October 2001
29 October 2001 | Bun
Paul remembers that the phone rang earlier, while it was still light, and that he did not answer it. Whoever it was hung up when the answering machine kicked in. Then later, in the middle of night, Liz noticed a flashing red light coming from outside the room. It looked like the light from a police car. “What’s that?” she said, afraid. Paul looked for some time before realizing it was the flashing light of the answering machine.
Earlier that same night they had walked to a grocery to buy milk. On the way back, a woman with a shopping cart full of stuff stopped them and asked for change. She said she wanted to buy some meat to go the bread she had. Paul gave her thirteen cents, which was all he had, and apologized. “Every little bit helps,” said the woman, and offered him a hamburger bun.
28 October 2001 | Trash
My former neighbor Barbara, back in the days when I lived in a so-called artist’s building (where no one, technically, was supposed to live), used to keep these enormous plastic bags of trash in her loft, every piece of which had her name on it. You would see the bags when you entered, stacked in the far corner. For the longest time I didn’t know what was in the bags, nor particularly care (artist-types save all kinds of strange things), but then one day Barbara stopped me in the hall and asked if I knew anyone who had a fireplace where she could, um, burn some trash. I asked why she didn’t just throw it out and she explained that she had once been fined for illegally dumping trash on Cambridge Street and that the police had tracked her down by going through the bags and finding various pieces of mail with her name and address on it.
“But I’ve seen you dumping trash,” I said. “We’ve even done it together.”
“Yes,” she said, “but none of that trash had my name on it.”
24 October 2001 | Freak
Walking to the train this evening, I sang Edelweiss in the voice of Johnny Rotten. So fucking funny.
Edelweiss, Edelweiss
You look so happy to me
A middle-aged Hasidic man at the corner of Hewes and South Fifth made a face as I passed. I hadn’t seen him in time and was singing quite loudly.
It occurred me that he had no idea who Johnny Rotten was.
*
On the train I read the same book I always read: The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. This is the only book I ever manage to read in its entirely, despite the fact that I read it in only one place: the subway.
The trick is, I read it nearly every time I take the subway, provided I’m alone and can get a seat. I read about five to eight pages per ride, depending how far I’m going. When I finish I return to the beginning and start again, around and around.
The book is musical, its effect on me is like music, like the effect music has. I never tire of it.
It has little or no plot. It is simply a person’s thoughts about his two closest friends, his only two friends, both of whom are now dead, one having recently committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree a hundred yards from the home of his sister, who abandoned him, as he saw it, in order to marry the owner of a chemical plant in Switzerland, in Zizer bei Chur, a godawful place name, as his often told his friend, “where the archbishop says Good Morning! each morning.”
Years ago I enjoyed reading books—novels!—but over time I’ve taken to avoiding them. Most seem so “written”; I begin reading and all I can think is how “written” they seem. Descriptions, in particular, I find intolerable.
The Loser contains no descriptions, or nearly none, which is partly why I love it.
A confession: I dog-ear the pages. I didn’t used to do this; I used to use a bookmark of some kind, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, bookmarks are unnatural. It feels unnatural to use this extraneous thing that must be stored somewhere while one reads. Perhaps if I found a suitable place to store the bookmark, it wouldn’t seem so unnatural, but I’ve never found such a place and so I’ve adopted the habit of dog-earring the pages, despite my reluctance to “ruin a perfectly good book.”
I’ve been reading The Loser (that is, this particular copy of The Loser) for several years now, and so nearly half the pages have little diagonal dog-ear creases. Oddly, this pleases me. It pleases me to dog-ear a previously dog-eared page, I don’t know why; I suppose it has something to do with loving something to the point of destroying it a little.
21 October 2001 | Switch
Unable to work – unable to think, really – Paul got into bed and slept. It was horribly hot under the covers but he was too exhausted to think of removing them. Then the phone rang and it was Liz. She said she felt like a switch inside her had been turned on and that she had a love/hate relationship with that switch. “Yeah, I know about the switch,” said Paul.
In one of Paul’s dreams, Liz had appeared and said that the reason she’d been so distant was because he had mistaken her for someone else. Then she introduced another woman – a woman who did in fact resemble her, though not to point of seeming identical. “This is the person you thought was me,” said Liz, and Paul realized that he had gone so far as to sleep with this other woman.
The woman said nothing; she merely smiled at him – with some laciviousness, thought Paul, though it difficult to tell for certain.
It occurred to him that the two women hadn’t necessarily told each other everything.
I’m still thinking about hope. Obsessively. My latest definition: Hope is desire accompanied by perceived possibility. This is different than faith, which is desire accompanied by ordained possibility. Does that sound right? To me that sounds right.
I’ve long considered hope the one necessity. We must believe our desires possible, however tenuous that belief, however miniscle that possibility, in order to drag our asses out of bed.
A friend wrote, partly in respond to Thursday’s request for accounts of notes left for desirable persons, that there should be a sign at the entrance to the nerve.com personals (where he has loitered of late, sending notes to desirable persons) counseling all to abandon hope, not because there is no hope but because hope is of no use there.
But he’s mistaken, I think. Hope is what allows him to imagine, as he must, that online desirability is a reflection of offline desirability, and that the various objects of his desire will grant him an audience. Otherwise, why write?
Another friend, Chris, disagreed in advance with everything I’ve said so far, writing: “Faith is superior to hope as a psychic state. It doesn’t have the stink of desperation. I think if people could actually give up hope, they might find a place in their hearts to cultivate faith. Nietzsche would agree. And Dante, obviously. But I also understand the suspicion that underneath hope is nothing but, in Mickle’s words, ‘grief, and a vacuum.’”
On cue, Mickle writes: “It seems to me that an unironic gathering of Hope is already something of a gathering of Hopelessness. To me, what’s the worry? Why do we need to affirm our Hope unless things have really gotten razor close to Hopelessness, which would be more a cause for despair. Me, I think things are just as they always were: violent within a context of infinity and the calm of the void. Hope needs no gathering. It’s permeated the cosmo-structure, to ‘gather’ it is to gather air.”
Frankly, my head hurts. I understand what Mickle is saying, I understand that view, but lately I’ve been taking another view, the “species” view, if you will, and by that view we’re fucked. Actually, Mickle would agree, I imagine, he would agree that we’re fucked; he’d just say that being fucked is not quite what it appears to be. Or whatever he’d say. And this is when my head starts to hurt. Because while I feel convinced that we’re fucked, and fucked in a way that none of us can actually grasp (which is part and parcel of why we’re fucked), I’ve come to feel in recent days that what matters is not our fuckedness (about which nothing can be done) but the possibility, the scrawny possibility, of, well, love and caring and kindness. (It’s been an intense time, in my head.) Which shifts the view to what I think of as little things. Not little in the sense of unimportant, but little in the sense of being about people’s everyday lives at one particular time. This time.
Said another way, I’ve been feeling that the ultimate hopelessness of action (by which I mean political action) is a poor excuse not to act. Maybe you already realized this. Probably you did. Or probably you don’t think it’s hopeless because you don’t know, or care about, how fucked we are. Bully for you, if that’s true; I won’t try to convince you otherwise.
Or maybe I will. Maybe that’s what my political action will consist of: A memorial to Oblivion.
Chris again: “Your Humanity Memorial nestles nicely in my recent conviction that the present American condition is a sort of ‘Groundhogs Day’ phenomenon, where we proceed, privately but collectively, through the first part of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, and get stuck at the critical moment, On Another’s Sorrow, rushing back to the beginning to have our innocence re-gained and re-lost all over again. Maybe Hope is just a symptom of this, and a Memorial is the better way to Call the Lapsed Soul & Turn Away No More.”
18 October 2001 | Logic
On the subject of notes left for desirable women in strange places, twelve years ago I stood in a kitchen at a party in Chicago with my friend Mickle, who wanted desperately to leave a note for the host of the party, a woman he had known, barely, in college, and who may have, he’d recently learned, admired him back then, in college, and who now lived with a man who was possibly her boyfriend.
We were drunk and being pressured by whomever was giving us a ride home to hurry the fuck up.
Mickle’s note invited the woman to attend a play he’d written, only in his haste he inverted the names so that the note appeared to have composed by the woman herself, inviting Mickle to see a play that she had written. This was both regrettable and perplexing, a regrettable and perplexing mistake, but still it seemed less significant than the task of finding a place to leave the note so that it would be found by the woman and not by her possible boyfriend.
It was panicked moment made worse by Mickle’s drunken conviction that this was his one and only chance to act.
I was no help.
What would you have suggested? It is a puzzle.
Mickle opened the refrigerator, surveyed its contents, and placed the note in a tub of lowfat cream cheese. His logic: Possible boyfriends don’t eat lowfat cream cheese.
And he was right. The woman found the note, attended his play, got together with him, broke up with him (or he her; I forget), married someone else, divorced this someone else, got back together with Mickle, and now, twelve years after finding the note (forgive me that I do not know how long it took her to find it, nor what she thought on finding it; nor anything, really), has consented to marry him.
17 October 2001 | Dryer
I washed my clothes with a friend at a place in Santa Cruz called Ultramat. Halfway through, a woman came in and put her clothes in the washing machine next to mine. She was kind of frumpy, with frizzy hair and baggy pants. In short, I found her irresistable. (What I told my friend was that I wanted to pull those pants off her.)
As we were leaving, I noticed that she had disappeared and that her clothes were still spinning in a dryer. On an impulse, I ran to the car, torn off part of a paper bag, and scribbled a note on it. The note read:
I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re beautiful and that I like your pants.
I signed the note, “The Guy With Round Glasses,” and I added a p.s.: “P.S. Goodbye forever!”
I left the note spinning in her dryer.
This was nine years ago.
16 October 2001 | Hope
Andrew,
I’ve been thinking about your and William’s Gathering of Hope and have had many ideas, none of which will prove useful to you. We are far apart, you and I. Nonetheless, I will share my thinking.
Hope is an odd thing. Often it is a false sentiment, if not an out-and-out lie, and yet it’s difficult to imagine proceeding without it. (Nietzsche called hope both “the worst of all evils” and “a much greater stimulant of life than any realized joy could be,” which goes to show that you can’t count on philosophers to clarify anything.)
We once sought hope in religion, and are now left scrambling. This is what pissed off Nietzsche: the weakness of needing a reason, however stupid or infantile, to bear one burdens. Nietzsche was attacking Christianity, but the critique holds regardless.
When I considered your action, my first thought, characteristically, was of a reversal: a Gathering of Hopelessness. This sounds sarcastic, I know, so I worked to make it less sarcastic, to bring out the thing in there that wasn’t sarcastic. Today, inspired by Leili’s words, I believe I succeeded.
My idea, in short, is to change tenses. The vision here is of a kind of memorial service; a memorial service for humankind. As I see it, recent events, while horrific, are merely another turning of the wheel. What interests me is the wheel and where it is carrying us.
It is carrying us to our end. It doesn’t take a visionary to see this, nor to see that we long ago passed the point of no return.
Hope looks forward; I propose looking back, from a moment beyond our destruction.
Last week you asked what a protest of artists would look like. This is my answer.
As to how it would work, all I know is that the event would allow for each person to “remember” humankind, each in his or her own fashion. The only real danger would be insincerity; the only limitation would be of the imagination.
For what it’s worth, the event could be conducted anywhere, by any number of people. And the genius of it, if I do say so, is that it would shift perspective to the larger issue, the one that ultimately matters.
I don’t expect you and William to suddenly drop what you are doing, nor would I even want you to. A Gathering of Hope is good thing, a worthy thing, and I hope (there’s that word again) it goes well. I merely wanted to let you know my thoughts, to bridge that distance between us a bit.
Nietzsche again, to end: “Let your love towards life be love towards your highest hope: and let your highest hope be the highest idea of life!”
xo,
Michael
P.S. A recent quote from Stephen Hawking: “Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do. In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can’t regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us. I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space.”
P.S. The ending to Beckett’s trilogy: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Leaving in ten minutes to watch a seven and half hour film with my friend Jodie at the MOMA. Still have to make a sandwich to eat in the middle. Things like this make me happy.
*
Didn’t see the film. Wrong day.
Me: “I suck.”
MOMA desk guy: “You made a mistake. Could have happened to anyone.”
Me: “I fucked up.”
MOMA desk guy: “Yeah, you fucked up.”
Left late because I wanted to post the link above and wasted twenty minutes writing what turned out to be three truncated sentences. Tried to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich to eat during intermission, but spread the peanut butter too quickly, “tearing” the bread, if that’s the word, the bread rolling up around the blob of peanut butter the way that snow rolls up around snow in the making of a snowman, the rolling of the three big round parts. Gobbled this on the spot, seeing that it was unwrapable.
Arrived five minutes after the film was scheduled to start. Jodie was nowhere to be found, I figured she’d given up and gone inside. Was told by one of the too many guards that I couldn’t bring a bag into the museum. Stood in the bag check line for five minutes. Stood in the admission line for ten minutes. Stood very briefly in the line where you show them your admission ticket and they give you a movie ticket. Saw the schedule there and realized I fucked up.
Desk guy was nice enough to get me a refund. I called Jodie. She’d figured that she was the one who had it wrong, so she hadn’t bothered to call and warn me. Now she wanted to see the three o’clock film, Damnation. I preferred to buy underwear. She talked me into waiting for her and hanging out together until Damnation, at which point she would see Damnation and I would buy underwear. A good plan, except she took twice as long as she said she would, which left me waiting for her in the lobby of MOMA, thinking I should have just left and bought underwear when I had the chance.
Then Jodie showed up with her new boyfriend, who I immediately liked, some people you immediately like, and I forgot about the whole underwear business. I asked him when he was returning to San Francisco (I knew he was from San Francisco) and he said that that was up to Jodie, so I turned to Jodie and Jodie gave me a little smile that said, “No time soon,” and so now, after all this crap – taking too long to write three sentences and fucking up a simple sandwich and arriving late and standing in three lines only to discover I have the wrong day – I’m happy.
12 October 2001 | Thinking
When we sleep we know in some sense that we sleep, that we are sleeping. So when we wake in the night, we do not find it strange that we are sleeping, that we have woken, or half-woken, from sleep. We knew that we were sleeping. We know that we are asleep. Just like the bed. We know that the bed is there. We know we lie on the bed. Without thinking of it. And when we lie with another, we know that too, we know the other is there without thinking of it. There is a way of knowing that does not involve thinking.
11 October 2001 | Dollar
A man in a wheelchair came to the door, acting as if he knew first Liz, then Paul. He said his name was Franklin and that he lived two streets away with his brother, whose name was also Franklin. He said he’d been shot and robbed on August 14th and had recently gotten out the hospital. He needed money, he said, for diapers, because he’s incontinent. Then he pulled up his shirt to expose the top of one of the diapers.
Paul refused to give him any money; Liz gave him a dollar.
Paul thought he was lying about everything except being incontinent.
There was an especially awkward moment when Liz went to get her dollar and Paul was left to talk with the man after having turned him down. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” said Paul.
Interesting that I haven’t read anyone acknowledge that bin Laden has such sad, soulful eyes. Guess that’s verboten.
But I think it’s important. If nothing else, bin Laden is a poster boy, of a kind. And whatever else you think of him, the man looks way better in his role than our president does in his.
*
A friend recently told me about a woman she knows, an elderly woman with Alzheimers, who suddenly turned to her daughter and said, “You know, I like this bin Laden fellow – he dresses nice and he seems to really believe in something.” There is something to be said for seeming to believe in something.
*
Please read this New York Times article about the writing of Bush’s recent speech to Congress. When you see the convoluted process behind the thing, you begin to wonder how it even made sense, in the end.
Fortunately for Bush, it didn’t need to make sense (can anyone tell me what “freedom and fear are at war” means?); it needed to “galvanize” the nation, appease our allies and threaten the Taliban – all of which it accomplished, in the end. There’s something to be said for professional speechwriters.
08 October 2001 | Yo-Yo
In the bus station a man displayed stuffed dolls on a blanket. Ugly stuffed dolls. Were they pigs? Whatever they were, they were ugly. Seeing this, Paul remembered something he’d seen while stuck in traffic with Liz near the Holland Tunnel. A man walked between the lanes of cars carrying a small cardboard box and playing with what was presumably a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo. I say presumably because there was too much light (this being morning) to confirm that the yo-yo glowed. As the man ambled past, Paul muttered, as much to himself as to Liz, “What pain,” this being a secret reference (secret in the sense that he never bothered to explain it to Liz) to a poem he’d heard perhaps twenty years before, a poem about a man who together with his girlfriend watches a boy miss a ball in a Little League baseball game – “The ball rolled between the boy’s legs. What pain” – a poem by a man who according to Paul’s friends was mentally ill and had spend half his life in mental institutions. Then the yo-yo vendor appeared a second time, having looped around, evidently. Neither time did Paul look at him for more than a second, in part because of how sad it made him feel to watch this person yank his yo-yo up and down and in part because he didn’t want to give the poor man the false hope of making a sale.
07 October 2001 | Shack
I remember a time I was hitchhiking and found myself in the countryside in the middle of the night searching for a place to sleep. I came upon a shack, a small shack on a hillside, and took shelter there, lying on the floor of this shack, which was no bigger than a shed, an empty shed with no windows.
The floor of the shack was slanted, the slant following the slant of the hill, so that the only workable position was “feet first,” with my head in the middle of the shack and my feet pressed against the downhill wall. I tried using my jacket as a pillow but soon felt too cold to sleep, so I put on my jacket again and tried to sleep that way, without a pillow. This failed as well – my neck hurt without support – so I returned to using the jacket as a pillow and slept perhaps a few minutes before waking from the cold.
Thereafter I wore the jacket and did not sleep.
*
It strikes me now that I had nothing with me, no bag or such, to use as a pillow. Why is that?
Also, I don’t remember where this was or where I was going. I’d been dropped off at a truck stop and had gone to find a place to sleep.
Also, I remember the moment I first saw the shack from the road – a dark shape in the darkness to my right, silhouetted against a starless sky. I do not trust this memory.
05 October 2001 | Combat
Been having a problem with roaches. It’s my own fault for leaving dirty dishes in the sink. The roaches disappeared, mostly, when I stopped doing that. Then I got lax and they returned. This happened several times. Then the roaches didn’t disappear anymore.
Rachel, hardly the squeamish type, in fact a lover of gross stuff, urged me to act. I dragged my feet for weeks as the roach sightings increased, including and more and more baby ones (smaller even than ants). In my despair (at least I think it was despair), I took to talking to them. Well, not talking; threatening. I’d see one and say, “Listen, mister,” (for some reason, I assume roaches are male), “you and your kind better bugger off, ha-ha, or else I’ll, I’ll… you don’t want to know what I’ll do.” Tough talk. Which achieved nothing but make me feel ridiculous.
Then yesterday Rachel presented me with two packages of COMBAT, a descendent of the Roach Motels of my youth (who can forget that ominous tagline, “Roaches check in, but they never check out”?).
Here’s how COMBAT works, in dust-dry, back-of-the-box language:
- Roaches enter the bait station and eat the bait
- Roaches take the bait back
- Roaches share the bait, killing other roaches
Thus began Operation Silence Is Deadly. For as I joked to Rachel’s roommate Jessi, the time for talk was now over. Only action mattered, and only death would result from that action.
A single package of COMBAT contains 8 or 12 “bait stations” – black plastic disks resembling small, hollowed-out hockey pucks. With sadistic glee, Rachel and I placed them in strategic locations around the apartment. I laughed this special laugh I perfected as a kid – a deep, exaggeratedly demonic laugh, almost operatic, originating in the bottom of my throat.
This morning I found my first casualty. It (he) was flipped on its back by the sink. I knocked it (him) onto the floor with a spare sponge and swept it (him) into a dust pan.
More have followed. I am confident of victory, praise be to COMBAT.
But what’s interesting in this (and the reason I bother to tell it) is the weird way I find myself treating it as a military campaign, replete with that semi-facetious “operation” name. It’s weird, right? I find it weird. At times I catch myself doing these weird things and I think, “Hey, what the fuck is that about?”
I don’t have an answer. I just know that I delight in finding one of the little mothers and thinking, “Fucking told you to fuck off,” (knock roach off counter). “Fucking said it over and over,” (get dust pan and broom). “Fucking silence is deadly,” (sweep, sweep). “You little fuck,” (in trash).
Jeff Dorchen: The next morning I woke up and saw a plane smash into a famous American building and explode, and I watched those skyscrapers collapse and all the rest of it. Just like you would dream it in a nightmare. In your nightmare the sky would be perfectly blue and the plane would come just like it did and the explosion would come. That’s what I saw. And I think I was still a ghost then.
William Vollman (via Joshua Allen): I’m an American, and I’m proud of the fact that I can keep guns in my house, I can listen to the radio, I can have whiskey and pork in the kitchen, I can have pornography, I can read “Mein Kampf.”
Wylie Goodman: When the towers crashed, cries and gasps rose up the room. People began to cry. An announcement came over the intercom system that we were safe, that there was no reason to evacuate the building. But none of us believed the omniscient voice telling us what to do anymore.
Arundhati Roy: Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake.” Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed—one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick.
03 October 2001 | Candy
Paul got to work and felt bad. No reason. Well, reason. Not worth thinking about reason. Decided to call Liz. Got into the damn “press such-and-such for such-and-such” loop. Tried her extension. No, didn’t know her extension. Tried her initials in the company directory. Didn’t work. Called again, hit zero for operator. Operator transferred him. Liz answered. Her “work” voice. He felt stupid. Stupid mistake to call. Said something like, “In light of our conversation last night, I thought of calling you. I feel bad. Can you give me just a minute?” She said, “Sure, I’ll call you back.” The whole thing felt stupid. Got up and walked into the conference room. Shut the door and locked it, then jumped up and down as though incredibly excited. This is what she’d suggested the previous night, to do an action associated with a feeling. Didn’t work. Jumped on the floor first, then switched to the carpet for fear of someone hearing. Went back to his desk and took a staple out of something. Went back to conference room and did the jumping thing again. This actually worked a little. Phone was ringing when he returned. Liz. He told her what he’d done, the jumping. She suggested he go buy some candy, a kind that kids like, Starbursts or something. He said, “I don’t really eat candy. Candy makes me feel worse.” She said, “Well, buy some and give it away.” This made him laugh, her insistence on candy. Noticed he didn’t feel so bad anymore. They only talked a minute. Now it’s several hours later and he’s leaving to get candy.
02 October 2001 | Dream
Here is the dream: You’re in a giant car that’s careening down an enormous cliff, plunging headlong to its destruction. In the manner of dreams, very few people in the car appear to recognize what is happening, although one must merely look out the window to see. Instead a small, dedicated group of passengers work to improve conditions within the car (which are abysmal), while the majority occupy themselves with more personal concerns – the business of living, of surviving: paradoxical occupations given where the car is headed.
(The car, I should say, has no steering wheel or brake, and even if it did, it’s now too late for turning or stopping – that moment passed long ago, if indeed it ever existed.)
And this is no dream.
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.
Was about to leave, was already late, when I realized I needed to pee. Went into the hall (the bathroom I share with the guy next door is in the hall) and heard the shower running: the guy, my neighbor, was in the shower. Thought of not peeing, of holding it in, only that seemed stupid: might be an hour or more before I reached a toilet. Went back into the apartment, took a used plastic container from the shelf and peed into that, standing by the sink. Didn’t have, unfortunately, any large size yogurt containers, which meant I had to be careful not to pee too much and overflow the container. Stopped, without trying to, just short of this. Dumped the contents into the sink, directly into the drain. Ran the hot water for a time and left the container to soak with water and soap. Thought, must remember to discard this.
