November 2002
30 November 2002 | Progress
I re-read the end of the above. In doing so, it struck me that what I say is wrong. I didn’t really break out of my prison; that’s going too far; but I did at least make some progress. Ah, unfortunately this reminds me of something G would often say. G had only limited use of his arms and legs. This was awful of course, an awful way to live, and yet G, perhaps to make it more bearable, would always insist—and truly believed, I think—that he was “making progress.” Thus he would show me how he could, say, open his hand a certain amount, and I would be forced to say something like, “That’s great, G,” although it seemed to me that I had seen him open his hand this amount a thousand times before.
29 November 2002 | Dick
A book for a straight woman to write: Dicks I Have Known. The book would consist of the author’s anecdotes about men she had known named Dick, men she had known who acted liked dicks, and of course the dicks of men she had “known.” A post-feminist classic.
My nephew dislocated his elbow. His grandfather did it to him, the way he lifted him. Don’t lift a two-year-old by the wrists.
My sister, the child’s mother, now has a new thing to fear: people lifting her son by the wrists. I saw the terror in her eyes whenever someone extended their arms towards the child.
My other nephew, age six, informed me that people steal children. “I’m still a child,” he said, “so I have to be super careful.”
Later, after his uncle-to-be performed magic tricks, he asked me to make his stuffed bear, Mr. Red-Blue, disappear. I got up and threw the bear out the front door.
My mother wouldn’t believe him when he told her what I had done. “Uncle Michael wouldn’t do something like that,” she said.
“Mom, it’s true,” I said.
“He almost threw it into the street,” my nephew said.
“I didn’t throw it into the street,” I said.
“Almost,” said my nephew.
“How about if I pick you up by your wrists?” I said.
27 November 2002 | Haircut
Again with the silence. A woman across the aisle reminds me of my ex-girlfriend, which reminds me of a different ex-girlfriend. A terrible realization: They are all my ex-girlfriend. Even M is, I fear. I see the clouds. I see a man stepping over a train track. I saw him. He stepped over and kept walking. He wore a jacket. I thought he gestured with his hand. It’s exhausting. From whence come the rocks and stones that lie between the rails? The woman across the aisle suddenly stood and walked past. I recognized her! She’s a friend of my sister! Sadly, she’s not much taller than a dwarf. Or perhaps I mean midget. Whichever I mean, I mean the one whose proportions are correct. She also has (or had) a lisp. I met her at my sister’s once. I felt bad because of her height and her lisp, then felt bad for feeling bad. Pity is ugly. From behind just now I liked her haircut. The way I remember it, her fingers are shorter than they should be, even for such a small person. Her haircut, however, is outstanding; it is the best possible haircut. I don’t think she saw me when she passed. You might think she did and was ignoring me, but I doubt it. I saw her scan the window for something. It is better this way. I am afraid I’ve either missed my stop or am on the wrong train. Sex didn’t work last night with M. She said (this is apropos of nothing), “I want you to get contacts more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” We laughed. I was lying on top of her when she said it and the laughter made me roll off.
26 November 2002 | n
I’m having trouble with the letter n. I noticed this yesterday while writing my return address on a bill. I get to the n in Brooklyn and feel uncertain. How does one make that shape? Does one begin at the bottom-left or the top-left? Or where do I begin, since I must have a particular way of doing it, having done it for over thirty years.
This has been going on for some time now; months, I believe. I notice it whenever I write my return address, whenever I get to that n in Brooklyn. I usually end up writing a scaled-down capital n, which isn’t at all how I normally write a lowercase n. I know this because it doesn’t feel right. All the rest of the letters feel right.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I’m having a problem. Previously I’d feel awkward for a moment, write the n as best I could, and promptly forget about it. This time, though, I connected the experience to those earlier experiences.
It was unnerving. How does one forget how to do something one has done ten thousand times? It wasn’t as though I was afflicted by self-consciousness, given that the problem didn’t register until yesterday. Instead I’ve somehow lost or misplaced the information.
One imagines (being the imaginative type) that this is merely the beginning, that I will lose the letters one by one until the act of writing my own name becomes a horrific struggle, a struggle made even more horrific by my memory of a time when nothing seemed easier or more natural.
The final loss, then, or the final loss that matters, will be the loss of all these losses, the loss of my knowledge of them. I will forget what I’ve forgotten.
It will be like the beginning again, except it will be the end. The end is just like the beginning, except it’s the end.
25 November 2002 | Realm
This happened.
I show up to see Realm of the Senses, a stupid film if ever there was one. When I arrive two usher-types are at the door asking for IDs.
Them: Are you a student?
Me: No.
Them: You need to be a student to see this show for free.
Me: Well, I’m not a student but I’m perfectly willing to pay.
I hold out a ten-dollar bill.
Them: There’s been a foul-up with the distributor. We can only show this film free to students. It’s a legal thing. We’re sorry.
Me: You don’t have to apologize. I’m only too happy to pay.
Them: You don’t understand. Our agreement with the distributor stipulates that only students can be shown this film for free.
Me: I don’t get it. Is this a student-only showing? It wasn’t advertised that way.
Them: There’s been a problem with the distributor. Only students can see this film for free.
Me: Why do you keep repeating that? I already told you: I’m not a student.
Them: If you were a student who has lost his ID however…
Pause.
Me: Oh, dear me, whatever has happen to my STUDENT ID? Being a STUDENT, I always carry it with me. That’s what STUDENTS do, you know: they carry their STUDENT IDs with them. I happen to know this because I myself am a STUDENT. By the way, have I mentioned that I’ve lost my STUDENT ID? It was just here in my pocket, but now, being a STUDENT, I’ve gone ahead and lost it.
They smile and turn to the next person in line. I walk into the theater.
24 November 2002 | Sex
Nothing to say about it. Can’t describe it. Don’t even remember it except for a few moments I hardly remember. Was that me who felt those things? There was a way she shifted her body inside her body. She shifted what she was doing in there, the angle of it. What things was I talking about when I asked who felt them? This is a genuine question. Can I even think of any? Try. One was towards the beginning, during the slow part. I asked if she was going to mess with my spices again and she said no, never, and I felt she meant it, although I wondered if she would continue to mean it later, after we were done what we were doing. This wasn’t a feeling exactly.
23 November 2002 | Backwards
When you turn it around, it appears even less plausible, the convergences necessary to make it happen. And yet every story, studied in reverse, leads back to where it began.
Who hasn’t traced the thing like this, saying, If you hadn’t and I hadn’t (and on down the line), I wouldn’t be holding you now?
We say, If events hadn’t conspired in our favor… It’s a conspiracy of events. They, the events, wanted it to happen. It was pre-meditated; they worked in concert.
A fear underlies this. Our lives, ruled by circumstance, by blind chance, are not our own. We are trying to steer a thing that cannot be steered.
22 November 2002 | Spices
Problems with M. No one bothered to tell me how… specific she is. I bought new underwear, the exact kind she mentioned, but it’s not enough. I’ll be the first to admit this has made me oversensitive. Like for example, there was this thing with the spices.
I come home one day (a day she stayed in my apartment after I’d gone) and she’s put my spices in the cabinet. I don’t like my spices in the cabinet; I like them right there on the counter where I can reach for them whenever I want them. It would be different if the cabinet was over the counter, but it isn’t; it’s over the sink. And not only is it over the sink, but it opens the wrong way if you’re standing at the counter, which is where one normally stands when one needs spices. Granted the counter looks nicer without the spices cluttering it up, but this is not about aesthetics; it’s about usability. I mean, think about it. You’re at the counter and you need one of the spices. What do you do? Well, if the spices are in the fucking cabinet, I’ll tell you what you do. You take two steps to the side, open the cabinet, take down the spice you want, close the cabinet, step back to the counter, use the spice, step back to the cabinet, open the cabinet, put back the spice, close the cabinet, and step back to the counter. That’s lunacy. Underwear is one thing but I’m not doing this little dance every time I need to put salt in my oatmeal. Sorry.
A few days pass and I can’t stand it anymore and blurt out something about the spices. Why the fuck did she move them to the cabinet? Actually I don’t say fuck or anything like fuck. Instead I’m totally calm about it, as though it hardly matters to me, just idle curiosity. She says, “Oh, shit, I meant to move them back. I put them up there while I was cleaning the counter.”
Later this day I’m lying in bed and she’s in the shower and she’s pretending to talk to herself in there, only she practically yelling because she wants me to hear what she’s supposedly saying to herself, because it’s a kind of performance: Much Maligned Girlfriend Talking to Herself in the Shower. “Woe is me,” she yells, “I try to do something nice by cleaning his counter. I think, He’s going to come home and see how clean his counter is, but now look what happens…” and so on. It’s hysterical and I love her.
Right. But it’s not over yet. Because later this same night I’m about to go to sleep and I’m washing a few dishes and I happen to look over at the counter where the spices go…
21 November 2002 | Ad
Years back a friend tried to put an personal ad in the Boston Phoenix but was refused. Her ad read: I want to eat your brains. The jerks there told her it had to sound more like a date, so she changed it to: I want to eat your brains and then see a movie or something. This one they accepted.
Months later I submitted my own ad, and they refused me as well, I wish I could remember why. Was it because there weren’t enough words? Probably it was. In order for the Boston Phoenix to accept your ad, you had to make it sound like a date and you had to use more than two words. Anyway I fixed their wagon by never again reading their lame-ass publication—a fact that sent shock waves through the company, though no one could quite tell what these shock waves were about.
As to my ad, it simply said (yes, this is whole thing, and yes, I realize how incredibly sexy this is): Minimalist seeks.
20 November 2002 | Enough
There’s something sad I can’t write about because it concerns a person who might read it. Of all the bad things I can think of, one of the worst would be for this person to read this thing I can’t write and know my true thoughts. This in itself is sad because I want to write my true thoughts and can’t. I’ve thought of different ways to disguise my true thoughts so that this person won’t figure them out, but in each case I either ruin the story or fail to disguise my true thoughts enough. Anyway I tell myself that anyway it’s just a sad story like a million others and that everyone knows what sadness is, so in a sense the world doesn’t need another reminder that sad things happen because the world already knows all too well about sadness and besides if the world has forgotten for sec (I don’t know how exactly, but let’s just say), then for christsake let it.
19 November 2002 | Moment
To be cracked, the big toe must be scrunched down against the corner of the futon, where the futon is hardest.
The moment of cracking is like the moment of orgasm; it is the moment the tension breaks, albeit a piddling sort of breakage.
The comparison is apt, for the toe cannot be cracked again for perhaps an hour or more, although occasionally it will crack a second time, with diminished drama.
18 November 2002 | Context
Near the end of the meeting (the Quakers call it a Meeting for Worship), I look up, see the silent people around me, and wonder if there is something vaguely improper in what I am thinking, particularly considering the words of the first speaker, who spoke of listening to the “still small voice within.” No, I do not think it improper, and yet I would not stand before these people and say, “I am wondering if the smell of her cunt was arousing in itself or if it was the context of that smell that made it arousing. Or again, whether I had learned to find the smell arousing because it signified an arousing context.”
17 November 2002 | Asterisks
I’m giving a big reading in, let’s see, three hours and twenty-three minutes. I just printed out the version of the story I’ll be reading. It is very slightly different from the one I’ve been practicing with. For example I removed the second that from the following sentence:
That is, yes, you could see a person’s back, but I don’t think that seeing a person’s back while he’s peeing means seeing him pee.
Similarly I added the that to this sentence:
I don’t believe my boss even realized that this other person was me.
After printing the new version, I inserted big asterisks at places that seem appropriate to pause and take a sip of water. I won’t necessarily pause at any of these places, but it seemed a good idea to give myself the option.
There are sixteen asterisks in thirty-five pages, or about one every two pages. Unfortunately there’s a stretch of eight pages in the middle, from page twelve to page twenty, devoid of asterisks. I circled the asterisk on page twelve to let myself know that this is my last chance to pause for long while.
After finishing with the asterisks I looked at how the text breaks between pages. I wanted to make sure that none of the breaks seem awkward. Only one appears to pose any difficulty:
Your so-
called filing system.
Fortunately I plan to read this paragraph, a very sad paragraph, slowly, so there should be plenty of time to turn the page without the “so-” hanging in the air.
Now there’s two hours and thirty-six minutes left until the reading. My mother called while I was writing the above. She can’t make the reading because my two-year-old nephew is having his birthday party today.
I just put the story in my bag. Actually I put two versions in there: the one I’ll be reading and the one I’ve been practicing with. The practice one is a backup in case “something” “happens.” While sliding it into my bag, I thought of the extra tennis rackets professional tennis players carry unto the court in bags shaped like stacks of tennis rackets. I decided I should have a bag shaped like a stack of stories, and then I realized I already do.
Fortunately I’m not nervous because as I always tell people, I don’t get nervous. Thus it’s merely a coincidence that I feel like I’m about to puke.
16 November 2002 | —-
The conversation didn’t get interesting until the end, after we ran out of things to say.
15 November 2002 | Walpole
Yesterday I had no tolerance for Hazel. I thought, Why am I in this fucking Friendly’s? I hate Friendly’s! I hate Friendly’s and I’m fucking eating at Friendly’s and I hate it! Not only does she have to go to Friendly’s, but she has to go to the fucking Walpole Friendly’s! She knows all these different Friendly’s and she always wants to go to one that’s thirty miles away. So I try to remind myself that this is about expanding our time together so that she can feel we’ve had a real visit. Normally I think, So what? So what if I have to go Friendly’s in Walpole when I can go to Friendly’s in West Roxbury that serves the same disgusting food? So what? It makes her happy if we drive to the Friendly’s in Walpole, it makes her feel like she’s had an outing. Okay, fine, I’m going to be eighty-eight some day and I’m going to want an outing too. Fine. But yesterday I couldn’t take it. I said, “Hazel, we’re not going to Walpole. There’s no way we’re going to Walpole.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of going to Walpole,” she says. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Why do you even say that?”
14 November 2002 | Pause
The love interest in my dream last night was named Michael Barrish. I don’t know what she looked like because I only spoke with her on the phone. I liked her voice and felt an instant sense of recognition and attraction. Some people only have to say ten words and an entire landscape of possibilities appears. The words themselves hardly matter; it’s all in the phrasing, the pauses.
When she told me her name, I got confused. “No, that’s my name,” I said, “I was asking about yours.” She thought I was fucking with her and began to get angry. Even after we sorted this out, it remained upsetting to both of us. She said, “What if we get married? How are we going to tell who the mail is for?”
I said I didn’t know, and a long pause followed.
13 November 2002 | Mantra
I’ve been teaching Eva a mantra to say whenever she thinks of Lars and the fact of his non-reciprocation. She says that it’s helping her deal, which means a lot to me. I want to be the kind of person who’s there for his friends when they need a helping hand.
The mantra goes: Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
I’ve been having her say it with the emphasis on different syllables.
Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
There’s a vaguely German-sounding accent that goes with this which sadly I cannot describe.
12 November 2002 | View
I’m in an airplane. I have a window seat. We’re flying. Another plane is flying next to us, the tip of its wing just a few feet from the tip of our wing. The two wingtips move a bit closer, a bit farther apart, a bit higher, a bit lower.
I don’t spend much time looking out the window. In fact I try not to look that way at all. When I do look, I see that the other plane has an open window over the wing and that a woman, M, has walked out onto the wing. From inside the plane, a man is holding her wrist. I cannot see the man but I know who it is.
This tableau has been pretty much the same for several hours now.
Sometimes I look and M has changed her position, moving one foot in front of the other or turning her shoulders slightly.
On my own plane they’re serving dinner.
11 November 2002 | Peru
For months I’ve been looking for something to read, a novel. Nearly every day I’m at the library, searching the stacks. Recently I’ve noticed this other person in the stacks; she’s there every time I show up. Has she been there from the beginning? I don’t know. All I know is that one day I saw her and realized I’d seen her before. Once I realized this, I started looking for her, and each time I did so, I found her. Like me, she’s trying to find a novel to read. Or that’s what I imagine, having never see her anywhere but in FICTION. Oddly, though, she never has a book in her hand. That’s the usual thing: you browse through the stacks and take down a book and skim through it. Often people stand in the aisle reading a particular book for several minutes, or else they hold a book in one hand while looking for another. She doesn’t do these things, or at least I haven’t seen her doing them. I find this scary. It’s not that she seems weird in any way. In fact she seems the very opposite of weird: the most unweird person you’ve ever encountered. Which in itself seems weird. Anyway I avoid her. If she’s in the C’s, I walk down to the T’s and start looking there.
Most days I return home with three, four, sometimes five books. I’ve yet to finish anything, nor even come close. Often I read a page or two and toss it on the bed. Yesterday’s haul included Asa, As I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen, The End of the Novel by Michael Krüger, and Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. I read seven pages of The End of the Novel before slamming it shut. I didn’t like the beginning of the second chapter, it seemed too written. Asa, As I Knew Him fared better, although at first I doubted it would. I found a picture of the author, a small photo, on the second page, the page before the title page. I didn’t like this picture. It seemed too much like a picture. The fact is (I might as well admit it, why be ashamed?), I found the author unattractive. I didn’t like her haircut. I didn’t like what she was wearing. Was it a robe? Was it some sort of jacket? She didn’t seem to have a shirt on, just this jacket, which while nice enough, seemed too much like the kind of thing one wears in an author’s photo. Obviously one would like to look attractive in such a photo, that’s a given. But my sense was that Susanna Kaysen was trying just a little hard, or rather, failing to hide how hard she was trying. I felt a touch of pity at this and didn’t like feeling it. I would have preferred if Susanna Kaysen had used a photo from grade school or maybe posed with a paper bag over her head with a smile drawn on it, which I’ve seen done to great effect. Of course the price of the latter approach is that one’s photo becomes a statement on such photos. Better to include no photo and avoid the issue entirely. However, one imagines that the publisher wanted a photo, knowing from industry studies that photos increase sales. I didn’t like thinking about these things and half-resented Susanna Kaysen for bringing them to mind. I liked her book titles, however. Aside from Asa, As I Knew Him, she’s written a book called Girl, Interrupted, which I believe was made into a film, and another called Far Afield. Far Afield is a so-so title, but I like the title Girl, Interrupted. I read thirty-seven pages of Asa, As I Knew Him. Or thirty-two, actually, since the book begins on page five. (I’ve never understood this practice of beginning books on page three or page five.) The first thirty-two pages of Asa, As I Knew Him concern a woman, Dinah, who works with a married man, Asa, the publisher of some sort of quarterly journal. Dinah loves Asa. Evidently they had an affair which in the end he ended. Here is a sentence I like: “I may have been born to love him—I’m sure I was; loving him was easier than eating or sleeping—but he was surely born to stomp my heart. He was better at that than loving me.” It’s two sentences, actually; I see that now. Asa is a blue-blooded Yankee. Call me narrow-minded, but I’m not interested in blue-blooded Yankees. Nonetheless I read the first two chapters, largely because they were easy to read. They weren’t ponderously pretentious like the beginning of the second chapter of The End of the Novel, which goes: “Through the holes in the sun umbrella quivering patches of light fell on my manuscript which a smooth stone I had brought back from Greece prevented from blowing about the garden. Enclosed in the stone is a small landscape, as though formed by mosses, a dreaming world, an Atlantis of minute houses and strangely distorted animals which effortlessly transverses the grey-hued sky carrying off the memories of gossamer-thin stick figures standing rigid on angular streets.” I’m sorry, but I don’t like this. Perhaps there are people who feel differently. This wouldn’t surprise me: people like all kinds of things I despise. Not that I would ever want to convince anyone to like the same things as me. People should like what they like, even if this means liking things like the beginning of the second chapter of The End of the Novel. The remainder of Asa, As I Knew Him concerns the youth of Asa, as imagined by Dinah. I know this because it says so on the back of the book. Unfortunately I’m not interested in Asa’s youth, imagined or otherwise. This is not the fault of Susanna Kaysen, who did her best to interest me. But she was behind the eight ball, as they say, from the start. I laid the book on the bed and opened Nausea. Half a lifetime ago I read a handful of Sartre’s plays, and I remember liking them, in particular No Exit. The beginning of Nausea is promising. It consists of a editor’s note stating that the notebooks we’re about to read were found among the papers of one Antoine Roquentin. To help us accept this premise, Sartre adds a few editorial footnotes in the beginning, indicating that certain words in the original text are missing or crossed out or illegible. I skimmed ahead and noticed that these footnotes soon end. Sartre simply included a few at the start to further the book’s conceit, if that is said correctly. Unfortunately for me, some cretin wrote all over the book, underlining words and scribbling comments in the margin: “Estranged?” “Losing grip?” “Thinks of past, but not now.” “Like mirror.” Disgusted by these remarks, which naturally I read and pondered, I threw the book on the bed (it bounced over, actually) and resolved to look for another copy.
Earlier, in the library, in the W’s, the aforementioned woman, the not-weird one, sidled up to me, facing the opposite set of shelves. I waited for her to leave, but she did not. Was she standing next to me to stand next to me or was she looking for something on that shelf? After a minute or so, I turned and walked to the L’s to see if there was anything there by Gordon Lish I haven’t read. There wasn’t. So far as I can tell, Gordon Lish has written a total of four books: three novels and a collection of stories. Sadly I can’t read stories anymore, not by Gordon Lish or anyone. When I was younger I hardly made a distinction between stories and novels. Novels I thought of as long stories. But that’s not how I think of it now. A novel is a world, while a story is… something less than a world, perhaps a fragment of a world, a thing which at best suggests the thing it belongs to. I want the thing it belongs to. Moreover I want it to last. This is my other complaint about stories: you are drawn in (this is in the best case) and suddenly it’s over. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of finding a novel you love and settling in. Strike that. Wading in. Wading in and climbing onto the raft there, for there is a raft there, and beginning the slow drift across. You can live for a time in a novel, but you can’t live in a story. Again, I would never want to convince another person of these things. Let the people who love stories love them and let the people like me who can’t read them, not read them.
I read Gordon Lish’s third novel, Epitaph, first, and read it through to the end—a rare accomplishment. The next day I attempted to read his first novel, Dear Mr. Capote, but gave up in the middle. Then I read his second novel, Peru. Peru is what I was looking for. Peru is always what I’m looking for. The last Peru before Peru was The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Two long years went by between The Loser and Peru. I can’t remember the last Peru before The Loser. Perhaps it was David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, although I don’t think David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress was quite Peru. Not that it matters which Peru was the last Peru. What matters is the next. It is, undeniably, like drugs, like being addicted to drugs. Or like love, by which I mean the first stage, the one in which the eyebrows of one’s beloved, suddenly discovered, appear achingly beautiful, each hair tenderly rooted in its follicle.
Since I was now in the L’s, I continued my search there. In the K’s I found The End of the Novel and Asa, As I Knew Him. I don’t remember how I found Nausea. Indeed, how did I end up in the S’s? Was it before or after the L’s that I went there? I don’t remember. No, I do remember. I found Nausea on the way to the W’s. I know this because I recall placing Nausea on a stack of books at the end of the W’s. In any case while in the W’s I found another book, the title and author of which I’ve since forgotten. It was a thick book, at least four hundred pages, and had something to do with chess. That’s what interested me: the graphic of chess pieces on the cover. This graphic made me think that the novel was about some sort of intrigue between people. Well, this describes nearly every novel ever written, doesn’t it? So let’s just say an intellectual sort of intrigue. This is what interests me, I suppose: an intellectual sort of intrigue. Although perhaps the word intrigue is not quite right. Nor the word intellectual, now I think about it. I opened the book to the title page and noted that someone had written there, using a black felt pen, “This book is profoundly boring!” The word profoundly was underlined. I laughed. Or perhaps I only smiled. In any event I was none too pleased that someone had defiled the book. Still I laughed (or just smiled), imagining the defiler, a disgruntled person with a black felt pen. This made me wonder if I seen the non-weird woman holding a pen like that. Had I? I imagined I had. I mean, I made up the idea that I had, and even went so far as to create a mental image of her hand holding this pen. The pen was open and she held it the way one holds a pen one is about to write with, the pen gently squeezed by her forefinger against her middle finger and thumb. The casual way she did this indicated that she was accustomed to holding that pen in her hand. Was this from defiling library books? I decided it was. Then I read the beginning of the book she had defiled. It was profoundly boring.
We decided there are two kinds of weird. The first is the kind in which you hear the other’s voice or see the other on the street and have to remind yourself that you aren’t with this person anymore, that you broke up. The second is the kind in which you hear the other’s voice or see the other on the street and have to remind yourself that you were with this person once.
We are moving, we agreed, from one kind of weird to the other.
09 November 2002 | Path
Exhausted, I finally turn off the computer. I get up from my desk, take off my robe, and hang it on its hook. While doing this I notice that the water container is still sitting where I left it on the kitchen counter, unfilled. I move the container to the sink, prop the top open against the faucet, and turn on the cold water. While the water runs, I turn off the light over the stove without realizing that this is the only light on in the apartment. Sudden darkness. What to do?
I should say how tired I am. I’m so tired I can’t figure out what you do when you mistakenly turn off the only light on in your apartment.
So what I do is, I stand there and try to figure it out.
Do I turn it back on? Is it worth the energy it takes to turn it back on when I’m only going to turn it off it again as soon as I put the filled container in the refrigerator?
As I ponder this, the water spills over the side of the container. Hearing it spill, I turn off the faucet and put the container away. Then I walk to my desk and take my phone from the desk and move it to the floor next to my bed. Each of these things is more difficult than you would think, partly because of my exhaustion and partly because the lights are out.
*
The reason I move the phone is because I’m imagining that M might call in the morning before I get out of bed.
A short time before, M had sent me an email containing an image of a block of color. This was her proposed color for us to dream in this night. Each night one of us a picks a color to dream in. Such is the stage we’re in now: we’re trying to dream in the same color.
As I move the phone, I remember the color, a misty gray-blue.
08 November 2002 | Gone
Those words I wrote back there, they bored me. What I want, what draws me in, is to close my eyes and think of you. I doubt I would find words for that. At times there is sex in it, or the sense of sex. When the sex is there, there are things I do to you. Like, say, [gone]. Do you get me? I don’t have the words to say it. But most times are not so clear, nor so much a thing done by me to you, or you to me, or each to each, joined. It is more like what I said just now, a sense. All we do is speak, it is the same as now when we speak, and the words we speak are not so much the point, as now, but how close we are to speak so.
07 November 2002 | Film
I think it begins with a snuff film or what I’m told is a snuff film. Do you know what a snuff film is? It’s a film of a person being murdered. In real life such films exist and people pay a lot of money to see them. Anyway it’s set in the desert. There are these two brothers and they have this famous artist father. The brothers bring home two people, a couple, and most of the film is about the horrible things the brothers do to this couple. Now I’m remembering how it begins. I go into this kind of barbershop and find all these bodies, not only of the people killed but of the killers, the brothers. And then I find this film that shows how this came to be, how they all ended up dead in these certain positions. I wish I could remember more of it, although maybe it’s better I don’t. But I do recall that somewhere in the barbershop I find a book, a novel, that tells the same story. It’s written by the father of the two sons. He’s some artist guy who marries someone who’s sort of like Lucille Ball but not really. She’s like a western chick. Reading the book, I begin to sort of see or experience—ah, yeah, here I go again. I begin to see or experience this weird bizarre story of all these weird bizarre things that these two brothers do to their victims and then in the middle of that I find a book just like the book I’m reading and I start to read it and start to see it all again, only this time it’s different; it’s the same people and the same story but it’s different. In this version the brothers see some film that inspires them to make their own snuff film. The film they see is fictional and was filmed in three days by a bunch of actors in the desert, in the same location where the brother’s film gets filmed later on. It’s really cheesy, a piece of crap, but it inspires the brothers to make their own snuff film, only to make it a real snuff film, not some cheesy thing with fake blood and so on, which they both agree ruins it. All of this is in the father’s book, the one I found in barbershop. Or it’s not in the father’s book exactly; that is, not literally. But when you read the book, it all comes to you.
06 November 2002 | Story
The woman in front of me on the bus has pieces of grass and little twigs in her hair. She’s wearing white, paint-splattered overalls and carrying a crumpled shopping bag. Why is she so disheveled? Her hair too is in disarray. She’s looking at people as they board. The left strap of her overalls has fallen over her shoulder. Now a pencil has appeared in her hand and I think she is writing with it. Her hair appears slept on or perhaps rolled around in. She’s tapping her pencil to her nose and gazing out the window.
Papers! I caught a glimpse of papers as she stood to exit.
So I ask Ben what he’s been up to and he says he hasn’t been up to anything, he hasn’t done anything, he’s been doing nothing for a whole week, for a whole week he hasn’t done one goddamn fucking thing, so I say, “What do you mean you haven’t done anything?” and he says, “I haven’t produced anything,” so I say, “Come on, you must have produced something,” but he says, “No, no, I haven’t produced anything. I swear it. I swear. Nothing,” so I say, “Well, what about number one, what about number two? Have you made number one, have you made number two?” “Well, yeah, okay,” he says, “I’ve made those,” and then all of a sudden he gets incredibly excited and says, “Fuck, man, it’s the fucking tie-breaker,” so I go, “What do you mean? What fucking tie-breaker?” and he goes, “It’s the fucking tie-breaker,” only I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I say, “What are you fucking talking about?” and he says, “It’s the fucking tie-breaker. There’s first degree murder and second degree murder and third degree murder, and first degree is so much worse, man, because you plan it, but then there’s first degree burns and second degree burns and third degree burns, and third degree is so much worse,” and then he gives this whole fucking technical explanation about the epidermis, because Ben knows all this shit about the epidermis, and he’s telling me all this shit because of number one and number two, because that’s the tie-breaker, because going number two is more intense than going number one, so that’s the fucking tie-breaker, and finally I understand what he’s talking about, and he’s so fucking happy, and you know, life is made up of this kind of shit.
04 November 2002 | Drunk
I’m waiting for her to call again. As I write this, she’s in another city, with friends, drunk. She just called me from the restroom of a Chinese restaurant to tell me this. “I’m drunk,” she said, “and I’m in love with you.” We discussed how much she’s in love with me. She characterized it as “ridiculously,” which we decided is a more extreme form of being-in-love than “incredibly” or “insanely.” I’m in love with her as well, but we didn’t discuss this.
Her voice echoed the way voices echo in restrooms. She held the phone to the restroom fan so that I could hear what it sounded like and I guess to prove she was in a restroom, although really all it proved is that wherever she was, there was a whirring sound. I told her I wanted to be drunk with her, or barring that, just with her, or barring that, just drunk.
As we spoke, some person or persons kept trying the bathroom door, so she moved to the area outside the restroom—what she called the vestibule. This seemed a too-fancy word (I was thinking “hall”), but since I’m in love with her and since she was drunk, I didn’t question it. At one point an elderly woman, no doubt having just eavesdropped on her love-besotted ramblings, stepped out of the restroom and beamed at her.
If forced to characterize it, I would say I’m “hopelessly” in love with her. “Desperately” seems too strong, but I’m definitely moving in that direction.
03 November 2002 | Wreckage
I have abandoned support for Netscape 4x. If you are using Netscape 4x, you will see now a plain, unformatted version of the site. It will be ugly but readable.
Previously Netscape 4x users saw a version that looked pretty much like the version seen in other browsers. This was accomplished with a Netscape 4x-only stylesheet. That stylesheet is now in a folder on my hard drive called discards. I have discarded it.
If you still use Netscape 4x, I hope that it is because you are poor and have to use the computer at the public library, because otherwise I hate you.
Why do I hate you, gentle user of Netscape 4x? Because I have spent an absurd and sad and infuriating amount of time making sure that the sites I develop “work” in your motherfucking piece of shit browser.
No more. It’s over now. We’re at the part of the movie where the hero has finally killed the bad guy, the part where the stunned survivors are holding each other and smoke is rising from the wreckage. The music, do you hear that music? It’s sad yet triumphant.
02 November 2002 | Orange
Her: This museli is good.
Him: I don’t like it.
Her: It’s orangy tasting.
Him: That’s what I don’t like about it.
Pause.
Her: It’s good.
Pause.
Him: Hold on a second. You said, “This museli’s good.” Then I said, “I don’t like it.” Then you said, “It’s orangy tasting.” Then I said, “That’s what I don’t like about it.” Then after a pause you said, “It’s good.” Is that right?
Her: Yes.
Pause.
Her: I wonder what it is.
Him: What what is?
Her: The orange taste.
Him: Wait a second.
He leaves. Returns with a laptop computer. Sits with the computer in his lap.
Her: You’ve been reading too much Beckett.
Him: Sweetheart, I need your support.
He types.
Her (pointing): Look, a new cat.
Pause.
Her: I don’t like cats like that.
Him: What did you say after I said that that’s what I don’t like about it?
Her: “It’s good.”
Pause.
Her: You’re never going to catch up.
Pause.
Him: Do you want to hear it?
Her: Sure.
He stands holding the computer and reads the above through “You’re never going to catch up.”
Him: “Pause. Her: It looks like the cross between a cat and a rat.”
Her: Who says that?
Him: You do.
01 November 2002 | Absence
One morning he stopped keeping track of time. Or he didn’t actually stop (can one even imagine such a thing?), but merely disabled all the clocks in his apartment. There were three in all: his alarm clock, the clock over the refrigerator, and the clock function in his computer. To disable the alarm clock, he removed the battery, keeping the clock facedown as he did so to avoid seeing the time. The kitchen clock proved more difficult as he had to figure out a way to get it down from the wall without noting the position of its hands. He managed this by squinting up at the clock to fix its location, then reaching up, head averted, and lifting it from its nail. The computer clock was harder still, for by default the time appears in plain view in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. How do you change something like that without seeing the time in the process? What he did was this: He held his right hand over the time and moused with his left. After changing what appeared to be the appropriate control panel setting, he restarted the computer to make certain it had taken. Sadly it hadn’t, and it was at this point that he saw the time for the first time that day: 9:59 a.m. Some time earlier he called a friend and left a message for her. “It’s Friday morning,” he said, and as he was about to add the time, he remembered that he didn’t know it. Later (was it an hour later? two hours?) he ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich (he knew it was before his usual lunch time, but he was hungry). Then he biked around town, doing errands. A few blocks from the library he saw a big clock on a black pole in front of a shoe store. He tried to not notice the position of the hands, but it was too late. 2:05.
Just as he returned to his apartment, his friend called back. He told her what he had done, and she offered to come to his place that night instead of meeting in a restaurant somewhere, since he would be unable to commit to a specific meeting time. Naturally they got into a conversation about time—the very thing he didn’t want to think about! This frustrated him until he realized that the absence of something will at first make one more, not less, conscious of it.
