Lemons, pt. 2 

“When God gives you papercuts, don't make lemonade.

The Woman Who Planted Her Children 

When the first one died, she buried it herself in her own backyard, and on that spot grew a beautiful tree, which she named Sarah.

When the second died and was buried, another tree sprouted, and she called it Daniel.

So it was for each of them, a tree for a child, till at the end of her own life, she had a forest for a family, and was herself laid to rest in this quiet grove of sadness.

Inner monologue of a Lakers fan 

I'm so happy now.

I'm so happy now, I'm screaming uncontrollably.

I'm so filled with joy that I'm hugging a stranger.

I feel so vindicated, I'm tearing off my own shirt.

I'm so exalted, I want to punch a woman in the face.

My life is so complete, I'm throwing a brick into a crowd of strangers.

I'm so happy now, I'm turning this car over and lighting it on fire.

I want to rape you all.

We won.

The world is so good.

The Rowboat 

I had a rowboat but I lost it.

I live in a place, inhabited but not overcrowded, and the boat would take me away from it, through bubbling channels and quiet lagoons, to drift instead among the frogs and the light-footed dragonflies that skate on the surface of the pond. It's not long being in the boat before my troubles disappear; I disappear, into the swirls of water, or swirls of algae in the water, imagining shapes onto them as if they were clouds; or I look into the shapes of the clouds reflected onto the surface of the water; or I look into the clouds themselves. I follow the current's meanderings, navigating its minute discoveries—why is the air cooler here?—why do the fish gather there?—Hello, old rock. I might as well be sailing around the world, I'm so far from my troubles; till I find my way back, more at peace than before, tie up my boat, and resume my business.

Then one day the boat was gone, whether stolen or lost to the weather or a weakness of the rope or most likely the carelessness of my knot, I don't know; but I'm sure it's the last: that one day, I'd have paddled up toward the dock, drifted, bumped it, stepped springing onto the bouncing pier, sun in my eyes, sweat dripping from my brow, smell of summer on my skin and in my hair, some sogginess from water, worry about sunburn, hungry, missed phone calls, impatient to-do lists, life—I forgot to tie up my little boat, or tied it poorly, I'm sad to concede. Waves pushed at it, gently, again and again, into the dock, knocking like a welcome but tentative guest; then, disheartened, nudged by a chance in the wind, pulled it in the other direction. Away. Adrift.

Headless, the boat wandered toward a deeper part of the pond, where, finding an easy current, followed it to the place the pond meets the creek; stalled for a while on a shallow embankment; nudged again loose and away, to the spot less visible to us than the fishes where the creek becomes the river, where the river opens out to the sea, and the boat was free free free, tiny on top of a whole underwater world, rising up on the waves, falling, up and down, the earth's own breath; and in this way, it torqued and turned and traveled the world, following warm waters up, passing bare beaches and thick forests, steep cliffs, crackling ice, breaching whales, flocks of birds, flocks of fishes; vessels too passed it and noticed it or passed it and failed to notice, fishermen from Portugal, from Japan; an ocean tanker which itself contained a kind of ocean; happy people in the heavy sun; sad people; people of all kinds. This little boat saw them all, though it didn't understand or recognize them, but drifted on, oblivious to the richness of its adventures; while I, at home, regretted my poor knot and thought on it often.

String Theory 

String theory. Noun. A single unified model in physics which can explain why headphone cables get so tangled and why shoes always come untied.

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Technologies for the Down and Out 

Duct tape
Scratch-off
Bedbug repellent
Plunger
Pennies
Anti-itch cream
Wet vac
Tax lawyer
Pay phone
Cover-up
Glue solvent
Airplane toilet
Gravestone

The Man of Tomorrow 

Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?," he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had evidence that Lex Luther was developing an advanced computer virus to take over the world. "How are you going to save us," the President asked him, "if you don't even know how to open up Outlook?"

"If I can't open up Outlook, I'll be the only one safe from the virus!" But he didn't like to think of himself as ignorant, so he hired a cousin of Jimmy Olsen's to install a complement of hardware and software into the Fortress of Solitude.

"How do I turn it on?," he asked the IT guy.

"The Internet? You don't turn on the Internet. It's always on, like the Sun."

Lois came over to show him how it all worked. "You should Google yourself! Look—one million, four-hundred sixty thousand results! Hey, click on the 'News' link: see if my stories are at the top."

"It says I already have a page on MySpace. What's MySpace?"

"Don't worry about MySpace," Lois answered.

When she came back a week later, he was still sitting at the computer. "Hey Lois! I'm the mayor of the Fortress of Solitude! @ThatSuperman has 400,000 followers!"

"You have a Twitter account?"

"I've got to protect my online brand, Lois."

The Internet afforded Superman with a whole new set of data that he could use to monitor crime, and to keep peace and order across the planet.

"Wait—Lex Luther is your Facebook Friend?"

"Well, we know a lot of the same people from high school. And sometimes he harvests my crops in Farmville. Anyway, he doesn't really have time for world dominion anymore."

The Internet was far more effective at eliminating violent crime than Superman had ever been, because the criminals now mostly stayed at home—uploading photos of old capers, editing Wikipedia entries on classic bank heists, and playing each other at Mafia Wars till they fell asleep at their keyboards, icing each other all night long, from the safety of their dreams.

Koan of the Jigsaw Puzzle 

The Zen master scatters the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle across the table. He does not attempt to assemble the puzzle. Instead, he picks up a single piece at random and contemplates it for the rest of the day.

The solution to the puzzle is the puzzle. The puzzle is the solution to the puzzle.

Longevity 

It was one of those silly online quizzes that suck up so much time and you're not even sure why you're taking it. This one claimed to be able to predict my exact lifespan, based solely on my answers to a few pages of multiple choice questions.

"Do you hold on to things?" was the question that disconcerted me. The prior questions had been about diet, exercise, and congenital predispositions. "Do you hold on to things?" I pretended momentarily to misunderstand, but of course I knew that the automated, multiple choice Internet quiz was asking me about her.

*     *     *

Earlier that morning, walking down the street, I passed by a little girl, a cute Asian-fusion child who hid behind the leg of her nanny. "Why are you hiding?," the woman asked. "I'm not hiding!" Petulant and adorable, and I almost started crying right there on the sidewalk, maybe because this child reminds me so much of her, or maybe because all children do, the idea of children, my idea of having them: this creature is the incarnation of a lost dream, the daughter I failed to have. It's my leg she should've been using for shelter, hiding her eyes in her own hair.

Hair. The word "hair." In itself, it shouldn't evoke any particular association of color or texture or smell. Everyone has hair. But I notice now, to me, "hair," simply "hair," implies the strands of it on my pillow, implies my hands running through it, implies the scent that I want lingering in the air. I've lost the word to her. I wonder how many such words I've lost: how many otherwise-neutral territories of vocabulary I've surrendered to her occupation. Like the strands of hair themselves, I may never stop finding traces of her, hidden in forgotten corners, left behind.

*     *     *

"No," I answer the questionnaire. "I don't hold on to things," and in its spite for the lie I told, it tells me that I'll live forever.

Sports Talk 

The guys at the bar talking so passionately about sports don't realize that if you swap out the nouns in their sentences, they're having the same conversation that the toddlers outside are having about their sticker collections.

Tech Support Our Troops 

The people most interested in my blog this week are making repeated visits from Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I can't tell from looking at my analytics software which blog posts they like most. "Therapy" and "Page Not Found" are both popular.

But the visitors from Fort Huachuca, Arizona aren't much interested in reading, really.

Fort Huachuca, Arizona is home to the United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command, and it seems that this week, they've started basic training in "SQL injections"—a process by which a hacker tries to get at usernames and passwords and whatever else, by appending some computer code to the end of a page's URL:

http://site.com/article.php?id=9%20union%20select%20Username,0,1,2%20from%20admin

As the people at USAISEC surely know, it's prudent to add some simple protections to your website, to help prevent SQL injections: a tweak to the php.ini file, for instance, and an extra function to strip the most dubious keywords from the URL's string ($string = eregi_replace($badWords, "", $string);)

Whatever their motive, I'm glad the site's found new visitors! Welcome, USAISEC! Don't forget to "like" me on Facebook and "follow" me on Twitter! I hope you find some things here that you like, and I hope that my usernames and passwords are not among those things.

Thanks for keeping us safe.

An American Dream 

The blast of cold air blew through our office and unmoored the various collected memos, contracts, loosely-held Post-It notes, food menus, and business cards, so it looked like a ticker tape parade, or anyway, it looked like our idea of a ticker tape parade: none of us had ever seen a ticker tape parade. None of us had ever seen ticker tape.

"Jesus!," someone shouted. Then another: "Jesus! Jesus!" Jesus was suddenly everywhere.

One of the employees had climbed out his window and was now balanced on a ledge he shared with three skittish pigeons.

I didn't even know the windows opened this high up.

Somehow it fell on me to talk him back inside, maybe because I am the designated fire deputy, or maybe I was designated as the fire deputy for the same reason that I was now being chosen for this task—a reason which has never been made clear to me.

"Doug," I called out.

Nothing in my background as a copywriter had specifically prepared me to help in situations such as these.

"Doug, why don't you come back inside?"

He didn't answer. I'd expected him to look like a crazed person out there on the ledge, but he didn't. He looked collected, all things considered. The pigeons, too, had settled down, acclimated to the idea of him, and the four of them perched there, Doug and the three birds, as if resting, or admiring the sunset, or waiting for the train.

"Doug," I tried again. Was it normal to keep saying a person's name in these instances? I did it naturally without planning, and wondered if it was residual muscle memory from some mandatory management training session. "Is everything okay? You want to talk?"

"Oh, hey," he said to me, as if noticing me for the first time, as if we'd bumped into each other in the kitchenette while fetching coffee.

"What are you doing out there, man?"

A pigeon started pecking curiously at his leg, and he shooed it away till all three birds flew off, flock mind.

"Aren't you cold?," I asked him.

"I'm good."

"Come on, it's winter out. Why don't you come back inside?"

"I don't want to go back inside. I don't want to go back inside ever." He looked at me, and I noticed he was sweating. "I don't want that life anymore," he said, and he shivered, maybe at the thought of staplers and khaki pants and action items, or maybe just the cold air.

"Okay. That's okay. You don't have to. I mean, why don't you come back in, and then you can have any life you want. Start over. Have an adventure. Start fresh. It's the American dream, right? No matter what you think, you can come back inside and then have any life you want."

I helped him climb back through the window, and then security helped him out of the building, and then the police helped him to the hospital, and after three days under observation, the hospital released him into the care of his parents, which, if you ask me, is enough to make any grown man a suicide risk.

The Common Cant 

“I am no blog reader,” “I seldom look into blogs;” “Do not imagine that I often read blogs;” “It is really very well for a blog,” —such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh, it is only a blog!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her laptop with affected indifference or momentary shame.

The Man in My Eyes 

When I close my eyes, there's a man talking to me. He's little, and if he's making sound, I can't hear it, but he sits on the inside of my eyelid, well-dressed, behind a desk, like a newscaster on a tiny television, reporting sternly and firmly on the passing of pressing events.

I don't know what he's saying but I know it's important.

He's not there every time I close my eyes—only intermittently, usually at the ends of long days. Sometimes he's changed his tie or he's wearing a different colored shirt. Even in a pink shirt he looks composed and urgent.

He's very small, and it's hard to make out the movement of his lips, but one word I think I can make out, because he uses it so often: "Help."

Lately, he's been cutting to other correspondents with greater and greater frequency. They're always on the scene of a terrible disaster—plane crash or hurricane or the death of an innocent child. When the correspondent finishes, they cut back to the original little man, but he always takes a moment of solemn stillness before his lips begin to move again, silent reading of an unknown almanac.

"Help," the little man is saying inside my eyes, and then maybe, after that (it's hard to tell) "yourself."

Agoraphobia.11n 

agoraphobia.11n. Noun. An abnormal fear of open or public places that are out of range of free, reliable WiFi.

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Eskimo Words for "Brunch" 

The common conception that Eskimos have "dozens" or "a hundred" or "hundreds" of words for brunch is a problematic one on many fronts. First, there is no single language called "Eskimo": this is merely a convenient (and offensive) grouping of two major cultural groups of the region, more correctly known as the Inuit and Aleut.

Second, what is a "word"? It is difficult to know when to distinguish between noun-verb pairs, complex or irregular verb conjugations, gerunds, phrasal verbs, etc. Part-of-speech disambiguation is a challenge in any language.

However: the peoples of this region do in fact make many fine linguistic distinctions regarding this ritualistic midday meal. For instance, the Inuit use no fewer than twenty-four separate lexemes¹ to describe in greater specificity what we in English characterize simply as "brunch."

qanuk

Brunch before noon

kaneq

Early afternoon brunch

kanevvluk

Brunch after 2:30pm

sanajait

Brunch cooked at home

namiippunga

Brunch eaten out

muruaneq

Brunch with a lover

nutaryuk

Brunch with a new lover

qetrar

Brunch with your friends

nevluk

Brunch with your family

tuktu

A savory brunch

mutuk

A sweet brunch

mamaqtuq

A brunch mixing sweet and savory

qujannamiik

Brunch with powdered sugar

pirta

Brunch in the air

aniu

Brunch crusting on the ground

qanisqineq

A mimosa brunch

quisuktunga

A Bloody Mary brunch

qanikcaq

Brunch involving three or more alcoholic beverages

qengaruk

All-you-can-eat brunch

utvak

Mother's Day brunch

ajjiliurumajagit

Weekday brunch (seldom used)

navcaq

Wedding brunch

natquik

Breakup brunch

navcite

Unexpected breakup brunch

As you can see, there is meaning to be derived from the truism about "Eskimos" and the number of words for brunch, despite its problematic and non-academic origin.

1. The list is organized according to lexeme meanings. Perhaps somewhat arbitrarily I have counted twenty-four of them. But an even more arbitrary decision is left to the discretion of the reader: the decision of how to count the lexemes themselves. Here are some of the problems you face:

    (a) Are all twenty-four lexeme meanings really 'brunch'-meanings? That is, do words with these meanings really count for you as words for brunch?

    (b) There are some synonyms present—alternative lexemes with the same meaning, like 'effete' vs. 'academic' in English. Are you going to count them separately, or together?

    (c) If you decided to count synonyms together, will you also count together both of the members of noun-verb pairs having basically the same meaning? (The members are, technically speaking, separate lexemes since partly idiosyncratic morphological changes mark the verbal forms, and must therefore be listed separately in any truly informative dictionary, as indeed Jacobson's dictionary does.)

    (d) Following Jacobson, I've specially labelled those lexemes that only occur in a small subpart of the Central Alaskan Yupik-speaking region. Are you going to try to make counts for each separate dialect? If yes, you will wonder if you really have enough information to do so. (You're not alone in this. Such information is difficult to compile, whether or not you are a linguist, and also whether or not you are a native speaker of a language.)

Choke 

“The danger of being clever is that your heart will choke on your tongue.

My Movie Pitch 

"Here's my movie pitch. Wanna hear it?

"There's this guy—this young, bright, hopeful guy. Like Orlando Bloom coulda played him a couple years ago, before he got old. But not Shia LaBeouf. Smarter than Shia LaBeouf.

"This guy, he gets outta college, he gets a job, everything's going pretty good, and then ... he starts feeling like he's losing himself, you know? Losing track of his dreams. So he says, "Fuck you, job! I quit! I'm gonna chase my dreams!"

"But it's too late, see? Because he's already forgotten them. So he just stumbles around all the time, trying to remember what he wanted.

"It's sort of Reality Bites meets Memento meets The Road."

The Manuscript 

“Working on a poetry manuscript is like masturbating to a picture of a woman you've loved for years.

The 100th Floor 

In all his days as a window washer, he had never once seen a door on the outside of the hundredth floor, until that day.

They'd started at the roof, as always, plunging their small platform over the edge and then riding it down, little by little. They enjoyed each other's company, but even more, they enjoyed the silence, the silence and the squeaking sounds as they worked over the glass. They enjoyed their own never-ending rhythm, fanning in graceful arcs, fanning and dunking and drying, complementing one other, filling in the limits of each other's reach.

They almost never looked inside the windows; they almost never cared to. The people inside were murky shadows, like ghosts, or underpaintings, or characters in an old, washed-out silent film. Their shapes distorted as the windows were doused, then wiped dry, doused, then wiped dry, and the men on the scaffold noticed the people inside only sometimes, the way one notices shells on the ocean floor, revealed after a passing wave, then hidden, then forgotten.

They loosened the ties on the pulleys and lowered themselves, and started again, window after window, floor after floor.

Outside, the Sun was an arm's reach away.

Outside, the wind was cruel.

Outside, they brought with them their own weather. On cloudy days, their scaffolding would sometimes seem to ascend above the clouds into a sunshine that no one on the ground could see. On sunny days, such as today, the window washers would sometimes disappear into a small cloud that hovered over their platform, perhaps fashioned from the water they were carrying and from the heat of their own breath.

It was from such a cloud, and dangling from a heaven-high roof, they wiped at the windows again and again and again; and in an otherwise unremarkable moment, their little cloud parted, and that was when he saw it—the door, high above him, high and to the right: a glossy black door with a brass knob that reflected the sunlight into his eyes, a heavy wooden door set into the vertical plane of steel and glass, an impossible door.

The other men were already unfurling the platform down the building and bringing the door farther out of reach, and he knew then that if he didn't reach for it, didn't at least try, then he'd never have a chance again, and never know what lay on its other side; and without a word to his colleagues and friends (for they preferred to work in silence), he stepped off the platform; and they never did understand why.

The Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto, pt. 1 

Or, What I Like: Thoughts Toward an Essay

A year ago, in an effort to help cultivate more of the writing that I myself like to read, I sent out a call for fiction, and attached the following statements as a short manifesto:

1. We believe there are many ways of looking at the world, and you can see a lot by sometimes closing your eyes.
2. We believe the best ideas come out in unexpected ways.
3. We believe fairy tales are for grown-ups, who might not always be able to puzzle out the moral.
4. We believe the medium is a message, and we like the digital medium.
5. We believe in concision and negative space.
6. We believe a lot can be built with shoestrings.
7. And we believe that stories—even short ones—especially short ones—should leave us feeling transformed.

People did send stories. (Thanks!) But I also received one short, unexpected, hateful email from a stranger: four sentences of unsolicited vitriol which can be politely summed up by its final line, "Get a job!" I had a job, but apparently something in my bullet list struck a nerve, and made this man understand me to be lazy, wasteful, and anti-capitalist. Whether those things are true or not is beside the point. (They probably are true.) The point is, with precious few clues as to what set him off, I'd like to guess that he was lashing out at the term "fairy tale."

Nothing evokes childhood and its spendthrift squandering of time—time, the most precious of all adult commodities!—quite so quickly as the fairy tale. These are stories set in faraway times and places, starring princes and frogs and whole casts of characters whom we can never hope to be. These royals and freaks struggle in worlds that don't even share our own laws of physics: wolves speak, at least one parent is always deceased, and the prick of a needle might put you to sleep for years. The world is warped, causality is surreal, and a practical person could reasonably conclude that the morals of these stories must certainly be useless to us. The fairy tale is the most extravagant example of the uselessness of all fiction, and the uselessness of the time that we give to it.

Yet this talk of "use" and "commodities" speaks exactly to the fairy tale's real value. This, then, is a "Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto," because it proclaims that one function of these stories is to liberate you from the belief that your time must be well spent. When you read a fairy tale, your time is getting wasted, and you, the worker/shopper disappear; as a reader, you are transported, however briefly, into a place where the concerns of your job cease to exist, where nothing is being bought or sold, where shopping won't solve any problems, and where things are, in general, much too weird ever to be commodified.

Thus, the act of valuing a fairy tale is a radical act, because it expresses your independence from a capitalist dialectic (working/shopping) that defines so much of our everyday ("workaday") existence. Every time that I decide I "don't have time" for fiction, what I'm actually deciding is that it has too little "value," in the sense that it doesn't help me to get any of "my work" done (though "my work" is, in these cases, usually actually someone else's work). This habit strengthens the value of capitalism in my mind and on my time, and it weakens and devalues imagination—the one place we are most free.

The point of a fairy tale is to enable you and to train you to think fantastically, and expansively. It enables your humanity, and makes you a bigger, richer human being—arguably, I think, even more so than "getting a job."¹

1. I don't at all mean to limit the discussion of "fairy tales" to the Hans Christen Anderson and the Grimm Brothers: these stories are so entrenched and well-known that they may make it harder to think expansively: they are too canonical. But I do mean to include Garcia-Marquez, Isabel Allende, etc.; Milan Kundera; Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, etc.; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, many of the writers associated with "slipstream", etc. etc. etc.... in short, I mean nearly all of the writers I read and like.^{2, 3}

2. The occasion for writing this not-quite-essay was a recent conversation with a friend regarding a playwright I much admire, Sarah Ruhl, and the common criticism that her work can be "twee." I disagree both that her work is "twee" and also that "twee" is, in itself, a criticism. Since none of my feelings on this particular subject made it into the above passage, I'd like to hope there will be a "Part Two"....

3. See also, "Mythic Proportions."

Chafe 

chafe. French for "My inner thighs are too fat."

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The Second Step 

“The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. The second step is dry-heaves and shakes. No wonder we linger on step one.

The Lomo American Dream 

A Walk on Hollywood Boulevard

Like so many before, you've come to Hollywood in search of the American Dream. It's the only place to look, really. Hard-working families in Cleveland, hopeful artists in Tulsa, military brats in El Paso, school teachers in Sarasota all have some chance of happiness where they stand; but if you really want to shine, you have to chase the sun. Chase Apollo's chariot as far west as you can go, and if you're one of the lucky few, you might actually catch it.

The city is ugly. Hollywood is the first, best proof that "All that glitters is not gold." (Sometimes it's just the reflection off a tarnished fender on the car ahead of you in the traffic jam.) The sun does that: turned up to full strength, as it is here (it goes to eleven!), it reveals things differently, for better and for worse. The same way that direct sun hastens the aging of paper or paint, it hastens the aging of everything. Arriving in Hollywood during the bright of day is like arriving at at bar after last call, as the bartender throws on the lights and reveals everything in a way it was never meant to be seen. Some things are better off in the dim.

Hollywood is one of those things. Seen from afar, on television, on Oscar night, it's the very definition of glamour. But to walk, as tourists walk, along Hollywood Boulevard from Vine to La Brea, is a disorienting experience, because there is no glamour—only storefront after storefront of cheap souvenirs, t-shirts, plastic Oscars, keychains, fast food, tawdry nylon lingerie. (Hollywood as it's depicted on Oscar Night is as temporary and contrived as the overpriced hairdos and costumes that the starlets wear; as temporary and contrived as the movies that they've arrived to celebrate. And why wouldn't it be? The event is a celebration of illusion. Once the camera crews and cinematographers leave, everything returns to its natural lomography.)

Still, people come, partly because the image-makers who control our access to the American Dream are so good at what they do, and partly because there is simply nowhere else to go. When you arrive in Hollywood, you're drawn like a moth to the spotlights that they point at the sky (as if each and every night is a gala event), and you arrive at the source, Hollywood and Vine—to find nothing: an unused subway stop, a small dive bar, and a restaurant known for its chicken and waffles. But like Dorothy landed in Oz, you recover from your disorientation to make out the trail of stars set into the sidewalk: they are  fantastical breadcrumbs of hope, commemorating so many who have chased their dream and achieved it—so you follow them, and hardly notice that, for all of the names on all of these stars on this sidewalk, you've barely heard of any of them. Time has erased them as surely as it erases everyone.

As you work your way west, the metaphors become unbearably obvious: the Hollywood Wax Museum defies you to tells the difference between its wax visages and the real stars: it suggests, though probably by accident, not that the wax sculptures are lifelike, but rather that the celebrities never were. "Look at these waxy corpses, and see the resemblance to the beauty you've grown up to revere!" There is a sheen coming off the fake skin. All that glitters is not gold.

Across the street, the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum offers a similar message: you pay an exorbitant admission fee to gain access to an underwhelming collection of exhibits—mostly plastic placards and animatronics that have long since failed; and in the end, you're forced to conclude, "No, I don't believe it"—but not for the reasons Ripley had intended.

Finally, at Hollywood and Highland, you arrive at the site of the Academy Awards, and a mock red carpet, set into the sidewalk, beckons you. You follow it into an enormous structure that looks equal parts Egyptian and Nazi: there are statues and flags and ascendant columns everywhere. Here, under these lights and in the cool California breeze, you feel you've finally arrived: you inhale deeply to get your first real taste of the American Dream; then your eyes adjust to the spotlights, and you make out the signs: Sephora. American Apparel. Lucky Brand Jeans. You followed the Yellow Brick Road, and it led you to a shopping mall.

Perfect Love 

Or, Romantic Idealism, pt. 5

I could love a photo of you, but never the real person. I could pass an hour every day looking at images of your perfection, but couldn't abide to spend an hour next to you.

No. No, I've said that wrong, because when I look at your picture, I'm imagining myself at your side—so it's not a problem of proximity. It's that, in my imagination, we're advanced so far into the future that it's painless: you're leaning on my shoulder with infinite calm; our questions are answered, and the hours of awkwardness spent to earn this comfort are half-forgotten (and half-deified). There's no more worry of being misunderstood, no more wondering what not to say. Glass half-full or -empty, it's no matter. It's brimming over now.

But now, the reality of you is too powerful and painful and real. I can't look at you, in all your realness. Why can't you love me (enough)? We love and hate each other for the same reasons, for our particularness. So much better to look at photos, perfect and framed; to retouch them, transpose them onto a better future. Everything is always better in the future. (In that, it is so much like the past.)

Better still to dream on photos of strangers, rich with the unknown, and then to transpose you upon them, till they are perfect. In my mind, so much is perfect. In my mind (and only there) I can make perfect love.

White Man Tan 

white man tan. Noun. A sunburn.

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The Introspective Superhero 

or, Fortress of Solitude, pt. 2

The Introspective Superhero would happily rescue people, if only he knew with certainty that's what they wanted. But it's hard to know what's best.

Take Anna, for instance. Her tabby cat Bartholomew is currently stuck up a tree, beyond Anna's reach. Bartholomew is getting more and more frightened at his situation, and he keeps pushing himself farther up the tree, as if sensing that the ground is an enemy from which he must retreat. Anna, too, is beginning to panic, though she's normally quite level-headed: she thought the cat would have good enough sense to come down by now, and since he hasn't, she's becoming unsure of how to resolve the situation.

Nothing would be easier for the Introspective Superhero than to swoop in, fetch the cat off its branch, and return it safely to Anna's worried arms. But how much better would it be, he wonders, if Anna were to arrive at her own solution—remembering, say, the old stepladder in her apartment building's shared garage; setting up the ladder; confronting her own modest fear of heights; and, from a rung halfway up, luring the cat Bartholomew back down to safety? How much more confident and empowered would she feel? How much more fond of her cat, and herself, at the opportunity, years from now, to look back nostalgically at her afternoon's heroics, and how her actions had brought her and her cat closer together? The intervention of the Introspective Superhero would not help her. It would diminish her.

Even in matters of life and death, the path of the Introspective Superhero isn't always clear. He remembers painfully a time when, during a bank robbery at United First Federal, one of the thieves pointed a gun at the chest of a police officer and fired. The Introspective Superhero used his lightning speed to interject himself between the officer and the speeding bullet. But the policeman was furious. "I was wearing my vest!" he yelled, pointing at his Kevlar. The gunshot wound would likely have been trivial, but would have afforded the middle-aged beat cop a medal, promotion, and a path to an easy retirement. The District Attorney, too, was put out by the hero's actions. Till he'd arrived on the scene, it had been a clear open-and-close case of armed robbery; but against the Introspective Superhero, all weapons were useless, and the bank robber's lawyer convincingly argued the judge down to a misdemeanor.

Superpowers, it seems, don't make the world less complicated. Rather, because they afford the hero with near-infinite options, they make the world incredibly more difficult to manage. Each choice presents so many possible outcomes that it's impossible to guess which one is best. That's why most nights, though the hero could be saving innocent lives, instead he elects to stay at home and do very little. The best way to make the world better, he reasons, is to avoid it altogether.

In Between Days 

Time travel necessarily evokes a kind of identity crisis, and this trip is no different.

From the moment I stepped off the Virgin America flight to Los Angeles (a flight consciously decorated in blue neon so as to resemble a space ship), this visit has been less like arriving at a different place and more like arriving at a different time: I drive the streets I knew ten years ago, toward places I knew ten years ago, to see people I knew ten years ago; and I am then. I am transported so I am from that time. The sun is shining. Everything is perfect.

In fact, it's better than perfect. This little moment, an air bubble in time, has none of the relentless march of my normal, linear life: this is a discrete event, misplaced into some other timeline—a transcendent resplendent reprieve from everything.

Who am I, here, now? People introduce me to their friends with titles I'd never have thought to pick for myself. But they'll do: they fit as well as any. Transplanted from my own personal collection of tasks and troubles, it doesn't actually matter much what I'm called.

I soak in the desert sun; it bleaches away everything.

My stay in L.A. is in between things—in between states and definitions and worries, in between heartaches and misgivings and hopes—a Bardo. I'm here till I'm next reborn (and as what, I don't know...).

Heart-Healthy Headache 

Heart-healthy headache. Noun. A red wine hangover.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Preemptive Eating 

Preemptive eating. Phrasal verb. Consuming an extra meal immediately prior to a dinner party, brunch meeting, etc., in order to avoid the appearance of gluttony.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

When in the course of human events 

“It's important not to confuse 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' with 'An opportunity to shop.'

The Travelers' Guide to Scatology 

Few issues are more serious to a traveler than pooing.

For those of us who have settled into a happy biological routine (TMI: for me, it's 7:45am every day, on the button), travel can be very upsetting, physically and emotionally. Despite the clockwork precision of our bodies, we'll inevitably find ourselves in unexpected situations...

Part One: Air Travel

This week, at 7:45am, I was in an airport security line, row upon row of winding stanchions holding roughly fifty people ahead of me and fifty behind: I was carefully herded by bored armed guards eager for any signs of (um) irregular behavior. I'd have to be very careful about making any sudden (um) movements or getting out of line.

For better or worse, though, nature never called. 7:45 came and went without incident, sparing me the awkwardness of dashing for a men's room and the associated health risks of sitting on a "Who knows where it's been?" toilet seat.

But not having to "go" at 7:45am also meant that I didn't "go" at 7:45am, a natural occurrence that I perceived as ominous in the way that one might perceive the Sun's failure to rise as ominous: a sign that something is wrong, and quite possibly on an apocalyptic scale.

Travel: the bestranged hours of waking and sleeping, so much unusual eating, the unpredictable stressors of departures and arrivals, all seem uniquely suited for digestive disruption. When you're traveling, no matter how "regular" you think you are, all bets are off.

It was in this state that I boarded a crowded airplane for six hours, and took my place at the window seat. I know it's imprudent to put these words in the same sentence, but sitting on that plane, I was a time bomb waiting to explode.

I'm a stress eater. Not too long after takeoff, I started grazing steadily on the food I'd stowed aboard—"chipmunk food," because it travels pretty well: fruit, nuts, sunflower seeds. High fiber food. The flight attendants, meanwhile, eager to please but with so few actual options at their disposal, came by every couple minutes to top up a bottomless cup of coffee.

If I was a time bomb, then these things were the timers and detonators, the fuses and blasting caps; and we were set to go off.

*     *     *

"Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. You are free to move about the cabin." Thus began the mass exodus of three-hundred coach passengers toward the two restrooms at the rear of the plane. The migration was so sudden and so complete that I don't doubt the pilot felt a sudden jerk on the control stick, from the abrupt shift of weight. It was rush hour at Grand Central; it was bumper-to-bumper on the 405. We were queued up and going nowhere, at five hundred miles per hour.

*     *     *

Airplane lavatories remind me of my first New York apartment, with the square footage and obtuse angles. You forget how much innovation there is still in plumbing design, till you remember the ingenious toilet-makers who squeeze a mostly-functional toilet and a Barbie-sized sink into a room only slightly larger than my ass.

*     *     *

If you've ever been splashed by the backdraft off the airplane toilet's high-powered flush, you never look at the color blue quite the same ever again.

*     *     *

Angling to sit on the toilet, you're grateful you didn't quit that Vinyasa Flow class series. It's overpriced. but now suddenly worth every penny, because you'll need all of that strength and flexibility just to stand up.

Haha. Ass-ana. Get it?

*     *     *

Too late, you realize everyone who had been ahead of you in line had been a woman; and women have a different relationship with toilet paper than men; and used up all of it.

*     *     *

The flush of an airline toilet is a great exhale, a momentarily-deafening sound that would seem to indicate something hydraulic. It is the same sound that movies use to indicate all of the air being sucked out of the cabin, as when a bullet shatters an airplane window. And thank God, because the air inside this little cubbyhole commode is something you definitely want sucked out of the cabin.

*     *     *

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're beginning our final descent. Please return to your seats. Thank you for flying with us, and we hope you enjoyed your flight."

Secret of the Universe, pt. 2 

There is no secret of the universe.

By which I mean, the universe is a miraculous but fairly transparent place; and if you spend your time seeking the meaning that you can't see, then you risk missing the meaning that is right in front of your eyes.

Frequently-Asked Questions 

The following questions are based on actual search queries which lead people to this site.

What is a sherpa? Can you carry my luggage?

A sherpa is a member of a Himalayan people famous for their ability to guide prideful Europeans up to the top of tall, treacherous mountains. But I grew up outside Philly, lived in Southern California for a while, and now make my home in New York. I'm happy to share what I know, and if I'm nearby, then yes, I can help you lift your suitcase into the plane's overhead compartment. Beyond that, you're on your own.   Learn more ››

Is Visine poisonous? Does it cause diarrhea?

I have no idea. I'm not a doctor, a chemist, or a poison control center. Seriously, why would you ask a blogger something as serious as this?   Learn more ››

Why do bagels suck in Boston?

It's all about the water. Also, it's about the fact that many things suck in Boston. The people there just don't know any better.   Learn more ››

What does Johnny Depp's tattoo say?

Why don't you ask him?   Learn more ››

How do you like your coffee?

I'll have what Kyle MacLachlan's having.   Learn more ››

Should I kill myself?

Maybe.   Learn more ››

How is Hillary Clinton in the sack?

Really? You're asking me this?   Learn more ››

Can I download cover versions of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" from this site?

Leonard Cohen is a brilliant artist who ran into financial difficulties late in life. If you like the song "Hallelujah," please consider buying it through legitimate channels, and send some money his way. He deserves it.   Learn more ››

Do you do any real writing?

Mind your own business. I don't tell you how to run your life, do I?

... and dreamt of becoming infinite 

“ Los Angeles is a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua tree and the May pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite.

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Pilgrimage to the Future Catastrophe

I lived in Los Angeles for seven years—long enough, no doubt, to have formed deep personal associations and memories of the place; yet, anymore, when I visit, it feels less like a reunion and more like a pilgrimage to pay homage to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (who once called the city "the finished form of the future catastrophe").

There are many things to love about Los Angeles, and many things to hate. Too few people understand that they are the same things. The garish excess, the social stratification, the semi-disposability of everything: this is American capitalist culture at its apex. From my home in New York City, I can see the high-rise towers of the great financial investment banks in downtown Manhattan, but the view from these steel pinnacles is reserved for a privileged few: New York may be the brain of American capitalism, but its body is surely in the archipelago of shopping malls that run from the Sherman Oaks Galleria all the way down to Rodeo Drive.

To live in Los Angeles is to consume, literally and metaphorically: every time I leave my home, I'll consume gasoline, to consume the miles between me and my destination; and once I've arrived at that destination, I've probably gone there to shop for something. This is not unique to Los Angeles. "All America," said Baudrillard, "is Disneyland." But Los Angeles was first: the first freeways, the first fast food chains, the first suburbs, the first exurbs, the first malls.

"As goes California, so goes the nation."

California is also home to the contemporary incarnation of the American Dream. Hard work is no longer required! Just a telegenic attitude, and the right hair. "Style" and "fashion" are always meant to describe a subculture of people who are in style and in fashion; and therefore imply the far-larger set of people who are excluded and left behind. And every part of the culture industry is founded on the idea that what you have now is inadequate, compared to what you might have tomorrow. Each new thing exists only long enough to be consumed by its children—next year's line of clothes, or cars, or smartphones, or pre-fab houses; next year's films, television pilots, and rising stars.

That's the dialectic of Los Angeles: its ephemera is its vitality. Everything is precipitous—at the edge of the continent, at the edge of fashion, at the edge of technology—and all of it is premised on an underlying implied destruction: some day an earthquake (again, literal and metaphoric) will carry all this into the sea.

Midwest 

Midwest. Noun. In Manhattan, the flyover blocks around Columbus (as in Ohio) Circle and Lincoln (as in Nebraska) Center. The people who frequent these places think rather highly of them; the rest of us don't think of them much at all.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Manufacturing Dissent 

or, Why Yankees vs. Red Sox is a Red Herring

If the Bush years weren't enough to prove out Chomsky, then the Obama years seem like they will be. It's one thing when a self-identified "conservative" delivers corporate handouts, wiretaps its citizens, sells national parkland to oil companies, and actually tries to construct "legal" arguments for torture and offshore detention camps. At least, in those moments, the dissenters can fixate on the term "conservative," and try to align themselves at the other end of the assumed spectrum. But when the self-identified "liberals" return to power and continue the same policies, then one must begin to wonder: is there a spectrum at all?

("There is no spoon.")

I still argue against people who claim that the Left is indistinguishable from the Right, and I think the recent "health care" "debate" is a good example—though I've put each of those terms in quotes for separate reasons, and I think "health insurance" "posturing" is closer to the truth. Still, one side of the aisle lobbied diligently to get health coverage for many disenfranchised people (while also promising to fill the coffers of private insurance companies); and the other side sat on their thumbs—which is presumably what they would have done on this particular issue even if they had been in power.

That is a not-insubstantial difference.

Yet... we're led to believe that the Democrats and Republicans are polar opposites, and that just isn't true. It strikes me like the belief (held widely in these parts) that the entire world of sports is contained in the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox, two of the oldest American League professional baseball teams, both based in large metropolitan areas on the East Coast of the United States, each with vastly high payrolls and rabidly loyal fans. On the most substantive issues, these two rivals are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them. The inflation of this rivalry leaves everyone else out of the dialogue—the other 28 teams in the MLB, the intense and exciting "grassroots" stick ball in the playground by my apartment, the Wiffle Ball I play at picnics—not to mention the athletes who compete in hugely popular (socialist?) sports like soccer and cycling around the world.

On the most substantive issues, the Democrats and Republicans are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them; and the inflation of the rivalry leaves nearly everyone else out of the dialogue.

I am not a cynic. Not even a little. I have no interest in trying to take the vigor out of good things. But I believe it's important to fight against those who try to inject false vigor into lifeless things with ideological Botox.

Media, in most of its current popular forms, exists to sell things: to sell movies, to sell iPads, to sell more media. When it sells political ideology as if it were a reality show or a sports rivalry, what it is selling is a contrived competition: Obama and the Republicans, locked in a heated battle, and only one can win! Just like an episode of Top Chef.

What if the result of this contrived competition were of no more substantial value than Top Chef? What if, no matter who wins, there will be corporate handouts, wiretapping, drilling in parkland, and torture in secret prisons?

If you're looking for a more substantial choice: "God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose," said Emerson. "Take which you please: you can never have both."

Land of the Lost 

The Unexistential Desert Island

In Lost, a set of characters, each having learned to thrive in their own way in modern society as best they can1, is suddenly thrust into a radically new world, when their plane crashes on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean.

If the show were a bit darker and a bit less fantastic2, this alone should have been enough drama to carry a TV series, without need of smoke monsters, hatches, time travel, or a nuclear explosion. How well would a spinal surgeon, a Lotto winner, a C-list rock star, and a Korean heiress thrive in the jungle, with nothing except the contents of some salvaged luggage3? Things would get ugly—and dramatic—pretty fast. If I were a betting man, all my money would be on Vincent the dog. (Photo, far right.)

This cutthroat Gilligan's Island would ask, first of all, this existential question: Who are you, when you're stripped of your context—when the skills you've honed over a lifetime are suddenly useless, when you can no longer take your identity from your job—and is that enough to survive? How much of what you do, and how you act, and what you believe, is circumstantial? In absence of society's structures, what are you?

By most measures, the passengers of Oceanic flight #815 are an exceptionally lucky bunch: they have among them a Boy Scoutish medical doctor, a cured paraplegic with a penchant for hunting boar, and an elite Iraqi soldier. Most times I fly, the plane is filled with people who can't even carry their own luggage without rolling it.

But moreover, the survivors of the crash are lucky because, through all their trials, their core values have remained intact. On Lost, no desert-island devolution of society ever happened: the doctor is still a doctor; the con man is still a con man, and the Lotto winner is still a lucky layabout. Thousands of miles from civilization and with no system of commerce, these people more or less elected to keep their day jobs—because without them, they (or we?) won't know who they are. And this would evoke existential questions that no television network is inclined to ask...4

1. Despite a societal bias to think otherwise, con artists and fugitives are also thriving within their particular circumstances: better to be the con artist than the conned; better to be running from the law than behind bars. "Thriving" is by definition circumstantial.

2. i.e., not on ABC.

3. Which, to be honest, would consist of nothing more useful than 3oz. bottles of hair product and cables for recharging now-bootless iPods.

4. We say we work to pay the bills, but it cuts both ways: we accrue bills because we work. Leisure is the dialectic flip-side of work, its antithesis: it's what we do when we're not working. So even our leisure time is actually defined by our work.

The Secret of the Universe 

There is no secret of the universe.

Denim Man 

Denim Man didn't fare nearly as well against The Crimson Dynamo as Iron Man did.

This is the Enemy 

The Real Dangers of Communism

Some warning signs that your government may have given over to Communism, or its less-understood cousin Socialism. If you detect any of the following, take up arms:

1. Roads
   If your roads were paid for with tax money and built by the government—they are socialist. In a perfect, free market world, each stretch of road would be a privately-owned toll road, and you'd move around it like it's a Monopoly board, paying each property owner as you go.


2. 911
   If your town allows you to place free 911 calls, then call 911 immediately to report Commies in your midst. If a private corporation isn't making money off of your emergency, then there truly is an emergency: the Reds have taken over.
   


3. Medicare
   "Are you now or have you ever been on Medicare?" This government program poses as necessary relief for the elderly, but any red-blooded American knows that if you get sick or injured, it's only logical that your employer should pay the bill—not the government. Medicare reveals the elderly to be what they truly are: Communist sychophants who are useless to the free market society.


4. Mortgages
   If you can't buy a house in cash, you shouldn't have a house. If you have a mortgage, it's because the government has intervened: they've incentivized it by offering tax breaks to you and to the banks. There is nothing free market about that. Keep big government out of your house! Pay for it in cash, and waive the tax break.


5. Marriage
   If you are married, you're a Leftie pinko. Again, the government has intervened against the free market by offering tax incentives to marry: they've got their big government hands on your wife! Also: people who marry are choosing a life where they share with one another, instead of selfishly hoarding. That's the definition of communism.


6. Public schools
   The only people who should be able to read and write are those who can pay for private education. Everyone else is a serf, and should stay that way. Educating the electorate is a luxury that should not be paid for by tax-payers. Instead, we should have a democracy run by illiterates, Tea Partiers, and Joe the Plumber.

It's not too late to save America. Act now!

The exact moment 

I am capable of great things
but only in the morning
on sunny days
when it's not too warm
after I've had my coffee
and a mango
if I'm well-rested
and then only for a minute or two
by accident
usually at the exact moment
that I've misplaced my pen.

The Waitress 

There's what you are, on the one hand; and on the other, there's what you think you can be.

No, let me put that another way: there is what you are, essentially, in your heart—the sum of all your capabilities; and on the other hand, there's the smaller set of what you've realized to date. There is You the Greater and You the Lesser. You whole, and you fractured.

Some people believe that you, the "real" you, is the lesser one—the tally of what you've achieved. "What do you do?," we ask each other at parties. "I'm a salesman," we answer, deftly swapping a verb of action with a verb of being.

Other people believe that you, the "real" you, is that farther-away idea: "I'm a waitress and an actress, but I also want to direct."

You snigger when she tells you this. "She's a dreamer," you think. "She's a cliché." (And these things, too, might be a part of who she "really" is.) But clichés are lazy shortcuts, a rubber-stamp version of the truth: the outline is correct and familiar, but the details are missing. The details are the essence. The details are the differentiators. In the mind of this waitress, what she wants to do is more significant than what she is doing. To know her is to know that she wants to direct. To know her is to know that she is a bundle of potentialities, and to know which potentialities.

[When robots can bring us coffee at restaurants, then we'll all be free to act and direct.]

[When we fall in love, is it not with a person's wants and with their potentialities?]

It is our dream that distinguishes us—the dream, and the degree to which we are willing to chase it: the degree to which we believe we are not the man sitting in the desk chair at the office, day after day after day. No. Rather, we are the brilliant burst of light, looming just on the other side of the horizon. We eagerly, lovingly chase ourselves, to find ourselves.

Down the Little Red Lane 

Me and the cherry-red redhead
Out to paint the town red.
She's red-hot and I'm red-blooded and
She to me is like a red rag to a bull.
I spend every red cent to roll out the red carpet.
"Hey, babe, let's cut through the red tape
and go back to my place."
It's a real red letter day.

Marriage 

marriage. Noun. A Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) wherein some or all partners wish they were independent consultants.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

These news cycles 

These news cycles are impossible. Someone here wants to run a story on Haiti. Specifically, she wants to run a story on text message donations to Haiti. Truth is, if you're covering technology, text message donation was the story to come out of this earthquake. (Deaths of tens of thousands, and the destruction of a civilization, don't unto themselves net much tech news: devastation has a way of rendering gadgets useless. Not to mention it makes you realize they're stupid.)

Anyway, the operative word, "was": this was a story, a few days ago, when it broke, but now, already, it's over, faster than you can say "tsunami warning system." I mean, the New York Times has covered it for Christ's sake. By the time they get there, it must be over.

"You got an angle?," I ask. Her story already is an angle, so now we're looking for an angle on an angle, because without it, the readers are just going back to Conan and Leno. She doesn't have an angle on the angle, so I kill the story. No reason to run it without an angle on the angle.

Whoever said "Life is a river" never worked in news. Life is a fucking class-six white-water rapid full of boulders, and the boulders don't love you one bit.

"What else you got? There must be something else. RFID tags on aid deliveries? The American SUV finally finds a possible use, more appropriate than soccer practice, in the rubble of Haiti? etc."

"A tech story on Haiti? They don't have roads. They don't have buildings. There's not even electricity."

"OK, OK, I can work with that. These aid workers, these reporters—how are they charging their batteries? Can you get me a solar story?"

Google, riding a wave of karmic good will after its "Fuck you" to China: what if Google buys Haiti? Sergey could build his very own Caribbean Utopia from scratch. God knows they've probably modeled it all out already, some SimCity / Google Earth mashup game. Idealistic freaks. That's a story.

God, I hate disasters. This job depends on writing about shopping, and human suffering takes all of the fun out of consumption. All that sobbing on Fox News makes my job impossible. You want something visceral? Go see Avatar at the IMAX. It'll shake your seat. That's visceral.

"We're still going with the original cover for February," she asks. "Right?"

"Hells yeah we are. Can't let one little earthquake get in the way of the biggest news of our nascent decade. Hells yeah we're going with the Apple tablet cover in February."

and wait... and wait... and wait... 

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.