Some readers have registered displeasure at earlier remarks I made in which they feel I characterized the American Midwest as boring, devoid of culture, unpleasant to spend time in, charmless, lacking in intellectual stimulation and generally existing as a nightmarish wasteland of stultifying vapidity where the only inspiration comes from hopes for escape, plus everything there has at least two sticks of butter in it, including one stick of butter. I’m deeply regretful if that is the impression I conveyed — I realize no one likes to see the place they’re from insulted, no matter how hellish it may be — and I’m sorry if I was a bit glib in an item that was meant to be lighthearted and fun. By way of apology, Midwesterners, let me share this song from the forthcoming Deradoorian album with you; it’s a terrific-sounding track that you are sure to enjoy, and if you listen to it today and learn all the words you will absolutely impress your friends with how hip you are when it finally makes it out your way in a couple of years.

The San Francisco bagel famine broke for a short time in 2011, when four former Dartmouth students started an outfit called Schmendricks. (The name means ‘‘stupid person’’ in Yiddish.) They decided to follow tech start-up protocol — ‘‘to A/B test our way to a perfect bagel,’’ says Dan Scholnick, one of the schmendricks who not at all stupidly kept his day job as a venture capitalist. By November 2011 they had a product ready to take to beta. So Schmendricks posted an announcement on Facebook and Twitter and placed a sign in front of Faye’s Video and Espresso Bar, across the street from Bi-Rite Market, a sort of Dean & DeLuca of San Francisco. Then, on the appointed morning, they showed up with four dozen bagels — and found a line stretching down the block. The bagel columnist for J., a Northern California Jewish weekly, described the product as “everything you could ever want.” But the glory didn’t last. Before Schmendricks opened a storefront, its bagel disappeared. “We were never going to grow the way a top-tier tech company is going to grow,” Scholnick told me, stating the obvious.

The fact that the perfect New York bagel is a mythical object notwithstanding, this is a great point: Why do anything at all that will never “grow the way a top-tier tech company is going to grow”? If your company is not growing, and its growth is not accelerating, then you are dying, and the hockey stick of death favors no man, which is all to say that you are already dead because you have choked to death on terrible bagels.

Photo by blinq

“A doom-laden US study in 1972 predicted that the earth would run out of food and resources, becoming uninhabitable by around 2050. Now scientists at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute have claimed we have a little more grace — until the end of this century, or the year 2100.”

Some day we’ll reach Friday with a sense of accomplishment rather than relief, but it will not be today. I’m afraid that just staggering up to the line and then throwing ourselves over it will have to count as achievement enough this time around. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy. We’ll try again next week.

The Only Sound During Sex Should Be The Pleasure Moans Of Your Partner Or Possibly My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”

Here is a selection of songs which the list’s assembler finds unsuitable to accompany the act of lovemaking.

★★★★★ The sand was cool and rain-damp still when toes dug into it. The waves were irregular and choppy, and a fishy smell came in on the water. Already, before the lifeguards were even posted, people were bristling about territorial boundaries. A truck went back and forth on the back of the beach, dealing with the storm-tossed guard chairs. The three-year-old defiantly hurled wet sand with his shovel at the advancing foam, and declared he was throwing poop at the ocean. He allowed the waves, backlit and pale green, to explode around him, and agreed to be carried further down into the surf till the bitter water splashed his face. The breeze chilled a wave-soaked t-shirt. In the afternoon, the clouds were white and made for slow watching. The air let the sun’s warmth come through clean and sharp, without trapping and abusing it. None of the ordinary suffering component of vacation could be found. A woman with a ukelele sat on a bench by the boardwalk and sang a popular song about murdering schoolchildren. The three-year-old had bought a bright green water gun and he drew a bead on a passing seagull with it. By ice-cream time the ocean was navy blue against a faint pink eastern sky. A sparrow moved in the dusk like one of the dark fallen pinecones gone ambulatory.

by Brendan O’Connor

319 East 105th Street #1B
• $3,650
• Three bedroom / Two bathroom
• 1,300 square feet
• 6 train at 103rd Street

For the past nine years, Sharon Frazier, an artist and occupational therapist who lives in a rent-regulated apartment on the Upper East Side, has owned and rented out a condo in Spanish Harlem. Her current tenants are moving at the end of this month, and she’s been looking for a new group of three to replace them. A couple of weeks ago, she was waiting for two sets of prospective renters to send her their financials. “They’re really geeky guys. They’re in their thirties. First or second jobs. They’re new into the job market. Both really geeky. Geeky guys love my apartment. Maybe they just love the flavor of the Latin neighborhood. I just love these types: Bankers, young lawyers, financial guys. These guys were CPAs, financial analysts,” Frazier told me. “They were both bidding on the apartment. I was just going to say whoever gives me the most stable financials gets the apartment.” Both groups, however, ended up in Brooklyn. Frazier attributes this to a recent news article that reported that Williamsburg is the best place to get laid in New York City using Tinder. “They texted me back, like, We’re really sorry Sharon, but we did this because it’s better for our lifestyle,” she said, shaking her head. “And they work in Midtown.”

According to city records, Frazier bought the condo on 105th Street for almost five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 2006. (“I realized the changes going on in Spanish Harlem early on.”) Two years ago, she considered selling and almost immediately received an offer of nine hundred thousand dollars. On her bank’s advice, she turned it down, given that an entrance to the (not entirely theoretical) Second Avenue subway line is planned to open just around the corner. “This is my banker telling me this: If you can at all hang on, and you don’t have to sell, keep it, and you’ll get one point five,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true.” But she held onto it anyway.

As she tells it, Frazier has had quite a few adventures in her life. He father was in the army, and her family moved from Japan to Puerto Rico when she was four years old. When she was seventeen, they moved to New Orleans. (“Nawlins,” she said with a drawl.) She moved to New York when she was twenty-six, for a job as an exhibit designer. “Didn’t know a soul,” Frazier said. “Lived at the Barbizon Hotel for women on 63rd. That’s now an Equinox.” She continued, “Then I met my ex-husband — I was married for fourteen years. We started a company, and now that’s number two in New York. It’s Brand X Editions. Very, very proud of it. They are the premier printing company for high-end artists. Like, Fortune 500 artists. Like Chuck Close. They’re the sole printer of Chuck Close. They print Robert Rauschenberg, they print Helen Frankenthaler. I don’t know if you know art, but these are — Helen’s dead now, but she’s like the most famous woman abstract expressionist.”

An artist herself, Frazier worked out of a studio in Spanish Harlem, on 106th Street, for a long time before she was ever a landlord. “I was one of the first blondes to ever be up there. I met the Spanish mafia — a little short guy who told me, You’re going to be protected,” Frazier said, putting on a gruff voice and an accent. “He managed, like four city blocks. I forgot his name. The people I talk to know his name, and I always forget. A little short guy with a big scar. And he was Puerto Rican. And he was like, Okay. You’re gonna be okay. And whenever you need car service, you go to — I guess he had like, a franchise or something, with the car service guys, he got a cut or something, I’m sure — you go out your building, you tell them during the day, you’re going to be leaving at eleven o’clock, they’ll be in front of your building at eleven o’clock. And they were. It was the beginning of Uber, in a way! At eleven o’clock, they knew that I worked there every day, and they would be out in front of my building and they would blink — it was really weird! — they would blink their lights on and off, and there would be a car there. Now, I’d pay for it, but he made sure — I only had to walk from my door to the cab.”

Her studio was part of Taller Boricua (“Puerto Rican workshop”), a nonprofit arts organization founded in 1970 to preserve the cultural institutions of Spanish Harlem. “I was the honorary rubia. The honorary blonde. But since I had lived Puerto Rico, my Spanish was almost better than a lot of theirs. They’re New York Puerto Ricans, so they speak slang,” Frazier said. “Taller Boricua homesteaded — we, meaning the Taller Boricua group — we re-did this building that was just so dilapidated, so we were some of the pioneers up there.”

“Spanish Harlem has grown and changed so much since then. The basketball courts used to be a huge drug kingpin dealing area. I couldn’t even walk by there. Really West Side Story stuff. Rubia! Rubia! That means blonde. La rubia!”

Around the same time that she bought the condo, Frazier sold her shares of the studio building back to Taller Boricua, on the assumption that she wouldn’t be able to maintain all three spaces: her studio; her condo; and her rental. “Now, I am an artist without a big studio,” Frazier said with regret. “I was very spoiled.” While she’s currently looking for tenants to move into the condo this summer, in a year or two she may decide to move in herself. For now, though, she’s focused on upgrading the space, as she does every time people move out.

The original plan was to move into the condo with her mother. It is a ground-floor duplex; her mother would have gotten the bottom floor, which has its own entrance. However, her mother died, and that plan was derailed. Frazier misses her mother, who was a realtor, and whose advice would be helpful in certain situations. “I have these questions! I don’t really have to renovate a bathroom, but should I just put a shower in, or make the bathroom bigger? Do you really need a tub? Everybody seems to take showers these days,” she said. “But some people like a tub to soak in.”

Still, Frazier doesn’t mind doing it all herself; in fact, she’s proud of her successes in so many different realms, and especially as a woman. “You have to be so many things. You have to be empathetic to your tenants, and attentive. You have to not get defensive, you have to always listen. You have to go to Home Depot with your contractors and wear a hard hat, and work with your contractors to make sure that they’re doing the right job, the right quality,” she told me. “I learned a whole way of being soft and hard at the same time. You treat every contractor and every vendor with the utmost respect, but if they don’t do a good job for you, you replace them. They think as a woman you don’t know, or you’re not paying attention. A lot of people don’t. Maybe it has nothing to do with being a woman, but I find it to be a little hard.”

“It’d be nice to have a partner to help me talk to the contractors. But I don’t! So as a single woman, you have a whole ‘nother job — it’s like, I’m running a company over here, but I have a whole other job over here, that’s a very intensive job, and then when I do start the projects of upgrading my property, usually in the summer, it takes over my whole life for a little while. Forget dating. You just have to say, I’ll have to fit you in between the contractor and the plumber. They’re like, What??”

Currently, Frazier says she’s showing the apartment three times a day. “On occasion, I get a Latino, but, unfortunately, not often,” she told me. None of her tenants have been people from the neighborhood. “Always people moving here. First jobs. Young professionals. They love the Spanish neighborhood, they love the ethnicity of the neighborhood,” she said. “I think that the braver, or the more open people who are not afraid of an ethnic neighborhood, fall in love with it up there. I’ve known guys that have left my apartment and just gotten a one-bedroom right there with their girlfriend or whatever. They just like the neighborhood enough to stay.” Frazier sipped her coffee and furrowed her brow. “If I had a lot more money, I’d buy some more New York real estate, in Spanish Harlem. I should have done it years and years ago.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

A Mix Tape: “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”

“Think of the tender things that we were working on.” — Simple Minds

Such a delicious pain in the ass to make,
on a double deck if you were lucky,

otherwise you had to drop the needle
onto the precise groove as your left

index hit PLAY/RECORD, taking all
afternoon or many. Mistakes, thinking

too hard about what you wanted
to tell the person but couldn’t say

any other way. It was always
“I love you,” didn’t you know?

Mix tape: private language, lost art,
first book, cri de coeur, x-ray, diary.

An exquisitely direct and sweet
misunderstanding. We weren’t

fluent yet but we lived in its nation,
tense and sweaty for an anthem.

Receiving a mixtape could be major,
depending on from who; giving one

to someone in public was a dilemma.
You had to practice. Would you say,

nonchalantly, “Oh, here, I made you
a mixtape?” By the lockers? In class?

Ugh! But giving it over in private
could be worse, especially arranging it.

You never picked the best song off
the album, definitely not the hit single.

The deeper the cut the deeper buried
your feelings for that person. You didn’t

know? Not all lovesongs, though — 
that would make you seem obsessed,

boring. They should know you’re fun
and also funny and dark-hearted

and, importantly, unpredictable.
A “Blasphemous Rumours” for every

“Only You.” And sexy! Though not
Prince’s moaners — not “Erotic City,”

not “Darling Nikki”! But what?
Not top 40, stylish, with a sly angle,

70s funk, some Stevie Wonder, like you’ve
got background you don’t really have.

As it records, you have to listen to each
song in its entirety, and in this way

you hear your favorite song with the ears
of your intended, as they hear it, new.

This was the best feeling of your young
life. Then the cold chill of suddenly hearing

in your 3rd favorite INXS song a lyric
you’d break out in hives over if you thought

they thought you thought that about them
when they heard it: (there’s something

about you, girl, that makes me sweat

).
The only thing worse was the tape

running out a full minute before the end
of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

You never got it right, not even once.
That was part of the mixtape’s charm,

to your dismay. Did it ever win you
love? You never fell for anyone

else’s mix either. Sometimes cool,
mostly was just someone else’s

music in a case dense with tiny
handwriting to get all those titles in.

So much desire in those squeezed-in
letters. Not “love me!” so much as

“listen to me! Listen to me always!”
So that’s really it, right? Maybe

you thought someday you’d make
a mixtape that your splendid friend,

your lucky star, your seventh stranger,
would take a pen to, punching in

the little plastic tabs which meant,
as you well know, it could never be

taped over again. They’d never use
your mixtape to make another mixtape,

to give away or to copy a friend’s album
they didn’t like enough to buy, joining all

the ok tapes in caddies stacked up a wall
or thrown in the backseat of the Datsun,

then in moving boxes, stored in parents’
garages, 5 for a buck at a yard sale,

buried in landfill, or, saddest of all,
discarded on the street, purple script

still aswirl on the white label FOR YOU — 
JUST BECUZ. Shiny brown ribbon

tangled, strangled, never again to play
out what had to be said just that way.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of Our Andromeda. Her next collection, So Much Synth, is forthcoming in Spring 2016. She teaches at Rutgers University–Newark.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Last Friday, I flew from JFK to SFO to attend the wedding of my close friend Vanessa, a girl I met in 6th grade. Josh flew there with me because we are married and spouses are legally required to go to all weddings with you; that’s part of the reason you get married. I spent part of Thursday packing. On Friday morning, a car picked us up at our house and we were off. We were through security and eating a breakfast quesadilla by 9:30 am. Our flight was delayed, so we lingered over our coffee for a bit, but by 11:30 am we were on the plane. By 6:00 pm that evening, we checked into our hotel and already at the rehearsal dinner, enjoying being surrounded by my childhood friends. And we were three thousand miles away from our eighteen-month-old daughter.

This was the first time I was ever away from her for more than five or six hours. Because I work from home, even when I am not caring for her, my physical location is so approximate to hers that I can usually hear her. This is a luxury on a personal level, and a curse on a professional one, insofar as I often get less work done than if there were not a cute toddler just a room away; I often take breaks to go visit her, or to make her lunch.

The point is obvious, but I need to repeat it because just thinking about it makes me anxious, as anxiety is my basic mode of being: I’ve never spent a night away from my baby. I’ve gone out just a handful of times in the evenings when she is asleep. When I leave her during the day, it is usually for a few hours. I’ve slept once since her birth without a baby monitor blaring second hand white noise at my ear, and that was just the few nights before the trip, when I was recovering from a lingering cold.

So for weeks — months? — I planned. Taking Zelda wasn’t an option: In addition to it being an evening wedding (which I read as “baby free”), I was looking forward to an adult experience: dinner in a civilized setting, drinks with friends, staying out past 7:15 pm. I planned to leave our daughter and our dog with my parents, who would travel from Pennsylvania to stay at my house, and Zelda’s nanny. There would be multiple levels of redundancy, and multiple escape plans. I typed email lists: the pediatrician, backup pediatrician, twenty-four-hour on call doctor service, veterinarian, animal hospital. Because they’d all be staying at my house I listed emergency tree removal services, water line troubleshooters, and driveway pavers. I listed local places to eat and buy supplies. I bought multiple packs of diapers and extra snacks and non-perishables, as if my daughter might go through an above-average amount of supplies in my absence. I called the neighbor and alerted her to our absence in case of any town-related emergencies (blackouts, road closures? I don’t know!). I drilled my parents and Zelda’s nanny on “if” situations, though I knew they were so unlikely. I bought Zelda new clothes. I did not panic.

On Friday, we were off, not to return until Sunday, around midnight — Monday, really. As the plane took off, I leaned back in my seat and opened a book. “How do I feel?” I asked myself, texting my father one last time to check in. “Okay? I feel okay?”

By the time I got to San Francisco, I realized I’d forgotten a few things, and so once I checked into the hotel, I walked to a drugstore a few blocks away, alone. I do go out alone at home, but this was different: There was no possibility of rushing home in the event of a scuffed knee or a sniffle. I was alone, completely. I had no work to do. I wasn’t away from home because of a doctor’s appointment or a meeting; I was gone for leisure. The air was warm and the sun was out. “How do I feel?” I asked myself again, wondering if I should buy cigarettes.

I felt amazing, not because I was away from my daughter, who is awesome and whom I already missed somewhere in the back of my mind, but because my one remaining becoming-a-parent fear was so clearly unfounded. You see, becoming a parent is “life-changing” but you also clearly remember the person you were before. You are, in lots of ways, still that person, but on hold: You remember going out shopping and not having to navigate mentally for a stroller. You recall not choosing restaurants based on how loud they are. And you remember getting into a car and driving, listening to music as loud as possible, all the windows down, no fear of a twig flying into the backseat and straight into a baby’s eye. You remember all these parts of being a single adult human. You just don’t do any of those things anymore. You are acutely aware of having changed, of being and inhabiting a double life; you used to take escalators while looking at Instagram on your phone with a cup of hot coffee in the your free hand. But not anymore. You’re a mother.

I barely blinked as I reverted back to that me, though. I hit the ground in a new city, babyless and with three days of nothing much to do besides eat and sleep and spend time with friends, happy and guiltless. I could irresponsibly stay up in a hotel room until 2 am and sleep as late as I wanted the next day (turns out that 7:30 am is about as long as I want to sleep in). I could eat without rushing, or worrying about what I ordered because it would need to be shared. We could drive around in the car aimlessly without agonizing over nap time or a stroller or a snack or a wet diaper. And it wasn’t as if I suffered over or even thought about these things: in the moments — the three days away — I barely noticed. The non-mother life I had lived came crashing back to me and I barely registered it. I didn’t worry about my daughter — she was safe and I got updates from three separate people almost hourly — and I was happy to see her enjoying life without her parents. It was the best proof I’ve gotten thus far of my belief in this obvious fact: Josh, Zelda, and I are three distinct people, with lives of our own, sometimes. My friend Emily, a new mother with two six-month-old twins, had a nearly identical experience: She travelled just as far, planned just as much, and was back to her old self — the only self I know — in San Francisco.

By Sunday morning, I was ready to go home. I felt myself seeping back home, thinking longingly of seeing my baby wake the next morning, smiling. I wondered if she would be surprised to see me.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting that was retired but if Jay-Z can come out of retirement whenever he feels like it why not?