At the intersection of Prince’s epic 1999 and a little thing called Y2K, I walked to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge to get married. Up the block by two days, Floyd the hurricane had dumped buckets on Long Island while two years down the road the two towers would fall, which would crack a door where hounds of hell would roar and roar and still roar. But still, I walked to the middle of that bridge, holding my dad’s hand and smiling. I’m not going to say I felt fizzy with joy, although I wasn’t sunk in dread. I was 38 and had lived a lot of life. I had a sense of how the world at large was in turmoil, a sense I still have stepping into each day and feeling the dissonance, reality-split between what I see looking out my window and what I know is outside the blown windows of so many suffering around the globe.

Split. That’s my general sense of how I entered into the aughts. I was at an age where there were a lot of ought-tos ricocheting around inside me. Ought I to have kids? I’d always been firm on this nay. Only once, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had I thought, Is this the thing I’m supposed to be doing now? as I maneuvered around the flotilla of strollers pushed by the young and the fearless that populated all the surrounding blocks I lived on at the time. Ought I to sort out my career? I didn’t even know what the word career meant anymore (further thoughts on that in future writing). And, nibbling around the edges of all this, ought I to be marrying this person standing up ahead waiting for me. Ooooh, that one was so faint as to be like a little mosquito buzz swept away by the lingering (strong) breeze of Floyd.

It wasn’t storybook, this marriage. I’d never really thought about getting married. I always wanted to be in a relationship. One that was deep in soul and sex, but I had never imagined a need for legal joining to make that so and definitely had no designs on ceremonies and the like. Maybe I’m unromantic like that. Maybe my parents’ relationship lacked any modeling clay of happiness around this thing called marriage (and subsequent divorce). Whatever the reason, I didn’t think it was necessary. But apparently health care was necessary, so in a telling, the-system-is-broken kind of way, it seemed to make sense for me, a freelancer making a very.small.amount of income, and the guy waiting on the bridge, who had very good health insurance, to make it legal. That was it. Medical coverage. But then, rather than just do a city hall situation, the idea of a celebration took hold in our heads.

I mean, ought I to buy a dress of some sort? Learn how to apply subtle, daytime-appropriate wedding makeup? Yes and yes. I found an excellent on-sale dress at Bergdorf Goodman’s, revolving through the doors on Fifth Ave and 57th across the street from where I’d started my music journo career thirteen years earlier at Rolling Stone (they weren’t in that building anymore having moved down to Sixth between 51st&52nd). During lunch hours at RS, I’d gone in and wandered around dreaming but not affording. This time though, I found a dress within my budget, then flush with finding I escalated down to the Bobbi Brown makeup counter. Possibly because my guard had fallen with the good-deal dress purchase, I said yes to a makeup application session, climbing onto a tall chair so the chic lady could fiddle with my face. My resistance had been left in a dressing room on the upper floors and so after subtle swipes and shadings in the style of that no-makeup makeup trend that the 90s were so fond of, which BTW requires a sh*t-ton of actual makeup, I said Yeah, sure, I’ll take it all. Then, seeing the total ring up on the register, my head detached from my body and floated off to debtor’s prison, or rather, credit-collection-hell phone calls, yet still…. Still what? Shame is still what. Oughtn’t I be a lady who can afford to buy makeup for my wedding? A woman of a certain age who’d lived a life and was now getting married and could afford to fix her face up, fer fux sake?

I handed over a credit card, took my bag of stuff—a fancy sack that felt radioactive—went up the escalator to the bathroom, and sat on the plush lounge-couch, sweating. Then I thought. I worried. I waited for inspiration. I came to understood that I’d have to return, to the scene, to my senses, to an actual give-back transaction. So, feeling shrunk smaller than a slug, I escalated nauseously back down, lurked in makeup-department-adjacent handbags, and when I saw that the saleslady who’d rung me wasn’t present, I stepped up to the counter and returned everything but a tube of lipstick and eyeshadow. (The lipstick is gone, the eyeshadow I still have. The dress remains in my collection.) I probably didn’t make eye contact as the monies were returned to my mostly useless credit card. Then I stepped back onto the sidewalk draped in a hot cape of icky shame-sweat. There ought to be another word for that emotion but I just looked and the S word about sums it. There were so many oughts pricking at me that wanted exploring. That didn’t become explored until so much later as the aughts rolled on.

And those I’ll be unpacking in upcoming writing moments here in this space. Personal, yes, but also weirdly like yesterday as the world continues to roil and I continue to explore.