magic words, vol. 6

it's the most natural thing in the world, to punch someone in the face. and it's also the most unnatural.

dependency issues

i'm not any good with money since my senior year of college. i used to hoard it mindlessly; my savings account was swollen, my clothes were shabby. when i started college, the knowledge that i would someday have a ponderous burden of debt hanging over my daily life caused the kind of seesawing associated with religious fanatics--i would hoard for a month or two, then spend recklessly for a day or a weekend, then vow to clean up...and repeat.

for some reason, just before my senior year began, i threw the greater percentage of my caution to the wind and began to spend. there were certain chemical explanations for this, but i think much was motivated by my eagerness to shake the habits of guilt and absconding-from-self that had ruled my behavior and emotions nearly as long as i can remember. i wanted to hold my head up, buy flowers for people i liked and take them out to coffee, and most of all i wanted to adorn myself in clothes that i liked, that expressed just how kick-ass i felt i might be, given the opportunity.

it was, however, not until spring break of that year that i made the decision that made a lasting wreck of my finances. predictably, my new kick-ass habits precluded any increase in my savings account that year; the possibility arose to go to a small overlooked island in the caribbean sea for the two weeks of spring break. i felt that i needed to go, for an extensive matrix of reasons. i prayed for the money to be provided; it did not come to me; it occurred to me that i could use what remained of my savings account, the substance of the last three years of summer jobs, and all i had in the world of concrete value. i forced the lock on the possibility and bought the airplane ticket less than a week in advance of the flight. as i clicked the button on my second-hand computer to complete the purchase, i began to shake, to cry.

i was like that child who has determined to jump from the high dive, but is petrified at the top of the ladder, suddenly seeing that the surface of the water is immaterial and measuring his actual height from the deep blue floor of the pool.

i suppose i shouldn't have gone. i have looked back at my experience on the island for valuable lessons, moral or otherwise, but none present themselves. neither was the trip like my summer in france, whose value i never seek to prove because it was the over-and-above fulfillment of a long-awaited wish. the trip to the island was an exercise in futility, most of all. i suppose that itself could be a valuable lesson...

i was tired at the end of two weeks, wearily eager to return home. upon reflection, the final day was also valuable, an introduction to the way i now undertake to live every day--a lesson in the stepwise methodology. i had not slept a full night the entire time, thanks to the importunate mosquitoes that came out in the cool of evening. i had drunk hardly any water for two weeks in fear of contamination. my nerves were frayed and my guts were dry and twisted, and the thought of the journey ahead made me almost frantic. so i took the advice of my dearest friend, who has to travel a lot and doesn't always like it. she said, "just look at your trip in stages, and get one done at a time." so, first, there was the hike down the mountain of castle comfort to the gas station at the bottom, inexpertly schlepping my duffel bag like a recruit marine, to wait for the taxi. then there was the wait at the gas station for the taxi...i knew not to expect him to be on time. then followed the five minutes intervals of worry and self-soothing. when at last i began to look around me, in case somehow i had missed the obvious, a man who had been parked at the gas station all the time and checking his phone walked up to me and said, "you are miss bird?" i thought, at least my wait at the airport is likely to be short.

there followed the drive into roseau, where i left the taxi and boarded the airport bus along with several other people, one of whom--an old man, ill-dressed--insisted on small talk for the beginning of the ride, and revealed himself to be the father of the island's representative in the united nations. the journey to the airport was a good two hours, maybe more.

and when we arrived, i found that i owed someone twenty dollars to successfully leave the country. the airline clerk was the one who demanded it--i know she mentioned "customs fee" in her rationale. i had spent the last money i had on the taxi and bus fare. i looked around me for likely americans.

there was a family--a father, a mother, and a girl and boy my age--all standing at the entryway together. eventually the boy kissed the girl--not a brotherly kiss--shook hands with the father, hugged the mother, and left them. in a few moments, i went up to them.

i don't remember what i said, but i do remember that i concentrated on producing an expression of humorous helplessness. "isn't this funny?" i meant to convey, as i asked them for money, "of all times to have left my millions back at home. these silly rules of intercontinental travel... one never knows, do one?" the mother looked at me pityingly, and forked out a twenty-dollar bill with an expression of resignation. i said, "when we land in puerto rico, i'll go to an atm and get cash to pay you back." and i meant it.

we all ended up sitting together in the terminal. they were from somewhere in california, or maybe it was the midwest, or florida--i can't remember. the daughter was engaged to the boy i had seen earlier, who was studying at ross university, the medical school on the island, where people from all over the world could get a M.D. for less. she was thinking about coming out to live with him next year. her parents had been in portsmouth, the other big city, on the opposite side of the island from where i had lived for two weeks. they had stayed in a resort hotel, eating and drinking and snorkeling. the father wanted to know where i went to school and what i intended on doing with a liberal arts degree. when i told him i was a writer, his face lit up. he had always wanted to be a writer. he liked tim o'brien and ernest hemingway. i liked ernest hemingway and john steinbeck. i was reading the brothers karamazov; he had never read the brothers karamazov. he wanted to know what i was working on right then. i don't remember what it told him, nor do i remember whether it was the truth or not. the daughter and i spoke about school and the horror of graduating. the mother said little to nothing.

we sat nowhere near each other on the plane; arriving in puerto rico, i lost track of them, but it was small airport and we all had a good while to wait before our connecting flights. i immediately leapt on my quest for an atm machine, but could not find one anywhere. i walked up and down the one hall of terminals, about the length of a football field, poking my head into every notch in the wall.

i stumbled upon the family an hour or so later, in the food court of the airport. i was embarrassed, but i accosted them, saying, "have you seen an atm at all? i'm looking all over for one..." the father stepped forward and said, "don't worry, don't worry, we've got you covered, don't worry." i looked at mother--her face was studiously, resignedly benign, much as she might look if her husband decided to take up some embarrassing hobby. maybe he had, in a way--the next thing i knew, he was pressing another twenty dollar bill into my hand. my jaw started to shake, though no sounds were coming out. he said, "just one condition, i want you to tell me one thing--do you write by hand, in a notebook, or do you type?"

i could not look at the daughter--i could not face her. i looked again at the mother--her face was pity-free, a cipher. i looked at the father, trying to gauge the boyish enthusiasm of his face, his sparkling eyes, red cheeks and open mouth, eager to seize upon my response. i wanted desperately, in my utter humiliation, to give him the best value for his money...

"in a notebook," i told him, stammering. "i like the moleskine notebooks...that hemingway used to write in..."

his eyebrows shot up like fireworks. "that's what i like the best, too!" he crowed raucously, barely containing his synchronicity-inspired excitement. he began to say more, but the mother pulled at his arm, saying "our flight's boarding, hon, we have to go." i looked at her and said, "thank you," in a low voice meant to convey my sympathy, my apology. she smiled with closed lips. i ducked my head over and over, like a pandering majordomo, and we all retreated from each other. i wonder if she was telling the truth, or, like i was, just doing her best to bring down the curtain.

james dean. part 2

i got home later than i expected to, and my head was pounding with the necessity of running. i had left as soon as i could, reluctant to make even civil goodbyes, because i feared that if i didn't do it now i might lose my nerve and not do it at all.

i remembered that i spent one year of the recent past conducting my romantic life along those same lines. that urgency is a good basis for something unequivocally good for you, like cardiovascular exercise. i can't speak for the effects being equally salutatory when you apply it to love.

i barely felt my legs under me tonight, as i ran, and i barely heard the music in my headphones--i didn't need it to lend my pulse a rhythm. unusual. amazing. incredible. the evenness of my stride, the steadiness of my heart rate. i opened my arms and let them pump up and down balletically, as if they were wings, wishing they were wings, feeling as if they were wings. someday i will fly. someday i will run up the side of the black mountain preserve and into the green open valley that rolls between here and the coast, and my legs will carry me on the strength of my steady hummingbird heart all the way down to where the hillside drops off into the plate expanse of the pacific ocean.

climbing a hill, i thought, as i often do, of dancing to the music i was hearing. that happens when my heart needs a little help to keep its joy in motion. and, as i often do, i thought of him--he is james dean, he is marlon brando, he is elvis presley, he is all the wrong things i love so much and never hope to find again. he's the man i want to marry and know that i never will. by the time i got to the top of the hill, i was thinking gleefully of the one time i stood him up--i didn't mean to but i'm eternally glad that i did. by the time i came down from the crest of the hill, i was thinking of the one time i punched him in the jaw, and wishing to God i could do it again. i was thinking, as my legs threw the miles behind me, of how unequivocally sweet it would be to have the opportunity to press my palm into his face, my fingers into his eyes, and screw his mug away from me with a challenging twist of my wrist. blood pulsed through my biceps as i thought of throwing my fists into his hollow cheeks, his mouth and his neck, pummeling him with the abandon of an eight-year-old on the playground, until others would have to hold me back, and i thought of how i would fight against their restraint to get another punch in.

of course if it ever happened he wouldn't let me get more than one--he'd probably stop my fist in mid-air and twist my arm behind my back and hiss in my ear. odds are equally good that he'd punch me back, or just slap me to the ground...if he did that i would get back up. i'd fight him so hard, so hopelessly, that they would have to drag me off to keep me from getting hurt.

he never lied, he never cheated. he just didn't love me, and i loved him and i broke my heart on his self-absorption, and it breaks almost every day still, because i never got or gave a final word.

it was a surge of testosterone, i guess, or maybe it was the adrenaline of getting over the hill, or the qi powering my forward motion. maybe it was my real feelings enjoying an unwonted escape from the restraint i impose on them. the next song i heard had a rolling guitar strum on a descending chord progression, the musical language of a road trip, and it was very soothing until i heard the lyric "good-bye, old friend, i can't make you stay/i can't spend another ten years wishing you would, anyway.../even i'm getting tired of useless desires."

well, i am getting tired of apropos song lyrics. i've been trying not to notice them in connection with this james dean for nearly three years. i think you'll agree that that is way too much time to spend on a relationship that was only acknowledged for about three weeks.

if only he'd do something for which i could fight him. maybe then we could be friends.

turning wheels

Today went to La Plaine, on the Atlantic side. (as opposed to the Caribbean side) Sandra did her Baha’i thing with Veronica, and I played with the two kids, Kayvon and JJ. La Plaine is a village like any other, but Veronica is Carib and her house is Carib style, a two-room hut with crepe paper party streamers on the door, and a separate kitchen hut. I was playing catch with the boys outside, and then Kayvon looks up and so did I, and there is this hugely muscled rasta man in sleeveless grey coveralls walking over. He barely gave me the time of day…maybe he don’t like white girls, or maybe he just felt my intimidation. Anyway, turns out that he is JJ’s father, but not Kayvon’s. Veronica, further turns out, is like the Samaritan woman at the well—any number of husbands and at least six kids, starting at age 18 and going down to JJ. She is the sister of Francilia, the Carib lady whose kid, Dylan, I played with last week.

They had all kinds of trees in their yard, as Kayvon showed me when I asked him—cacao and mango and what I think was guava. The cacao pods are big and gnarly and purpley-brown. The mangos, alas, were not ripe. We played catch for about a hundred years, then Kayvon found a stick and switched to cricket. The rasta father worked on his car and smelled up the yard.

Sandra told me all sorts of interesting stories on the way. Apparently in the sixties there was an uprising of the rastas against the very few whites that were around. Ted Honeychurch tried to befriend them and defend their cause, and they kidnapped him and I think she said they killed him eventually. They killed some other people, too, so all the whites fled. She told me about a friend of hers who left her husband and two kids to go and live in a tree with a rasta who called himself “Mango.” But after a couple of years she visited Sandra and warned her to get out of Dominica, saying that she was fleeing, as well. Then there was the story about the Geneva plantation, which was huge and fruitful but got burned up and some of the family killed and now it’s a cricket field and “bits of this, that and the other.” Then there was a story of a friend of hers who was white but pretty native in his style of dressing and hygiene; he was working up on a telephone pole and a bunch of black rasta types started yelling at him to get off their island, and he yelled back, “Your island? Who do you think brought you here?”

She also told me about my Chinese astrology sign—I’m a water dog, it turns out.

Tay wrote to me today…how nice. I’m horribly tired and my neck hurts and I’m all bloated, probably all from dehydration. Funny that I don’t feel it, and drinking water only makes it feel worse. I don’t want to go back to the old mill anymore—I’m too tired and it doesn’t feel worth it. Still, what else am I going to do?

There’s this inner level that native people here don’t seem to have, or work with. I can only call it “examination”—they don’t seem to realize the sub-par level of, for example, their dance workshops, or their written publications, any of that. Or the possibility of a person’s skill having levels—if I say I’ve worked on magazines before, they hand over the job of editing and designing fully to me. If I say I’m interested in dance, I’m a dancer and qualified to teach a class. If I say I have experience in a choir, I’m qualified to critique a performance. The idea of amateur doesn’t seem to exist. If you can, you’re an expert. For some people I guess it would be nice—for me, who came here to learn more, being called upon to teach is not nice.

don't make me move

A girl walks
By tossing her angel hair
With rosewood chopsticks;

The twilit wind makes her
Skirt swish. It is time, I say, for
Revelry and exhaustion in the waterways,
But everyone is leaving, and frantic
They seem to know
Where or, at least, to extract
The last from the last.

The redbud lights seem
To have gone out,
But the moon reflects on the metal
Plate embedded in the tree,
And people are going home for the summer,
Just as the nights are growing longer,
And the weather ripening for youth.
It is time for workers to think of holiday,
But all the youth are thinking now of work.

st. pius x

his lips are the sort i have always wanted for myself.  they are blushing and soft, a little too large for his delicate face, they hang like petals unfurling too early, self-consciously, as if he didn't know quite what to do with their largess of sensuality.  that is the way of people blessed by birth.  his face, as i said, is delicate, his cheekbones broad but vertiginously triangular, his chin a round, perilous point of anchor.  your palm would have barely to open if you were to take his face in your hand...it would be more uncomfortable for you to hold your hand in such a position than for him to endure it.  his eyes are large, as they must be to fit proportionally in his wide brow, and they are crystalline grey, like woodland pools under a twilit sky, and his dark hair grows also with the generosity of some wild vernal plant springing eagerly from the ground and covering stones and the limbs of trees.  

fortunately, he is immensely intelligent--not in the smug way of most of upper-class boys that show any predilection for reading, but in the true socratic way, intently questioning, possessed of a round perspective, an idealistic vision and a pragmatic method, open and wondering as a child.  i say fortunately, because his constant interrogation affords me excuse for looking at him often, and closely, as i admit i have done.  God bless him.  

the other boys might be expected to give him a hellish time, but instead they seem to like him.  he shows an average ability in sports, along with an eager submissiveness for direction--which may be another exercise of his intelligence.  on the field he falls rather short of the platonic ideal--he does not run or leap with any beauty.  his coltish body leans forward at an ungainly angle and his hair covers his head like a mop.  it is in the sports competitions that i am most keenly reminded that he is a boy, just a boy.  i never watch for long.  

a lesson learned from a brief stint as prom queen

Being the different one makes you constantly wonder—is it because I’m white? Or American? Or just a new person? Wondering what impossible thing you could change about yourself to make the experience less awkward while knowing that it’s probably all these things together. It doesn’t matter whether you’re getting treated well or badly on account of being different. Sometimes getting treated badly is almost better, because you can ignore it. Getting treated nicely for it makes you feel guilty and then makes you feel contempt for the people doing it, for their ignorance of how ordinary you actually are.

The thing is I, and maybe many people, while we want to be known as someone “special” and “unique”, don’t want to be treated any differently as a rule. Much as you wouldn’t like to be the only one in your group that no one talked to, you wouldn’t like to be the only one whose birthday was ever celebrated, would you? Or the only one anyone ever said anything nice about?

Either way of special treatment is an incomplete recognition of who we are as people. We want others to recognize that we have strengths, because we need our confidence bolstered for it to carry on. We want others to recognize that we have weaknesses, because we need to know that we don’t have to forfeit our confidence on their account. Do you see what I mean? Recognition of both things makes us feel a right to the confidence we need to function.

Here is my inspirational thought for the day—do your heroes the favor of recognizing that they are all big screw-ups, while treating them no differently than you used to. And to those you pity or kind of despise, go on doing what you’re probably already trying to do. Recognize that in both cases, you’re only treating a whole human being like half of one.

(from march of 2007 in roseau, dominica)

the effects of violence on television

Following a suggestion
made by a poignant memoirist (who,
shall remain nameless, if we are lucky)
I came home from the library, the hairdresser’s,
and the grocery store, took up a rolling
pin and whacked it against the television.

A long crack striped the screen,
much more assertive than those uncertain
grey worms of static that
buzz, begging you to wait.

My brother left his baseball bat, again,
in the hall. I wielded it experimentally.

The practice swings were
successful. I lodged his
ball in the VCR, which feat is not mean.

Accompanying myself with a sharp
nasal hum, I reenacted
Norman Bates’ famed obsession,
then ululated like the savage,
square-jawed princess of the afternoon, taming
the mythic world in aluminum underpinnings.
I am glad no one was there to see.

As I cut swaths against
the coiled tubes, slicing
them as for a tea sandwich,
the colored wires stood out like nettles
in an unkept field. I vacuumed the shards of glass.

I hate that memoirist for her
good-looking success.

I suppose I saw
through her narcissan pool and found a murky
bottom, the fiendish
delight of beating rerun shows
to death, the joyous effect of violence
on television.

not bad, just misunderstood

Have you ever had the peculiar sensation of having your hands tied?

It chafes, very much, at first. Then you realize the peculiar release of responsibility that it involves, and in some ways it is very freeing. If everything goes to pot around you, you can’t be blamed for it. And that is a surprisingly potent source of satisfaction. Especially when you watch your captors muddle and crash. In fact you have a front-row seat.

If you keep saying yes to everything, soon they will ask you for the thing that destroys them. And then, with the same strange smile you’ve hosted for the last hundred answers, you can say again, with a exultant lift of your heart into your throat, for this is the moment of your vindication, and you only hope they realize it in the moment before they blindingly implode…

“Yes.”

Then you can go to work on your bonds.

(first published on 7.23.07, 6.39am)

magic words, vol. 5

"The world is composed of the sick, and the not-yet-sick."

new world order

He lets his keys fall on the counter. They ring with authority.

Yeah, he thinks.

He opens the refrigerator—it seems like the right thing to do. But he knows what is inside. He bought it all himself. He eats something with his fingers, because he can, looking around as he does.

Why doesn’t somebody clean up?

He smiles at himself. It's funny.

He knows what will be on television. He knows what will be on the radio. He read the news that morning.

God damn!

He flings the food back into the fridge and slams it.

Why shouldn’t he watch tv? It’s still funny. Things are still funny, even if she’s gone. And who won the game? The Cardinals still play baseball, with her or without her.

He thinks he could sit on the sofa with food on his lap and watch tv. He can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t really want to. It’s stupid to pretend.

He looks at the reporters as they speak, and he wonders how much money they make. Just for saying what they think—so many people, he ponders, do that for free. He has been hearing what people think for days. Days and weeks. They ask him what he thinks, and he only tells them what they already said. What’s funny is that they know, they and he. If I could get clear what I think, he ponders, I wouldn’t have problems and I wouldn’t give the time of day to other people’s opinions.

The game analysis ends and a show comes on. But it isn’t funny. Guys and women are not funny now, if they ever were. When a guy says something clearly wrong, and everybody watching knows it was wrong but he doesn’t, what's funny about that? And there she goes…everyone watching knew it was coming, and it’s supposed to be funny that the guy didn’t?

What’s funny is that she used to always ask him what he was thinking. She could ask it so many ways, to irritate him or seduce him—he wonders, now, if she knew the difference when she was asking. Sometimes he would want to grab her and she would look so surprised. He would get irritated and she would look so surprised.

Everybody was explaining it now. Maybe he should have been asking all along. If he had known to ask, he wonders, would he have done it?

He could throw the remote control into the screen. He could throw the tv through the window. He can do whatever he wants.

There were times, before she was gone, when he wanted to do things like that. Throw the tv, break glass. Could he have done them back then? He wonders. Because she’s gone now. Instead of doing those things, he ate with his fingers, with the bowl propped on his belly. He did it instead of throwing the tv, and hoped she would not notice. Even though he was careful, though, she is gone.

Songs keep running through his head that, he thinks, sound like they were written for him and his situation, but he doesn’t believe in that artistic intuitive bullshit. It happens to everyone, he thinks. Even songwriters and guitarists, even guys in the Cardinal post-game analysis, even Ray at the office, who asks how things are going and then nods like a guru as if all the answers were only to be expected.

You may know all this already, Ray, he thinks, but for me it’s today’s news. I didn’t know you could feel this way. I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t just drink off, or sleep off. I didn’t know you could actually lose something valuable. My mom took good care of me when I was a kid.

He wonders whether he ever had anything valuable, before. He wonders if it might help to buy something new, something expensive. But, he thinks, does he really want to? He thinks that he doesn’t.

(first published on 7.14.07, 8.53pm)

meantime

I’ve often wondered where the word “meantime” came from. It just seems too fitting.

St. Augustine of Hippo asked “What, then, is time?” Rhetoric. He was smart; he had to know the answer. Time is mean. Even I’ve always known that, even as a child. Time is a snarky, manipulative, rule-skirting kleptomaniac, the kind that sings “na na-na na na” at you from a great distance away while you’re down on the ground with a skinned knee and a bike or something on top of you.

An exhaustive search during the last fifteen minutes has got me nowhere much toward the etymology of this word, leaving me to conclude simply that it is coined in reference to time’s character, its attitude. Clearly this perspective on the nature of time is officially recognized fact and if you disagree with it, you’re wrong.

But I’m selling you short. How could you disagree? Who finds time congenial? It’s always either too fast or too slow—reliable only in being exactly what you find least comforting or convenient. Time accords no pats on the head for having learned your moral lesson from suffering or defeat. Time takes the din of success, the uproar of joy, and throws it back at you in the following silence as taunting empty echoes. And I can tell you from nearly a quarter-century of experience that time has never healed a wound of mine. The closest it has come is giving me a kick in the shin that makes me temporarily forget the kick in the head it gave me earlier. Most of the time, the wound just throbs until I consider it a part of life.

If time healed wounds, we wouldn’t use such occasions to mark the passage of time.

“No, honey, it was in ninety-two, because it was before your cataract surgery, remember?”
“I reconciled with my mom the very same morning that they realized my cancer was in remission.”
“After I got my nose job, everything changed.”

I’ve got nothing good to say about time. Everything it procures for us, it hands over with a smirk, knowing that it would have been much better if we’d had it earlier. It’s like the annoying uncle who never fails to give you a birthday present, but also never forgets to slip a whoopee cushion under you as you sit down to open it. The best I can do is take the gift it brings, grimly smile at his smug idiocy, and console myself with writing invectives that everyone will agree with.

He knows nobody likes him.
He hates New Year’s Eve as much as you do. It marks one less year he gets to make jokes at your expense.
The best thing you can do against Time is act like you’re going to live forever, and then die.

(first published on 8.2.07, 11.57am)

stick tea

i feel i must apologize to anyone i meet on the way to and from the teapot in the morning. it isn't that i'm sullen--my eyes just won't open.

don't make me go to work, clyde. i'm tired. the kids are sleeping; if i get up they'll wake up, too. it's saturday.

only a few more minutes before i have to go.

brooklyn was never good enough for my parents. i guess that's how we ended up in milwaukee. a little farther west than they set their sights. be careful what you wish for.

i was a track star in high school. did you know that? our uniforms were blue and gold. i ran the five and the ten k. as a whole our team was lousy, but i was a star. me and eddie caruso, on the men's side, always stole the show. he was a sprinter. i wish i could run now. if i didn't have to get up so early.

those two kids who come into the coffee shop in the morning--they seem so much in love. i wonder if either of them works, or has to work. that makes a difference, you know.

that's a funny thought--parents paying for their kids to get by, so they can just be in love. that's a funny thought.

why do they put sticks in this tea? it just gets in the way of waking you up, doesn't it? but it tastes all right. now my eyes are almost open.

maybe today i'll...

according to hubert selby, jr....

Sometimes we have the absolute certainty that there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.

today's weather report

"I have always been enamoured with the music of the speech in New York." --Hubert Selby, Jr.

my strange ambition to be glamorous

isn't it funny that i have never read anything yet by john updike, and now he is dead?

no. it isn't funny.

there is a great deal that i have not read. and he lived to the age of seventy-six and won almost every literary prize available, including two pulitzers.

when frank sinatra died, i did not feel sad, even though i was much better acquainted with him than i was with john updike. he lived to the age of eighty-two, was married four times, danced and acted and sang. he had a huge network of friends and spent at least two decades being paid to goof around with them on a stage.

to be honest, i feel sad for myself, that i have reached 30% of the age of john updike and achieved nothing like a percentage of his published work.

the man reportedly suffered from asthma, psoriasis, and a stammering problem during his youth, nonetheless nurturing "my strange ambition to be glamorous" among a normal family content to be normal. there must have been a point of self-assessment in his life, where he either redefined the glamor he sought, or else gave up trying to wear that particular shade of ambition.

why do we seek glamor, anyway? glamor only gains us envy and mockery. there is a certain shine that classic beauties wearing classic designers uniquely unearth, to be sure, but does that shine make you want to spend time with them? or just to be them? if we all want to be that way, we'll all wind up enjoying our own selves so much that we won't feel any need to have friends.

frank sinatra, unquestionably, was glamorous, and far from psoriasis, he had melting blue eyes; he didn't stammer, either. but his glamor was the company he kept. the man was friends with everybody, because that was what he spent his time on--giving gifts, caretaking, connecting, going to people's shows, going to people's restaurants, marrying people. whether or not he put them together, the pieces of his business plan work--if you want to have a devoted following who will keep coming back to hear you sing, you have to devote yourself to your following. people worship nothing so much as something that seems, at key moments, to worship them.

the eidos of the punk movement is to take liabilities and turn them into assets. if you can't sing on key, scream and growl a little. if you can't play very well, use a lot of aggressive distortion. it says a lot about the universal craving for god-likeness that even within that world there is a certain type of glamor that its sycophants pursue...the hilton sisters of the punk world, if you will permit me. but it gained a following--even the status of a musical genre--because the outcasts felt they were being given some attention, some validation, by the screaming voices.

what are you trying to say? who are you trying to reach? whether you enjoy or despise your self-consciousness, indulge in it rarely and only momentarily. there is too much to do. if you can't think of anything to do, i suggest you start by either calling a friend, or else writing some books.

a terrible thing

A terrible thing happened today. I looked into a copy of my alma mater’s quarterly magazine, and I found it charming.

Life is so much easier when disgust accompanies hindsight.

I didn’t wish to go back. But I had no distaste to spur me forward.

Love is so much more permanent than hate.

Hate is appetitive. Hate, when it is our prime mover in a given motion, comes with an instinctive knowledge that once it is sated, we are free to discontinue the action.

In contrast, love is a force of the intellect. It has to be, by its very nature. That is why we desire it to come to us. That is why we fear it when it comes upon us. No matter how our appetites change, or the strength of our will, the intellectual is almost eternal. “It increases in years and beauty.”

I read the magazine and I thought fondly of what had passed.
The memory of an ended period of happiness causes me pain, like being hungry and remembering Christmas dinner. But I know that hunger is better than the solid stasis of constant disgust. It just is.

Why are we so afraid of what is permanent?
I wish that I could say.

(first published on 7.2.07, 8.55am)

magic words, vol. 4

"'Judging' doesn't mean you are judgmental. 'Perceiving' doesn't mean you are perceptive."

did you ask?

i used to read this blog during the long hours i was paid to do nothing at a certain firm in new york. i think i had heard of it--blog, not firm--through an acquaintance's passing reference. it shows you how little i had to occupy my thoughts, that i could search for the source of this vague reference on the internet until i found it.

it's a niche site, wildly popular among the sorts of people who share the writer's own various conditions of health and personality. it features misty assurances that the writer's life and your own are indeed okay, that the irritations we suffer are epic tests of our mettle, along with descriptions of the writer's favorite friends and favorite foods.

why are people drawn to this kind of reading?

my own story is that i read it as a way of calming my nerves, that were frantic with idleness, as a way of passing the long hours without being engrossed in anything that was not work-related, which would have been unethical. but this is not the kind of acclaim i would post as a reader comment on a blog; this is not the kind of acclaim that is, indeed, posted as reader comments on this particular blog. the readers of this blog, to judge by their comments, are engrossed, enchanted, and occasionally outraged--by what, i cannot imagine. the writer claims to receive hate mail from time to time. (i suspect she might be exaggerating, in order to seem like one of the more important bloggers of our time.)

because i keep a blog of my own, i envy the volume of comments that follow her posts, inasmuch as it indicates an engaged and loyal readership. however, i don't tell anyone that i have a blog, unless they happen to ask to "see some of my writing," having learned from somebody else that i am a writer. i don't tell anyone that i am a writer. it seems, to me, even more self-aggrandizing than the act of keeping a blog. if you are a soldier at war, if you are a missionary, if you are a circus performer, even if you are a schoolteacher--in other words, if you have an experience that few other people have--you have a valid claim to spend time on a blog, letting the world in on your day-to-day. however, if you are a housewife, or a college professor, or an average college graduate like me, spending regular time on a description of your mundane activities seems to me excusable only because cyberspace is an unlimited resource. (...so far as we know.) starlets post on their myspace pages, while actors make motion pictures.

my story is that i keep this blog as a means of practice. i want to be a paid writer--that is, paid to write the kind of material found on this blog--but i don't have the guts to try and fail in the necessary manner. also, it is a useful means of ascertaining whether people truly want to "see some of my writing."

the idea of putting pages in someone's hand seems to me so self-aggrandizing. it will take up space in their hand, on their desk, in their bag. it will lie there reproaching them, good souls that they are, as one more thing that they have to do, that will take only five minutes probably, but five minutes they could spend on something else.

if i was a good writer, i would know it. if i was a good writer, some teacher in my youth would have pulled me aside for a serious talk, like they do in the movies. if i was a good writer, i wouldn't have time to keep a blog. if i was a good writer, people wouldn't have to ask me when they wanted to see some of my writing--they could go and buy it.

people shake their heads at the book industry, and say that it is going under, that movies and television are replacing written literature. they know little. everyone is a writer, because everyone has an idea for a story floating around in their heads. far too many books are published today, and far too few of those are published on the basis of personal merit; rather, they are published on the basis of personal connections that the writers have with powerful people in the publishing industry. books are become little more than a currency of favors owed, because everyone likes to see their own names in print, because everyone would like to see the world of their creation distributed abroad, because everyone has an idea for a story floating around in their heads, because art lessons are hard and pianos are expensive, but everyone knows how to bang a keyboard.

ooo, canada!

They opened a treasure chest that they’ve had, I don’t know how long…as long as I’ve been here…sat together on the sofa as they cracked open the lid, their legs kicking at the knees in an improbable Christopher-Robin manner, and as the lid fell back, simultaneously they said,

“Ooo-ooo!”

What is it that makes something old and familiar consistently wonderful and awe-inspiring?

I spend my energy trying to devise new activities, innovative but simple projects, and they just want to crack open their old treasure box full of toys they already know, and know what to do with.

Then they abandon that toy and just play airplane, sitting on the same sofa, holding their school backpacks that they’ve stuffed with random junk from the playroom; they tell each other where they are and where they are going—canada, for no reason I know—then they move into another room and suddenly they are in a hotel. And that’s it. They are just there and it’s blowing their mind, clearly. Suddenly conversation ceases; alarmed, I look over and find that they have returned to the airplane, a more compelling setting than the hotel room, apparently. They are not looking at me—what are they looking at? They both say, low and breathless, leaning over the arm of the sofa,

“Ooooo, Canada!”

They remember things I did or said from days and weeks ago, and when I come down in the morning they say, “Remember when you cried like a baby? Remember when you made that face? Do it again! I want to see you do it again!”

And so I did it.

I say we can walk to the playground, down where the ducks live, and they look at me for a moment and then they say,

“Or…we can go to that playground out there,” and they point to their backyard.

They’ll get worked up in theory over the foreign, but they prefer to stick with the familiar for actual use.

Maybe it’s because they know what to do with it. Maybe it’s because they can make it whatever they want it to be.

(first published on 7.9.07, 8.58am)