May 2003
25 May 2003 | Poetry
I am a horse begins one, and here the speaker, the horse, is riding in a train that’s absolutely packed, and he has his hind legs folded on the seat behind him and is wearing, as the poet tells us, the six shiny buttons of sex appeal. The middle part I don’t remember much of, but then the comes the end which I love which is this: O how small this world is. How large cherries. And then another, quite different, begins, We don’t know anything. We haven’t learned one single thing about pain. That bitterly cold season only leaves long streaks in our muscles, and here again, as often, the best parts are the beginning and the end, whereas the middle could be the middle of almost any poem, something to connect the beginning to the end, a bit of passing landscape, otherwise the poem doesn’t work, we get off at the same station we boarded, no time having passed, no distance traveled. Naturally I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, poetry being totally a matter of who you are and what you bring to it, but when I read those three lines, we don’t know anything and so on, I can feel them vibrate in my head like when I’m singing and I have my hand on my chest, I know it and have always known it without knowing I knew it, and then the end too, no less, which goes, then we might understand that death can be a beautiful long voyage and a permanent vacation from structures, systems, and skeletons. Granted it gets a bit poetical, particularly the business about skeletons, but I’m happy to overlook that because it’s such a striking thought, the thought that in death there are no skeletons, that skeletons are something which we the living must live with, rather than the dead, who are evidently on a kind of loosely organized cruise ship, I don’t pretend to totally grasp that part, which in poetry is fine of course, almost the point really, make it interesting but not totally graspable, keep a certain friendly distance between what you mean and what you say, such as when Cesar Vallejo says that he will die in Paris on a Thursday in the rain and that they, whoever they are, will beat him hard, with a stick, and hard, the only witnesses being the bones in his arms and the rain and the Thursdays, so that you’re left feeling that Vallejo doesn’t quite mean what he says, because first of all how would he know this in advance, when and where and how he will die, not to mention the weather that day, and second, how could his own bones be witness to his death, that makes no sense and is obviously the sort of thing that poets say when they are trying to say something that can only be said by saying something else, except of course that Vallejo really die that way, in Paris on a Thursday in the rain, just as he said he would, so maybe this is not the best example.
23 May 2003 | Flag
Her technique, she said, is to put those particular feelings on a raft in her mind and push the raft out to sea and then sit on the beach and watch it drift away, or maybe leave for a time and come back to find it far from shore, just a bobbing speck, or perhaps broken to pieces because she didn’t do such a good job putting it together.
Most recently there was a man she liked so much she made a flag with which to surrender to him. Lacking a proper flag, she used four paper napkins left over from a time she had bought a take-out burrito. She unfolded the napkins (they were surprisingly big: 11 1/2 by 7 1/2 inches) and taped them together with scotch tape and waved the taped-together pieces at a particularly beautiful email he had sent, hoping he could feel it though of course not believing he could.
Whether he did or didn’t feel it, he soon did some things that upset her, fucked-up things, she declined to give specifics, so on the subway ride home she put the napkin flag on a raft but it blew off almost immediately and landed in the water and quickly broke into pieces, with the pieces floating on top of the water as the waves came in, but not actually going anywhere, just floating like that, idly, until at last her stop came and she walked home.
19 May 2003 | Mom
This just in from my mother:
I just saw your picture in a “fucking suit.” That was the style then! Anyway, the picture is adorable and it should definitely help your business.
Me and my mom (yes, I was the fattest baby in human history)
May I publicly announce how much I love this woman? True story: When I nineteen she came into the room at the hospital where I had just finished vomiting up the last of the thirty-two sleeping pills I had taken, and her first words to me were: “If you ever do this again, I’ll kill you.”
Love you, mom.
On a personal note, I just launched a new fancypants, all-CSS, all-XHTML version of my business site, Blue Archer Media.
I suffered greatly for this. I am a lunatic and I am my own worst client. If I were hired by me, I would quit long before I had a chance to fire myself. Then I would bitch about myself to friends.
Want to know what I hate more than anything? It’s writing promotional copy. After writing three words of promotional copy, I begin to sob. Then the woman down the hall, the tall punky-looking woman who listens to industrial music and has a dog, comes knocking on my door and I have to tell her that I’m just writing promotional copy.
“It sounded serious this time,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “but it’s just promotional copy.”
What I wouldn’t give to be able to just put something like this on Blue Archer, in giant letters:
HIRE ME. I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. I AM NOT A JERK. I WILL LISTEN TO YOU AND I WILL PROBABLY TALK YOU OUT OF THREE BAD IDEAS. I WILL MAKE JOKES. WHEN THE BILL COMES, YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU GOT A GREAT DEAL.
Okay, just to see what that feels like, to try it on as one might try on clothes one can’t possibly afford, I just made the page with giant letters. Here it is. Dig the photo of the future lunatic.
10 May 2003 | Bluff
It’s 1982, summer, and you’re standing at the corner of 11th Street and Avenue D, across the street from your apartment building, and you’re talking on a payphone and straddling your bike, when you suddenly feel a tap on your shoulder and twist around and see that two young guys are standing there and one is holding a baseball bat which he’s sort of leaning against his shoulder, and though neither of these guys are that big, one of them, as mentioned, is holding a baseball bat and twirling it slowly in his hands, and then the other says, “Give us your money,” looking right at you. “Hold on a sec,” you say to the person on the phone, who as it turns out is a woman you are falling in love with and who you will later follow to Michigan, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend whose erection you will be confronted with one night when you knock on her dorm room door for some forgotten reason and her boyfriend in his underwear answers and he’s got this erection which is rather dramatically stretching his underwear and which he doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed about it. Holding one hand over the phone, you say, “Money? What the fuck would I be doing here if I had any money?” By here you mean New York’s Alphabet City, which at that time, 1982, is a giant sprawling heroin superstore, and in fact a dealer deals right out of the apartment below yours; on Friday and Saturday nights there’s a line of junkies that goes down two flights of stairs, the junkies slouched against the stairwell wall, and there’s also a big guy who stands right behind the front door and who if he doesn’t know you or remember you, always demands to see tracks, which is to say, holes in your arms from shooting heroin, and since you don’t have any tracks, never having shot heroin, you have to act tough and say, “Man I fucking live here, just ask your boss,” and then usually you get escorted up the stairs, past all the junkies, many of whom look just like you, young twenty-something white kids, only these kids have tracks in their arms, and then you get to the apartment where the dealer is dealing and he sees you and says to the guy who escorted you, “He’s cool,” and then to you, “Sorry, man,” and he winks and it’s clear that he has no idea that he’s going to get his head blown off by another dealer less three months after you finish your phone call, because after all he’s just a kid just like you, not even twenty, good-looking, charismatic, probably from the Bronx, the son of a mother who’s about to lose her son, his head blown to pieces on the sidewalk in front of your building. The truth, though, is that you have plenty of money, more than two hundred dollars, and it’s all wadded up in your left-front pocket, because you are a fruit vendor, you sell fruit on the street, and the woman you are talking to on the phone is the person who gives your money to the guy who supplies you with fruit, this is how you know her, she vends fruit just like you, in fact she works for your supplier, who no doubt hired her because of how beautiful she is, and personable, and warm, and a painter to boot, you’ve always had a thing for painters, although probably the supplier doesn’t care about her painting ability. “We’re fucking serious,” says the guy with the baseball bat, so you say, “No joke, man. I’ve got some change, that’s all I have. You want change?” and you make as though to put your hand in your pocket to get change for them, only right then, exactly as you had hoped, the baseball bat guy says, “Fucking keep it,” and they turn and start to walk off, so after a few seconds you put the phone to your mouth again but don’t actually say anything for a while, because in truth you’re shaking inside and would definitely start crying if you were alone in your apartment, or better yet, in the arms of the woman on the phone, who regrettably will never consent to that sort of relationship with you, though she will by some quirk of fate appear outside a now defunct Co-op supermarket in Berkley, California, in 1993, where she will quickly reveal what an incredible new-age nutcase she has become, spouting all kinds of embarrassing nonsense about earth-visitors and soul-retrieval, which for better or worse will put an immediate end to your lingering low-level obsession with her, or rather with who she had been in 1982, when you were talking with her on the phone just across the street from your apartment building.
The following is a transcript, nearly word for word, of a tape recording I made earlier tonight. Normally I would try to edit this into something else, but I think in this case it’s best to leave it as is. In any event I want everyone to know I’m okay. I really am, more or less. I figure I’ll write more about this later.
May 8th, I think. I was beaten tonight, attacked and beaten. I was walking to the Chinese restaurant to pick up dinner, a late dinner. It was about 11:15. I had just crossed Washington Street and had gone perhaps a hundred feet. I was less than a block from my apartment. I don’t know what happened exactly. That is, I do know what happened; I just don’t have any recollection of it. I was walking and then I was being hit. The first blow must have come from behind because I didn’t see anyone in front of me. Then suddenly I was being hit by several people. At least two. They were young African-American men. And at least one of them was yelling something at me. I don’t know what he was yelling. It was the same thing over and over, but I don’t know what it was. This went on for what was perhaps a short time but felt like five minutes.
I didn’t see the first blow coming. Or any of the blows. If I had seen the first blow coming, it would have been much easier. Because the way it happened, it was as though something had suddenly fallen on top of my head. Plus the first blow was probably the best one, the most effective one, so not only did it come as a surprise but it made my head fuzzy. Had I seen a fist coming into my face, it would have been enormously helpful, but that’s not how it happened.
Still, after a certain number of blows, I managed to gather myself to the degree that I knew what to do, which was to run. As I ran I expected, because I was in this stunned state, to be easily caught and knocked to the ground, or whatever they were going to do to me—beat me unconscious, I suppose—except I wasn’t chased. I knew this because I didn’t hear anyone chasing me. I just heard the guy yelling the thing that I don’t know what the fuck it was and don’t think I ever will.
I think I turned at a certain point, perhaps a hundred feet down the block, when I realized that I wasn’t being chased, and yelled, “What the fuck is this about? What the fuck did I do to you?” Something along these lines. I remember now that I yelled this sort of thing when I was being hit as well.
I was without my glasses as I yelled this, since they had been knocked from face during the attack. The thing is, I need my glasses and can’t see without them. However there was no way I was going to turn and go back to where I had been beaten, so instead I crossed Washington, which was kind of difficult to do because I was badly shaken up and didn’t have my glasses. On the corner there I went into the bodega where I sometimes buy coffee or a banana. They know me there. They’re friendly, I like them. They’re Arab, I don’t know from where exactly. I can never understand what they’re saying. The moment the guy behind the counter saw me, I realized that my face must have looked pretty bad, that I must have been bleeding a lot, because he said something about the hospital and handed me a napkin which I’m still holding as I record this. It’s covered with blood. There were a few other people in the bodega, customers, and they listened, they came over and listened to what I was telling the guys behind the counter. And then I said, “Would someone be willing to walk back there with me and help me find my glasses?” An African-America woman said, “I’ll do it,” and we walked together across the street. This may have been totally insane, going back to where maybe these guys were still hanging out, where maybe they would jump up and start hitting me again, but it was the only thing I could think of doing because without my glasses I’m screwed.
There were two big African-America guys sitting on a low wall there. The woman asked them if they had seen my glasses. This was a problem because I wasn’t sure exactly where I had been hit, the physical location. I ended up pointing at two spots about fifty feet apart and saying to the woman, “Somewhere between there and there.” One of the guys said he thought my glasses were by a particular tree, so we went to that tree but didn’t see them. The woman was ready to give up immediately. Maybe she was scared to be there? Maybe she felt like she’d done enough? I kind of pleaded her, I said, “I really can’t see without my glasses, so I can’t find them without you.” Then she found them. They were right near her feet; she had almost stepped on them. Thankfully they weren’t broken, though one of the stems had been badly bent. However they were a good ten feet from where the two guys had indicated—these same two guys who I’m ninety percent sure had witnessed my beating and who of course had nothing to say to me and who I’m sure will have nothing to say to the cops.
A digression. I’m waiting for my friend Andrew to arrive. I called him a short time ago. He’s coming over on his bike. I don’t have any ice. I realize that I should put ice on my face but I don’t have any. I would go down to the bodega again to buy ice, but I feel I should stay here. I’m waiting for Andrew and I’m waiting for the police. I’ve often thought of putting ice in the damn ice trays, but I’ve never bothered to do so. So I’m doing it now, what good this does me.
On my way home I went back to the bodega with my glasses and held them up for the guys there to see. One of said something to me (I never understand what they’re saying) and I said thanks. Then I came home and the first thing I thought of doing was to take pictures of myself, so that’s what I did, I took some photos of my face in the bathroom mirror. Then I got out a pliers and bent my glasses back into reasonable shape. They fit okay now; not great but okay. No, actually I think I called Andrew before I bent back my glasses. Anyway I also called the police in there, I don’t remember when, and tried to tell the dispatcher what had happened. I was asked how many assailants there were, and I had to say I didn’t know. There could have been as many as five, I said, I have no way of knowing.
I just realized that I must have been hit in my shoulder, just below my right shoulder, because it’s starting to hurt there. The main blow was to the side of my face, near my eye. My left ear hurts as well. It may have just been three or four blows, I don’t know. I wish I could remember what the guy was yelling. All I can say is that my sense was that it had to do with me not belonging there, with me being white, not that he ever said the word white. This is a mostly black neighborhood. I’ve never felt uncomfortable here other than in that one stretch from Washington to the next street. This is where I was attacked.
I’ve been pacing around my apartment recording this. I am to say the least wound up. And my face hurts some. Andrew arrived a short time ago; I sent him to the bodega to get some ice and bread. I hardly have any food in the apartment, so I figure I’ll make myself some eggs. I’m okay now, though I’m shaken up, obviously. My mother is going to be upset to read about this. She reads my website. I said to Andrew that nothing has changed. I’ve always known that there are people who would do this. I’ve always known why. I’ve been lucky till now that it hasn’t happened to me. I guess I’m lucky I’m not hurt worse. I said to Andrew that we haven’t evolved very much.
At some point (I forgot to mention this before), I decided to call the Chinese restaurant to explain that I wasn’t coming to pick up my food. However I stupidly hit “redial” on my phone, which meant that I redailed 911, because I had forgotten that I had called them. When I realized it was 911, I hung up on them and then decided to not bother with the Chinese restaurant because it was already past their closing time. The next time I’m in there, I’ll apologize and pay them for the food I never picked up.
08 May 2003 | Toast
When I said I put a baked potato in the oven, what I meant was that I put a potato in the oven.
It was a mistake to say it was baked.
However, the next day, when I put that same potato in the oven again, I really did put a baked potato in the oven.
Still, that’s not the potato I was talking about the previous day.
Which is to say that it was the same potato, but since it hadn’t been baked yet, I was wrong to refer to it that way.
One does not speak of putting toast in the toaster; rather one puts bread in the toaster, whereupon it is toasted.
Unless one really does put toast in the toaster—this being a different matter altogether.
Allowing for this exception, to speak of bread as toast is akin to speaking of a living person as a corpse.
One does not say that one met a corpse today; instead one met a person.
Unless one really did meet a corpse, this being akin to putting toast in the toaster.
The fact that most persons will one day become corpses and likely spend some time in that state, changes nothing.
Such persons are not corpses when one meet them.
Except perhaps in a figurative sense.
Similarly one might refer to a person as toast.
Toast meaning dead, figuratively.
And dead meaning without hope, a goner, figuratively.
Assuming one can speak of a person as spending time as a corpse.
For it seems rather that time ends at the moment one’s personhood ends.
Or perhaps it ends some time earlier, if one is in a coma, say.
I speak here of time as something one experiences.
Although one might fairly say that while in a toaster, bread spends time being toasted.
Language being quite loose in this case.
For surely bread doesn’t experience being toasted.
Nor does a potato experience being baked, for that matter.
Similarly I was wrong to say that a person spends time as a corpse.
For surely a person is no longer a person at that point, so there is nothing there to spend time.
Still, one can fairly speak of a person as dead, and so something must be there to be in that state.
Dead being a state of being, evidently.
One in which there is nothing there to spend time, evidently.
By evidently I refer to the apparent meaning of dead, as opposed to there perhaps being something there to spend time, this being something else I could have meant but did not.
In any event, time would appear to be over at that point, with respect to the person previously capable of experiencing it.
The person now dead.
The person who if murdered would be called the victim.
The victim being a term that can be applied retroactively, so that one can speak of the victim as a victim in the time before the victim became a victim.
As in, The victim baked a potato, or even, The victim baked a baked potato, provided this is true vis-à-vis the potato.
I had a date today. We bought sandwiches and ate them in the park and talked. Then I came home and looked at a picture of my ex-girlfriend and cried. The chair, I noticed, rattled because of the way I was shaking. This proved so distracting that I got up and walked over to my bed and cried there.
This reminds of something that happened when I was masturbating recently. In the middle of coming, I realized that I needed to clear my throat. I realized this because I wanted to sigh in a certain way, with my throat, only it was clear that I needed to clear out some phlegm first. Suffice it to say, that orgasm sucked. Because I couldn’t decide, while coming, to “waste” a second or two clearing my throat or to hold myself back from sighing. I chose the latter, then cleared my throat like mad once it was over.
My date asked what it’s like knowing that so many people know so many intimate things about you because of your writing. I said I try not to think about it.
