January 2002
31 January 2002 | Shower
In the shower
just now I had an idea for a story. The idea was inspired by something that happened earlier today, which is that I received an email from a guy I hadn’t heard from in seventeen years. Coincidentally this same guy was the model for a character in a story I just wrote. So it was as though I had conjured him by writing about him. Thinking about this in the shower, I had the idea to write a story about a writer whose stories make the people in his stories contact him all of a sudden. Like even ridiculous people such as Parker Posey. The guy writes a story about a Parker Posey-like character and then the next day he receives an email from Parker Posey. And he doesn’t have to show the story to anyone to have it happen; it just happens.
Well, I hated this idea, and for several reasons. To begin, it’s a rip-off of a recent Kevin Fanning piece, Emails from Dead People. In that story (which I so love) a person starts receiving emails from dead people. So it’s the same thing, basically—dead people, people who’ve been fictionalized.
Despite this, and despite the fact that I hated the idea and knew I’d never write it, I remained in the shower until the hot water ran out, trying to imagine why Parker Posey would send me an email.
Straight off I decided that it couldn’t be because of Oblivio, since that’s ever so slightly plausible: one can imagine Parker Posey stumbling on Oblivio and deciding to “shoot” me an email. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Parker Posey has “shot off” several such emails in exactly this way.
So I decided that the protagonist couldn’t have a website. But this still left the question of why the sudden email from Parker Posey.
By this point the water was definitely beginning to run out, I think because the journalist woman downstairs was insisting on taking a shower, even though it must have been obvious to her that someone already was.
At first this pissed me off, the nerve of that journalist woman, but then I remembered that I had been in the shower a good fifteen minutes already and was in the process of using every last drop of hot water.
So in the end, as the water temperature shifted from almost-kinda-lukewarm to definitely-no-longer-lukewarm, I decided that the protagonist’s email address is one letter different from the email address of a famous “dentist to the stars.” Thus Parker Posey sends an email to her dentist, describing some tooth problem she’s having, and the protagonist has to respond saying, Listen, Parker, I’m not your dentist, but I really loved you in Scream 3.
This wasn’t one of my better showers.
29 January 2002 | MIAs
My memory is bad and getting worse.
This morning I tried to count how many women I’ve slept with. The number I arrived at was three less than the last time I did this, which was several years ago, I think.
Instead of going down by three, the number should have gone up by one, so that’s actually four missing women.
It’s disturbing.
I should say that the total number is not so high as to excuse oversights.
Also, I’ve never been one for casual sex—casual kissing, perhaps, but not casual sex. So again it would seem that the MIAs are probably all women who at one time I really liked and may have even gone out for a few weeks before realizing it wouldn’t work, or vice versa.
It bothers me to have forgotten them. And what it makes me think is that I should write down the names of the ones I do remember, in case I forget them as well.
This seem tacky, doesn’t it, to make such a list?
I think it seems tacky.
But then I picture myself at ninety and I can’t remember a single woman I’ve ever slept with, not even what’s-her-name, the contortionist.
I’m ninety and I think I’m a virgin.
Fuck it, I’m making that list.
There is a form of colorblindness in which the world is reduced to shades of grey, like a black and white film. (Funny that “black and white” really means “shades of grey” in this context.)
What must that be like?
I’ll tell you what I think. I think if one previously saw colors, it’s crushingly sad. And then in time one adjusts, by which I mean forgets.
The healing power of forgetting.
And then there are those who are born in a grey world. This seems worse still: to know that there are colors—right here, here, and here—that you’ve never seen and never will see. I doubt this could ever be forgotten.
28 January 2002 | It
A couple on the inbound 1 train. She’s got her arms folded across her chest. Both are trying to kept this private.
Him: It’s not what you think it is.
Her: What do you mean “it’s not what I think it is”? Is it or is not what you told me it is?
Him: I don’t know what I told you, but I can tell you’re thinking it’s something else.
Her: Like what?
Him: Like I don’t have to say what.
Pause.
Her: Fine, it’s not that, I believe you.
Pause.
Her: But that doesn’t stop me from feeling hurt by it.
Someone brutalized my snowperson.
Perhaps this sounds a tad funny, but let me tell you it didn’t feel funny at the time.
It happened last Sunday, during New York’s one and only snowfall this winter. As Rachel and I walked through Prospect Park, I noted that the snow was perfect snowman snow: wet but not heavy wet.
We choose a spot away from the big field, on a slight rise.
The way to make a snowman, in case you don’t know, is to roll a snowball through the snow and push down. At first it’s difficult because the ball is small and has little surface. But once you reach a certain mass, it gets easier.
I decided that we were going to make the best snowman in the entire park, and I believe we succeeded. Except it wasn’t a snowman in the end but a snowwoman. We gave her spikey hair made from twigs and breasts with acorn tops as nipples. I was particularly proud of her breasts, one of which was slightly larger than the other, like with non-snow women.
(Confession: it was strangely erotic to rub the breasts with my palm to smoothen them out. Does this make me a pervert?)
Rachel regretted not having a camera, but I felt that a snowperson is by nature impermanent, so why try to capture it? However on the way home, she convinced me to return later and take photos. “You can post them on Oblivio.”
Sadly, shockingly, this is what we found when we returned:
If this doesn’t look like a snowperson to you, it’s because it isn’t a snowperson anymore; it’s a crime scene. The pile of snow in the middle is what remained of her head after someone threw it to the ground and stomped on it. We found her torso elsewhere, smashed to pieces. Only her base remained intact.
I was upset. I’m still upset. Rachel and I walked through the park taking photos of other snowpersons, none of which had been harmed. Only ours.
Was it because of the breasts? Was it because we made a thing out of snow that had breasts and so someone decided it would be fun to knock it to the ground and fuck it up?
I’m not kidding, I really think this is what happened. Or else some asshole decided that exposed breasts on snowpersons are an affront to decency and shouldn’t have to be looked at, that little children will see breasts on snowpersons and all hell will break loose.
Anyway, fine, this was over a week ago now and I’m trying to let it go. Non-fucking-attachment.
Oh yeah, her mouth. We found her mouth stuck in a tree. It had been a metal top from a can, the kind you pull off with a tab. I used the tab part to make it stay on her face. They folded the thing in half.
The guy at Mister Pizza—the proprietor—had a rash he had not had before, on his right temple. It was purplish and large and reminded me, in shape, of Alabama. He also limped, which he had not done previously, and in such a way as to indicate hip pain.
I felt sad immediately. Even before the rash and the limp, this man made me sad. He is (I hate to use this word, but this is the word that goes through my head whenever I see him) stupid. A kinder word would be slow.
He confuses orders and has trouble calculating change.
For these reasons, I make it a practice to avoid Mister Pizza. However on this day, needing something quick before jumping on the train to meet you, I thought I’d pick up a slice and eat it on the platform.
Two customers were ahead of me, waiting for their food. This being a pizza parlor, where the food is simple and easy to prepare, I imagined that I would be out of there, slice in hand, in no time.
I was wrong. My order didn’t get taken for five minutes as the proprietor struggled to wrap two hero sandwiches in tin foil. There seemed to be a problem with his right hand which made it difficult for him to open and close his fingers.
I should add that this man is earnest. He makes a good faith effort to serve his customers and devotes himself to doing it right. He is not a slacker; he cares.
And this is what I find so painful. He is doing his best, but his best isn’t good enough.
I placed my order. He cut a slice and carried it, limping, to the oven. “To go or stay,” he asked. “Stay,” I said, not wanting to put him through the business with the take-out box, which I’ve seen him botch so badly he had to discard the box and get another.
I was concerned about time. A J train had passed as I reached Broadway. These trains come every ten minutes or so, which meant that if I stayed too long in Mister Pizza, I would miss the next train and show up late for our meeting. I didn’t want to show up late for our meeting.
The proprietor placed a paper plate before him and tried to separate this plate from the one beneath it, but again his fingers wouldn’t cooperate, so the two plates remained stuck together.
I said nothing. My chest felt heavy. I decided to look at the soft drink dispenser.
He limped to the oven, scooped up my slice with a big metal spatula, then limped back to the counter and placed it on the plate—or rather, plates—adding an absurdly thick clump of napkins to the side.
“A dollar fifty,” he said. I handed him two bills. He rang up the order, then stared into the open drawer. What was this? Suddenly he turned and hobbled toward the back room. What now? Ah, I understood: he was out of quarters and had gone to get a new roll.
I watched him back there, or half of him, the back half, as he fought to unwrap a roll of quarters.
Then I heard the approaching train.
My first thought was to run—there was still time if I ran—but then what, I wondered, would I say to the proprietor? Yes, I could have said something along the lines of “That’s my train; keep the change,” but had I said that, he would have known the truth: that I had been hoping to get out of there quickly because I had a train to catch, and that he had failed me. As he fails others, of course, all day long, day after day, despite his best efforts.
I couldn’t bear it. I stayed and waited for my change. This is why I am late.
19 January 2002 | Doorknob
There’s this moment in the car, before I get out of the car, where we have no choice but to say good night in the car because I can’t invite her in—I don’t live here, and even if I did, I’m not so sure I would, probably I wouldn’t, but anyway I don’t so I can’t, nor can she invite me to her place, it’s too late for that, the time for that was back in the restaurant or soon after the restaurant, only for whatever reason she chose not to do it, assuming she considered it, which doesn’t seem likely, the vibe between us is not a let’s-keep-this-thing-going vibe but rather a let’s-just-wrap-this-thing-up-shall-we? vibe. I mean that’s how I feel, I feel awkward and frustrated because while I want to break through, I don’t think I should break through, because I’m not so sure I’d be happy to have broken through once having done so and in fact I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t, so it seems stupid and selfish to even try. She turns and says something to the effect of how grateful she is for all my help, so I say how I just hope it proves useful to her and helps her land a job she loves, and then we both remark how nice the other is and how enjoyable the whole thing was, especially to get to know each other some, which we agree was the nicest part. I don’t dare lean over to kiss her cheek, a permissible action under the circumstances, nor do I offer my hand for her to shake; instead I just sort of wave good-bye as I leave the car, rotating my hand back and forth in much the same way one would jiggle the doorknob of a locked door, only here I hold my hand mostly open, so that it’s actually more like the way one might fondle a breast of a certain size, rubbing the nipple with the sweaty part of one’s palm, although in the case of a breast the motion would naturally be slower, a breast requiring a slower, more sensuous motion than a doorknob.
18 January 2002 | Thing
Spent a ridiculous amount of time writing a thing I abhor, and now it’s nearly morning and I’m angry with myself for persisting with something that wasn’t working and didn’t feel workable and yet I persisted, as I do, I kept trying, as I do, despite the hour, I couldn’t help myself, I got locked in, I thought there was something there, I thought that if I kept looking I would find it, only what I needed to do, what I should have done, what any sensible person would have known to do, was to let go, to give up, only I couldn’t, I wanted it and could almost see it there, but that was desire speaking, it wasn’t and never could be there, I wanted it to be there but it wasn’t and no amount of trying could make it so, goodnight.
Rachel’s been looking for a job for several months now. It’s been difficult at times, but I’m proud of her because she’s managed to maintain a positive attitude through it all. Her motto: One day at a time. Sometimes when I see she’s getting a little discouraged, I remind her that the earth will one day be a flaming ball of fire and that all this will be forgotten. That helps. She says, “How do you always know the right thing to say?” so I say, “I don’t know; I just know.”
Today she sent me her latest cover letter.
Dear Executive Director:
I am responding to your poorly worded and unclear posting on
the low-paid-jobs-for-losers-who-decided-
to-go-into-social-work-because-they-actually-
thought-they-could-make-a-difference website for the position of Peon in your poorly run and under-funded social service agency. I have enclosed my way over-qualified resume for your consideration.
My employment experience is abundant and varied. I have been underpaid, overworked and not appreciated in a variety of positions including Band-Aid Applier, Finger-in-Dike Holder, and Justifier of Lousy Policies. I have always excelled in situations that require a high degree of denial, a capacity to look the other way in the face of gross malpractice and fraudulence, an ability to accept horrifying working conditions, and a tolerance for seeing zero affect of my efforts to ameliorate people’s lives because, “well, we do the best we can.”
At this time, I am looking for another underpaid, overworked and high-likelihood-of-burnout job and would relish the opportunity to learn more about the available position in your agency. I am particularly intrigued by the prospect of working for another lunatic director with no interpersonal skills, management ability, or capacity for leadership.
I look forward to hearing from you if and when you get your shit together, but will not hold my breath.
Jokes aside, Rachel wrote this by taking her actual cover letter and replacing the lies with truth.
Do
you remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the wizard, frantically pulling levers in his wizard control booth, intones, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”? I’ve long believed that language developed so that we can play these kinds of tricks on each other.
Certainly this is true of the language of business.
I will refrain from discussing the language of love.
I have forgotten her name. Not Alison but a name like Alison. We were roommates in 1993. She was an art student: British, pleasant, messy.
She told me about a dream she had and showed me her drawing of it.
This is what she’d scrawled, nearly illegibly, above it:
I had a dream a man was floating in the sky comforted & happy then someone (probably God) said come on Michael and before he could think a Helicopter fell from the sky to the sea and when it would have crashed it was a drawing.
What does a baby experience during birth? In thinking about this, I realized that a baby doesn’t have any words to represent the experience. What is thinking without words?
A bird surely thinks as it builds a nest, just not in words. In what, then, is it thinking?
This brings me to something written by a friend whose site remains, alas, top-secret:
There is a theory about how some birds learn the global positioning skills that will guide them along their migration route. The theory talks of the nights that they spend after breaking out of the egg, exhausted, eyes able to see only the nest below and the sky above. There, for the first weeks of their life, they stare endlessly at the constellations as they move across the theater of night sky. The stars, in their subtle movements, imprint themselves on the little bird brains with such force, such permanence, that the birds will always be able to know where they are in relation to where they began.
That’s what it was like, looking up from his lap into his calm eyes above for minutes and minutes. Minute movements there. And much love. A positioning, an equipping for travel.
I told her she was wrong, at least when it comes to birds, but then she came back with evidence.
And just now, walking up the stairs, I remembered what’s it like when I bite my nails. It’s less like thinking than feeling. And there are no words. “Get that. Good. Again. Now bite. Good. Now over. Again. Bite,” and so on. Just not in words.
Which is how it must be, I imagine, for birds.
However, a baby at birth thinks nothing, I think, beyond the baby equivalent of feels good and feels bad and also perhaps something that adds up to something very much like, hey, wait, this is… what the holy goddamn fuck!
- Begin with soup. I use canned (Health Valley is good), but any kind of soup will do.
- Pour the soup into a pot and turn the flame up much higher than necessary.
- Do not stir.
- Sit at your computer and work on a proposal for a new job that you really really hope you get because you would be perfect for it and do a fabulous job and the client would absolutely love you forever and life would be great.
- Become so engrossed in this proposal that you forget about the soup and also fail to smell that horrible burning smell coming from the kitchen, which in your studio apartment is located just eight feet behind you.
- Finally notice the horrible smell, then rush over and turn on the faucet and hold the soup under it for a bit, at which point an enormous plume of steam should shoot up and nearly burn you.
- Stir the soup with a big wooden spoon, frequently scraping the bottom of the pot.
- Consider making a different pot of soup but then decide that you actually like the taste of burnt things.
- Cool the soup in the refrigerator, placing an oven mitten under the pot to prevent the plastic shelf coating from melting.
- Serve with crumbled bits of toast over-toasted in the oven because you don’t have a toaster and forgot about the fucking toast.
12 January 2002 | Hand
All I can see is the bottom half of her legs, her legs from the knees down, plus the top part of the left knee.
Also, vaguely, some thigh.
Of course I can’t really see her legs but rather the shape they make her slacks make.
Her slacks are gray, a brownish kind of gray, a color you imagine some rich person’s horse being.
Her shoes are black. I can see her shoes, in part; I forgot to mention that.
She has one hand—I see this also, although it requires me to move my eyes as far to the left as possible, like during an eye exam—folded over the other.
Before sitting down, I saw that she is beautiful.
We’re waiting for the train.
I have some judgment about her shoes. I find them too fashionable: the heals seem too high, the fronts too square. I sense too much energy, just from looking at her shoes, devoted to appearance.
But then her appearance is what people have always responded to, as I imagine it, and so here she is, wearing the latest shoes a person can wear, with entirely square fronts.
Of course it’s all about love. Wanting love. Whatever love is.
Last night I curled behind Rachel as she slept. She was on her side and facing away from me, so I brought my left arm over and around and laid my hand on hers, her right. It was warm. I could feel her breast under my arm. She took my hand in hers.
10 January 2002 | Totalled
My bathroom-mate Michelle, who I would turn in to the FBI under certain circumstances, make this nice sketch of me last week. She warned me that her pictures don’t often resemble their subjects, but that, I think, is praiseworthy: nothing should ever have to look like the thing that inspired it; nor like anything, really. We had a lovely chat and she told me about getting totalled at her company’s holiday party and deciding with a friend that they would each try to take home one of the bigshot editors, whom no one in her department is supposed to talk to, let alone try to take home. Michelle made two advances on her chosen editor and was rebuffed each time, but the way I look at it is, you give it your best shot and live with the results. I think Michelle feels the same way.
These days we have mice, Michelle and I, and all I can say is, I wouldn’t want to be one of those mice right now, because Michelle and I are both the kind of people who once we decide to do something, do it, thank you very much, the thing with the editor notwithstanding.
09 January 2002 | Shitless
So Josh and I were emailing about some high-level writer stuff, stuff about tense and stuff, in particular how commendable it is when you simply abandon the whole notion of tense and just write the way that Josh wrote in 1976, with each clause its own little universe of time, the way it is in dreams, time being thrown out the window or jumbled to the point of irrelevance, only it wasn’t Josh who was saying this stuff but me, although he wasn’t disagreeing with me either, although, fine, I wasn’t really saying most of it but rather thinking it, when I remembered this story I once found on a pockmarked piece of notebook paper in a gutter by a bus stop in San Francisco, that big street whose name I’ve forgotten, the one that went out to where I was living then, not the Sunset but the district just north of the Sunset, the, the, the, fuck I can’t think of it, the Something district, so I went and found the story and sent it to Josh, who in his generosity said that it was ten times better than his story, which it isn’t, that’s cracked, but I do like it and have more than once thought of it, because as I see it there’s a kind of wisdom in it, which at the time, I have to admit, scared me shitless.
ONCE THERE WAS A GIRL NAMED RANATA. SHE WAS LIKE ALL THE OTHER GIRLS, EXCEPT FOR ONE THING. SHE ALWAYS WORE A GREEN RIBBON AROUND HER NECK.
THERE WAS BOY NAMED SCOOBY IN HER CLASS. SCOOBY LIKED RANATA, RANATA LIKED SCOOBY. ONE DAY HE ASKED HER, “WHY DO YOU WEAR THAT RIBBON ALL THE TIME?” RANATA “I CANNOT TELL YOU” SAID BUT SCOOBY KEPT ASKING, “WHY DO YOU WEAR IT?” AND RANATA WOULD SAY, “IT IS NOT IMPORTANT.”
THEY GOT MARRIED AND HE STILL ASKED. FINALLY, SCOOBY AND RANATA GOT OLD. RANATA GOT REAL SICK. THE DOCTOR SAYS SHE IS DYING. RANATA CALLED SCOOBY TO HER SIDE. “NOW I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT THE GREEN RIBBON. UNTIE IT AND YOU’LL SEE.” SCOOBY UNTIED THE RIBBON AND RANATA’S HEAD FELL OFF.
THE END
Remember that fabulous Powerpoint presentation entitled Yours is a Very Bad Hotel produced by those guys who were totally screwed by the DoubleTree Hotel in Houston? Well, Cory Doctorow, the guy over at Boing Boing, received an email about it today from the General Manager of the DoubleTree Club Hotel in Houston, one Joseph Crosby.
Dear Webhost,
Please provide written authorization, either electronic or hard copy, for use of the Powerpoint Presentation titled “Yours is a very bad Hotel”.
Thank you,
Joseph Crosby
General Manager
DoubleTree Club Hotel Houston
Here’s Cory’s response.
You’re clearly not the copyright holder, your message is clearly intended to intimidate, and there’s clearly an invitation in the body of the work itself, constituting a good-faith license, asking users to “share” this presentation.
If you’ve got something to say, say it. I don’t take kindly to intimidation tactics.
The plot thickens because Cory then heard from the author of the piece, who asked him to take it down. So he did. (More on the author’s feelings in this USA TODAY piece from January 4th.) I, however, decided to look for another version, which I found at hyperorg.com.
Right. But then Cory gets a second email from Houston.
Cory Doctorow,
Thank you for removing the powerpoint presentation from your website. Now I must ask that you remove my name and the name of the hotel from your website as you do not have permission to use either.
Thank you,
Joseph Crosby
One theory I have is that maybe this guy has a YAHWAY thing going on, where for some reason it’s not a good idea to say his actual name or the name of his workplace. You can’t hope but notice those two capital letters: JC.
But seriously, the whole thing boils my blood for some reason, despite being totally ridiculous. I talk about why in the discussion linked to Cory’s first report.
It’s interesting how much I care about this. I guess it’s because I was thrilled to see our community have an effect. I mean, yeah, so they’re getting attitude training down at the DoubleTree. Big deal. That’s a corporate thing: stop the bleeding. But the larger lesson is worth thinking about. Not necessarily trying to, we generated enough bad publicity for that hotel that they had to respond. That’s cool. And the whole thing happened because the presentation is brilliant; it strikes a nerve. That’s inspiring to me.
Okay, maybe I need to lie down now and get my blood pressure to drop.
Maybe I do. But before I do, just let me say this: Joseph Crosby of the DoubleTree Club Hotel Houston is a Very Bad General Manager.
Powerpoint presentation anyone?
08 January 2002 | Chair
From my journal, 1994, a bad year for love.
- Walking there, I reminded myself that I am beautiful and to ask her questions.
- Thanks for working on my resume for eight hours, she said. I didn’t do it so that you would drive me to the bus station, I said. Nor it is why I have agreed to drive you, she said. They why are you? I should have said right then, only I would never say such a thing.
- What we did was talk, and there was a time when I became acutely conscious of this, that we were two animals conversing. I was aware too that I did not want to kiss her particularly, so that is what I did: not kiss her.
- I haven’t said her name. For some reason I’ve avoided it. Calling her her feels best. She, her. And the reason, I see it now, is that she is one of many over time. A procession. All of whom are the same, in a sense, the same procession. Like in G’s play. (This is for you now, this explanation. You who are not reading this.) The play had two characters played by six actors. When a character walked off stage and returned, that character was now played by a new actor. Seamlessly. And in time the original actors came back playing the opposite characters. Not that it mattered half as much as the giant chair over there that nobody noticed.
07 January 2002 | System
My system is this. If I’ve made it to China Star when I hear an approaching J train, I run for it. If not, I let it go.
So I was a good 100 feet short of China Star this time, which meant letting it go, only I was late, having left late, so I hesitated.
What to do? Danna, my dinner date, might very well be late herself—not late late but late, which is partly why I left late: my feeling that Danna would likely keep me waiting.
Problem is, Danna is unpredictable: sometimes she’s late, sometimes not. Or perhaps she’s late more often than not, but only ten or fifteen minutes late when she is, which to some people is not late enough to even count as late, although neither does it count as being on time, exactly.
My point here is that if I let the train go, I would be stuck waiting the fifteen minutes or so until the next train, which, together with the fact that I had left late, would put me solidly in the late late category, which is to say later than Danna, which is something that I would feel pretty shitty about. It’s not the being-later-than-Danna part that would bother me, but the late late part, or that coupled with the being-later-than-Danna part. Basically I have a rule that it’s fucking rude and selfish to keep other people waiting; although admittedly that rule is it not stated in the traditional form of a rule. (Another such rule of mine: people who don’t help their friends are scum.)
Of course I’m being misleading when I speak of “letting the train go.” My system is born of experience. If you run for the train from some point before China Start, you haven’t much chance of catching it. Basically you need everything to break your way in that case, and even then the odds are against you. And here I hadn’t even reached the dumpster! Never have I tried to run before reaching the dumpster. It would be lunacy, really.
On the other hand, why not try? Would it be so terrible, so shameful, to run for a train and miss that train and have the people who just got off that train look at you like you’re ever so slightly a loser? Why not run anyway and thereby put yourself in the position to possibly catch the train if the train sits in the station a little longer than usual, perhaps because some kids are fucking with the doors?
It took me perhaps two seconds to weigh these things in my head, the pros and the cons, and then I took off, swinging my bag from my back and tucking it under my arm, running back style. As I did this, I consciously chose to carry my bag under my left arm, anticipating the need for my subway pass, which I keep in my front right pocket.
At Marcy and Broadway, I turned right, taking a wide line around the corner deli for fear of colliding with eastbound pedestrians. Then I dodged two homeless guys having soup outside the chicken place and made a bee-line for the stairs.
I was wearing, I should say, my long winter coat, which is not ideal for running, the extra material flapping wildly behind me. Not that there was anything to be done about that.
The stairs to the J are across from the hairdresser, a mere ten stores or so from the corner. They’re made of metal, the stairs are, with a metal railing, and they head up, not down, as the J is elevated in Brooklyn.
The moment I saw them, the stairs, I realized that I should have swung my bag under my right arm, not my left, because I was going to need my left hand free to grab that railing and turn myself around. Realizing this, I switched the bag back to right arm, as running backs do when they want to keep the football away from would-be tacklers. This cost me some fraction of a second, for I am not practiced, as running backs are, in this maneuver, and needed to slow a bit.
About fifteen feet from the stairs, I slowly a bit more, but not much, then grasped the railing with my left hand and swung myself, coat flying, bag held out from my body, onto the stairs, which, if it is not clear, headed in opposite direction from the one I had been running.
Whoosh.
The stairs are broken into two sections, separated by a brief landing, and these sections are long, perhaps twenty steps each, with poor footing, the grooved metal worn to smoothness from decades of traffic.
I went full out, taking two steps at a time and saying the word ATTACK! in my head, over and over. (It’s a cycling thing: you “attack” the mountain.)
At the top of stairs, still running, I slipped my pass from my pocket. The train, I saw, was parked in the station, doors open; some of its former passengers had reached the turnstile.
My only chance, if I had one, was a perfect swipe. Sadly, though, I’m a lousy swiper and often have to try it three or four times before it works. I don’t know why this is, that is, what I do wrong, but the fact is, it’s unusual for me to get it on the first try.
I had been thinking about this on the stairs, preparing myself for what lay ahead. The train, I knew, was already in the station (I could hear the doors open as I climbed), so I knew I had to cut corners, if corners remained, to have any chance. Thus I resolved to skip the part where you wait to see if the swipe has worked, and to instead push the turnstile and keep running. If the swipe didn’t work, I would smash into the turnstile, which would no doubt piss off the booth person and might even hurt, but this was a chance, I decided, I was willing to take.
I should say that getting the pass out was not as simple as it sounds, for the pants I was wearing are a little tight at the entrance to the pocket. Of course I would have gotten the pass ready on the stairs (I usually do this at China Star!), but it seemed that I needed my arms free to stay balanced as I climbed.
Oh, and then I had to turn the pass so that it was oriented correctly for the machine, there being four different ways to orient a pass, not counting numerous crazy ways.
Both of these things, getting the pass from my pocket and orienting it correctly, went perfectly, ten on a scale of ten, my years of subway riding serving as inadvertent training for this moment.
I swerved past an outgoing passenger, angled for the end turnstile, swiped the pass, and pushed.
It gave.
Baby.
Ah, but just then the train door closed half way, then three-quarters way (this part was happening in slow motion), then seven-eighths way… and still I kept running, thinking that sometimes that door re-opens before it closes, it’s a quirk I’ve never understood, a little glitch in the system, maybe it’s something the conductor does, or maybe it’s just a mechanical hiccup… and then it happened: the door opened again, and quickly closed.
Between opening and closing, I was in.
A woman facing the door gave me a big smile (she had witnessed the dramatic last few seconds), so I smiled back.
My impulse was to run through the train, high-fiving all the passengers, maybe waving my bag like a flag, the whole compartment stomping its feet in unison and whooping it up.
Instead I sat down and removed my scarf.
At sixteen, in an act of pure desperation, I took an aptitude test. Soon after taking this test, I dropped out of high school—or rather, announced having done so, for I had actually stopped attending classes the previous academic year.
The test I took consisted of several hundred yes/no questions. You answered the questions and tallied the results. This left you with a three-letter code, which you looked up in a different section of the book. There you saw a list of jobs typically performed by people with that three-letter code.
When I turned to the page with my particular three-letter code, it listed but a single job title. This seemed strange, as most of the other three-letter codes had a dozen or more job titles.
The first thing I thought at this moment—I mean after turning to the page with the solitary job title—was of the banana splits at Woolworth’s. When I was a kid, I would buy a banana split at the counter at Woolworth’s, and this banana split would cost whatever was written on a little piece of paper inside a balloon I would pick from among dozens of balloons floating above the counter. I knew going in that the banana split would cost no more than a banana split would normally cost, which was $1.29, but I also knew that the banana split could cost as little as a penny. Or that was what the sign said. When I first started buying banana splits this way, I assumed that the average banana split would cost sixty-five cents (the average of a penny and $1.29), but as it turned out, most of those little pieces of paper said $1.29, or something very close to $1.29. I know this because my grandfather Abbie would take me to Woolworth’s all the time, and we eventually realized what was going on. It was a lesson I’ never forgotten.
Anyway, the reason I thought of those banana splits when I discovered my single job title was because no one had ever said that my three-letter code would lead to a certain number of job titles. I had assumed that, and my assumption had been wrong.
This hadn’t been my only assumption, nor even the most important. The most important had been that taking an aptitude test thing would turn out to be a big fucking waste of time. This assumption proved to be true: taking that aptitude test turned out to be a big fucking waste of time. And not so much because I ended up with a solitary job title, but because of what that solitary job title said.
It said Furrier.
Listen: When I was sixteen, the only person who had ever meant anything to me was my grandfather Abbie, who had died the previous year.
Abbie had been a furrier.
I used
to go into his basement sometimes, where he had his workshop, and there I would look at his table, his sewing machine, and his enormous collection of pins, and I would think, Not for one million dollars.
So I closed the aptitude test book and went back to my earlier plan, the one I’d had before deciding to take an aptitude test. This plan was simple. It was to drop out of school, write poetry until my money ran out, and kill myself.
Later, I mean many years later, I read about the test I’d taken and came to understand my crazy result. My three-letter code is rare, given that the first two letters—representing artist types and detail people, respectively— don’t often go together. Notably, the making of a fur coat calls on both sensibilities.
As does the web development. Of course when I took that test, the web lay thirteen years in the future, and then it took me nine more years to discover it. But now that I’ve discovered it, I’m happy, relatively, and feel fed by what I do, as opposed to eaten by it, and so I feel lucky I didn’t kill myself.
I miss my grandfather, though, something terrible.
Eleven years ago I went on a long and ridiculous bike trip which to tell you the truth I’d rather not discuss right now. For many years after this trip, I worked on a book about the trip which I never finished to my satisfaction and which I’m also not discussing. However, today, while looking for something else, I found myself reading parts of this book and was struck by several stories I tell about meeting kids in parks. Here are three:
I sit in Cinderella’s carriage—an enormous, pumpkin-orange playground toy—scribbling in my journal. The metal seat is cool against my hamstrings.
A horde of kids approach; I hear them clamor atop the structure, screeching and singing, Oblivious to me in the shadows.
Then, abruptly, silence.
“Hey, there’s a man down there,” whispers a girl. “I don’t think we should disturb him.”
“No, you should disturb him,” I say, calling up through the hole in the roof. “He needs a little disturbance.”
The kids poke their heads inside from above and read all the graffiti aloud, taking special pleasure in spelling out the word fuck wherever it appears.
It appears often.
*
Walter Johnson city park. After watching a few run-filled innings of a girl’s softball game, I walk my bike to a nearby picnic table and begin on dinner. A young mother appears with her two small kids. The younger child, a boy, makes a dash for the swings.
“It’s dinner time!” shouts the woman. “You can play after!”
The boy ignores her, swinging.
“I’ve already told you once!”
The boy swings higher, throwing out his legs.
“If I have to come and get you, you’ll regret it!”
“Get it, regret it,” he sings. “Get it, regret it.”
The woman hands a bag of food to her daughter, strides up to the swings, plants herself directly before her son and in one motion wraps her arms around the boy’s legs, tackling him in mid-air. The boy, holding the chains with all his strength, twists violently, his forward momentum impeded. For a moment they are frozen like this, mother and son, as though posing for a photograph. Then the woman grasps the boy’s belt on either side, yanks him off the swing, plants him upright on the ground and smacks his butt, hard. Neither say a word, though both gasp frequently and loudly.
After a moment to re-adjust clothing and hair, the young mother leads the children to my table, apparently the only table in the park. I have the usual these days, macaroni and cheese with canned spinach; they have fast food hamburgers, french fries and soda. The woman maintains a steady stream of chatter, remarking on the nutritional value of my meal and periodically offering me their surplus condiments, little packets of mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup.
“Who cares!” cries the boy suddenly. “My daddy is fat!”
*
In the background of Shirley’s drawing, in the upper third, she sketches a tent, a campfire, a giant sun, a tree and some clouds. I stand in the foreground, holding my helmet in one tiny hand, a water bottle in the other. My pear-shaped face is longer than my torso and my smile is almost the size of my helmet. The dark hair of my chest is prominent and my glasses seem delicate and fragile. The clouds resemble waves, so that I seem to be standing underwater.
From Shirley Age 11, she writes in long-hand along the edge of the page.
Warren, her six-year old brother, is more of a minimalist. He draws two intertwined stick figures with big dopey smiles.
“Get it?” he snickers. “They’re humping. Get it?”
Back in 1999, Jaron Lanier, a leading figure in the history of Virtual Reality (he coined the term), proposed a revolutionary vehicle for archival storage: cockroaches. Lanier’s plan was to translate the contents of The New York Times Magazine into a form that could be stored in the DNA of cockroaches—eight cubic feet worth of cockroaches; about enough to fill the average refrigerator, including the various door shelves—
which would then be released at specified locations throughout Manhattan. After fourteen years of, you know, doing it, every cockroach in Manhattan would carry the archival information.
Lanier, who was not kidding around, submitted this proposal to an international competition sponsored by the New York Times Magazine to build a time capsule that would preserve information for a thousand years. In his insanely brilliant proposal, Lanier noted that the cockroaches would be able to survive nearly all conceivable bad-thing scenarios, including terrorist attacks, rising oceans, and ecological catastrophe.
The archival cockroach exceeds the materials specifications: it is water tight, impervious to changes in weather, easy to locate, impossible to destroy.
Because the archival cockroach will exist in so many copies, it will be easy to read the data without altering or destroying the archive. This is the most attractive aspect of the archival cockroach. No future historical revisionist will be able to locate and destroy each copy.
I know what you’re thinking: What if other cities adopt similar archival strategies so that cockroaches imbedded with an archive of, say, the Washington Post start, you know, bumping uglies with the cockroaches carrying the New York Times archive? Wouldn’t the resulting cockroaches end up storing an unreadable mishmash of more or less interchangable news pieces and sadistically difficult crossword puzzles?
Good point, you, but Lanier has it covered.
As significant sequence similarity is required for recombination to occur, genetic crossover between Washington Post and New York Times articles is extremely unlikely. Indeed, if crossover were to occur, an earlier of instance of plagiarism or reprinting would be implicated. At any rate, as long as each article is stored with its proper reference data, it will be possible for future historians to reconstruct both archives from a sample of roaches.
Makes sense to me. Or no less sense than the idea of preserving a complete archive of the New York Times Magazine for a thousand years. Not that it was Lanier who decided that one; no, that was decided by the competition’s sponsors at the New York Times Magazine.
Alas, the corporate corpus reaches everywhere else, so why not inside cockroaches? If nothing else, it would provide a postmodern twist to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Instead of becoming cockroaches, which in Kafka’s world leads to shame, failure, and finally death, we blithely transform the buggers into handy places to store old magazines.
No doubt it will happen, just you wait. However, for the present, Manhattan’s cockroach population is free to party all night without fear of having its DNA used as a latter day storage facility: Lanier’s proposal lost out to a metal sphere folded to look like a giant fortune cookie.
02 January 2002 | Shadows
The way I write is like this: I sit at my desk, at my computer, and think of what to say. When I think of something that seems half-right or half-interesting, a half-right or half-interesting thing to say, I type it into the computer, and then after typing it, I read it over and think about it. Sometimes I go back to the previous sentence or the beginning of the paragraph or even to the previous page and read what I wrote and think about it. This happens over and over. And along the way, at various junctures, I change things, then change things again, until I can’t think of anything else to change. The thing I write in the end, the thing I am left with, is sometimes revealing of something—sometimes, sometimes not—but it is never, I don’t think, what it pretends to be.
Thoughts, said Nietzsche, are shadows of our feelings: always darker, emptier, and simpler than these. And the written word, it strikes me, is a shadow of our thoughts.
I’ve been working on this piece for nearly an hour now, writing a clause or two, thinking about it, writing another, going back and changing what I’ve written, moving things around, deleting, deleting, deleting… How long did it take you to read it? Two minutes? How different it would seem if we were talking. For it appears, reading back, that I have a certain point in mind and am taking the shortest route available to making that point, when in fact I’ve been discovering things as I’ve gone, not knowing what I would find.
The newspapers would be in a pile in the foyer, if that is what that is called—the space between the two doors; the space where the mailboxes were.
They had, the papers did, apartment numbers written on them with black marker, which always struck me as rude because what if you wanted to read an article and this article had this big black number right through it? Although perhaps I am remembering this wrongly in that perhaps the delivery person wrote the number above the masthead, in the big open space up there, rather than directly over the articles, which the more I think about it is probably what that person did.
Of the eight apartments, four received the Boston Globe, two the New York Times and one the Wall Street Journal, with the two Times people also being Globe people, so that in sum five apartments received one or more papers.
I favored the Times, although to reduce the chance of taking multiple papers from one apartment, I sometimes read the Globe from the two apartments that received the Globe only, and even occasionally read the Wall Street Journal.
I lived on the third floor.
I don’t know why I mentioned that.
Generally I “operated” in the late morning, after most people had left for work or school or wherever they left for.
My “cover” was that I was checking my mail. Thus I brought my mail key. If someone appeared suddenly, I would switch to checking my mail.
Sometimes I checked my mail anyway, since the mailboxes were right there.
Whatever else I wore, I always wore a sweatshirt so that I had a place to conceal the paper on my way back to my apartment. The way I did this was that I would tuck one end of the paper into the front of my pants and pull the sweatshirt over. The whole operation took perhaps three seconds; I practiced it in my room with a folded magazine.
The key moment was when I was holding the inner door open behind me with my foot and was about to grab the paper. This was key because once I grabbed a paper, it could happen that the outer door would be opened by someone coming in and I would be found standing there, foot in door, paper in hand, busted. There was no way to eliminate this risk; it was built into the configuration of the space. I once considered opening the outer door first, to see if anyone was coming up the front stairs, only it struck me that a person could always appear from the other direction, down the stairs, which would be worse in the sense that I would not necessarily see or even hear this person coming, facing, as I was, the opposite direction.
Of course I never intended to steal the papers; I intended to borrow them.
The way I thought of it was that a newspaper doesn’t any lose value when read by more than one person. Compare this to a pie, which is diminished with every bite.
Granted, there were times when I would for whatever reason neglect to replace a paper before my neighbors began returning from work, in which case it seemed better not to return that paper at all, as it might happen that someone might find a previously missing paper and realize that someone had stolen it for a day, as opposed to thinking that perhaps the newspaper person had fucked up. It was shameful, but in cases such as these, I preferred to have the newspaper person fall under suspicion. Of everything, this was worst thing. I didn’t feel so bad about the stealing, for it didn’t feel like stealing, it felt like forgetting; but this business with the newspaper person was difficult to reconcile.
In what was some kind of miracle, no one ever put a note on the inside door saying: HEY, FUCKBALL, STOP STEALING MY PERSONAL NEWSPAPERS!
I confess I was expecting this and more or less planned to stop once the note appeared. But it never did.
And I am perhaps implying a greater frequency of “thefts” than actually occurred.
Still, it happened, I can’t deny that.
And when it did, I faced the problem of what to do with the inadvertently stolen paper, once read. I solved this by hiding it in the recycling bin between a mass of other recyclable paper so that a., my roommates wouldn’t ever see it there, particularly the apartment number written in black on the front page, and b., so that it wouldn’t appear on top of the pile when we emptied the bin into the big recycling bin out back, the one that got wheeled out to the curb on recycling day.
I didn’t think of this then, but it occurs to me now that someone could have gone through the big recycling bin and found the missing papers and had proof of what was happening and also possibly figured out which apartment was responsible based on the surrounding papers in the recycling bin. Only this too never happened.
Anyway, the reason I went to all this trouble to do this was not because I was too cheap to buy my own subscription (instead of subscription, I just wrote prescription), but because I was hopelessly addicted to reading the newspaper, particularly the sports section, which I would read in its entirety, even the horse racing page, and then hate myself for doing, which is to say that I didn’t want to receive my own paper because I knew that I would read it every day, even the days I left early for work, as opposed to just the days I happened to be around to steal my neighbor’s papers, that’s the reason.
