“DOES A MORE EQUAL MARRIAGE MEAN LESS SEX?” So ponders Lori Gottlieb of The New York Times. It seems, upon reading, that women prefer us men when we’re all sweaty after a hard day’s work, or a workout at the gym, rather than when we are sweeping up broken toys or washing pots and pans or folding the laundry. “The greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s satisfaction.”

For the most part, I agree, except when it comes to cooking, because I don’t think that making food is a “feminine” activity. I started cooking not only because I was encouraged to by a feminist mother, but also because I was hungry, and I thought that I could make a better meal than most of the ones available to me. So, I’ll be damned if womankind is going to steal “cooking” from me as a “feminine chore.” I mean, seriously, fuck you. And don’t ask me. Ask Clemenza and Michael Corleone. In this classic scene from The Godfather, Clemenza instructs young Michael on the nuances of making the sauce. “Come over here, kid. Learn something. You never know. You might have to cook for 20 guys some day. Start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste. You fry it, you make sure it doesn’t stick. When it comes to a boil, you shove in all of your sausages and meatballs. Add a little bit of wine. And a little bit of sugar. And it’s perfect.”

Anyway, The New York Times piece was supposed to be provocative. We have been raised to think of egalitarian couplings as ideal. Yet egalitarianism might lead to a lackluster love life, and that can’t be good in this world where we are all expected to be everything and have everything. Yet after reading it, I have to agree with it, not because I endorse old school divisions of labor, but because, apart from cooking, doing the dishes and laundry has never got me going either. Washing a frying pan is tedious, folding towels is dull. And I don’t think there was one time when I felt like, “God, all of this vacuuming of the living room is really turning me on.” These are activities that frustrate a person, not make them more likely to head for the sheets. I do remember when I was out shoveling snow all morning in Estonia, though, that when I was finished, certain primitive synapses rewired themselves, and there was less thinking and more forward motion. My female counterpart, meantime, who was seated in the same position as when I left her, was now radiant and gorgeous. So, something very funny was going on, and shoveling snow had something to do with it.

There was also that time I cycled across Vormsi Island, and then went into the cafe to purchase a beverage to quench my thirst. I had sweat stains all over my shirt and smelled like a horse and spoke with the demanding, rapid-fire cadence of a psychotic, but I did sense a tingling curiosity from the otherwise alarmed seller behind the counter, something like, “Holy shit, I better give this guy his Evian or else.” Or else nothing. But I am sure it was the most memorable bottle of Evian she sold all week.

THEY CALL IT A ‘CULL.’ Any other person would term it “slaughter.” And soon slaughter will come to the Town of East Hampton, on the East End of Long Island. The town of second residences, of the Seinfelds and Spielbergs and Baldwins. And the town of many deer. Too many of our antlered and un-antlered friends, according to some, including the local government. They damage precious landscaping, and ravage un-fenced crops, and carry dreaded ticks harboring Lyme disease. And so federal sharpshooters will arrive next month and the one after that, to eliminate 2,000-3,000 deer of a herd estimated at between 25,000 to 30,000.

It is a problem, true. In East Marion on the North Fork downwind of the Blue Inn, lies an adult female deer. Hit by a car, but with no noticeable injury, frozen in a quasi-fetal position. Each time I have passed its glistening, glazed over corpse, I have at first glance thought it a discarded lawn ornament, only to see the reflection of the headlights in its still open eyes and realize, “Oh my God, it’s real.” Deer are large creatures, some approaching the size of a human, many others much bigger. These are not flattened birds or opossum guts. When the deer lie sprawled on the side of the road, it’s not hard to imagine limp, dead people in their places.

The irony is the people who drive the cars that hit them are likely on their way to the Greek restaurant across the way for some tasty gyros, or to the IGA in Greenport to pick up some burgers or Italian sausages. All of that money, wasted. All of that time, wasted. Venison is a lean, savory protein source and, like it or not, it is right there,  splayed out on the side of the road. But from what I understand the collected dead deer are actually transferred to dumping grounds, beyond the sight of some of the major local highways. The trucks back in and dump the bodies on top of the other fermenting bodies. And I do wonder — what will they do with all of those 3,000 deer once the sharpshooters take them down? The fact that there are federal sharpshooters willing to slaughter these animals — “cull” as they put it — shows that people will do anything for money. But if they are going to kill all those animals, at least the good people of the Town of East Hampton could get some warmth and nutrition out of it.

The only thing that I am grateful for in all of this, is that I do not live in the Town of East Hampton. I’m over here across the Peconic Bay in Southold Town, and Southold Town doesn’t feel like much of a town anyway. The North Fork is isolated, insulated, clubby. People in Southold proper refer to the Village of Orient — a 15 minute drive away — as “all the way out there.” And this is another one of the instances where I am glad I live “all the way out there.”

JOHNNY’S THE MAN, with the flowing yellow tie and the timeless mustache. From the second deck of the eastbound Long Island Railroad train he regales his fellow passengers with tales of the early days of his commute in the sepia-toned waning hours of the Nixon Administration. At least until the train reaches Kings Park and he gets off this amusement park ride gone terribly wrong to head to his suburban castle. Johnny doesn’t drink but the vultures who crowd around the WC do, they nurse their Bud Lights from paper bags, as if we can’t see the shiny blue metal beneath. These three kings of commuter land have slicked back thinning hair and show purple where the cheek meets the eye. Along with their comical attempt at business attire, they display the paunch of the modern professional, a calling that requires many decades of sitting on one’s ass. “Oh, well,” they sigh. “Gotta earn a living …”

And this is what they sacrifice it for — telephone wires and half extinguished neon signs, 99 cent discount stores and greasy hamburger joints. I did that, too, I think, but I only lasted a month and a half before we rushed into Hoboken with its sometimes quick PATH connection. I’d wake up and scrape the ice from the windows of the station wagon and then I’d run out of gas on the way to Ronkonkoma station. Then I’d walk to the Hess station and buy a plastic container and fill it with Regular Unleaded and then walk all the way back to the car and fill it up with my numb fingers on the plastic and metal. The reenergized fuel tank would show a quarter of a tank and I’d think, “Ah, just enough,” that look of contentedness, just enough to get me on the next train, to buy my coffee and doughnut, to let Bebel Gilberto massage my aching soul through my headphones …

Forty-five days. That’s all it took for me to give up on that life. And yellow-tie man’s been here since The Godfather, Part II.

What the hell, right? Don’t bash on the commuter, that beleaguered martyr of wing-tipped Manhattanite dreams. You think he wants to sit on this train? No. He has to. Or at least he has convinced himself that he has to, and those around him are passionate in their agreement. Yes, we have to. And at the same time, you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t get in lock step with the rest of the human race. You thought there had to be another way. Career opportunities await in San Francisco or Juneau or Bozeman, places with a better view. “Oh, but my family …” But your family consists of Americans who left other continents to come here. They’ll just have to understand. “Oh, but my career.” Remember those vast graveyards in Queens? That’s what God thinks of your career.

Into this walks a woman with an Eastern face that reminds me of old drawings of Genghis Khan, with maroon pants and Inuit boots and a rough flannel jacket and a mariners wool hat. She stands among the living dead and speaks to someone through some device and then stands there and watches the windows, avoiding the glances of the skeleton crew on the LIRR. I glance at her too, and I see that her eyes are alert, as if she has also stepped out of an alternate reality into this soul-muddying one, and she looks back at me, trying to discern my intent, as if I was checking her out, which I am not sure if I am. All I can think, is that I am grateful that there are other living people here on this train of the dead like her. Alive on the train of the dead. In such a place, they are easy to spot. They shine like angels.

IT CAME OVER ME  a few years ago in a little dive of a record store off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, a place so starved for space that the recorded output of Ziggy, Damian AKA Jr. Gong, Ky-Mani, Stephen, and Julian was grouped together under one sign, “Sons of Bob Marley.” And in that store I picked up my copy of Willie Colón’s album Cosa Nuestra. Carefully, cautiously. It had a menacing cover, a mercenary man with mustache and sinister trombone case standing over a body on a pier with a rock tied to its foot. Bad shit. And, let’s not forget, it was in Spanish.

I glanced over my shoulder and caught the clerk eyeing from me and set the disc down. “No, it’s not what you think. I mean, I’m not.” But I was just too curious to pass it up, and after that, things were never quite the same. My car was a roving salsa party. Ching ching ching, ching ching ching. I grasped for the wandering piano patterns, felt the bass skip about in that definitive way, so sublime you couldn’t tell if those strings were plucked or merely inferred notes, music you thought you heard but was never really there. True majesty.

There was a nurturing of the inner Latino, in those early Willie Colón days, especially, when I was in my old ‘hood on Long Island, I would roll the windows down, because I knew how much the local Anglos and wannabe Anglos detested the Latinos who were taking over their country with their swinging dance music and outdoor family parties and seven children and 42 grandchildren and 307 great grandchildren, and I wanted them to hear that trombone and Hector Lavoie’s boogaloo voice. They were like audiokinetic hand grenades — “Take that, you pretentious country club pricks, and that, and that, and that!” BAM! They went over. BANG! They went down. Dead, deceased. Slayed by the trombone of Willie Colón and his Cosa Nuestra. Or so I imagined.

But the frosting came the other night in the real San Juan, the day after “Three Kings’ Day,” when they children flitted about the Condado Beach park, trying out their new skateboards and roller skates and soccer balls, little Antonios and Andreses and Carolinas and Catalinas being chased by parents who seemed joyous and content and so far away from the petty clannish conflicts of the norte-americanos and who I only caught glancing into the absorbing soul sucking mirrors of the so-called smart phones in a few instances, because who needs a phone when you can have a park in San Juan? Palm trees, great big trunks of other kinds of trees that seemed to be one hundred percent roots, all decorated up with blue and white Christmas lights in night weather that still made you sweat at nine o’clock.  With true affection, the local mothers with their toothy white smiles fawned over my little Maria — “A Spanish name!” “One of us!” — but did I really care to remind them that it was an Italian name and even a Swedish one?

The braided child Sanjuaneros poked at her and prodded at her with curiosity — Who is this little blue-eyed Maria girl? — but they were always kind and playful and inclusive. In Maria’s little blue eyes, I saw two-year-old wonder, and the reflections of the Christmas lights and the street lamp lights, and the Three Kings’ felicitations. And when the breeze picked up and the palms rustled, I thought I could heard the distant salsa music playing down the street, even if it was that special, inferred music I was telling you about, those melodies and rhythms you can hear but that aren’t really there.

IT’S A PITY that I shaved because Williamsburg is for the unshaven. Not that I ever set out in my life to match myself up to some kind of image {Like those three fellas over there, the ones with the wire mustaches and wispy beards and Where’s Waldo? hats, standing outside that vintage clothing boutique} but I had taken to keeping it hairy when I lived in Estonia because it was cold and I had children, and I’d get about half of the fuzz off before I had to go intervene in some domestic unrest, leaving me with half a beard, so it made sense to just buzz the fuzz. Which is what I had set out to do the night before my daughter’s birthday, except I forgot the attachable comb on the groomer and took a chunk off the beard, leaving me with no choice but to …

Yet it was not enough to undo the fact that I was listening to the 13th Floor Elevators when I was 16 {Thank you very much} and the MC5 before that. You can take the facial hair off the hipster, but he will ooze and reek hipness nevertheless. “It’s so weird,” says Epp eyeing lanky thirtyish men with tormented expressions and facial hair. “All of these guys. They all look like you.” “What’s that, honey? Hey, could you move out of the way? I want to take a picture of the Konditori Swedish Espresso Bar.” “Why?” “So that I can show it to my Swedish friends.” “What Swedish friends are you talking about?” “Um, Elias.”

Epp loves Williamsburg. She cherishes it, relishes it, the same way she beholds the steam off her coffee. Oooh. Ah … I don’t think she ventured within a few blocks of the vaunted yellow Mini-Mall on Bedford Avenue. {“Three dollar books?!”} And then there were the two mandala traps — the Tibetan shops. Uh oh. She didn’t stand a chance. There was also the matter of the banana and peanut butter and brown bread sandwiches {“See, Estonian bread is becoming really popular. We should import that …”} Ah, is this our future? The Hipster Estonian Bread Merchants? {Or is that just the name of my new band?}

Ah, yes, graffiti. Ah, sigh, yes, stinked up toilets and funked up telephone booths {“And I bought some ginger elixir at the grocery — organic ginger, organic turmeric, organic this and organic that, oh, and organic carrot and organic garlic juice”}  Ah, yes! Stunning Brooklyn Fox Lingerie models in the frosted windows with the sparkling What Does The Fox Say? foxy masks. “Hmph, I wanted to go to New York City,” says the ten year old, thinking Toys ‘R’ Us amusement park or Wizards of Waverly Place. “But Brooklyn is New York City,” comes the paternal-hipster-parental reply. “It is?” “It is.” And, yes it is a gathering point mecca for poseurs. But I am a poseur {“Hey, I didn’t mean to shave, guys, it was an accident“} and I am just fine with that now.

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? They ask. It’s an honest question, a serious one, a frequent one. “The years just blow by.” But do they? Because when I think of the day when our first daughter was born, it feels like it happened a long time ago. How many homes have we had since then? I care not to count them. The  past decade brims with times and places and things that happened then. How I cradled the newborn in my arms in that hospital corridor in snowed-in Tallinn, or how I ran back and forth over the bridge in Glasgow in the summer of ’05, with the 18-month-old barn on my shoulders, and the sun and wind in our hair. She laughed and loved it. On the Isle of Arran, Epp nursed her in the rare Scottish warmth. We fanned out across the soft green moors, following sheep, searching for standing stones. We changed her diaper in the grass with the midges buzzing about.

Two thousand and five. We lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, that summer. It was hot and crushed-like-sardines urban, the home to which we returned. The other day, I was driving past our old place, coming up over the hill, with Manhattan in the distance, I could almost see myself chasing the little one down the sidewalk on the way to the park. “Lähme kõndima!” She says. It’s an Estonian phrase that means “Let’s go for a walk.” Except on that day, when she yelled it, I wasn’t sure of what it meant. I was listening to melancholic music and began to tear up, not because I was sad, but because it seemed like that scene happened so long ago. Who knows if she remembers any of it. Now, she’s a decade old and tells me that my hat is stupid and that my jokes are bad, and that all the bands I listen to sound like The Beatles, and that I’m just annoying, period. Then she hooks her arm in mine while we are walking, as if she’s afraid to fall.

THE ADDRESS IN THE GARMIN ended with Parksville, New York. But to get from lower New York to upper New York you have to go through New Jersey. The master Garmin sent me through the Lincoln Tunnel, and New York glitz faded into Jersey ruin with each westward avenue. By the time I emerged on the other side of the Hudson, I knew well where I was — Chris Christie’s state, the tax-rich, high-income land of rotten infrastructure. Time-eaten bridges that resemble the weathered limestone of Yucatan archaeological sites, tomb-like wetlands that grow unhappily around electric towers. The sprawl arrives and gives way in pleasant waves of Lowe’s, Home Depot, Michaels, Best Buy, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Michaels, Best Buy, Shoprite.

But soon you see the hills, the fuzzy gray Ramapo mountains, known for a mysterious triracial isolate — the mountain people — who are thought to descend from local Indians, free Blacks, and Dutch settlers, even Hessian mercenaries from the Revolutionary War. Now you are back in New York State, heading up into Rip Van Winkle country, sleepy hollows of mysteries. The Catskills, little settlements and towns with generic and oddball names. In Sullivan County, there is a ghost town called Neversink. It lies at the bottom of a New York City Reservoir.

Somewhere in the same county I started to encounter large billboards for breads and meats. LIEBER’S: KING OF KOSHER FOODS. MANISCHEWITZ: QUALITY SINCE 1888. Little Orthodox Jewish boys and girls with golden locks and heads covered, eyes revealing the pleasures of rye bread and pastrami. And then the shanty shops built into the hills with the yellow and black signs: WE BUY GOLD. Many miles northwest of Rockefeller Center, where the late autumn fog and moisture at last gave way to sun-kissed cliffs and a light dusting of snow, I had stumbled upon a melange of Crown Heights and Gold Rush Era California.

When I arrived at the maple candies factory, the cheerful ruddy owner asked me how my trip had been and I told him about the signs. “What?” he said, “you mean you haven’t ever heard of the Jewish Alps?” “The Jewish Alps?” I imagined men in long black coats on skis, trailed by faithful Saint Bernards, each of whom bore a barrel of rescue Manischewitz wine around its neck. “Every summer, the population of Sullivan County swells to about 150,000 from 76,000,” the jolly owner said. “They all come up from the city. There are dozens of youth camps, too. Three right down the road from here.” “And they put all those signs up so that Jewish families will be reminded to buy Kosher matzo and wine when they’re driving up?” “You betcha.”