Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

29 August 2003 | Nerve

I was just… actually it doesn’t matter what I was doing, but I found this document I wrote many moons ago when I was, as they say, “doing Nerve.” The document begins with list of women I was corresponding with at that time. I wrote down their names because I needed to figure out who to contact to say I’d just met someone I saw some potential with and was leaving Nerve. My little notes to myself are why I bother to share this.

Elaine - no need
Kietryna - call or write
Alexandra - ?
Heidi - gulp
Eva - call or write; oh fuck
Nancy - call or write
coy_mistress - who cares

The document (entitled Nerve Misc; admittedly not the most thrilling title but who knew I’d be going public with it) concludes with three unusable profile headlines I’d written earlier and subsequently forgotten.

(If you don’t already know, online dating services require members to compose short headlines for their profiles. It’s hateful and yet of a piece with what’s happening here, which is that people are publishing advertisements for themselves as romantic partners or fuck buddies or what-have-you. When you browse the profiles, you see three things for each person listed: username, headline, and more often than not, thumbnail photo. On the basis of these three things, you decide whether or not to view that person’s profile. All of which is to say that the headline is crucial, even more so than the photo, which besides being tiny is sometimes so cleverly artistic as to be revealing of nothing so much as the person’s Photoshop skills. Nerve has thousands of profiles (the bigger services have tens of thousands), and so no one, not even a maniac like myself, can possibly read them all. Thus an insipid headline would always earn a quick no from me, just as a brilliant headline never failed to inspire a click. In fact I kept a file of my favorite headlines and would write to these women, regardless of my interest in them, just to say how great their headlines were. Regrettably this file is now lost and all I can remember is the one that made me spray spit on my monitor: Obscene amount of T&A. (T stood for tenacity; A for attitude. But you already knew that.))

I realized today that my rejected headlines, each of which was rejected for a reason that’s even clearer to me now than then, comprise a little poem. Here is that poem. It is very short. I think it’s called Three Rejected Nerve Headlines.

1. Again
2. You have no idea
3. I never intended to read her journal

24 August 2003 | Patients

I’ve been told that social workers work with clients, while psychologists work with patients. This is true even when the two types of service providers provide the same type of service.

I have a web design friend who, having learned this from me, now refers to his clients, behind their backs, as patients.

On the subject of patients, here’s a beloved quote from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse:

The parting contained in the greeting.

22 August 2003 | Toast

This is true, and anyway when have I ever lied to you.

Nine years ago my sister called me in the middle of the night to say she’d met the man of her dreams. My sister normally goes to bed early, so I was forced to take this seriously.

How long had she known him? —About a year.

How had she met him? —At the office; he was dentist (my sister’s a dental hygienist).

When had they started going out? —Two months before.

What had taken so long? —She wasn’t interested.

When did she get interested? —When she cleaned his teeth; he had such excellent oral hygiene. (That last response is a quote; I immediately wrote it in my journal.)

At their wedding, I offered a toast to my brother-in-law’s excellent oral hygiene, which, I explained, had won my sister’s heart. The celebrants, most of whom were either dental professionals or closely related to one, roared their approval. Then my brother-in-law’s father stood and with restrained emotion toasted his son’s childhood orthodontist.

Teary, people were teary.

21 August 2003 | Song 19

It wasn’t the taped-together cover, nor the fuzzy orange ovals floating in a darker orange ether, nor even the giant black-and-white close-up of fork tongs and their shadows that made me sad. It was my own happiness. Which is absurd because if I can’t be happy when I’m happy, when do I expect to be happy, when I’m sad? Said another way, Ceyda just called and said we can’t watch any films tonight because Leili doesn’t want to, so I said, “Maybe we can put plays on for each other” only Ceyda heard, “Maybe we can put pastries on each other,” which I in turn heard as “put pasties on each other,” pasties being a word that Ceyda, who is Turkish, doesn’t know. Actually that has nothing to do with anything, however it occurred to me after hearing the final song, Sing Swan Song (did you know—I looked this up—that swans are said to sing some exquisite song as they die, thus the expression swan song?), that the song list was a map, each song a stop along a route you laid out. Or that’s what it felt like to listen, a full day between songs, and that too is why I found it heartbreaking: because I want to live (I typed love) in that place (a place forever down the road?) and never leave. I’m reminded of the songlines, which if you don’t know (I learned this from the book by Bruce Chatwin) are paths in the form of songs, or songs in the form of paths, through which the ancestors of today’s aboriginal Australians sang into existence all the visible world, and which their descendants today must walk and sing (both together, for they cannot be separated) to guarantee and confirm the existence of creation. It’s a bit much when speaking of a mix CD but who knows what our descendants will be into and anyway other than that Wire song and also #12, which I still haven’t listened to, it rocked.

20 August 2003 | Song 18

As I stepped off the Q train and headed for the stairs, a woman approached me, her mouth in the shape of an about-to-be-asked question. The question was: “How do I get to West 14th?” I told her how to get there, was thanked, and then as I reached the top of the stairs I realized I’d seen something on the platform that hadn’t quite registered. It was a scene in the car I’d been on. Three or more people standing in the aisle. A man’s voice saying, “She’s fainted. Stop the train.” Did these things really happen? I’m still not sure.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is what music is, or rather, why people make it. Song 18, Dramamine by Modest Mouse, brought this to mind. I don’t have an answer yet, but I think it’s the same reason I stop to look at torn and trampled scraps of paper on the street in the hope that one will mention that the author should not have punched Alex at all and should instead have been doing something on the When You’re Done List, despite how hard it is to stay quiet when everybody else is running around and yelling across the room, for example.

19 August 2003 | Song 17

Song 17 is Nick Cave’s “The Weeping Song.” I found the production a tad bombastic. Listening to it, I thought: Nick Cave would be an intense person to have over for dinner.

Also something in the music made me remember this time when, high and freaked out, a man appeared in my head and helped talk me down. He was older and had a nice voice. I was so stoned I didn’t realize I had conjured him.

Then I remembered the time I got caught in an undertow. This is not a metaphor. I got caught and couldn’t get uncaught. The shore was right there, with hundreds of people on it, and I couldn’t get to it. I thought of calling out for help but was too embarrassed to do so, so close to shore.

Nick Cave would have yelled his head off.

18 August 2003 | Song 16

This has nothing to do with Song 16, “I Am A Scientist” by Guided By Voices, which I must have played a dozen times throughout the day, not consecutively but in moments between things, as a way to get to whatever was on the other side of the song, as I thought of it, or to pass some time until that time arrived, or to simply hear the song again and think again about how I am scientist and an incurable, etc., or to just unlock my mind, yeah, just unlock my mind.

There was once an air conditioner that sat perched on a windowsill, held in place by a heavy window that pushed down on it from above. The air conditioner shared the sill with five former yogurt containers which were used to store loose change (two held pennies; three were for larger coins). The containers were on friendly terms with the air conditioner and would often kid around and tease the air conditioner for being a big energy-guzzling galoot. Then one day a supermarket opened nearby, and this supermarket had a fancy coin counting machine. When the yogurt containers heard about the coin counting machine, they got scared. The air conditioner tried to assure them that nothing bad would happen, but the yogurt containers didn’t believe this for a second—and with good reason! Less than a week after the supermarket opened, the yogurt containers were taken away and never heard from again. After that the air conditioner felt really lonely and missed being teased.

17 August 2003 | Song 15

Wasted day. Don’t want to say what I did, or rather didn’t do, except to note that I watched as Ryan Nyquist sewed up the X-Games Bike Stunt Park competition by putting together a Double Truckdriver, 360 Bar Spin Backflip over the Spine, One-handed X-Up Backflip over the Sharkfin and finally a 720 over the Spine. Now my head hurts. I listened to a song (not Song 15, which was the sweet and melodic “405” by Death Cab for Cutie) but that song by Caetano Veloso I mentioned in Song 5, a link to which was subsequently sent to me by a kind reader. It nearly made me cry. That was today’s highlight: crouching with my ear next to the lousy mono speaker and feeling overwhelmingly sad and melancholic.

16 August 2003 | Song 14

I wanted to figure out how to put Song 14 on a loop so I could listen to it like that, over and over, and possibly write about it, or write from within it, but there was no way to get my CD player to do that. It has a button that says REPEAT but evidently the button is broken or is repeating something elsewhere in the world.

Vaguely related to this, I’ve been thinking about pleasure. My main discovery is that pleasure cannot be described. Instead one must rely on the experience of the reader, on the fact that the reader has had certain experiences, and attempt to write something that recalls those experiences. Consider, say, kissing. What is there to say to describe kissing, the experience of kissing, other than that it feels nice, which describes nothing. Choreographic descriptions of lips and tongues don’t cut it.

After failing to get the song to play in a loop, I turned out all the lights, started the song again from the beginning, and danced. This felt nice (!) until I noticed my outline in the mirror near at the foot of my bed. That made me self-conscious. I like dancing but I feel self-conscious to see myself dance. The reason, I think, is that I don’t like being reminded of how I am a person like other people, one of those things. It’s not that I ever imagine otherwise; I just don’t like to be reminded of this fact, particularly in moments of pleasure.

15 August 2003 | Darker

My friend Jarek Kupsc took these photos. I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing them with you. For me they capture what it felt like to walk home last night, the city darker—and stranger—than I ever knew possible.

[ larger ]

[ larger ]

15 August 2003 | Song 13

Song 13 made me think of a ship—or a ferry, actually. The ferry was operated by two men, one of whom steered while the other did nothing, evidently, but lower and raise the mechanical gangplank. No one boarded. The ship went back and forth at regular intervals (between where and where, I haven’t a clue) but no one ever came on board.

I don’t really think this has anything to do with the song, nor possibly with anything.

Unrelated, when the gypsies say I love you, they say I want you. They don’t have a separate way to say I love you. Which meaning they mean, affection or desire, is expressed by context.

Also the Russians don’t say I have this, but rather To me there is this. For the Russians, things are not had but exist in relation.

15 August 2003 | Song 12

I was asked not to listen to Song 12, so I didn’t. I was writing about this when my computer died. My first thought, once I discovered the extent of the blackout, was not of elevators or train cars or even open-heart surgeries, but of the people stuck in rides at Coney Island, upside-down.

13 August 2003 | Song 11

12 August 2003 | Song 10

The tenth song is The Desperate Things You Make Me Do by the Magnetic Fields. I hate to complain, but I think the banjo or glockenspiel or whatever that was, was mixed too high. This made it hard to hear the lyrics and I really wanted to hear the lyrics because they reminded me, from what I could hear of them, of Morrissey, whose lyrics I’ve always loved, so much so that just this past weekend I realized that Morrissey isn’t merely a great lyricist but a great philosopher, albeit in the oblique and somewhat fragmented sense of, say, the later Wittgenstein.

Speaking of the Magnetic Fields, many years ago a friend borrowed my copy of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, which is one my favorite CDs ever, stuck-on-a-desert-island stuff, far better than anything she’s done since, almost to the point where you have to seriously wonder if Liz Phair actually died right after making it and was secretly replaced by a woman who looks exactly like her, sings exactly like her, and even shares some of Liz Phair’s “issues,” but isn’t Liz Phair. All this aside, my friend, who is now my ex-friend, kept promising to return the CD but kept “forgetting” to do so, as he put it, until I finally had no choice but to tell him to either return my CD or consider himself my ex-friend, whereupon he mailed the CD to me, only the CD he mailed wasn’t Exile in Guyville but some piece of crap by the Magnetic Fields, which for obvious reasons I never listened to.

This reminds me (I’m in an even more associative mood than usual) of the enormous depression I saw in the middle of the street today. It must have been eight feet across and two feet deep. It was right in the center of the south-bound lane on Vanderbilt, just past where Vanderbilt crosses Sterling. The police had drawn a thick yellow line around it, but that was all: no traffic cones or traffic barrels or traffic anythings. It was scary. What if someone drove right into it?

As I walked away, I imagined a story about a guy who sees such a depression, except in the story the depression is much deeper than two feet, so deep that when the guy looks down into it he can’t see the bottom, so that it’s not really a depression at all but a hole. As the guy walks away, he imagines seeing some kid ride his bicycle right into it. This terrifies him to the point that he has to turn around just to make sure that no kid is approaching on his bicycle. It’s irrational of course—what are the chances of such thing happening just at that moment?—and yet this is precisely what happens: a kid rides his bicycle directly into the hole. The weird thing is that the kid never screams or does anything to indicate he’s falling into a hole, and instead just keeps pedaling his bicycle, eyes straight ahead, seemingly calm and relaxed, so that it looks like he’s simply at the top of a long steep hill and is now just heading down it.

11 August 2003 | Song 9

Songs I love I devour. I listen to them until there’s nothing left to hear, just a pile of greasy little song bones. Then the waitress comes and says, “Anything else?” and I say, “No, just the check,” and she takes the plate away.

10 August 2003 | Song 8

My friend Eva is visiting on her way back from Bali, where she spent a month with her boyfriend, a 51-year-old Balinese shadow puppeteer. She phones him, in Bali, three or four times a day. After each conversation, she reports how affectionate he was on a scale from sparingly to exceedingly. Rarely does he rate higher than sufficiently, although in fairness to the man, I sense that Eva’s a hard grader.

The one thing that bothers me about this guy (I base this entirely on what Eva tells me) is his cellphone addiction. Once when they were having sex (totally great sex, says Eva), his cellphone rang. Incredibly he stopped what he was doing and got up to answer it. That’s an addiction.

The eighth song is by PJ Harvey. It’s called The Garden. This morning Eva and I listened to it together, except that she spent the entire time downloading pictures of her boyfriend.

09 August 2003 | Song 7

So a friend made a compilation CD for me and I’ve been listening to exactly one song a day and more or less writing about that experience but not really. (Yes, one song a day: I have tons of self-control; and by the way, today’s song, Je Ne Respire Plus, Milos by Domnique A, was intense and excellent.) Probably you already knew. But what you didn’t know is that this same friend recently received a rather weird and scary email.

My friend doesn’t know Stanley Dougler of Boise, ID. When she forwarded the email to me, I wrote back that if there is a nuclear war this month, which fuck knows could happen, the first thing she and I will think of will be Stanley Dougler of Boise, ID. Now you will too.

It was meant as a joke (or something resembling a joke), but then today I wondered what I’d do if I believed what Stanley Dougler believes. It seemed a good question, a revealing question, but as it turns out I couldn’t imagine believing such a thing. No vision, however vivid and apocalyptic, is going to convince me to send emails to strangers, or whatever I’d do as a result of such a belief. So I gave up on that and instead considered a related question, one others have pondered, and still others have faced in real life, a question I could at least project myself into believing, that is, believing I might one day be forced to answer: What would I do if given a month to live?

My response was immediate and certain, but before I say what it was, I’d like to mention what my friend Eva said. She said she’d spend the first two weeks writing her life story, a book called Things I Noticed On My Way Through. We were in Starbucks when she said this, and she was drinking a double tall mocha.

“Why not write it now?” I asked.

“Lack of discipline.”

“A death sentence would give you discipline?”

“I already have a death sentence and I’m not writing anything.”

“So why would a more specific death sentence change anything?

“The illusion of immortality. All day long we live with the expectation to live. We know on some level we’re going to die, but we don’t expect it to be today or tomorrow. If I knew I had a month, I’d write.”

The sad thing is that this is probably true: Eva would write if given a month to live. One reason this is sad is that Eva can really write. The other reason is that in lieu of a such a sentence, it’s doubtful Eva will ever write. So Eva needs a tragedy (albeit an unlikely tragedy) to do the one thing (this is what she said) she really wants to do.

My lot is similar, I suppose, not that I would ever dream of writing at such a time. I’ve written too much already, and anyway the thought of spending that month alone in front of a computer seems insane. Instead I’d post a thank you on this site, either mention my illness or not, and close up shop. Then I’d be with the people I love. That was my first and only thought. I’d visit friends around the country, exclaim my love for them all, get drunk a lot, cry buckets, possibly sleep with a certain ex-girlfriend, and consume a lot more coffee than I do now, no longer needing to fear developing a more serious habit.

Also, silly but true, if I listened to my friend’s CD again—I mean the compilation containing Je Ne Respire Plus, Milos by Domnique A (which by the way translates, according to Google’s hokey translation service, as I Do Not Breathe Anymore, Milos)—I would listen to all nineteen songs in one go and forget this exactly-one-song-per-day bullshit. Life is too short.

08 August 2003 | Song 6

I sit at a school desk, the kind where the desk is permanently attached to the chair, so that to sit in it you have to slide in from the side. Actually they’re all like that, aren’t they. This one has a Formica top and a thick plastic chair. The desk is outside a bar, and across the street, perched above another bar, is a giant neon sign in the shape of a cigarette, the red tip of which flashes on and off as though someone, a giant, were smoking.

Your own cigarette finished, you’ve gone into the bar to pee. I sit at the desk, thinking about my prayer. A man walks by I immediately recognize. He sells belts and other assorted junk at the corner of South 5th and Marcy. Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s skinny and Asian and lays out his merchandise on a white canvas laundry bag, the kind with a drawstring at the top. I can’t imagine he’s ever made a sale: his belts are ugly and he is insane.

I never did tell you about my prayer. Basically I talked to myself out loud and explained what was happening, which was that there was something I wanted so much I was willing to pray for it, despite having no one and nothing to pray to and despite feeling like an idiot for doing so. This was all part of my prayer. The idea was to be as honest and vulnerable as possible. I said it felt wrong to be praying for what amounted to a personal favor and that I therefore saw no reason it should granted. I said that the thing I wanted had to come of its own and not through some magical manipulation of reality. I was on my knees as I said these things, kneeling near the end of my bed with my hands joined in a vague approximation of a person praying. I said that instead of having my desire granted, a better thing to ask for, a better thing to be given, was what I called joy but what I really meant as wisdom in the face of loss.

The sixth song is beautiful. He never quite says what he means, yet you know what he’s saying.

07 August 2003 | Song 5

I could see the musicians as they played. They were in a room, perhaps at different times, wearing headphones. A series of images floated by, extreme close-ups: the drummer’s right wrist, a hand moving over keys, a guitar pick held between thumb and forefinger, the muscles in the neck of the man singing. I didn’t want to see these things, preferring to experience the song as one thing, a kind of wave, not a collection of sounds made by several people in a room, perhaps at different times, according to some complicated arrangement.

I once saw Caetano Veloso in a film. I’d never seen him before, wasn’t expecting to see him, had no idea what he looked like. But when he opened his mouth, out came that voice—a voice, I realized, I’d never quite thought of as belonging to a person, nor even being a voice exactly but simply some BEAUTIFUL THING, the way maps are beautiful, or, say, manhole covers.

At the co-op yesterday, I watched a baby stick her foot in her mouth. She managed it without using her hands. After that, as I shopped, I made a mental list of things babies don’t know. It was a long list (babies know almost nothing), but today I can only remember four items:

• What a baby is
• Where not to stick your foot
• How to tell if a melon is ripe
• Plato’s metaphor of a cave

06 August 2003 | Song 4

We had to pass through a place with small, low trees. It was just a short way, ten or twelve feet. It was night and dark. I’d been there before and knew the way. Still, you were scared. I’d never seen you that scared, and it confused me. I told you it was safe, for it was, but you wouldn’t budge. I went through and came back, to show you. It didn’t matter. You were scared in a way that left no room not to be scared. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I took your hand and put my arm around you—left hand in left hand, right arm wrapped tight to your waist—and led you through. We went slow.

The fourth song is bad methinks. How it is possible you like it?

In the film I watched last night, a woman looks out the window during an argument with her lover and threatens to take up with the first man she sees. This is what she does. She follows a random man to a train station and stares at him as he buys his ticket. Next we see the man calling his wife from a hotel where he’s in bed with the woman. He tells his wife exactly what has happened and says he’s going with the woman to Barcelona. In Barcelona we’re treated to various shots of her naked breasts in the moonlight. The film very well could have been called Naked Breasts in the Moonlight. In his journal, in 1913, Kafka wrote: “Went to the movies. Wept. Boundless entertainment.” I didn’t weep but became sleepy.

The song made me realize that you are capable of anything, including hearing the same thing I hear but in such a way that it is no longer the same thing. That threw me.

05 August 2003 | Song 3

Zero conversations yesterday. I did say “hi” and “thanks” to the woman at the gym who handed me my towel and did leave a phone message for a friend, but neither could be called a conversation. A conversation is a living exchange, it’s when people say things back and forth and no one knows for certain what’s going to be said. Imaginary conversations are not conversations. For even when you need to think long and hard about what the imagined other might say in response to what you imagine yourself saying, you’re still just talking to yourself.

This time I raised my arms to the ceiling and danced, flexing my legs at the knees and rocking my head a little from side to side. It was nearly involuntary. I felt like a baby in its crib, reaching up at one of those crib toys that spin and make sound. It didn’t strike me until later what I looked like from the outside: a mostly naked man wearing headphones and dancing while lying flat on his back in bed.

I have tried not to think about how you picked the songs, what each may or may not mean, why one follows the next, to what degree you thought of me and asked yourself what I would think. It’s dangerous ground. In the years I was gone, my mother read and reread a book she had found in my abandoned apartment. She gave special attention to the notes I had scribbled in the margins, for she saw these as clues to my inner life, the life, as she imagined it, I’d never shared with her or anyone. She told me about the book when I returned. It had taught her a great deal about me and had strengthened her faith that I was alive and would one day reappear—a faith she alone maintained through those years.

And it was all a mistake. I had never seen that book before.

04 August 2003 | Song 2

Forgive me for the cross-outs. Once, tripping, G cried because we had to go back. The cross-outs are like going back, they’re like when G said he’d never trip again because of how it felt to remember it.

When the music started, I uncrossed my legs and opened my hands. I do this in the night sometimes, in moments of partial wakefulness. Changing positions, I discover my hands partly clenched, so I flatten them against the bed or pillow. To be certain, I often slide one under the pillow and lay my head on top.

This time I sensed you beside me. At first I thought I was in bed, on my back, and that you lay to my right, listening with me. But then I saw we were floating. It was as though we were floating on our backs on a lake, that’s how our bodies moved, a sort of slow ripple, but instead we were in a room, floating in air, our arms suspended at our sides.

When we left the room, we talked about what had happened, but what we talked about was not what had happened. I wasn’t sure if you realized.

03 August 2003 | Song 1

Before listening to the first song, I did the dishes, put away my laundry, wrote to six people, showered. There could be nothing else I needed to do. Then I moved the machine in bed with me. The wires. I wanted to be in bed when I heard.

There is nothing to say of music. This one was like a merry-go-round that is both faster and slower than merry-go-rounds are. Perhaps this could be filmed with cameras which themselves spin. I saw a blur of trees. Dabs of green. We had been brought there blindfolded. When it was over, the blindfolds were put back on, but it was not scary because we knew we would sleep in the car on the way home.

On the train, I studied the case, the artwork, and saw how you glued two images back-to-back and taped the titles in the center of one. Such heartbreak. This is how it is these days: the happiest thing makes me sad.

Across the aisle sat a mother with two young sons. One of the boys was standing on the seat, looking out the window. I was scared he was going to fall backwards and smash his head on the floor of the train. It would not have taken much. He kept losing and regained his balance. His mother, seeing this, would periodically grab the pocket of his shorts. I set my bag to the side and quietly got into a kind of sprinter’s position, one foot back, ready to push off should the boy begin to fall. In my mind I could see him falling. He didn’t fall.

01 August 2003 | Beer

I am giving a reading this Sunday in Manhattan. If you live nearby, please come. If you live far away, please send a proxy. If you live nearby but have plans, change them.

This event is part of a bimonthly reading series called The Oblivio Series. It is my own series. I run it. Every two months I pair up with a different co-reader who, miraculously, is even more fabulous than the last.

The big winner here is you, the lucky audience member (or perhaps your lucky proxy), who for a mere $5 will receive a double-barreled literary experience of orgiastic dimensions.

Failing that, there’s beer.