Godzilla Reading Haiku 

"Are you gonna eat those?" He was eying up my pancakes.

"Of course I'm going to eat them. I wouldn't have ordered them if I wasn't going to eat them."

"Oh. I just thought maybe you weren't going to eat all of them."

No way was I going to eat all of my pancakes, but no way was I going to share them with him, either. "You want me to get the waitress, so you can order your own pancakes?"

"No, that's OK. I'm not that hungry."

The trouble with Godzilla is he's always hungry. And he breaks things by accident. And he scares people. It's kind of a drag.

"Here." I cut my pancakes down the middle. "Take half."

"You gonna eat that sausage?"

*     *     *

"You wanna come up?" I ask my girlfriend on the stoop.

She nibbles gently at my ear. "Dunno. Is your roommate home?"

I play with the button on her shirt but don't answer.

"I think I'm just gonna go home," she says.

*     *     *

The alarm clock goes off and I stumble out of bed toward the bathroom. I pass Godzilla, coming out. "Don't go in there!" he warns.

And he's used up all the toilet paper.

"Sorry!"

*     *     *

Sometimes we sit in our apartment in the dark, in the quiet, though it never gets completely dark or completely quiet because Tokyo leaks in through the windows. The lights flicker off the walls, and horns bleat, and sirens, and sometimes through acoustical miracles, conversations carry up from the street to our window. But things feel mostly muted and far away, and it's relaxing. We enjoy it when we can afford to.

Godzilla has a little plastic lamp clamped to the cover of the book he's reading.

"'Summer grasses—all that remains of soldiers' dreams.'"

"That's a good one," I say.

"Sad, right?"

"And not sad, too. Just, you know, true."

He's got little Post-It notes sticking out of his favorite pages, and he turns to another: "'Clouds—a chance to dodge moon-viewing.'"

"Ha," I laugh.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah..."

"OK, one more."

He flips pages. "Here's one." He clears his big throat. "'Not one traveler braves this road—autumn night.'"

"Hmm. I don't know about that one."

"I like it because it's quiet," Godzilla says.

I nod. "I get that," I tell him.

*     *     *

"What did you do today?" I ask Godzilla as he walks in the door. But he shrugs and looks at me kind of sheepishly and lumbers off to his room, and I decide it's probably best if I don't watch the news tonight.

*     *     *

"What's it like?" I ask him once. "All the killing." He frowns at me and looks like he wants to spit, and I'm sorry I asked. He absent-mindedly picks up our salt shaker and crushes it and then looks embarrassed.

"It's not like that," he finally answers. "The guy who gets off on destruction, on being big and strong and powerful—I'm not that guy.

"I know you're not that guy."

"It's lonely being a monster."

"I guess it probably is."

"I'm glad you're my friend," he tells me, and I hug him the best I can with my little arms and his big body. Not in a gay way, but in a way so he knows I mean it.

When Harry Met Daniel 

The Urban Sherpa Interviews Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe is tired.

He is sprawled out on a chaise lounge in London's Claridges Hotel. "I'm knackered!," he laughs. "I don't even know what's going to come out of my mouth."

Radcliffe has good reason to be tired: while he's promoting the recent installment of the Harry Potter franchise (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), he's also begun principal shooting on the final set of Harry Potter movies.

"Sometimes it feels as though I've been working on this for my whole life. It'll be really nice to finally kill Voldemort once and for all, and get on with things." He stares out the window with a faraway, dreamy look in his eyes. "You know, Ron and Hermione are off to university this week? But not me."

"You mean [Harry Potter co-stars] Emma Watson and Rupert Grint?"

"Right. Of course." He gives one of his famous shy smiles. "Sorry."

Radcliffe fantasizes about going away to a university and having a normal life—but a "normal life" may be impossible for the charming millionaire who has spent his whole adolescence in the public eye, depicting a beloved hero, growing up alongside him, their fates always intertwined. "Other people lined up for their copy of Deathly Hollows to learn what was going to happen to Harry Potter. I read it to learn what was going to happen to me."

He plays absent-mindedly with the promotional broomstick that Warner Brothers left in the hotel room. "You can imagine, growing up like this... Everywhere I go, it's 'Oh, look, Harry Potter.' I'm not ungrateful. But sometimes being the Chosen One is its own burden.

"I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like, without this—" he gestures to his forehead, to the location of Potter's famous lightning scar. "I wonder what I would have become. Maybe a cricket star. Or maybe a tosser. Who knows?"

He snaps out of his sulk at the chance to talk about his turn in Peter Schaffer's Equus: "I was naked!," he exclaims. "Waving my magic wand! Seriously, it was a brilliant experience, a great chance to prove to people that I'm more than just 'The Boy Who Lived.' Even my friends, sometimes I think they wonder: 'Sure, you survived the Killing Curse. But can you act?' Hopefully, I showed that I can. Professor McGonagle came opening night—"

"You mean [Harry Potter co-star, Dame] Maggie Smith?"

"Right. After the show, she kept going on about how I'd grown. It was really affirming."

The Potter series has given Radcliffe a chance to act alongside the greats of the British stage. "They've all been so supportive. I've learned so much. But most of all, I don't think I could have done it without my parents. The bravery and sacrifice of James and Lily Potter is a real inspiration."

"But surely you mean your real parents, [literary agent] Alan Radcliffe and [casting director] Marcia Gresham?"

Radcliffe shoots a look and snarls something in Parseltongue, before recovering his charm. "Yes. Of course." He stares out the window again with a grim and distant look, as if remembering fantastic wrestlings with evil, flying battles pitched among the clouds, powerful magicks that Muggles will never know. "It's been a very, very long day."

Forced Entry  

Kato Kaelin's been here again today. He broke a window to let himself in, ate some food from my fridge, made a mess of the living room, and was gone before I ever got home.

I think he might have napped in my bed.

I don't know what to do.

We used to be friends and now we're not. But he keeps coming over when I'm gone and it's driving me crazy.

I want to tell him he's got it all wrong: he doesn't have to be so furtive. I want to tell him to help himself to my things. I don't mind if he tries on my clothes; it's nice that we're the same size. I like that he listens to my music and that he watches my movies; I like that we have the same taste.

He'd be a welcome guest.

I'd like to see him, actually.

But he doesn't want that. He prefers this other way, this occasional, unpredictable forced entry. He prefers coming and going, leaving trails of crumbs and greasy fingerprints everywhere. Leaving traces and clues. He prefers leaving. Touching everything, and never being touched.

The Far End of the Curve 

Ode to the Infinite Jester

"Successful, obscenely well-educated, and sort of adrift." - David Foster Wallace, describing himself and his readers

Why do we continue to feel shock and disappointment when our heroes choose to end their own lives? Why do we respond every time as if this trope were impossible to imagine? How many times will we be surprised by these repeated acts, and what is it that keeps us from understanding them as commonplace? Suicide: quite ordinary. But strange every time.

We're so quickly numbed by school shootings and genocides—the nightly news and its mundane varieties of death bore us—everything bores us—but give us David Foster Wallace, hanging from a rope, and we're thrown agape as if it hadn't always been a foregone conclusion.

[How does such a thing as a suicide gene continue in a species? How is it possible that Darwinism—"survival of the fittest—could favor members of the species who have such low regard for their own life? Because these same people invigorate us, even while they destroy themselves.]

To see and feel things so keenly.... To live and think so freakishly far at the end of the bell curve, till you are lauded for the thing that alienates you. The bell curve, an island where the mob gathers at the safety of altitude, watching while you spelunk the slippery shore. The mob won't immolate you, though you frighten them; you immolate yourself, burn up on your own fuel, and the mob uses you to warm its fingers.

The iPhone is Not Jesus 

Even Gandhi had to wait in line for the new iPhone. He queued up an hour after I did, just as the sun was heating up. "Do you mind if I stand up there?," he asked, pointing to a spot of shade in front of me. "Fuck you, old man. Wait your turn," I told him.

Bruce Willis, who was queued up two people ahead of me, nodded his approval, and chimed in, "That's right, Macaca. We've been here since 8am this morning. Wait your goddamn turn."

Mary Kate Olsen fidgeted with her hair and hid in the shade offered by her umbrella. "How many do you think they have in stock?," she asked no one in particular.

Steven Hawking answered: "I heard they're already out of the 16GB."

"What did he say?, asked Gandhi from the back of the line.

A hot dog vendor rolled his cart by. "Water, five dollars." Mary Kate bought one and popped a pill.

"What are you all waiting for?," someone called out from a passing car. Bruce Willis shouted back: "They've got a new book at the library." The driver looked disappointed: "Nobody famous?" He drove off.

Lily Allen, who had been one of the first to arrive, came out of the store and showed off her new iPhone. She'd gotten a white one. She made up a little iPhone dance, and we clapped for her.

"You want another forty?," Bruce Willis asked me, passing me a lukewarm bottle before I could answer. "Could I have one?," Gandhi asked. "Sorry," Bruce Willis answered. "That was my last one."

The hot dog vendor rolled by. "Water, ten dollars."

Steven Hawking pointed to the front of the line: "I think John Mayer just jumped the queue."¹

The heat was too much for Mary Kate: she had to be taken home. When the store manager came out to announce there were only two iPhones left, we decided that the honorable thing to do was settle it by knife fight. I made short work of Steven Hawking, and when Gandhi killed Bruce Willis, the two of us walked into the store together, bloody and triumphant. The iPhone was delivered to us, shrouded in blinding white light, by naked angels.

"This is some tight shit," Gandhi said, already installing the free Light Saber app. "Totally worth the wait." Then: "What's your number? You wanna grab a drink?"

1. Just like Steve Wozniak.

---

Kurt Cobain's Stomach 

If rock'n'roll is a menace to society, then maybe it's because we're all so ill-equipped to pick our own role models. We somehow spend our formative years idolizing long-haired, philandering men in ripped Spandex who have no greater skill than the ability to keep 4/4 time while drunk.1

How does this happen?

When Kurt Cobain died, they called him the spokesperson for my generation, without considering that this spokesperson was best known for lines like "Load up on guns " and "I have never failed to fail." I'm not sure that this is what one should seek in a spokesperson.2

What is the long-term lingering effect of a whole generation that admires and aspires to be a sickly, whiny, hyper-sensitive, drug-addled suicide?

I wonder this because lately I seem to have inherited Kurt Cobain's stomach—his famous stomach, the one which caused him so much hard-to-diagnose pain that he turned to heroin (or so the story goes)—and I'm proud of it as though it were a stigmata.

---

1. Which is not entirely unimpressive.

2. I took a makeup class once. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) After a few rudimentary lessons ("This is a pancake…"), we were each asked to clip a photo of a celebrity from a magazine, and then, using our makeup kit and whatever we could find in the nearby costume shop, make ourselves look like that celebrity. Become the celebrity. Be the celebrity. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) Most of the class walked in that day with photos of rock stars, and I had that famous Rolling Stone cover of Kurt Cobain.

 

Kurt Cobain Action Figure

Fucking Hillary Clinton 

The ice cubes in my glass freeze together head to head, like a kiss. At the point where they've decided they best fit, they become one, melt together, away from the world, and I twirl them around in the midst of their disappearance, to hear the music they make against the glass, clink clink.

The phone is ringing and I'm not answering it. I'm playing with my ice cubes and their wonderful music, clink clink, and the dull thump when they slide against the lime.

The answering machine will pick up, like a good answering machine.

I'm thinking of fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm thinking of taking her in a darkened room of the White House, under the titillated eyes of the Secret Service, on a desk used by Andrew Jackson. I'm thinking of thrusting my way into American history, pulling Hillary Clinton by her hair, biting the diamonds on her earlobes, biting her neck, while she writhes to reach the clasp of her dress. I'm thinking of making her famous lips quiver.

The answering machine picks up, as it is wont to do. Whoever's calling hangs up. It's annoying, especially 3am. But that's the way the game is played. The ball is in my court.

Things I have trouble imagining: Hillary in the throes of orgasm; Hillary with morning breath and raspy voice; Hillary cooking me breakfast; Hillary unrolling a condom onto me; Hillary letting me do her without a condom.

The harder these things are to imagine, the more they turn me on—so when she does them, so goes the game.

I pick up the phone and dial *69, but after the first ring, I hang up. I'm getting too old for this.

I like the image of Hillary pacing by the phone, feeling junior high, trying to get up the courage to call. I like to picture her hanging up after she hears my voice. I like Hillary flustered. I like knowing I just *69ed Hillary Clinton.

I pour myself another Scotch and watch the ice cubes fade into oblivion. The phone is ringing again: she's 69ed me right back. I reach to turn off the machine, cover up the evidence, shred the papers. She knows the drill. But I change my mind. I'm no good at being coy. Let her know what she's dealing with.

I enjoy watching Hillary at press conferences, on TV, wearing tailor-made suits of red or blue, crafted by conservative designers who are well paid but will never be known by name. I like watching her and guessing which panties she's wearing. I like knowing Hillary is cool and collected and smart and tough with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that she can't sleep nights thinking of me. I like not calling her back, and standing her up for our secret, elaborate, tightly-scheduled rendezvous, pushing her nearly far enough to put my own life in danger. I like making Hillary Clinton cry.

And I think she likes it too.

Oh the games people play.

The machine picks up, and she hangs up again. Maybe she's thinking of Bill right now, somewhere in the back of her mind, thinking of a long time ago, when she was in love; when she still believed in love. I don't know what she's thinking, and I never will. I can only try to love her in the ways I think she wants to be loved, in the ways I think she needs to be loved.

And I do. Every day, I do.

Lying Naked and Face Down (pt. 2)  

New York: a big enough city that it's easy to forget it's a small town. I try to pass off as coincidence the fact that, at various points during the day, I walked by Xxx Bxxxxx Street in Soho, and also Xxx Hxxx Street in Brooklyn—both addresses piled high with flowers and cards of condolence—the addresses, respectively, of the late Heath Ledger, and his former fiance, Michelle Williams.¹

To be fair, I had business in Soho, and the Brooklyn address is only a few blocks from where I live. Both locations really were on my way. Still, I traveled the extra block or two both times, knowing full well where I was going—yet each time, the pile of flowers (and the pathos) caught me off guard: whether I was surprised at my own sadness, or just pretending to be surprised for the sake of passersby, even I don't know for sure.

Either way, I'm forced to conclude that I'm actually upset, for reasons I don't fully understand. I am upset by the death of this person I never knew, and even in the midst of this upset, I think that's pretty strange.²

Celebrities thrive in life because they're so adept at wearing our projections, and I suppose it's no less true in death: I project onto the exit of this celebrity all of my own unrelated, contemporaneous sadness.

I am sad for all of the things I've lost in these last months—the romantic notions of that wonderful future I was supposed to have, a particular future I now realize I'll never see. I grew so attached to this one route to happiness that I'm having trouble imagining any other way.

And this death dramatizes my own loss of hope, and of imagined, better futures. ³

This idea (more than the death itself) shakes me deeply, shakes me so I can't sleep, till finally (and without irony) I too take a pile of Ambien, and lie naked and face down in my bed, hoping to make it till morning without dreaming.

1. Actual street addresses removed, once I saw Google traffic coming in, and realized stalkers (like myself) were using this blog as an instrument to disturb the peace of these mourning individuals. (We should leave them be, and find our own people to mourn...)

2. A friend of mine died this week. He wasn't a close friend, but he was someone I liked very much, someone I cared for and trusted; and I missed seeing him, even before he died; and now I miss him in a wholly different—and final—way. He has "left the building," and when he left, some of the air got sucked out of it, and it reminded me (the way it does whenever someone I know dies) of the terrible loud sound of nothing. It reminded me that our gradual accumulation of things, throughout our lives, amounts to nothing—because life is also about losing things, getting less and less, growing smaller, and then finally, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly, exiting altogether. And I'm sure this week I've been conflating my feeling of loss for the one person with the more publicized loss of the other, the stranger, the celebrity.

3. A feeling I've not felt since the death of Nate Fisher (!).

Lying Naked and Face Down 

Nominations are in for the next James Dean, and we have a winner.

There is little for me to contribute to the Web-based discourse surrounding the sad passing of Heath Ledger. (Find solid, respectable eulogies here and here.)

But I'll add this much to the heap:

The press has almost universally zeroed in on the same few, lurid details—mainly:

1. Ledger was found [like Marilyn] "lying naked and face down" by his bed; and,
2. There were sleeping pills nearby.

These two facts have been summed up with the sort of arithmetic that tabloids are best at, to conclude that Ledger must have died from a drug overdose—which, though it's possible, is pure speculation, and I'm already sick of hearing it.

I'll wager that anyone who takes sleeping pills keeps them in the vicinity of their bed, because I'll wager that this is where these people would like to sleep.

I'll also venture that there were other things near his bed which have gone unreported—say, a bathrobe, a picture of his two-year-old daughter, maybe a few unread screenplays. According to the brilliant logic of the Associated Press, the proximity of these objects, like the proximity of the Ambien, should be sufficient to implicate them in Ledger's death, and the police should bring little Matilda in for questioning immediately.

[Even if drugs are found to be the cause of Ledger's death, I'm still unwilling to acquit that nearby pile of scripts, because one way or another, Hollywood must certainly be responsible for this regrettable loss.]

The news is stupid. I'm moving to a cabin in the woods.

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2 

I can't remember.

What was I watching when your careworn face showed up on screen?—reminding me, first of all, that you existed (I just hadn't thought about you in a while...), and then, only a moment later, reminding me that you didn't. You didn't exist anymore.

I really can't remember what I was watching.

Fact is, I've seen you a dozen times on TV, and it's never made an impression on me. Your craggy voice is what strikes people, and your tiny body, and sometimes they get a lucky hint of your intensity: more intensity per pound than anyone I've met.

But to people who know you, these things are already familiar, and the feeling from seeing you onscreen isn't much different than seeing you anywhere else. "I ran into Pamela the other night," I'll find myself saying to some mutual friend. "Where?", they might ask. And then I realize: Freaks and Geeks. A TV show.

* * *

That's where it was—Freaks and Geeks. I remember now. You growled something funny in that voice we used to call "emphysemic" (till we discovered this was actually true). And then you were gone.

And then I realized, you were gone.

I also have trouble remembering where I was when I learned this fact. Far away, that much is certain: I left you as suddenly and certainly as I left all of you, that whole crew. I learned it by telephone, from the woman who introduced us. I can't remember if we talked, or if it was a voicemail. I recall being shocked, though I don't know if that's a fair word: you sometimes seemed so frail that I wondered if you were dying from the moment I met you.

[They say we're all dying from the moment we're born, but you somehow turned this on its head: living right up until the moment of death.]

* * *

"How old are you, Pamela?", we'd ask now and then. We had an idea that you'd been around forever, that you were maybe a beauty from the silent film era; the math didn't work, but still it made sense, because you behaved as though you'd been there since the Beginning. The beginning of something, anyway.

You'd cackle at the question, that signature laugh: "Even the coroner won't know how old I am," you'd say, "on the day I die."

You were wrong about that. That's the day I learned—on the day that it no longer mattered.

Maybe it never mattered.

[I think I wanted an answer because I needed to know how fragile you were, how brittle. I wanted to know how hard to squeeze when I hugged you. Your refusal to answer was your way of saying you weren't brittle at all. Maybe it's also the reason you never told us you were dying. Maybe you thought that if you told us, we wouldn't hug so tightly anymore.]

* * *

I was in the northern part of California, you know, when they buried you in the southern part. Closer than I'd been, but still not close enough. I wanted to be there. I doubt you'd have cared; you never thought much of ceremony. I expected, as always, you'd stand and watch from the wings, halfway heckling, but also mouthing our lines as we spoke them: your silent support.

I wanted to be there and I wanted to bury you with a bottle of cheap red wine, and my love.

I'm glad to see you show up on my television screen now and then, answering a door, peering into a crystal ball, pulling on a cigarette—typecast somewhere between mystic and sight-gag. You'll say something in your husky voice, you'll laugh your signature laugh, and you'll be gone. And later, I'll think, "I ran into Pamela the other night.

"It was good seeing her."

Ghost in the Machine 

for KW

I have a friend who maintains that if you have a story involving a famous person, and you have to use the name of that famous person to make the story interesting, then it's not an interesting story, and shouldn't be told in the first place. She knows a lot more famous people than I do (Bxxx Mxxxx was best man at her wedding!), so I'll take her word for it. The people in this story aren't so famous you'd know their names, but they are friends of mine. Or were friends of mine.

A long time ago, we used to be friends.

Then something happened. Then gradually I forgot about them, most of them, anyway—most parts of them. I forgot about them in a day-to-day way, and they faded into the background of my memory. Nothing unusual about that. That's normal. That's healthy.

It's what you do when people die.

The difference with these people is that they keep coming back. In syndication.

* * *

It happened again tonight. I was watching TV—which by itself is pretty unusual. I was enjoying myself, lost in a fantasy world of fantasy people working through their fantasy problems—enjoying it most of all because it had nothing to do with me. And then there she was.

There you were.

I haven't thought of you in years. And there you are, with your easy charm and your funny faces. You smile your smile; it hasn't changed after all this time: it can still smite every man in the room even with the sadness in it. You always could manage a happy face, but you could never hide the world-weariness of your smile. A latter-day Norma Jean.

World weary.

You haven't changed a bit.

Except, of course, you have. And now we're left with the handful of digital traces you left behind. Ghost in the machine. Five-year-old reruns of your tragic smile—a smile that says, in retrospect, that maybe you knew all along what was going to happen. But we didn't. It caught us all so terribly by surprise, partly for the loss of you, and just as much for introducing the idea that it could happen at all, without reason, without warning, without explanation. One day you flash a tragic smile. The next day you're gone.

"Every day above ground is a good one."

You see the irony in that, even now, don't you?

Am I talking to myself?

* * *

Ether. Isn't that what they sometimes call it? Television passes through the ether. Ether: the regions of space beyond the earth's atmosphere; the heavens. The element believed in ancient and medieval civilizations to fill all space above the sphere of the moon and to compose the stars and planets.

* * *

On September 11, I remember gathering at my friend's house, the friend who knows all the celebrities, maybe in part because she had more TVs than anyone I knew, and we all wanted to surround ourselves with televisions that day, trying to make the shock of the image lessen through repetition. So all day, on no less than seven different screens, we watched those two planes slam into those two buildings, and we held each other and shook our heads and didn't say much at all.

I remember, later that afternoon, talking to a little boy whose parents had also come to the House of TVs that day. "So many," he said. "So many what?," I asked. "So many people?" He shook his head. "So many buildings. So many planes."

Each time the news channel repeated the image, the boy thought a new plane flew into a new building and killed another fifteen hundred people.

The ether is where people go when they die.

Television is where people go when they die.

It is easy to conflate things, and on that day, easier than most.

* * *

Tele-vision: far-seeing. "Television's biggest social aspect is the fact that it allows users to instantly view content that may be occurring far away from where they are."

You haven't changed a bit.

You see the irony in that, don't you?

A long time ago, we used to be friends.

---

Stranger Than Fiction 

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."

This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.

"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"

"I'll have what he's having."

* * *

PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

Movie stars in public. What a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:

Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.

Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?

* * *

I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.

Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."

Thanks.

* * *

Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."

He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.