February 2003
28 February 2003 | House
Yesterday I had an idea to build a house out of something, only now I’ve forgotten what it was. I was talking on the phone with a friend and she said something that made me think of these things, whatever they were, and so I said I would love to make a whole house out of them. “Like we used to do with Popsicle sticks,” I said, “but on a grander scale.” It was a funny idea, I swear.
What was it? All I remember is that the forgotten things were somewhat larger than Popsicle sticks but shaped kinda like that. Also, I was going to have to ask certain people for their used stockpile of these things, only these people weren’t going to give them to me, I don’t remember why not. Also, these people may have been corporate people, although I could be wrong about that.
Two paragraphs ago I was certain I was going to remember and in fact was trying to slow down the process so I could write what I’ve just written in a genuine state of forgetfulness, but now it seems I may never remember.
Another clue: It struck me at the time that the idea was yet another one of my anarchist fantasies. I’ve been noticing this a lot recently. Half the things I think are ideas for a world that can never be, a solar-powered utopia in which the bad people lose every time and you can make houses out of anything you want.
27 February 2003 | Blur
There are two of me. One knows this, the other does not. For the one who knows (let us call him A), the situation is painful. Alone in his knowledge, he tries to share it with B, but B ignores him, believing A’s voice to be his own. Sometimes A tries to disguise his voice, but this too fails, because B has come to think of his voice as several voices. This follows from B’s theory that, as he puts it, a person is a crowded place. A has the same theory but for different reasons.
In B’s version of the theory, all the persons in the place are himself or aspects of himself; he, B, is the amalgamation of all such persons or aspects, known or unknown; he is the place that contains the amalgamation. And since this amalgamation is in flux, B is in flux. In a sense there is no B, as B sees it, for there is no moment at which a box could be drawn around B such that the contents of the box would define him. A photograph of B would be a blur.
To A, both A and B are selves described by B’s theory. They share the same body but are in other respects distinct. They are something like Siamese twins who overlap to the point they occupy the same physical space. Other selves share this space as well, although B is the only one A knows. The way A thinks of it (and all this is intended by way of analogy, like the way physicists speak of billiard balls and mushy pool tables to describe the curvature of space/time), B is his closest neighbor. He, A, assumes the existence of other coextensive selves (the place is crowded, after all), but has no direct experience of them.
It is surprising which one is writing this.
Lawrence, the IT Manager, tosses some rocks at me, one of which hits me on the side of the head, just above the left ear. Though it doesn’t hurt much and isn’t bleeding, I’m livid. (Some background: I’ve never liked Lawrence, save for my first few weeks on the job, when I failed to recognize what a phony he is.) We’re both standing in a river when this happens, so I go over and sort of bang his head against the pebbly sand, saying, “You can’t throw rocks at my head.” Lawrence surprises me by getting up and performing a song he’s just written, accompanying himself with an instrument that looks like a cross between a tuba and a trombone. He sings a verse, plays a few bars, sings another verse, and so on. The song is a narrative of our “misunderstanding,” as he puts it, and it goes something like this: [sings tune]. While singing and playing, Lawrence does a dance in the shallow water that involves a lot of rapid marching movements. It’s so beautiful, particularly the dancing part (which makes me think of that football drill where the players step in and out of overturned car tires), that I immediately forgive him for the unfortunate business with the rock.
24 February 2003 | Talk
—Have you said anything to him?
—No.
—Are you planning to?
—Do what?
—Say anything to him.
—No. I’m not going to talk to him anymore.
—Are you just not going to talk to him or are you going to tell him you’re not going to talk to him?
—I’m not going to talk to him.
—What happens if he calls?
—What do you mean what happens?
—What are you going to say if he calls?
—Nothing. I’m going to hang up.
—What if he calls and uses a different voice?
—Why would he do that?
—Because you keep hanging up on him.
—I’ll hang up when I realize it’s him.
—What if you never realize?
—Eventually I will. Or else I’ll hang up for some other reason.
—What if he kidnaps your little girl and says he going to kill her if you don’t talk to him.
—I don’t have a little girl.
—But say you did.
—He wouldn’t do this.
—But say he did.
—I suppose I would talk to him.
—What would you say?
—I don’t know. I guess that I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I remember when we loved each other and that I don’t know what happened to change that. That sometimes, late at night, I read our old emails. That I copied them into one document, even the ones where we’re just making plans or something, even the ones that are forwards of things. That there’s this tenderness there, in the emails, and that I haven’t forgotten that tenderness and don’t think I ever can or will. Some bullshit like that, the fucker has my kid.
23 February 2003 | Syllables
>hey,
>am suddenly in Sao Paolo, where it’s summer. I
>was very close to getting bumped and receiving
>a travel voucher, which meant I would have
>showed up at your apartment again and
>temporarily fulfilled your prophesy of me
>forever trying and failing to leave you.
>
>another question about syllables. (I know, I
>know, I know: I am BAD with syllables.) when
>there’s a lonely vowel in front, like ‘alone’
>or ‘equator’, is that vowel a syllable?
>
>love,
Alone is two syllables. Equator is three. I can’t get my fucking keyboard tray to work is eleven.
I’m really glad to hear from you so soon is also eleven. As is, sorry you didn’t get that travel voucher.
Me and my godforsaken prophesizing is, eerily, eleven as well.
Evidently a lot of sentences are eleven is, paradoxically, fourteen.
Love is one,
List of everything of hers still in apartment.
*
Story of finding secret recording of us talking on phone.
*
Failure, suddenly, to remember her nipples.
*
Contrasting and contradictory representations of breakup in emails to friends.
*
After she left the last time, I took a shower. When I got in the shower I noticed I had an erection.
Explain this.
20 February 2003 | Oatmeal
“The original soufflé was an accident by the chef to the king of France.”
I gesture to the bowl of oatmeal to indicate that history has repeated itself.
“This is still just oatmeal,” she says. “All you did was cook it a different way.”
Earlier, during a cooking-show-style demonstration of how I make oatmeal, I happened to use the word motherfucker.
“Wait,” she said. “You can’t say motherfucker on a cooking show.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “This show is going to be called Motherfucker.”
Now, though, I think it should be called Oatmeal. Each morning I make oatmeal, the same as always, except I have someone videotape me as do it and as I chat about some unrelated subject, since the instructions for preparing oatmeal should take no more than perhaps fifteen seconds to convey. Add some quick editing, slap on a bouncy theme song, and poof, it’s a five-minute cooking show on Oblivio. A cooking show, I should add, that’s really no different from any other cooking show, save that I happen to make the same thing each time: oatmeal.
This is a old idea for me. When I was a kid I read a story about a painter who spends his entire life painting the same tree. Years later, tripping on acid, I remembered this story and decided to look for something that could serve as my tree. I couldn’t find anything and instead found myself staring at a certain spot on the floor, convinced that if I stared long enough (this is what I told people) something would spill there.
That something, I now realize, is oatmeal.
The problem is finding someone to videotape me. Would you, dear reader, videotape me? Naturally it would be best (Rosecrans Baldwin dared me to mention this) if you were also my girlfriend, for that way you’d already be at my place, or I’d be at your place, when it came time for breakfast. However since you are not my girlfriend (of this I am certain!), I propose a purely platonic exchange of slapdash videotaping and editing services for a hot and yummy oatmeal breakfast.
Seriously: I am looking for a kindhearted Brooklynite with video chops (plus a camera!) to help me just one time, just to see.
Here I am reminded, for better or worse, of a quote by the former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. A bad plan, Kasparov said, is better than no plan. Of course it should be noted that Kasparov made his career as a relentlessly brilliant attacker, a player with uncanny intuition, lightning-fast vision, and a notorious knack for switching strategies mid-game. Also he was referring to chess.
19 February 2003 | Still
Photographs are false. One is never so still. We look at a photograph and imagine that it captures what a person looks like, but no one ever resembles a person in a photograph because no one is ever that still. Even the dead move.
15 February 2003 | Journey
The flakes of oatmeal at the top of my oatmeal jar are like the people waiting for a plane at the airport. They’re all very excited because they know they’re about to board the plane and go on a fabulous journey. However what they don’t know is that they will soon be dropped from this plane into a boiling sea, where they will be cooked alive, their flesh expanding and congealing into a sticky mash which will be spooned into a bowl and subsequently eaten in huge gulps by a hungry giant as he reads his newspaper.
I’m talking with J on the phone, and as I’m talking I’m concentrating as hard as I can on trying to think of something to say to her. We’re having a very nice-seeming conversation, although in truth I’m wracking my brains the whole time, trying to come with the next question, the next topic-starter. The naturalness between us is gone. It’s been this way a long time now. I’ve continued on in the vague hope things will improve, that some small portion of naturalness will return. It doesn’t seem possible this will happen, not now or ever, but then I’ve seen plenty of impossible things happen, and anyway it won’t happen if I don’t allow for the possibility. So that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to allow for the possibility.
When I’m in a fight with someone and feel bad, it often helps if I go to sleep and wake up and have it be the next day. It’s like I put on a new head, as Bernhard says. It’s like my old head disappears and a new one takes its place. In this case, though, J and I aren’t fighting, and many years’ worth of next days have passed, so I don’t think a night’s sleep is going to make much difference.
J told me a story once. She was leaning out the window of her parents’ apartment, looking down at the street below, when her mother came up behind her, wrapped her arms around J’s legs, and lifted them from the floor. For the briefest moment J thought her mother was trying to throw her out the window. It was terrifying. But then her mother released her legs and explained that it was all just a joke. J lost it at that moment, which she rarely does, and started screaming and raving at her mother, who was profusely apologetic. However J’s mother’s apologies only infuriated J more, because in characteristic fashion her mother turned the thing around so that it wasn’t about the horrible thing she had done to J, but how badly she felt about doing this horrible thing. That is, it was somehow about her feelings, J’s mother’s feelings, rather than J’s feelings, despite the fact that J was the one who had had the horrible thing done to her, not her mother.
While trying to think up questions to ask J to keep the conversation going, I remember this story, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’m J’s mother. This makes no sense, of course—I’ve never grasped J by the legs, nor done any such thing—but this is the thought that comes into my head: I’m J’s mother. I’m J’s mother and I just lifted her legs a little, as a kind of joke, and now J is screaming at me, only her screams sound like conversational remarks, a causal bit of catching up after months of being out of touch. I try to respond, to apologize for what I’ve done, I want J to know that I realize how wrong and horrific it was, but what comes out instead are rote questions about J’s life and rote remarks about mine. She screaming at me and I’m trying to tell her how sorry I am, but the words actually passing between us (we’re standing together in the living room all this time, talking to each other on our cellphones) have nothing to do with any of this, or anything, really; they’re just words said to fill the space where words belong.
And then suddenly, as it often happens with cellphones, the reception goes bad, and so we each try moving around the room to see if that helps. First I move, then J, then I move again… As we move, we periodically say things like, “How does this sound?” and “Is this any better?” and “Can you hear what I’m saying now?”
13 February 2003 | Mystery
J. R. Harvey writes in with an investigative analysis of the mysterious ass I discovered two weeks ago while searching for a photo to accompany a piece inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal:
concerning the picture of the woman’s ass, did you look around on that website? there are lots of other movie dialog snippets, and each has a picture at the top, and of course i wanted to see if there were more asses. but most of the pages have a broken link. it would seem that person (ajdlro) has linked to images on other sites, and a lot of those images are not there any more. but it appeared that the images in general had to do with the movies. so why is the ass there? i went to the website where the picture of the ass actually is. it’s another movie fan site. this site also has a seventh seal page, but the pictures are actual seventh seal pictures. and they are numbered; there is seventh6.jpg and seventh8.jpg, but seventh7.jpg does not appear on that page. seventh7.jpg is the ass.
from this i have formed a theory for the appearance of the ass in a place where death and the knight might have been. the picture of the ass is actually on danb’s server space, and ajdlro linked to it. i think that the picture of an ass wasn’t an ass to begin with. i think the ass was what openix.com/~danb/seventh6.jpg is now. That image is 329 x 232, which is what the html on the ajdlro’s page specifies for the ass, even though the ass is really 335 x 227.
so i think that danb noticed that adjlro was linking to an image on his page, and thought it would be funny to change the image to something else, thereby changing the whole tenor of adjlro’s page. perhaps adjlro has no idea that there is an ass there. or perhaps adjlro was as amused by it and left it. though i think the former is more likely, judging by the predominance of broken image links on adjlro’s site, and the claim at the bottom of the page that it hasn’t been updated since 1998.
at any rate, i like it.
Another reader, Sergio, reported that on the day I posted the original piece, the image of the ass rose steadily in the Google Image rankings for “seventh seal death,” for which I feel I owe a personal apology to Ingmar Bergman.
Sergio also noted that the woman’s fingers don’t really seem to pushing down the fabric but resting on it. This follows from the fact that the photo was staged. A woman stood with her pants half-off, pretending to be in the act of pushing them down. However, as I have just personally confirmed, you do most of the pushing in this case with your thumbs. You grip a bit underneath with your forefingers and perhaps your middle fingers and push down with your thumbs. The woman in the photo is doing no such thing. She’s holding her pants in place, having recently used this same grip to pull them up. Why were her pants previously down? That’s easy: So as to allow someone—presumably the photographer, but it could have been anyone, even a passing stranger—to wet her ass.
Considering the image from the viewer’s perspective, Sergio asks what real-life events could conceivably lead to a woman’s ass becoming wet just as she is removing her pants. The minds reels, writes Sergio.
In my response to him, I observed that the deeper one considers this photo, the less sexy it becomes. That is, until it becomes so unsexy, it’s suddenly sexy again, like traveling so far east you end up west.
12 February 2003 | Accident
An accident on the Interstate. Traffic crawls for miles. Dozens of emergency vehicles fly by in the shoulder: ambulances, firetrucks, an empty white bus that says POLICE in black letters.
Finally I approach. Flashing lights. People on stretchers being loaded into ambulances. Others with dazed expressions. My god, it’s a bus. No, two buses. One bus smashed into the back of another. The one that did the smashing has its front smushed together accordion-style. The driver must be dead, crushed. Are they’re trying to pry out the body, is that what they’re doing? I can’t see it, don’t want to see it, can’t see it, missed it.
Suddenly the scene is behind me and I’m zooming down the highway. I’m supposed to meet John at noon and will be late.
Date: 2/10/03
From: CEO
To: All staff
Subject: Opportunities
Site statistics are in for January, and I have bad news: Our numbers are down for the first time in the history of this website. While this is no reason to panic, it does indicate a leveling off of interest in our core product: Michael’s obsessive and depressing writing.
I’ve spoke often about perspective. We have no problems, you’ve heard me preach, only opportunities. Now that philosophy is being tested.
I don’t have all the answers here, but I do sense the need to expand our strategic horizons. We need to look in a new way, both within and without, and bring new vitality to our work. It all comes down a single word: humor.
Michael, as many of you know, can be quite funny in person. People often laugh when they’re with him. To give a single example: One time he got into bed with a woman and immediately turned over as if to go to sleep, then after a brief pause said, “You asleep?” We need to find a way to incorporate this kind of dead-on humor in future pieces.
It can’t be all gloom and doom. Not that there’s anything wrong with gloom and doom—it’s real, it’s moving, and let’s face it, it’s sexually compelling. But life is about more than doom and gloom, and the same should be true of this website.
Take Paul Ford’s goatrilla piece. What the hell is a goatrilla? I don’t know, but that picture Paul made was funny. Granted, Michael doesn’t consider the goatrilla piece the best thing Paul’s ever written, but so what? There are only three websites Michael will deign to read, so who cares what he thinks? We need to find a way to introduce goatrillas to Oblivio without diluting our core message or forgoing our core capabilities.
Of course I don’t mean goatrillas per se (although a few goatrillas wouldn’t hurt anyone), but rather the idea of goatrillas.
No one needs to tell me what Michael would say to this, but you know what? I’m tired of what Michael would say to things, and I think our readers are too.
For example there’s the cliff thing. In a recent piece, which I for one found humorless and depressing, Michael recycled an idea he used sixteen months ago in an equally humorless, equally depressing vein. Obviously the man is super-fond of this idea. We’re in a car, he says, that’s hurling down a cliff, and this car has no steering wheel and no brakes, and so on and so forth. Okay, fine. You already said this. If you insist on mentioning it a second time, how about adding a twist to make it new? Like, I don’t know, a goatrilla. There’s a goatrilla in the car and it’s doing something funny, something you wouldn’t expect a goatrilla to do. Again, I don’t mean a literal goatrilla, but something different, something new, something with the head of a goat and the body of a gorilla (just kidding).
I’m not sure if everyone knows this, but Michael can imitate the sound of a trumpet with his mouth. It’s actually more like a cross between a trumpet and a trombone, but whatever it is, it’s damn convincing. Combine this with the “squeezy” sounds Michael can make with his hands, and you’ve got a pretty rousing rendition of When The Saints Go Marching In.
My point is this: We don’t need to look elsewhere for answers; it’s simply a matter of recognizing what we have.
Did you know Michael writes jokes? It’s true. Admittedly he’s only written one, and this was many years ago, but that one joke has an unmistakable jokiness to it, which is something we all can draw inspiration from.
—What do parents in India say to their children when they feel they’ve been neglected their spiritual duties?
—You must pray more. There are spiritually starving children in America.
Bada-choom.
09 February 2003 | Hum
I’m at the gym and I’m riding one of the exercise bikes, the one I always ride, the one in the back corner, the one next to the room where the yoga classes are held. It’s a recumbent bike, the kind you sit on like you sit on a lounge chair, and as I’m riding I’m listening to music through my headphones. There’s a gizmo on the bike that’s wired into the gym’s audio system, and this gizmo has little arrows that allow you to navigate between channels, which is what I’m doing, I’m going from one channel to the next in search of a song to listen to.
Some channels are music-only channels; they’re like music stations on the radio but without any commercials or announcers. Other channels are audio feeds of television stations. Across the room, mounted above a bank of elliptical machines, are five television monitors, each set to a different station. Using the gizmo on the bike, I’m switching between MTV2, which is playing on the middle monitor, and three music-only channels.
And then suddenly I hear the oddest sound. It’s on MTV2. It’s like a hum of some kind. Not an electronic hum, a human hum. Like the hum of someone imitating the hum of a machine. I glance at the MTV2 monitor expecting to see a blank screen, but instead there’s a video playing, one I’ve never seen before.
Just to confirm that the audio system is working, I switch to a different channel, and this channel sounds fine, so I return to MTV2, where the hum seems to have gotten louder. It’s weird and frustrating, this hum, but soon I stop thinking about it so much because I become immersed in the video. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before on MTV2. It’s very spare and low-tech. It’s shot in black and white and appears to be slightly out of focus, although my sense is that this was intentional, that the videographers wanted to create a certain dreamlike effect, although it’s also possible that this was an accident, that the people who made the video simply didn’t know how to focus the camera.
Best I can tell, the video consists of a tour of an empty apartment. The camera moves from room to room, panning clockwise through each. It takes a few moments, I suppose because I hadn’t expected this, before I realize I’ve seen this apartment before. It’s the apartment I lived in in 1989, for a time with K.
The video begins in the room in which K and I had sex the first time, the room in which she cried, saying how much she’d wanted this, this meaning us, until I broke down and said that I’d searched all my life for her, for what I felt with her… truly the most embarrassing dreck you can imagine, although I meant every word of it. It’s a small room, barely big enough for a futon and dresser. The camera pans from left to right, then backs out through the doorway and swings into the room I made into the living room when K left to move in with a woman she met through an ad she found on a bulletin board in a woman’s bookstore, having explained to me that she couldn’t be my girlfriend or anyone’s girlfriend because being someone’s girlfriend means being that person’s possession, although she would continue to have sex with me if I wanted, to which I told her to fuck herself, I wanted a real relationship, not just someone to have sex with.
The third room isn’t the kitchen, which actually comes next, but the room on the far side of the kitchen, that is, the room I lived in after K left, the room that K and I would have sex in during the period immediately preceding her move to California with her roommate, who by this point may have also become her girlfriend, although K has always claimed that happened later, during the cross-country drive, which is something I’ve never believed: K lied to me the same way she lied to the man she left for me, the same way she lied to whomever she left her girlfriend for—not that I’m bitter about it; I’m just stating facts. Regrettably this room, which in the video appears darker than I had remembered, is also the room where I slept with my coworker during lunch one day in order to get back at K, who said I could fuck whoever I wanted to, not that I wanted to fuck my coworker, I just wanted to tell K what I had done and have it be true and look into her eyes when I said it.
The fourth room isn’t a room exactly, it’s the back porch. I switch at this point to one of the music-only channels because it wasn’t until after K had gone that I started using the back porch, and so nothing of any significance ever happened there.
I just went to Google to do a search, I’ve already forgotten what of, and you know how Google has this practice of garnishing the “Google” logo with cutesy crap like a turkey on Thanksgiving or a moose on Canada Day or god knows what? Well, this time there was a bomb above the two o’s in “Google,” and this bomb was heading straight between the two o’s, and underneath the two o’s were what looked like tiny Iraqi children. I’m looking at it again and it’s not clear that the children are definitely Iraqi, but it seems like they must be Iraqi because they’re wearing tiny turbans and have olive-colored skin and of course we all know what’s happening in Iraq, or what’s about to happen in Iraq, so I assume they’re Iraqi. Anyway these children, whoever they are, are looking up and pointing at the bomb that’s coming between the o’s and that they can evidently see coming—a fact that at first struck me as dumb but that now seems truer than true.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit what I thought when I first saw this, but I’ll say it anyway: Holy fuck, there’s reason for hope. Because just last week I was talking with some friends about hope and I was saying I have absolutely no hope and haven’t had any since the day in the fifth grade when I polled a bunch of kids at recess about who they would vote for if they could, Nixon or McGovern, and most said Nixon. This was crushing to me, but as crushing as it was it was also eye-opening, as though every part of me got crushed with the exception of my eyes, which were forced open due to the crushing of the other parts. I mentioned my schoolyard poll to my friends last week, and everyone told their own “political awakening” story, and then I said what I always say, because it’s really what I think, which is that we’re in a car careening down a cliff and this car has no brakes and no steering wheel and no driver and anyway even if it had these things it wouldn’t matter because the car is careening down a cliff. Then I said the other thing I always say, I really only have a few things I ever say, which is that we are no stupider, collectively, than people have ever been, we’re just ten thousand times more powerful, which means we can do ten thousand times more damage, which is what we’re busy doing, people have always done as much damage as they could, more or less, and so our only hope is to become, collectively, ten thousand times smarter, smarter in the sense of wiser, which isn’t going to happen because we, collectively, are crushingly stupid, it’s a biological fact written into our DNA. Not that there’s a gene for collective stupidity; it’s just that each person is programmed for enough self-interest to guarantee that collective action, by which I mean the actions of individuals considered together, lacks what Gregory Bateson called “knowledge of the larger circuit of change.” This was Bateson’s definition of wisdom: knowledge of the larger circuit of change.
As I look again at the Google logo with the bomb and the Iraqi kids, I nearly feel like crying, because whatever it lacks in sophistication, not to mention prudence, it’s going to get a ton of media coverage. Everyone is going to be talking about it. Because it’s one thing for left wing intellectual hippy freak art fags to oppose the war (or oppose anything), and another for Google to attempt to say something more significant than Happy Canada Day. And what it makes me think is that maybe there’s something I haven’t grasped, some possibility I haven’t considered, because lord knows I never dreamed that Google would do this, just as I never dreamed that a group of fanatics would hijack several commercial planes and fly two of them into the Twin Towers, thereby reducing the World Trade Center to an enormous hole surrounded by tourists with video cameras. Neither thing would have seemed possible, the Google thing even less so, and now both have happened and I’m starting to wonder (granted I’m a bit worked up and will probably regret having said this) if maybe it’s time to come up with some new things to think.
“You drew black,” says the knight.
“It becomes me,” says Death.
Writing this, Death’s line sounds kind of dumb, but actually it’s great, in part because the actor who plays Death says it with this knowing smile, the very smile you imagine Death using to underline such witticisms.
Below the ass are snippets of dialogue from the film, presented in colored boxes. These are well-chosen. It’s a dark film, dark but oddly uplifting, and the quotes reflect this.
That’s it: a title, a woman’s ass, snippets of dialogue.
