August 2004
26 August 2004 | Puck
A man comes every Saturday and brings me paint. He’s always the same man. For some reason I’m not allowed much paint at any one time. I asked the man about this once, and he just looked at me. That’s probably the biggest response I ever got from him.
In truth, I’m not really sure he comes on Saturday, because I’m not sure which day Saturday is. After a while the days are just days. You wake up, urinate, and fall asleep. Sometimes you urinate on Saturday, knowing or not.
I have an air hockey puck. I took it from my daughter. Long ago I had a daughter, and I still may have one. My daughter was a child when I took her puck. I didn’t mean to take it. The air hockey game had two pucks, so I put one in my pocket. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe I thought the second puck would get lost.
Yesterday I made a painting of the puck. It—the puck—is red and thin and made of plastic. It’s like a poker chip but bigger. In my painting, you can’t tell how big it is—not that you really need to.
Most of my paintings are of the puck. The man who comes on Saturdays, or whenever that is, has never said anything about my paintings. Maybe he doesn’t like them. When there are too many to fit in here, I put a stack outside. A different man takes them away. I don’t know what day he comes or what he does with the paintings.
One time—I still remember this—I read a book about a woman who believed she was the last person alive. This woman was a painter, or had been, and had lived for a time in the Metropolitan Museum, in the great hall, where she built a fire once.
I remember the part about the fire. She shot holes in the skylight in such a way that the smoke would go out but the rain would not come in.
That made a lot of sense to me.
In all these years, I’ve never understood how to look at a painting. You look, and it’s some thing, and that’s it. If I’m drunk, I might notice how the bristles make grooves in the paint and how these grooves look like the much bigger grooves between sand dunes in the desert.
I have to be pretty drunk, though.
20 August 2004 | Post-it
The ghost of my father keeps leaving me post-its. He sticks them on my bathroom mirror. I know they’re his because of the handwriting. I wouldn’t have known I knew my father’s handwriting, but I recognized it immediately.
Each post-it includes a quote from Werner Erhard, the founder of est. I don’t know if my father knows I know where he’s getting these quotes. Are ghosts capable of knowing such things? Can they read our minds?
I found the first post-it last week. My father had placed it in the middle of the mirror, where I couldn’t miss seeing it. It read: You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from. Let me tell you, it was weird seeing these words in my father’s handwriting—this plus the shock of finding the post-it. I checked to see if the door to my apartment was locked, which it was. I’m not sure why I did this because, like I say, I knew it was my father’s handwriting—he has a characteristic way of writing his y’s. I mean the lowercase ones. I think he writes them backwards, beginning with the long descending stroke, then crossing this from the left with the shorter stroke which he continues to the next letter, if there is one.
The quote sounded familiar so I looked it up online. Werner Erhard. Then I checked to see if the post-it matched the post-its I keep in my desk drawer. It did, although that didn’t really mean anything since I use standard, yellow, two-by-two-inch post-its. There must be billions of these in circulation. Also, what difference did it make if my father used my post-it or one of his own? It adds up to the same thing.
The next day he left me a second post-it. This one wasn’t on the mirror itself but along the left-edge of the cabinet. It read: Create your future from your future not your past.
I recognized this as Werner Erhard without having to look it up. My father used to say it to me all the time. I always took it to mean I should forget all the shit he pulled when I was a kid.
Anyway, I got to thinking about that shit again, which I don’t like to do, and this made me so upset that I went to my desk and wrote a post-it of my own: Create your lies from your lies not from mine. I wasn’t really sure what this meant, but I liked it anyway so I stuck it on the cabinet in the spot where I’d found his.
The next day he left me another post-it, this time on the faucet. It read: Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
My post-it was still on the cabinet. Had he read it? Knowing him, he probably saw it there and ignored it. On the other hand, I’m not even sure ghosts can read. I tried to look this up online. Naturally I realize that people write all kinds of crap online, but I was curious if anyone had written an account that mentioned ghosts reading. No one had, that I could find. Not that this means anything one way or another.
I guess the real question is whether ghosts can change. I know they change in The Sixth Sense. That’s the whole idea of the film—all the ghosts, including Bruce Willis, are in the process of accepting their deaths. They don’t know this, so it’s scary.
Is my father in the process of accepting his death? It doesn’t seem so. Instead it seems like he’s lecturing me, just like old times. Every day there’s a new post-it. This morning’s read: In life, understanding is the booby prize. That’s Werner Erhard as well. They’re all Werner Erhard.
I stopped writing post-its after the one about lies, since for one thing, I don’t even know if my father can read them, and then for another, I doubt he would even if he could. And finally of course, what’s the point? That’s the clincher. There’s no point.
A few days ago, though, he left a post-it that really pissed me off, coming from him. It said: Your life works to the degree you keep your agreements. The second I read this, I rushed to my desk and scribbled two words on a fresh post-it, in big block letters.
DROP DEAD, it said.
Then I remembered. He is.
18 August 2004 | Buddy
I’m in the army and a robot is my best buddy. This is great, I guess, except yesterday I had to watch my buddy’s head get blown off. We were crawling through a ditch on our bellies when there was this sudden flash of light and ka-boo, no robot head. I was grief-stricken because I loved that robot and because this was supposed to be a training session; nobody said anything about explosions and blown-up heads. Holding back tears, I went up to Sarge and said, “Sarge, they blew the head off my best buddy.” Sarge wasn’t sympathetic at all and told me to shake it off—best buddies got their heads blown off all the time, he said, and in fact he’s lost a dozen best buddies this way. Typical Sarge.
The next morning, while I’m cleaning my gun and thinking about that blown-up head, Sarge introduces me to my new best buddy. This one looks exactly like the last one, and really is like the last one, except it turns out that he can’t remember anything I told the last one. Evidently those conversations got blown up with his head.
The new one knows all the jokes told by the last one, and he tells them the exact same way. These are all light bulb jokes. For example:
Question: How many radical lesbian feminist robot soldiers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: That’s not funny.
All his jokes are about robot soldiers. I change them in my head to be about real people, because I find the robot soldiers part distracting. I don’t tell my new buddy this because hey, why risk offending him? If he tells a joke and I laugh, that’s what matters, not what I’m laughing at.
11 August 2004 | Man
There’s a man who sells candy bars from a cardboard box. I used to see him when I lived in Williamsburg and rode the JMZ train. He would walk from car to car and hold out his wares for the passengers to see. He never said anything. It may be that he didn’t speak English, or it may be that he had nothing to say. The one time I saw him make a sale, he held up a forefinger to indicate the price for a particular candy bar. One dollar. Probably all the bars cost a dollar.
He was beaten down. People who do what he was doing are invariably beaten down, but he was beaten down more than most. I believe this hurt his sales. He never smiled, never tried to make eye contact. He was like zombie, shuffling from car to car.
Once, late at night, I got on the Brooklyn-bound J train at Canal and found him sitting there, alone, in the middle of empty row. I’d never before seen him sit. It had never even occurred to me that he sat. He had his cardboard box in his lap and was looking across the aisle—at nothing, apparently.
When the train reached Bowery, I got up, walked out of the car, and hurried down to the next car, where I re-boarded. I tried not to walk too quickly, for fear he might see me hurrying away and realize where I was going.
09 August 2004 | Exact
You know
that last thing I wrote? Wasn’t that the exact sort of thing I always write? I mean, not the exact same thing but clearly a thing that only the person who wrote those other things would ever think of writing? Didn’t you read it and think, That is so him, him and his whatever it’s called?
06 August 2004 | Now
There is always, among the things I must do, the one I want least to do. This thing is also the one that weighs on me most, its weight increasing in proportion to the amount of time I spend not doing it.
I know that to be happy, I must do this thing, and yet time and again I put it off.
Even now, as I write this, there is something else I should be doing.
The game is five-card draw. You compete against three opponents. Each is represented by a photograph in one of the corners of the screen. You chose these opponents from a gallery of candidates. The program provides a brief bio of each, with an assessment of his or her skill level.
Selecting at random, you choose a beginner, an average player, and an expert. The expert, Marv, reminds you of your mother’s ex-boss, the man who fired her. He is a shrewd-looking middle-aged man in a suit. The beginner, Janet, is an equally shrewd-looking thirty-something woman in a suit. You notice, because it is difficult not to, how sexy she is. Actually Marv is sexy too, as is the average-level player you chose, Jim, a youngish guy in a suit.
All the players wear suits, including the ones you pass over, and all are sexy.
Each player begins with five hundred dollars. There’s a fifteen dollar maximum bet in the first round, twenty-five in the second, with two raises permitted per round. Stacks of chips rest near the players’ photos. When a player makes a bet, an appropriate number of chips disappears from that player’s stack and re-appears in the center of the screen, accompanied by a chips-hitting-the-table sound. Play proceeds around the table. The program flashes each player’s plays and prompts you when it’s your turn.
Right from the start, Janet plays like a beginner and squanders her money. You feel bad for her: she bet on nearly every hand, no matter how terrible—a classic beginner’s mistake. You play as you usually play in a new game—conservatively, feeling people out. Only you soon realize that there’s nothing there to feel. The players have different styles, that much is clear, but there’s no sense of a personality or thought process behind their decisions.
When Janet loses her final bet, you and Jim have won most of her money. Surprisingly, Marv has played aggressively, frequently raising in the first round. The tactic has cost him; he’s down to less than three hundred dollars. Soon, though, his fortunes turn. He and Jim compete for nearly every pot, each repeatedly raising and re-raising while holding nothing. Marv wins the majority of these battles and quickly jumps into the lead.
A big hand follows in which everyone remains in for the maximum number of raises. You win with three kings. Marv loses with a queen high two-pair. Jim loses with absolutely nothing—an insane, kamikaze bluff. This nearly finishes Jim, but then he wins a few small pots to get back over a hundred dollars. The final blow is struck by Marv. It is another confrontation of nothing versus nothing. Marv’s nothing wins this time, and now it’s just the two of you.
You sit up in your chair.
When your mother was fired, she was given a single afternoon to clear out her desk. A security guard sat with her to ensure she didn’t sabotage the computer system or do god knows what. She had worked at the company for seventeen years. The boss who fired her was her sixth. He was hired to cut costs, and that’s what he did. Your mother, now asleep in her bedroom down the hall, was a cost he cut.
Things go badly at first. Marv is aggressive and wins a long series of hands in which you fold after his first or second bet. Soon you’re down to less than five hundred dollars, the amount you started with. This means that Marv has over fifteen hundred. You’ve been banking on Marv’s recklessness, but it’s not working. The amount you win in the big hands, the ones in which Marv stays in with nothing, is less than what Marv is winning in the larger number of small hands. You need to change tactics.
You pause the program to think it through.
The approach you settle on is not something you would ever try at a real poker table. It comes to you when think back and realize that once Marv has made a big bet, he always remains in until the end, provided you haven’t preceded Marv’s bet with one of your own. For this reason you decide to rely exclusively on what is called sandbagging, which is the act of passing with a good hand in order to lure others into misevaluating your hand and thus betting more than they should. Once they do this, you raise the maximum. It’s a kind of trap, and when it works, your opponent feels compelled to call your raise, because of how much he or she has already bet on the hand.
The plan works to perfection. Each time you’re dealt a strong hand, you bet nothing, waiting for Marv to bet first. When Marv does this, which he does regardless of which cards he holds, you raise him the maximum, and now he’s yours. A real poker player would quickly realize what you were up to and stop falling for it. But Marv is not a real poker player; he’s an algorithm, and a rather predictable one at that.
The final hand is typical. You’re dealt two queens—a strong hand in a two-person game of five-card draw. Still, you choose to pass. Marv bets ten dollars and you raise him fifteen. Marv raises you another five and you call. Marv takes two cards; you take three, none of which help you. Marv bets twenty dollars and you raise him twenty-five. Marv calls with his last twenty-five. There’s now a hundred and ninety dollars in the pot.
Marv has a jack high nothing. He called a twenty-five dollar raise in the last round with a jack high nothing. Your pair of queens win, although a single queen would have sufficed.
A message appears on the screen:
Game over. Would you like to play another?
You click NO and close the program. Down the hall your mother calls out something in her sleep. Probably she was doing this the whole time you were playing—she does it a lot—but you were too engrossed in the game to hear her.
