January 2004
28 January 2004 | Bounce
Two dear friends became first-time fathers this past weekend—one on Saturday; the other late Sunday. It was a very reproductive weekend.
I spoke with the latter yesterday and he described, or tried to describe, the experience of seeing a head coming out of his wife’s vagina. What he ended up saying, in so many words (and I totally trust him on this), is you can’t fucking imagine.
After we hung up, I read an article about how NASA landed those rover things on Mars. They did it by wrapping them in a skein of giant airbags. The rovers bounced to the surface. Spirit, the first to land, bounced more than thirty times. Its twin, Opportunity, bounced, miraculously, into a crater.
21 January 2004 | Cramps
I’ve ambled up to Everest
And made the rounds with boxing champs
Though clever as the cleverest
I don’t know squat about your cramps
I’ve been around the block a lot
Known vixens, vestal virgins, vamps
Except I have one caveat
I’m not familiar with your cramps
Some curios are curious
Some highways have a thing for ramps
Some paramours are amorous
Sometimes I think about your cramps
I’ve shed some light where darkness lay
And turned on lamps of many amps
But where I see myself today
Is in the dark about your cramps
So tell me, dear, or call, or write
I’ll reimburse you for the stamps
Though some might think it impolite
I’d love to hear about your cramps
20 January 2004 | Jesus
A few nights back my girlfriend made me watch Jesus Christ Superstar, a film I’ve spent the last two decades actively avoiding. In case you don’t know this, and I sincerely hope you don’t, Jesus Christ Superstar is a remarkably bad film with remarkably dated, unlistenable music. Worse, the Jesus Christ of this film has nothing nice to say about anyone and spends the entire film seeming terribly put upon. In one scene he complains to god about having to die. In the beginning I was inspired, he sings, but now I’m just tired. I found myself wanting him to be crucified just so he’d shut up already.
I’m trying to remember if I talked to anyone today. I believe I thanked a few people and said “hello” and “excuse me” several times. At the bodega I ordered coffee, saying, “Coffee, black, no sugar.” After the guy gave me my coffee, I thanked him and wished him a nice day.
This isn’t talking exactly, but I did exchange some emails with a friend, Alisa. The emails were about a guy named Charlie L. who many years ago borrowed Alisa’s copy of A Lover’s Discourse. Recently Alisa asked for it back, and Charlie L. said, very irritated, Well do you need it? Alisa was frightened and didn’t reply. A few days later she read a quote on my website from Roland Barthes—“I am like those children who take a clock apart to find out what time it is”—and this made her realize she’s afflicted with a love curse. A love curse meaning a curse that prevents one from having love. The curse began when Charlie L. borrowed her copy of A Lover’s Discourse. Alisa told me all this in an email, and then she wrote:
What do I do? Should I buy a new copy? Should I go to the gypsy fortune teller and bring this new copy and for $100 they will do something to it to remove the curse? Bury or burn it, I imagine?
This guy lives in New York now with his longtime girlfriend, so there’s no curse on him.
What do you think?
For some reason people like to ask my advice about their romantic problems. Given my own romantic history, this is both strange and, to use an overused word, ironic. Nonetheless I always take these queries seriously and try to craft a thoughtful reply.
Here’s what I wrote:
Knowing just one thing about Charlie L., I feel safe in saying he’s a bad person. Thus I recommend that you buy a new copy of A Lover’s Discourse and put Charlie L. behind you. One way I’ve changed over the years is that I don’t hesitate to drop stuff that isn’t working. Stuff like Charlie L.
Mr. Butternut[1] goes in the same category as Charlie L. Or rather, he goes in a similar but different category, since, in contrast to Charlie L., he’s not a bad person. Still, he’s not working, so I say drop him.
Knowing nothing about Charlie L.’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend, it’s hard to say if he’s cursed or not. That aside, I don’t believe in curses. You get what you pay for. Or not. But there are no curses.
08 January 2004 | Swerve
“You seem so subdued these days, so quiet and subdued.”
R’s statement is not a statement but a question, and that question is: Why have you been so subdued? What’s making you subdued? What’s bothering you?
“I have?” I’m surprised to hear R call me subdued, as I haven’t been aware of acting subdued or anything like subdued. “Is it true?” I add, knowing it must be true, for R wouldn’t have said it otherwise. “I guess I’ve been wrapped up with A.”
R, who is driving up the ramp of the interstate and merging into traffic, says nothing.
“A and I have our own little world,” I say, thinking this is probably not the source of my friend’s concern.
R looks nervously over his shoulder and swerves one lane to the left.
Last night I watched a television program called DNA: The Secret of Life. It was silly and manipulative, but I liked it anyway, in part because of how silly and manipulative it was. In my favorite scene, Maurice Wilkins, one of the scientists who lost the race fifty years ago to discover the structure of DNA, stares wistfully at a postcard of a sort of fairy dancer who is supposed to be, in Wilkins’s mind, his former colleague Rosalind Franklin. The idea is that if Wilkins had managed to collaborate with Franklin, they probably would have reached the answer first. But Wilkins was too diffident and Franklin too headstrong, so the prize went to the cheeky Watson and Crick, who were aided by the fact that Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin’s crystallographic portraits of DNA, produced using a technique called X-ray diffraction. This is not a scientifically accurate account, nor does it have anything to do with whatever happened fifty years ago, but I liked the fact that the story kept coming back to the brilliant and tragic Franklin, who died of cancer at 37 and thus didn’t get to share in the Nobel prize, which is never awarded posthumously.
Near the end of the program, you see a computer-generated animation of DNA replicating itself. This animation looked totally weird and crazy, and it made me think by assocation about this awful thing that happens sometimes when I come, which is that I get fixated on what my body is doing at that moment, the internal contractions and such. It always freaks me out that my body somehow knows how to do these things, for it means that I have a body, which means that I will die. Coming equals body equals death. I don’t really put these thoughts together like this in the moment, but still it’s awful to feel this particular thing in this particular way instead of the usual way of simply enjoying it.
Related, though it may not appear so, Lisa wrote to tell me about some guy who sent her a creepy email about grapefruit. I wish I could quote it, but that would be wrong. Due to this grapefruit email, Lisa doesn’t feel comfortable advertising the reading we are doing next month together with our friend Blaise, which is sad because Lisa should be able to advertise her own reading without fear of lord knows what. Lisa wrote: Why are people crazy, Michael? Can you answer that question? I said that what amazes me (and this really is what amazes me) is that people aren’t a lot crazier than they are.
