June 2003
27 June 2003 | Echo
As I write this, programmers from around the world are collaboratively developing a new, open source RSS format. What is RSS? I don’t totally know, but I’m certain that at least one of those S’s stands for syndication. In any event, my friend Mark Pilgrim is one of the folks involved in this effort, as is Paul Ford. I respect both of these gentlemen immensely, and if they’re involved in something, it must be a cool thing to be involved in.
Wanting to get in on some of this coolness, if only from the sidelines, I have taken to reading comments about it, both on Mark’s site and the site where the collaboration is happening.
Now, although these comments are written with relative clarity, in a language I understand, in regard to a subject I grasp much better than I am letting on to here, most read to me like total gibberish. I recognize the words themselves but can rarely glean what anyone is saying or why they are saying it.
Oddly perhaps, this experience feels remarkably like watching porn on a blocked cable channel. The analogy holds not only because of the flickering fuzziness, but because of those moments, rare and unexpected, when the picture suddenly comes into focus. As you might imagine, I sit up in my chair then, nervously excited. Ah, there is it, I can see it, he’s got his… whoops, gone again.
Is it unfortunate that one always knows in advance how long a story or poem or novel is? Sometimes I think it is, for that knowledge greatly affects how one reads; one does a kind of internal calibration, much the calibration one does before a trip, orienting oneself to a specific anticipated duration.
This makes me think of a text whose length is unknown to the reader. You see only a single line or group of lines at any one time. After reading this line or group of lines, you push a button and another line or group of lines appear.
No one has to tell me how maddening this would be, to not know where the end is. And yet this is what a relationship is: a story of unknown duration. The difference being that a relationship, as lived, is unwritten. The button, when pushed, produces a blank page—an empty stage, if you will, on which to enact another scene; the final scene, possibly, like all the others.
25 June 2003 | Song
My thoughts divide roughly into memories, observations, and fantasies.
Fantasies include desires.
Probably there’s a better word here than fantasies, one that encompasses both fantasies and desires, but what would it be?
Also, what is a word for what happens in my head when I read? I want to call this mastication, but that seems a different sort of thing from the things above.
Anyway, right now an ice cream truck in the street outside my window is playing that insipid ice cream truck song over and over. You know the one. If I could, I would gladly and without remorse smash the truck’s speaker into a useless and possibly smoking heap of metal and wire. This is both an observation and a fantasy.
Also, had I previously seen someone else do this, or had once done it myself, or had once simply fantasied about doing it and had now, hearing the song again, remembered my fantasy, it would also be a memory.
23 June 2003 | Regrets
I used to claim I didn’t regret things. Maybe when I said that, I didn’t. More likely I did and didn’t know I did. I regret breaking up with K. I mean the fourth time. I don’t regret the first. I had no choice the first. The second and third times were her doing, so I can hardly regret those. Although it’s true that I drove her to it the third time, so if I wanted to regret that, I could. I don’t though. I only regret the fourth.
If I wanted, I could regret getting back together the second time. Also the third. I could even regret getting back together the fourth time, if I wanted. But what’s the point? You do what you do and what happens happens. It’s too easy to look back and say you shouldn’t have done what you did, given what happened. How were you supposed to know what was going to happen?
I knew what was going to happen. I mean the fourth time. She called me and said she wanted to get back together and to do it right this time. She said she loved me, this being only the second time she ever said that. The first time was during the third time, meaning our third relationship. That time she didn’t actually say she loved me but that she had told her therapist she loved me. In response I said that her therapist knew better than to believe her. I now regret saying this. It was mean. All the mean things I ever said to her, I regret. Although it was certainly true that she didn’t love me.
The fact that she didn’t love me was why I broke up with her the first time. It’s also why she broke up with me the second. The third time was different though; that time we broke up because I didn’t love her.
Actually the third time may not count as a time because all it was, was sex. Once a week we would have dinner, talk about our weeks, and fuck.
In order to distinguish this from “going out” or “having a relationship,” or “being together,” we would say that we had “an arrangement.”—an arrangement she ended because it prevented her from going out with or having a relationship with or being together with anyone else.
She told me this on the phone. She said that my comment about her therapist had hurt her and that she now wanted to end our arrangement. The moment we hung up, I returned to what I was doing before she called. Five minutes later I realized how callous I was being and stopped.
The second time she told me she loved me was when she called and said she wanted to get back together for the fourth time. This was how the fourth time began, with her phone call. In response I told her that I loved her too, which I now regret because I didn’t really love her.
Also, while having sex we would sometimes say that we loved each other, but that was different because we were having sex at the time. Point being: I don’t regret it.
Here are the things I regret:
- Saying mean things to her.
- Telling her I loved her.
- Breaking up with her the fourth time.
Everything else I’m okay with.
21 June 2003 | Space
I must be alive because of all the emails I get and the phone calls and the invitations to sign up for credit cards. I’m not kidding. Those credit card people don’t want to send letters to people who don’t exist, who aren’t people, who can’t use credit cards.
This makes me remember that when I’m dead, the air will fill in the space where I had been, just like in that poem I read a million years ago by Mark Strand. In a field I am the absence of field.
And then, when I am dead, the credit card companies will eventually figure it out and take me off their lists. At which point the name below mine will move next to the name above mine, filling in the space where my name had been.
20 June 2003 | Oars
How is my favorite niece ever? Fabulous, I hope. I hear from your dad that you like third grade and are getting great marks. This is excellent news, and as always I’m very proud of you. Your dad also said that you asked him if I’m still your uncle now that he’s not living with you and your mom. Sweetheart, I will always be your uncle no matter what, so you never have to worry about that.
Anyway, I’m writing to you today to teach you a new phrase. Like all the phrases I’ve taught you, this one means that someone is crazy. Here is the phrase used in a sentence: Daddy doesn’t have both oars in the water.
Do you know what oars are? They are the long wooden things you row a rowboat with. If you row a rowboat with only one oar in the water, the boat will spin in circles. So when you say that someone doesn’t have both oars in the water, you are saying that the person just goes around in circles. This means that the person is crazy. Do you understand?
This phrase is a lot like saying that someone is minus some buttons (remember that one?). However, it is meaner than minus some buttons
because a person can be minus some buttons and still be okay, but a person who doesn’t have both oars in the water is in big trouble.
Both phrases are different from saying that someone has lost his marbles (remember that one?). When someone has lost his marbles, there is a chance he might find them again, but when someone is minus some buttons, it is because he never had those buttons to begin with.
Maybe you are thinking that buttons can be lost, the same as marbles. This is true, but notice that the phrase doesn’t say that the person lost some buttons. Instead it says that the person is minus some buttons. You can be minus something without ever losing it. Think of a person who was born without a nose. That person would be minus a nose, but he wouldn’t have lost a nose since he never had one to begin with.
Another good example would be your father. There are things your father can never lose because he never had them to begin with. Do you know what these things are? Don’t rush to figure this out, because I’m sure it will come to you in time.
But back to the new phrase. When you say that someone doesn’t have both oars in the water, you are saying that he is minus something he needs to make his oars work. This is a lot like being born without a nose. A person born without a nose would never smell anything, no matter how hard he tried and no matter how nicely things smelled. Nothing in the world can ever change this. You need a nose to smell things.
Try to remember this for when you figure out what your father is minus.
Film starts on the space ship. Charlton Heston records his final log before giving himself an injection that will put him into suspended animation. We see the other astronauts, already out for the count, in their sealed sleep bubbles. The camera lingers on the woman astronaut, who even at nine, or however old I am, I recognize as hot.
Next, crash landing on the planet. When do they wake up? Is there water involved? Whatever happens, it’s bedlam. And then someone discovers that due to a bad seal in her sleep bubble, the woman astronaut has aged all the years that have passed and is now this decrepit corpse. Bummer.
The survivors (I think there are four total) walk through a canyon. High on the cliffs, shadowy figures appear, accompanied by scary music. (Warning: I may be confusing this with various westerns I saw around the same time.)
Maybe they’re attacked and maybe they get away, but at some point they encounter a band of primitive humans who are mute and wear very little clothing.
Together with these primitive humans, they get swept up in big nets by a small army of gorillas. Probably there’s fighting involved because only two astronauts survive, as we learn later. A sexy, dark-haired primitive woman ends up in the same net as Heston. (Remember this for later.)
Conveniently Heston’s throat is injured in the round-up, so he can’t speak. He is tended to by a chimp scientist played by Roddy McDowell and his chimp scientist wife. The wife dubs Heston Bright Eyes.
Charlton Heston, whatever else one might think of him, looks awfully good without a shirt.
Various scenes show us ape society, which is divided in feudal-like fashion between chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. Even at nine, I hated the obviousness of this, understanding on some level that there was a “message” in it.
Far more interesting was the way McDowell and his wife kiss. The mouths on their ape costumes are nearly inflexible, so their kisses appear exaggeratedly, almost comically, chaste.
Finally Heston’s throat heals (is there an operation?). His first words to his captors: “Get your hands off me, you stinkin’ ape!”
McDowell (who I just remembered is called Cornelius) argues with his wife about what to do with the talking human, who for unknown or perhaps forgotten reasons is a threat to ape society. The entire middle part of the film is devoted to the couple’s conflicted struggle to save him. Boring.
At some point Heston finds one of his former shipmates, now lobotomized.
Much later Heston and the chimp scientists end up in a cave where Heston is shown various secret relics, including a human doll.
Maybe the gorillas appear and there’s a battle, I don’t know, but in the end Heston is given a gun, a horse, and the dark-haired woman from his time in the nets.
She rides with him down a beach, and you kind of think it’s over, only it’s not quite over, there’s still one more scene awaiting them at the end of the beach.
Meanwhile the dark-haired woman, who after all these years I still remember so vividly, wears an unbelievably sexy one-piece outfit that appears to be sewn from rags.
12 June 2003 | Florida
I fell in love.
She moved to Florida.
I freaked and couldn’t follow her.
After that she didn’t want me.
I lost everything.
For whatever reason.
Sheer stupidity.
A bank account.
I still cry.
Let me get to Florida.
Miami can be lovely.
A long weekend.
$300.
You wear a ski mask.
You sabotage intimacy.
You talk your way back in.
So much drama.
Everything was bliss.
We talked about it.
I fucked her.
Love is not supposed to end like that.
12 June 2003 | Connie
Connie, whose husband has deserted her,
consults another man, each time
introducing slightly different details.
With repetition her story
becomes troubling, suspect.
In later versions she is openly
confused. What appeared to be problem
is really a statement.
The inside shapes the outside.
10 June 2003 | Planet
The mind is derivative
of nothing, but the problem is real.
Some primitive people believe
in a planet on which human beings
have evolved from trees.
What world is this?
For these humans a tree is not
a tree. It is only a representation
of the mysterious
accidental truth
which came from a planet
which knew nothing of trees.
Someone is writing to me via the search function on Oblivio. Each week I receive a report that lists the ten most popular searches on the site, and in recent weeks someone has been doing the same searches over and over so that they appear at the top of the report. Last week there were eight searches for “u r an unabashed prick” and five for “fuck you asshole.” I’m not totally sure that “fuck you asshole” was bogus given that the most popular all-time search is “fuck my wife” (!), but there’s no question that “u r an unabashed prick” was directed at me.
Last week there were 14 searches for “but you are a jerk.” However this is nothing compared to the week of May 10, when the top seven searches were as follows:
- 18 for “and that means you mike boorish”
- 16 for “how do you live with yourself you stupid fuck”
- 15 for “murder any ducklings lately j o”
- 14 for “total fucking prick”
- 13 for “complete and utter asshole”
- 13 for “u r a complete and utter asshole mike”
- 12 for “u r a total jerk fuck mike”
Being a complete and utter asshole, I considered writing a piece in which this exact thing happens, only the searches add up to a love letter to me. That’ll fix their wagon, I thought. But then after a minute this seemed gross, and anyway I don’t really want to fix anyone’s wagon. If anything, I feel grateful to this person for transforming my search report into something I look forward to reading each week. Perhaps it’s the unabashed prick in me, but I rather enjoy imagining this person at his computer (he must be a he, I’ve decided), doing the same inane searches over and over, with what I imagine to be demented glee (my personal favorite: “and that means you mike boorish”).
Not that there isn’t something disturbing about this. The week before the top-seven avalanche, in what I believe to his first message to me, my search-crazy friend did a single search for “and that means you mike.” Meaning: he planned the avalanche in advance and wanted to leave this message behind, to be found after the fact. That’s creepy.
And speaking of creepiness, I realize that I invite more of the same, from him and others, by writing about this. Still, call me a total jerk fuck, but I could care less. Anyone who does 15 searches for “murder any ducklings lately j o” deserves a few paragraphs of public acknowledgement before finally realizing it’s time to get a life.
We kissed for the first time at the northeast corner of St. Marks and Fourth Avenue. It was raining. We had been walking in the rain for several blocks. I was standing to her left and holding her umbrella above us. For some reason I was holding the umbrella in my left hand, across my body. The light was red. I was standing quite close to her, and probably our arms were touching or nearly touching. I believe she’d just been explaining why she wasn’t wearing her sweater, despite the rain. The reason was, she wanted something dry to wear later. It seemed better, she thought, to have a dry sweater for later than to be warmer now. I didn’t say but certainly did think that I respected her logic. In fact this may be why I kissed her: because I respected her logic.
She was wearing white and red sneakers which I believe are called Vans. Normally I don’t notice such things, but these sneakers were adorable. When I first saw them, I remembered that on our first date she had worn blocky black sneakers which I couldn’t help but find sexy. The truth is, I am usually impervious to such things. If anything, it’s a turn-off when I sense that a woman devotes half her life to fashion. The sneakers were white with little red flowers. The red matched the red of her pants. Later she confessed that she had left her entire wardrobe in a giant pile on her bed, which may have been the nicest thing anyone has ever told me.
The way the kiss happened was, I turned to her and simply started kissing her, without really thinking about it. Well, there was a bit more to it, of course. Because as I moved in, I definitely looked to see if I had permission to move in further. Did she tilt her head in acceptance? Did she part her lips slightly? Probably she did both, although I don’t claim to remember. In baseball this is called a bang-bang play. A player slides into second, the throw comes in, the second baseman catches it and slaps the runner with his glove, and it’s over, bang-bang, no time for anyone to think about what’s happening. Contrast this with the kiss itself, during which I focused entirely on the fact that we were kissing, that those lips touching mine, not to mention that flicker of tongue, belonged to her. This part was more like those slow-motion replays, usually in basketball, in which the announcer scribbles a lot of lines and arrows on the screen to explain what just happened and how it relates to what happened before and how it reflects and reveals what each team is trying at this moment to do, beneath all the lines and arrows.
02 June 2003 | Blank
Story of guy in room where you masturbate for sperm for artificial insemination.
What’s the drama?
There are magazines and videos. He watches a video. What does it show?
Okay, first person narrative. He can’t come, maybe even can’t get hard. Explain his previous problems. Doesn’t do well when anxious. Can’t pee in presence of others. Main thing: He blames it on the video he watches where doctor screws patient, which makes him question his wife’s fidelity. Also, is afraid wife will say or least feel that deep down he doesn’t want child.
Must research specifics about such rooms.
“It’s a blank room with blank…” That’s the beginning, a description of the room.
Bring in issue of ultimate existential aloneness despite marriage and whatnot.
