April 2002
29 April 2002 | Haiku
The buzzer in my building works by radio signal. When someone pushes the buzzer downstairs, it sends a signal to the receiver in my apartment, which produces a buzzing sound. Unfortunately the people in the next building have the same system, so whenever someone buzzes their door, it rings in my apartment as well. Since I receive so few visitors, I usually assume that the buzzer is for them and ignore it. There are only two exceptions: when I’m expecting a delivery or when I’m expecting my now ex-girlfriend. When it’s my now ex-girlfriend, or when it was, she would let herself in with the key she still has and I’d go out in the hall and wait for her at the top of the stairs.
I liked doing that. I could hear her steps as she approached. When she made the turn one floor below, I’d say, “Hi, sweetie,” and she’d pause and look up and say, “Hi, sweetie.” I liked that.
When the buzzer buzzed just now, I had the idea that it was her, that she somehow knew that I cried in the shower until the hot water ran out and that I wrote a new haiku for her, the first in a long while (for first five months or so, I wrote her at least one haiku a day). I hurried into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs.
The stairs were filled with silence. I waited a long time, telling myself that perhaps she standing on the first stair, paralyzed with fear. I tried to listen for her breathingwas ; it was so quiet I figured that I would be able to hear her breathing, assuming she was down there. But she wasn’t down there. I know this because I finally went and looked for her. She wasn’t there. I knew she wasn’t there before I went, but I went anyway, because you never know. Or perhaps you do know, but still.
When I returned to my apartment, I disconnected the buzzer.
Each room has several doors, and each door has a sign. I don’t know what the signs say. It’s possible that I take the signs from room to room and hang them on the doors.
An interesting fact about the building: A room not entered vanishes. So if you walk into a particular room and turn back, the room you return to is no longer the room you left.
When deciding between rooms, I open the doors one by one and peer in. The rooms change each time I look, then change once again once I enter them. Despite this, I always look.
Long ago I tried to construct a model of the building in my head. I stopped doing this when I realized the building kept changing in defiance of my model.
I don’t really want to talk about the thing I was just working on. In fact I’d like to get as far away from it as possible.
Before returning to it.
The idea, and maybe this is just an excuse to not have to think about it for ten minutes, is that things look different when you go away and come back. Even if you’re just gone for ten minutes. No matter how many times this happens, I’m always surprised by it—unnerved, even. You come back and it’s like you’re looking at a different thing.
Makes you wonder how much of what you see is a function of how you’re looking.
I mean, we’re all aware, more or less, that it’s “all in our heads,” or whatever, but it’s another thing to see this in action.
Anyway, fine, I just wanted to mention something about my penis.
That’s what seduced me away from that other thing: this thought about my penis. I actually had it this morning, after peeing. I was about to run a few errands and figured I should pee first. So I peed—which is no big deal, obviously; one pees all the time—however this time I managed to get a few sprinkles of urine on my pants. This happens to me sometimes: I pee on myself.
The way it happens is… Well, my penis has this teeny-tiny little fold thing on the—fuck, now I have to check—right side of the opening.
(I was going to qualify that and say “I mean, the right side from my perspective,” but then I realized that we always describe a person’s parts from his/her perspective. Does this rule extend to things? If you’re looking at a chair, what do you call the armrest on the right—the right armrest or the left? For some reason, I can’t figure this out right now.)
I’m not sure if this fold thing is a regular feature of penises or if it’s particular to mine, but I’m guessing the former. That is, it looks to me like a thing that more or less belongs there and probably even serves a function. Yes, yes, its function is plain: it seals the hole, preventing leaks.
Seen this way, it’s a clever bit of engineering. However, as I was reminded this morning, there’s a downside. Sometimes the little fold gets stuck shut—most often, if this isn’t obvious, because of a drop of dried semen (yes, America, I sometimes get semen on the tip of my penis). When this happens, the stream of pee has to break through the seal (that is, assuming I forget to open the opening beforehand, which I often do). It doesn’t take much force to break through, thankfully, but in that split-second of breaking through the pee sometimes deflects off the half-open fold and goes leftward and downward, landing on the left leg of my pants, usually just above the knee.
We’re talking about a few sprinkles here, but of course it’s enough to make one want to remain in one’s apartment until the evidence has dried.
This is precisely what happened this morning, and when it happened I wondered if it’s the sort of thing that happens to other men. Probably it is. Probably I’m going to be deluged with emails confirming that men the world over are peeing on themselves right and left, depending on the location of the fold.
Ah, the fold! Is it always on the right? That’s another question I’d like answered.
Also, it must be acknowledged, since I’m on this subject, that the opening looks more like a mouth than a real mouth does. One time (I’m not naming names) a lover used mine to deliver an improvised monologue. You had to be there, of course, although I’m rather glad you weren’t.
15 April 2002 | Gambit
Yesterday I woke up and realized I don’t have anything to say. For some time now I’ve been feeling tired of myself and my problems. I had this plan to make a quiz for April 15th called Which Tax Form Are You? Various friends contributed questions, some quite funny. An example (this one I wrote):
If you had to lose one sense, which would it be?
- Sense of decency
- Sense of proportion
- Sense of humor
- Sense of possibility
That’s pretty good, right? Anyway, I like it. Of course you may wonder what this has to do with tax forms. Well, not a damn thing, which was going to be part of the charm. Yesterday, however, I bailed; I just couldn’t muster enough “charm” energy.
It makes me wonder if I should take a break from writing, just stop thinking for a while.
After working out this morning, I stopped at the local produce store to pick up bananas and orange juice. While the cashier was ringing up my order, I looked up and saw myself in the surveillance monitor above the register.
I don’t look like myself from that angle. Or I suppose I do look like myself, but it’s not the me I’m used to seeing, the one who faces me in the bathroom mirror, the one I sneak looks at in car windows and such. And then there’s the weird effect of turning your head one way and having the guy in the monitor turn his head a different way, although the same amount.
The interesting thing is that I was shoplifting. I hadn’t realized it. In the monitor it was plain. With my left hand I reached under the counter and grabbed a candy bar, apparently at random, and slipped it into my left jacket pocket. I watched myself do this three times. It was clever too, because my body blocked the cashier from seeing. Plus I looked up the whole time (at the monitor!), this being a classic magician’s gambit to draw attention away from the action.
12 April 2002 | Mallet
The woman upstairs (I’m at Rachel’s) is screaming at her kid. I can’t tell what she’s screaming this time, because I’m in the living room and you can’t really hear that well from the living room. The place to hear her from is Rachel’s bedroom, particularly at three o’clock in the morning when all else is quiet.
At three o’clock in the morning, she’s usually screaming stuff like, “GET. BACK. IN. BED. NOW.” Evidently her kid wakes up and wants to sleep with her and her husband. You have to hear this woman scream to know how scary it is. You feel she might as well be clobbering the kid with a mallet.
The kid cries the whole time; wails, really. When it gets to be too much for the woman, she switches to screaming at him to stop crying—“STOP. CRYING. STOP. CRYING. STOP. CRYING.”—which as you can imagine does a fuck of a lot of good.
We’d take turns reading to each other while having sex. If you were the reader, the idea was the keep reading. Whoever read longer without stopping won.
What we read was unimportant; it could have been anything; we even used the phone book once, as a goof.
I don’t think I ever lost this game. She wasn’t very good at it, or at any game, really. Not that she didn’t enjoy playing. It was the kind of game (bowling is like this, although for different reasons) you didn’t need to be good at to enjoy.
*
She would often talk during sex—a kind of continuous commentary, like an announcer at a race track, but more associative.
I listened less to the words than the feeling. Probably this is always so, but here it was exaggerated.
*
Sometimes she would type things on my back. We didn’t have to be having sex for her to do this, but I can’t remember her doing it out of bed.
She was an extraordinary typist: over 100 words a minute, and accurate.
I don’t believe she knew she was doing it. Her fingers would form the words by themselves, without her conscious direction or awareness.
As much as I wanted to know what she was typing, I didn’t dare ask her. What if my asking made her self-conscious? Instead I’d try to follow the pattern of the touches—a hopeless task.
I had the idea—the dream, really—that she was typing her secret thoughts to me. Things like: “I love you and can’t tell you I love you, because to say that, I lose you. I have to pretend I don’t love you, and that you don’t love me, so I always have you.”
There were other possibilities—“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” for example—which I preferred to ignore.
09 April 2002 | Upgrade
There’s something wrong with my email program. It was working fine until I decided to upgrade. Never upgrade unless you absolutely have to; bad things happen.
Everything seemed okay until I received this bizarre email from my ex-girlfriend Barbara. It was an invitation to a party she was having. At first I thought it was just some generic invitation, but then once I started reading I realized this couldn’t be true.
It went:
The only reason I’m inviting you to my party is because I’m worried if I don’t invite you, you’ll hear about from someone else and realize I don’t want you to come, which I don’t, only I can’t let you know that because it makes me look like a person who was hurt by you, which I am, only that’s intolerable for me, to be exposed like that, so I’ve decided to pretend I’d like you to come, or maybe don’t totally mind you come, when really I’m praying you have the good sense to ignore this invitation and stay the fuck away.
Barbara had never sent me anything even remotely like this. It’s just not her style. Her style is: pretend that nothing ever happened. So the only thing I could think was that it was mistake, that Barbara wrote it as some kind of therapeutic exercise, but then got carried away and accidentally clicked SEND. It happens. And if it happened in this case, I figured that Barbara must have felt like shit about it. To be exposed like that is really her worse nightmare.
The more I thought about this, the sadder I became. You don’t stop caring about a person after a certain number of months apart. And of course I couldn’t help thinking about the moment that Barbara recognized her mistake. That’s always the worst: when you see what you’ve done and realize it can’t be undone. I’ve seen Barbara want to hurt herself at such times.
It took me a good hour to write a response. I kept typing things and deleting them. My idea was to try to convince her between the lines that her email hadn’t been a mistake, since I hadn’t realized it was a mistake and since my reaction was the best possible reaction to such an email, mistake or not. In the end I was left with just four brief sentences:
I received your email today. More than anything, I appreciate your candor.
Suffice it to say, I won’t be coming to your party.
This is all.
Between the time I sent this off to Barbara and the time I received her response, I imagined that I’d done a good, caring thing. That’s really what I thought. Certainly I never dreamed it would inspire the reaction it did:
I have an idea, sweetie. Why don’t you bring your new girlfriend along and fuck her on the couch? I think everyone would enjoy that immensely.
Then you can feel bad about it, and tell everyone how badly you feel, particularly since we used to have sex on the same couch.
This was too much. It was as though it’d been written by someone other than Barbara. Not that Barbara would never think such things; she very well might. But I simply couldn’t believe she’d express them to me.
I went into my OUT box to re-read the email I’d sent her. For it occurred to me that maybe I’d said something hurtful between the lines, not intending to. It didn’t seem likely; I’d been very careful in choosing my words, but at this point I really didn’t what it think.
This was dead end of course. My email to her was nothing if not respectful.
I went back and read Barbara email again, then scrolled down, intending to read her original email, the one that started all this, only I soon saw something that made me stop. Right under her latest email, in the place where my email to her should have been, was this:
> If you don’t want to invite me to your
> party, don’t invite me to your party.
> Like I fucking want to come to your
> party. What for, so that you can find
> new ways to shit on me?
>
> It’s only because I’m a total idiot that
> I hold out hope that you’ll one day
> treat me like a human being and
> stop blaming me for something that
> was nobody’s fault.
I recognized these sentiments immediately. They were my thoughts on receiving Barbara’s first email.
The rest should be obvious. I trashed my email program and re-installed the original application, without the upgrade. It was the upgrade that had caused the problems.
I don’t know when I’m going to learn to wait until they work out the bugs with these things. For some reason I feel I have to have the latest version, or else I’m going to miss some cool feature. Never again.
08 April 2002 | Uds
A woman is sitting too close to me. We’re on the J train. There are just ten people in the car including me and her. I think she’s crazy. She came in and sat down right next to me as though that were the only available seat, when really she could have had a whole row to herself.
I have two more stops and have decided to wait her out. She’s definitely crazy. When I moved my bag onto my lap, she slid closer, filling in the space between us. Occasionally she stamps her foot, the right one, hard.
Right now she’s looking at what I’m writing. I’m leaving out letters so she doesn’t understand. For example, the previous sentence reads, “I’m le out lts so sh ds uds.”
06 April 2002 | Song
I’ve been listening to the same song over and over, and crying. As I listen, I imagine the singer is Rachel. “Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken lovelorn on your rocks.”
There’s a recurring theme in my writing of a man who does not know himself, or who fears he does not. Sometimes it seems like I’m tracing something, circling something. Am I too close to see it? Would I choose to see it if I could? Is there anything there to see, or am I merely tracing, circling an absence?
Song to the Siren (2.9 mb)
On the floating, shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
til your singing eyes and fingers
drew me loving into your eyes.
And you sang “Sail to me, sail to me;
Let me enfold you.”
Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you.
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?
Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken lovelorn on your rocks.
For you sang, “Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow.”
Oh my heart, oh my heart shies from the sorrow.
I’m as puzzled as a newborn child.
I’m as riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or shall I lie with death my bride?
Hear me sing: “Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you.”
“Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you.”
04 April 2002 | Gone
I was gone for six years. To the ones I had left, I could have been dead, they did not know, for I did not speak to them. When I came back at last, one of my sibs, a girl, was no longer a girl but grown. It was like a time, long past, in which a girl who played a girl on a show—a show of six sibs in a bunch—was gone one day and a new girl took her place. None of the sibs looked at the new girl as though she was strange to them. And that was strange. I would sit and watch and think, “Don’t they see that she is strange?” But if she seemed strange to them, none showed it.
My own sib gave me pics of her in the years I had missed. I put them down so that each year was next to the next, as the years had come. The first pic was from when she was girl and I was still with her. The last was from the day I came back. I would look at the pics from one to the next and try to grasp how this could be. But I could not. To me my sib was gone, and this new girl, a grown one, had come in her place.
03 April 2002 | Emperor
I am troubled. Yesterday one of my favorite websites, The Morning News, debuted a new design and a new direction. They’ve decided to make the site into what they call a broadsheet, which they describe as having something to do with all boats rising together.
I’m a part of this, actually, having signed on as a contributing writer, along with four other writers I rather respect the hell out of: Josh Allen, Paul Ford, Kevin Guilfoile, and Dennis Mahoney.
As part of the re-launch, TMN editors Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack wrote a piece explaining the rationale behind the changes. They also introduced their new slate of contributing writers, using a single adjective to describe each. Josh is prolific, Paul elusive, Kevin cunning, and Dennis gentlemanly.
I am troubled.
The troubled Michael Barrish.
Reading this felt a bit like overhearing someone gossip about you. So this is what folks think.
My first thought was that they’d gotten it wrong. Paul is the troubled one, I told myself. They only called him elusive because they needed to call someone elusive, and lord knows I’m not elusive. They perhaps considered calling Josh elusive, only that would have left prolific and troubled for me and Paul, and lord knows Paul is more prolific than I’ll ever be. I could perhaps have been cunning, I thought, only my brand of cunning is so cunning than no one even realizes how cunning it is. Besides, this would have left Kevin with troubled, and Kevin is too cunning to be troubled.
I report all this with a smile. I knew why they called me troubled. Still, it was a bit unnerving. After all, troubled is a negative word. We speak of troubled children, by which we mean children with mental or emotional problems. Another word for this is disturbed.
The disturbed Michael Barrish.
It goes on: troubled expressions, troubled areas, troubled sleep.
To be troubled would appear to be troubling, but I can’t say it feels that way.
My favorite story as a child was The Emperor’s New Clothes. I fancied myself the child, of course, the one who sees things for what they are.
Very little has changed in thirty plus years. To my own mind, I’m still that child. About the only difference now is the emperor. Yes, he still parades around in nothing, telling himself it is something, and a magnificent something at that. The only difference is who he is.
He is me.
02 April 2002 | Will
On Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, a couple having two conversations at once.
Him: Kurt Cobain died almost eight years ago. I read it on the wall in the restaurant.
Her: You and I might die tomorrow.
Him: If someone had asked me, I would have said he died four years ago, tops.
Her: Do you have a will?
Him: I have a way. Anyway, Kurt Cobain was a genius. I still remember the first time I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Her: I don’t have a will either.
Him: Neither did Kurt Cobain. But I’m pretty sure he wrote a suicide note.
01 April 2002 | #1
Several readers responded to my failed attempt to steal a duck sign by writing to tell me that stealing is wrong. Although these emails didn’t come as a surprise, my reaction to them has. Before I get to that, here’s a quote from one of the more forceful and articulate emails, written by Jay Perkins:
Presumably the duck sign is there for a reason, maybe so people are
alerted to the presence of ducks and don’t run them over? I guess you
feel it’s more important to satisfy a juvenile urge than to respect or care about the lives of defenseless animals, whose only protection on that road is said sign.
Besides which, it’s not yours to take. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is called ‘stealing’, and whether you get caught or not, ‘stealing’ is morally reprehensible, especially for such unnecessary and idiotic reasons as yours appear to be.
From your picture, you don’t look like an eight year old, so you might try not acting/thinking like one. Grow up.
I was at Rachel’s when I read this, and was wearing only my underwear. I had meant to check if a certain client had written, then jump in the shower, but instead found myself mesmerized by Jay’s email. I began various responses, none of which captured my thoughts, for my thoughts kept changing.
Eventually Rachel appeared and asked why I was sitting there in my underwear. I showed her the email. In short order she voiced the same arguments I’d previously written and deleted, and in more or less the same sequence. And on each point I felt she was wrong, and told her so. What she was doing, and what I had done earlier, was scrambling for justification of her own self-serving behavior.
The most interesting part of this was how Rachel’s tactics mirrored my own. Evidently there are three things you can do in such a situation:
- Minimize the wrong
- Attack the accuser
- Defend your character
(I was going to add “Place the blame elsewhere,” but I think that’s covered by “Minimize the wrong.”)
It’s worth noting that I’ve never been one for the rule of law. Fact is, I respect the law only in the sense that I can be punished for breaking it. The only laws that matter to me – and these matter quite a bit – are the ones I make for myself.
One such law or rule (this may sound strange in the present context) is that stealing is wrong, particularly when one steals for what Jay Perkins calls “unnecessary and idiotic reasons.” And it doesn’t matter that one’s accuser is a righteous jerk, or that little harm comes from the theft, or that one is fundamentally moral. It’s still wrong.
When Rachel asked me to help her steal the duck sign, I weighed that wrong against my desire to play hero, and decided to play hero. It was a purely selfish decision. I make such decisions all the time, and for no better reason than that I feel like it.
When pressed to defend my actions, I invariably resort to the three-point approach above, leaning heavily on “minimize the wrong.” You can get a lot of mileage out of “minimize the wrong.”
Of course I’m not just speaking about duck signs here, nor only about myself. The same self-serving logic used to justify petty theft is used to justify the destruction of the planet. People do what they want, then find reasons to justify it.
Except for Jay Perkins. Jay Perkins is a paragon of righteousness.
That was a joke. See #1 above.
Okay, it wasn’t totally a joke.
*
Addendum: Jason cut through the crap and found a nice duck sign available online. He wrote: “Why steal when you can buy?” Thanks, Jason.
