May 2002
I once rode a bus into the Berkeley Hills, to the state park up there, while tripping, mildly, on mushrooms. It was a resplendent day, a day much like this one, and I was the only person on the bus besides the driver. With my journal open on my lap, I was scribbling statements on the subject on lostness, the sort of things I always think when I’m tripping—“you can only be lost when you wish to be elsewhere,” “to be lost is to lack a story for where you are,” etc.—when I struck on the idea of addressing my future self, the one who would return to these words one day, in pursuit of wisdom or some such, whatever compels one to return to one’s old journals.
It’s now been nine years. Here’s what I wrote, using giant, child-like letters:
HELLO, MICHAEL-READING-THIS-IN-THE-FUTURE. WHY DON’T YOU GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK AT THINGS FOR A CHANGE? YOU HAVE AN INTERESTING MIND BUT WHERE DOES IT GET YOU?
20 May 2002 | Swing
Had another dream about you. In the manner of dreams, you didn’t look like you, nor did I realize you were you until after the fact.
We were playing miniature golf at my childhood miniature golf course and you insisted on taking a full swing on every shot. That right there should have told me something.
Although this was miniature golf, you had a caddie who followed us from hole to hole. I think now that he was your boyfriend (your waking-life boyfriend, not your dream boyfriend; I was your dream boyfriend). He would estimate yardage and hand you your club. No matter how far it was, he always gave you the same club (you only had one), and you always swung as hard you could.
At the sixteenth hole, a complicated deal involving a mechanical Shiva whose arms and legs rotated at different speeds, you kissed me, or laid your mouth on mine, to stop me from speaking. Actually, it was the latter: you laid your mouth on mine. It was only after a time that one could say we were kissing.
I didn’t really dream this.
19 May 2002 | Mofo
A thoughtful reader informed me yesterday that Oblivio is now the #1 search result on Google for the word motherfucker.
Choosy motherfuckers choose Oblivio.
It’s all because of a piece I wrote back in September (Motherfucker, by name) in which I explained my decision to change Oblivio into whatever it has become and also to build a separate website for my web development work so that, in part, I would be free to write the word motherfucker as many times as I wanted.
Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.
When I went to Google to confirm the news, I discovered several other top “motherfucker” sites, including one for the band Motherfucker, “the only truly open, absolutely insane, psycho sexual, rock’n roll extravaganza left in New York City.” This site was #2 in the rankings. I particularly enjoyed the graphics.
At #6 was an essay about household explosives called Celebrating Independence Like a Bad Motherfucker. The author, one seanbaby (the piece is a part of seanbaby.com, a four star recommendation for both profane beauty and beautiful profanity (don’t miss Angry Letters from Angry Christians!)), believes that everyone should build and own household explosives, and explains how. I found his arguments refreshing: “We should know by now that America’s freedom needs to be celebrated with the most life-threatening devices we’re able to build. To hell with a few dumbasses firecracking their fingers off. Do you think Abraham Lincoln would have put up with British taxes just to keep you with the correct number of fingers on your dumbass hand?”
#10 concerned Motherfuckers International, which appears to be a legitimate organization in the sense that it exists, or at least has a website saying it does. If nothing else, it has rules, to wit: “If you lose your Motherfucker ID (or need a new one due to theft) and all other membership info is unchanged, you must reregister and pay the $10 fee to get a new one—check ‘Get New Motherfucker ID’ at the bottom of the form. This safeguards you from another Motherfucker getting your Motherfucker ID through trickery.” Evidently some Motherfuckers are attempting to obtain their IDs through trickery—a sad commentary on the state of our motherfucking culture.
Seriously, I can’t think of a word I’d rather be linked to than motherfucker. Every so often, I return to Google to make sure it’s still #1.
It still is. I know this because I just checked.
Ah, and now I just checked again. Still there.
It might take me a little while to adjust to this.
Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker!
I had a dream about you.
You came into my grandparents’ house.
You had a wound on your head, I think.
That is, I think it was on your head.
We had arranged to meet somewhere.
Waiting for me, you had gotten hurt, I don’t know how.
Besides your head, if it was your head, your nipples were exposed and possibly bleeding.
I was supposed to meet you on a bridge in a car.
I had tried to get there, but there’d been all these cars behind me, honking.
A few blocks past the bridge, I tried to make a U-turn and ended up on the curb.
I think this was the night after meeting you.
When I had this dream, I mean.
I don’t know when it was in the dream.
Probably not any time in particular.
Or several times at once.
Later we had sex, in some sense.
This part is fuzzy.
We were on the floor of my grandparents’ dining room.
Which didn’t look like their dining room.
Mostly we just held each other.
Then I woke and made myself say everything into my tape recorder.
I haven’t transcribed it yet, nor even listened to it.
I remember lying there in the dark, telling it.
The little red light on my tape recorder.
How difficult it was to speak.
14 May 2002 | Grate
I still feel bad about this. I think it happened in Dalhart, Texas or maybe Guyman, Oklahoma, some place hot and flat like that. As dusk came on, I bicycled through a residential area (some house-like shapes pass, in memory, on my left) until I came to what was probably an elementary school. Schools were often good places to sleep behind, better even than used auto parts stores and the like, for there was usually an athletic field in back. Unfortunately this particular school was surrounded on all sides by cement. I rode into a courtyard (this too was cement) and set up my tent behind a trash dumpster. It was ugly and it smelled, but at least I was hidden: one would have needed to walk halfway into the courtyard to see me there. After unloading my bags, I cooked dinner on my little camp stove (macaroni and cheese with a can of spinach stirred in) and studied my maps… the usual routine.
Soon, though, I faced a problem: where to shit. Since the idea of looking for a better place struck me as stupid (I not only doubted I would find anything, but feared being seen leaving or re-entering the courtyard), I shat into a spare plastic bag, then wrapped this in a second plastic bag and placed both under some cardboard boxes in the dumpster. (It’s strangely comforting to hold a bag of one’s shit in one’s hands, to feel the heft of it; don’t ask me why.)
Anyway this part I feel fine about: my shit was carted away with the trash and no one was harmed. But then I needed to pee.
Between my tent and the dumpster was a metal grate. Best I could tell, there was a big piece of machinery under the grate, probably an air conditioning unit. I peed through the grate.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I did this. Or do I know. It was something like: “My god do I need to pee.” I chose the grate because I didn’t want to smell my urine all night; otherwise I would have peed on the cement. Fact is, I could have found a patch of grass somewhere if I tried. Pissing in public after dark is not that difficult to pull off, particularly in a place like Dalhart, Texas or Guyman, Oklahoma or wherever I was. But I was too lazy to do it. Which means in all likelihood that a janitor had to clean up my mess, which couldn’t have been much fun.
That is, assuming he figured out where the smell was coming from.
Like I say, I’ve never been proud of this.
13 May 2002 | Prison
Years ago at a holiday party hosted by a friend’s well-to-do parents, I found myself standing with a group of people discussing crime. A woman said something about how people in prison haven’t had many opportunities in life and that that’s why they’re in prison—something by-the-book liberal like that—at which point another woman offered the group tangelo slices, so I took a slice and said, “Now, this is an opportunity I can’t pass up.” “You’re making fun of me,” said the first woman, whose name was Pamela and whose disability (cerebral palsy, I believe) twisted her body in several directions at once and made her sound like she was… well, retarded, which I soon realized she wasn’t. I touched her arm and said, “No, not at all.” Subsequently I made an effort to show her that I liked her, only it soon became clear that she was liking me back a little too much. I temporarily escaped her gaze by excusing myself to go the bathroom (I didn’t actually need to go and instead simply walked to the other side of the apartment). When I returned, Pamela waved me over to introduce me to her mother, who was sitting on the couch eating hor d’oeuvres. At some point in this conversation, Pamela gave me her card and mentioned the possibility of us having dinner. I wish I could remember how she said this, for it was brilliantly done. Somehow she posed it as a general question, something like “Do you think that people like us can have dinner together?” or “People can dinner together, can’t they? Like us, for example!” No, this isn’t how she said it. But however she said it, I ignored it and instead complimented her on the design of her plain-as-toast business card, which as it turned out was her mother’s creation. We discussed the possibility of her hiring me to make a website for her disability consulting business, and her mother asked how much it would cost. I said, “Well, I generally work with my girlfriend, who is a graphic designer. We’d need to sit down with Pamela to get a sense of the scope of the project.” The girlfriend part was a lie, but I felt I had to find a way to tell Pamela not to like me. I am a consummate liar, but I’m not so sure I pulled this one off, in part, as I imagine it, because Pamela had heard such lies again and again. The look on her face, one of trying not to betray her emotions, was excruciating. I excused myself on the pretext of getting my card, which I said was in my bag in the bedroom (in truth it was in my pocket). When I returned, Pamela’s mother was alone with her hor d’oeuvres. I never asked where Pamela had gone.
09 May 2002 | Form
Long ago I noted that every woman has a form or shape that is repeatedly expressed, fractal-like, in all her features and at all levels of her, for lack of a better word, anatomy. Her forearm is the same as her nose which is the same as her clitoris which is the same as her thumb and calf.
It’s not just a physical thing; the form is no less explicit in her personality. Or perhaps it is her personality—her personality given physical expression.
Poetical exaggeration? Certainly. And yet when I cast my mind back, I see nothing but proof.
08 May 2002 | Corner
It’s late and I’m in bed, remembering things.
My elementary school playground was divided into two sections: the white top and the black top. The school itself was shaped like an L, with the white top occupying the crux of the L, and the black top bordering the white top. This would be easier if I drew it.
The school had five grades. Only the older kids, fifth graders mostly, ever ventured into the black top. Not all the older kids, but some.
One day during recess, I think while I was in third grade, the most wretched grade of all, I followed the fence to the end of the blacktop, to the corner farthest from the school. This may have been the bravest thing I’ve ever done. It was rumored that certain kids, possessed of a badness beyond comprehension, would slide under the fence here and run to the 7-11. And it may be have been true, for there was sufficient space to slide under.
I have no memory of what I did in that corner. All I can remember—and this may be something I’ve added after the fact—is watching tiny tornados of trash rise off the ground and wondering how the hell I was ever going to get back to the school, which appeared to be far away, almost impossibly far, and receding into the distance.
06 May 2002 | Lonely
Only one balloon remains. There were two balloons once, then three, then two again. I considered saying something when the third balloon disappeared, but what was there to say? A balloon is gone.
Both missing balloons must have broken off and fallen into the yard. A string dangles from the branch where the most recent one had hung. When I saw this, I wondered what a person who puts stock in “signs” would say, what meaning might be “found” there.
Anything and everything, I’d imagine.
A friend once worked on a film with a famous actor/writer/director. The actor/writer/director hit on her for a week, praising her “artistic vision” and saying how he wished he had a ring to give her (he was married to his fourth wife at the time).
My friend was torn. She knew he was full of shit, but she was also attracted to him, this famous actor/writer/director. So she went for a walk looking for signs. Along the way she spotted two dead birds and an upturned dead beetle. The beetle decided it. She appeared at the actor/writer/director’s office and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re not having an affair.”
“What are talking about?” he said. “Don’t you realize how I feel about you?”
“You said you believe in signs.”
“Yes.”
“I saw signs in town.”
“What signs?”
“Dead birds. A dead beetle.”
“This is the country. There’s dead shit everywhere!”
“The beetle was upturned.”
“Okay, that’s not good.”
(My friend discovered later that he propositioned three other female crew members before embarking on an affair with the make-up artist. Evidently, five is a lucky number.)
The remaining balloon, silver once, is now a dull gray. I hate to admit it, but it looks lonely without the blue one next to it.
03 May 2002 | Bomb
Once upon a time there was a nice lady named Leslie who had a website called hoopla.com which all the child loved because Leslie was a gifted writer with serious design chops. Then one day Leslie’s website was stolen from her by some bad people, no doubt because of the negligence of a company called Verisign which is the keeper of domain names and has a long history of fucking people over, largely, one imagines, because they wield absolute power in these matters and absolute power corrupts. (Actually, the truth is probably more pedestrian than that. Probably they’re just regular people like you and me, doing regular jobs like you and me, it’s just that their jobs happen to require them to ask people like Leslie to cut their thumbs off with butter knives.)
Now, does everyone know what a google bomb is? A google bomb is a method for exploiting a loophole in Google’s page ranking algorithm so that a particular web page appears at the top of Google rankings whenever a certain word or phrase is searched on. The first Google bomb was launched last year by Adam Mathes in a piece written for uber.nu. Adam asked his readers to link to his friend Andy Pressman’s site using the phrase “talentless hack.” Enough readers played along that Andy Pressman’s site soon became the #1 search result for “talentless hack.” A few months later Dean Allen, who is anything but a talentless hack, asked his readers to link to a certain page on his site using the phrase “fuck me.” That page is still the #1 search result for “fuck me.” (Go ahead, try it.)
Today Dean asked the world to link to a piece on his site describing Leslie’s plight. The phrase used to link? Verisign. Very soon, after all the angry children have added that link to their sites (preferably on the home page), the #1 search result for Verisign will be Dean’s piece.
Will this help Leslie get her website back? Will it help save her thumbs? I don’t know, but it certainly couldn’t make things any worse.
A special bonus joke, comprehensible only to Oblivio readers:
What did Andy Pressman’s lover say to him as Andy got into bed?
Fuck me like Verisign, you talentless hack.
01 May 2002 | Bridge
I’m standing at the bus stop singing I Saw Her Standing There and I’m excited because I just realized that if I sing an octave lower, I can hit the high note at the end of the bridge—“And I held her hand in mi-eee-ine”—and that it sounds almost sexy this way. A minute ago a woman sat on the bench behind me, so in deference to her, I’ve taken to singing the song under my breath, as they say, which strikes me as sexier still—I can barely resist myself when I sing this low, although I know from experience that I’m the only one so affected.
