Leaving the Internet behind

Well, we're off the grid for a couple of days, which leaves me with only a short period of time to post something epically intelligent.....


This video, courtesy of a Ms. Nesmith status update is an attempt to redeem last night's blog. I now love this song.



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Obligatory DFW quote:
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?

Now obligatory G.K. Chesteron quote:

"I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

I occasionally write literary fiction as well.

ONE PERSON AWAY FROM YOU

Last night, I decided to become proactive. The cable had gone out and I was staring at the reflection of the lamp on the screen. I turned off the stereo, which had been playing Joan Baez for weeks, and put three handfuls of food in Oscar’s tank. I decided it was time I visited you in New York. Even from a hundred miles away, I could tell you were excited. Your new girlfriend was not going to like it. But she could become a story we’d tell our children on a camping trip— ribbons of fire that lick the dark, burnt s’mores, sticky fingers—about how we’d almost lost each other.
I watched Oscar swimming through the food above blue pebbles. It seems as though he will swim forever—small gills, fanning out to catch water—in his lonely universe of glass. I lay in bed touching myself absently, and someone started coming up the fire escape towards our apartment. I imagined that it was you, that I could hear your dress shoes, heavy against the grates. When you arrived, we’d have wild sex with the lights on; after, we’d lie awake and reflect on the aesthetics of a backlit clavicle and the island of shadow in the crease where hip meets waist.

You’d outline my body with your fingertips, gently sliding your calloused hands across my back, goose bumps rising to meet you. You’d nibble at my ear and whisper, “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.”

You wouldn’t roll away from me and say, “No, like this. Like this,” holding yourself between your hands.

At the end, your near perfect body would be spread across the smooth sheets, the firm line of your calves lit by a small bedside lamp. I’d wait until your chest was rising and falling, and we’d forgotten the miles of cement you put between us. I’d whisper, “I forgive you.”

And even though it turned out to be no one on the stairs, it was only one person away from being you.

Uh...Taylor Swift

(Note: In order to restore my waning masculinity we'll be discussing the relative merits/attractiveness of various Disney leading ladies in an obnoxious manner)

7:16 A.M. Wake up and glance at my alarm clock. Heave a sigh of relief. I've still got one whole minute to sleep. (Sleep)

7:17 A.M. (Alarm goes off) What? That was a minute, it only felt like thirty seconds? What a bunch of crap. Proceed to lie in bed for three minutes staring at the ceiling.

7:20-7:50 A.M. Perform morning ablutions, showering, eating cereal et al. Wonder if I should put jell in my hair. Wonder if my hair is too long? Is it too short? Stop wondering.

Interpolation:

Girl: You should go to this play it's really amazing.

M: Yeah, I heard about it on NPR

Girl: Are you under thirty five?

M: (A little part of me dies).

8:00 A.M.-11:20 A.M. Proceed to process interlibrary loans in a timely fashion.

11:20-1 P.M. Play basketball poorly. Proceed to kick the ball against the wall and exceed my curing limit for the month in about a two minute time span. Briefly consider how much has changed since I was a kid playing basketball. Hell, I used to enjoy it. Now, I don't enjoy it when I lose, but I don't always try my hardest to win. Perhaps to give myself that excuse. The same could be said for writing. I'd be good if I just spent more time.

Interpolation because of late I kind of dig Chesterton:

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."

1 P.M. Go back to work feeling like the incredible Hulk. Desperately wanting to break something. I work in a library. No such luck.

4:30 P.M. Get off work and go out to read in the sun. Proceed to read without sunglasses despite the glare. Consider retrieving sunglasses, but decide against it on the grounds that it would be inconvenient. Make my body do numerous contortions in order to read effectively. Fail.

Because facebook is a funny thing.

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Okay, I left out on critical element in my day. Months ago I didn't even know whether Taylor Swift was a guy or a girl and then I heard a song by her on Dancing With the Stars. And yes, I realize that watching DWTS and listening to Taylor Swift are not earning my any masculinity points. I just love a good Argentine tango. Anyhow, as it turns out she sang a song that doesn't suck and that is remarkably catchy. Thus, I walk around with said song going through my head throughout the day of late. And eventually I just cave in and start listening to this song. But I do so filled with shame, and I turn the volume kind of low, this even though I'm using headphones, and I try and make sure that the tab only says YouTube and that the Taylor Swift part isn't even visible. And then I just indulge, and it is so sweet.

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Obviously I'm lying I would never listen to this where other people might notice. I mean, I lift weights and play sports and stuff. Oh well, I've already lost you all. Strangely I'm quite a snob when it comes to literature and consider most peoples tastes to be about as evolved as that of a high functioning chimpanzee, and I know that those sort of music snobs exist as well. Though honestly the only kind of music snobs I respect are the ones who listen to classical. I'm just not that into this garage band you heard one time when you were on a bender in Seattle. But I'm certain that those same snobs hate this music like I hate crappy novels. But honestly, look at how pristine Taylor looks and feel bad for disliking her.

Oh well, so besides that I'm kicking it watching episodes of Glee and getting all psyched about people pretending to be in their teens singing to one another. At least I grew up as a fan of 90210 and Melrose Place, so I get the love of people pretending to be sixteen when they're twenty five, but singing? Come on Andrew. Thankfully this catchy song turned out to be by some punkish type band All American Rejects, so I can listen to it without incurring much internal wrath. Unless someone hears me listening to it and asks if I'm listening to it because of Glee in which case I'll be forced to lie.

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I'm also a fiction writer.

Fiction (Cont.)

It occurred to me as my two friends were being roundly beaten in the living room that my shoe had not given way. The ground was slick, but my shoe’s grip had been uncompromised. All those recriminations I’d made against that poor company through the years were a misguided attempt by my mind to hide my own cowardice. I had taken enough gymnastic classes in my youth, to assist me in making a fairly painless roll down the hill that day. And after, when the ambulance pulled up, I must have created this new scenario, which displaced the reality. Clearly, my cheap shoe had slipped rendering me helpless.

After this realization the horror of Katie’s face came back to me with a vengeance. Of course, I now understood that the left side of her face had remained entirely normal following the accident and that I had created the judgment as a defense mechanism. This did nothing to curb my growing insecurity. In fact, realizing how unstable I was made it nearly impossible to work with any of my female colleagues, whose faces now bore that same mark of judgment. The mere sight of elderly secretaries with thick glasses sent me scurrying back into my office.

I spent an hour hiding underneath my desk when I saw my secretary approaching with a message. And the woman just had to sit there, having clearly seen me duck beneath my desk, and I had to remain there for a solid hour, until I could come out and report that I had concluded my lunch break. The whole thing was really an awkward mess for the both of us. I put in for a week’s vacation that afternoon and that’s pretty much why I’m sitting here with you.

No, wait. Hold on. I stil have a minute. I want to tell you the whole thing before you answer me. I haven’t been entirely truthful with you. The trigger wasn’t any of the valences that I’ve suggested in the retelling, the vomit, or the girl, or the shoes, or the plants on the balcony, all the sorts of details that are potentially relevant or fabricated. No. It was a feeling. The visceral feeling of contentment, of being warm and safe as her screams reached me from what seemed like miles away—relief. My god, I experienced a flood of relief so incredibly strong and full that I can only associate it with feelings of religious fervor that I had during my pre-Atheist days as a youth. And it was this same overwhelming, dare I say religious, feeling of relief that overcame me when I held Jerry’s bicuspid up to the blue television light.

I came to see what this whole project of living has been about—that the old Austrian bastard the Skipper was right—self-preservation. I’m no better than one of those fish eating vomit.

Unless, unless, I’ve created this whole elaborate scenario to account for my profound unhappiness in a life that I’ve freely chosen. I hope that explains why I’ve directed this whole thing to one side of your face. Why I’ve been moving around you a bit to stay in a perfect site line with that good eye. Why I’ve asked you to stay turned away. It’s why the two of us are going to conclude this meeting, and I’m going to go out and buy you a nice new pair of shoes.

But now I want you to turn and tell me something, something true. You’re a professional. I trust you. Am I making this up? I’m sure men have told you worse things. Haven’t they?



Question: Is the narrator speaking to a prostitute or a psychologist?

The Reading

I gave a reading the other night, cataloged in the prior blog, and it went all right. Unfortunately, S managed to steal the show by being imminently more comfortable on stage than I am. Of course, to try and stave off my bouts of nervousness I drank a healthy amount of white wine before leaving the house. I wasn't sure if I'd had enough, so I drank a glass or two of Kahlua.

G.K. Chesterton interjects:

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beasts - sex, poetry, property, religion. Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.


I can only take that to mean that G.K. never had to deliver a reading to a group of people he didn't know. Obviously untrue but go with me. For in that instance, drink, and if not drunkeness, buzzedness is a great gift to man. After imbibing a bit more Kahlua I wasn't certain if I had obtained the right level of fearlessness to read. Shortly thereafter I was singing this song: ">

And when Lisa got to the bridge and I was turning my radio (iPod) up with her I knew that I might be ready to read. Needless to say I hadn't had nearly enough to drink, and I was still petrified by the time I mounted the stage. Odd word choice mounted. Was the stage actually a burro? Anyhow, I delivered a performance not worthy of Ms. Lisa Loeb, and I think that wherever the heck she is, she was probably disappointed in me.

People tell me that you get more comfortable speaking in front of groups by doing it consistently. However, I've been told the same thing about beer since I turned 20. Just keep drinking it and eventually you'll like it. Vile substance, the heavy aftertaste that almost always makes me wretch. I don't like Guiness or Michelob Light, or Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. No, they all suck. As will speaking in front of groups of people larger than two.

Just for those who think Lisa Loeb was a one hit wonder, she also had this song:
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Obligatory DFW quote:

Like living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to a lot of shitty country music. Because that's pretty much all there is on the radio, when you're tired of hearing Green Day on that one college station. And these songs are just so--you know 'Baby since you've left I can't live. I'm drinking all the time' and stuff. And I remember being impatient with it. Until I'd been living here about a year. And all of the sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor? And what they're really singing to is themselves, or to God? "Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning." That in a weird way, they're incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're sining about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something...if you cock your ear and listen real close, it's deep, you know?

Fiction (Cont)

On a particularly warm day, we saw a movie at the local theater and I mistakenly sat to her left. Poor thing. She took my accidental lapse in memory as a sign that things were going to change. However, during the first half of the movie I sat rigid in my seat, aware of the judgment issuing from her seemingly benign face. She knew, or rather that part of her knew that the only reason that I stayed with her now was so that I would be perceive as a good guy. The sort who sticks it out when the, pardon my French, though I’m certain you’re used to bawdier things being said, shit hits the proverbial fan. And that this idea that I had of myself was far more important to me than maintaining an open and honest relationship with her. My discomfort became so intense that I retreated to the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face and attempting to forget the stare of her left eye before returning to the theater and sitting very quietly in the seat to her right. I contended that I only switched sides because the subtitles of the film were harder to read from the angle of my previous seat, believing the excuse at the time, and holding it against her that she got offended. I transferred up to Oregon that fall and she remained in Southern California.

Do you think she made the face or that the whole thing was a manifestation of my unresolved guilt? Why the hell am I asking you anyway? Can I smoke? What if a man came in here and told you this exact same story but from over there. Do you think that would change anything?

A reading or recycling

Do you remember when The Office had that episode this year that was just full of clips from old shows? And you realized what bs it was to call that episode a "new" one for The Office. And that probably this was some sort of death knell for the show. "Well, they've run out of material," is likely what you thought or should have thought. Anyhow, I gave a reading last Thursday night at a local bar and after boring people with literary stuff I read some excerpts from my blog. Here they are:

On Housing:
M: Here's my impression of what you want. I think you're looking for a three bedroom single family home, with an attic, with original windows, and a basement for storage, with an open kitchen, granite counter tops, maple cabinets, in a walkable neighborhood with below average crime stats that has a Whole Foods in the second basement. Then you'll say, "Is that too much to ask for" and start crying.

S: Did you just say a Whole Foods in the basement?

M: I think so.

S: That would be nice. (Pause) That does sound like me.


On Reassurances During the Homebuying Process:
S: How did you like the house?

M: It seemed bigger.

S: Yeah, it did, didn’t it?

M: It also seemed like it was freakin’ haunted.

S: Really?

M: Oh yeah, we're definitely going to get some ghost children living in that place.

S: That's comforting.

On Duvet Covers:
If you're like me, every time you hear a conversation in which somebody says, "This could really use a duvet cover," you immediately respond, "What the hell is a duvet cover?" But, you honestly mean this. You know that is it has something to do with the bed, and maybe the comforter. But honestly, what the hell is a duvet cover? And maybe your wife and her sister kind of laugh, in a way that indicates that your stupidity about the names of essential bedding items is acceptable, though not preferable, and that they know that of course, deep down you know what a duvet cover is, and you're just saying, "what the hell is a duvet cover?" because you like to joke around.

(S returns from shopping)

S: I bought a duvet cover.
M: Oh. That's good. Right?

Unfortunately, (and I know a lot of my readers are going to be shocked by this) a duvet cover isn't as cool as you'd think.

S: So, just spread it out and match it evenly on the corners of each part of the bed.
M: Okay. (All right, honestly, I lost interest in distributing the corners evenly. It probably had to do with my poor fine motor skills and extreme impatience with housing projects. I feel a sort of mental/physical lethargy when we talk about working on the house that must be akin to what a mama bear feels right before she hibernates).

S: Now just slide it around the corner.

M: Wait. So you bought a blanket for our quilt?

S: (Laughs)

M: No. Seriously. You went out and spent money on a blanket for our blanket? That's a duvet cover? Did our blanket wake you up in the middle of the night last week and tell you that it was cold? I mean. It just seems like a waste.

S: You don't know how essential this was. The black and the grey were totally clashing with each other. (She may not have said totally. And even if she did, it's clearly meant to be read as totally, as in entirely clashing, rather than as the teenage colloquialism totally, which stands for nothing.)

M: You told me that we couldn't get a desk because we already had one. And now this. Now you're buying a blanket for our blanket? Excuse me if it feels a little redundant.

S: Do you like the colors?

M: Do I like the colors? No. I don't like the colors. Okay, maybe I do. I'm not sure. I think I need to be angry about this for a little while longer.

On Couches:
S: I like this tan one.

M: Oh it's just probably that time of the month.

S: What are you saying?

M: I don't know. I just love playing devil's advocate.

S: I think I've decided on which couch I want.

M: I can tell you right now that I don't like that couch.

S: I haven't even told you which one.

M: It's not my fault that the good Lord blessed me with a Frank Lloyd Wrightesque sense of style.

S: Do you have anything to contribute or do you just want to shi- on my ideas?

M: Can't it be both?

M: I guess I just don't want our house to look like a dorm room.

S: What else are you suggesting?

M: I'm suggesting that we buy something classically stylish.

S: Like what specifically?

M: I don't have specifics. I have vague ideas for improvements that I dispense freely right before we make a purchase.

S: That's helpful.

M: do you mean that? (childish light in eyes).

On Upkeep:
Mice droppings on the floor.

S: Every time we have mice they dupe me. I think to myself, oh those are just some pieces of rice on the floor or some coffee grinds. It's always mouse poop.

M: Well, at least it's one more thing for us to obsess about.

S: I don't want one more thing. I have some traps we can set.

M: I have some traps as well, but they are mostly intellectual ones where I try and get the mouse to voice an unpopular opinion and then ritually shame him into leaving.

S: I'm not sure those are going to be as helpful.

On Living Together:
S: It says here in this book that a husband shouldn't get drunk if the couple is trying to get pregnant.

M: How else is she going to get him to sleep with her?

S: I guess that was kind of an easy one.

M: I felt like letting it pass would have been a disservice to both of us.

Interpolation:
S: I read that dancing is supposed to make you smarter.

M: That's why I'm always trying to get you to go to the club.
S: The article also mentioned that you should only watch, at maximum, two hours of television a day.

M: What a shocker. Finally an article that lets us know that television isn't great for us. New stunning research comes out, "If you punch babies in the face you may be an asshole. More to come on Channel 7 news.

(Time Passes)

S: Let's do the dishes.

M: I’ll be downstairs lowering my IQ.

Interpolation:
M: See. Everyone else thinks I'm nice. You're the only person who doesn't like me.

S: Remember that I know you better than anyone else.

M: That is the meanest thing that anyone has said to me in weeks.

S: Really?

M: I didn't intend for that to be something you'd be excited about.

Interpolation:
S: What are you up to?

M: Fantasy football draft.

(Minutes of silence).

S: I'm not ready for football season.

M: What? It's been like nine months since football season ended. You could have already had a baby.

S: I forget how much attention you pay to football.

M: Shhhhhhhhh.......I'm drafting.

Interpolation:
M: I'm proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free. (Note: Sung with vigor).

S: If I were doing that you’d shoot me in the head.

M: What if I switched it up a little, sang I’m proud to be part of a global hegemonic narrative.

S: The point is that I didn’t say anything.

M: Your pointing out that you weren’t pointing something out. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?

S: I’m saying that I’m not saying anything.

M: You're clearly the better person.

On Art:
M: (After painting for five hours or so). You know, this wasn't so bad. Granted we've been doing this all day, but it's nice to be close to finished. I guess I could have spent the day writing or something, but honestly, I'm not even really an artist.

S: Oh honey. You're an artist. You're just a failed one.

On Dental Care:
M: (Floss breaks in my mouth for the millionth time, lodging itself between my teeth. Note: Do not ever buy cheap floss.)

M: I hate this shit!

S: Why?

M: It always breaks off between my teeth and the shit gets lodged there, thereby causing the very problem it’s supposed to be alleviating.

S: Yeah, well, you've got to consider that your real problem might be that shit keeps getting lodged between your teeth.

On Happiness (a conversation with a friend):
Friend: You look like a happy camper.

M: Believe it or not I'm not often described as a chipper guy. In fact, I was talking to my wife the other day about being unhappy. She said,

S: I don't think since I've known you that you've ever been happy. It's just not your personality type.

Friend: That must have made you happy.

M: It did cheer me up a little bit.

On Finances:
S: I think we need to tighten our belts a little for a few months, so we can be prepared when your college loans start kicking in.

M: That whole class thing wasn't free. What a rip off.

S: No. No it wasn't.

M: I’m going to buy some cocaine and call some escorts.

S: Please don’t.

M: I’ll take your protest under consideration.

On New York:
M: I love this city!

S: These buildings are unsightly.

M: I think you just hate New York because I like it.

S: That's possible.

M: How do you spell minuscule?

S: P-E-N----

M: Very funny.
(Just then we pass a white billboard that has a picture of a doctor holding a needle behind a patient with the caption "Life is full of little pricks.")

Why I should be raising your children

Last week we went out to the Austin Grill in Silver Spring with my mother to have a nice dinner before she returned to CA. The food was excellent, the service, not amazing, but good enough. And the music was, well, that's where it gets more complicated. Initially we heard a young woman singing, quite beautifully, while we waited for our dessert. However, apparently it's an open mic at the Austin Grill, and some children decided to take a turn at wowing the crowd.

They were awful, not quite ear splittingly so, but they were pushing it. And one of them was playing a guitar, not well, and any sort of pleasant ambiance had been removed by their caterwauling and generally awfulness.

M: These kids are ruining my dinner. What the hell happened to that one girl?
Mom: They aren't very good are they?
S: They are kids.
M: Yeah, kids who suck at singing.
S: They have to learn to be good somewhere.
M: Do you know where they should be practicing? In a room, alone, with the door closed.

For the next ten minutes I prevailed upon S and mom to join me in my crusade against permissive parents. I mean, the awful part of this ordeal is that the parents obviously green lighted this assault upon our ears. They were, no doubt, beaming with all sorts of pride over the racket that their children had managed to create. But you know what? they aren't good. Your permissive parenting is interfering with my enjoyment of local cinnamon ice cream. I haven't had that ice cream in years, and now this indignity while I try and partake of it's effervescent beauty?

I've worked a few years at pre-schools and let me tell you, kids need discouragement. In fact, once you start school, you get discouraged all the time. They give you grades for stuff. Your employer isn't happy that you gave it your best effort, they want you to do the damn thing correctly. So fine, let your kids hammer away on the guitar and warble the night away, at home!

Short story rather long, it turns out that after I'd been defaming these miserable permissive parents we discovered that they were sitting right next to us. Could they hear us? I don't know. But here's how I know that my complaining hadn't been a bad thing. I didn't give a damn if they had heard me or not. And yes, I'll now be writing my local government to complain about squirrel populations and pot holes, I am officially a sixty three year old man.

The real point is that I am a modern day Mother Theresa. If you don't want your children, send them to me. I will take care of them. And Lord knows they won't be learning to play the xylophone while you're trying to enjoy the company of some attractive personage. Nor will they tie your shoelaces together underneath the table just to annoy you. No, they will be the best sort of kids. Milford Men. Milford Academy, where children are neither seen nor heard.

Fiction (Cont)

I have long had an unhealthy obsession with shoes likely related to the event. These here are high grade Columbia boots: waterproof, abrasion resistant fabric, soles lined with Vigram trek rubber, an aggressive lug pattern designed to maintain maximal connection between foot and ground even on the harshest of trails. These shoes are the equivalent of a Vermeer amongst the other common painters of Dutch baroque.

The problem was, after the surgery, I swear that her left eye constantly prosecuted me. I could not see that alluring asymmetry without feeling the ground giving way beneath my shoe. Imagine for me, living in the presence of someone who is constantly weighing and judging your every movement. Someone who sees that almost every small gesture that you make is intended to create a positive reflection of you. That every smile at work, every opened door, every turn of phrase or slight shift in your demeanor is designed to create some sort of archetypal version of yourself that bears only a vague resemblance to the person that you really are.

Naturally this change in her disposition towards me eventually caused a problem. I could not look at that side of her face without being overwhelmed by guilt. As such, I was forced to create elaborate distractions when we were seated in booths, to ensure that I was on her right side, I’d fumble with my keys, or pretend to have lost my wallet. I’d sit on the same side as her so as to avoid looking at that near perfect reconstruction head on. Which, when faced with this prospect, her face head on, I developed the habit of cocking my head slightly to the left and rubbing the palm of my right hand across my right eye and eventually insisting on wearing an eye patch in public places due to a case of fabricated pink eye. The whole avoidance of her face becoming an elaborate scenario more important to me than anything I can remember. The natural outcome of this was that a discrepancy occurred between the reality of the situation and Katie’s perception of that situation. She assumed that I shaded my face, or wore an eye patch because the plastic surgery had been unsuccessful and that I now regarded her as some flawed thing. And though I assured her that her fears were misguided, she could not be dissuaded. I should say that I think the eye patch did not aid in making me a figure in whom one puts trust. The doctors had really done amazing things. She could have modeled afterward.

Wallace: Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not, because I'm too worried about whether you like me. It's stressful and unpleasant.

And yet at the same time it's sort of like agoraphobic kleptomaniacs. Somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance even trying to write something--much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it.

But there's also, the shyness that feeds into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: part of the shyness for me is, it's very easy for me to play this game of, What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It's this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse? Makes things very difficult. But in writing, you've got to be able to plausibly project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So that there's a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer.

End quote. Incidentally these are all taken from the Lipsky book, and are from his conversation verbatim via a tape recorder. Thus, all the pauses and such, and the occasional moments of unelevated diction. I've recently discovered that I'm a fan of putting un in front of things and making new words like unelevated and unattenuated. Anyhow, here is the continuation to my story. How unbelievably arrogant? At least I'm offering it for free.

Fiction (Cont).

Sorry. I feel the need to extrapolate on the earlier question. I don’t have any sort of Superman or hero complex. I’ve no desire to be perceived as a savior or otherworldly being to the woman I love. So no, I did not feel any irritation at the sight of one of the gardener’s stroking her hair and speaking softly to her in Spanish.

Fuzzy trace theory is based on the idea that memory is stored in two different ways. Simply, that we store “verbatim” and “gist” accounts of any event. The “gist” account gives the overall feeling of an event while the “verbatim” is exact. Because of this people may mistakenly recall a memory that only goes along with a vague “gist” of what happened, rather than the exact course of events.

I should mention now that the doctors worked miracles. Literal miracles. My father is a plastic surgeon of some renown in the Hollywood Hills area. Katie not only retained her good looks after a couple of minor surgeries, she was perhaps improved by them, the surgeries. The operation, in which her left cheek was put back together with a skin graft from her right hip, gave her face an alluring asymmetry. Such that, after the accident, she was distinguishable in a room full of pretty girls because of the slight tilt of her left cheek, which gave a new prominence to her already alluring eyes.

Are those comfortable for walking on the streets? The shoes. What is the tread like? How do they function in a light to moderate rain?

We dated for several months following the event. The two of us acknowledged the role my fall played in her disfigurement once. It ended with me casting aspersion on that particular brand of shoe, which to this day I have not purchased any more of. And, quite honestly, can hardly bear the sight of, even pre repressed memory.

On dolphins

Wallace on why he dates crazy women: "Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move."

Wallace: It's just much easier having dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling that you're hurting their feelings all the time."

Wallace: "I emphasize it's a platonic relationship with the dogs."

We're a bit behind on our DVR and just watched both episodes of Glee. Anyhow, I found myself inspired by that great line "Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?" This caused me to turn back to something I wrote to S eight years ago after reading an online article about dolphins attempting to mate with divers.

Has anyone else noticed the great lack of support for dolphin intelligence of late? This majestic creature, that has been known to save human beings from sharks, be eaten with tuna and also throw occasional house warming parties has fallen out of style. During the early nineties, scientists and other nerdy eggheads believed that dolphins had formed some kind of underwater utopia which uncannily resembled Lenin’s writings on communism. Dolphins had domesticated octopus to do their agricultural farming eight times as fast as was previously possible and pretty much lived in harmony on Atlantis. Needless to say the Snorks came along with pitchforks and the like and chased the dolphins out of Atlantis and impaired their speaking ability. Or so scientists think.

Dolphin intelligence has been in decline lately which is surprising considering the anecdotal evidence I found on CNN just a couple of years ago. A dolphin was attempting to mate with human swimmers and was drowning them as a consequence. While it is clear that somebody’s parents felt a little too awkward to have the birds and the bees talk it shows surprising intelligence to kill a species that is systematically wiping you out. Dolphins are also capable of using sonar and I’m pretty sure I saw at some point on television that they learned sign language by watching videos of Jane Goodall.

Given all of this evidence I am shocked to see the decline of this once supposedly intelligent creature. I have brought this up at parties before, and been shot down immediately. With shouts of, "What the hell are you talking about" Or "How many margaritas did you say you had." I can only assume they are jealous because they had not realized the decline of the dolphin as well until I pointed it out to them. I plan to carry this to my local US Senator via a comprehensive plan. Whereby I e-mail him at least three times a day, and send him copies of the show "Flipper" in the mail on a bi-weekly basis. Soon this weak willed creature will succumb to my wiles. Then the majestic dolphin will be raised from the ashes of minor resort attraction and sea world sidekick to orcas back to its proper status as man’s other white meat.

S: It's really stupid. Dolphins are mammals and sharks aren't. If you really get into the biology of it, it just doesn't make sense.

M: I think most good jokes could use a heavy raking over biological coals to give them more zing!

S: That's what she said.

M: Are you tired?

Fiction (Cont)

As he lunged, we, though it could have been I, dropped hands and began to back down the hill. When I stepped back my foot slipped on the grass, which was densely moist, most likely due to irrigating the grapes, and I tumbled to the bottom of the hill.

I could tell you at this point that I have a long and corrosive history with the canine species—A history that no doubt contributed to my actions that day. I have an earlier unrepressed memory of a dog biting me in the nose when I was a toddler.

As I tumbled down the hill I heard screams issuing from Katie’s mouth, ear splitting things. I learned later that the dog had fixed his canines firmly in the flesh of her right calf, and that the “intense pain” caused her to fall to the ground, bringing the two of them on level. I managed to stir at this point, and I had a clear view of the dog raking his teeth across the left side of her face. I watched the skin of her cheek distend as the hound whipped his head back and forth in a movement that brought to mind a typical canine playing with his favorite chew toy. The chew toy, in this instance, being Katie’s zygomatic bone.

The sight, needless to say, was horrific. Nearly all of the inhabitants of that rich city are white. However, they must employ a small standing army to keep the grapes and ivy in quintessential states, and thus, cheap Mexican labor is pretty much ubiquitous in the area. Anyhow, as I stumbled up the hill to assist Katie, a group of Mexicans gardeners appeared and pulled the dog from her prone form.

Did I resent not getting there first? Resent?

A good portion of Katie’s face had been shorn away, and the pink skin looked like nothing so much as raw hamburger. The piece of flesh still hanging from her face was attached by a few, stray, spaghetti like tendons.

Some things that I miss

Wallace: It was like, I really sort of felt like my life was over at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And I didn't want to feel it.
And so I would do all kinds of things: I would drink real heavy, I would like (expletive) strangers. Oh God--or, then, for two weeks I wouldn't drink, and I'd run ten miles every morning. You know, that kind of desperate, like very American, "I will fix this somehow, by taking radical action."

I've decided that I'll keep posting my favorite parts from this book over the next few weeks. Anyhow, I already blogged about this, it pretty much canvassed a time in my own mid-twenties when it suddenly seemed like my life was over, like all sorts of ships had left for the New World, and I was some poor orphan kid standing at the dock waving goodbye. And that's a strange way to feel when you are, by today's standards, still so very young. I think it had something to do with living in a place that was extremely cold and working at a business school, where you have this idea that everyone is pretty much just out for themselves and trying to cash in. It's not like the place where I work now where everyone has big plans to shore up that bit of trouble we've been having in the Middle East and get everyone back to holding hands and singing songs.

Here is an interesting article about writing fiction. fiction
I think that the point is well taken. Primarily because it's a point I've espoused numerous times while getting my own degree in creative writing. If I had a dollar for every time someone bitched about taking a literature class while getting a degree in creative writing I'd be a rich man. Guess what? People who are getting MFA's who whine about having to take lit. classes are pretty much just whining because they are lazy and because they aren't writing enough. If they had more time, they'd just waste it watching television or f-ing around on facebook. I know, I am one of those people. I realize I'm speaking to a very small audience here. However, even if you didn't get an MFA imagine how ridiculous it would sound to you, if one of your colleagues refused to learn a task by observing someone else doing it well, but insisted instead that they'd rather learn by feel. It's asinine. That being said, I'm totally in these peoples camps because it's bad enough that those of us who won't end up as writers anyhow spend all day not writing of our own volition, it pisses us off even more when it's someone else's volition. Even if that volition involves reading books. You know, the sort of things writers do.

I was also struck by the latter portion of the quote when Wallace talks about this very American, I can fix it right now craze. Hello, six million diet ads.

Melt your fat away with the heat boxer. This belt wraps around your waist and delivers short bursts of heat in excess of the full heat of the sun. By the time you sit up you'll be so dehydrated, read skinny, you won't even care if you don't look better.

Take this pill and you'll be skinny. Sure you may also grow wings and start having an intimate relationship with your trash can who may now look like Oscar the Grouch. Oh, and you may also suffer kidney failure or something, but who cares, you'll be skinnier.

Try out my new diet. It's called the Ramadan, no food or water from sunup till sundown. Plus, if someone accuses you of being anorexic you can just claim that it's for religious reasons. Genius.

Come in to our office and we'll slice the pounds away. That's right, don't change a thing, we'll change you from the outside in. These knives can cut right through a penny or rail ties and now we'll use them to cut through your fat. Note: Bring bandages.

The point is, that like most things in life, correcting your diet, or your state of mind don't really happen with epiphanies. It happens in a myriad of small little ways that wind up amounting to something more. But we're always waiting for that next big thing. And I'm afraid that if we, I, stay that way, that I'll find myself standing on that same lonely dock from sunup until sundown, waiting for the sight of ships in the distance, waiting.

Fiction (Cont).

Anyhow, as we approached the top of an idyllic hill—like, hills alive with sound of music stuff—we found ourselves in a small vineyard, boxed in by a low stone wall. Ivy grew at manicured intervals along the stones. I can see the metaphoric value in describing the myriad of ways in which the ivy is connected to itself, and the wall. The area is primarily renowned for Pinot Noir.

We were holding hands at this point. The valley is bordered by the Santa Ynez and San Rafael Mountains, which act as conduits for the cool ocean air, air that keeps you feeling pleasant even on the mordantly warm, dry days. The heat was palpable but bright and clean.

As we reached the precipice on that sun splashed perfect day, hands held tightly, shoes, not muddy in the slightest, perfect grip, a medium sized brown dog of indeterminate species started barking at us.

We’re not talking cereberus here. No flames flowed forth, but the thing was clearly malfeasant. I remember this distinctly. It is as clear in my head now as your face is. The hairs on the dog’s neck rose—hackles, I believe, is the proper term—and his lips parted, pink gums, long white canines. Lupine, almost.

No. Don’t turn, please. The profile is pretty exquisite.

Well, the dog bared his teeth, snarled or growled, my memory is unclear, and then he lunged towards us. Strange, that we automatically assumed the dog was a male. I suppose it’s a bit of anthropomorphism. The tendons in his legs were sharply visible as he leapt. They glistened in the way of wet sand being struck by the sun between waves. I only learned the gender of the animal from the newspaper stories that followed. I did not condone his killing. It was sheer animal instinct. You can’t condemn an animal for behaving like an animal.

Later than I had hoped

The dog is barking in the dead of night. Inside, we close the windows and slip into sleep beneath the low hum of the fan, not concerned about what the dog is barking over, or what we've missed while we weren't watching television. We close our eyes, and drift into dreamless sleep, our faces cradled in palms, our jaws slack, alone at last.

I'm drinking a glass of water with two bugs floating in it. The bugs flying in too low for that ocean of purified water. They move away from my my mouth as I take a drink, and consider their lives lost. I do not toast them. But I give them this passing thought in the evening before I go to bed, and that should be enough. Tomorrow, tomorrow I'll clean this cup, I tell myself, tomorrow they'll go down the drain. But tonight they will be the silent company in these late hours, and I will bid them a fond farewell, a death at sea.

Have you ever imagined you were a fly? Like how big a glass of water would be? Like if it would have so much appeal to you that you would fly (joke) right in and dunk yourself in it. If the water was like some sort of baptism. Do flies baptize? Lord only knows, I suppose?

Fiction (Cont.)

I bent at the silver railing, slick and salty, and hurled my lunch overboard. A school of fish appeared and began snapping it up, little bubbles appearing where their mouths closed. I remember the hair on her arm, bleached white, resting inches from mine. I remember all the tenebrous connections I’d sought to get here close to me, and how I deemed it ironic, chronically misused I know, that the vomiting had done it. We stood in that unfiltered morning light, the sky getting clearer, watching fish eat vomit. “I’d love to stay like this all day Gilligan.”

Anyhow, I loved her. I loved her as you love a first: all head over heels and stupidly, such that when you finally emerge from that plunge you have no earthly clue why you’re wearing designer clothes and listening to jazz in your spare time.

We were hiking on the day of the event. I wore sensible shoes, contoured soles designed to give increased grip on slippery terrain. They were some sort of trail scramblers that I’d picked up at an outlet store in Gaviota. The shoes were fairly new. I’d had them for two months. It’s highly unlikely given my infrequent usage that the grip had worn away at all. The trail took us around an empty polo field pock-marked by gopher holes. It meandered, I suppose.

The polo field was surrounded by a track, red, comprised primarily of clay. The track was ringed by a series of yellowing bamboo shoots, which appeared to me, ghoulish, like the bones of some long dead race of giants. I’m projecting backward now though, I’ve no earthly clue if they were anything but bamboo shoots lining the path. The sky was, as I recall, beige in color. The clouds were light and variable.

On Childhood

If you've never had a person suggest that they'd like to read your writing perhaps this post won't make any sense to you. However, we were all young once upon a time, and perhaps even remember bringing home a picture from school. My pictures were devoid of any artistic talent, and yet, I wanted the same approval that other kids garnered when they skillfully drew with a variety of rulers, and colored pencils that included colors like cobalt blue that I didn't even know existed, or rather, thought of as just blue. Those same children, tongues pressed to their cheek or slightly exposed above the white ridge of their teeth, focused, intent. The light coming through the small rectangular windows in squares. The windows themselves crisscrossed by black lines that to this day remain inexplicable. And even at that age I already knew that I was not gifted. That the pen was not an extension of my mind. That it, the pen, was something that would betray my dreams rather than fulfill them, such that when I drew a small blue river, with blue willows along the side, and blue birds in the sky, and it was not awful, my mother hung it in our kitchen for two years. She perhaps realizing that this was as great as my artistic achievements were to get.

The smell of coffee on my kindergarten teacher's breath overpowering, and the pen not obeying in the sort of fashion that would suggest the beauty of order, linearity. The desks are the type that can be lifted up, so that each child can keep an eraser, and a ruler, and some pieces of paper in it for weeks on end. The other children all have the big pink erasers that they apply liberally and neatly to any error, blowing the bits of lead off onto the great white expanse of floor. Myself, not in possession of the big erase, but constantly losing pencils, and being left with one of those eraser less types that scrape and eventually tear the page when applied with any force. The mistakes themselves occurring at such a frequent rate that the stress of the pencil scraping through the paper is almost too much to stand. And, the paper itself once ripped is replaced by yet another sheet, and we haven't learned yet about the environment and how we should stop wasting things like paper and maybe I was some sort of martyr for holding on to that old pencil.

And at recess the other kids gathering around the large play area, filled with gravel, which at the time, was considered to be the safest thing, little stones that slightly larger children would fling themselves into from black swings with silver chains, when the ladies, mostly Asian, who watched over us would turn their heads, the pebbles getting lodged in the tender skin right in the middle of the hand. And me, knowing that some sort of social hierarchy exists that is related to the scissors and the writing of names in good solid block handwriting, and pink erasers, and cool pencils, of a variety of colors, not just the standard old no. 2 sans eraser that I'm using.

Some of the kids in the class get up often to sharpen their pencil, and you are aware by the stare that the teacher gives them, the herding type motion of her arms as she pushes them back into their seat that it annoys her. And so, you sit, with those windows of light, small rectangles, seeming like miles away. And why were the windows so high in those old classrooms? And even though your pencil has been worn away and you're just writing with the nub, barely able to withstand the shiver that using that small nub on the paper creates in your spine, you don't get up.

This being the first of what's to become a litany of failures, though that particularly verbiage was certainly not available. The teacher's hair, short and severe, her last name Marx, like the German. She drives a small sports car and drinks copious amounts of coffee, and has a son of her own, though it's hard to imagine. Your glasses are affixed firmly to your forehead, the light now creating a slight glare to coming up off them, the glasses, during math time, which really just amounts to kids sitting around with a bunch of beans, practicing taking them away and then putting them back. The math itself, fairly easy, but the act of breaking through that fourth wall, the wall that exists between the inner and the outer self, the public and the private, nearly impossible to break down, so that you sit quietly while other children move beans and gain little pats on the head from various student aids, your hands nearly shaking under the table. And you are happy, in a way, to be viewing the world through those big round lenses, gaining just a little bit of extra space from all that was new.

Fiction (Cont).

We were students at City College, taking a sailing class. I was, in short, not exactly a natural in the sailing department. I proposed to Katie, early on, that we ascended to land from the primordial depths with good reason. She found my nautical ineptitude alluring. The teacher, Mr. Gifford, took to calling me Gilligan. Affectionate, no doubt. Purest of motives. Well, the Skipper, and yes, I realize that I’m calling him that even now as a defense mechanism, gave me the most menial tasks on the boat due to my astounding incompetence. “Help us shove off if you can handle it Gilligan,” he’d yell. You know, the type of psychologically damaging thing that’s said sometimes with the asinine assumption that people have thick skin. I remember everything. I’m like a female elephant.

The morning that we met, and from which I later drew an intense connection, was clear and warm. The sky was cloudless, waves light, and the beach flat and appealing. Unfortunately, I was struck ill due to an excessive bout of under-aged drinking that I’d engaged in the prior evening. Thus, while the Skipper explained the intricacies of tacking to a rapt crowd, I bent at the railing barely holding in my lunch. When he’d concluded his lecture, the Skipper walked past and said, “You look a little green around the gills Gilligan.” Mr. Gifford, the Skipper more properly, had a large white mustache, and the sort of eyebrows that grew eyebrows out of them. You could imagine a whole ecosystem developing in the midst of them, almost tide pool esque. I have no doubt that he singled me out for ridicule because Katie—unquestionably the most attractive girl in the class, stood next to me and was considering my plight with the sort of consternation that seems more readily available to the fairer sex. It’s a proclivity in older men, this compulsory need to diminish the younger men who are all boffing the girls their wives once were.

Shade vs. Sun

Last week, on a warm day, clear blue sky, no hint of clouds, even on the far reaches of the horizon, I sat in the sunshine on a warm bench and talked about the Internet. And, on the way back, I walked past a few benches nestled in the shade of unidentifiable trees. The people on the benches were reading books, casually flipping through the pages of magazines, or pausing, the fork poised before their mouth, as if considering whether to continue.

I work on a college campus. Ergo; the vast majority of people on the campus are currently in various poses of relaxation, and in various states of undress, as if they are in the cult of Helios. And, as I was walking back, with my sun-reddened face, I peered through the light and into the bits of shade where people flipped pages of books.

The point is: I found myself wondering what the hell those people were doing in the shade? Why would a person, who has been cold for months mind you, willingly choose to spend their precious time out of the sun? Perhaps they just really enjoy being cold, but I couldn't understand it. I thought about tracking them down, maybe smacking on the head with a rolled up magazine and saying, "You see that fiery orb in the sky? It's good for you." And then dragging them with me out onto a blanket and maybe kicking around the hacky sack or whatever college kids do these days. I resisted though.

Conversely, I found myself wondering why people were lying in the sun and taking it in so gloriously. I nearly flagged down someone with a bullhorn, so I could tell them all about the dangers of the sun. I'm thinking of starting a campaign with pictures of elderly folks that says: "You'll all have wrinkles." Kind of an awareness program for youth. And aren't those kids being selfish and foolish, indulging in the beauty of their youth without considering the consequences? Foolish youth, only concerned with the moment. I thought about creating an enormous sun shade and planting it down over all those kids, so they could see how what was really fun, was that we were all together united in this thing, and that the sunlight was really immaterial to our enjoyment. And that perhaps I'd taught us something with my sunbrella, that it's a good thing to live in community. Sadly, my fourth grade science fair project was just a bunch of ill-formed clay dinosaurs. I couldn't even get together one of these easy but flashy volcanoes that all the kids who got blue ribbon prizes did. I don't remember if I got a consolation prize or just a thanks for entering ribbon, but who really gives a crap. I didn't win. I blame the judges. Clay dinosaurs are awesome. I probably could have been the next Michelangelo with just a little more encouragement.

But then I started to think that perhaps the selfish ones were sitting in the shade. Basking in all that shadow, trying to save themselves from the ravages of aging. I secretly began to suspect that they were the ones who needed to be witnessed to, so I began to recast my posters writing things like "seize the day," and "et tu brute" on posters because I couldn't think of anything else.

And I wondered just what the heck my relationship was to the sun. Not really, like my relationship per se. It's pretty one-sided. But just why I'd spent the day on the bench rather than in the shade. What that might have said about me. Because that's the sort of thing that people do, they start thinking about other people outside of themselves and then they stop and think, what the hell does that have to do with me? Mainly because that's what it means to be human.

Finally, I took down all of my signs and stopped worrying about the kids reading books who will be really sexy grandma's and all the young people who will one day have creases in their brow. And I just considered the fact that maybe some people don't like being hot and sweating, and maybe some other folks just like their skin to be warm. And that I should probably stop thinking so much about why people do the things that they do and just do.

Fiction (Cont)

“What the hell was that back there?” she asked.

I stared at her stupidly. “I passed out.”

“Your breathing was too even for that,” she said. “I swear I saw your eyes flick open.”

“I believe the phrase, not dignify with a response is in order.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, locking and unlocking the door.

My actions seemed beyond reproach. I haven’t spoken with her in weeks.
When I arrived back home, I turned on the television in order to distract myself. However, I was distracted by a small white object nestled into the neat carpet fibers. The sheen of it reminded me of the stories of white gold pulled from the tusks of elephants and of my own childhood, spent looking for never found treasures. When I bent down and peered closely at the carpet, I saw that what I beheld was a small human tooth.

I know that I’m paying you, but you’re doing an admirable job none the less. Stay just like that. It makes this whole thing easier. You know, even just this one side of your face is the sort of thing that men cross seas over with malicious intent.

I’d like to point out that any of these extrusive details could amount to, at the very least, a connection to the event that had happened years earlier in my life. I’m using the word extrusive incorrectly here, though I feel that its application provides an apt metaphor for the relationship between these two events. The prior event had remained largely submerged in my adult unconscious until the night of my black out. And that next morning, the events of the former came back to me in the manner of a Biblical flood. And I saw, or let’s be honest, thought I saw where things had gotten off track for me. Isn’t that the sort of thing we all look for at a certain point in our life? Some external reason or moment that discolored everything to follow? a Waterloo of sorts.

I lived in Santa Barbara at the time and was dating a girl named Katie.

Continue there. No. The whole scene is immaterial don’t you see? Like a red herring. We’re going to get to the real meat now. I avoided the fist fight, and inevitable beating at the cost of remembering this thing that I’d tried so hard to forget. Does that satisfy your yearning for closure? that what I felt most clearly was this vast calm that one usually associates with vistas overlooking swaths of forest or sitting in front of ocean waves? That as I sat in the dark flipping channels, watching strangers I think I know, running my tongue over the ridges and valleys of my teeth, that I was so thankful to be me. Not someone else for once, not a celebrity or athlete. No, watching the extreme physical pain being inflicted upon Jerry, looking at his tooth in my hand brought me a profound, near monastic level sense of connection with myself.

Is that so wrong? The tooth, incidentally, was unquestionably a bicuspid.

Refreshing work E-mail

Refreshing work E-mail. I'm not referring to refreshing in the sort of way that Coke wants you to think of on a summer afternoon. Not the sort of thing where you start handing Cokes to strangers on the street and they suddenly realize what a stand up person you are, and that they should probably stop drinking booze and cheating on taxes and such. Nor is it the sort of refreshing where suddenly all of your friends are smiling and laughing and attractive enough to be in a coke commercial.
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No. What I mean is that moment when you are refreshing your work e-mail. I often do other tasks during the course of the day that take me away from my e-mail. (Insert fun here). And when I return to my computer and hit the refresh button on my inbox, occasionally it takes a bit of time. And here lies the question for anyone reading this. When my inbox takes a while to update, like it's really thinking hard about something, and the wheel is spinning and spinning, what do you/I think?

a) I'm going to have a shi- ton of e-mails to get to when this thing finally loads up.

B) Why are we still using LotusNotes. Hasn't anyone realized that it's an obsolete e-mail operating system. Could it be any more annoying?

c) Am I really thinking about the quality of my work e-mail's operating system? What has gone wrong in my life that has lead me to this point? I largely blame....

d) This computer is so slow. When the hell is it going to update? While I'm waiting I might as well open my regular e-mail to see if anyone has sent me an innocuous message in the thirty seconds since I checked it last.

E) I've been fired. I've been let go. My e-mail is going to load and it's going to be a message from my boss informing me that I'm fired. That's why it's taking so long. My e-mail knows I just can't handle this in my life right now, and it's waiting to break me the news.

F) I wonder how many meetings I've missed today. Hopefully this e-mail lets me know.

So, which one? And what does that say about you? I fall in to category e. I have the tendency to associate long e-mail waits with the expectation that I'm being fired for some reason. Is this rational? Well, yes. Theoretically I could be fired at any point. Is it probable. Well, no. I've worked for nine months in the same jobs receiving e-mails ever day, none of which have included the information that I'm fired. We're not even talking about a guilt complex. In fact, I've done nothing that would remotely warrant my firing. So why all the upheaval when it doesn't load? I don't really have an answer, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else ever experiences a-f in any way shape or form or whether I'm just kind of going it alone hear in my insanity.

Some writing advice from Dave Wallace:

Wallace (A story he likes) This needs more control. It's kind of just the head vomiting at us.

(On that old MFA classic): This is just your average campus romance story. I've go to tell you, to the average citizen, this is just not that interesting.

On characters: To have the narrator be funny and smart, have him say funny, smart things from time to time.

Wallace (though the parenthetical's are mine) : The key to writing (and good old fashioned human relationships one could argue)is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment. Because, if it's interesting to me, I automatically imagine it's interesting to you. I could spend a half hour telling you about my trip to the store, but that might not be as interesting to you as it is to me.

Fiction Cont

Jerry waved the discarded bottle in his hands, making circles as if he were a boxer trying to find his jab. And me. Where was I? I was on the cold cement next to Julie, listening to her cry. We could see the action going on inside from the balcony but were hidden in the dark. I ran my hand through her hair. “It’ll be okay,” I murmured, very softly into her ear. “I’m here. I’m here.”

Her hair smelled fine, like streets after a summer shower. I was on her left side wearing a pair of Omnitrons with dual density grip—suitable for all seasons. We sat next to a plant that I’d kept on the balcony, a tiny shrub that smelled slightly of home. The two guys in the living took turns punching Jerry, who had lost his bottle, in the ribs. Steve screamed something at the guys that none of us could understand. Julie and I half-watched this, breathing softly, half-watching the city below, wishing that the distance between us would empty and that we could cross over into that sea of lights.

Freud calls motivated forgetting psychogenic amnesia. He describes it as an act of self-preservation, an alternative to suicide. Would it have been suicide to reenter that room where my two friends were being roundly beaten? I think not. But as I sat in the dark, aware of the distances between things I remember, though perhaps it didn’t happen, hearing the crack of Jerry’s ribs and a howl of pain akin to that of a forlorn dog on an empty city street. It was at this point in time that I blacked out, the night sealing me in its embrace. I came to when the medics arrived. I remember the flecked blood on Jerry’s lips, and I watched as they strapped down his body which was wracked by uncontrollable shivers. It is not often that you bear firsthand witness the tears of another adult male.

After they had left, I drove Julie home. We were silent for most of the trip. The myriad of turns in the maze like city, diagonal streets be damned, reminded me of what it was to have been like if the plans of L’Enfant had come to fruition: a series of dark canals weaving darkly through crumbling buildings. I imagined all the cab drivers being replaced by knobby handed men plying these strange waters at night. I’ve no earthly clue what Julie thought of me passing out.

Blog town Friday Nights

Not a bolt of lightning unfortunately. Or fortunately, unless the bolt was metaphorical. I'm fairly certain that being struck by an actual bolt of lightning would not be to my liking, though one never knows now do they?

Random thoughts on news, violence and NPR:

V: Sometimes you just feel like they have to report the sensational stuff in order to get people to watch.

S: That's why I don't watch the local news. It's just one horrible report after another.

M: I know. That's why I like NPR, they are like, six thousand people died in China in an earthquake today but check out this new folk singer. And you're like, yeah, he is pretty good.

Some thoughts on television from DFW and David Lipsky:

Lipsky: My parents operated a very clear and effective NPR/PBS/New Yorker propoganda course: that TV is bad, it's a waste of time, you don't want to be someone else's audience.

Wallace: It's not bad or a waste of your time. (A conclusions I've come to as well about television. Good television does exist. Though, from here the analogy gets extended by Wallace to masturbation so be sure and jump on a trampoline while reading this next part). Any more than, you know, masturbation is bad or a waste of your time. It's a pleasurable way to spend ten minutes. But if you're doing it twenty times a day--or if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand--then there's something wrong. I mean, it's a matter of degrees. (The analogy, though perhaps indelicate, is apt).

On Jane Eyre:

G: I don't really like any of the Brontes.

M: I didn't care for Wuthering Heights.

G: Uh, and Jane Eyre. (Rolls eyes).

M: Jane Eyre? (Note: said with a questioning lilt and tears forming in the corner of my eyes). It's like you just ran over a puppy with a semi in front of me, stopped, backed over it again, and then gave me the thumbs up.

G: You liked it?

Back to Conversation with Wallace about television, I promise, nothing else Joyceanly indelicate. I'd recommend extrapolating this conversation to any social media that seems applicable.

Wallace: I think one of the reasons I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And I can receive entertainment and stimulation without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention.(Extrapolate away here please. Feel free to try and connect the difference between interfacing with someone vs. texting them or interfacing with someone while texting vs. keeping the phone in your pocket. Ruminate about facebook) And that is very seductive.

The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've got to do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I've got to pay attention to him. The stress level goes up. But there's also something nourishing about it, because I think as creatures, we've all go to figure out how to be together in the same room.

On Work phone Calls:

A: Can you give me the transaction number? (Pause)
A: It's the six digit number on the top left corner. (Pause)
A: It says TN. (Pause)
A: Okay, what't the title of the book?

My understanding of the answers:
M: I'd like to give you the transaction number, but I'm not sure what that means.
M: Your left or mine? Do papers now cardinal directions? Not a cardinal you say?
M: Doesn't TN stand for Tennessee? I was up there once for a conference about horses....
M: I can't give you the title, but I can work out an interpretive dance that I'm going to like, mentally commune to you about what I think this book is really about. (Pause). Just so you you know I'm dancing now. Is this helping?

Fiction (Cont)
Julie’s mascara ran down her face like the Amazon and its tributaries were bound for portions of her neck and ears. She attempted to wipe the vomit from her cheeks. “That was a hell of a shot Julie,” Jerry said, patting her back. “One in a million.” The two guys, by now, had broken their impromptu huddle and were marching back into the building in a manner that suggested impending bodily harm.

My heart beat like a rabbit in the path of a combine. I hadn’t been in a fight since the fifth grade. Steve importuned the sky to stop wasting its financial resources on cheap liquor.

Yes. I was scared. No need to turn. I can feel your empathy from right there.

Jerry plucked the bottle from Steve’s weak grasp. Steve sat up and wandered over to the iron rails and threw his arm around Julie.

We’ve got an enchanting view from that particular balcony. I’ll show it to you if all goes well. I’ll bet you hear all sorts of promises from people that they don’t keep.

“Look at all those people,” Steve said, gesturing towards miles of porch lights and dark wires. “Philistines.”

Jerry held the bottle when the knocking started. Hammering is probably a more precise way to describe the persistence with which the door was being struck—Telltale Heart type stuff. Steve, brazenly drunk, opened the sliding glass door and stumbled into the living room.

Strangely, I remember, that when the sliding glass door opened I could suddenly hear music, sad and slow. It was the type of music that makes you pause and take stock of your life, the sort of thing that guys who’ve accomplished as little as I have avoid after a certain age. My heart knocked solidly against my ribs. Steve peered into the keyhole saying, “Knock. Knock.” The response was a body flung vigorously against the door. “Ask who’s there dammit,” he said, taking a karate chop at the door.

Steve, joyously inebriated though he was, still managed to time his opening of the door inward to send the first of the guys sprawling on our carpet. Before the guy could get his bearings Steve was on him, delivering short swift kicks to his, the prone guy’s, ribs.

Late, Late

Julie turned towards us her pretty face marred by a strand of thick red vomit clinging to her hair like connective tissue on an open cadaver. Given the extenuating circumstances I think the three of us behaved in an entirely blameless manner that night—damsel in distress and such.

Studies of subjective reports of memory show that memories of highly significant events are unusually accurate and stable over time. A fact, which I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out, that seems to stand in stark contrast to my earlier reference to the hippocampus. Last thing to keep in mind here, according to the APA it’s impossible for a patient to distinguish between a repressed memory and a false one. Thus, you can suffer a delusion that you’re now remembering something that actually happened when in fact, you’re remembering nothing.

The three of us made our way over to the railing and looked down at the frat guys, who, upon our arrival, began making indelicate remarks about portions of our reproductive systems and related claims as to our upcoming diets. Not the sort of thing I’d repeat here. Again, imagine the contortions that the best of Bosch’s folks are engaging in, and you’ll have some idea of the proffered threats.

Telling them that the Pinot Noir was free of charge did nothing to curb their enthusiasm for violence. Pearls before swine, right?

Steve wandered back to the table and began waxing eloquently about the risks of imbibing cheap liquor. Jerry and I remained at the railing, surveying the guys below who were hunched over like football players. “Watch the play clock,” I yelled. “Get the damn thing snapped.” Jerry asked for a time out and threw down a mock clipboard.

This is only to indicate that I had no intention of doing what psychologists suggest. I did not intend to engage in any activity that would cause me to recall a repressed memory. I’m partial to the term motivated forgetting.

Late

Imagine with me. You are leaving your apartment with your friend, John. This whole scenario is being utilized to help me drive home an earlier point. John is occasionally too rowdy for your tastes. You wouldn’t describe him as a close friend. The word kindred spirit is not in your vernacular yet. But you’re aware that something is amiss. The two of you smell quite good, though in a masculine way. You’re wearing cologne that costs approximately forty dollars a bottle. The smell is nearly indefinable, littoral, but pleasantly so. It brings to mind childhood sandcastles—the slow march of the tide intent upon their destruction, the sand that sticks beneath your finger nails, and the blinding shafts of light reflected from white grains.

Repressed memories are often triggered by a taste, smell, or other relatively innocuous identifier that correlates to the lost memory. Apparently, even patients who discover that their repressed memories are fabricated can suffer serious post-traumatic stress.

Of course, any person who remembers childhood in detail knows that reality and illusion are closely wedded. It is not the boogie man’s existence that keeps you up at night, but the illusory fear that he might exist. The two are indistinguishable. I guess it’s assumed that we leave that sort of thing behind with the night light.


Your mother bought it, the cologne, for you this last Christmas on your previous girlfriend’s request, a girl who your family really and genuinely liked and approved of, which you counted, though not always consciously, as a strike against her. The facts of the break up are really neither here nor there, though you’ll occasionally remember her in years to come, perhaps in the bathroom late at night when your wife is sleeping—how seraphic her face could look wrapped in the early morning light. You’re already a few drinks in and are prone to fits of nostalgia while under the influence. You are on your way to meet some fine looking specimens you’ve happened upon recently. One in particular, Becky, is promising. You drive a sports car purchased by your parents. The longest you’ve held a job is three months—life guard at a local pool. Becky is at least in the top tenth percentile of attractive girls you’ve met. The car has only two seats. You don’t know how the evening is going to go, or when it is going to happen, but Becky and you are going to find yourselves alone, in the back of a group, talking quietly. You’re going to suggest that you go for a drive. She’s somewhere below the famous women who adorn magazine covers but a definite cut above your garden variety cute girl, who come in droves on college campuses. You are going to take a wrong turn onto an old dirt road lined by elms. You’re going to suggest that the two of you stroll through stalks of dried corn. You’re going to talk about your love for the attenuated quality of moonlight, the way it’s ringed in ice. You’re going to touch her cheek with the back of your hand, and then something is going to happen. Your step is light; the sidewalk has springs. It is at this point, in the full bloom of youth, on a pleasant, though crisp evening, benevolent appearing sky, no less than four readily identifiable constellations visible to the naked eye, with a space left between you and your friend’s shoulder appropriate for heterosexual males walking in concert, that it begins to rain vomit.

How much time do I have?

Thus, when these two fine young men, paragons of all the term entails, looked up and saw Julie, head lolling between the rails, she appeared to them, not prayerful, but like a Greek goddess, come to bring some awful retribution. So naturally they began to cast aspersion upon her in an attempt to ward off the unraveling of the universe that up until this point, barring a few setbacks, had been rooting for them.

Did you catch the part about the grain of sand or the way the moon was shrouded in ice crystals? This is the sort of detail that a patient might remember and cling to as an absolute fact, even if the fact is a fabrication. How? Diffracted light at an angle of twenty two degrees. The effect is actually an illusion. It doesn’t exist.

Weekends

In the morning, the sky is ash. The warm air has been blown out to some place far away. In the shower, there is mold that I don't ever see.
I told her the other day that I would never wash the shower. That it was a thing that I just wouldn't do.
On Saturday morning when I am trying to sleep I hear her making noise in the bathroom. "I'm pulling out the caulk because it's all moldy." Neither one of us even makes a joke. You've got at least a hundred different types of mold growing in there" she says.
"Are you impressed," I ask, but my words are lost beneath the grunts she emits while pulling out the caulk.

I spend the better part of the morning trying to sleep, groaning whenever she makes a loud noise from the bathroom. When I finally arise at 10:30, I call her into the room.
"I've decided to start washing my own bathroom," I say. "I'd like you to show me how."
"You're a good husband," she says, And a smart one."
Discretion is often the best part of valor.

In the afternoon she mops the floors, while I read a book on the porch.
"Can you take your shoes off for the next couple of days," she asks, imploring.

"I'll try my best," I say. "I can't make any promises if I'm not wearing sandals."

She says, "Your bathroom is a cesspool!"
And I take mild offense. I'm also somewhat proud of my bathroom, because like the azalea, and the dying pansies, I consider it my own. "Don't say it so loudly," I say, not where it can hear you."

In the evening we watch a television show.
"I'm going to have nightmares about this," she says.
"It's not scary," I say, "It's suspenseful."

In the afternoon she puts together the lawn mower while I dig at the roots of poison ivy in blissful ignorance. Our neighbor's dog runs up to the fence and starts growling at us. "We need a bigger fence," she says.
And I nod, waving a yellow wiffle bat in the direction of the dog, as if he'd understand.

On Monday I used her cell phone as a bookmark because nothing else was at hand. I'll use other books, tv controllers, keys, anything as a book mark. Anything but bookmarks, which I'm particularly averse to.
She e-mails me from work.
"I can't find my phone." she says.
I answer, It makes a great bookmark.

The truth of the matter is that we have more weeds than grass. Our neighbor's lawn has bermuda, which I'm particularly fond of. Mostly, we cut rip out the large weeds with our hands since the push mower doesn't quite handle them.

That afternoon I have a root beer on the porch, feel the sun warm my arms, knowing that I've done a good day's work. She is on the porch for another hour, washing off the pollen and cleaning the new rocking chairs.

"You need to know when to quit," I tell her, belching back a little bit of root beer.

"You're right, she says, and sighs.

I've got a case of the Mondays

I'm not entirely certain what that would have meant in a pre-industrialized world. However, I'm fairly certain that it is widely accepted as now connoting a pretty crappy day that is coupled with some minor fear that the better part of a person's life is being spent doing something that they don't actually want to be doing.

After working diligently in the yard on Saturday I was rewarded with my third case of poison ivy within the last 15 months. The last bout, which I chronicled in this blog, left me looking like an orc from Lord of the Rings. Vanity laid low. This time, the offending plant has merely left its crude marks upon my arms. However, I've grown tired of wanting to rip into the skin of my arms and scratch them down to the bone. My desire to raise up a beautiful English garden from our plot of grass and weeds has diminished rapidly, with the knowledge that I'll be fighting poison ivy as well. Sadly, it is not the sexy poison ivy of Batman fame, with whom, despite my great reservations, I would be willing to do battle with.


In other house related news our washer has decided that the spin cycle is immaterial in the washing process. We tend to disagree, as you must pull your sopping weight clothes (I mean S, not we) from the washer and wash them by hand. We've tried to explain to the washer that its new method is not up our alley but to no avail. Inanimate objects are rarely as intelligent as you'd like them to be. Though, in truth, nor are humans.

S: What haven't we had go wrong in this house?
M: I'm sure it will find something.

The long and the short of this new mess of problems is that I need to procure a vast amount of money quickly. And I can only think of one honorable way to do that. The time has come for me to write a jazzy book about some random topic. "The Earth is Flat." "The Tipping Point." "Blink." "Why atheists need to write long tracts to other people about being atheists." I think the world needs another book about something vaguely scientific, written in the NPR style. I'm now just going to go ahead and call for suggestions. Though I'm considering just forming an amalgamation of the most popular literary reforms. Perhaps a romance, with all sorts of clues about Jesus being a woman that takes place during a time of economic disaster due to a water shortage. Eventually the two people fall in love and their clothes fall off. Also, they stop people from overusing water and hating freedom, and China, something about the rise of China. Would you read this book? Damn right you would!

Just finished A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

I'm inclined to disagree with the NYT assessment of this book as one of the best five works of fiction this year. The book is definitely worthy of praise, particularly the first third. However, after a while the stories take on a vague sameness, and it is only in the final story that you start to feel as if threads are being woven together. I'm certain that the book was hailed as brilliant for being able to depict women so accurately at various points in history. The gist is to cover about 130 years in the lineage of one family, focus on the women, starting with the matriarch who starved herself to death to draw attention to the womens suffrage movement. However, I felt Walbert lost her way a bit when she ventured into the modern world. Though, as I think about it, the final two stories do it quite well. Perhaps it's just pretty damn hard to read a trapped woman after seeing how well Woolf does it. Again, this book is quite good. My one caveat is that the sameness of the narrator, made the women blend together a bit, in a way that was unintended as the lives they lived were quite different as time passed.

Kate Walbert A short History of Women

She watches him leaving out the window, latch locked, the watchdog fast asleep on her bed in the other room. He limps a bit, though she knows he'll be fine. He is a tall man, William, and from here, in the moonlight that has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, he seems taller, his shadow falling back to her. There is something defined in this, in the manner of his leaving, so that when she turns to find Hilde waiting, Dorothy is not surprised. Hilde sits in the corner of the room, just behind the piano, her face bruised, her nightgown loose. She smiles and fades into the pattern of the wallpaper, twisting vines and leaves too large and somewhere, here or there, a parrot.
"I see they've stuck ladies in darkest of Africa," William had said upon that first visit. God but he was handsome then.

Fiction by me (Continued)

At this point, we were feeling the acute camaraderie commonly shared in excessive drink. Julie was bent at the railing in a posture of supplication. She had her fingers wrapped around the vertical bars as if they were prayer beads, and she dipped her neck between the rails. She then commenced vomiting riotously on the sidewalk below.

We were on the sixth floor. Anyhow, apparently as we debated the role of the feminine in the development of a benign afterlife, Julie’s vomit hurtled towards the sidewalk like some ungodly waterfall when two unsuspecting young men stepped into its path. Of course, she had no intent to strike them. They were innocent bystanders. The two young gentlemen, understand that I use the term quite loosely, with barely digested pinot noir on their shoulders, did not have time to consider that their shower had been an unfortunate fallout born of necessity, a Calvinist’s God’s whim. And thus, I presume, regarded the angel bowed in prayer above them not as a beneficent deity or intercessor, but as an object for disparagement.

Confabulation is characterized by a spontaneous pouring out of irrelevant associations, sometimes bizarre ideas, which may be held with firm conviction. For instance, what if I pretended this whole time that you were something that you are not?