Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

29 November 2001 | Etch-a-Sketch

Inspired by Catherina, I’ve been reading my journal from 1992, which is when I began writing it on the computer. I don’t know what to make of this guy, the journal-keeper. He seems like me in certain ways, but he’s much softer, I think, a softer version of me. I mean soft in the positive sense. Sometimes he talks crap, yes, but no more often, certainly, than I do.

Some selections:

11.8.92
Laura found this in a book about baseball card collecting: “Remember, baseball cards have no intrinsic value; they’re only worth what people will pay for them.” So what has intrinsic value?

11.10.92
Camus does not say that we must imagine Sisyphus free but rather that we must imagine him happy. Though, again, he does not say that Sisyphus is happy but rather that we must imagine him so. What seems to be implied is that life is unbearable if one has no faith in the possibility of happiness.

11.21.92
There’s a boy, a young boy I first noticed a few days ago, in back of the house next door, playing at the edge of a swimming pool. He’s walking along the edge of the pool with a stick, splashing the water. I stopped writing for a moment to watch him. He seems intensely interested in the effects of his splashes.

11.26.92
The moment J answered her door, I knew she’d never be the woman I want. It was a sad, almost tragic moment. After she took my coat, I put my bag down in a corner and, facing the wall, allowed myself a private little moment of pain for us.

12.9.92
After nearly four years, I now have a regular place to sit at Quaker meetings. It’s by the window towards the back, on the east side of the building.

Why this spot? There are five reasons:

1. The sun: In the first half of the meeting these days, sunlight streams in at an angle through the window, shining directly in my face if I lean against the wall. Though the room is comfortable (there’s often a fire going in the fireplace), I enjoy the sun.


2. The window: In the beginning of each meeting, I often watch people walk up to the building. Later I watch the birds on the lawn or the wind blowing in the bushes.


3. The window ledge: Having the ledge there gives me more positions to sit in. Sometimes I put one arm across the ledge and another across the back of the bench. But then this sometimes feels a little too relaxed (or a little too Christ-like) for a Quaker meeting.


4. Freedom: I used to have to decide where to sit each time. This was a bother and made me self-conscious. Now that I know where to sit, I don’t have to think about such things.


5. Sight lines: From here I can see almost the entire room, including the balcony. This becomes particularly important if there’s an interesting woman in the room.

12.19.92
An idea for a character in a film, perhaps in passing: a man who has taken a vow a silence and only expresses himself using an Etch-A-Sketch hung from his neck.

12.20.92
I’ve been thinking about the break-up. What a change this has been. I surprise myself by having a lot of anger at her. A lot of anger. Then, at times, I can see how this too shall pass. Although the loss, the loss is permanent.

No, even the loss shall pass.

28 November 2001 | Sweet

Played hide-and-go-seek over Thanksgiving with Rachel’s three youngest nieces, ages five, five, and three. Totally kicked butt.

First round I hid in the utility closet. Little kids don’t like looking in dark places, they’re afraid of the dark, so this keeps them busy a good ten minutes, an eternity in this game. Finally Samantha opens the door, no doubt praying I’m not in there, and I scare her shitless. Last time she looks for me in that closet.

Second round I sit in the living room while they head the way they always head, clockwise from the pantry. Then I sneak back to the pantry (the pantry’s where the “seekers” count while the “hider” hides). Sidney, when she finds me, is like “How the fuck did you do that?” so I’m like, “Fuck if I’m telling.” Without us actually saying anything.

Third round I dominate. First I’m in the middle bedroom, on the top bunk of the bunk beds, behind a bunch of shit that’s up there. The girls come in three, four times, never think to look behind the shit. I wait until they’re out of earshot, then move to the laundry room and from there to the dining room where I sit with Charles, the father of Sidney and Hannah, reading the Wall Street Journal. Hannah, the three-year-old, runs up saying, “Daddy, daddy, help us find Michael,” so I say, “Where have you looked, sweetheart?” and she starts telling me where she’s looked, then realizes, hey, what the fuck? and can’t say anything; she tries but nothing comes out.

Sweet.

27 November 2001 | Boner

Rachel asked if I would betray my bathroom-mate Michelle for a million dollars.

Michelle, in case you don’t know, works for a famous publishing concern and is very nice. Twice she has given me color-laser copies of drawings she’s made, I believe with crayon. I liked these drawings enough to save them in a folder marked MICHELLE. Also, the bathroom we share abuts her apartment, so sometimes when I’m in there peeing or what-have-you, I notice the music she’s playing and invariably like it and feel pleased she lives there. Also, when I’m in a certain mood, I like looking at the things on her bathroom shelf, such as this yellow plastic carrying case she has with a giant bumblebee on top.

Rachel and I were talking about the $25 million award for Bin Laden, when the conversion segued to Michelle, a less abstract case. The idea was that Michelle was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. We never discussed what she had supposedly done to get on that list, aside from probably killing several people, but I assumed a political angle, something along the lines of the Weather Underground. Not that Michelle is such a blatant politico; it’s just that I had trouble imagining her killing anyone for fun or profit. Well, I had trouble imagining her killing anyone for any reason, but that’s beside the point.

The question was whether we would turn her in, and my first thought, I’m proud to report, was to knock on her door and advise her to pack up that bumblebee and run. However, Rachel pointed out that if Michelle was really who the FBI said she was, she might very well kill me on the spot, for fear I’d betray her. Thus I amended the plan to include a reference to a note left with a trusted friend, to be opened in the event of my death. As soon as this came out of my mouth, I realized how stupid it was: What was to stop Michelle from killing me anyway? Fear of some idiot reading my note? She’d be long gone.

This is when I decided, fuck it, I’m turning her in. Who am I to mess with someone wanted by the FBI?

And then there was the money to consider. The money, I’ll admit, was the main thing. A million dollars equals a shitload of broccoli with fried tofu at China Star ($2.75 a pint), not to mention the opportunity to write full-time and not work and travel and maybe buy some land somewhere.

For Rachel, though, the money was irrelevant. You do the most moral thing, period. So if you think it’s moral to turn her in, you turn her in. Otherwise, you don’t. And in no case do you accept any money.

So what do you do when you’re having a perfectly nice discussion with your girlfriend and your girlfriend surprises you by taking the moral high ground, leaving you with no defense, basically, your greed sticking out like a boner?

You change the subject. I asked Rachel if she would eat a plate of shit for a million dollars, and she said would.

“Hey, me too,” I said. “That makes two of us. I’d eat a plate of shit for a million dollars also, sweetheart.”

26 November 2001 | Mouth

Bad scene in the Fulton Street station. A “police action” knocked the 4/5 out of service at rush hour, stranding thousands. I ended up in a corridor packed with commuters, many of whom were trying to make their way back to the 2, having waited in vain for the 4/5. My group, a smaller group, dreamed of reaching the Brooklyn-bound J train via a stairwell on the 4/5 platform. We had time to dream, too, for we were moving at a rate, as I figured it, of about five feet a minute, or three hundred feet an hour, about half the speed of a crawling baby.

Remarkably, the vibe was mellow. Yes, a few scattered “jesus-fucking-christ”’s could be heard, but overall the crowd was composed and orderly and even a bit philosophical, for a crowd. Impressive. But then this guy came up the stairs who evidently needed to BE SOMEWHERE, in contrast to the rest of us, who were merely STANDING IDLY IN THE SUBWAY and for no other reason than that we ENJOYED going groin to butt with our fellow New Yorkers.

He was large, as in tall, perhaps six-five, and broad. Also violent, I decided, for only a violent person would do such a thing. I recognized him immediately. He was the same guy who drives like he’s playing a video game, weaving between lanes at ninety miles an hour.

How I hate him.

I said, “Friend, we’re all going the same place.”

He said, “Yeah, well, fuck you.”

I said, “Yeah, well, fuck you.”

Actually, no, I said no such thing. I said nothing. I didn’t want him to smash me in the mouth.

Jesus had it easy, for He could heal people.

24 November 2001 | Touch

I keep a list of things to write about, ideas and such, but also fragments, beginnings of things. One such fragment says simply, “Stuff I can’t say.”

*

I once considering writing a piece about what I do when I masturbate, or what I used to do, only I soon realized that I couldn’t possibly write such a thing. Which is sad, because my plan was to simply describe what I do, or did, as opposed to making it pornographic, which as a reader I would dearly appreciate, having never seen anyone write it that way.

*

I have a friend (this is a different subject now) who can’t come unless she’s reading pornography. Out of shyness, I’ve never asked her how this works with partners (do they read to her? do they fuck her, etc., while she reads? how does she handle lighting?).

*

A character in a story: A woman like my friend but blind. The texts she reads are written in braille. Exploit the sensuality of touch.

22 November 2001 | Uroborus

So I get this email from this guy, the husband of an old friend, which consists of a long attack of what a different old friend has written in a different group email addressed to me, among others, only he, the husband, more or less ignores everything said by my friend (who is also his wife’s ex-boyfriend, although that has nothing to do with anything) and instead responds, point by point, to various things he imagines him having said. This email is soon followed by a response from my friend, also sent as a group email, in which he attacks the husband for not only having ignored everything he’d written but also for having made shit up. Both emails are unnecessarily harsh, which upsets me but which happens a lot with email, people are unnecessarily harsh, and then I make the mistake of writing to the husband to tell him that the document he attached to his email crashed my computer and that he should try sending it another way, only what happens instead is that this begins an exchange of emails between us which is fraught with misunderstandings. I point this out to him, hoping to short-circuit the problem, only my pointing somehow leads to even greater misunderstandings between us, we have misunderstandings about our misunderstandings, and so at a certain point I give up: he writes me a long email that I don’t respond to and that’s it. Today, however, two weeks or something later, I feel sad about the whole thing—he is, after all, the husband of someone I care for, despite the fact that I almost never see her and certainly don’t keep in touch with her—and so I send the husband a brief email in which I attempt yet again to explain myself, knowing that this will only lead to more misunderstandings—which is where things stand at present, they stand at the point where I’ve sent the email and am awaiting word of exactly how everything I’ve said wasn’t at all what I said but something completely different and so on, and so on.

21 November 2001 | Fortune

My step-grandfather Andy died by running himself over.

This was years ago, and I should add that Andy was a remarkably stupid man, perhaps the stupidest person I have ever known. This said, Andy’s death was not merely the result of stupidity but rather a combination of stupidity and stubbornness and old age and perhaps a fourth thing, bad luck, although this final factor is debatable.

The story is this. Andy stopped at a Texaco station to fill up on gas, but in characteristic fashion failed to park close enough for the pump to reach the gas tank. Not realizing this, he got out of the car, tried to use the pump, saw that it wouldn’t work, and got back in the car, presumably to move the car closer to the pump.

For unknown reasons, Andy neglected to shut the driver-side door before starting the car again. This was his fatal mistake. Well, either this or his decision to drive with his left leg partly outside the vehicle. In either case, the location of Andy’s left leg forced him into an awkward spread-eagle position which in turn made it difficult for him to control the vehicle as he pulled forward. Or rather, as he careened forward, for that is what Andy did: he careened.

Fortune is subjective. There is always cause to say that luck either is or is not on one’s side. Andy’s death is a case in point. For while it is true that he avoided hitting any oncoming motorists, it is also true that he struck a succession of parked cars. The optimist would say that Andy was lucky to kill no one but himself, while the pessimist would consider Andy’s death proof of bad fortune. For my purposes here, I will stick to the facts and leave these determinations to others.

After smashing a final parked car, Andy jumped over a curb (or rather, his vehicle did, for there is some question here as to volition), then sped across a connected series of lawns, leaving toppled fences and broken ornaments in his wake.

Oddly, I cannot recall what happened next. Which is to say that I have forgotten what it was that Andy crashed into. Was it a wall of some kind? I believe it was a wall. At any rate, Andy was no longer inside the vehicle when this crash occurred and thus it may not be correct to say that it was he who did the crashing.

More significantly, I have always assumed that Andy met his end by tumbling out of the car. Certainly this is how the story has been related to me. However, it occurs to me now, as I consider the final moments of Andy’s life, that his fall may in fact have been a jump. That is, unable to bring his left leg into the car, Andy may have decided to abandon ship, as it were, and follow the leg out.

Whatever the truth, and perhaps it is better that we cannot know, Andy did what many would have thought impossible: he ran himself over. And died. He died by running himself over.

20 November 2001 | FAQ

I cut my fingernails as short as possible and have done since childhood. I don’t know what started me on this, other than that I liked it, the feeling of it, particularly during the day or so after cutting. At a certain point I realized that I could cut the hardened skin under the nail, which made it possible to cut the nail further. Then I discovered that hot water, the hot water of a shower, made the skin under the nail soft and puffy, which allowed me to cut further still. I’ve cut my fingernails this way for years, decades, to the point that they’ve become freakishly short, perhaps a quarter the length of normal fingernails, and oddly shaped, growing at the ends but not in the middle, which means that if I somehow ever neglected to cut them, the corners would grow straight into the skin.

*

Not surprisingly, I never liked having fingernails; I never liked how they felt as they grew. As a kid I had an overwhelming fear, a phobia, of the nail being bent back. I haven’t a clue where this came from. No doubt it concerned control, or the lack of control, but beyond this, I’m stumped. From my earliest memory, I cut my nails as short as possible, and for reasons that seemed self-evident.

*

I’m often asked if it hurts. No, it doesn’t hurt, because I’m careful. Once in a while (this is rare now) I go too far in one of the corners – invariably with the middle or ring finger – and draw a tiny bit of blood. Subsequently it’s tender there, so that it stings when I grip or push down on something in a way that involves my fingertips. But after a day or so, the cut heals and the skin hardens again. Meanwhile I try not to grip or push down on anything.

Twice such a cut has become infected. The first time a doctor sliced through the infection to drain the pus. She offered me two options. Either she would give me a local anesthetic with a needle, or skip the anesthetic and lance the finger directly. She made clear that it would hurt either way, and plenty. I liked that. Bluntness is a winning quality in a physician. I said, “Skip the needle,” and she pulled out a scalpel and made a single, steady incision halfway around the fingertip.

Beforehand, as she examined me, she turned to the nurse and said, “chronic such-and-such.” That hit home. “Chronic such-and-such.” I was doing something chronic to myself.

Having watched the doctor, I drained the second infection myself, using a sterilized razor blade. It took a long time to gather the courage to cut that deep. I’d cut a little and stop, cut a little and stop.

*

The other thing I’m asked is how I feel about it. I feel sad. Sometimes I look at my fingers in disbelief. Why was this necessary? Of course it’s not the worst thing imaginable – my fingers are perfectly functional, not counting the difficulty I have opening pull-top beer cans or picking up fallen coins – but still it feels wasteful and embarrassing. A certain part of me, an ugly part, is facing out. “Once a tree grows crooked,” wrote Reich (this was in his early years, before his break with Freud), “it cannot be straightened.” A tree meaning a person. Here was Reich’s reason for giving up on people, or rather on adults: they could not be straightened. He was right, of course, but what he didn’t say or see is that trees grow crooked, to various degrees, that that’s how they grow. I need to be reminded of this sometimes.

15 November 2001 | Winner

Some additions to my vocabulary, all from the Alternative English Dictionary:

fuck me harder (idiom): response to an unwanted and undesirable action

fugly (adjective): short for fucking ugly

nooner (noun): 1 sex at noon; usually applies to a man who can’t leave home in the evening; 2 a person involved in a nooner

queef (noun): an expulsion of gas through the vagina

pearl necklace (compound noun): a trail of sperm along one’s neck, suggesting a necklace: “John gave Mary a pearl necklace”

zoom-in (noun): a sudden, unexpected, sometimes unwanted, kiss: “Ew, John kissed me last night; it was a real zoom-in”

A word like zoom-in makes me happy. It’s useful. I knew a guy who did this all the time and was hated for it.

There are many words in the AED I already employ – asswipe, for example, and dickwad; also shitfit (I use shitfit a lot; I enjoy shitfit) and stiffy – so it’s nice seeing them acknowledged. Certainly I could have gotten by without a published definition of dickwad (“someone who acts like a jerk; ‘Eat me%2

13 November 2001 | This Happiness Business

Dean and Gail are in love. The love of Dean and Gail is of the pass-the-puke-bucket variety; my favorite kind.

The thing is, I’ve never actually met these people.

Dean writes textism. I like textism. Last August Dean announced in textism that he was moving to the south of France to, as he put it, “spend languid days and nights with a beautiful, ludicrously smart woman” with whom he was “deeply, irrevocably in love.” The words “ludicrously smart woman” linked to Gail’s website, openbrackets. This is how I came to know Gail, or rather her writing. (I wouldn’t pretend to know Gail herself, or Dean for that matter, or anyone, really, merely through what he or she wrote. It is not enough. Bowling. I have always said this. Bowling is the best way to know a person. Aside from sex and poker. Bowling, sex, and poker: the holy trinity of knowing.)

There were sixteen days between Dean’s announcement and his actual move. He used this time to finish his final projects, sell or abandon the bulk of his possessions, and be feted by friends – events he related with bitchy and characteristic wit.

Gail, meanwhile, swooned. The day after Dean’s announcement, she posted her own brave declaration. I became a fan on the spot and read the entirety of openbrackets. Along the way I discovered an entry from July 14, “Love and the turning year,” unquestionably addressed to Dean:

Thunder

Thunder. My heart trembles.
I lift my head from my pillow and listen.
It is not a chariot.

Fu Hsuan (217-278)

I can no longer untangle my hair

I can no longer untangle my hair.
I feed on my own flesh in secret.
Do you want to measure how much I long for you?
Look at my belt, how loose it hangs.

Anonymous (Six Dynasties)

Translations by Kenneth Rexroth

On August 28, Dean posted his final To Do list. It consisted of twenty-five items, beginning with “Call bookseller” and ending with “Print last set of proofs” and including, in the middle, the mysterious “Sell kitchen to Bev.” Gail’s list from that day was different, as befit her different circumstance:

1) Eat
2) Sleep
3) Breathe
4) Run grinning like a simpleton through a crowded airport and jump into his arms.

Oh, come on, 1 out of 4 isn’t bad…

My heart went out to Gail who had nothing to do but wait while Dean mocked Kate Winslet’s breasts and sold his kitchen to Bev. On August 24 she reported on the effects of this waiting:

Let’s see…

Found the remote control in the fridge this morning.

Promised a client that I’d do something right away. Remembered to do it three hours later.

Walked into town to post some letters. Forgot to bring the letters. Went back home, got the letters and, back in town, noticed I hadn’t put stamps on. Laughed out loud, raising concerns among villagers’ about my current mental state. Begged 9 F credit from post office.

Read the same sentence 15 times before deciding to skip to the next one.

Contemplated new chair.

Charred the brioche.

Sighed a lot.

It’s 3 am.

*

George Bernard Shaw observed that newspapers cannot distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. I feel like a newspaper sometimes, especially when it comes to love. Dean and Gail posted nothing for two days. Silence. I told myself that they were probably too busy fucking, etc., to attend to their readers. Which is understandable. Life is to be lived. But then I fretted that all was not well, that the build-up had been too much.

Truth is, I had fretted all along, for each had given indication, here and there, of ambivalence, of difficulties. Not with each other, but with love. Dean in particular concerned me. In his original announcement, immediately after saying that he was “deeply, irrevocably in love,” he wrote: “Still a little unclear on this happiness business.”

I take back what I said about not knowing someone through their writing. I feel I know Dean. He’s pissy and opinionated, a man who abhors half-measures. Isn’t love, the lived version, a half-measure? Sometimes I think it is. And I would venture that Dean does too, or did, previous to Gail, which would explain his uncertainty about “this happiness business.”

*

In their first posts post-move, each described driving through the countryside on their way from Paris to her home – their home now – in the south of France. The two descriptions formed a little two-panel portrait of the experience:

Him: “Bombing at midnight across the countryside in her decrepit Ford, grinning like fools, the air hot and rich, the streets narrow.”

Her: “Up out of the city, Mediterranean midnight wrapping itself around us as we speed deep into the country. Only wide curves of dark tree-lined roads lit by high beams, fragrant air passing over us. Heat lightning flashes red revealing sudden contours of the landscape. And we’re speechless.”

Do you see it? Two approaches. He’s more direct. She’s more sensuous. But it’s the same experience. And each is present in the other’s description. And the two perspectives form… jeez, I don’t know what they form, but it’s really lovely, don’t you think? the two of them in her car, and so happy, thinking, This is it, holy shit, my god, fucking finally.

*

I have a theory. My theory is that the parting is contained in the greeting. Is this a theory? No, it is an observation. My observation is that one knows from the beginning why a relationship will fail, that the problem is plain and yet one pretends not to see it; or perhaps one admits to seeing it but downplays its significance. The flush of love, or attraction, or simply of hope, is a powerful hallucinogen, one that causes us to see things that are not there and to fail to see things that are. A relationship does not begin in earnest until the effects of this drug have worn off.

I don’t think the effects have worn off for Dean and Gail. Or perhaps my theory does not apply in their case. Time will tell. Meanwhile, there are the periodic declarations. This one and this and this and this. I collect them. I don’t know these people, but I care. No doubt for personal reasons. If it can work for them, it can work for others. For me, for example. For me and Rachel, for example. Among others, of course. But mainly for me and Rachel.

11 November 2001 | Left-over

I knew a man who killed himself precisely twenty years ago, November 11th, 1981. Except I didn’t really know him. We sat across from each other in a restaurant, at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend. This man, whose name may have been Marvin, said almost nothing the entire night. Then, just as we were about to leave, his watch started beeping. He stared at the thing in silence, transfixed. When he looked up again, he was smiling.

I asked what had happened.

“It was just 11:11:11,” he said. “I never miss it.”

Less than a year later, he killed himself. Shot himself in the head. On 11/11. Presumably at 11:11:11, although no one knows for certain.

Fucking life. He ordered Veal Parmigiana and didn’t finish it.

10 November 2001 | Hat

The moment Liz leaves the apartment, Paul goes to the window to watch her exit the building two stories below. How odd to see her walk away. Odd and sad. A woman in a blue hat. Has he ever seen her alone like that? No, never: when they’re together, she’s with him.

Strike that. Sometimes he surprises her at her apartment. She doesn’t hear him come in, or thinks he’s her roommate, and so there’s a brief moment before she hears him or sees him, before she has time to react to him, when he sees her there, alone. It’s only an instant. He thinks of her as sad. That’s the only word he can think of. Sad. But is she? Sad, alone, but is she?

Sleep, too; he watches her sleep. So that’s another kind of alone.

Ah, and orgasm.

08 November 2001 | Ladder

I was being charged for collect calls I had not made, so I called the phone company to complain and spoke with this operator who first asked me to tell him my name and number, which I did, I told him my name and number and then I explained the problem to him from the beginning, speaking clearly and carefully, the way one does in such circumstances, hoping to demonstrate through the reasonableness of one’s tone and the clarity of one’s language that one is a decent person with a legitimate grievance, whereupon he, the operator, said that he would connect me to customer service (I don’t know who he was, but evidently he wasn’t customer service), only as I was waiting to be connected to customer service, I received a call on the other line from another operator who said that she had a collect call for me from Michael Barrish, so I said, “I cannot be getting a collect call from Michael Barrish because I’m Michael Barrish and in fact I’m on the other line right now with another operator making a complaint about a collect call I never made,” so she said, “Does this mean you won’t accept the charges?” so I said, “Of course it means I won’t accept the charges,” so she said, “Okay, I’ll tell him that,” at which point I switched back to the other line and got the very same operator, the one I had just spoken to, the one I had told that I would not accept the charges, and she reported that my collect call could not go through because this person, Michael Barrish, was not accepting the charges, so I told her, I said, “Look, I’m Michael Barrish, I’m the same person you just talked to, and I’m not trying to place a collect call, I have a complaint,” to which she said (you hear this coming, don’t you? this is the really the only thing she could have said that followed the logic of all that preceded it and yet trumped that logic, as it were, rendering it null and void, much like the ladder that Wittenstein speaks of at the end of Tractatus, the one that must climbed in order to be discarded), “Okay,” she said, “I’ll connect you to customer service.”

07 November 2001 | List

I’ve lived in exactly forty-two forty-four houses and apartments. Oddly I don’t know how this happened. One thing led to another until I found myself here, in Brooklyn, with forty-one forty-three behind me.

I could perhaps say what prompted me to leave one place for another, forty-one forty-three times, but that would explain nothing, or nothing important. What can be learned from a series of turns?

In the back flap of my address book, I keep a list of all forty-two forty-four places, arranged in chronological order. The list includes the dates I lived at each place, rounded off to the month. Between certain entries I’ve noted places I’ve stayed or trips I’ve taken after leaving one place and before moving to another. These have dates as well. The dates are important. I refer to the list often, wanting to know when something happened.

*

There are things I don’t understand. I feel I’ve always been the same person, even when I lived on Tremont Street, even before my sister was born, and yet I’m suspicious of this feeling. One forgets. One creates a past that makes sense in the present—which in turn keeps changing.

Maybe it’s different for different people. Probably it is. My sister, for one, remembers everything, and with matter-of-fact clarity. For her the past is neatly printed and arranged into clearly defined sections, with a first-rate index and four-color photography. For me it’s a room strewn knee-deep with un-dated papers, many having long since yellowed or smeered to the point of illegibility.

*

Characteristically I’ve forgotten when I complied the first list. I believe it may have been in Salisbury, Connecticut, where I stayed for a month with my then girlfriend. Wherever it was, I remembering having to call my sister to fill in certain dates from my childhood.

*

In the last ten sixteen years I’ve added eleven thirteen more places. Each time I’ve done so, I’ve been struck by how the last place on the list always ends with the word present. The list grows ever longer, but this word keeps sinking, anchor-like, to the bottom.

*

*Later additions.

03 November 2001 | Jolly Ranchers

What the fuck is this doing online? Does the public really need to know the final meal requests of the last 253 death row inmates to be executed by the state of Texas?

I’ve always been one for public access to information, the more the merrier, but why is Texas putting this stuff online? To show that they’ve nothing to hide? To show that they keep accurate statistics? To show that a man murdered by the state is something less than a man and therefore undeserving of privacy.

Admittedly, as much as this disgusts me, it’s also mesmerizing, and in a way that only real things can be mesmerizing – real things, that is, which are equal parts lurid and banal. Clicking on an inmate’s name brings you to a page evidently scanned from his death row file (produced here as single, enormous image; a bad way of doing this). These pages (many of which are poorly three-hole punched, the little holes often breaking the edge of page) contain identifying information, a pair of mug shots, and a summary of the crime. As one might expect, these summaries are horrifying, to various degrees, the horror enhanced by the dry as dirt language. An example:

Convicted in connection with the deaths of sisters Grace Purnhagen, 16, and Tiffany Purnhagen, 9, in south Montgomery County. The bodies of the two girls were found along a pipeline in the Imperial Oaks subdivision on Rayford Road. Grace’s throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted with an object later found to have been a beer bottle. Tiffany had been strangled with a rope found around her neck. Grace’s former boyfriend, Delton Dowthitt, then age 16, confessed to killing both girls following his arrest in Lousiana four days later. He later recanted, saying he killed Tiffany at the order of his father, who he said had actually killed and sexually assaulted Grace. Delton led police to where his father had disposed of the knife. Police also found a bloody bottle and rope at Dowthitt’s auto sales business in Humble.

Elsewhere on the site you can access gender and racial statistics, final meal requests, and other handy death row facts. I learned a lot about lethal injections, the current execution method employed by Texas (previous to 1977, the state used electrocution, and before that, from 1819 to 1923, hanging). To quote directly from the site, a lethal injection consists of the following:

• Sodium Thiopental (lethal dose; sedates person)
• Pancuronium Bromide (muscle relaxant; collapses diaphragm and lungs)
• Potassium Chloride (stops heartbeat)

“The offender is usually pronounced dead,” they report, “approximately seven minutes after the lethal injection begins. Cost per execution for drugs used: $86.08.”

$86.08 for the drugs. Thank you, Texas. Elsewhere we learn that the cost per day per offender is $53.15 and that the average time on death row prior to execution is 10.58 years.

If I remember Foucault correctly, he said that public torture served to restore the state’s sovereignty (which had been violated by the offense) by displaying infinite force on the body of the prisoner. Here we’re dealing not with force but disclosure, or rather the force of disclosure. Since we no longer witness executions (although Texas now allows a victim’s close relatives and friends to watch his or her killer die), all we’re left with is the paper work. Well, that and a strange USA Today-like affection for factoids:

• shortest time on death row prior to execution: Joe Gonzales, 253 days
• longest time on death row prior to execution: Excell White, 8982 days (24.6 years)
• average age of executed offenders: 39
• youngest executed offender: Jay Pinkerton, 24
• oldest executed offender: Cydell Coleman, 62

And then there’s Mike Graczyk of the Associated Press, a man who has made a career out of watching people die, having witnessed 234 out of 253 Texas executions since 1982. I know what you’re wondering: “Where was Mike for the other 19?” I’m wondering this as well. We may wonder forever.

But we don’t have to wonder what Mike will be doing on November 14, because that’s when the state of Texas is scheduled to execute 41-year-old Jeffrey Tucker of Parker County, convicted in the July 1988 robbery and murder of 65-year-old Wilton B. Humphreys of Granbury. There is no indication of what Tucker has requested for his final meal, but we know that the previous inmate executed, Gerald Mitchell of Harris County, requested a bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers.

Sadly, Odell Barnes, Jr. of Wichita County, executed on March 1, 2000, never received his final meal. How do I know this? Because he requested justice, equality, and world peace.

02 November 2001 | Bliss

Many years back, during a crisis of direction and meaning and whatnot, one of several such crises in my life, all of which have coincided with the end of a relationship, I decided to publish my own journal. Or this, I decided, was what would end my crisis. I think I was inspired by The Sun. My journal was going to be like The Sun, only better, because it would have more stuff that interested me. This was my idea: to publish a journal consisting entirely of things that interested me.

Another model was Poor Richard’s Almanac, which I’d never read and still haven’t, but which I imagined to be an annual collection of things that interested Benjamin Franklin.

Frankly, at this time I may have been reading one of those books that purport to help one figure out what the fuck to do with oneself, and it may have been this book that gave me the notion to, er, follow my bliss.

However, I didn’t follow my bliss very far and soon abandoned the project. I mention it now because I thought at the time (this was before the Internet and before zines hit) that if done well, it would work, that a person would be revealed in the seemingly unrelated things he liked. It would be a self-portrait, of a kind, one that would deepen as the reader made connections, saw patterns, and began, inevitably, to grow accustomed to me and my shit.

I am not one of those who believe that everyone has a story to tell. Or, no, I do believe this, I believe it with all my heart; I just don’t believe everyone capable of making that story seem interesting. This is why there are writers; writers have a way of making stories seem interesting.

How writers do this, I do not know, nor particularly care to know, and anyway that’s not what I was talking about. What I was talking about, or at least leading up to talking about, is the fact that this site has evolved into the very thing I once dreamed of making: a journal of things that interest me. I refer chiefly to the right-hand column of the homepage, which consists of links to things I like. Such links are common on personal sites, but I have chosen to present them in a more expanded, magazine-like fashion, in an effort, not entirely unconscious, to transform Oblivio into, well, something more like a magazine. But not a magazine. Like a what, then?

Like Poor Richard’s Almanac, only without the homespun quotes and without all that annoying, you know, Benjamin Franklinness.