Andrew J. Lederer

so I could use them as fodder for my blog and storytelling shows.

I tried to explain that it's not true, that blogs are what you get when you don't get what you want; that I want to be happy, that I want love, that I want success, that I want it all. That those things can be hard to obtain but that stories are easy to come by.

Not sure if I got through, though.

Anyway . . .

I had a very upsetting experience recently, which engendered in me feelings similar to those which followed the death of someone close to me. (Fortunately, this time it was only the death of a dream.)

There was a family dinner that night and, as had been the case when the person close to me died, I was funny and charming and ate my gefilte fish (I might not have had gefilte fish the last time) and was generally normal to the people around me, while simultaneously feeling a great loss inside.

After dinner, I walked downtown along the East River rather than heading for the subway 'cause I needed to think and I needed to feel.

The moon was high. There was a quality to the night that was part crystalline and part suffused. The man-made mountains of the city seemed composed largely of light, both sharp and soft.

I wanted to keep walking; to walk across the Queensboro Bridge before taking the G train home; to see the city from a great height and the Manhattan skyline as it receded into the distance; to be alone, both in and above my city, as I worked out my fate and made sense of my pain.

But the pedestrian entry to the bridge was two avenue blocks further west than I'd hoped and by the time I got to it, it made sense to just take the nearby Brooklyn-bound F.

I mean, we were talking about a lot of extra walking.

However, in movies and stuff, the guy in pain always walks across the bridge and I knew it would look good in my blog.

So, I headed up the ramp toward that long trudge across the river and home.