Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

31 December 2002 | Vigor

Earlier, while formatting David Kozubei’s masterwork Lord Rumwinkle’s Painting for the web, I came to Chapter 6 of Part Two and happened to notice, in the middle of the page, the word wanked. It just sort of jumped up at me. Wanked. Curious, I stopped formatting for a moment and read Chapter 6 in its brief entirety.

Afterwards, refreshed, I returned to my work with renewed vigor.

30 December 2002 | Box

I have been thinking of you. You are like a box I hold but cannot open. When I shake the box, the sound is soft and distant. I have the thought that the box contains a second box, and that the second contains a third. Each is different from the one that held it.

When I leave the house, I carry the box with me. It is light—so light I am apt to forget it’s there. In fact I do forget, but then I see my reflection in a storefront window or in the window of a passing car, and I’m this man holding a box.

29 December 2002 | Broken

I’m on the bus, heading to the For Eyes place downtown to get my glasses fixed. The left stem broke this morning as I tried to bend it back into position. It was an interesting moment when it broke. I thought, It’s broken now. It made me remember a time I was in a car with friends and the car began to swerve off the road (it was snowing) and it seemed like it was taking a long time for the car to swerve the entire way off the road (which it wasn’t), so I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, Remember this moment. I didn’t get upset that it had broke; I just started to figure out what I needed to do to fix it. (I’m extremely nearsighted—legally blind in the left eye and hardly much better in the right. As a kid I once, having broken my glasses at school, walked into the pole of a traffic sign.)

After some thought, I tried to epoxy the little piece that broke, although I doubted it would hold because the break was at the worst stress point. I took a shower while it set, and when I returned it was clear that the epoxy wasn’t going to hold. Still I managed to put the glasses on without breaking the seal (it did bend, though). I wore the glasses for about a half-hour like that before the seal gave. Now the stem is in my pants pocket and my glasses are in my jacket pocket and I’m writing this from what appears to be the bottom of a swimming pool.

*

Given how badly I see, there are only four times I go without glasses. In order of frequency:

1. Sleep
2. Shower
3. Sex
4. Swim

What can I say, I take a lot of showers.

Sorry, five:

5. Broken

28 December 2002 | Light

The first night she stayed with him, they laid in the dark for several hours, talking and kissing. When she finally turned on the light to show him something, it shocked her how beautiful he was. In the time since it had gotten dark, she had forgotten.

Earlier, while it was still light out, the phone rang and he chose to ignore it. Then later, in the middle of the night, she was wakened by a flashing light in the window. It looked like the light of a police car. Frightened, she woke him. “What is that?” she asked. He looked for some time before realizing that it was the little light on the answering machine, indicating that a message had been received.

27 December 2002 | Aristotle

I have a pair of long underwear. Technically it’s not long underwear but some kind of tights. I borrowed it from my girlfriend at the time and never returned it. It’s black and made of stretchy material. I think of it as long underwear because that’s what I use it as. Plato said (I’m paraphrasing) that a thing is what it was made to be, whereas Aristotle said that a thing is what one uses it as. I side with Aristotle.

I just twisted the back around and read the label. It’s made of 52% cotton, 40% polyester, and 8% spanex. Also it’s from the Kathy Ireland Active Collection.

Just now while I was putting it on, the material in the left leg got bunched up in such a way that I couldn’t push my leg through. I mean that the material at the bottom had slipped up past my foot, so that by pushing down with my foot I created a kind of seal. The thing to do was take my foot out and unbunch the material and put my foot back through, but for whatever reason I lacked the patience to do this. Instead I pushed harder. While doing this I addressed the thing, the garment, my long underwear, saying, “Fuck you. Get the fuck up my fucking leg.”

This accomplished nothing, as you can imagine, so I stopped, one leg in the air, both hands clutching the fabric, and said, “I see. Fine. Now we’re going to use force.”

26 December 2002 | Beginning

M came by today, against my wishes. She knocked and I answered. Two days ago when I left to buy a window shade, I locked the top lock, which I never do. I did it to keep her out of my apartment. (She has—or had—just the bottom lock key.) Today she returned that key, although it’s possible she made a copy first. Did she make a copy? I doubt it. Will I keep locking the top lock? Probably.

We sat at the kitchen table and talked. It took less than five minutes to get to the usual place. The usual place is: She shuts down because of something I say or don’t say, or more often, say but say wrongly. Also the thing I say or don’t say or say wrongly is something crazy—crazy in sense of something that couldn’t possibly (in my mind) cause a person to shut down. Then she storms out. She stormed out quietly this time, which I appreciated.

In the beginning (six weeks ago!) it struck me as strange that the beginning felt like the end. Why the hell does the beginning feel like the end, I kept asking myself. Now I know why: Because it was the end.

25 December 2002 | Stan

I swear this is true.

A man calls his son.

FATHER: Stan, this is your father.

SON: Hi, dad.

FATHER: Stan, I’m sending some work your way.

SON: Hey, thanks, dad.

An hour later the man calls his son again.

FATHER: Stan, this is Stan.

SON: Hi, dad.

FATHER: Son, I’m sending some work your way.

SON: Yeah, dad, you mentioned that. Thanks.

An hour later the man calls his son a third time.

FATHER: Stan, I’m sending some work your way.

SON (annoyed): Dad, this is third time you called to tell me this.

FATHER (pissed): You know, you’re an asshole, you know that?

Two weeks later the man calls his son again. The son’s answering machine picks up.

FATHER: Son, this is your father. I just want you to know I’m sorry I called you an asshole. You’re my son and I love you. Please forgive me.

After hanging up, the man turns to his wife and says, “You know, he really is an asshole.” His wife replies, “Actually, you’re both assholes.” Then the phone makes a funny sound and they look at it. It isn’t lined up on the cradle right, and everything they just said was recorded on their son’s answering machine.

Glad tidings and so forth.

24 December 2002 | Town

You’re at a party and it’s not so bad. It’s not great either, but not so bad. At certain points you have no one to talk to, so you sit and look at all the people talking.

Earlier a man told you that he’s trying to become a clown. He said that when he was little he had a recurring dream (he was just remembering this when he was talking to you) that there was rocking chair horse in his room, and that this rocking chair horse looked like a clown, and that this clown had a searing bright light above it and that above the light was a trapped door. It was a scary dream, he said, and talking about it now, he wondered if it had something to do with his wanting today to become a clown.

The dream didn’t make any sense, but still it was the second best thing to happen.

The best thing was hearing a song about a town that’s going away or something, you couldn’t really hear the lyrics over the chatter. “On our town, on our town” it went. It was sad, but not sad sad. It was like something beautiful was dying and you were saying goodbye to it, but it was also vaguely okay because everything dies in time, and now here this too, although lord knows it was sad.

Or no, it was sadder than this. The thing that was dying was not supposed to die, or even if it was, there was no way to accept it, and yet here it was, accepted or not, approaching, and the person singing could see it, and that’s what she was singing, she was singing that she can see it and feel it (both equally: seeing and feeling; neither without the other) and that this was what it meant.

23 December 2002 | Platform

It’s two a.m. in the 14th Street subway station. A woman, a blond in a dark coat, leans against a pole and possibly cries. You can’t tell for certain that she cries because she’s facing away from the platform and also because her hair comes down past her shoulders, hiding her face. She has her arms crossed in front of her and appears to be shaking a little, presumably as a result of crying. However because her coat is so thick, it’s hard to tell if she’s definitely shaking. Also it sounds like she’s whimpering, although this too is uncertain.

You pace back and forth along the platform, walking three or four poles past her in each direction. You do this so as to disguise the fact that you’re trying to figure out if she’s crying. Similarly you walk at a consistently slow pace so that it doesn’t seem strange how slowly you walk when you pass her.

It has to be that someone made her cry. There is a man she loves, and he hurt her. She was with him tonight; this is where she just came from. She has nice shoes—black, fashionable—and dark pants which you can only see the bottoms of. You wouldn’t dare tap her on the shoulder and ask in a concerned voice if she’s okay because that would be creepy. She is standing where she’s standing because she wants privacy to cry. If indeed she’s crying. To ask her if she’s okay would be to pose as someone who cares about her, when really you’re just curious. Although in another sense you do care: it’s just an abstract sort of caring.

The W comes. You’re not waiting for the W; you’re waiting for the Q. The W is a new train, and it confuses you. It’s better if you wait for the Q. The woman gets on the W. If you get on the W, you can sit somewhere near her and find out if she’s been crying, because it will be evident in her face. All you know about the W is that it goes to Brooklyn, then turns in the wrong direction. So if you take the W, you’ll have to switch for the Q where it turns, assuming the Q stops there. For this reason it’s better if you just wait for the Q. You get on the W.

That’s not true: You don’t get on the W. You stand on the platform and stare through the train windows as the W goes past. Your hope is that she’s facing your direction and possibly crying or looking like she was just crying or perhaps even looking like she wasn’t—any of these would fine.

But no, you see nothing: a blur of faces.

22 December 2002 | Contraption

You’re sitting in the kitchen reading a short story in the New Yorker called “Polygamy,” though you should be in your room working and though you’re not at all interested in the story, it’s just something you’re reading, when you hear the front door open and footsteps in the hall and Sonia appears in the kitchen and you say Hi, trying to make the Hi cheerful-sounding, only you know it isn’t cheerful-sounding because you don’t feel cheerful, you feel lousy, you have a lousy feeling, you should be in your room working, you should have been in my room working all day but instead you kept doing something else and now Sonia is here and you’re ignoring her because you haven’t anything to say nor the energy to find something to say, you just prefer to sit in silence and read a story you don’t even like. Sonia takes some sort of green or rather greens from the refrigerator and puts the greens in this wooden steamer contraption she has and runs some water into a pan and places the pan on the stove with the steamer contraption above it, and it occurs to you that Sonia is trying just as hard as you are to think of something to say because here the both of you are in your kitchen and you aren’t saying anything. It’s not that you don’t like Sonia, you like Sonia plenty, Sonia is a decent person who lets you use her steamer contraption whenever you want, and one time when she was out, you snuck in her room to borrow a book for a second and there on her desk you saw that she was writing something in incredibly small letters, pretty much the smallest letters you can imagine someone writing in, and although you didn’t understand a word of what she was writing (you only read maybe three sentences before feeling overcome by guilt), to see those teeny tiny letters made you realize again how precious she is, a totally precious person, so it’s not that you don’t like Sonia, you like Sonia very much, it’s just that at this particular moment you prefer to read this boring-as-fuck story in the New Yorker.

21 December 2002 | S.O.B.

I’ll make this brief.

In recent years I’ve taken to singing holiday songs. I don’t sing the usual lyrics, which I either don’t know or don’t like, but rather my own lyrics, which are the same for every song. If nothing else, this simplifies things.

This year I have decided to share a sample song with my readers. I nearly went with Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which cannot be beat for jauntiness, whatever the lyrics), but in the end chose the more somber, more sober, more “Oblivioian,” Silent Night. I hope you approve.

And now, the music.

[Much thanks to Pat Power, who, Flash in hand, would not go gentle into that good night.]

20 December 2002 | Blacktop

She walks along the fence on the far side of the playground, heading toward the blacktop. She’s in third grade and no one in third grade ever goes to the blacktop. The blacktop is bigger than the whitetop and doesn’t have painted lines for hopscotch or kickball or bottlecaps; it’s just black. The only kids that play there are older kids, and some have been suspended.

She doesn’t really want to go to the blacktop, but according to the game she’s playing, you have to go farther each time. Last time she made it to the backtop and stepped over with one foot, so this time she has to step over with both. This is the rule, and though it’s her game and her rule, it would be wrong to break it just because she doesn’t want to step all the way.

When she reaches the edge of the blacktop, she looks down and sees that the surface is made of the same thing streets are made of. Everything is made of something, and this is what the blacktop is made of. Seeing this gives her courage. She steps forward, first one foot, then the other, and stands with both feet in the blacktop.

Nothing happens.

Looking along the length of the fence into the far corner of the playground, she sees some trash swirl into the air and fall back down and swirl up again. Then she turns and faces the whitetop, which is different now.

The changes are all small things, and at first she can’t see them, she just knows they’re there. Soon, though, she realizes that one of the kickball fields starts farther from the building and that the dodgeball circle is smaller than it was and painted a darker shade of yellow.

To make the lines change back, she steps into the whitetop with both feet, but nothing happens. Then she steps back into the blacktop, but again nothing happens. Several more times she steps between the surfaces, standing on one side, then the other, but nothing ever happens.

She looks for the playground monitor, Mrs. Chamberlain, who always stands near the bathroom the little kids use. A woman stands exactly where Mrs. Chamberlain always stands, but she’s not Mrs. Chamberlain.

Scared now, or something worse than scared, she runs to where Laura and MJ were playing Chinese chink before, but the girls playing Chinese chink now aren’t Laura and MJ. She scans the playground, frantically searching for a familiar face, it doesn’t matter whose, only none of these kids even go to her school. They all look like kids who would go to her school, but none really are.

Later, in the Vice-Principal’s office (a different Vice-Principal, though no less mean), she tries to tell him how she stepped with both feet on the blacktop, but the Vice-Principal isn’t listening. Instead he wants to know what her “real” name is and where she “really” comes from, because to him she’s not a student in the school, nor is her teacher a real teacher, nor her street a real street.

More than anything she wants to scream, to yell as loud as she can, but something tells her to stay quiet from now on and not say anything to the Vice-Principal, or to anyone, no matter what anyone says, or what happens, or anything.

19 December 2002 | Pause

They waded through the street fair crowd, searching for the stand of Cafe of India, where he thought they could buy a mound of Sag Paneer and rice for three dollars. She was in a foul mood, as she often was in crowds, and saw no reason to hide it. In fact she deliberately made the experience as unpleasant for him as possible so as to give him pause, in the future, before forcing her to deal with such a crowd—what Lorca called, as she kept reminding him, the “urinating multitudes.”

18 December 2002 | Walk

Arguments with her on the walk home.

She is not there. (Lord knows where she is.)

I am arguing with my idea of her. (Wasn’t I always?)

To anyone else I would simply be this guy walking.

These arguments, often I lose them.

17 December 2002 | Backhand

I arrive at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library with a list of five books to take out.

The first, After Midnight by Irmgard Keun, is not in the catalog.

The second, Artificial-Silk Girl, also by Irmgard Keun, is listed in the catalog as on the shelf in Fiction. I look in Fiction, but it’s not there. I ask the librarian if it might be elsewhere. She looks on her computer. It’s in New Arrivals. I look in New Arrivals. It’s not there.

The third, James Dickey’s Deliverance, is listed, like Artificial-Silk Girl, as on the shelf in Fiction. However, like Artificial-Silk Girl, it’s not actually on the shelf in Fiction. I ask the librarian (the same librarian) if it might be elsewhere. No, it should be on the shelf in Fiction. I ask if books are often not on the shelf when they should be. Yes, she says. She has a nice smile.

The fourth, De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s prison-written, book-length letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, yields the same result as Deliverance: on the shelf in Fiction, yet not on the shelf in Fiction. I mention to the smiling librarian having noticed in the catalog that other branches have copies of this book. Can a copy be transferred from one of those branches? Yes, it can, but it costs fifty cents. One fills out a postcard, she explains, which gets mailed to one when the book arrives. Said cards are obtained from the something librarian up front. I go to the something librarian up front, who explains that as of December 11, the library no longer provides this service. I tell her, nicely, that her library totally sucks. The way I say it is, No offense meant, but this library totally sucks. I know, she says. She has cool glasses.

The final book, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, is, like its brethren, not where it should be, which is on the shelf in Fiction. I ask the first librarian if it might be elsewhere. She looks on her computer. Yes, there’s a copy stored in the basement. How do I get this copy? I fill out a slip and give it to the something librarian up front. Ah, the something librarian up front! I fill out a slip and give it to the something librarian up front, who suggests I return in fifteen minutes. To pass the time I read an article in Tennis Magazine about the Best Strokes of All-Time. Andre Agassi’s backhand is not mentioned anywhere under Backhands, which I find absurd. In fairness to Tennis Magazine, they do rate his return of serve the All-Time Best, although in another sense this fact is damning. Doesn’t a return of serve consist of fifty percent backhands? How can someone have the greatest return of serve of all-time, yet not deserve at least Honorable Mention under Backhands? I am fuming, although it’s a kidding kind of fuming. I return to the something librarian. Down and Out in Paris and London is not in the basement.

16 December 2002 | Heartbreak

About forty minutes ago I called M and broke up with her. (Yes, on the phone; I broke up with her on the phone.) Then I got up from my desk and washed some dishes. Before doing so, I put away the dishes in the dish rack. As I was placing a glass on the shelf, I noticed that one of my two mugs (that’s correct: I only own two mugs) was gross-looking, a subtle film having formed along the bottom. I took the mug down to wash it and in the process spotted a similar film along the bottom of the other mug. So I proceeded to wash both mugs, thoroughly scrubbing them with abrasive side of the scrubbie.

[An email just arrived from M. She has agreed to my proposal of no contact until after the holidays. She signed her email “be well, m,” which I dearly appreciate.]

I believe I set a record today for total amount of time spent with one’s forehead on one’s desk. I didn’t keep track, but I’m sure it was well over an hour. I would stay in that position for ten minutes or so, then realize what I was doing and pick my head up. Later I’d find myself with my head back on the desk, and pick it up again.

Yesterday, when things were at their worst, it occurred to me that if I could write an account of what was happening at that moment between me and M, an account consisting of nothing but our dialogue and some basic stage directions (“She runs to bathroom, shuts door. He follows, opens door, turns on light. She is standing there, bent over. He turns off light,” etc.), it would out-Bergman Bergman. Not that I’d ever want to write such a thing, or could.

After reading her email, I opened Internet Explorer and deleted the link to her website in my Favorites. Lord knows this won’t stop me from visiting her website; I’m just hoping that the time spent typing the url will give me a moment to reflect on what I am about to do.

We were together for thirty-two days. Aside from the times we were fucking or had just recently been fucking, it went badly—shockingly so.

Also I’m heartbroken.

15 December 2002 | Vertigo

We went for a long walk together, a walk that became a kind of Hollywood film. I was played by an actor somewhere between Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart; she was played by Kim Novak. It was a Hitchcock film, now that I think of it, based on Vertigo. The film had a certain fatefulness to it. We took to understand that if these two characters walked far enough together, they would fall in love, so the Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart character, knowing this, maneuvered to get them lost.

14 December 2002 | Box

First story I ever wrote was about this ten-year-old kid who meets an old man in the playground. I was ten when I wrote it. It’s lost now. Everything I wrote back then is lost.

An old man is sitting on a bench in a playground, holding a wooden box in his lap. One of the kids in the playground thinks he’s seen this man before, but can’t figure where. All the other kids are afraid of him: all he does is sit there and look at them. One kid wants to go and tell his father about it, but the main kid (the protagonist) insists that the man isn’t hurting anyone and that they should leave him alone.

When the kids head home for dinner, the protagonist sneaks back on some excuse and goes up to the man, who’s still sitting on the bench with the box and has this look like he knew the kid would come back. The kid doesn’t know what to say so he asks what’s in the box. “Time,” says the man.

I don’t remember anything else until the end of the conversation, when the man gives the box to the kid with shaking hands. The kid takes the box and opens it and suddenly there’s this blinding light. When the kid can see again, the old guy is gone and he, the kid, is standing in what looks like a completely different place. Only it’s not a completely different place: it’s same place seventy years before. The kid doesn’t realize this until he walks to the corner and notices that the street names are the same as the street names right next to the playground. Everything else is different of course: the roads are made of dirt and people are riding horses. At this point the kid looks down and sees that he’s still holding the box, which is closed.

Now the kid realizes who the old man was. He was himself.

13 December 2002 | Girlfriend

My girlfriend is sitting on my knee right now. I can feel how warm her cunt is through my pants. I think she wants to come again, but we don’t have time to fuck. That is a sad state of affairs—when you don’t have time to fuck.

Dear reader, I didn’t write that. My girlfriend did. When she wrote it, she really was sitting on my… well, however she describes it. I suppose it seemed funny to her that I would post it. Also she wasn’t sitting on my pants; she was sitting on my underwear. I don’t know about you, reader, but I don’t think of underwear as pants; pants are what you wear on top of underwear. Although in another sense, yes, underwear is pants. However, when you use pants in a context like this, your readers will naturally imagine a garment that goes over underwear, not underwear. Say what you mean, girlfriend.

12 December 2002 | Philosophy

When she returns from the airport bathroom (where she has presumably washed their two peaches), she sits down and says, “You weren’t paying attention.”

Looking up from his book, he says, “Yes I was.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

*

Later they argue about philosophy.

Her: “There is a difference between belief and knowledge.”

Him: “Who can say what’s true other than what’s true for oneself?”

Her: “Haven’t you ever believed something that turned out to be false? There is a different between such beliefs and true beliefs.”

Him: “Perhaps everything I believe to be true is false—unbeknownst to me of course.”

Her: “Funny, that’s what I was just thinking.”

11 December 2002 | Falling

PILLS scored the highest, followed by OVEN. Then came GUN, JUMP, and finally DROWN.

DROWN scored half as much as PILLS, seventeen to thirty-three. This surprised me. I knew DROWN wouldn’t win, I knew it didn’t stand chance, but seventeen points?

I think it’s because of the ocean.

I think it’s because the ocean’s right there, because I’m always hearing it and seeing it and smelling it. This is why I thought of including DROWN when really there was no good reason to do so, as evidenced by the score it received: seventeen points out of a possible fifty. An average of three-point-four on a scale of ten.

Even JUMP, which I knew would do poorly, did better than DROWN.

In defense of DROWN, it did win the OTHERS’ PAIN category, I did give it the highest score in that particular category, figuring that there was a chance, however slim, that my body would be swept out into the ocean where it might—who knew?—be eaten by sharks, in which case no one would ever have to find it or face it: an ideal result.

Don’t get me wrong, I never actually thought this would happen. I just thought it might, that if all went well it might, which was more than I could say for JUMP.

With JUMP I knew for certain that some unfortunate person or persons would be forced to encounter my body on the sidewalk. Not to mention the fact that I might been seen falling. All of which is why I gave JUMP a one, the lowest possible score, in the OTHERS’ PAIN category.

By comparison DROWN received a seven for OTHERS’ PAIN—an excellent score. However DROWN was not helped by the fact that I weighed OTHERS’ PAIN lower than the other two categories, counting it for half as much as either MY PAIN or CHANCE OF SUCCESS. But even if had I weighed all three categories the same, DROWN still would have scored the lowest overall, despite the fact that I gave it a seven for OTHERS’ PAIN.

My point of course is that I never should have included DROWN in the first place.

The same goes for JUMP.

Neither JUMP nor DROWN belonged on the list, since I was never sincere about including them.

*

How do you drown yourself anyway? How do you prevent yourself from keeping yourself afloat when you’re there in the ocean with the ocean all around you?

I can see getting tired. I can see having your arms become so exhausted, so leaden, you literally can’t lift them anymore. But I can’t see not using them to begin with, I can’t see surrendering like that, giving in like that, no matter how much you want to.

It’s like holding your breath. You can’t accomplish anything, you can’t get anywhere by holding your breath. At some point you’re going to breathe again. You can’t decide to stop breathing and then stop.

Of course when you jump, once you jump, it’s over. You fall. But with the ocean, the ocean holds you up. It pulls you down and holds you up.

*

It’s the falling that scares me. It’s when you’re in the air and you know that it’s over, that in four or five or however many seconds you’re going to run out of air and hit the pavement.

What if in that moment, in those moments—this is the question I ask myself—what if you change your mind? What if in falling you see you were mistaken, that in all this time of wishing, you never understood what you were wishing, but that now, falling, you understand?

No doubt this happens all the time. Because how can you know anything—I mean really know anything—until you’re there and you’re falling?

You can’t.

*

What’s worse is that they’re all falling, at bottom. Because there always comes a point at which you pass the point of no return. From that point on you’re falling. Even drowning is like falling. Even shooting yourself.

Of course with shooting yourself you’re only falling for as long as it takes the bullet to leave the gun and enter your head. Which is what, a hundredth of a second? So it’s a kind of falling you never experience.

Unless time slows down at that point to the point where you have time to think something. A single thought like, say, I did it.

Or more like, I—.

I

What is a thought less than I?

10 December 2002 | Moment

My button fell into a toilet full of pee. I had to reach in and fish it out. I’ve been having this problem for some time now; months: the button falls off when I unbutton. It’s annoying. It’s the button on my pants, the one above the zipper, the one that, together with the zipper, holds my pants shut. What’s happening is, the little hole into which the button goes so as to attach it to my pants has torn or worn slightly, so that when I unbutton the button, the button pops out. Sometimes I don’t notice it until I feel the button roll down my leg or wedge against my thigh. Other times, like today, it pops out, like today, straight into the toilet.

The moment I grasped the two flaps of my pants and realized that the button was gone and that it had to have fallen into the toilet and that if I wanted it back I was going to have to reach through all that pee (I’d had a long, satisfying urination) was not let me tell you a happy moment.

09 December 2002 | Bind

I’m not kidding, this is an email exchange I just had with a complete stranger.

08 December 2002 | Dreamland

All mammals but platypuses dream.

Also: Dolphins have split brains so that when one brain is dreaming, the other is awake. Otherwise they’d drown.

07 December 2002 | Hand

Despite being ambidextrous, there are few things I do equally well with either hand. Basically, whichever hand I used the first time I tried something is the hand I use thereafter. Why develop or maintain redundant skill sets?

For those keeping score at home, there’s no logic or pattern to which hand I use for what. Thus I eat, write, golf, and play tennis right-handed, but throw, bowl, shoot pool, and play basketball left-handed. I’m a switch-hitter in baseball, having spent a humiliating summer at eleven learning to bat the other way around, which in this case was left-handed.

With no small amount of pride, I place myself in a different category of ambidextrous from those natural southpaws who are forced to write right-handed. Instead, I am “purely” ambidextrous, born with no dominant hand, naturally adept with both sides of my body and thus both sides of my brain.

Ultimately this is where my self-flattery points: to my brain. I tell myself that my dual-handedness reflects a special “dual-brainedness,” which in turn explains my odd mix of talents: left-brain logic and analysis combined with right-brain intuition and creativity.

We all need something to lean on.

*

Only once have I tried to “exploit” my ambidextrousness, as it were. This happened at a summer league tennis tournament when I was 15. My team was in the city semifinals and I played 16-and-under singles. Thinking myself clever, I warmed up left-handed so as to fool my opponent into believing me a worse player than I was. My plan was to continue the ruse right up to the first point, when I would switch hands and rip a shot right past the poor chump.

Only it didn’t happen this way. Having neglected to warm up properly, I sent the first ball flying far beyond the baseline. By the time I found my range, I was hopelessly behind. I lost, the team lost, and my coach was pissed.

“Smart move, Lefty,” he barked as I walked off the court.

It wasn’t easy, but I managed to stop myself from informing him that I’m neither left-handed nor right-handed but ambidextrous.

06 December 2002 | Ellipses

Another scene with the buxom circulation librarian. As he stood in line waiting to check out his books, two other librarians handled checkout and the buxom librarian did something behind them. He didn’t think there was much chance he would end up in her line because she didn’t have a line, but then just as he stepped up to the counter, the phone rang and one of the other librarians answered it, so the buxom librarian took over for her. Not exactly looking at him, she said, “Buh, buh, buh. Sorry about the line. It’s Saturday afternoon, it’s quite hectic.”

“Hey, that’s okay,” he replied.

He waited to see if he could think of anything else to say, but nothing came. He tried to remain calm and just leave himself open to the moment, but it was hopeless: he felt neither calm nor open, and nothing came.

As he stepped away from the counter, several things he could have said flashed through his mind. The first was to ask her if she knew where that came from, saying buh, buh, buh like that.

“I’ve known other people who say that,” he could have said. “It’s said instead of regular words. It’s like a spoken sort of ellipses.”

Short of this he could have simply complimented how well she was handling the hecticness. Both approaches would have had their merits, although he liked the first one better, because of the word ellipses. Ellipses struck him as a word a librarian would definitely like and might even find sexy, in the right circumstances.

Obviously it was moot point now: he said neither. In fact he said nothing. Again.

She was wearing a sweater she wears a lot. He thinks of it as her Lawrence of Arabia sweater. He believes she wears it because she thinks it hides her belly. He hasn’t actually seen this belly of hers, but the sweater (or the pullover, rather; it’s more a pullover than a sweater) definitely gives her lots of room to hide it, particularly given the way her breasts, which are of considerable size, create a kind of tent effect.

05 December 2002 | Process

I imagine a work that would be a transcription, that would consist of a transcription or transcriptions like this one. In this way the reader would read, the reader would be able to read, in this way the process of thinking would be evident, would be part and parcel of what we read. Not just thinking, not just the process of thinking, but the process of trying to find words, the process of trying to find words, of trying to find a way to say something.

04 December 2002 | Phone

Paul: Are you drunk?

Liz: Let’s see. I had two martinis, a glass of wine, and a single malt.

Paul: I would say you’re drunk.

Liz: I would say there’s a blood alcohol level above what is legal to drive.

Paul: Yeah.

Liz: Yeah.

Paul: I’m high.

Liz: Good, okay, we’re great now. So, um, can we talk about how much I want to fuck you?

[Laughter]

Liz: Never mind, I’m just kidding.

Paul: This is first time I ever wanted to say to you that you’re making me feel like I’m dying.

Liz: Do you have any idea of what I would do to you if I was there? You really don’t know. You don’t have any fucking idea.

Paul: You know, seriously, I hope that’s not true. Because if that’s true, if I really had absolutely no idea…

Liz: No, you really don’t have any idea. You know what? Frankly, here’s my frank opinion. You really don’t understand. You don’t understand. I really don’t think you understand.

Paul: The funny thing is, I don’t think that you understand either.

Liz: Understand what? What don’t I understand?

Paul: More or less the same thing.

Liz: Oh, whatever.

Paul: Can we bookmark this moment? Because what’s the actual question? “Who understands?” “Who understood?”

Liz: You don’t get it.

Paul: Yeah, “who got it.” Will you promise me something?

Liz: What?

Paul: That when we return to this moment you’ll tell the truth.

Liz: That I’ll tell the truth?

Paul: We’re gonna go back…

Liz: Later?

Paul: Yeah, at some point we’re gonna turn back to this conversation and we’re gonna try to figure out…

Liz: You know what, if I don’t tell the truth with you then I might as well kill myself. Don’t you feel that?

Paul: Yes.

Liz: If I can’t tell the truth with you, then I need to just take 400 sleeping pills like, now. You know what I mean?

Paul: Yes. I know.

Liz: Because then who the fuck is it if it’s not you?

Paul: Yeah, who is it if it’s not you.

[Pause.]

Paul: It’s you.

Liz: I know.

Paul: So, uh… Ali, you were with Ali. I’m making talk.

Liz: I know you’re making talk. You’re good at talk making. Good at making up talk.

Paul: So you were with Ali.

Liz: With Ali. I was so fucking late. I left her sitting from 7:00 to like 7:45, or whenever the fuck it was that I got there.

Paul: Why?

Liz: Oh, because, I don’t know. Because what was I doing? What the fuck was I doing? I was really late and I felt bad.

Paul: Wait. How late were you?

Liz: Well, I was already late.

Paul: Well, obviously.

Liz: And then there were two things. I was obsessed with this man in New York. That I want to fuck. And I called him. And… oh, I’m sorry. Whom I want to fuck.

[Laughter.]

Paul: Is that right?

Liz: You can’t use that or which for a human being.

Liz: Whom I wish to fuck. Yes.

03 December 2002 | Speak

My great-aunt died today. Or yesterday, I forgot to ask which. I am to speak at her funeral tomorrow. In my family I have become the designated speaker-at-funerals. Earlier today, while telling a colleague these things, I wondered aloud who will speak at mine.

Apropos of nothing, a woman outside is screaming: “You did not want to tell me. Shut up. I’m speaking. Shut the fuck up. You stupid motherfucker. Shut the fuck up. You dumb bitch. I something your fucking head.”

02 December 2002 | Emails From Readers Concerning Direction and Orientation

Joooooolia Tenney writes regarding Progress:

*

Larry Hampshire writes regarding Deflection:

01 December 2002 | Spin

We were on the Interstate, in eastern Ohio, near Pennsylvania, when Monique lost control of the van. I believe we spun around one and a half times. I was in the back when it happened, sleeping on the fold-out bed. As we spun Monique called out something to effect of, “Michael! Michael! I can’t control it! Oh my god!”

When we landed (for it felt like landing), the van came to a gentle standstill against the divider in the middle of the highway.

Actually we may have spun two and half times, I’m not sure, but however many times we spun, it had to be something and a half, because we ended up facing backwards.

The spinning was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy is inside her room and her room is inside the tornado and the entire room is spinning, only it was a lot slower than that, or it felt a lot slower, and anyway it was different because this other person, Monique, was yelling the whole time.