The friends I was reuniting with in New Haven have left, and I’m going to spend the day reuniting with the town on my own. It’s like having a disastrous relationship with a guy and then meeting him 10 years later and realizing that he’s not that bad and you might even be friends with him. Granted, I’ll never feel this way about any guy but maybe I can about a town. 

I’m so happy I came. I can now have the happy recent memories of the place get superimposed over the unhappy ones from the past. 

Plus, a brusque change in scenery and routine for a short period of time is intellectually invigorating. My work rhythm had gotten a bit sluggish back home. 

God, I love the New England climate. For the first time in weeks, my head is clear and I can think with no effort. 

BFF and I went to the Yale bookstore and I bought tons of paraphernalia because I’m no longer Yale- traumatized. The Gestalt has been closed. 

Richard Russo worked at my university for a few years and he left because of the nasty weather, too. And he was on the campus that’s 5 hours to the North. So he didn’t even experience the worst of it. 

These days it’s fashionable for authors of reviews to substitute analysis and argument with detailed descriptions of their physiological responses to whatever they are reviewing. I’ve noticed this in students’ essays where instead of analyzing a work of literature, the author lists one’s physical reactions to the complexity of the text. 

If I have changed, then New Haven has, too. It’s become a lot more chic. Tons of expensive places have sprung up while more budget-friendly ones have closed. I’m not sure who’s supposed to be able to afford all this. It’s not like the student body could have changed all that much in 10 years. 

I would have been happier here if it had looked this nice back in 2003-7. It’s kind of annoying that the place had to go and stop being a pit when I no longer have any use for it. 

I was standing in my hotel room bathroom a minute ago, laughing my head off. I mean, I’d had two uncharacteristic cocktails earlier, so that’s part of it. But also, being in the town where I’d spent 4 years as a hard-partying graduate student and now suddenly realizing I’m very middle-aged, with a bottle of prescription medication, a blood sugar measuring device, and even dentures on my bathroom counter. OK, it’s not real dentures but that mouthguard thingy but it’s the same thing. 

I so wish somebody could have told me back when I was living here how this story was going to end. I was deeply unhappy here, and if I could have gotten a tiny little glimpse of myself 14 years later, with my family, my books, my nice clothes, my driver’s license, my savings account, and even my dentures, it would have made things much easier. 

It might seem that I spend all of my time in New Haven visiting toilets but I promise to reverse this trend in the coming days. 

It’s only in the East Coast that I’ve seen restaurants and coffee shops bar access to the restrooms and require patrons to hunt around for a key.

Once I got to NYC, I bought a bag of kale chips because I always wondered what they were and wanted to feel like a real chi-chi fru-fru East Coaster. 

And now I’m on the highway, flying past all those white plank houses that I detested so much when I was living back here. It made me feel like a total failure at life to be surrounded by such defeated, ugly landscapes at such an advanced age. 

Richard Russo’s mother was a total rancid stank-ass bitch who fucked him up proper and good. But he became a famous writer, at least, because she did one thing right. She always told him that he could become anything he wanted and she believed it. That’s an enormous gift. Which doesn’t excuse the rest of the rancid shit she did to him but it’s better than nothing. 

As the great psychoanalyst of childhood Winnicott said, even a horrible parent is better than no parent. 

I hate The New Yorker. It’s so poorly organized. Instead of placing a few photos of West Virginia in the article on heroin epidemic in the state, the magazine put some dumb, entirely unrelated (and frankly offensive in this context) cartoons. 

“This woman’s young daughter died of a heroin overdose. Oh, by the way, here’s a funny cartoon about pastry chefs. So, about those drug addicts. Oh, and before I forget, here is a cartoon on reality TV. OK, back to those addicts.”

The image of the perfect reader they promote is a smug, consumerist scatterbrain who sees West Virginia addicts as entertainment.