September 2003
I couldn’t find my orange juice. I had made a so-called spritzer (orange juice and seltzer) to drink with dinner, and now it was past dinner and I was thirsty again, so I went to the refrigerator to get some more orange juice.
Finding an empty refrigerator shelf, I once again remembered the thing for which I will one day be famous. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before. I will be famous not for my writing but for my method of finding lost things. It is called the Barrish Rule, because it is expressed as a rule:
When something is lost, it is almost always in one of the three most likely places for it to be, but in a way you are not thinking.
Maybe that’s not a rule exactly, but whatever it is, it’s the truth. The trick is, you have to get yourself to go back and look in the places you already looked, but in a new way. This is hard to do. Once people have checked a particular place for a thing, they draw a big line through that place in their minds and scribble a note in the margin that says, “Don’t look there. It’s definitely not there; I already checked,” and then they draw a line from the note to the image of the place and put an big arrow at the end of the line which points to the place, and if they have time they fill in the arrow a little so that they can’t possibly not see it in the future. The arrow ends up looking something like this:
Anyway you should see how quiet people get when you make them go back to re-check the places they’ve already checked and you ask them to check these places in a new way and they look at you like you’re a dick for making them do this, and then, ho-ho, the thing is there. People get very quiet.
Now, as to my orange juice… it wasn’t on the refrigerator shelf, so I looked to see if I had left it on the counter, which I hadn’t, so I looked to see if I had brought it over to my computer, which is something I do do sometimes but in this case had not.
One, two, three places.
I opened the refrigerator again and stepped back. No orange juice. I stood a good ten feet from the counter and scanned it slowly. Nothing. I turned and looked at my desk again. Nada. Then I walked over to my bed and took in the entire apartment. It was, I saw with some sadness, an apartment bereft of orange juice.
Could I have finished the container and thrown it out? This would count possibility number four, and I was damn certain it hadn’t happened, and yet I still made myself check the trash can, which as expected was orange-juice-less.
Remembering my rule (the rule, remember, for which I will one day be famous), I forced myself to repeat the entire operation again, minus the trash can, but in a new way. I would characterize this new way as pissed. I looked in all the places I had already looked, but this time as a person who was pissed to have to be doing this. It didn’t help.
When I was kid and something was lost, my mother was fond of saying that the lost thing didn’t just get up walk and away. I imagined that the container of orange juice did in fact just get up and walk away. It had grown little arms and legs, forced open the refrigerator from inside, climbed down the shelves, and scrambled off into the bathroom, where it was now cowering in the bathtub, the poor thing, having realized that there is no way out of my apartment except through the front door, which I am not in the habit of leaving open (below is an artist’s rendering of the plight of the orange juice container).
My own plight, while comparatively less harrowing, was nonetheless beginning to annoy the shit out of me. There had been an orange juice container in the apartment. I had combined some of the orange juice from this container with seltzer and had drunk the combination, a so-called spritzer, with dinner. The glass from which I had drunk was still sitting on my desk. If I went over and looked inside it (which I was not about to do, FYI), I would find little pieces of orange juice pulp at the bottom.
A certain unease began to roll in. Could I possibly be remembering these things wrongly? Had my mind gone off its wheels for a bit and moved last week’s spritzer to tonight? It didn’t seem possible, and yet where the goddamn fuck was that orange juice container?
I walked over to the kitchen and opened all the cabinets. The orange juice container was sitting on same shelf as the plates and bowls and glasses. I had placed it in front of a row of glasses, I suppose because it is more closely related to glasses than plates or bowls.
I may not end up becoming so famous.
The rain is coming down hard. The sound of it sounds like something sizzling in a pan but with cars swooshing by. Ah, and with a bus, braking.
A new thought: The Buddhists speak of walking with one’s death, but it’s really one’s fear one walks with. Meaning: Everything I do is done to clear out a space for not being afraid, for having the sense that this space around me, the space I walk in and that in a sense emanates from me, is safe. Which obviously it isn’t. The whole thing is an attempt to beat back the truth.
Anyway, one answer to Lorenzo’s question is that I’m afraid of both life and death but more life than death because death is such an abstraction.
Another answer: It’s not death I fear so much as dying, which still counts as life. I don’t even know what counts as death.
And also: I am afraid of both living and not living and so I oscillate between these two fears, living when not living scares me most, not living when living does, back and forth.
This just in from a friend, as if to illustrate:
Still no word from Nancy. Odd, because at the end of our date, when she asked me if we should get together again and I said “sure,” she touched my arm and said “oh, yay” before leaving.
It’s like we’re playing a game of chicken in reverse. Instead of veering toward each other to see who stops first, we’re veering apart to see who’ll be the first to look back.
22 September 2003 | To Do
Busy day. Things to do. As I’m producing some comps, an email comes from Lorenzo. Too complicated to explain who Lorenzo is, not that I even know. He writes:
are you afraid of life?
are you afraid of death?
what (if yes) are you doing about it…
bullshit to those questions are ok but rather prefer the real one, not the witty one…
I put it at the bottom of my To Do list:
UDN Comps
Story
Mail sweatshirt
Gym
UDN Webs
Naturalistic
Install Mozilla
Reading promo
Study cell phone manual
Fear life/death
20 September 2003 | Nothing
I’ve had nothing to say, nor seen any reason to say anything, so I haven’t. Yesterday I bought a shower curtain and shower curtain liner. It was kind of a big deal. I used to use just a liner, because the fancier sort of curtain seemed silly, a useless bit of decoration, but something got into me yesterday and I decided that man does not live by usability alone.
I’m feeling surprisingly good about it today, although it dawned on me this morning that when it’s time to replace the liner, I will need to carefully remove both the liner and curtain from the hooks on which they hang, before hanging the new liner. Maybe that doesn’t sound so significant to you, but you have to remember that I’m used to just tearing down the liner and putting up a new one. This will add another step.
Also, perhaps because I’ve had nothing to say, I recently gave in and bought a cell phone. I hate it already. I spent an hour trying and failing to figure out how to leave a greeting for when someone calls. Then I made the mistake of emailing my new cell phone number to the dozen or so friends I see regularly, figuring that these are the folks who might actually need it—say, when one of us is late to meet the other. The email I sent went:
I have a cell phone now. The number is […]. Please don’t call me on it for a while: I’m a little freaked out.
Right away three different friends decided to call me, as a joke. Evidently all my friends have the same sense of humor. I refused to answer the thing and tried instead to figure out a way to turn it off, which I failed to do because the user manual sucks. In the end I stuffed it at the bottom of my laundry hamper, which is where it will remain until I decide my next step. If I forget it’s there and end up including it in my next load of laundry, so be it.
Oh: A short time later the phone started ringing again, so I dug it up and stuffed it inside four pairs of athletic socks (eight socks into all, one inside another) and returned it to the bottom of the hamper. Then I called it on my regular phone to confirm I couldn’t hear it, and I definitely couldn’t. As it rang I covered my regular phone with my hand and walked over to the hamper and stood there listening.
Nothing. Silence.
Just after midnight on Thursday, I got a call from my friend Lisa. At first I couldn’t make out what she was saying (she was talking so quietly; almost a whisper), but then, in pieces, I understood. She was in an ambulance on her way to the hospital; she’d had a bike accident on the Williamsburg bridge, had flown over her handlebars and landed on her arm and face, didn’t know which hospital she was going to, didn’t think it necessary for me to come. I convinced her to hand her cell phone to the ambulance driver, who told me where they were taking her.
Soon after I arrived at her bedside, she asked to be photographed like that, her face scraped and bloodied, her arm broken at the elbow, one tooth chipped. Then I took notes so that she’d remember things later, when it came time to write. It was, we both recognized, an EXPERIENCE, one that needed to be captured, the capturing becoming, unavoidably, part of the experience.
Yesterday I sent her my photos and notes, which she used in her written account.
There’s just one thing I want to add. Friday afternoon, after fifteen straight hours of “dealing” (post-hospital I slept on Lisa’s floor and did what I could to help her handle the logistics, and shock, of a one-armed existence (“my mouse hand,” she cried in a rare moment of semi-untoughness)), I sat at her kitchen table and looked at the photos I’d taken in the hospital, still in my camera. As I did this I could hear her on the phone in next room telling someone, I think her father, what had happened. I knew she couldn’t see me there, so I let myself weep, weeping as quietly as I could, so as not to upset her.
Holding back the sound kept the tears in as well. Perhaps because of this, I felt acutely conscious of the way my shoulders were heaving, a rapid and seemingly exaggerated flapping motion.
09 September 2003 | High Line
I walked the High Line Saturday. If you don’t already know, the High Line is an abandoned elevated freight line that runs along the west side of Manhattan, from lower midtown to the west village. It was built in the 30s and discontinued in 1980. The final freight train (I learned this from the friends of the high line) carried three carloads of frozen turkeys.
The city plans to convert the remaining structure into a “grand, public promenade,” which I’m sure will be cool, only not one-hundredth as cool as what’s there now, which is a dilapidated overgrown junk-strewn oasis. I don’t have the strength to describe it except to say it reminded me of The Zone from Tarkovsky’s film The Stalker, sans all that intense metaphysics.
Some photos:
If you’re in New York and know what’s good for you, you will go do this thing posthaste, okay? Here’s how:
GETTING ON: Enter the big truck lot on 33rd between 11th and 12th Avenues. See that opening in the fence directly across? Walk through that, make an immediate right, and climb straight up the embankment onto the ramp. Easy.
GETTING OFF: This part is harder. The High Line ends around 10th Street, but there doesn’t appear to be a viable way down there unless you enjoy jumping fifteen feet onto the tops of trucks. Instead, double-back to 17th Street. On the west side there’s a staircase plastered with signs that say TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. You are a trespasser. Walk down the stairs to the level where the nasty-looking barbed wire is, then climb out over the barbed wire and kind of shimmy down the opposite side of the big girder at the corner of the stairs, onto the car below. Do this quickly and quietly as there’s a security guy in the booth in the yard who will be mean to you when you gallantly remain behind so that your friend can get away and who will order you to call after her and get really pissed when she doesn’t turn around (I recommend calling the wrong name) and who will ask sarcastically if you happen to have seen all those NO TRESPASSING signs plastered on the stairs, to which I recommend replying, politely, with the truth, as this will confuse him.
My friend Ross just sent me this dream he had. He thinks it’s about me but it’s really about him, I think: him in the costume of me. Although maybe the word about is too strong here.
With Charlotte at a film screening in the cinematheque of an archive where I work. It’s an Ingmar Bergman movie, and Bergman is there in person to present it. Michael B. is in the audience, along with other friends of ours. After the screening, in the Q & A, Michael asks a question, perhaps makes a statement. There’s something provocative in his manner—not quite transgressive, but as close as one can come without quite being so. The comment is not really directed at Bergman, but more at some general condition of the event itself or its context: the institutional politics surrounding the screening, or the wholesale corruption and hijacking of our common culture. That’s the sense of it anyway. And it’s somehow just beyond appropriate. Without quite being obscene it hints at the unspoken lies that bind our lives, the unnamed laws which we all agree to live by. So there is some question as to how the “authorities” holding the screening will respond. Will they let it pass, or curtail it somehow?
They choose the latter, an aggressive response. They tell Michael to leave. The question now becomes how Michael will react in turn. Will he argue it? Will he comply? Clearly he wants to stay, but it’s forbidden. His burning impulse is to exit in sound and fury, screaming outright the profane secrets he merely hinted at in his earlier comments.
But he knows I work in the archive and doesn’t want to get me in trouble.
Furthermore, he knows that this type of emotion is the one thing that cannot be expressed in an institutional setting, or in one’s public life. Any manner of transgression or obscenity is tolerated, provided it’s mediated or obfuscated by the distance of intellect. But emotion, especially anger, must not be exhibited.
The whole audience is now directed at him. He arises from his seat, appears about to speak. But he doesn’t. He commences a series of movements, perhaps picking up his bags and putting on his coat. Each act seems about to burst in tremendous violence—his coat to be slammed whip-like to the floor, his bags hurled furiously across the room. But in each case what begins with this threat evolves into extreme slow motion, a focused continuation of an “acceptable” gesture: threading his arms into the coat, sliding on the backpack. It culminates in his exit. Taking the heavy door of the theater in his hand, Michael extends his arm in a great arc as if to slam it with a force that would send shakes through the hushed room. But what begins as a slam slows suddenly at the end, as if the door had springed hinges. It doesn’t though—the slowing is pointedly controlled by Michael’s hand. The last few inches thus takes minutes to shut, and each micro-interval of the door’s movement is felt with the full force of the slam, even as it’s not slammed, it’s in fact closed incredibly delicately, with the cold heat of a Butoh performance. And in shutting the door, Michael somehow remains standing inside the room, even ‘though it’s understood he is leaving. His face emanates a still fury, sweat pouring freely from it as the door gently, excruciatingly, closes.
Ever the filmmaker, a part of me steps back and can’t help wondering what the heck Bergman is making of all of this.
Then Michael’s gone. Some people start heading for the doors. Among them are a number of huge thugs who seem to have appeared from nowhere. I stop one of them to ask what they’re doing. He’s got a roll of bills clenched in his fist. I ask if he’s been paid to beat up Michael. No answer. I try to find the theater managers to stop this madness, but they’re nowhere to be found. Then I see that C. and our friends have run out of the theater in an effort to get to Michael and the thugs. I go to join them, and find a crowd dragging Michael into an alley. He’s already been hit once in the face. I meet another thug, again ask if he’s been paid to attack Michael. No answer, but there’s now no doubt that it’s true. A brawl is about to break out. Another friend gets hit. I run in to try to break it up. A huge man aims a fist at my face.
I wake up.
01 September 2003 | Wings
At the wedding picnic, Ishmael tied the broken pieces of a giant Styrofoam airplane to his body (side wings to his arms, tail wing to his back) in an effort to fly. Later, in the car, stuck in a traffic, we discuss Icarus. Ishmael, still wearing the wings, already knows the story and plans to avoid using wax.
I met Ishmael’s father twenty years ago, in Michigan, five years before Ishmael’s father met his mother, the woman to my left, at a time when Ishmael was negative twelve.
The longer you live, the less possible it becomes to explain anything.
