December 2003
28 December 2003 | Sick
I got sick Friday night. It happened during the night. In the morning, the moment I stood, I knew I was in trouble.
I’ve been caring for Lisa’s cat, Jane. Saturday morning, just as I stood, Jane headed over to rub herself against my leg. The way I figured it, I had maybe fifteen seconds to get to the bathroom, so rather than wait for Jane to reach my leg, I jumped over her. It was a smart move, too, given that the proceedings began the moment I reached the toilet.
I’ll try to keep the graphic stuff to a minimum, although I must say I found it incredibly interesting. How does my body know how to do that? I was struck—flabbergasted, really—by the velocity of the heaves. Ain’t nothing tentative about it.
Afterwards, as I brushed my teeth, I noted that my vomit smelled exactly like vomit.
23 December 2003 | Done
Been too busy to write. Too busy, even, to think of what to write, had I the time. I mentioned this in a dashed-off email to a friend (everything I do these days is dashed-off, hurried-through, woofed-down—a blurry, multi-tasked rush from To Do to Done). She suggested I write about how busy I am. Would that I had the time.
Another friend showed me his new personal digital assistant. He uses it to make and receive phone calls, check and write email, send and receive text messages, manage his schedule, maintain his address book, update his website, take photographs, write memos, download applications, and synchronize critical data with his computer. The device weighs 5.9 ounces and fits in his pocket.
I’m like, I need one of these.
We pay for our choices with the lives we lead.
13 December 2003 | Tracks
We’re sitting on a little loading dock at the edge of train tracks. The platform is cement and sticks out from what may be a yellow building. Trains stop here—or did. She’s sitting to my left and has her back against the loading dock door, which may be corrugated. I have my hand in her pants.
I’m not sure which hand it is.
There may be also houses whose yards border the opposite side of the tracks, behind a row of trees or bushes.
The platform is visible from the road but far enough away so that no one can tell what we’re doing.
This is happening just after the first time we got back together, the time that begins from when she saw me from her living room window. It may even be the same day.
It’s not clear which side I’m on, her left or her right. The one image I have is of the building and platform as seen from the road. The building is a block or more long and made of brick. The brick is painted a light color—yellow probably, or white. I don’t know what’s beyond the building, but it feels very open back there. The tracks, bordered on the right by trees, trail off into the horizon.
12 December 2003 | Ghosts
I dreamed I died and became a ghost. It was a lot like the movie Sixth Sense. I was the Bruce Willis character, except I knew a lot more than Bruce Willis did, having seen the movie Sixth Sense.
Just like in the movie, there was a little boy who could see me and who told me I was dead. I remember being amazed by this, because I hadn’t believed in ghosts when I was alive. Which is true: I don’t believe in ghosts. However my friend kfan does, or at least I think he does, so in the dream I hatched the plan to email him and mess with his head a little, particularly since he once wrote a story about receiving emails from dead people.
Then I had what seemed like an important insight. It was that ghosts only mess with people who believe in ghosts, because otherwise it’s not as much fun. I figured I would tell kfan this in my email, perhaps in a p.s., but the little boy said I wasn’t allowed to send emails to anyone or even have an email account, because of problems with ghosts writing spam.
08 December 2003 | Squid
Gave a reading yesterday. I always say I’m happiest when I’m reading, and I suppose it’s true. Anyway the light was so bright, I couldn’t see anyone when I looked up. Just blinding light surrounded by black. But I’m good reader, so I looked up a lot. It’s all about connecting with the audience, even when the audience is a roomful of blackness.
A few times—does this happen to you?—I felt the compulsion to ruin the reading, really fuck it up good. This felt a lot like wanting to swerve into oncoming traffic. One idea I had was to jump up and down like a little girl in a tutu and shout, over and over, “I’m a squid, I’m a squid.”
Other times I found myself thinking about my left hand. There’s this thing I do when I read where I let my left hand do whatever it wants. I stand very close to the mic and hold the pages of the story with my right hand, while my left hand is off over there, being expressive.
This time, for whatever reason, I got curious what it was doing. Best I could tell (I could only take a few seconds here and there to check), it was making a lot of circular motions interspersed with an occasional turning-over gesture, or sometimes the two together, a circular motion that turned over.
06 December 2003 | My K
A brief scene from Wings of Desire. A man stands in a room, at a desk, and thinks about his mother, who has just died. The desk is crowded with her papers. This is her apartment, and he’s come to put her things in order. Seeing the clutter, he thinks: “She could never throw anything away… My mother… My mother… My mother was my mother… My mother was my mother, and my father was my father…”
I understand this. He means: The woman who was my mother was my mother.
Or: Of all the women in the world, that particular woman was my mother. Just as that particular man was my father.
This is how I feel about K. K was my K.
04 December 2003 | End
I’ve collected our emails in a single document, and I’ve been adding to it as I write or receive new emails. The document is now a hundred pages long, not counting the current email. Seeing this, I can’t help wonder how long the document may become, in the end. This makes me think of something I’ve thought before, which is that it’s unfortunate that one always knows in advance how long a novel or story or poem is. I mean, before reading it. Because that knowledge affects how one experiences what one reads. Here I imagine a text whose length is unknown to the reader. You see only one line or one group of lines at a time. To move forward, you push a button, and another line or group of lines appear.
How wretched an idea this is. Imagine reading a story that may be a thousand words long, or a thousand pages long, or anywhere in between, you have no way of knowing. It would be maddening. And yet that’s what a relationship is: a story of unknown duration. I suppose the difference is that a relationship, as lived, is unwritten, with no ending to peak at.
This reminds me that The Tempest is considered a romance because of how it ends. Romances end with marriage, and tragedies end with death, or something equally awful.
02 December 2003 | Real
Happy day: Michael Van Vleet just sent me a tremendously good mix CD he made, which I’m listening to now. On the back of the Air Shield protective Bubble Mailer, he drew a drawing of a robot saying, “Robots have music, too. We may tell humans it’s out of their range of hearing, but it’s not. We just don’t sing in front of you ‘cause most of the songs are about how you suck.” The word suck is underlined. Inside were some stickers. Here’s one:
01 December 2003 | Date
I was on a date that may or may not have been a date when a giant roach flew into my neck. We were playing pool and had stopped to talk. I had no way of knowing what had flown into me. My date, if I may call her that, told me what it was. She was upset because, as she explained it, she’s afraid of flying things.
I’ve thought about this a lot and what I’ve decided is that a date is only a date if both people think it’s a date. By the time the roach flew into me, I definitely wanted her to think this was a date, because that’s what I was thinking it was. Actually what I was thinking was more like: I hope she thinks this is what I think it is, because if she does, it is.
After flying into my neck, the roach flew off toward the front of the pool hall. I offered to go kill it, but my date said not to bother because it wasn’t a big deal. My sense however was that it was a big deal but that she didn’t want to admit how much of a deal it was because to do so made her seem girly and absurd.
The only reason I asked her on a date was because I was certain she was going to turn me down. I was having a problem with liking her, so I came up with a plan to ask her out and have her turn me down. Once she turned me down, I could let go of liking her, is how I thought of it.
All that backfired when she said yes.
At first I’d thought she’d said no. The reason I thought this is because when I asked her to play pool, she said exactly what I thought she would say, namely that she’d really like to play pool with me but was super-busy and would let me know when she had time. The words she used were the exact words I had imagined her using in order to turn me down without having to say no outright.
Oddly this made me happy. I had made a plan and the plan had worked and now I could begin to stop liking her.
The reason I wanted to stop liking her was because of how much younger she is than me. This is what I would think about then. I would lie in bed and calculate how old she was when I was certain ages, and then I’d picture the two of us at those times, standing together. It wasn’t much fun. Here’s the worst of it: On the day I first had sex, she was two years old. Do kids still wear diapers at two years old? For me to pursue someone this young, someone who may not have been potty trained on the day I first had sex, seemed gross and clichéd. As a result I tried to stop liking her so much—an effort which failed, miserably. You can’t stop yourself from liking someone. The best you can do is not write to that person and not talk to that person, but you can’t make yourself feel different things about a person just by wanting to. Deep down I knew this, and yet I still tried to will my feelings to change. When this failed, I hatched the plan of asking her out so that she would turn me down. At first I thought this had worked, but then a week later I received an email from her in which she said she finally had time to play pool with me and when could we?
At her insistence, I let the flying roach be. However I couldn’t help noticing that whenever it was my turn to hit a shot, she would do a lot of looking toward the front of the pool hall, doubtless to see where the roach had got to.
“You’re worried about the roach,” I said finally.
“Not really.”
“I’m going to go kill it.”
When I found the roach, it was dancing around a cluster of florescent lights above an empty pool table. I was holding an extra t-shirt I had, gripping it by one of the sleeves. The plan, if it isn’t obvious, was to kill the roach by doing that wrist-snapping thing boys do with towels in locker rooms. My sense was that even if I didn’t get the roach with the tip of the shirt, I could probably hit it well enough to stun it, at which point I would keep snapping at it until it was dead. If necessary, I would stomp on it.
That was the plan.
However the roach wouldn’t budge from the florescent lights and I was concerned about breaking one of the lights with my t-shirt. So after standing there for two or three minutes, I gave up and walked back to our table.
“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You just looked at it.”
“I didn’t want to break the light.”
I would like to say we kissed then, in part because it would make such a sweet ending to the story—they kiss after he fails to be her hero—and also, mainly, because I would have liked to have kissed her. Instead, though, we returned to the game we were playing—a game she won easily, just like she won the next. Even distracted, she’s a way better pool player than me.
Later, at a bar, she told me about her boyfriend in Wisconsin. I hadn’t known about her boyfriend in Wisconsin. The moment she mentioned him, the moment she said the word boyfriend, I realized, looking down at my beer, that I definitely wasn’t on a date anymore, assuming I had been previously.
