September 2002
29 September 2002 | Spell
Her:
Him: Did you notice that you can include an email at the bottom, under where you click submit? This is my email.
Her: Take that.
Him: Fucking vowel salad. If I don’t get some consonants soon, I’ll… aaaaiiiiioouuueeeee!
Her: Excuses only highlight your mediocrity.
Him: It’s your move, girl. I pity you.
Her: Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Him: I’m cowering behind my scratching pole.
Her: Done with my left brain tied behind my back.
Him: Just you wait.
Her: I’m going to bed now. Thanks for letting me kick your sorry ass at online Scrabble tonight.
Him: Running away, eh?
Her: Morning, lover. Here’s a kiss.
Him: Well, baby, that’s a fucking amazing move. I find it…arousing. Whew.
Her: He is aroused by seven-letter words. Hmmm. Trying to imagine porn for him. Final rounds of spelling bees. Women reading Kant with their legs spread. Debby Does Dallas overdubbed with lines like, “He thrust his throbbing signifier into my dripping wet signified.”
Him: I had a slew of worse moves ready. You have made my ass a little less sorry this morning.
Her: I find it quaint that you are planning your moves in advance, but some of us have a life.
Him: And yet I put a spell on you.
Her: A happy spell.
Him: But dangerous.
Her: I’ll manage.
Him: I hadn’t realized this before, but I have come to the conclusion, particularly considering that you possess the last blank and that I am 23 points behind, that I have no life.
Her: Ah, the death blow.
Him: You’re lucky I didn’t have a better move on that last turn. It was a risky play to go for more points as opposed to getting rid of your letters, because of course the person who goes out first gets the other person’s remaining points, and the other person also gets those points subtracted from his/her score. You knew this, right?
Her: No, I didn’t know that. That was only my second game of Scrabble. :)
Him: Bitch.
28 September 2002 | Again
Again, so that it is remembered. You stand in a dark room looking at a round concave surface perhaps five feet in diameter. This surface sits on a three-legged stand in the center of the room; on the surface is an image of the ocean.
As you look, the image moves. It is like watching a film, but this is not a film; it is a magnified reflection of what you would see at that moment if you stood on the roof of the building and slowly spun, taking two or three minutes to complete a single rotation.
The image moves from right to left, so that it corresponds to what you would see if you spun the other way on the roof, left to right. I am not describing this right. The image itself does not move but change. In this respect it is, again, like a film, like watching a film; or perhaps like a window, like standing at a window and looking out on the ocean. But it is different than being at a window, for only a small section of the ocean is visible at any time.
Here is a way to see it. Imagine a room by the ocean with curved walls made entirely of glass. You stand in this room looking out, a large box over your head. The box has a sizable hole in front to look through, so that it serves as a kind of blinder, limiting your vision to what can be seen though the hole. You stand before the window with the box on your head, with your head inside the box, and slowly move along the perimeter of the room, stepping sideways. Imagine what you would see if you did this; this is what you would see in the dark room.
Of course the ocean is only half of it, for as you watch, the image reaches the place where the ocean ends—or where it begins, rather—and continues without pause up the shore. This is the progression: first a long slow pan across the ocean, and then the shore, and then trees, and then the buildings behind the building you are in, and then the shore on the other side, and then the ocean again, and across it.
The image is too light at first, but soon your eyes adjust. There are birds flying above the waves. From the shore you cannot see them, but here they are plain. Birds above the waves. It is like the part in the music when you come to a feeling you cannot come to any other way, a feeling that only the music makes possible, although you believe it is always there, this feeling, dormant, waiting for the music.
26 September 2002 | Biggz
whats the web site where yer ex is at, i wanna see those naked pics
Sincerely, Dustin Morris A.K.A. Biggz
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Doesn’t exist. I made that story up. I’m a writer.
-mb
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why would you make up fake journal entries? thats kinda strange
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Biggz, why would you make up a fake name? I bet it’s because Biggz allows you to be different from Dustin, right? Anyway that’s my guess.
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because my real name was already taken as an email
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I mean Biggz, Biggz. Why Biggz when you’re already Dustin?
—
well it was a nick name given to me in high school and it has stuck since then, so i use it a lot. not as an escape but as another part of me, to keep ahold of old memories i suppose. i take it u never had a nick name?
—
I’ve had a ton of nicknames, including Crump, Bloomers, Spike, and Misu (which means Little Bear).
But my point about yours is that it’s a little like me writing stories that aren’t true. Actually, it’s not really like that, so my point is not so good.
My real point is that stories are always made up, even when they’re about something that really happened. On my website I mix completely made-up stories (like Bookmark) with stories that are only partly made-up, and I don’t bother to say which are which, in part because deep down I’m not totally sure.
There are different senses of “true,” if you know what I mean. There’s the sense of “this really happened,” and then there’s the sense of “this gets at the essence of something.” I’m interested in both, but probably the last one more.
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so do you write these things becaue you wish they happened or because you wish they will happen because you write about them? i see your point though
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Biggz, that’s a fabulous question.
Sometimes I write about things because I wish they happened, or rather to
create a world in which they did happen. Bookmark, the story you read, is not a good example of this. I don’t want my ex-girlfriend to start doing online porn; I think it would make me sad. Although, whatever, if she got into that, I’m sure it would be interesting.
I wrote a different story called Poolhall which was about seeing my dead grandfather in a poolhall. That one, maybe, I’d want to be true. Although I’d want to change it so that the dead grandfather was the grandfather I actually liked. This means that the story wasn’t really what I would wish.
The second part of your question is interesting too: Do I write to make things happen? I think in a larger sense that’s true. I write in part to have people notice me and my thoughts, which I think are worth noticing. But that’s not what you meant. You meant do I write something so that the thing I write will come true? No, I’ve never done that.
Although, wait. I once wrote a story called Badger which was based my relationship with this awful woman I worked with. In the story the character based on me does secret things to torture the woman based on her and ends up driving her crazy. I didn’t really torture her in real life, nor even want to torture her, but I have to admit that writing the story made it a lot easier to deal with her. It was like I had got it all out in this other world, a world like the world of dreams, and so I didn’t have to feel so bad in this one. This is different from what you meant, but related.
Also, another time I wrote a story that besides being a story was also a message to the woman the story was inspired by (although the story wasn’t inspired by her so much as by my relationship with her), because at that time she wouldn’t talk to me or let me communicate with her in any way. This was true in the story as well: the woman wouldn’t let the man contact her. I got around this by posting the story on my website, where I knew she would eventually read it. Writers do this sort of thing all the time; it’s a perk. Filmmakers too. Like there’s this famous film by an Italian director, Fellini, that’s about a famous Italian film director who can’t figure out what to make his next film about. In one scene the director (who is played by this super-sauve Italian actor, someone way better-looking than Fellini) shows parts of his film-in-progress to some people including his wife. The parts he shows include this part about a beautiful actress who he, the director, is obviously obsessed with. We see the wife’s reactions to all this, and she’s got this fuck-you-asshole expression on her face, which you have to figure Fellini’s real wife does as well, somewhere, which is why Fellini included it: to tell his wife that he knows how she feels about his real-life obsession with such women—perhaps even with the actress who plays the filmmaker’s obsession in the film!
That’s all a bit complicated and doesn’t totally relate to your question. Anyway sorry about not having any pictures of my ex. Sometimes I wish.
23 September 2002 | Shovel 10
He had a board with letters on it which he would point to with this thing he held in his mouth. The mouth thing was u-shaped at one end, so that he could grasp it in his teeth.
He was dying and had once been the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. I learned these things from his wife, who appeared always about to cry, or having just cried, but never did cry.
I don’t remember what my job was, exactly. Probably feeding him and getting things. It didn’t last long because he died in just a few weeks. I got a call from his wife who said I didn’t need to come in anymore. I wasn’t sure if I had been fired or if he had died, but then a few days later I saw his picture in the paper.
I have only one memory. We were alone in his study and he was spelling something with his pointer. This may have been the first day. He had just spelled a word I didn’t know. First he had spelled the words DON’T BE SUCH A and then this word I didn’t know, so I had asked him to do it again. That’s what he was doing. I thought he seemed annoyed.
Here’s what he spelled:
N
E
B
B
I
S
H
18 September 2002 | Alana
I recently made it a goal to have Oblivio comply with every accessibility recommendation in existence. I did this partly to make the site more accessible, partly to educate myself about such matters, and partly because I couldn’t possibility do this on the commercial sites I develop. That’s a sad fact. Several key accessibility practices won’t fly in the commercial world because they reduce control over visual layout.
In large part inspired by (one might say shamed by) Mark Pilgrim’s bitchin’ series Dive into Accessibility, I decided it was time to set aside objections and do the right thing. I believe this resolution lasted all of five minutes, as I quickly realized what it meant. It meant clunky-looking text.
My first love, Alana, was a virgin when I met her. (This is supremely relevant to the discussion at hand, so bear with me.) We both were virgins, actually. I was sixteen and she was fifteen. When we broke up, two and a half years later, we weren’t virgins anymore. The transition wasn’t easy, although in another sense it was perfect, the perfect way to go through that.
Basically we talked. About each thing. Each step along the way. Interminably.
Our first such conversation concerned what was then called, and probably still is called, second base. (How do people in countries without baseball refer to second base? Do they use another metaphor? Do Eskimos speak of catching the bumpy fish or something?) Alana and I talked about second base for over a month. I would see her after class and we’d talk about it. I would come to her house in the evening and we’d talk about it. I would call her when I got home and… more talking.
I think the reason for all this talking was that I didn’t want Alana to do anything for me; I wanted everything to be mutually desired. Alana, meanwhile… I actually think she had some interest in the act, only she had trouble saying that. For me the verbal part was crucial. I needed to hear her say “yes,” or preferably “please do,” before preceding. A certain ambiguous arching of the back didn’t cut it.
So after a month of nothing but talking, we finally agreed to try it, finally, and then we tried it, finally, and it was a total disaster. Alana (I still remember her exact expression!) stared at the wall while I… did what I did. I stopped after maybe thirty seconds, heartbroken.
The next day Alana asked me to promise that I would never do that again. Ever. I agreed. Never again would I do that.
Two weeks later Alana surprised the hell out of me by suggesting we give it another try. So try it we did, and this time it seemed that my obsessive reading and re-reading of my father’s copy of The Sensuous Man paid off.
This pattern was to repeat itself at each stage. After first talking ourselves hoarse, we would at last give the new thing a try, only to discover how disgustingly pointless it was, whereupon we would swear it off forever. But then, after a period of reflection, or whatever the hell she was doing, Alana would announce her willingness to try again. These second tries were always the charm.
I mention all this because it precisely parallels the process I went through as I came to accept clunky-looking text on Oblivio.
At first I couldn’t bear it; it was out of the question; under no circumstances was my precious website going to look like that, et cetera, et cetera. And then after a few weeks of not thinking about it, I decided, What the fuck, fuck it, who cares.
This is how change happens. It happens in the dark, in spurts, to a person who doesn’t want it to happen.
As regards Oblivio, the process repeated a good half dozen times as I made change after painful change. (You can extrapolate the details of my suffering from my accessibility statement, itself a source of considerable anguish.) In this you might say I played Alana’s role, while my own role (the role I played as a teenager) was filled by the menschy Mark Pilgrim, with whom I corresponded in moments of despondence. Mark heard out my objections, offered solutions when possible, and generally just lent a sympathetic and technically-sophisticated ear.
Thank you, Mark Pilgrim; I couldn’t have done it without you.
And thank you, Alana; I couldn’t have done it without you either.
Seriously.
17 September 2002 | Thing
There was once a basketball player named Jeff Hornacek who was ugly but a very good shooter. Whenever he shot free throws, he would bounce the ball a certain number of times—the same number of times each time—and then he would rub his cheek with his right hand. This gesture was a signal to his kids that he loved them.
If you didn’t know this, you may have thought the gesture unconscious. A man looks at something, focusing all his attention on it, trying, as men do, to reduce the world to just this thing and him, and then without thinking he raises his hand to his face and slowly strokes his cheek a single time, as though to wipe something away, or more likely as an accompaniment to his thoughts, which are focused on the thing before him.
I’ve been thinking about this and wanting to find a symbol, a word, a gesture, anything that might stand in the place of the things not said. It would be for you, and it would mean a thing that only you would understand. To everyone else I would appear to be a man, the same as always, the same man as always, absently rubbing his cheek.
16 September 2002 | Piggyback
I don’t know what tears are for. Or rather, I do know; I just don’t know why they take the form they do.
Laughter consists of sound, mostly. Sound and a kind of convulsion. Why does crying include this extra thing?
I am not a biologist (ahem), but it would seem that crying and tearing (I mean the kind of tearing caused by irritants in the eye) share the same underlying mechanism. This would make evolutionary sense. Why develop a new mechanism when you can piggyback on another?
Tearing, I’m certain, came first. I say this because humans are the only animals that cry; the rest merely tear. This includes apes of course, which means that crying developed after apes evolved into humans, which means that tearing preceded crying, which is what I just said.
But to back up a bit. I’m aware that certain mammals get sad (dogs, for example) and that some even vocalize that sadness. None, however, cry. Only humans. Why is this?
I wonder if it’s about the display of emotion. Could there be an advantage, an evolutionary purpose, in exposing one’s pain and grief?
Unless one is an infant, I rather doubt this. Crying reveals vulnerability, and vulnerability, um, leaves one vulnerable. Moreover, crying is debilitating; a person can barely stand while crying, let alone run or fight.
But anyway the question is not about the purpose of crying (one must merely cry once to know this), but rather why tears are part of the package. This I don’t know.
I have a guess, though, which I only just thought of. It’s because tears are so difficult to fake. This sort of follows from my thought about emotional display. We tear when we cry so that others can tell we’re not faking it.
A gentle reminder, most likely unnecessary by this point: I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.
14 September 2002 | Shovel 9
I don’t remember if they asked how much I wanted, or if they offered a specific amount; I just know that it added up, in the end, to a lot of money, a thick wad of it, which I kept in a pocket on that coat I didn’t normally use, a pocket that embarrassed me, with a zipper.
That much snow, it always reminds me of the dream in which our street is buried in snow, with only the third floor windows showing, the chimneys and antennas taking on disconcerting prominence. My friends and I have dug a network of tunnels between our houses. How have we managed this? Has one person called another and said, “Let’s all dig toward the manhole” or “You head toward Howard’s house, and Howard will head toward Brian’s”? Each time I have the dream I’m bothered by this question: How have the tunnels been dug?
My friends don’t particularly care. The snow fell long ago, and somehow we managed.
The thing is, no one in the dream even owns a shovel. I look and look but have never seen any shovels. Whatever happened to all the shovels?
11 September 2002 | Note
At the risk of revealing what a quasi-intellectual dickhead I am, I couldn’t care less about 9/11. It’s unspeakably tragic that three thousand people died, but this world has no dearth of unspeakable tragedies. Why should this particular tragedy matter so? In my more cynical moments, I think it’s because the victims were Americans, the visuals were spectacular, and the action was televised live.
I don’t mean to insult those who grieve, nor offend those who lost loved ones. There is enough suffering in this world for everyone to have a turn on the wheel. Several turns, in fact.
More than anything, I long for perspective. There are things I don’t understand, can’t grasp, have trouble taking in. I know, in much the same way I know that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, that we are rapidly ravaging the planet while simultaneously starving half the world’s population and burying the rest in an avalanche of junk.
Meanwhile I write about my housing woes and my fickle heart. Previous to this, I worked on a series of pieces, which I intend to return to, about various jobs I’ve had.
Something doesn’t compute.
Last week, on the day I moved, I stood in the bathroom of my now former apartment and looked out the window at the big tree out there. Several balloons had once been stuck in that tree: first two, then somehow three, then two again, then one. Now there were none. Suddenly, and this was new, the final string was gone. Three floors down, in the yard, I noticed the makeshift ladder I had once used to climb into our yard from the neighbor’s roof. I had locked myself out that day, and one of my neighbors, a man I’d never met before, had loaned me this flimsy ladder-like object—two long two-by-fours held together with three skinny cross pieces—so that I could scale the wall that separates our buildings and climb down into my yard. From there I planned to take the fire escape onto my roof, enter my building through the hatch up there, and simply stroll into my apartment, the lock of which, it can now be revealed, I never locked.
Everything went as planned until I got onto the roof and opened the hatch. Looking down I found myself peering into someone’s apartment. A retractable ladder, partly unfolded now, hung into the space below. Where was I? I looked around and realized that I was standing on the wrong roof; mine was one over. This roof had a hatch just like mine, only the hatch opened not into the hall, like mine, but someone’s apartment.
I tried to pull up the ladder, but couldn’t manage it; it was built to be pushed into place from beneath. Leaving the hatch open, I went down the hatch of my own building, got a pen and piece of paper from my apartment, and returned to the roof. On the paper I wrote: “Sorry to open your hatch. I’m your neighbor in 281 and got confused. I tried to pull up the ladder, but couldn’t swing it. No harm meant.” I dropped the note into the apartment and closed the hatch.
Standing in the bathroom, I remembered these things—the guy who helped me, the climb down into my yard, discovering the wrong hatch, watching the note I’d written drift into my neighbor’s living room…
It’s something that happened, and I remembered it.
I honestly don’t know what my point is.
Let us say that you need to find an apartment as quickly as possible and that by some miracle you have succeeded in doing so, only the landlord of this apartment is requiring you to prove that you make and have made considerably more money than you do and have, despite the fact that you can afford this apartment on your current income (for you have been doing just this for several years now), and despite the fact that you have always been an excellent tenant, the kind of tenant landlords dream about, the kind of tenant who always pays his rent on time and who never hosts loud parties and who always maintains cordial if distant relations with his neighbors, even the ones he despises.
It occurs to me that if you were a “bad” person, a person who is willing under certain unfortunate circumstances to do “bad” things, you might decide to create bogus tax documents, using the handy downloadable forms provided by the IRS. For example, you could download a PDF version of last year’s 1040—not the plain version one fills in by hand, but the fancy version one completes on one’s computer. Nothing could be simpler. Although you might be surprised to discover how much work is involved in creating a bogus 1040, since after all you would want everything to add up correctly and make sense, just in case the landlord happens to note such things. Likewise, it would probably be a good idea to create some bogus supporting documents such as 1099s or W2s, or whatever seems appropriate in your case. All of which takes time to do, particularly if the forms you’ve chosen aren’t available in fill-in-able PDF versions. In such cases, it would be helpful if you had access to a typewriter, since handwritten forms are more likely to cause the landlord to pause for a moment and think, “Hey, wait a sec, these documents could easily be forged” etc.
In my case—that is, if the theoretical bad person were me—I would be in luck (or would have been in luck just one week ago, before moving to my new apartment), because my then bathroommate Michelle had a typewriter in her apartment. I know this because I sometimes heard Michelle typing as I peed. Given this, I could have easily entered Michelle’s apartment through our shared bathroom and carried her typewriter back to my apartment and typed up the necessary forms, no doubt making several infuriating mistakes while typing, since that is what one does when one is trying desperately not to.
A potential roadblock: What if the landlord has also requested a letter from your tax lawyer or accountant stating the amount you are projected to gross in 2002?
Well, it strikes me that if you had a friend of equal badness, or who possibly owed you a favor, or who, ideally, was both bad and owed you a favor, you could convince this friend to allow you to create a bogus tax preparation business for her (or him!), replete with bogus tax preparation business letterhead, which you yourself could design and produce, provided you had the requisite skills, and for which you could use a logo left over from, say, a web development job.
This logo, I should note, is not truly necessary; any letterhead, however hideous, however logo-less, would suffice, provided that it included the name and number of your friend so that the landlord could call her (or him!) with questions.
Needless to say, your friend would need to be informed of this possible phone call and thus would be advised to avoid answering her (or his!) phone until the lease has been signed. This is true even if your friend is a professional actress (or actor!) who relishes the opportunity to play the role of a helpful tax preparer.
Doubtless one could go further and get fancier—for example, by photocopying the forms several times on several photocopy machines to simulate “wornness”—however I question the need for such measures. In all likelihood the landlord will simply glance at a single line on each form and skim the bogus letter, and that as they say will be that.
You will be lucky if he even notices that the letterhead has a logo (assuming you’ve included one), let alone how well that logo works with the typeface you’ve chosen for the phone number and address, not to mention the tag line at the bottom, which I would be careful to make a few point sizes smaller and much lighter than the rest of the copy, since if it were me doing this I would be apt to make a joke here, something with private meaning but which would also seem semi-believable as a tag line.
Something like A tax for the frozen sea within you, say.
10 September 2002 | News
Saturday afternoon, after the mover guy left, I stood in the chaos of my new apartment, boxes everywhere, my desk in pieces in the corner, and said to no one, “I want to go home now.” Home being the place I left behind.
I’m in a bad way. On Sunday Rachel came over to see my new apartment, and we ended up taking a nap together. I love Rachel. Nine days ago I broke up with Rachel. After our nap I walked her to the subway.
Along the way we were approached every hundred feet or so by young Jewish men, often in groups of five or more, dressed in traditional black and white garb. First they would ask if I was Jewish (they pretty much ignored Rachel), and then the leader of the group would offer to have me blow the shofar (a bugle-like thing made from the horn of a lamb… I think). After the first time, Rachel explained what was happening. These men were members of the Lubavitch movement, a proselytizing Hasidic sect. They consider it a mitzpah (a good deed) to help Jews blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. Thing is, I don’t even know what Rosh Hashanah is. My mother is Jewish, which by Jewish law makes me a Jew, but it might as well make me a squid for all I have ever cared.
Also—and you will need to know this to understand what is to follow—I despise proselytizers. When a Jesus fanatic starts up on the subway, I feel the kind of rage one normally reserves for the rapists of one’s loved ones.
Rachel and I were standing outside the subway exit, saying goodbye. We had just hugged, holding each other as tightly as possible. Two Lubavitcher’s approached from behind Rachel. “Are you Jew?” asked the older. “Fuck off,” I said.
“That’s pretty blunt,” he said.
“I meant it to be blunt. Now fuck off.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t, hit me?”
He seemed surprisingly calm as he said this.
“Yes, stand here another ten seconds and I’ll beat the fuck out of you.”
I was dead serious. The whole thing was insane. I started counting in my head.
“Move on,” I said.
“Now,” I said.
They left on the count of eight.
Earlier, pre-nap, Rachel demonstrated the advantages of the new, extra-long phone cord she had convinced me to buy. Taking the phone from my desk, she sat in my green chair six feet away and pretended to be talking into it. “Hi, Michael, nice to hear from you. Oh, so you’ve decided you do want to have a baby with me. That’s fabulous news!”
Laughing, I grabbed the phone from her and sat where she had sat. I put on a happy voice, held the phone to my ear, and said, “Wow, Rache, I can’t believe you’re getting married. And after just three days of looking! See, I told you it would work out.”
07 September 2002 | Marathon
Woke ridiculously early, given how little remained to do this morning. The mover guy is due in an hour and a half, at 10:00 a.m., and all I have left to pack is the air conditioner (which will be last) and this computer. All the dishes are packed, so I’m eating my banana and peanut butter sandwich off a manila folder.
My question this morning concerns crying. Is a certain amount of crying necessary to complete the process of mourning, and if so, does the crying need to be spread out over time or can you do it marathon-style?
When I learned how to type, I ignored the instructions that came with the program, which said to practice just an hour a day, and instead typed three weeks straight, eight hours a day. No doubt it took longer this way in terms of total hours, but I also reach proficiency much faster in terms of days.
When I work out, I sometimes wonder what I’d do if you could distill the pain of an hour-long session into a single minute. Which would I choose—one minute of super intense pain, or one hour of on-again, off-again discomfort?
I realize there are people who don’t cry at all, or very little. How does that work? What happens when they get sad? Or do they simply not get sad? Perhaps they get sad a little, then immediately do something to stop feeling sad. I know I’ve been avoiding certain songs on the CDs I’ve been listening to while packing. I’ll hear three notes, feeling a wave of heaviness flood my chest, and rush over and hit the NEXT button. It’s not that I’m afraid of crying; I welcome it, actually; it’s just that not every moment is a convenient moment to lose it.
Two days ago in the gym, some damn song came on the radio about giving love one more chance, so I had to walk out of the room and quietly weep on the stairs. I was nervous the whole time that someone, a fellow gym member, would discover me there, which made it difficult to really let go.
Because I packed the utensils last night, I didn’t have anything to spread the peanut butter with. I considered using the scissors I’m using to cut packing tape, but that seemed gross, so I decided to use my forefinger. As it turns out, it’s difficult to spread peanut butter with your forefinger, particularly if you use real peanut butter, the kind ground from peanuts at the health food store, and if you like to keep your peanut butter in the refrigerator. I knew it would be difficult, which is why I considered the scissors.
I have to stop here because it’s time to pack the computer. Now would be a good time to listen to sad songs and cry—who knows how long the mover guy will be?—only I already packed my CDs.
You will find the phone number on the menu, which is affixed with little black magnets to the refrigerator door. For some reason I’ve never bothered to memorize it. It has proved easier, each time, to walk the five paces from my desk to the refrigerator, temporarily memorize the number, then walk back to the desk and dial the number. Today, two days from the day I move, I find myself regretting this small repeated laziness. Had I the chance to start again, I would memorize the number on the first day and save myself the walk, performed two or so times a week for two years, to the refrigerator and back.
When you call the number, the China Star woman, whose name I still don’t know, will say, “China Star, can I help you?” only her accent will make the words impossible to decipher. Chhnahsta kunnaheyuh. This doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve dialed the right number. Chhnahsta kunnaheyuh means that you’ve dialed the right number. Wait for her to say it, then say, “I’d like to place an order to pick up. Broccoli and tofu. Small.”
Looking back, I realize that after the first few months I didn’t really need to say “small,” as by that point she had learned my voice and learned too that I never ordered anything but broccoli and tofu, small. Indeed, had I wanted, I probably could have left out the bit about wanting to place an order and instead have just said, “Broccoli and tofu, small,” or even, “Broccoli and tofu.”
Regrets.
Wait at least ten minutes before heading over. Fifteen is probably better. The point here is to avoid having to stand too long in that cramped little space (China Star is take-out only).
Or don’t wait. Spend the time working or doing the dishes or perhaps indulging in a fun, relaxing activity. However, if you decide to go online and watch fifteen-second porn clips with sound, be sure to turn down the volume on the computer, because Michelle’s room is right down the hall and I don’t think she wants to hear that stuff, in part because she’s queer and in part because she’s not one hundred percent queer, but mostly because it’s gross.
Personally I like to use the time to write.
Broccoli and tofu costs $2.75. I get it fried, as the steamed version has no flavor. If you decide to try it steamed, be prepared to pay an extra quarter. I haven’t a clue why the plainer, simpler version is more expensive; all I know is that this feels analogous to paying extra for an unlisted phone number.
Your order should be ready when you arrive. Sometimes, though, you will have to wait a few minutes while the China Star woman deals with other customers. A total of three times she’s forgotten to pass my order onto the cook. I’m proud to say that I’ve never shown any anger about this. The poor woman works seven days a week, twelve hours a day (thirteen on Friday and Saturday), and thus must be forgiven for the occasional oversight.
We’ve now arrived at the hard part, the part about the condiments and the fork. If you’re like me, you don’t use those condiments, nor would you dream of eating with a plastic fork when you own nice metal forks which can be washed and reused forever. The China Star woman includes a fork and a half dozen little condiment packages in every order. I don’t know how many orders she fills each day, but it must be in the high hundreds, if not the thousands. And each time the same motions: fork in, condiments in, close bag.
It took several months to stop her from giving me these things. Time and again I had to ask her to take back the fork and condiments, and each time she responded with a confused and weary look before opening the bag. I tried to be light about it, to make it into a kind of joke, a friendly jesting: “Ha, you didn’t remember this time.” Part of the problem was that she doesn’t understand the word condiments, so I had to be excruciatingly specific: “Please, no soy sauce or duck sauce or hot sauce or fork or anything.” I would accompany this with a frantic hand gesture. The turning point came when I hit on the phrase, “Just the food, please.” Somehow this clarified things for her, and I found it easy to say and remember. “Just the food, please.”
A new thought. You could mention me whenever you request no extras (she doesn’t understand the word extras either; I tried it), perhaps by saying something like, “Just the food, please—like that guy” (she doesn’t know my name). Here it would help if you only ordered broccoli and tofu, for that is how she must think of me, as the broccoli and tofu guy. The combination of the two things—the broccoli and tofu and the “just the food” request—would surely click in her head, and you’d be set.
Back at home, remove both containers from the bag and uncover the broccoli and tofu. Allow the dish to “breathe” (I really do think of it this way) at least five minutes. The longer you wait, the more the sauce congeals and (I swear this is true) sweetens. As with many of the best things in life, it is better if you make yourself wait. However, as with certain specific best things in life, you definitely want it to be hot.
Here my recommendation is akin to the classic instruction to “salt and pepper to taste,” which is to say that you must experiment and find what works for you. Alas, in this I can be of no assistance.
03 September 2002 | Egg
Rachel spoke on the phone with her nieces last night. The first thing Sydney asked was if Rachel and I are going to get married. Rachel said no, holding back tears. “We’ve decided to just be friends,” she said.
Sydney is almost six and, though precocious as fuck, doesn’t understand certain things.
“Is Michael going to live at your apartment?”
“No, Sydney. We’re going to live in different apartments.”
“But you’re going to sleep over, right?”
“No, Sydney, we’re not going to sleep over anymore.”
Rachel tried various ways to explain what a break-up is, but the concept was new to Sydney and thus difficult.
A sudden memory: At a family dinner this past spring, Sydney asked me if I was going to sleep at Rachel’s that night. I nodded and smiled, for Sydney is obsessed with sleeping arrangements. “I know what that means,” she leered, and for a moment I believed she did. “It means you’re going to wear her pajamas!”
Hannah got on the phone after Sydney. Hannah is three and half. She asked if Rachel wanted an egg.
“No, thanks, sweetie. I already ate.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, okay.”
It’s not clear if Hannah tried to squeeze bits of egg through the tiny holes in the mouthpiece or if she merely held some egg there for Rachel to absorb through the wire. Whichever was true, Rachel nearly lost it again.
“Why, thank you, Hannah,” she said, making appreciative chewing sounds. “This egg is delicious.”
01 September 2002 | Door
Told John that I’ve been feeling like that character, the guard, from Hogan’s Heroes: “I understand nothing. Nothing.”
John corrected me. The line wasn’t about understanding but knowing. “I know nothing. Nothing.”
John said that he often thinks of the guard, whose name he remembered was Sergeant Schultz, in conjunction with Socrates, who also claimed ignorance disingenuously.
Of course the two men (can I speak of Schultz, a character in a television show, as a man?) feigned ignorance for different reasons. Avoidance for Schultz; entrapment for Socrates.
This reminds me, for no apparent reason, of a poem, I believe by Robert Bly, that ends, for no apparent reason, with a line about a door under the water where all the pigs go in.
Your guess is as good as mine.
