Ode to Hoboken: II
If you look carefully you can see, from left, the (partially hidden) air purifier, faux fireplace, dumbbells, bicycle and, beyond the window and balcony railing, Pier A. All this counts as “Hoboken.”
HOBOKEN (DUH), AUGUST 21, 2026. A year ago, inspired by the prose-poem Paterson, I set out to compose an epic celebration of Ho-Ho-Hoboken, which is an intrinsically comical synecdoche for the cosmos, or at least Jersey. After I posted “Ode to Hoboken: I,” I planned follow-ups but got sidetracked by war, artificial intelligence, desire.
This morning, I feel inspired to write “Ode to Hoboken: II,” and not because I can’t think of anything else to write about. A Cosmic Question has been nagging me, but I’ll write about that later. First: Hoboken!
Should I go outside and walk around Hoboken? Nah, no need, plenty of Hoboken is visible through the sliding glass doors of my living room. At this moment, I see tiny humans jogging around the tree-studded oblong of Pier A, which juts out into the Hudson. I peer at this slice of Hoboken through my balcony’s railing as if through bars of a cage.
“Cage” is too grim, I’m not trapped, I possess free will, I can leave my apartment any time. I just choose, right now, to pay attention to Hoboken from the comfort of my couch. And actually, there’s plenty to pay attention to right here in my living room, which is a synecdoche of a synecdoche.
Art, after all, just reveals the weirdness of the familiar, right? Yeah, art counters habituation, the mental equivalent of entropy.
So here we go: Before the glass doors, on the faux-parquet floor, squat two dumbbells, each stamped with “25.” I occasionally lift these weights with much grunting and straining in a vain effort to delay my body’s degradation.
In the corner stands a tapered gray-and-white column, an air purifier I bought three years ago after smoke descended from Canada like a harbinger of apocalypse. I couldn’t even see Pier A! Last January I visited Delhi and Kolkata where according to my iPhone the air quality was worse every single day than during the Canadian incursion into Hoboken. That global context didn’t make me feel better.
Then there’s the faux fireplace, the orange box I turn on to cheer myself on gloomy nights in winter or any time of year. The box’s top is dented because years ago I stupidly stood on it while hanging Christmas lights over my glass doors. The fireplace couldn’t bear my weight, it’s not designed for that, dumb-ass, but it still works. Maybe I’ll turn it on tonight and the Christmas lights too, which I left up for aforementioned gloomy nights.
To the right of the glass doors, leaning against my AC unit, is the cool orange-framed bike I bought last year to ride with Vicki. We rode once or twice, then my brakes got grabby and I didn’t get them fixed and the tires deflated and every time I looked at the flabby-tired no-longer-cool bike I felt lazy and overcome with lassitude. Then last month a strange burst of energy made me walk the damn bike down to Flo on Wheels on Washington and 13th and Flo fixed the brakes and filled the tires and Vicki and I went riding from her place in the Heights to Union City which Vicki insists is like Jersey City but just nicer and we plan to ride along the Hudson down to the Colgate Clock soon and now when I look at my bike with its rock-hard tires I feel proud and think, Fuck entropy.
What else? Hanging above the couch is a painting by Tom Ferris, an artist/carpenter who lives in Brooklyn with his wife Claudia in a first-floor apartment with a lush backyard. Next month Tom and Claudia are moving to Portugal, he can’t take all his paintings so I bought this one which is pleasingly meta, a painting of paint brushes. Tom and I can still talk over the phone, it’s not like he’s gonna be dead or living on Mars, and maybe Vicki and I will visit Tom and Claudia in Portugal, but I’m still feeling sad that one of my oldest and dearest friends is going away for good.
Running along the opposite wall is the long low white Ikea cabinet that holds up my TV and turntable and has slots for miscellaneous stuff, including a CD player that doesn’t play and a silver poker-chip case I bought for poker nights with my Stevens buddies Jim, an historian of science, and Michael and Greg, who are philosophers. We started poker nights at my place after Jim retired from Stevens and moved to a retirement community with his wife Jackie in Pennsylvania more than an hour’s drive from Hoboken. I worry about Jim making that drive especially at night but he insists it’s fine. We used to play poker for money, each of us bought $20 of chips, but now we just gab over pizza and beer, Jim wants to hear gossip from Stevens and to argue about the unattainability of truth and fluidity of sex and pros and cons of AI yada yada, so I haven’t taken the silver case out in a while. Maybe our next poker night I’ll take out the case and lay out chips and cards and we’ll play 5-card stud for old times’ sake. But we’ll still gab.
Hey, I should ask my poker buddies the Cosmic Question! Are we in a bound state or a scattering state, as the physicists put it, meaning is the world headed toward some destination like paradise or heat death or are we wandering eternally on a random walk to nowhere? I’m betting on, hoping for, the latter.
Further Reading:
How Ho-Ho-Hoboken Became My Home
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
For more of this sort of thing, see also my work of autofiction Pay Attention.