by Mark Bibbins, Editor

MY BODY IS AFRAID OF YOUR BODY WHEN YOUR BODY

My body is afraid of your body when your body
moves to move away. My body is a theme party
that’s found a deeper way to care about its guests
and when they leave. It’s me and not my body
that gets the words of the song wrong, My body lies
over the ocean, though it’s my body that gets up now
to turn off the television. On it, two bodies who aren’t
your body read news that pertains to other bodies
and are proper inside their clothing. I or is it my body
knows when it’s time to make a room go dark, the trick
is sending the sound away. Sometimes when I’m trying
to fall asleep I picture large quantities of mercury.
It feels good to picture this, it all slows down.
Sometimes when things feel good, everything speeds up,
like when a body responds to the music at theme parties.
I wonder if you’re having the same thought as I
am having now, that it’s too quiet to be the world.

Laura Eve Engel’s work can be found in the Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Tin House and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she is the Residential Program Director of the UVa Young Writers Workshop.

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

The challenges of parking a car in New York City

by Alex Dworkowitz

Mary Norris doesn’t want other people to know where the block she dubs “the Sanctuary” is located, so I won’t provide the key details. But, like most streets in Manhattan, twice a week, parking is prohibited on each side of the Sanctuary under the “alternate-side parking” program, which allows New York Department of Sanitation sweepers to clean the curb. Unlike most other city blocks, however, the ban only lasts half an hour, instead of the usual hour and a half, giving Norris plenty of time to get to work by 10 a.m. Moreover, in a rarity for Manhattan, the Sanctuary is a cul-de-sac, and one not easily accessed from the main street grid. Its out-of-the-way location also makes it a pain for both street sweepers and traffic police to access, so Norris is unlikely to be forced to move or be ticketed once she finds a spot.

“It’s my favorite place of all time,” Norris told me one day this past winter, as we toured parking spaces in her East Side neighborhood. As we walked, she noticed that there was plenty of space between a nearby car and a fire hydrant — well more than the fifteen-foot gap required by law. “I can’t help but look for a spot even though I don’t have my car here,” she said. (Her 1990 Honda Civic was on loan to a friend in the Rockaways.) Later, she pointed out a new smart car on the street. “There’s a great parking car,” she said.

Norris is a long-time copy editor at the New Yorker, and, as required by the job, an expert grammarian. Parking is her other obsession. A Cleveland native, Norris moved to New York from Vermont in 1977. During her first week in town, she received two hundred dollars in traffic tickets. She gave her car up for a decade afterward; her current study of parking is partially an attempt to master an art that once eluded her. In 2007, she started a blog called “The Alternate Side Parking Reader,” which has covered topics like the optimal time of day to find a parking spot, getting her car towed by a “Sex and the City” film crew, and earning bathroom privileges at a local Greek restaurant after helping a waiter squeeze into a spot. “Some people think it’s a dull subject,” Norris said. “But I never tire of it. It’s like grammar.”

Norris is one of many New Yorkers who have a quiet fascination with the challenges of parking a car in the city. Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Greg Daniels poked fun of the city’s parking culture in two early episodes of Seinfeld. Author Calvin Trillin wrote an entire novel, Tepper Isn’t Going Out, about a man who just wants to sit in his parking space in peace. Even Horst Störmer, a Columbia University professor who won a Nobel Prize in physics, has pontificated on the best techniques to finding a parking space in New York City.

The City of New York does not keep data on the number of residents who park their cars on the streets, but some sources suggest that it’s a large group of people. There are approximately 1.8 million cars registered in New York City. While many are kept in garages, driveways, or parked on the streets of more suburban outer borough neighborhoods — where finding a parking spot is rarely an issue — if just a third of the city’s registered vehicles are kept on the streets of the more densely packed neighborhoods, then six hundred thousand people depend on the city’s graces for parking.

When cars were first produced at the turn of the twentieth century, they were seen as a replacement for the horse and buggy; it was expected that only the wealthy would own cars, which would be stored in their carriage houses, so there was little concern about where to put them when not in use. With the advent of the Model T and other, more affordable cars, however, middle-class people who did not own garages began buying them, and by the late twenties and early thirties, parked vehicles were a common sight on New York City streets.

City officials blamed parking for promoting a constant stream of menace: Parked cars served as hiding places for holdup men, a means of escape for bank robbers, a hurdle to sanitation men, a cause of traffic congestion, and, above all, a fire hazard. Not only did parked cars make it difficult for fire trucks to get by, but their gasoline tanks could explode if ignited. The Chief Magistrate of the Traffic Court, charged with punishing violators of the city’s traffic laws, viewed street parking as an “intolerable and dangerous nuisance”; the City’s Fire Commissioner called it “a distinct menace to life and property”; and newspaper editorial pages routinely referred to it as an “evil” that needed to be addressed.

For others, parked cars were less a danger than an eyesore. “It is unpleasant to have a car, usually an old dilapidated one, in front of one’s windows,” a Manhattan resident wrote to the New York Times in 1935, contending that the “streets of New York were never intended for garage purposes.” Later that year, a feud between a doctor and a banker on the Upper East Side made headlines when the doctor sued his neighbor, accusing the banker of vandalizing his car. The banker, upset at the doctor’s habit of leaving his car in front of the banker’s house for long periods of time, had attached a series of sarcastic stickers on the doctor’s windshield. (“Do Not Open Until Christmas,” one read..)

Responding to the anger directed at parked cars, the city issued regulations in 1927 that codified a practice of limiting parking to one hour in business areas. Critically, the regulation also imposed a three-hour time limit throughout the city on parking between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m. The message was clear: anyone with a car needed a place to store it at night.

Parking regulations were applied arbitrarily from the start. New Yorkers accused police of accepting bribes to ignore violations and of looking the other way when customers of favored businesses parked in front of those shops, while others faced the full brunt of the law. In 1927, seven residents of Harlem and the Bronx were given jail sentences for keeping their cars parked on the streets, though the sentences were converted to fines after the Chief Magistrate found that the sentencing judge had discriminated against the seven parkers because they were black.

The time limits also proved difficult to enforce. A violation required the police to prove that a car was parked in a particular spot in excess of the given time limit, and New Yorkers grew savvy to the challenges of doing so. A group of Columbia University students took turns moving their shared car in the middle of the night in order to avoid breaking the three-hour limit. An advice column suggested that drivers check their tires in the morning and remove any chalk marks to frustrate the police’s time-tracking system. Just as infuriating for police was the requirement — which was not modified until 1933 — that motorists be personally served with a summons for all parking violations. Even when the police, undermanned and overburdened, could track down a parking violator, they were often reluctant to punish people during the height of the Great Depression, when many clearly had no alternative to on-street parking. Judges, however, were frequently less merciful. When a salesman told a magistrate in 1933 that he parked in front of his East Village home because he could not afford a garage, the judge chastised him and imposed a fine, telling him, “A man with your nerve would buy a portable bungalow, put it up in the street and live there rent free.”

Judicial lectures and police crackdowns, however, were not enough to combat the growing number of cars. The time-limit system finally came to an end in the early nineteen fifties. Parking meters were installed in business areas, rendering the one-hour commercial limit rule moot. In 1952, Mayor Vincent Impellitteri proposed that New York City end the ban on overnight parking by establishing a system of residential parking permits with an annual fee of sixty dollars per permit. The State Legislature approved, but the Board of Estimate, the city’s primary legislative body at the time, declined to adopt the change. Two years later, the city, finally recognizing the reality that overnight street parking was not going away, dropped the three-hour time limit, and parking was effectively legalized on most city streets.

Around the time that New York’s parking ban came to an end, complaints about the filthy condition of the city’s street curbs had become common; tightly packed together cars made it difficult for sanitation workers to reach the refuse with their brooms. Sanitation Department officials proposed an experiment: require car owners to clear their cars from one side of the street at a time, so that vehicles with brooms attached to their bellies could sweep up the curbside trash. On August 1, 1950, a team of policemen, cleaning vehicles (known as street sweepers or mechanical brooms), tow trucks, and three hundred and fifteen welfare recipients acting as “parking wardens” descended on the East Village (then called part of the Lower East Side) because a Health Department survey found it to be extensively littered. From 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., they issued summons to motorists who did not remove their cars in time, hauled away vehicles that blocked the path of the mechanical brooms, and cleaned the streets.

One day later, the Sanitation Department declared the alternate-side program a success, contending the neighborhood had not been that tidy in many years. The program was brought to other parts of the neighborhood over the following months. By 1955, the program was in effect throughout Manhattan, with curbs typically being cleaned three times a week; it soon expanded to many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs.

More than sixty years later, the system remains largely the same. In most neighborhoods, at certain times on specific days of the week, cars are forbidden from parking on one side of the street to allow street sweepers to pull up to the curb and spray it with water while the rotating brooms sweep refuse into the vehicle’s hopper. Parking is forbidden on the opposite side of the street on other days, so that side can be cleaned. Drivers need to switch back and forth between each side of the street depending on the day of the week — hence the name, “alternate-side parking.” When parking is banned, traffic cops give out tickets to illegally parked cars at sixty five dollars per violation; the cars of repeat offenders also can be towed.

New York remains an outlier in terms of how often it cleans its streets. After discovering that cleaning each side of the street three times a week was generally not necessary, the city reduced the frequency to twice a week in the early nineties — and some neighborhoods with a high “cleanliness rating” are swept just once a week. Other major cities, like Dallas, Philadelphia and Seattle, don’t bother with regularly cleaning residential areas. Those that do, such as San Francisco and Boston, typically sweep each side of residential streets twice a month — one fourth as often as in much of New York City. Boston and Washington, D.C., also cancel street sweeping during the winter.

“Street cleanliness is almost entirely driven by population density, and particularly pedestrian density,” Brendan Sexton, a former commissioner of the Sanitation Department, told me. As the nation’s most densely populated major city, Sexton explained, New York needs to clean its streets more often than others. In the nineteen eighties, under Mayor Ed Koch, Sexton wanted to end the lax enforcement of laws that contributed to dirty streets and came up with the idea of a new form of punishment for violators of New York’s street sweeping laws: plastering car windows with Day-Glo greenish-yellow stickers. The stickers, in use up until 2012, were notoriously difficult to remove. “They were very ugly, and that’s why I loved them,” Sexton said. “The intellectual connection of what you do with your car and how the neighborhood looks is a hard one to make.”

Sam Schwartz, a transportation consultant and former commissioner of the Department of Transportation, who goes by the nickname “Gridlock Sam,” told me that the alternate-side parking rules have had the tangential effect of regulating parking. “New York is like any organism,” he said. “It has adapted itself.” The rules ensure that no one leaves their car on the street for more than a few days. They thus introduce a liquidity to the exchange of parking spots, and have the unintended effect of benefiting commuters who can time their arrival to the hours when alternate side forces spaces to open up. “If we didn’t have alternate-side parking, our streets would become storage,” he said.

Then there is the matter of revenue: New York earns more than half a billion dollars a year from parking tickets, many of which are issued for alternate-side violations. City agencies feel pressure to make sure that revenue doesn’t decline, Schwartz said. “It’s a big business.”

I hadn’t been in touch with the man affectionately dubbed “the Mayor” by his neighbors, but one assured me that I’d have no trouble finding him. Sure enough, as I walked onto a short block just off the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, I spotted Louie Formisano sitting on patio furniture in his driveway, relaxing underneath a red umbrella. Formisano is a rarity in the city: a man who will move your car for free. “You want everyone to feel comfortable where they live,” Formisano said. “You want to be able to go up to someone and say, ‘Listen, I need some sugar, do you have any?’”

Alternate-side regulations vary throughout the city, so the rules and customs regulating what a person should do with his or her car while a ban is in place shift from neighborhood to neighborhood. On some streets, drivers continue to sit in the illegal space, swinging out of the way only when the sweeper comes by; on other streets, people double park on the opposite side of the street, moving back to the proper side near the end of the parking ban.

Knowing the difference between the rules of a double-parking culture and a sit-and-wait culture is critical to navigating alternate-side parking: Don’t assume that you can double park just because doing so is common in the neighborhood; if it’s a major avenue or a street with a bike lane, the police will probably give you a ticket. If it’s a double-parking neighborhood, you can get boxed in by double parkers on days when you don’t have to move your car; if you double park, leave a note with your name and number in case the person you have blocked needs to get out. If it’s a sit-and-wait neighborhood, then you don’t have the freedom to drive your car around during the parking ban period; your spot will probably be gone. These are rules, of course, not the law. (Double parking is still illegal, even when done courteously.) But they have developed over the sixty years that alternate-side parking has been in place in New York City.

Formisano’s block is one where double parking is the norm. He keeps a little wooden box in his house with the spare car keys of about twenty of his neighbors. On days where street cleaning rules bar parking, he moves each car from one side to the other, one by one, leaving them double parked. After the sweeper passes, he moves them all back.

Formisano, who is fifty eight, has lived in the neighborhood his entire life. Although some call it Carroll Gardens or its more gentrified name, the Columbia Waterfront District, Formisano assures me that we are in Red Hook. “They had mob here, gangsters,” Formisano said of his childhood. “If you didn’t break someone’s face, your face would be broken.” After retiring, Formisano, a former bail enforcement agent who had started his own security business, found himself undertaking small improvements on the block: planting and pruning trees, picking up leaves, and plowing the street after a snowfall. He tackled larger projects, too, like cleaning out an abandoned lot at the end of the block that was overgrown with weeds and full of trash. He also brought in a small pool for the local kids to swim in during summer. “I take care of everybody on the block,” Formisano said with a proud smile. “I’m a silent employee of the city.”

Formisano found that the greatest need for some of the block’s residents was dealing with the parking regulations and he began offering to move his neighbors’ cars for them, so that they didn’t have to worry about taking time off work. Having worked in law enforcement, Formisano knows many of the local police, so they do not interfere with his routine. “It gives you the opportunity to park the car where you live,” Formisano said of the arrangement. “One guy brought a brand new car because of me.”

Formisano shares something in common with most New Yorkers who chose to park their cars on the city’s streets: He is someone with a little extra time. Because dealing with alternate-side parking takes so much of it, most people who regularly park on the street have some flexibility in their schedules; they are working and middle class people who have managed to earn enough money to live in the city and own a car, but don’t have sufficient disposable income to pay for a garage or a house with a driveway. (Others, like cab drivers and deliverymen with cars, don’t have any choice but to park on the street). The New York residents who talked about parking with me included a superintendent at an apartment building, a psychotherapist, a retired beautician, and my father, an artist who runs a picture frame business.

“It’s time that I have to relax and think,” Helena Barthell, a woman I met sitting in her double-parked SUV on a sunny day on the Upper West Side, told me. Barthell recently moved to New Hampshire with her husband, but the two frequently return to the city to visit family, and during those trips, Barthell takes on her old parking responsibilities. While waiting for the sweeper to come by, she often listens to books on tape and prays while holding her rosary beads. She notes that the alternative is paying six hundred dollars a month for a space in a parking garage. “I view this as my job,” she says. “This is what they are paying me for.”

The idea that a parking space is a thing with an economic value has recently motivated a trove of scholarship critical of municipal parking policies, especially in New York City. “I don’t know of any other big city that throws up its hands and says there is nothing we can do about parking,” Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, told me. Shoup, who authored the book “The High Cost of Free Parking,” views free parking in New York and other cities as a classic “tragedy of the commons” problem, in which a resource is free to the public and, as a result, becomes overused. Free parking causes an overuse of cars, Shoup contends: A block may have fifty parking spots, but sixty people want them. The end result is that ten people are keep circling the block, looking for another place to leave their car.

There are a lot of people driving around looking for parking spots. The group Transportation Alternatives, which is dedicated to the reduced use of cars in New York City, found that twenty-eight per cent of traffic in Soho and forty-five per cent of traffic in Park Slope consisted of people just looking for a place to park. (A study of west Midtown came up with a lower figure of eight per cent.) The consequence of this searching is more than just a waste of time: More traffic means more pollution, higher emissions, and less clean air. It also means more traffic congestion and more car accidents. More than fifteen thousand pedestrians and cyclists were injured by cars in New York City in 2012, and two hundred and seventy people were killed in car accidents that year. At least some of these accidents involved drivers searching around for parking.

To Shoup and others, there is a simple solution, one that was recognized by the angry magistrate judge back in 1933: Charge for parking. The goal, explains Shoup, is to set a price that would deter driving to the extent that there would always be one or two available spots on each block. In business areas, this could mean charging a variable price for parking. San Francisco has experimented with this in a program named SFpark, which uses sensors installed along certain curbs to tell whether the space is occupied. If spots on the block are full, the meters increase the price of parking; if a block is mostly empty, the prices drop.

In residential areas, Shoup recommends a permit system, with the price of a residential permit determined by the demand, perhaps set by auction. The number of permits sold would be about equal to the number of spots available in the neighborhood; the sales figures should be set just low enough to ensure that there is an average of one empty parking space on every block. The benefits of such a system would be more than cleaner air and better traffic flow, Shoup notes; it would produce significant revenue for the city. “It ought to be easy as possible politically,” he said. “You need to recognize the local costs and benefits. You cannot sell a good policy on the grounds of reduced global warming alone.”

There would be some real losers. The point of this type of reform is to take a scare resource that is currently allocated by time — those who are willing to wait the longest for a spot get it — and instead allocate it by capital. The only way to get more parking spaces on the street would be to force some people who currently park on the streets to stop doing so, and those people would be drivers with the lowest incomes. Many who rely on their cars for commuting wouldn’t be happy to hear that they had to switch to less convenient public transit. And while a hundred and fifty dollars a month for a space might seem reasonable in a city where real estate is so expensive, in the Manhattan neighborhoods where the cost of a garage space routinely goes for six hundred dollars a month, it’s not hard to imagine auctions producing prices near those levels.

There is another implication of enacting a policy that would end the difficulty of finding a parking spot in New York City: that the New York culture of parking — the spot-finding strategies, the trading of spaces, the ad hoc parking block associations — is, in truth, a societal waste. Like graffiti In the age of law-and-order New York, this culture wouldn’t exist if the city were properly managed.

Toward the end of my parking tour with Mary Norris, she told me that a parker on one of her regular blocks once passed out parts of an aloe plant as a gift to his fellow parkers as they waited for the alternate-side period to pass. She used it to plant her own aloe plant. “I still have it,” she said. I wondered if she would miss this type of interaction if she no longer had to park on the street, and I asked if she would accept a free space in a garage if it meant she had to give up street parking.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “I don’t like parking that much.”

Photos by Natalie McMullen, former resident photographer at The Awl.

Memorial Day weekend doesn’t really start until…. 1:30 in the afternoon tomorrow? Yes: That is the time at which your already diminished presence at work will become an active detriment to your employer. It is the time that you should come up with an excuse to leave — any excuse, because it is also the time after which all managers will lose their ability to doubt what would, in other contexts, be obvious lies. For repeat listening until that moment: A short new album from Robyn and Röyksopp (“Röyksopp and Robyn”), streaming here in full.

How is one woman’s boycott against Amazon, a response to the company’s ongoing campaign to make life miserable for the mega-publisher Hachette and its authors, going?

“I’m convinced that Amazon will not make any effort to regain me since they can rely on getting me back due to the magnetism of their efficiency and their massive stock of everything,” she wrote. “So, feeling as isolated as I do in my feeble protest, I believe I’ll call it quits soon if there is no prospect of it making a difference to anyone.”

But Ardelle — can I call you Ardelle? — are you sure you want to give up so easily? What if the inventor of stuffed-crust pizza decided to call it quits because he thought, in his darkest hours, that “there is no prospect of it making a difference to anyone” by filling what had been a doughy void in every pizza consumer’s life with rivers of hot, stringy cheese, baked right into the crust? Where would this country be right now? Filled with more carbs. He made a difference, and you can too. But it’s okay if you wait until your Prime subscription runs out, I know it’s expensive, and can you believe they raised the price? I know. I mean, if I wanted to watch some old HBO shows, I’d just steal my dad’s HBO Go password, right? Ugh.

Who Will Care for the Dogs When All the Humans Are Gone?

Dogs have been nothing but kind to man. In return, man has bred dogs in such thoroughly impractical ways that they cannot easily survive without us. We have left our pets in a terrible post-cataclysm position! Cats that don’t go outside, dogs that must be “walked.” Horrible. Here is a short film imagining how, in death, we might earn our dogs’ forgiveness.

“To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations.” — What is an ambitious, bold, beautifully written magazine cover story worth in 2014? That is to ask: Can it still force people to talk, or is the power of the information void such that it will be merely processed and forgotten, filed away in the abandoned longform warehouse? This is as good a month as any to find out.

★★★★ Any plausible reason for walking would do. Certainly taking the 1 train would have been senseless. People were out in the sun wearing earbuds, talking into dangling wires, tethered to routine or duty as lightly as possible. A pair of pristine landscaping trucks stood beside Dante Park, delivering new plantings, spring sprouted by subcontractor. A gangling cop in dark short sleeves crossed the street with an oddly deferential jaywalker’s jog; CNN interviewed average people on the street about something about their iPhones. The green retinal glow from the daylight lingered all the way down the steps, through the mezzanine, down the second set of steps, and into the waiting subway car. Crumbs of cloud were scattered above downtown. The retinal afterglow floated up the office stairway. It seemed worthwhile to walk the dozen or so blocks to the used bookstore, for a volume listed online as in stock, and it was almost even worthwhile to walk back empty-handed when the book couldn’t be found. Whenever the air threatened to get hot, breeze and shade intervened, and whenever it threatened to get chilly, the sun came on again. Only the clouded and colorless evening was a disappointment, a slacking off after such scrupulousness.

There are something like 25 people associated with Circulatory System, a sort of all-star team for the Elephant Six label/collective/music/sect, including most of Olivia Tremor Control and Jeff Mangum. The last album was fun but sounded like a crowd; this track does, too, but not quite as much. (via)

According to a government dataset analyzed by Planet Money, “Real Personal Income for States and Metropolitan Areas, 2008–2012,” U.S. currency goes further in Danville, Illinois, than in at least three hundred and fifty-five other American cities. Thirty thousand dollars there is more like thirty-five thousand dollars.

Here are some other facts about Danville, Illinois, in case you are considering moving there because ten dollars barely covers cost of a Chipotle steak burrito in New York City these days, and that’s not even with guac:

— It has thirty-three thousand or so residents, and “offers small town charm and big city amenities.” (Emphasis not added.)

— The mayor is Scott Eisenhaueur. His voice is his trademark. He is also the liquor commissioner. Vermillion Liquors, a local liquor store, seems like a bustling, well-stocked place.

— Abraham Lincoln slept there for a while. So did Dick Van Dyke. And Joshua Ferris.

— There is another Danville, in Pennsylvania, but it doesn’t seem as nice, since its population has fallen by nearly half over the last century, to around forty-seven hundred people. Also, it’s in the middle of Pennsylvania. It is uncertain which town has more Dans in it per capita.

— The crime situation is a little sketch — slightly above the national average for both violent and property crime. There have been some burglaries recently.

— Where should you live in Danville? The most expensive home for sale, according to Zillow, is a seven-thousand-square-foot brick charmer with seven bedrooms and five-and-a-half baths, granite counters, Brazilian cherry wood floors, motorized dock for a boat (it is on a lake) and geothermal heat, for just over five hundred thousand dollars. There are multitudes of houses for less than one hundred thousand dollars, like this four-bed, three-bath number built in 1930, which has “character in a nice neighborhood.”

— There is a litter patrol meeting later today to keep things nice and clean.

— Rawhide Meat Company is a local old fashioned MEAT shop that sells fresh quality MEAT and items that go with MEAT, so you will not be wanting for MEAT. (It has the rare perfect Yelp review.)

— Speaking of Yelp reviews, Gross’ Burgers don’t sound too gross to Yelpers, while the Custard Cup may be “the best place in town for a good cold treat.”

— There are definitely some events.

— It doesn’t have a Chipotle, but there is one thirty miles away, and a steak burrito costs $6.65.

It’s ready for you.

Photo by Ross Griff

Hello Polly!

I’m 23 and I feel like I’ve come a pretty long way already. I grew up in an abusive and poor-as-hell home; went to live on my own when I was fifteen; struggled with depression and a terrible relationship; and made (and paid off) a huge amount of debt. All the terrible things happened. ALL OF THEM.

However, I think I did a lot of cool things as well: I raised my sister to be a happy, normal person, and I finished school with really good grades even though I did not know at the time where food would come from and I had to sleep on the smelly couch of the local pot dealer. When the schizophrenic father from hell returned (he had been missing for years) I told him to fuck off. I made peace with my tired, overworked, shy mum and we glued the family back together and we’re all pretty damn happy about it. Since I was kind of a stoner, I pretty much got along with everybody and I made some cool friends who made my hard life way easier and who I loved very much. So, that was my teens, basically.

After I finished school, I moved to a new city to be with my cynical asshole boyfriend who somehow had realized that I was smart and funny and routinely used lines I said in his shitty standup comedy act. I started training to be a nurse. All of my coworkers were boring, or way older then me — plus, asshole boyfriend pretty much scared away anyone I tried to make a connection with — so I went friendless in a big city with a really hard job that I hated. My old friends all moved to new cities and started university, moved in with friends, threw giant insane parties — I couldn’t relate at all. I felt boring, grey, poor. Every time one of them asked me, “So, what’s happening?” I could only say “hard work, stupid boyfriend,” so I stopped saying much and eventually the calls stopped. This part of my life lasted almost three years.

I decided to blow up the whole damn thing because I was super unhappy and found myself staring at the wall in my bedroom smoking cigarettes and crying one too many times.

During all of this, I had been drawing things whenever I could. I drew and I painted and I glued things together, and even though asshole boyfriend told me all the things that could be improved, I mostly loved the things I made. I got pretty good at it. One day in spring, I told the boyfriend he had to go; he told me that he had wanted to break up anyway, since I was just a sad shadow of a person and also I never did the dishes.

I got a tiny, cheap apartment, stopped going to the hospital to wash sick people and instead started working behind the bar at a cool club. I drew all the time, every day. I got so good I finally decided to do the thing I never thought I could do: I packed together my best work and applied to Very Prestigious Art School for its Very Famous and Good Costume Design Program, which has been my dream since I was 15 years old. They get bazillions of applicants and you have to go there and do two days of creative tests and studio time and intense talks and stuff and I never thought I could do it but I did and they chose me.

I talked to a lot of cool people who are all starting with me this September. I live in Germany, so it’s not unusual to start university at 23 or 24; I clicked with a lot of the other applicants. Now I’m not a poor dirty stoner or an overworked sad nurse’s assistant anymore, but a cool bartender who can draw better than most people, with good taste in movies and music and style and a nice apartment where the dishes are always done and I look fine and — well I don’t know how to be a friend anymore?

It seems since everything has always been on fire, now that things are good I don’t know how to be normal? I have a lot of people I talk to casually once a week or something, but how do I get from that to developing a friendship? I’ve been so busy with saving myself over and over again that I never learned how to be there for friends. I want to be the kind of person that, you know, throws parties and is just a friend, but I feel so different from everybody else. I feel like the dirt of everything is still on me. And people seem to notice that? I sometimes say things that weirds people out and I notice it too late, so most of the time I’m still really quiet. I know I have a lot to give, but I’m so very lonely and I just want someone I can call once in a while just to chat about stuff. But it feels like there is a giant chasm between me and “normal people.” How can I bridge that? How can I feel not dirty and unworthy when talking with people?

I’m sorry if this sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person and I apologize if my English sounds weird or something, English is not my first language. I just feel so lost, which is weird because I’m also the most happy I’ve ever been. It would be the coolest if you had some sort of advice for me. I know you must get a ton of letters. Your writing has really helped me through a lot, so thank you a million times for that.

I wish you the very best.

Friendless Dirty Artist

Dear Friendless Dirty Artist,

If you take just one thing away from my letter and believe it, let it be this: No giant chasm exists between you and other people. The “dirt of everything” is not on you. You are not unworthy. It is very common — more common than you can possibly imagine — for a youngish human being to feel this way, no matter what strange, tumultuous sea of freakjuice that particular human arose from, like a bedraggled Venus on a half-assed halfshell.

Maybe, just maybe, you “weird people out” right now. But that’s only because 1) you’re out of practice in talking lightly with people you don’t know (almost every smart person alive has been there, and will revisit that state repeatedly over the course of a lifetime, thanks to various isolating circumstances) and 2) you are a million times more independent and interesting and tough than most of the people you’re going to run into casually.

I mean, if I were still 23 years old and I found myself talking to a woman who lived independently at age 15 and raised her younger sister? I would be the one who felt unworthy. What could I say? “Yeah, I totally know what you mean about hardship, my hostess shift at Applebee’s was SUPER FUCKING TAXING sometimes, like when the Megaritas were on sale for $4 and I had to remember to mention that AND the Chicken Mexicali special? Whew, that was tough.”

At that age, I might’ve avoided you. But guess what? You would’ve really benefitted from me avoiding you. Because I would’ve been a TERRIBLE fucking friend to someone as tough and talented and interesting as you are. I would’ve half-listened to your troubles (while scanning the room for hot dudes) and waved off your worries (while chugging my sixth pint of beer) and then vomited all over your shoes (without apparent remorse, unnervingly enough).

So thank your lucky stars that some people are going to self-select themselves out of your life right now. DO NOT view these “weirded out” people as people who see clearly that you’re dirty and unworthy and are rejecting you because of it. View them as people who can’t handle real life or real people yet. They have a long, long road to travel. And also? Try to be patient and forgiving of them, if you can. Allow them a light, easygoing place in your life if you have room for casual acquaintances. But don’t tell them everything. Don’t blurt out big truths or dark passages from the past or heavy asides or self-doubting confessions to these people, who don’t want that stuff clogging up their distraction-focused lives, because they can barely grapple with their own twisted, confused, vague “it’s all good” shit yet.

I can personally guarantee you that at ART SCHOOL (cue Hallelujah Chorus!) you will find plenty of people who don’t think you’re TOO WEIRD AND DIRTY AND UNWORTHY for them. I just taught at an art school, and fuck, art school is awesome! It’s filled with weirdos who feel dirty and unworthy in the best possible way. If anything, feeling weird and dirty and unworthy is a wonderful ticket to a fun and exciting social life! I met some of the nicest, smartest, most interesting people at that job. Those were the grad students. I bet the undergrads are a little less tamed and polite, and some of them are probably vicious, freaky, awful, one-uppy hell, just like they were to Claire on “Six Feet Under.” (Best show ever, BTW. Watch it. First season not the greatest, sort of awkward, but then? It is good good good.) I bet some of those student artists walk around and wear that “I’m more punk or more EVS or more YOLO or more whatever the BRAND NEW (but really old) way of being stylishly indifferent is” on their tattoo sleeves.

All you need to do is be nice and keep your eyes wide open and listen and believe in yourself and your talent, no matter what. You will prevail. You will have friends. All of these people are also about to make their first lifelong friends, trust me. They will want to see if you match them. Some of them will be shy and awkward. Some of them will be outgoing and arrogant. Try to give the pretentious children some time to show their true selves to you. Try not to worry about how they’re judging you. We all feel like unworthy dirt, deep down inside.

In fact, it’s very common — BELIEVE IT! — for full-grown, adult-ass human beings who should know better to feel this way. I have felt like a mutant every other day for most of my life. I have often felt that the dirt of everything was crusted onto me, a layer of crazy that would never come clean. Even when I am winning and win-winning and never, ever failing, some grime lingers. Even at the exact moment when it seems I’m finally in step with the other Earthlings (at last!), I fall out of step again. The terrible, beautiful irony of my writing an advice column at all is that I do NOT FEEL all that evolved on most days, or at least some days. Who can tell, really, how many days are RIGHT ON and how many days we enter the self-hating oven and broil in our own juices? Sometimes I think that’s exactly what makes this advice column THE FUCKING BOMB, MOTHERFUCKER! And other times I feel a little ashamed at how I tell innocent humans what to do, and then I can’t even do those things myself, because I fucking suck.

But look, I’m smart and I have good intentions, just like you. I write this stuff because I really love to do it. It makes me feel good, it helps me to revisit what I believe, it reminds me that hope and optimism and connection do make sense, if you can manage to get there organically — if you can open up to what’s around you and accept it and embrace it for what it is, instead of shoving it away and hiding hiding hiding. Writing is part of my practice, if you want to put it in pretentious terms — and who doesn’t? You have a craft, too. You love to draw and make things and you just keep getting better and better. It connects you with something good and real and it reacquaints you with the fact that hard work really does build on itself, and there is a way out of hell, if you work hard enough. I mean GODDAMN YOU’RE IMPRESSIVE, WOMAN!

That’s what people are going to be saying to you a lot, once they really get to know you. But that won’t happen immediately. One of the big mistakes of being young is that you want to get that pat on the head right after you say “Hello, my name is Wingle Wangle.” You have to be patient and not blurt out dark things. You have to listen and focus on others and TRUST that they don’t think you’re unworthy. You have to take a leap of faith and just be in the moment with others. That is all.

So look. You and I, like most other people, work hard at what we do, and try hard not to slip into darkness, and we feel like mutants a lot, despite our best intentions and our angriest self-recriminations. The only real difference between you and me (uh, aside from the tiny fact that you’ve overcome much, much more hardship than I have and didn’t spend your formative years vomiting on other people’s shoes like I did) is that I CHOOSE to believe my own self-generated hype about sixty-five per cent of the time, just because it makes my life much easier and it makes my writing better and it makes me nicer to be around and that way, I get to pour a vat of margaritas into my throat occasionally. I take my little flaws and I say “YES BUT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT MAKES ME THE BOMB, MOTHERFUCKER!” And some people dislike this, and some people tolerate it, and a few people sort of like it. I take the dirt and the unworthiness and show that shit off like it’s diamonds and lace and silk and all that trash they coveted on “Dynasty.” My wrongness is my swagger. My baggage is my LUXURY LUGGAGE.

Except when it’s not. Some days, my baggage is just heavy and misshapen and sad and dusty, like actual ugly, cheap baggage that you can’t tell apart from everyone else’s ugly, cheap baggage on the conveyor belt at the airport. It’s important to know this. You can resolve to embrace your flaws, and decide that your awkwardness is also your charm, but you’ll still have days when you feel dirty and unworthy.

Everyone will. So this is what I want you to do: Pay attention. Put your focus on yourself into YOUR CRAFT. Take the big truths and the dark passages from the past and the heavy asides and the self-doubting confessions, and pour those into your art, your costumes, your creations, your drawings. You are an artist, after all! (Cue Hallelujah Chorus, again!) Investigate your bleak history (in therapy if possible, and on your own). Look closely at your fears and your darkness, and use them to fuel your passions. You are so lucky, in some ways, to have a past so rich at such a young age. I know, I know. That sounds totally insensitive and ignorant. So the fuck what? There’s luck in damage, for an artist. Some of those artists you meet are going to be seriously fucking jealous, when they dig for something profound and all they can find is Applebee’s Twice-Baked Cheesy Tater Boats. (But don’t discount those envious privileged boobs, either, because shit happened to them, too, they just don’t realize what they’ve got onboard yet.)

Once you pour the darkness into your work to some extent, and study other great artists who’ve done this, and write down your feelings regularly, and mingle with youngish artists of all stripes, THEN you will have a less Sensitive Alien way of moving through the world. Learning NOT to tell everyone everything immediately is a big step. I think I learned that lesson, hmm, about four years ago? It took FOREVER. I have entire friendships now that are fueled by shared good times and shared interests instead of shared troubles and shared confessions. Sounds shallow, sure, but — little known fact! — some shallowness gives a life balance. Light friendships remind you that you CAN simply engage in small talk and go with the flow, if the rest of your life fills your needs, if you have deep connections and you have ways of expressing the dark emotions that come bubbling out of you without warning. I’ve only recently discovered, for example, that if I’m in a spectacularly shitty mood, I can usually write something pretty funny. SHITTY MOOD ENERGY CREATES COMEDY. Who knew?

Use the rough road behind you for inspiration, and you won’t need to stick it into the middle of every conversation. Use the rough road under your feet on any given day for inspiration, and you’ll grow to appreciate your sensitivity and depth of feeling as a gift rather than a curse. Honor yourself and believe in yourself and listen to other people first, and believe me, you will have more friends than you can handle.

There is no chasm. You are not alone. We are all right there with you, feeling wobbly and uncertain. We muddle through and weird each other out, every single day of our lives. It’s ok. We are dragging our luxury luggage all over the planet, scowling at each other like strangers when, in fact, we all match inside. You’re not alone. You don’t have to feel lonely. You’re with us.

Polly

Are you a lonely, tangled vine among flowering perennials? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by troy mckaskle