24 March 2004 | Blanket
Unedited selections from my email inbox, Monday, March 22, 2004:
today is monday. i am already tired and weary from a week that has yet to happen. i feel like i’m planning ahead, getting on the ball by being already so beaten down. i’m no procrastinator!!
> Big Theatre For Little People
> presents:
>
> the works of
> Samuel Beckett,
> Jean-Paul Sartre,
> &
> Augustus Strindberg
>
> as performed with soiled and discarded
> handpuppets and abandoned stuffed animals
>
> “Your security blanket is useless.”
>
> Tickets Prices:
> what does it matter, when the price of
> existence is sorrow, anxiety and
horror?
Unfortunately nothing solves everything nor makes every situation the right one. Develop that pill and you’d be a zillionaire. And my personal hero.
Stay? Go? Stay? Go? I tore my hair out daily over that one with the Hungarian. For me there was value in staying—for awhile—just for the sake of having stayed. Because, as you know, for me, something that lasts as long as three months is unusual. I wanted it on my record. But also I wanted to practice working on something with someone. Unfortunately, though he very much wanted (and wants) to be together, “working” on it for him meant telling me what I should do to change. Anyway, that’s all neither here nor there relative to why I began this paragraph. But now it’s time for a new one. See below.
Ok. What I’ve been thinking as I’ve been dating these past two weeks and meeting three men, each of whom would be in many ways a vast improvement over the Hungarian, is that I wish I could make myself a composite boyfriend. And I think it is the human condition to want that and one of the sad realities of adult life that we all have to face that it isn’t an option. Actually that’s a brand new thought but I think it’s not a bad one, frankly. So, what are we to do instead? The impossible: choose which things are absolutely essential in a mate and let go of the idea that we can have it all without “settling” to a degree which will make us angry, bitter, lying, cheating, absent, or unbearably ambivalent so-called partners. For me, the Hungarian was that kind of settling. I had someone I loved having sex with, enjoyed cuddling and watching a video with, occasionally had a good laugh with, with whom I could not have a decent conversation, who made no effort to understand me, and who so regularly made me want to kill him that I began to feel like a madwoman. (Ok, I admit, that should have been a fairly obvious “no,” but I’m a sucker (read starving person) for sex and companionship.)
All that to say, in a word, aaaaaaaaaargh. Even if one can let go of the idea that having it all is possible, how the fuck do you know what’s absolutely essential and what you can live without without hating the other person for their failure to be what you want them to be? Another pill I’d like you to invent, please.
17 March 2004 | Escape
It’s 3:49 p.m. and I just finished writing the story I’m reading tonight. Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t know it ends. Now I know. I would have known earlier but I didn’t have time to write it.
This morning a friend joked that instead of the story I just finished, I should read a story about a man who doesn’t have time to write the story he’s supposed to read.
“And I will write this when?” I asked.
“You’ll ad lib it.”
This reminds me of a story. Long ago I was in a theater company. One of the company members, a brilliant comedic actor, presented a two-act play for us to perform. We did a reading of the first act, liked what we read, and decided to do it. A few weeks into rehearsals, after many delays in getting us the second act—which, we were told, simply needed some tweaking—the playwright confessed that he hadn’t written a single word of it, and wasn’t even sure how the play ended.
The next day six company members gathered in my bedroom to write the second act. We started from the beginning and wrote it straight through, line by line. None of us had any idea of how it was going to end, so we simply kept adding more lines and scenes, in a kind of horizontal pile. Finally we reached what we recognized to be the final scene. Here all the characters are on stage at once, and at last it looks as though the two protagonists will be caught. (They’re clowns, by the way, one of whom has been posing as the president of a Central American republic.) We knew only this: Somehow they escape. But how? Notably, my friends and I faced a similar predicament. To finish the play, we needed to get those characters out of that room, but how?
I remember the moment we solved it. Someone suggested, perhaps as a joke, that the main clown pretends to be a detective who, in classic murder mystery fashion, delivers his brilliant solution to a roomful of awed suspects. The fact that no crime had been committed, mattered not. The force of this detective’s personality would hold the room in thrall long enough for he and his compatriot to escape. Or rather, this would be the clown’s logic at the moment he suddenly turns and shouts in a bad French accent, “Nobody leaves this room!”
It was a desperate move, not only by him but by us, and yet it led, in both realms, to the solution. The solution was this: The clown’s hackneyed and pointless accusations all turn out to be true. When he claims that there’s a knife in so-and-so’s pocket, a knife appears there—to shock of everyone present, the clown most of all.
The clowns are saved by a divine streak of dumb luck, arrived at through desperate improvisation.
12 March 2004 | Atlas
The cliche about accidents is that everything seems to happen in slow motion. In this case, everything sped up, way up. I was in the shower and, having long since finished washing myself, was singing A Day in the Life in the voice of a German torturer. This is my favorite thing to do nowadays—sing popular songs in the voice of a German torturer. I used to sing popular songs in the voice of Johnny Rotten, but that got tiresome. At any rate, A Day in the Life is a nice song to sing in the voice of a German torturer because several things happen in that song which the torturer can take sadistic pleasure in reporting, and also because the line I’d love to turn you on can be sung in such a way as to mean, I’d love to make you suffer. It’s all in the delivery.
Anyway, smoke alarms are incredibly annoying. Obviously they’re designed to be annoying, that’s the whole idea, but come on. I ran around the apartment in desperate search of an implement to wave at the thing so as to clear the smoke away and squelch its horrible screech. Actually the first thing I did was turn off the burner under the charred and smoking pot of oatmeal; then I ran around the apartment. I was naked of course, naked and dripping wet, but more to the point I’d left my glasses in the bathroom, which meant I couldn’t see anything. Three times I started back to get them, and three times thought better of it. I didn’t realize this at the time, but in retrospect the scene resembled a compacted, minimalist version of the Keystone cops, with all the cops played by a single actor who for reasons unknown is naked, wet, and severely nearsighted.
Here’s something I learned today: Dynamic HTML by Danny Goodman, while certainly an excellent reference source, comprehensive and well-written, is not the best thing to wave at a smoke alarm. For starters, it’s 1,073 pages, not counting the front and back matter. That’s a lot of pages. Despite using two hands, I couldn’t get any speed going. Worse, the book is just nine by seven inches, so there’s not much surface to generate resistance. This is a problem with the entire genre of computer reference books: they’re just not big enough to generate much resistance. A coffee table book, being both lighter and larger, would have been ideal; that or an atlas. I just now thought of the atlas. I don’t own any coffee table books, but I do own an atlas. Two, in fact. They’re tucked between my desk and my filing cabinet. Fuck.
Anyway, whatever, I used Dynamic HTML because that’s the best thing I could think of. For a moment I considered looking for the off button on the smoke alarm, only this would have meant getting my glasses from the bathroom and dragging a chair from the kitchen, and I wasn’t even sure that smoke alarms have off buttons. Do they? Probably they do. Which is too bad for me, because I must have waved that book for two full minutes before the screech finally stopped. When it did, I turned to the bathroom to dry myself, but then the screech started up again. This happened four times, with the pause between screeches growing progressively longer. During the pauses, I dried myself, put on my glasses, dressed, moved the pot to the sink, opened all the windows, and turned on the vent above the stove.
Now it’s a few hours later, and I can’t tell if my apartment smells a bit better, or if I’m just getting used to it. Probably it’s a combination.
Also, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last half hour by singing Radio, Radio in the voice of a German torturer. The best part is when he goes:
You had better do what you were told
You better listen to the radio
I’ve worn glasses since first grade. On the first day of school, I couldn’t make out what was written on the blackboard. It was scary. I got moved to the front row but still couldn’t see anything.
These days my glasses almost feel like a part of me, which means I rarely notice them. They’re the first thing I put on the morning and the last thing I take off at night. Otherwise the only times I remove them are:
- before cleaning them
- before going to sleep
- before showering
- before swimming
- before, or sometimes during, sex
There are exceptions to the last case, as previously noted.
This brings up something interesting: For me, sex, swimming, and lying in bed are all “fuzzy” activities. A small ring of clarity surrounds me, as in a heavy fog, and beyond this lies the larger world, forever at a distance.
I believe I’m introverted in large part because of my eyesight. Living in a fog turns one inward.
So there’s this couple, a guy and a woman, who meet through a website devoted to people who have a thing for left feet.
At the end of their first date, drunk and horny, they break into the apartment of a woman who has just moved into the same building as the guy. It’s pitch black in the woman’s bedroom, so they quickly grab a shoe from her closet and hurry out. Back at the guy’s apartment, they turn out the lights and make love, in their fashion, to the shoe. It’s the hottest experience either has ever had. However when they wake the next morning, they make the mortifying discovery that they stole a right shoe, not a left.
Seeing this, the woman turns to the man and says, “It seems we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”
