Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

31 July 2003 | Grand Opening

A friend writes:

30 July 2003 | Sundial

If it would work, sure, I would change all the clocks in the world for you so that you won’t be late anymore, sure, why not? Sadly, though, I doubt this would help you. Why? Say you have a two o’clock meeting, for which you need to leave at one-thirty to be on time, but instead, for whatever reason or reasons (I don’t pretend to understand any of this), you don’t manage to leave until two o’clock, which means that you will likely arrive a half-hour late, at two-thirty, only when you arrive, the clock there miraculously says two o’clock because I previously went around and changed all the clocks in the world to read a half-hour earlier. Pretty sweet, right? Wrong. Look down at the watch on your wrist. It now says two-thirty; you believed it and that’s why you’re “on time.” But what about all your future meetings? Are you expecting me to go around and change all the clocks in the world again so that your watch is now a half-hour ahead of where it was before, which is to say a full hour ahead of all the clocks in the world, so that when you mentally subtract a half-hour from what your watch says (as you are bound to do once you discover it’s a half-hour fast), you will still have a half-hour cushion? This is asking a lot of me, to put it mildly, and anyway it won’t work. To use an analogy, imagine asking me to move an entire bowling alley every time a bowling ball leaves your hand so as to compensate for the way your shot always hooks to the left. Wait, sorry, this is a bad analogy because I think it might actually work. Which is interesting because it points to an important difference between the tendency to be late and the tendency to hook. What is that difference? I don’t know. Meanwhile I can barely type fast enough to tell you how flawed your plan is. Because for one thing, if you see any clocks on the way to your meeting, you’re screwed, because once you see one, you’ll know you have an extra half-hour and aren’t going to be late after all, and so as is your nature, you’ll spend another half-hour in transit, or however you spend it, and show up the usual half-hour late. Consequently, on top of changing all the clocks in the world every time you have to be somewhere, I would need to invent special glasses that prevent you from seeing any clocks on your way to where you need to be, or that if you do see any clocks, these special glasses would have to change the time you see by a given amount, all of which would be quite a trick for me to pull off, particularly since we’re not only talking about digital clocks and analog clocks but sundials. And even if I could pull it off, which I’m not saying I could, every time you make a plan with someone, you’ll have to also contact me and ask me to change all the clocks again and also recalibrate your special glasses (via remote control, presumably), which could quickly become tiresome for both of us, and of course I would then have to drop whatever I was doing to do this thing for you, and even if we limited it to New York or Brooklyn or even just the route between you and wherever you need to be (which means you would have to stick to that route, which I can’t imagine you would enjoy; no, you would positively hate that), that’s still a lot of clocks to change, particularly when you consider all the people on the subway who hold onto the bars above their heads in such a way that their shirts and/or jackets roll up their arms, so that you, standing to the side, inadvertently see their exposed watches. Or forget watches: What about the people who publicly answer the question of what time it is? How do we prevent you from overhearing these answers? Do I invent an ear-filter gizmo that somehow blocks out such exchanges, perhaps keying on the phrases like “What time is it?” and “Do you have the time?”? It starts getting crazy at this point, because as you know, it’s not unusual to see people ask the time by pointing at their watch-less wrists and mouthing the question. How do we screen for that? Also, to return to the example of your two o’clock meeting, it now strikes me that it’s going to be more difficult to fool you a second time than I originally thought. Specifically, once I’ve tricked you once (for it is a kind of tricking), you are bound to catch on and anticipate the amount of the next “adjustment,” an “adjustment” which you yourself will have requested. Thus it seems that I will need to always exceed your estimate of my next adjustment by precisely the amount we both anticipate you would otherwise be late. That’s a difficult sentence to read and an even more difficult thing to pull off. And anyway, we haven’t for one second discussed the ethics of selfishly messing with everyone’s clocks several times a day, which knowing you I’m sure will be a deal-breaker. And so for these and probably several other reasons I haven’t yet thought of, I believe you have no other choice than to ask someone (not me; this would be way too scary for me) to conduct surgery on the part of your brain that controls stuff like how you estimate the distance (measured in time) between where you are and where you need to be, and also the part, which I assume to be elsewhere, of how you deal with the fact (measured in anxiety) of having committed to be somewhere at a certain time, or perhaps simply the part, if such a part exists, which produces stories, each better than the last, that explain why you’re late.

29 July 2003 | String

Almost forgot to mention this. Remember when some guy used the Oblivio search function to dis me? Well, the following week someone else used the same technique to not only praise me but dis my dis-er. Here are the ten top search strings from that week:

• 7,290 for “fuck him you rock”
• 51 for “hi mike”
• 30 for “love letter”
• 25 for “eh guy s a fuckwad don t sweat”
• 25 for “i love you mike”
• 24 for “your site rocks”
• 22 for “you are so cool”
• 19 for “dont listen to them”
• 15 for “cheer up i like your site”

Yes, fuck him you rock was searched on 7,290 times that week. One assumes—prays, really—that the operation was automated.

Also, I lied: only nine results are listed above. I left out the fourth in the list. The fourth was the best. The fourth is the phrase I want used if I ever appear in a documentary and some identifying text is shown at the bottom of the screen. It is the phrase that belongs, had I the courage, at the top of my business card and resume; the phrase that describes my best self better than any phrase ever (not that so many have tried) while using a mere five words, two of which are actually the same word and none of which is longer that five letters (the average is 3.8):

dear man weird but dear

28 July 2003 | Dirt in a Cup

Back from a short trip to Philadelphia. Big highlight: me and mom reading every letter or postcard I ever wrote to her. My favorite was a postcard sent at eight from summer camp. Even then, my writing style is evident.

Dear Mom,
Camp isn’t getting much better. We had to go to Camp Council for a carnival. I got poison ivy + a small case of the common cold. It was mean of you to send me here. Please send me 3 stamped postcards addressed to Pop-Pop. Miss you. Love, Michael

Another highlight: Hanging out with my seven-year-old nephew and my cousin’s five-year-old daughter at a playground called The Castle. After exhausting ourselves in the heat, we took shelter under a playground toy and waited to be picked up by the rest of my family. They were late so my nephew, a complainer, started complaining. Rather than reassure him, I announced that we had been forgotten and were likely to have to sleep in The Castle and eat a dinner of wood chips and grass. The girl, Casey, recognized I was kidding and played along. “We can have dirt in a cup,” she said. Matthew asked where we were going to get cups. Casey rolled her eyes at the obviousness of the question.

“From the garbage, Matthew. Where did you think?”

Later Casey said there was something written on the beam above her head. Without thinking, I asked her to read it to me. “I don’t know this word,” she said, pointing. I leaned over and looked. Casey was pointing at the word COCK in the phrase SUCK MY COCK, which was written in large white letters across the beam. What to do? I decided to play it safe. “I can’t read that word to you because your parents will be angry. They think it’s a bad word.”

Matthew scooted over to see. “I think it says cock,” he said.

Cock. The two children looked at each other, baffled.

25 July 2003 | Feathers

I understand that each part of my body is a part of me and that the parts, taken together, embody me, but where am I in the parts? Nowhere to be found. The I I experience, the I who experiences, the I whose experience is mine, is elsewhere.

What is it like to inhabit a body? I can never know, never having known otherwise. I think of Rilke’s poem of Leda and the swan, of the line And then for the first time his feathers felt marvelous. That line comes as the god Zeus—Zeus, that is, in the form of a swan—fucks Leda, at the moment he first penetrates her. When did my feathers feel so?

24 July 2003 | Heroes

There’s a firehouse on my block. I call it a herohouse. That’s my little joke. I call the people who work there heroes, and the truck they drive in, a herotruck. Sometimes when I’m talking on the phone with a friend and one of those trucks comes tearing down the street, sirens blaring, I’ll say, “Hold on a sec, there’s a herotruck passing.” It’s now at the point where I have to remember what other people call them.

Unrelated to this, I just read a story, and after finishing it, no more than a second after reading the final word, I pointed at the computer on which I had read it, that is, at the monitor of the computer, that is, at the words displayed on that monitor, and yelled (to whom? for whom?), “Fucking great!”

23 July 2003 | Gone

M emailed me last night, the first contact between us in seven months. I worked on my reply for five hours, finally sending it at four in the morning.

When I started writing, I was kind. I told her that before reading her email, I peed and that while peeing I repeated a little mantra to myself: “Generosity of spirit. Generosity of spirit. Generosity of spirit.”

All that got deleted.

In an early version I wrote:

Of all the things I could tell you, the thing that seems to matter most is this: I’m sorry about what’s gone down. The scene of our relationship now resembles the site of an accident months after the cars have been towed, a few random skids marks the only proof that something happened there.

In the version I ended up sending, I deleted the phrase I’m sorry about what’s gone down, which totally changed the meaning of what I’d written.

I’m not sure what happened between eleven o’clock and four in the morning. Or I do know: I read her website in there, for the first time in seven months. The thing that struck me was a piece she wrote soon after our breakup. It was about her childhood relationship with her father. As she was talking about her father, I got confused for a moment because it seemed like she was talking about me. I felt certain I must have missed a reference to my name, so I read back. There was no such reference. I re-read the passage about her father and again was sure she had switched to talking about me somewhere and had merely forgotten to say my name. However in the next paragraph she does say my name, and it’s clear she’s now comparing me to the person in the previous paragraph, who really is her father.

This made me angry. I’d rather not go into why this made me angry, for it’s a long crazy story all bound up with how we were bound up once, none of which matters now. What matters instead (or so I thought while peeing) is to find some way to say it’s okay, even if for now I would only be saying it. Generosity of spirit.

We had our own private language, M and I. It was based on a game. One of the new pieces on her site was addressed to me in that language. It was a kind of goodbye. I cried when I read it. She always could write things that made me cry. Immediately after reading it, I wrote a response in the same language, never intending to send it. I wish now I had. This is how it ends:

But what does it all mean now? Not much. I say this not to be harsh but to say it. All gone like a dream. For that’s what it feels like, like a dream I had or we both had once. Can you think of when we would try, each in our own bed, to dream in the same shade or hue of blue or red? Not once did that work. Nor could I feel it when you would kiss me in my mind how you said you planned to—on my throat, my eyes, in front of my ears, and at last on my lips. Still it’s true, I want to find a way to say that we do what we can, though it is nuts, all of it, nuts and cracked, and that still the sun comes up and goes down like that ride in the park, the one that goes round and round for what seems like no time when the time has all passed and you step from the ride and are gone.

20 July 2003 | Fireflies

I attended a friend’s birthday dinner last night in Central Park, at Sheep Meadow Cafe.

I think I drank too much.

At one point, head spinning, I went off in search of fireflies. I found a few in a dark field. Watching them, I realized for the first time that they don’t flicker on and off but dive, again and again, into something dark. We see them as they surface, turn, and dive again.

17 July 2003 | Shoelaces

She said: The way my life is now, I don’t have many interactions with people. This affects how I experience things like going to the store to buy shoelaces.

She said: He ended up in jail while I was there. That should have tipped me off.

She said: I come back to the same insight: I am false, removed from myself. Others also: everyone is false and removed. It’s exhilarating.

She said: I woke in the middle of night and found I’d fallen asleep with the pause button on.

16 July 2003 | Structure

Spoke with my mom last night. We ended up trying to figure what happened in 1979, in what order. I hadn’t realized how much happened in 1979. It must have been some year.

For one thing I dropped out of high school. This came first, we decided, because I was definitely living at home when it happened, which means that my mother still had the house then, which means that my girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me yet and my grandfather was still alive.

The reason I know I was living at home is because that’s when my father kicked me out of the house, when I dropped out of high school. No house, nothing to be kicked out of. So the house was definitely still there, which means that my grandfather was still there, as my grandfather didn’t die until after the house was gone. I know this because my mother said that she would visit him in the hospital while she was living on South Street, and my mother didn’t move to South Street until after she had lost the house.

So the order of events is: leave high school, booted from house, mother loses house, grandfather dies.

Somewhere in there Alana breaks up with me. This is where things get complicated because my mother and I both remember that Alana and I had sex in my mother’s South Street apartment. Well, my mother doesn’t remember the sex exactly, but rather the fact that she allowed Alana and me to use her apartment for a few days, which naturally led to me and Alana having sex there. This means, among other things, that Alana and I were still together after my mother lost the house, which means that Alana broke up with me sometime between the time the house was lost and my grandfather died.

The way I remember it (and this is what I told my mother last night), Alana broke up with me in April of that year, just a few months before she finished high school and moved to Mississippi (just a few months, that is, before our scheduled break-up). If this is accurate, it means that the house was lost sometime before April, as the house was definitely gone when Alana broke up with me, witness the fact that Alana and I had sex in my mother’s South Street apartment, an apartment my mother didn’t have, nor have any reason to have, until after she had lost the house.

To confirm all this, my mother went to look for her divorce papers, having remembered that the house was lost (stolen, as she put it) when the divorce papers came through. If my logic was correct, my parents’ divorce must have been finalized in early 1979, soon after I dropped out of high school and just before Alana broke up with me, though not before Alana had sex with me (for the last time?) on the black fold-out couch in my mother’s South Street apartment.

Unfortunately my mother couldn’t find her divorce papers (she said she had probably thrown them out), so we switched to the question of which one of us was living with my grandparents when my grandfather first got sick. My mother eventually convinced me that it must have been her, which felt strange at first because I’ve always believed it was me, despite the fact that I don’t have any actual memories of it. I realize that sounds odd—to believe something you don’t remember—but what I’ve always assumed is that I’ve blocked out all memory of the experience because of how traumatic it was. As it turns out, though, I was in New York at the time (my mother helped me remember this), living in a dingy sublet I almost never left and writing a depressing, lovelorn play about Alana. This means, among other things, that someone, probably my mother, called me in New York to tell me that my grandfather was either dead or dying, which means that I then took the bus to Philadelphia for my grandfather’s funeral—something I have no memory of doing, although I do remember reading several poems by e.e. cummings to my mother in the synagogue as the two us held each other and cried. This means, again among other things, that I somehow managed to get to that synagogue from New York, assuming I was in New York when my grandfather died, which at this point I have no choice but to assume, otherwise the whole structure comes crashing down like a proverbial house of cards, each floor collapsing onto the next.

13 July 2003 | Fountain

The hot water isn’t working again—the third time this has happened in as many weeks. Sweaty and smelly from a workout, I tried to convince myself to jump in the shower anyway, cold be damned. I actually spoke out loud as I did this, saying, “You have been beamed here from the third century. You have been transported to this very bathroom, in Brooklyn, where you have discovered a magical fountain of water that flows on demand. Surely you, a person from the third century, want more than anything to stand beneath this magical fountain of water.”

Surely I did not, and did not. Instead I boiled a pot of water and used this to wash the “essential” places, a list of which I will spare you.

11 July 2003 | Focus

To get in, I lied on the form and said that I’m constipated and that I eat a lot of yogurt. My plan, in short, was to nod a lot and agree with whatever anyone said, however idiotic or nonsensical.

The group was scheduled to last ninety minutes, for which I would be paid a hundred and twenty dollars. That works out to eighty dollars an hour, or a dollar thirty-three a minute—not a bad wage for nodding and agreeing; plus the friend who hooked me up said they give you free sandwiches.

When I arrived, there were maybe ten or twelve people in the waiting room, none of whom, I noted with some apprehension, looked even remotely constipated. This made me wonder if maybe everyone had lied. If true, this would be a disaster: someone in the group had to actually know what to say or there’d be nothing for anyone to agree with. Doubtless I was being paranoid to think this, although it’s something at this point that I’ll never know for certain.

As I was filing out my form, a woman in a business suit placed a big pile of sandwiches on the coffee table. I had half a turkey, half a mozzarella and tomato, then another half a turkey. The turkey was excellent: sliced extra thin on pumpernickel with plenty of honey mustard. I took another half and slipped it into my bag.

Just as I did this, the alarm started ringing, and for a split-second I thought it was because I’d been spotted stealing half a sandwich. Looking back that seems ridiculous, an alarm for sandwich thieves, but it’s really what I thought.

Then the sprinklers went off and everyone started yelling things like “Hey” and “Fuck” and “Shit to hell” (someone really yelled that), and then the woman who had brought out the sandwiches ran in and said something about the sprinklers having gone off and that maybe there was a fire in the building. I felt sorry for her: she was in charge and yet all she could think to say was what everyone already knew. In part to help her out, I stood and said that while it was probably nothing, we should all get out of the building immediately. Everyone agreed and started walking toward the elevators, at which point I observed that the stairs were much safer—lord knows, one didn’t want to get stuck in an elevator at a time like this—so the whole group turned and walked around the corner to where the stairs were, which is when I grabbed the remaining sandwiches.

10 July 2003 | World

These days I can’t figure out the point of reading. That’s how it strikes me. I read things, and some are good, and then I start looking for something else. In other words, nothing changes as a result. I’m not sure what I would like to have change, but nothing ever seems to. It’s the same with writing. Nearly every day I write things, and sometimes something seems good, but nothing ever changes.

10 July 2003 | Message

I was typing very quickly, transcribing something I had written in longhand, and the paragraph I was typing included the word nothing in three different places. Each time I typed it, I typed it wrong, but I didn’t know this at the time because I was being good and keeping my eyes on the page.

Here are the three typos, in order of appearance:

• no thing
• nthing
• nothinging

Unrelated to this, whenever I go to a certain website, I get an error message that reads:

‘undefined’ is undefined

Sometimes I go just to see the message.

09 July 2003 | Solution

For a long time I was unhappy and unproductive and would end up masturbating a lot in the middle of the day, which overall wasn’t such a hot idea. But then this morning, in a flash of inspiration, I realized what was wrong and resolved to finally do something about. So what I did was, I re-organized my email folders. The new rule is: Nothing stays in the In folder.

It was the In folder that was upsetting me. I would look at all that unanswered email and think, I can’t do this, it’s too much, I’m only one person, and then pretty soon I’d start jerking off.

So this morning I created a new folder called Reply. If something needs to be replied to but I don’t feel like doing it just then, I transfer it to Reply. This way I don’t have to be constantly reminded of what I’m not doing and can concentrate instead on actually doing something.

The result: It’s only been a few hours, but so far I’m feeling much better and have been getting things done and haven’t even once thought of touching myself.

08 July 2003 | Poem

Met her at a poetry reading
In 1981. Read a poem
About beer nuts.
Afterwards she came

Over and said how much
she liked my poem.
We talked about poetry
Mostly, but also beer nuts.

I knew a lot of things
About beer nuts then.
Women like it when
You are passionate

About something—
Even beer nuts.

07 July 2003 | Joy

The ice cream truck cometh. There, hear its maddening melody, as rude and relentless as a roomful of telemarketers. Fortunately I have steeled myself this time, thanks to reader E.P. Johnson, who read my piece Song and emailed the following story:

And now I have sung, loudly and with feeling, reading the lyrics from the page taped next to my computer.

Joy is possible.

05 July 2003 | Columns

Everything she did or didn’t do was done according to the new plan, which includes among other things the turning off of certain things for hours at the time so that she has space to think.

She also arranged everything into three columns and only did the things in the first column.

Now it’s late and she’s tired and it doesn’t seem like any of this made any difference.

02 July 2003 | Definition

In a recent email to her, ostensibly about his refrigerator, he mistakenly wrote condensensation instead of condensation, so she responded with a definition:

Condensensation: n. A focused and intense sensation, as on the lip or ear.

She thought long and hard where to place the sensation, wanting to keep it G-rated, which in its original formulation it was not.

His response:

Condensensation. n. The feeling of water evaporating on one’s skin.

Then her:

Condensensation: n. The sensation of condensing something that never should have been that big to begin with.

She’s nearly certain this is flirting. One more definition from him will seal it.