Postcards 

You always collected postcards, everywhere you went, imagining some day you'd sit at home, the solid comfort of your desk, and send them out to your friends and family. You saved them up for years, waiting for the opportune moment, the moment when you'd have enough repose to be able to pause your various projects and anxieties, to sit at that desk and unselfishly write by hand, each one a loving collection of words to make its recipient feel, if not loved, then at least known—known, and on your mind.

You collected postcards from Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona; from Petaluma, South Dakota, Zion; from Salem Massachusetts and Alcatraz; Portland Oregon, Portland Maine, Paris and Prague, Disneyland and Disneyworld; postcards from truck stops, postcards from a convenience store in your hometown; postcards from hotel desks and restaurant lobbies, postcards you picked up at a garage sale, postcards from places you never visited; postcards of 50s pinups; postcards that sang tinny music box tunes; popup postcards; scratch-and-sniff postcards; postcards hollowed out and filled with wildflower seeds; large-format postcards that required extra postage; postcards from days gone by, which said "5¢ stamp required;" custom-made postcards of your face, posing in front of real or fake scenery; plain postcards; postcards faded with age.

So few words fit on a postcard, there's only space to say hello and describe one or two circumstances, usually spent on the reasons for writing now, today after not writing for so long.

"I miss you." "This place makes me think of you." "Wish you were here."

The writing takes so little time. The time goes to thinking, feeling, pining, wishing, wondering, and then to the not-writing. It's the time we waste that makes it precious. Time is like salt in the sea: its expanse is useless to us and we drown in it, and our awe does nothing to tame its indifference. Lick your lips and taste it. It's already over.  

Packing 

“ Packing is one percent perspiration and ninety-nine percent procrastination.

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.

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.

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...).

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."

... 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.

Getting Your Aquarium Above Water 

Today, while visiting your aquarium, we invented a few ways to improve it, which we'd like to share with you, in the hopes that they might help enhance your finances in these troubled times.

1. Monkeys

Your aquarium was sadly lacking in monkeys. As you know, monkeys make everything more entertaining, because they're funny, and they look like people. Consider having them take tickets or serve food in the cafeteria, or create an act involving a miniature bicycle, a tightrope, and the piranha tank.

2. Fish food

The average aquarium visitor is familiar with salmon, shrimp, scallops, lobster, and cod—in short, the fish we eat. Your aquarium has very few of these fish. We think that the aquarium would be a richer experience if people had deeper familiarity with the fishes you keep; therefore, we recommend opening a cafe that serves bite-sized samples of all of your fish. Remember, everything is good with the right dipping sauce.

3. Death Match

Once per week, pit a giant squid against a sperm whale and let them fight to the death. Gambling revenue will allow you to fund more programs for children.

4. Paint a beluga

Your whales are cute, smart, and friendly. But let's face it: they're white. Allowing children to finger-paint the belugas will give them hands-on experience with the wonderful creatures—literally!

5. SCUBA

Thanks to the effects of global warming, we'll soon all be living under water. Help people get used to the idea by allowing us to SCUBA our way through your fish tanks, and take our chances with the predators of the deep.

6. Dolphin Quiz Show

Everyone knows that dolphins are smart—but how smart? Pit a dolphin against a human for a special-edition underwater quiz show: "Mackerels to Mackerels."

7. Gift shop

Open a gift shop that sells overpriced plastic trinkets shipped from third-world countries, in the hopes that hapless tourists will lose their judgment long enough to buy all of it. Oh, never mind. You're already doing that. Congratulations on your proactive thinking about aquarium financing.

Aspirin for Gangrene 

MP3 audio track

You're new. You show up in town with a few things you stuffed into a bag. They're not essential or valuable or even all that well-planned; they're just the things you happened to bring. You arrive for no particular reason: everyone has to live somewhere; and maybe it doesn't matter where, as much as people think.

This place will do.

You walk a lot, somewhat relentlessly. You could take busses or trains, but you don't, because you don't want to miss anything. You want to see everything. You want to learn to distinguish that corner from that corner from that corner; and you do. You've only been in town a few days and already you see the sense of it.

You learn your way around. You learn the bus routes and the ways people talk, and why it's better to buy your coffee from here and your lunch from over there. You find an apartment and a way to make a living, so you go back and forth, carving out a new routine, slowly, like a river carves a canyon. There are people you begin to see regularly, co-workers, neighbors; and you see some of them regularly enough that you call them friends.

You learn some shortcuts, some efficiencies. Direct routes. The routine cuts a little deeper.

But unrest is a whisper in your ear, or maybe that's ambition, and you find another, better job; and like two points plotted on a graph, you can now connect your two jobs and call the line a "career path." You find yourself out at restaurants and bars for the second or third time, remembering the first time nostalgically. People sometimes ask you for directions on the street, and you're happy to oblige.

You meet still more people, and some of them become new friends, till you've accumulated more than a few, enough that you actually sometimes lose track. You wonder, sometimes, whatever happened to that one, that old friend? You haven't talked to them in a while.

The freshness wears off. The grocery store, the pharmacy, once sources of small pleasurable novelties—cereals and toothpastes you'd never seen, medicines with unfamiliar labels—these things are the new normal. You cease to notice the quirks on your walks—the gaslights and the cobblestone streets, the woman who hawks newspapers a little too aggressively, the fountains and sculptures and scenery, the man who needs one dollar to ride the bus.

You're discontent; you're not clear why. You think maybe it's because the color of the light in your apartment is wrong, tinged with too much yellow. You find another job, but you're not certain that it's a better one. It offers you a fresh commute in the morning, and new people with whom to small-talk. You wonder if it's like aspirin for gangrene. You sigh deeply. You take longer walks home, if home is the word you mean. The routine cuts deeper, a habitual insulation that it's easy to confuse for continuity, direction, meaning. Nothing is actually bad, but still, you find yourself packing a bag, a small one, filled with arbitrary things, and thinking of other places. It doesn't matter where. Any place will do. Somewhere new.

Aloha 

or, Hello / Goodbye

No blogging while traveling. Mahalo for your patience.

(But there is photographing.)

Paris 

Packing

I nearly missed the plane.

I'd been "packing" for three days, by which I mean I'd been thinking about packing, and that morning even going so far as to throw an assortment of clothes and hair products onto my bed. But not into a bag. I thought the flight left at 3pm but it was actually 2pm—something I learned at 1pm. So after three days of thinking of packing, the actual act happened in about three minutes. And I was off. Off to Paris.

Phantom Ringing

At first, the hardest thing was detoxing from all the über-comm. Vacation is a departure from normal, and "normal" for me had meant, lately, the constant email, the surfing, the IM, the SMS, the BlackBerry. The connection. "Only connect." But for this trip I was leaving it all behind. If it required electricity, it had no place on this vacation.

For days, I felt the phantom ringing of my absent BlackBerry in my right pocket—vibrations without cause. The device itself was switched off and sitting on my bedside table in Brooklyn, 3500 miles away.

"Only disconnect."

Backpacking

I vacation badly—alone and without much itinerary—so a lot of time gets wasted and when I do find something to enjoy, I can only share it with my notebook. Even in urban destinations, I sling a bag with food, water, and a map, and I hike. And hike and hike and hike. I take little breaks, sips of water, a PowerBar. That first day in Paris, jet-lagged and on no sleep at all, I walked straight through from 5am till 7pm, walked the full extent of my Streetwise® Paris map, because I felt I needed to "orient" myself before I could possibly enjoy myself.

I vacation like a backpacker (but without a compass).

[A friend tells me, "I think the compass needle is going to spin a lot in the next few months for you."]

Quel Chemin?

It's easy to forget: while visiting Paris, we tourists visit the Louvre, the Orsay, the Cluny, the Pompidou. But we don't want to see the Louvre, the Orsay, the Cluny, the Pompidou. We want to see Paris. Which way to Paris?

Nabakov: "The dull mad fact is that it does exist somewhere."

Tourism ushers us on a conveyor belt from one protected place to another, insulating us from the random or the sublime. But at 10am, in a room inside the Louvre full of gilded gold clocks from the 18th century, they each begin to chime, one, then another, then another. Each is encased in glass, and the room is filled with the muffled chimes of clocks built for kings, dead two-hundred fifty years. The moment—purely accidental, perfectly sublime. Welcome to Paris.

Sans Fromage

Someone I meet in Paris says, upon discovering my condition: "I have another friend who is lactose intolerant, and the entire time he was in Paris, he spent on the toilet..."

For my own protection, I start avoiding patisseries, cafes and boulangeries,with their butters, creams and fromage, and instead head to the supermarket. (Nothing says "I'm on vacation in France" better than grocery store hummus and dry rye crackers...)

When I get to the front of the line, the checkout girl scowls at my French, and then reaches into my hand to recount the change I'd given her: she corrected my grammar and my math. I leave the marché sans fromage, sans ego.

The World is Spinning

I check my email but none of it sinks in. It all feels thousands of miles away. Then I realize it (it being my life) is thousands of miles away.

Nabakov: "The dull mad fact is that it does exist somewhere."

Paris is a good town for the dead. Monuments at every intersection. Plaques mark the walls where resistance fighters died. The crypts and cemeteries are tourist hotspots. I'm in Montparnasse on Toussaint, All Saint's Day, tripping over the tombstones of Sartre, Baudelaire, Cortazar. A week ago none of this had anything to do with me, and today it's my life. It being my life.

Cortazar: "Just because the world is spinning 25,000 miles an hour, there is no reason to get dizzy."

Meetings at Fountains

A few days in a row I'm scheduled to rendezvous with people at fountains. Till yesterday, I don't know if I'd ever met at a fountain. I don't know if I could name a single fountain in New York or Boston or Los Angeles.

(On some meridian, this place is the polar opposite of Los Angeles: here nothing is less than two-hundred years old; there everything—even architecture—has a "use-by" date. I'd never say, "Meet me at the Fontaine St. Michel," but instead, "Meet me at The Gap in the Beverly Center.")

While I'm waiting by the fountain, a woman keeps looking at me and smiling. I can't tell—is it friendly? Flirty? Is she intrigued? Or am I somehow silly? God, I'd love to be here with vocabulary! When I finally stand up from where I'm sitting, she and her friends swoop in to take my seat. That's all she wanted. Now she's lost interest altogether. And I notice my butt is soaked, too.

L'Orange

Does this orange taste better
because it is a Parisian orange
(or because I am hungry)?

Regret

My longest single French conversation happened while waiting in line outside the Notre Dame cathedral. The line was long but moving quickly. It was flanked on both sides by beggars who ran a whole gamut of disabilities—blindness, amputation, disease. There was also a small swarm of vendors hawking chincy keychains shaped like the Eiffel Tower, six for €2. The conversation went like this:

Vendor: Six for €2.
Chris: Six? Porque six?!?
Vendor: C'est porque. Voulez-vous?

Why would anyone need six keychains? I spent my whole time in the cathedral laughing. How dumb do they think we (American tourists) are?!?

As I left the cathedral, I realized those keychains would make great stocking-stuffer gifts for my whole family. Six for €2 was a great bargain. J'ai voulu six.

But now, the urchins were nowhere to be found. The place had been cleared out. No one was selling anything. A lone woman played her violin, and a small crowd listened, and clapped.

The Dull Mad Fact

I'm late (again) heading to the airport—but for some reason I take the time to jot this inane haiku on my hotel stationary:

The end of the trip.
Is it sadness I feel, or
is it just fatigue?

Did I get everything out of the trip I intended? (What did I intend?) Did I find what I was looking for? (What was I looking for?)

My friend tells me, on my way out, I seemed "bien dans ta peau"—comfortable in my skin. (Clichés always sound less cliché in another language...) I suppose that is what I was looking for. I suppose I did find it. It does exist somewhere...

Welcome to Paris.

Things to Do in Paris When You're Dead  

"Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre." - Aldous Huxley

I haven't been myself lately—and by lately, maybe I mean the last couple of years. I've felt "absolutely devoid of savoir vivre." It reached a critical point a few weeks ago, and as an emergency effort to resuscitate the patient (myself), I got it in my head that I should go to the place where savoir vivre was invented: Paris, France.

In my escapist fantasy, I was going to follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller: quit my job at the proverbial telegraph office (or, in my case, the Internet office), hop on a sudden flight with a one-way ticket bought at the eleventh hour, and ... see what happened next.

For better or worse, I discovered I'd lost my passport, and had to get a new one: I was forced to proceed a little more moderately. Ça ne fait rien. So now, I'm going to France with a return ticket, and a little bit of my own joie de vivre, in my pocket. (I found a bit of it lying around, stored away in some places I'd forgotten.) A plain old normal vacation to a place I've never been, and a whole wonderful wishlist of things I want to do while I'm there.

Who knows? I might even come back.

Au revoir.

---

Terminal B 

The literal definition of utopia is "no place." A place that doesn't exist. Nowhere.

That's where I am.

It's not where I set out to go when I got in the cab. I told the driver to take me to the airport. But now that I'm here, an hour before my flight, I realize there's nowhere ("no place") I'd rather be: it's well-lit, relatively quiet, and it's a place that's simultaneously new (I've never been to this terminal) and also completely familiar: I can find my way around like an old hand, and I know all of the place's cultures and etiquettes: I put my keys in the tray and take off my shoes without even being asked.

The hour before the flight, having put aside all of the anxieties of "Will I miss my plane?", is pure luxury: free time that doesn't exist on any calendar, spent in a location that is between places—nowhere. Everything is artificial, in relation to my "real" life—and since our "real" lives are mostly constructed, a break from that construction, an hour at the airport, might be the more real of the two.

* * *

Yesterday, walking to work, I saw a billboard of the Marlboro Man. I haven't seen these around much lately: Big Tobacco's changing tactics must have the iconic cowboy on the lam, hiding out in caves or whatever. So this billboard image of the rugged, unshaven, weather-worn cowboy struck me in a way I don't think it ever had: I'd become un-numbed to it, and it had become unfamiliar and regained some of its original power.

In that moment, I dreamt about a life in the outdoors of the High Plains, sun and rain on my face, unfettered by walls or cities or clocks or any of the constructs with which I've chosen to self-identify—without my job or apartment, without my family or friends or hobbies or skills. I too could be horseback, wearing a chamois and a wide brim hat, drawing on a cigarette, with wild horses and snow-capped mountains behind me.

At that moment, I saw (as I sometimes see, as we probably all sometimes see) the entire set of things which I choose to define myself as if they were arrayed on a lattice, and through the framework of this lattice, I saw the Marlboro Man. The lattice—its pieces collectively adding up to what I call My Life—was designed (consciously? unconsciously?) to provide structure, strength, and stability. A cage whose bars could keep chaotic reality at bay, in favor or something calmer, more stable, and less real. Nonetheless, a cage.

"That's silly, I don't even smoke." And continued my walk to work. Like now I continue up the causeway to my plane.

Let's Go Cyrodiil 

Whether you're looking for quiet sailing by the beach, hiking in rugged, snow-capped mountains, or you just want to swap stories at a tavern and watch a show, the province of Cyrodiil has it all. Its seven cities each have something to offer a traveler, and during your stay in Cyrodiil, you should plan to visit all of them. An extensive road network means you can get around easily; some residents prefer jaunting from place to place on horseback.

Cyrodiil is known foremost for its wide variety of flora and, especially, fauna. The countryside is decorated with dozens of varieties of wildflowers and fantastic-looking mushrooms. Wildlife, too, comes in many fantastic varieties, many of which you won't find anywhere in the world. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to go for even a short walk without running into a creature or two. (Most of the animals you'll see are not at all shy about approaching people; as always, be safe: travel in numbers when possible, and always carry a whistle or other device to frighten the creatures off when necessary.)

The people of Cyrodiil are a mellow folk, approachable and generally helpful to strangers. Even in cities, people are quiet. Most are at home in bed not long after sunset, though bars and pubs stay open all night long. People are, on the whole, religious and law-abiding. The police are a visible presence and keep the province very orderly. Cyrodiil has a remarkably effective justice system, and nearly all wanted criminals are eventually brought to justice.

Visitors to Cyrodiil will never be at a loss for things to do: the cities have book shops and restaurants, and each region within the province has its own unique cuisines and flavors. Shoppers won't be disappointed, either: the mostly-quaint mom-and-pop boutiques are lively; haggling is not uncommon. A sports arena in the center of the province hosts contests through all of daylight hours, as well as legalized gambling on the outcome of the events.

The countryside, too, is full of adventures for anyone interested in exploring, and rich with destinations of historic interest—cathedrals, old forts and ruins from antiquity are scattered throughout the province.

Indeed, Cyrodiil has so much to offer that few visitors will have a chance to see it all. If you choose to visit, pack light but be prepared for anything, and know that more than two-hundred hours of adventure await.

See you in Cyrodiil!

Everywhere You Go, There You Aren't 

You wake up before the alarm and you're completely disoriented: the way the light comes through the window makes you think you're in that apartment you had in Santa Monica, all those years ago. When you come to, you head to a coffee shop down the street, which reminds you of one you visited a few times in Berkeley. Later that morning, you stroll through a park, a copse of trees that looks a lot like a section of Valley Forge, near where you grew up, and that bend in the stream reminds you of another spot, in Westchester County. That afternoon, you're riding in a friend's car, suffering deja vu from a road trip somewhere in Arkansas, and you pull into a parking lot that strikes you as looking oddly like one you visited in Phoenix. Your destination, a grocery store, is laid out exactly like the one you used in Ithaca, New York. Finally, you get your bearings in Harvard Square, a place that looks, thankfully, like Harvard Square, but as you look around, you're nostalgic for another time, ten years ago, when you and some good friends spent a summer here. You duck into a movie theatre—escapism from all of the escapism you've been feeling—and once the lights go down, thankfully, you could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. By the time the movie is over, you sincerely have no idea where you are...

Angeles 

The First Night of the Rest of My Life

The phone rang seven times before I picked it up. The voice on the other end was the one I expected.

"What? No answering machine?" (Obviously.)

"I threw it out. I don't want people to be able to get in touch with me."

"You answered the phone." (Baiting.)

"I can't stand the thought that people can't get in touch with me."

"You've really lost it." (Without sympathy.) "Be at the Dresden Room at midnight."

I looked at the clock. 11:11. I wanted to make a wish, but I couldn't think of anything to wish for. "Make it twelve-thirty: I want to finish this Details."

On my way out, I fetched the answering machine from the trash can. There was an earthquake, a little one. The radio man said a 4.0. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Over the Counter Pick-Me-Up Cocktail

• One shot of espresso, grains tightly packed, prepared with a twenty-second press, and served with a lemon twist.
• Two capsules of Korean panax ginseng, 500mg each. Swallow with:
• One cup of cranberry juice cocktail. Save the last ounce or so and set it aside.
• Two hits of Primatene mist.
• Two capsules of Ripped Fuel metabolic enhancer. Swallow with:
• 2 oz. Absolut Citron, shaken with crushed ice, the juice of one lime, and the splash of cranberry juice (above). Strain and serve in a martini glass, with a lemon twist.
• One bar of Hershey's Milk Chocolate, preferably the Big Block, though never the King Size Big Block, which is just too much.
• Four cigarettes, chain-smoked. Ideally, the first should be European. The last three may be of any high tar domestic variety. Kamel Reds are an excellent example.

Try to remember where you left your car keys. Now you are ready to go out.

The Dresden Room

The usual crowd was there, and the lounge singers were crooning a song that I recognized from a Frank Stallone album. I ran into Paul by the back door. "They keep the phone in the bathroom! I just called you and left a flush at the tone—to welcome you back to the Answering Machine Age."

"The Kids", Cathy and Dunbar, were in the better-lighted half of the bar (the part I'm told is a restaurant during so-called business hours, though I can't vouch for it personally). They were in a corner booth sipping from drinks they thought made them look reminiscent of alcoholics—Amaretto sours, and a drink Cathy liked to call a "Corrupt Shirley Temple"—grenadine and ginger ale with a shot of Bourbon. "Which she says she invented herself," Paul explained, "but only because she's blacked out all of the times I used to get her drunk on them and take advantage of her."

"You have a different tactic now?," I asked.

"We're in love. I use guilt to manipulate."

Paul and I have a strange relationship. We say we're friends for lack of a better term.

There was also a vaguely European-looking man in the booth I didn't recognize. "You remember Davíd?" (with an accent—not David). I said I didn't think we'd me, and he smiled and shook my hand graciously.

Graciously. As in, not from Los Angeles.

Cathy and Dunbar were in the midst of something they'd picked up in an acting class. "Ansel Adams," she called out.

"Adam Ant," he shot back.

I ordered a Tanqueray gimlet and held my breath.

Cathy squirmed.

"What are they doing?" Davíd asked in a vaguely European-sounding accent. He was wearing an orange tie.

"Alan Alda."

I saw our waiter coming around the corner with my drink. "The Name Game. He has to find a first name beginning in "A", any last name. She takes the first initial of the last name and uses it for her next first name. But Cathy and Dunbar only pick doubles, because they're pretentious."

The waiter, prompt and cordial as ever, served off my drink, powdered sugar along the frosted glass like alpine snow. Sweetness.

"I understand all that." Davíd smiled. "I mean, why are they doing it?"

I smiled back. Orange, I'm told, is the new black.

Caution Curves

I take Mulholland home. It's not on the way, but it's closer to the stars.

Monsieur has to leave, I'd told them, because Monsieur has to get up tomorrow.

Tires squealing around the bend, g-forces pressing away from the curve and toward the tangent of the curve, shoulder leaning into the curve, as if that changes anything. As if gravity gives a damn.

Monsieur does not have to get up tomorrow, Paul heckled, because Monsieur is gainfully unemployed, and Monsieur can drink his life away, if Monsieur wishes. Does Monsieur wish?

Foot hovering over the brakes nervously. Foolish foot. Mind persuading foot that brakes aren't real, brakes don't actually exist, brakes are propaganda put forth by Mercedes and Volvo to ensure our continual investment in research and development for new, always-improving ABS systems, which also don't exist, but somehow mysteriously raise the price of all cars on the market. Foot not following mind's sloppy argument, but continuing to hover in inert confusion.

Mon dieu forgets, I said, slipping out of the booth, that Monsieur is on creative leave. Said with enough emphasis to get the attention of the table.

Pardon. Monsieur on leave of his creativity? Paul's goodbye. Good riddance to Monsieur.

The entire valley of Los Angeles opening up beneath me, beautiful view, clear night sky, (Is that a shooting star?), and free fall, one, two, three, four seconds before my cradle, my crèche, my fair-weather, fuel-injected friend, skipping on rock, rolling on gravel, meeting a tree and making a bad first impression, glass is everywhere, steel is everywhere, sky is everywhere, and yes, I'm sure, yes. It was a shooting star.

Dreams

A dream I remember: I am driving through the town where I live. I am listening to the radio, driving without thinking. I make a left turn and nearly drive the car off the road—because in front of me, rising up out of my neighborhood, is a volcano that has never been there before. It takes up my entire field of vision, a wall of glacier and granite with its own pull of gravity. I am terrified, because it is spewing steam and smoke and ash, but more because it exists, and somehow I never knew.

Another: I am in the sky, flying high above Los Angeles. Somehow I can see the tectonic plates of California and the eastern Pacific moving as if they have been filmed in stop-action animation, sliding across the Earth's mantle like butter in a pan. Where the two plates meet, off the coast, there is an amazing fire, impossibly hot and under water, nearly nuclear, and I can see its glow through the ocean and through the miles of sky. The plate that California rests on is being pushed into this fire, and cremated into mustard-colored ash. There is an unseen force pushing—easily—the United States into the fire.

Visiting Hours

My first guest at the hospital was Davíd. He brought irises. He wore a black suit with an orange shirt beneath. "These are for you," he said, handing them to me. I tried to take them but got tangled in my IV.

I sat up. "How long have you been here?"

"How long have you been here?" He smiled again. He was always smiling. Actually, I had no idea how long but was afraid to ask, so I looked down at the flowers, already wilting in spite of the sub-zero air conditioning.

"It's the IV gives you the chill. What's flowing into your bloodstream. The room is about seventy-eight degrees."

"Are you a doctor? I can't feel my body."

"It doesn't matter." And then I must have fallen asleep, because when Davíd spoke, he was on the other side of the room.

"I have a message from God."

From the hall, I heard the clatter of aluminum, maybe falling bedpans. Then a vague electronic beeping, and, farther away, the cry of someone very old: "Help me. Help me please. I think I'm rotting from the inside."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"You're going to be okay. But God wants something from you. God is ready to destroy Los Angeles. He wants to do it soon."

I could feel my body for the first time. The feeling came as a pain from underneath my ribs.

"God wants you to write a screenplay to record it all. If you set down all the things worth remembering, He may spare the world."

Then Davíd was gone. Visiting hours were over.

Demerol

Generic name: Meperidine hydrochloride

Type of drug: Narcotic analgesic

Clinical pharmacology: Meperidine hydrochloride is a narcotic analgesic with multiple actions qualitatively similar to those of morphine. The most prominent of these involve the central nervous system and organs composed of smooth muscle. The principle actions of therapeutic value are analgesia and sedation.

Warnings: Side effects cannot be anticipated. Most frequent are dizziness, light-headedness, euphoria, dysphoria, transient hallucinations, visual disturbances, and disorientations.

Caution: The side effects of the narcotic drugs are exaggerated when the patient has a head injury, brain tumor, or other head problem. Narcotics also hide the symptoms of head injury. Meperidine should not be mixed with alcohol or other depressants. It should be taken with food to reduce stomach upset.

Flowers

"My stomach is killing me."

"How's your head?"

"Still can't feel it."

The room filled with flowers I didn't know the names of, and Cathy's eyes rimmed with mascara. She looked like a raccoon—or a speed freak. "Well, we were worried about you."

I read the cards:

If you die, can I have your stuff? Hugs and kisses, Dunbar.

"They said you broke your head. I pictured spilled brains everywhere, Blood on the Highway, all that. It was scary."

What do you expect? Your whole life is a car accident. Paul.

"Look, I got you this." Cathy held up a plastic crow. "When you pull the string, it's supposed to squawk and say 'The end is nigh.' But it's broken."

"What's that one? Is that one a pot plant?"

"It's basil. It's from Pepper. She said you'd take actual flowers as too much commitment. She's probably right.'"

I changed the subject: "How's the car? Am I being charged with anything? "

"You haven't heard? The accident was listed as 'No Fault.' You were thrown off the mountain by an earthquake.

(Suddenly remembering, sitting up, looking around the room.) "Where are the irises?"

"What irises?"

"From David."

"From who?"

My head hurt, and my ribs, and my leg. The smell of flowers everywhere, it made me feel I must be dying. I closed my eyes. I saw orange.

"I'm going to let you sleep," Cathy whispered, kissing me on the cheek.

Release Date

Paul picked me up from the hospital and drove me home. The cars all seemed faster than usual, and the highway seemed strewn with a disproportionate number of roadkills, or what looked like roadkills: looking more closely, I could see they were old car parts, big bits of carpet, trash bags. Nothing organic at all.

At home, the afternoon sun was just starting to come through the kitchen window. The plants were dead. Dominos Pizza had left three ads on my door. The room smelled like dirty laundry. There were ants in the pantry.

"Sweet, or dry?" Paul asked.

"Dry."

"Shaken or stirred?"

"Shaken."

"Olive or onion?"

He couldn't find a clean glass, so he poured into a coffee mug. "Welcome home."

Message from Pepper

"Ben, you little shit. I am so pissed at you. How could you? I go away for a few days, I'm practically relaxing, and you almost get yourself killed. You're so selfish. You probably got absent-minded while you were driving and started looking at the stars. Prick.

"I miss you. Be careful. I'll be back Tuesday."

Lost

At some point I might need to talk about myself, tell you who I am and why I'm writing all of this down. For now, a few facts:

I live in a small deco apartment that is ugly in that it looks like a bathtub, and beautiful in that it is four blocks from the ocean.

I spend a lot of time by the ocean. Some days the beach is crowded and I squeeze in to claim an unobtrusive spot of sand, to watch people fly their kites, spin their cartwheels, laugh at each other's jokes, and walk hand-in-hand along that always-moving line where the water meets the shore. Some days I let this remind me of a condom commercial, but most of the time, I manage not to think anything at all.

Los Angeles is the wrong place to be lost: the light is too good, the roads too well-marked, the distances too insignificant, the people too apathetic.

Behind me a wall of mountains strewn with debris, flotsam left from a hard rain, the last stop on the long march from the Continental Divide: at the foot of the ocean, it's all uphill from here. In front of me, waves roll in from the Channel Islands, from the Marianas, from Japan.

I am on a beach, pinned between mudslide and tidal wave.

I bury myself in the sand, to hide from the sun. I think I can make out an island, through the haze, but I'm not sure.

Skipper

I went to visit my friend Skipper (because we all need a friend who is crazier than we are). Skipper has what might be the only basement apartment in Santa Monica. The light comes in from a lone window, tiny, facing east, where he's set up a telescope.

"Look at that." He had the telescope trained on a bulldozer resting in a vacant lot. "New strip mall. Just what this town needs. Why'd you shave your head?"

"I was in an accident. Got some stitches."

He didn't seem impressed."Strip malls spreading like cancer. I don't need another grocery store. You know how many places I can go right now and buy fresh arugula?"

"You eat arugula?"

"Seven. Seven different markets, all within walking distance."

"I find it bitter, as greens go."

"Soon to be eight." He wheeled the telescope around for punctuation.

"Romaine, red leaf, I find them more palatable. I'd go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and eat iceberg lettuce before I'd eat arugula. Eating arugula is like eating a salad made of parsley."

"Not by Flood, not by Fire, but by Strip Mall. End of the fucking world." Then: "Have you noticed all of the birds are dying?"

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cathy put on her best pout: "What are ya thinkin' when you look at me like that?" She batted her eyelashes. Dunbar pushed up his glasses: "I don't remember thinkin' anything, Maggie."

Off in the distance, I watched the strange sight of a DJ setting up speakers on the beach, running from one speaker , back to his mixing board fifty feet away, and then to the other speaker. He seemed to be having cable troubles.

Cathy plopped down in the sand: "Livin' alone with someone you love can be loneliah than livin' entirely alone."

Dunbar leaned in: "Would you like to live alone, Maggie?"

Cathy looked up. "You cut off my line. No, it's okay. But you cut off my line."

Dunbar frowned. "Where? What line? Maybe we should cut it."

A small crowd was starting to gather around the DJ. They didn't seem particularly young or old, skinny or fat: I couldn't tell what the event was. I stretched out my legs in the sand and tried to read a magazine but the wind kept folding the pages into chaotic origami.

Cathy moved in on Dunbar. "You're the only drinkin' man ah know that nevah seems t' put fat on." She patted his bony belly. "Well, soonah or latah, it's bound to soften you up."

I saw something had washed up on the beach not far from us: a dead seagull. No, not quite. The wing of a dead seagull. The flies were already on it. With all their motion, the wing was practically alive again.

Cathy continued to berate Dunbar in a bad southern accent: "Ya always had that detached quality of playin' a game without much concern ovah whethah ya won or lost, and now ya've just quit playin'. Ya have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in the very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. Ya look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool."

The DJ finally got his speakers working. "Check, one two. Okay, everyone. Happy New Year!" It was Rosh Hashanah. We'd meant to leave as the crowd came in, but they started singing songs in a language we didn't understand, and we decided to stay.

The Click

In the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick explains to Big Daddy, "I have to hear that little click in my head that makes me peaceful. Usually I hear it sooner than this, sometimes as early as noon, but today it's dilatory. I just haven't got the right level of alcohol in my bloodstream yet."

Sometimes, if you're quiet enough, you can sneak up on the click. The right combination of sun and sand, cuddling you as the waves "Shhh," over and over. Sometimes, too, under night stars, when there's no noise but gentle waves, the click comes. That one moment of peaceful nothing: no wind.

And just as suddenly, it's gone.

On nights like these, I look up with vague memories of the constellations I was taught in junior high school. I look up and wonder about questions I've never been able to articulate, and wonder if I'll see the answer in the sky. But all I ever see is sky.

Pepper

Pepper argues when I tell her I'm amazed people ever manage to leave Los Angeles. Her flight arrived that morning; I picked her up at Burbank, the drive-thru airport.

"It's like gravity must be stronger here, making it harder for people to leave. Like there's a black hole in the middle of the city. Probably the Cathedral..."

Pepper was trying to find something on the radio. "Ask me about my trip."

"Or maybe in the Hollywood Bowl! It's the only explanation for the constant traffic on Highland."

She raised a red eyebrow like a Shakespearean actor. "You don't think it has to do with the freeway, and the cars coming out of the theatre?"

"At one in the afternoon? At four in the morning?"

"You're the only one I know who's been in a traffic jam outside the Hollywood Bowl at four in the morning."

I changed tactics. "Maybe magnetic fields. Does iron usually collect around a fault line?"

"My trip was amazing, thanks for asking. The leaves were changing out there! When's the last time you saw real fall? I brought you some. They're in my bag."

"You brought me some leaves? Thanks."

"And I watched the eclipse from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Where were you? You did watch the eclipse, right?" Those same expressive, acrobatic eyebrows furrowed. "Jesus, you've sold you soul or something."

"I've seen them before."

"It was the last one of the millennium. Maybe the last one ever. Isn't the world supposed to end soon?" She gave up on the radio, turned it off, rolled down the window and sat back..

Average speed on the freeway was eighty-two miles per hour.

Jellybeans

Pepper at my apartment made a Mickey Mouse mosaic out of jellybeans. Since neither of us like licorice, she used the speckled cappuccino flavor for Mickey's head, instead of black. "Look," she said. "He's graying."

"About time. What is he, seventy?"

She started combing the fuzz on my head with her fingers, I'm sure leaving sticky bits of colorful corn syrup. "You're not even half that old. But look at these: growing back gray." She tried to pluck one.

"Ouch."

"Ben?," she asked. "How come we're not in love?"

"I don't know. We never wanted that."

"Mmm." She pulled my head back against her belly, still running her hands through what little hair I had. She grabbed a handful, gently. Then she let go.

Theme and Variation

The lovers I have had, their faces arrayed before me in snapshots that seem unfairly to cheat time (because these are neither the women as they are now, nor as I knew them, but in a way, as they truly were at that time; they are snapshots, then, of women I never really knew), come in all figures and shapes and sizes. Even photos of a single woman make her a chameleon. I rearrange the order of the faces and find that everything falls apart; the only thing about them that is, in fact, solid is their chronology: FACT: This comes first; FACT: This follows; FACT: Third in succession.

My memory of each is determined by the memory to precede it. They are not people; they are events for contextualization; they are control, then experiment, then hypothesis, then control, then experiment, then hypothesis. And my memory of the whole of them is determined wholly by my latest theory.

[Time is confused for lovers because for them it stands still, while the world goes on. In my mind I have locked them so that I may freely compare and contrast. Are they still growing? Of course. But my system does not allow that, which is why I prefer snapshots. Moreover, my history with my lovers is not determined by me, but by them. They dictate to me whether it was "true love" by their current interpretation of the whole affair. E.g., my first love was true enough at the time; now it is a fact that it was not true love, because she has decided it was innocent and naive. As I was there, I have no choice but to agree. So, though I would like to keep my old lovers, I will not, because it is more important to me to have control over my own history.]

The sum of all of this is that my second experience in love is held in direct contrast to my first and is not an unprecedented experience unto itself. The third is compared to the average of the first two, and so on, so that I have distilled the THEME, "Love," and have a number of examples, VARIATIONS. It is now impossible for me to have an experience of love, only an event that will fall closer to or farther from a feeling that I think I once felt, but which continues to be re-written.

The Screenplay That Can Save the World

Why, given a mandate from God through an archangel named Davíd, has our hero Ben Hugo not given a single thought to writing a screenplay? To be fair, screen writing is harder than is commonly believed: there are pitch meetings, treatments, rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. There are lawyers, agents, managers, unions. There is a tremendous amount of work between the typing of the first slugline and the completion of a final draft.

But none of this has occurred to our hero Ben Hugo. Here is why:

Ben Hugo doesn't believe in very much. If a man named Davíd, whom no one else remembered, came to you and claimed that God wanted a screenplay, what would you do?

Ben went to the Smog Cutter.

The Smog Cutter

Karaoke night at the Smog Cutter (isn't it always?), and a woman with big hair was belting out a heartfelt if atonal rendition of "California Dreamin'."

Pepper tugged on my arm. "I love this song. Let's dance."

"You want to dance to karaoke? I can't: if I dance before I'm ready, my arms and legs get all out of control. People could get hurt."

"One dance, that's all I'm asking."

"Pep, it's for your own protection."

Paul suddenly appeared and clinked my martini glass. "He just doesn't want to spill his drink."

"Poor Ben. If only he had a hobby, he wouldn't need to drink so much." And she disappeared to the dance floor.

The bar was crowded with people wearing flannel, latter-day hipster lumberjacks. The song changed to something by the Kinks, and the waitress took orders for another round.

"Are you and Pepper okay?," Paul asked.

"Sure. Why?"

"Dunno. Cathy asked me, earlier." We both watched quietly while the bartender poured out our next round.

"Pepper Corazón!" the karaoke man read from his list. She squeezed her way through the crowd toward the mike and drilled her eyes on me I. The music came up — the Go-Go's "Vacation." I smiled and lifted my drink to toast her; she didn't smile back.

Can't seem to get my mind off of you
Back here at home there's nothin' to do
Ooo, ooo.
Now that I'm away
I wish I'd stayed
Tomorrow's a day of mine that you won't be in

"God." Paul leaned in to me with gin breath. "She looks even better than Belinda Carlyle."

Vacation, all I ever wanted
Vacation, had to get away
Vacation, meant to be spent alone

Suddenly I felt sick.

Purging

My body heaves with a mix of vomiting and sobs, near a urinal that is ponderously high.

"What's the matter?," asks Davíd.

"I don't know."

He holds me, while I shake, against his silk shirt. "Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I'm so lonely."

Davíd nods and points two fingers at my chest. "Look here."

A hole has opened in my chest, a black cavity the size of my fist. "Where your heart used to be," he says. "Look at it. Look inside." He takes my hand and forces it toward the hole.

I shake my head. "I don't want to." I try to see, but the angle is wrong, and it's too dark inside. "What's in there?"

"Nothing. That's why you're sick."

Davíd's eyes are pure black, indiscernible. He takes the flower from his lapel and places it inside my chest. Covering the hole with his hand, he leans over and kisses his own knuckles. "Now maybe you will feel better."

He leaves through a side door, out into the alley. I'm no longer shaking. But when I get back to the bar, Pepper is gone.

The Man with the Flower in His Chest

A man has a flower planted inside his chest in the men's room of a small Silverlake bar. What does this mean? How can this ambiguous gesture give him the strength he seems to require? Can he draw strength from a metaphor?

One thing is certain: if a man has a flower planted inside his chest, it is a challenge to him—can he let the flower grow?

Coverage

Title: Angeles
Author: Ben Hugo
Type of Material: Vague
Location: Los Angeles
Circa: Present day
Genre: Apocalyptic black comedy (?)

SYNOPSIS: The story of yet another marginalized would-be-writer, Ben Hugo, drifting through life and using his own boredom as his only self-motivator. He has a menial job writing coverage at a small production company but tells his so-called friends that he works in "development," and covers his malaise with a veneer of high-proof alcohol.

The story's real adventure is happening in Ben's mind: he begins to envision his aimless wanderings as a spiritual quest set at the end of time. He becomes certain that epiphanies wait at every corner; he meets angels for coffee; he has been chosen by God to chronicle the apocalypse. But he's out of step: he misses his meetings with the angel by the minutes it takes him to find a legal parking place.

COMMENTS: This story lacks plot, it lacks drive, it lacks legitimate love interest. It has little arc and no climax. It thinks it's wittier than it ever is, and its main character fails to be sympathetic or engaging. The whole thing is a wet blanket: don't get wrapped up in it.

RECOMMENDATION: Pass.

Black Iris

Greeted at my home by a mail slot filled with overdue bills (I half-expected a phone bill saying, If you die, can I have your stuff?), I found a postcard written in an architect's handwriting—clear, strong, unfamiliar:

The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence, and it repenteth me that I have made men. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee a script for film. Plots and subplots shalt though make in the script, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it: the length of the script shall be one hundred and twenty pages in a twelve-point font. In breadth, it shall obey verisimilitude of space and time, and shall not tax the limits of plausibility. With lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

And behold I, even I, do bring all fire and water to do my bidding, do call all locusts and birds and things living to do my bidding, to destroy all flesh. But with thee will I establish my Covenant: thou art my Instrument of Remembering.

And on the other side of the card, a Georgia O'Keeffe flower: Black Iris, 1926. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Oh shit," I said aloud. "God's an Aristotelian."

But it was settled. I was going to have to write a screenplay. I grabbed my Syd Field book from the shelf and got started.

 

[end of part one]

Sunshine. Springtime. Shopping Mall. 

It's true—after half a year of short cloudy days with blistering cold winds and, lately, a Johnstown amount of water, the sun is finally making its belated spring debut. The sunshine is warm, the breeze is mild, the sky is clear.

Where do I go?

Shopping mall.

Through some perverse and ironic act of civic planning, the nicest park I've found within walking distance of my apartment is the atrium of a mall. Sunny and secluded, sheltered from the wind, the "South Garden" is nested between two of Boston's biggest buildings (the Prudential Center and the Cheesecake Factory).

I've spent a few of my free afternoons here, and I've come to believe it might be the most iconic site in all of Boston—more than the old statehouse, more than the Common, more even than Fenway Park. In my mind, the South Garden is a perfect example of Massachusetts neo-liberalism: a generously-sized bit of green space flanked by Starbucks and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Clinton and Blair's "Third Way" interpretation of liberalism is now just a nostalgic memory, eclipsed by ... whatever it is we have now. ("No Way.") But compassionate conservatives be damned: the Third Way is alive and well in Boston, and seems to go something like this:

• Just because you are well-off doesn't mean you have to be a Republican.
• Just because your own mores dictate that you'll buy a condo, marry and have kids doesn't mean you have to feel threatened by people who won't.
• Just because you are terse and closed off, personally, doesn't mean you're not open, generally.

[How does a state with so many khaki pants continue to re-elect Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank?]

The Third Way in Boston seems to go like this: on the one hand, you like nature, and on the other hand, you're thrilled with the conveniences afforded by a thriving economy.

So you build a park inside a shopping mall.

You can have your latte, and drink it, too.

Postcards from the West 

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Days of Moving Slowly 

We were glued to the TV late on Thursday night, because all three of us had places to be early the next morning. "They won't strike," one of us said. "They never actually strike."

They, in this case, was Transit Workers Union, who were threatening to shut down New York City's public transportation if the city couldn't meet them halfway on a new contract agreement. This backroom poker match happens every few years and always has the same result: a heroic late-night resolution to the impasse, with train service continuing uninterrupted the next morning. And sure enough, they didn't strike on Friday, though all day and through the weekend, the trains moved with almost sympathetic slowness.

Maybe I was remembering badly. Maybe the trains were always this slow.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a the last and final stop. Please exit the train." People on the car looked confused. "I thought this was an express...?" I shrugged. Maybe this is how you strike, without striking....

On Sunday, there was a rat in my subway car. I'm sure it was a coincidence. Disgruntled subway workers wouldn't stoop so low. Would they? The rat ran up and down the car in a panic, sending the passengers squealing, swatting with shopping bags, standing on their seats. Finally, somehow, the rat found a way out of the car, and things quieted down again. "Well," chuckled a man in a suit, "that broke up the day."

By Tuesday, there really was a strike, and no good way into or out of Manhattan. I had to get back to Boston. "You could walk to the train station," a friend suggested. "But it's seven miles. It's fifteen minutes just to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. And it's 28 degrees." Finally, I convinced a car service to drive me, what turned out to be a two-hour ride. The driver was furious. "In my country—it's a democracy, you know, but a dictatorship—this would never happen. They'd all go to jail. They're ruining Christmas." Then: "When is Christmas?"

Even Amtrak seems slow. Standstill outside Stamford. Sympathetic slowness? And people seem reluctant to say goodbye: they hug on the platform—nothing unusual about that—but they cling to their hugs just a little bit longer. "I love you," they say. "I'll talk to you tonight." They hug one more time. "I love you," they say. "I'll see you soon." Whenever that is....

Hotels (part one) 

Lobbies: the privacy of public spaces (and vice versa)

Back when I was a wee slip of a lad (26?), I spent a lot of time lounging in the lobbies of luxury hotels. I discovered at some point that, no matter how poor you are, no matter how grungy your clothes or how bad your haircut, if you walk into a hotel as if you belong there, no one will ask questions. The coffee is expensive but the service is great. (This was Los Angeles, and I took some comfort knowing I could pass myself off as a hotshot rockstar or film director who the so-last-week hotel staff hadn't yet discovered. "Don't you know," I practiced, "who I am?")

I ate complimentary baguettes from the Mondrian, read free New York Times from the Hotel Bel Air, dipped in the jacuzzi at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, and (maybe best of all),was delivered a never-ending bowl of gourmet olives at the Chateau Marmont. It's possible I spent more time in the garden/lobby of the Chateau Marmont than then-resident Winona Ryder did.

But my point in being there had no more to do with these free perks than it did with the chance to mingle with the rich and famous. I spent time in these hotel lobbies because they were bigger and nicer than my own living room—and because I could enjoy all of the benefits of privacy while also soaking in the random element of public spaces. Hotel lobbies are a DMZ between the public and private spheres.

I forgot all about this until I moved to Boston: for some reason, the urge never struck me in New York (though my living rooms in New York were smaller than in Los Angeles, and the hotels just as nice). Only recently, while exploring this new city, have I rediscovered the guilty pleasure of bilking off hotels. Maybe I feel a kind of kindred spirit in the transients and wayfarers who pass through these places. After all, the only real difference between these spaces and other cafés is that hotels, by definition, are no one's "neighborhood" café: hotels trade cozy familiarity for near-absolute anonymity. The staff is impeccably friendly and has no reason to learn your name.

So imagine my surprise when, on my second visit to Boston's Marriott in Copley Place, the concierge gave me a familiar nod.

I left right away.

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When I first got to town, a few months ago, I leafed through Boston magazine's "Best of Boston" list and discovered that a few of their top-rated bars are in hotels. That's odd, I thought: Who goes to hotel bars, except for jet-lagged travelers trying to turn back their body-clock with alcohol? One of these, Cuffs (in the Jury Hotel Boston) was called one of the best Irish pubs in Boston—a bold claim, I thought, in a city with enough Irish heritage to call a sports team "Celtics." My image of an Irish pub is cozy, quiet and neighborly, with hundred-year-old fixtures and maybe some board games behind the bar—and this is exactly the opposite of what I'd expect from a hotel bar.

So I had to check it out.

En route, I noticed something else about Boston's luxury hotels: many of them connect directly to shopping malls. It's possible to wind one's way from the South End straight through to the Boyleston Street shopping district—nearly two miles—by bobbing and weaving through a series of two hotels and two malls, without stepping a foot out of doors. From the Westin lobby, Christmas shoppers file onto the escalator like products on an assembly line. (The consumers themselves are, in a way, manufactured goods....) But they aren't hotel guests; they're locals, cutting through the hotel lobby as a shortcut. ("Our motto of the day," a woman says to her son, "is 'Shop till we drop'," and the boy nods solemnly.)

And when I arrive at the hotel/pub, it's crowded with big men gathered around a few television sets to watch a football game. (And I don't mean "football" in the Irish sense: there's a collective groan when New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady throws his second interception of the quarter...). I try to find someone who is obviously a hotel guest, and not a Bostonite on a break from shopping. But I soon learn the distinction is impossible to make. "Jimmy," someone shouts across the bar. "Drink up. I just booked us a suite: we're crashing here tonight."

I guess I'm not the only one playing tourist in my hometown...

On the Road 

or, Outside It's America

It's like a dream. There's some kind of country music coming from the car stereo and no traffic on the road. The windshield wipers keep slow time, the car's own heartbeat, while the dotted white lines running the center of I-95 flicker by in a rapid staccato—the road spools out like film, and it all reaffirms the sense that I am the star of my very own road trip movie. A full tank of gas and an atlas that points to anywhere. "Take me away," I say to the car. "Take me anywhere."

Exit for point south. Exit for shore points. Last exit before toll.

Each road trip reminds me of the others—this jaunt from Boston to Pennsylvania reminds me of that midnight drive drive Chicago to St. Louis, the slow saunter through rainy Arkansas and Texas panhandle; reminds me of the cool crisp air in Flagstaff during that morning dash across northern Arizona; reminds me of Montana, reminds me Big Sur, reminds me of.... It's as if it's all one big continuous road trip, driving in circles, always moving, always leaving somewhere, always going somewhere else. Digesting America. And taking short rest stops—three months, two years—to go through the motions that other people think of as life.

The road is life.

Scenic overlook ahead. Caution curves. No rest for 57 miles.

Connecticut welcomes you. New York welcomes you. Pennsylvania welcomes you.

America welcomes you.

The gas station attendant asks, "Where you headed?" The gas station attendant asks, "Where you coming from?" The gas station attendant wipes the windshield, checks the oil, checks the tires. "Good luck." "Drive safe." "Have a nice trip."

More road between here and there. The leaves are changing. I remember this place. Have I been here before?

"A little lucky; a little unlucky; a little better."

Last exit before toll.

Thanks for visiting. Please come again.

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Home / Away From Home, pt. 2 

(or, "What's On Your iPod?")

The Fung Wah bus lurches through traffic, somewhere in interminable Connecticut, on another leg of its Sisyphian circuit between Boston and New York. [The drivers, I'm told, finish off each four-hour leg with a short cigarette break, then turn the bus around and drive back to where they started, back and forth, who-know-how-many iterations before they get to rest for the day.] As we finally cross into the no-man's land of bridges outside New York City, the song on my iPod is Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" (now featured in the trailer to some movie or another, can't remember which):

I am the passenger,
and I ride and I ride...

I step off the bus like I did two weeks ago, in Chinatown, in New York City, in the place I still think of as my home though my mailing address would indicate otherwise; only this time, it's a little different. "Can you tell the way to Reade Street," asks a passerby. But I can't. I can't remember the way to Reade Street. I duck straight into a favorite bar because I really need to see a familiar face; the place is crowded, but not with anyone I know. Rather than stay, I grab my bag and head back out into the street, where it's started with a gentle rain. My iPod, as if to mock me, starts in with Whiskeytown's "Sit and Listen to the Rain," and for a little while, I do.

Used to feel so much,
Now I feel so numb
Could go out tonight
But I ain't sure what for
Call a friend or two
I don't know anymore

The weekend passes. I swap books and DVDs with friends, go to a party, go to a brunch. There's one person I want to see and I don't manage to see her; we can't get our schedules together. I confess to her, "In a weird way, I'm already looking forward to getting back to my lonely simple life in Boston." In the background, while we talk, is The Devlins' "Drift":

You say what you want to say,
In my arms, I know you're home
You go where you want to go
and leave me on my own
to drift alone

By the time I head back north, I'm feeling vaguely Sisyphian myself: I'm not sure why I bothered to come. I stand under the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplate the crisscross of cables; I feel a stone of disappointment in my stomach. I'm not sure what comes next. I decide to take the train back. The song iPod plays PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea:

One day
I know
there'll be a place
called
home.

"Last call. All aboard. We're going to Boston. All aboard."

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Liminal's Revenge 

For some reason, I keep thinking of a family vacation we took to New England when I was young, maybe four, barely old enough to remember anything. I barely do remember anything from that trip, except the googly eyes of a whole cooked lobster, a mountain that had been carved by wind and rain into the face of a man, and, near our hotel, a gigantic statue of Paul Bunyan.

Paul Bunyan, that famous giant lumberjack, marched across America’s wilderness with each foot in a different state. But me, I’m not having such an easy time straddling two states at once. I have to make a choice that will change my life and I can't decide. My brain can't break out of the loop; I'm stuck between the two places—past and future? nostalgia and daydreaming? I'm stuck between chugging along with my life, as is—familiar and not entirely unsatisfying—or jumping tracks, starting something fairly new, mostly unfamiliar and not entirely un-frightening.

I am neither here nor there.

I don't know what I want to do.

I'm not very comfortable not knowing.

Paul Bunyan, legend has it, once set his raft down in a round river. He thought he was sailing downstream, but just sailed round and round and round. The scenery looked familiar because it was exactly the same. Finally realizing he was going in circles, he heaved his axe and split the river open, changing its course forever.

I guess what I'm saying is, if the scenery looks familiar, how do I know I'm not stuck in a round river?

Or, to put it all another way—I can't remember ever having been happy. And if that's the case, how can I be expected to make any decision in my own best interest?

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P.S. It's the Metaphor, Stupid

I've just read a bit by "cognitive linguist" George Lakoff, who says that, contrary to the belief held since the Enlightenment, we don't necessarily act in our own best interest. Rather, we seize on metaphors we feel represent our belief system, and try to fit our actions to that belief system – even when a particular action goes against our self-interest. (Lakoff cites the "red state" blue collar worker who votes for political candidates certain to make the man less well off.)

The round river metaphor might not be working for me.

Mr. Lakoff, incidentally, looks like a well-read Paul Bunyan.

More on Mr. Lakoff later...

Vacation to Saturn 

"Dreary winter so far. I was thinking we should get away. Take a trip."

"Where you want to go?"

"New place I keep reading about. Saturn."

"I saw pictures. Supposed to be nice."

"A lot of frequent flier miles. Like seven-hundred million."

"People go to Saturn?"

"Yeah. Well, no. Titan. Moon. That's where I was reading about. Oceans, beaches. Maybe some wildlife."

"We should do it. It'll be nice."

"We'll sit on the beach, we'll look at the sky: it'll be a full Saturn out."

"I love you."

"Love you too."