Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Diversions | Oct 01 2001

I’m having this problem. I’ve written all these things I was planning to post at some point and then these certain people did this bad thing and everything changed in such a way that it no longer to seemed appropriate to mention things that didn’t have anything to do with what these certain people did or how life has changed as a result, things such as the thing I posted earlier today concerning my pee and also the thing I wrote several days ago about my face.

I’m not the only person with this problem. In the upper-right-hand corner of the cover of the current issue of TimeOut, a weekly magazine here in New York, there is a rectangular block of text that reads “DOING OUR BEST TO RETURN TO THE USUAL ROUTINE, WE PRESENT…” Below this, in much bigger letters of the same style, is the actual title of the issue: “THE FIFTH ANNUAL EATING & DRINKING AWARDS.” Now, I happen to know that the weekly theme of TimeOut is chosen far in advance so that advertisers can make decisions at the beginning of the year as to which issues they’d like to advertise in. This means that the people at TimeOut couldn’t have changed the theme of this issue to something like “THE BAD THING THAT HAPPENED” (assuming they had wanted to) for fear that their advertisers would have been pissed and demanded their money back. So instead they came up with a way to tell their readers that they knew about the bad thing and weren’t heartless jerks who cared only about putting out their silly magazine. This allowed them to put out their silly magazine.

The idea is to find some way to acknowledge that things aren’t normal. This then allows you to act like things are normal. I learned about this a week after the attacks when I decided to send out an Oblivio update containing the announcement that I had launched a new version of Oblivio. I had actually written such an update a week before, only its jokey tone no longer seemed appropriate. What to do? What I did was, I stayed up until 3:00 in morning trying to find the right words to excuse myself for sending such an email, which I felt I had to send because I was now writing things for Oblivio about the attacks, things I wanted people to read. At first I tried to use the update I’d already written, surrounding it with explanatory text, but this didn’t sound right, no matter what explanatory text I used, so I started again from scratch. After myriad failed attempts, I finally struck on a beginning I could live with, as follows:

I wrote a breezy Oblivio update last week which I regrettably did not send. In light of recent events, breeziness no longer seems appropriate, so I’ve distilled that update into four unbreezy items, as follows:

This sounds so simple now – two factual sentences – but it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written, taking a good four hours to complete. Perhaps the TimeOut text took just as long. God knows, no one wants to offend anyone or appear callous. For people in the business world, this is a crucial decision. You handle it badly and you lose money.

For me the issue has nothing to do with money, but that doesn’t make it any less significant.

Late last night I wrote a rather intense political piece which I posted for five minutes, then took down, feeling that yet another intense political piece would be too much. In its place I put the pee piece.

Was this a mistake? I don’t know. The fact is, I’m finding it difficult these days to integrate politics and pee. Said more directly, I’m confused.

On the various sports sites I read, columnists have finally stopped talking about the supposed “healing power” of sports and have gone back to reporting on the sports themselves. This is a great relief. Sports don’t have any healing power; they have diversionary power. Only in America would people consider it healing to be diverted.

My own words – that is, those written before the bad thing happened – have been seeming more and more diversionary. What to do?

My uncertainty here, on the surface an uncertainty about what to post on my website, reflects a deeper uncertainty: I don’t know how to integrate recent events, and recent insights, into my everyday life, or even if that’s possible. Said this way, the problem makes a world of sense, but that, I suspect, is merely my formulation of it. In truth, I’ve no fucking idea what’s happening.