to find because Sam has dynamite SEO and whatever version of “sensory deprivation” and “isolation blah blah” you’re auto-completed for in New York, you can find him in the top 3. To set something up, you ring him or email, and he almost always gets back to you within the hour. Sometimes he’s booked several weeks in advance and other times, he has a cancellation and you will find yourself in his apartment (yup, YOU WILL BE NUDE IN HIS HOME) within 48 hours. This is what happened the first time I went and it’s the only reason I didn’t flake: I didn’t have time to talk myself out of going.

Couple other things to keep in mind: Don’t drink coffee beforehand, and don’t pre-game with a heavy meal. If you skip breakfast and lunch because you’re saving yourself for a post-float Hill Country Chicken x Shake Shack x Eately gelato bar combo, you’ll likely be disappointed. I ended up crushing whatever garbage I had at home (Wheat Thins + gummy teeth) because I felt bananas after and couldn’t deal with the crowds.

You’re also asked to bring cash or a personal check (LOL personal check) because Sam doesn’t take credit cards, which feels annoying since even the most irritating/bad-mood-making restaurants in Brooklyn mostly all take credit cards now and he could just get a reader thing on his phone but whatever, Sam can do what he wants since he’s cornered the market. And besides, the old timey-ness of the means of consideration makes it feel weirdly official in a New Age-y way.

Blue Light is not a spa — if you arrive early, there’s no whirlpool bath or spigoted decanter with cucumber/sage water. There’s no micro-waffle bathrobe that you shimmy in and out of while you enjoy the ancillary amenities. Instead, you wait downstairs with the doorman on a bench and, if it’s the weekend, you can watch rich people who live in rock-climbing clothes file in and out with their breadbox-sized dogs. You can also watch 90s-looking juiceheads in kicky little singlets and vertically striped or color-blocked bike shorts mill around the gym down the street. If you wait outside, there are also the saddos flitting in and out of TekServe in various states of crisis but it’s best to avert one’s gaze because nobody needs to invite that kind of hideous, contagious juju into their eyeballs. Disgusting.

Blue Light is not a spa — if you arrive early, there’s no whirlpool bath or spigoted decanter with cucumber/sage water. There’s no micro-waffle bathrobe that you shimmy in and out of while you enjoy the ancillary amenities.

Sam’s place is on the fourth floor. I didn’t love that since it’s a number that signifies death to all of Asia but I got over it and took the elevator up anyway. When you walk in, you’ll slyly crane your neck to see the entire apartment because you want to know what a 1BR in this building looks like. You never actually see a whole quadrant of the apartment, so you’ll never get the full lay of the land, but do know that Sam built his tank and the adjoining infrared sauna (!) a decade before his building went co-op so there was no board-approval dramz (obviously this is one of the first things I ask).

There are drywall partitions and the unit is railroaded, so both you and Sam get a little privacy. You will feel crazy vulnerable when you’re told to shower, but you deal, because at least you know that all the grimy humans that went before you all had to shower too. There’s a hook with a hanger on the bathroom door for your clothes and purse, and a little mat in the hall for your shoes. You ball up your underpants as tiny as they’ll go and pop them in your purse along with your bra. Then you wash your hair with some shampoo you’ve only seen at the health food store and you use that brown Dr. Bronner’s stuff on your body that only comes in huge bottles that should totally have a pump top but doesn’t.

After your shower, you wrap yourself in one of two towels that Sam’s left out for you and tiptoe just across the hall to the little room with the tank. The room is big for a walk-in closet, tiny for a bathroom, clean and painted white. Other than the tank, there’s a filtration system that’s about the size of a hot water heater, and just enough floor space for you to get in and out of the tank without crashing into anything complicated. There are no windows (YOU WILL BE FINE!) and above the tank, on the wall, there’s a little sconce with a soft bulb that points up and away from your eyes.

Okay. This is when you realize you had a picture in your mind about an isolation tank, so you’re going to be simultaneously bummed out and fully relieved that the tank isn’t one of them lock-down joints from “Fringe.” This one basically looks like a huge bathtub, enclosed behind an upright sliding shower door that’s black and features a handsome wooden handle. There is no lid. The darkness is your lid, just as it’s always been. (JK JK, I don’t even know what that means!) This is good, because you don’t have to worry about suffocating on your own carbon dioxide because you don’t experience that thing where your breath breathes back at you because you’re panting and watching the intruder from inside your closet that is so very small. 🙁

The water — “water” — is set at exactly body temp, so don’t expect that tingly sensation of sliding into a hot tub. And remember that it’s saline solution, so don’t get it on your face. It’s not that tricky, since you’ll slide in so that you’re on your back. So your eyes, nose and mouth are completely exposed and floating, as well as your toes, the tops of your thighs and a half-bagel of your belly (or full bagel depending on the day).

There’s enough room in the tank that when you float in the middle, you’re not touching any wall. If you do lazily pong into one side or another, the slightest nudge of a finger will set you straight. You do not need to know how to swim because the one thousand pounds of dissolved salt will help you out and you don’t need lessons to get in a bouncy castle. Unless you DO need lessons and that’s OK because you’re probably blessed with some other capability like “doing math” or dogs liking you.

***

Want to know something really embarrassing? The whole reason why I decided to make the appointment in the first place is because I’d read this article about how this Strikeforce MMA guy won his matches (battles?) by incorporating 90-minute isolation bids into his training to increase focus and I chose to buy into it because I had a deadline and was in the weeds. I’m not ridiculous; it was a fiction deadline (I am convinced that this would not work for non-fiction), and I had trouble toggling back and forth from my regular assignments and the comic-book script that was messing with me and so I was willing/desperate enough to chuck money at the problem.

I point out my back-story only because I think it helps to have a selfish incentive for being a joiner. It’s not like skepticism or suspicion clogs your heart or the pure energy conduits of your psyche or, whatever, but at the very least be “X Files: The Movie” about it and WANT to believe. I can’t imagine how devastatingly dull it would be to wait out a desultory 60 minutes while rolling your eyes.

Allow your brain to drift somewhere productive just in case they’re onto something or the plan is so crazy that it just might work. I’m sure each float is as very special and unique as a snowflake, but for me, the experience wasn’t life-changing like how in Office Space Ron Livingston gets perma-hypnotized in some rad, freed realm but it did sort of remind me of the hypnosis scene in that the Kevin Bacon classic, Stir of Echoes, where dude imagines himself in a movie theater. If you haven’t seen the movie, floating is kind of like backing into a dark room where the light from under the door gets further and further away and then your foot hits a box of crap you’d forgotten you’d left there.

Look, I know there is no right and wrong way to do this but if you love grades and tests as much as I do, know this — if you get aggy at your own pulse — THAT is you doing it right.

You’ll feel like you’re doing it wrong basically the entire time. I’d been deep in a procrastinatory “30 Rock” binge-watch so all I could do was make up “things that Tracy Jordan would say” in that nonsensical, wavy way, like how when you’re about to fall asleep and you can read writing on a sign or in a book because they’re real words and not bogus captcha words but none of it make sense together (read: LEGIT Tracy Jordan dialogue).

The cool part is right when you’re worried and annoyed that your thoughts are conveyer-belting only the most inane non-helpful stuff, you get pissy at how loud everything is because your heartbeat becomes deafening. And that’s good! Look, I know there is no right and wrong way to do this but if you love grades and tests as much as I do, know this — if you get aggy at your own pulse — THAT is you doing it right. It’s like getting at least a B if not an A minus. The little shakes you get right before you fall asleep also happen to you.

***

In the tub there are two silver-dollar-sized buttons by your left hand. The one closest to you is a dummy button because it’s deactivated since it’s intended for music and Sam thinks that’s bunk. The other is for illumination. When your hour is up, Sam pumps in some quiet muzak and you switch the light on. You will feel CRAZY so take a second to get it together enough to stand. And make sure that you take a second to wring out your hair so all that intensely salty water doesn’t get into your eyes or mouth. You’ll walk back to the bathroom to shower but you’ll barely remember it, and you’ll put your clothes back on and be grateful that you are often too lazy to wear anything binding like jeans because those tiny ankle holes are such chores. Don’t forget to carefully Q-Tip out the solution in and around your ears because when that stuff dries up, it gets crusty and visible in a gross way.

You head out to Sam’s living room where you pay him and have a cup of tea. He then leaves you alone for a minute or two so that you can reflect and he can check in on the tank and do some light cleaning. You look around because now is the time to clock any red flags like Nazi memorabilia/cannibalism books/”Family Guy” posters but all you see is artistic little petrified wood geegaws from Sam’s travels, some incredible framed graphite sketches that he drew himself (you can tell because he’s signed them), and a Kleenex box with a knitted robin’s egg blue “Blue Light Floatation” cover on it.

Sam is awesome. His disposition is serene but he’s OCD so everything in his apartment is immaculately clean and everything has its place. He’s unassuming and is so relieved when you’re not an inconsiderate blockhead that you’ll have a decent chinwag and he’ll talk about how some of his other visitors will bring friends or kids who he’s expected to blink at as if his home is a train station. I don’t know what the literature is on getting high before floating but even if you’ve scored medical-grade sativa or THC tincture, I’d absolutely take a spin without the bells and whistles. And even though Sam sounds/vibes a bit like a younger Bob Ross and seems mad chill, I’m pretty sure there is no secret string of words that invokes him to produce Smiles, Bath Salts, Krokodil, Scopolamine or whatever because this is not that type of operation. It’s like that one reptile farm off the interstate where, despite high school rumors, “change for a fifty,” doesn’t score squat but two twenties and a talking to.

To be all the way real, I didn’t auto-workshop anything big in terms of my writing project while I was floating but because I’m patient and kind to myself and maybe forgot to, I didn’t beat myself up about it and was rewarded with a nugget of something else that I will sit on for a spell to see if it turns into something real. All told, it was worth the $80 (I have NO idea if you’re supposed to tip and did not) that I’d usually spend on a low-rent walk-ins-welcome ethnic massage and a drink.

I’d do it again and would probably get into it. I didn’t try the sauna but I think you get more bang for your buck to float. I don’t expect that you’ll mull your quandaries into sharp relief every time or have that thing where you pick up the thread exactly where you left it, the way LSD is on TV, but it’s a decent afternoon reset. Especially if your eyeballs hurt from so much screen staring and there are just too many people people people all around you always all the time, oh God the people.

If nothing else, I’d do it for the way it made my skin feel now that it’s winter and the dry heat from my baseboards gives me shin dandruff. It’s like you’d sheathed yourself in Kiehl’s crème de corp + afterbirth and wrapped yourself in damp lotus leaves + cheesecloth and chilled in a wet-heat sauna for 20 minutes. That and your hair gets amazing and you serve full-tilt beachy waves for the rest of the day. Plus, and this is the kicker, you will sleep like the dead and wake up inexplicably sore. It’s as if you were visited while you slept by some brutish, brolic incubus. WIN. Five stars.

Editor’s Note: This story is brought to you by the Samsung Galaxy S III. Stories like these are purely editorial, presented by a participating sponsor; advertisers do not produce them.

Mary HK Choi writes for Wired and MTV’s House of Style. Photo by Toni Frissell, via.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Matanuska

Three hundred seconds away, a grizzly
claws at the brains of a Coho. This is less
messy than expected: this ursine,

nitpicky, chooses the prized fatty
offal before bolting up to the nonsound
of the ice cracking away from itself —

the air eeling, squirming for melody,
a crispness that blankets the Alaskan
white, some spell that cools the trees in their sway.

You

can’t hear it,
but you feel it,

gripped tight and sprung quick as three
swings of the connibear trap trapping,
lunging, strangling a furry, warmblooded

abdomen.

The highway is closed for the season.

Three amanita will poison a hiker
who forgets that parasoled mushrooms
with gills are always never edible.

Out on the water, three frozen sheets,
dashes of caesuraed February
dusks, mistake you for a bluelipped
cadaver,

microflora hush on the sail of your skiff.

Christine Larusso is from California. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Additionally, she is learning to play the accordion.

If you were to ask me, “Say, where might I find some more poems to read,” I would gently, but not in a forward way or anything, take your head and lead you here, to The Poetry Section’s archives. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Frightening news for Miami’s aging right-wing Cuban population: the county is considering going FULL-FIDEL. One lone City Commissioner/communist is putting forward an ordinance that will force all employers to let their employees accrue sick time. This is worse than Obamacare! Nearly half of all workers in the county currently do not get sick time, according to “some random dude from a union,” whose pockets are lined with money stolen from little children.

Local Miami commenters respond to the Herald’s shocking report:

• “why should they even have to work!!! ill just send them money.”

• “What I don’t understand is that if the liberals want this, why don’t all the liberal business owners provide this sick time? If they do this, then the BEST employees would go to work for these liberal business owners and all the other businesses would then have to offer the same benefit or end up having a competitive disadvantage by only have the poor performing employees working for them.”

• “Unions make me “Sick” ;(“

• “Socialism only works while others still have money that the government can take away. After it’s all gone, we get Cuba’s reality: Poverty and misery as far as the eye can see.”

• “The small business owner is the one that needs protection… It used to be that everyone would have saved at least 6 months of living expenses in case one lost their job or got sick… now no one saves a penny nor have any financial literacy…”

To be fair, these are mostly comments from people who are dozing on their plastic-covered couches while waiting for their Social Security checks to arrive or their dog fight bets to pay off.

With only 10 issues remaining, the print edition of Newsweek will now serve as Tina Brown’s updated résumé. What will she do with these final covers, now that “everyone” (in New York media circles) is watching again?

You can help Tina decide how to make these last issues really shine! We’ve got the editorial calendar through the final issue, December 31, and can already see some interesting cover possibilities. “Smartest Families: How to Raise a Brilliant Child,” holds promise, maybe with Einstein’s head on a “regular baby” in a BOB double stroller in Prospect Park, with maybe Steve Jobs’ head on the other baby? And “The Hero Issue” cover could be as important a canvas for Tina Brown as the ceiling of that one church was, for Michelangelo — we’re thinking all of the Romney sons, as The Avengers.

Please put your suggestions in the comments, and by all means spend a few hours doing “mockups” at work, because you don’t want to look like you’re overly concerned about losing your job. Remember that your bosses can sense desperation, the way dogs can sense fear, or leftovers. (Note of Sincerity: We are very sorry for our colleagues and comrades facing layoffs, and hope they can quickly find new jobs or at least get decent severance packages.)