A Definition of Irony

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There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
— Samuel Beckett

The Irish, claimed Freud, are "one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is no use whatsoever"—a quote that usually comes to my mind after a few shots of Jameson's, when I get that hard-to-suppress urge to punch something. Usually, I have the (relative) good sense to pick an inanimate target, at least, so that the only person I hurt is myself (which I think is why people go into psychoanalysis in the first place...).

I'd like to posit a theory, based on the evidence provided by two of Ireland's more famous—Sam Beckett and James Joyce. Clearly the Irish have a refined sense of irony. ("Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.") And for an ironic, there's no higher station than that of a sad clown. The Irish are impervious to happiness because anyone with a heightened sense of irony is in love with his own sadness. Ever the aesthete, he will go out of his way to sabotage his own life, because only then can he fully savor its irony...

Alt-Country

alt-country. "Lost my job, my house, my truck.

"Got new ones."

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and wait... and wait... and wait...

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

Autoschadenfreude

autoschadenfreude. Noun. A malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of yourself.

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Blog of the Last Man on Earth

Monday, 3pm

It started with the sound of nothing, which was unusual even at that time of the morning. The power was out in the kitchen, and when I peered out the window, there was no traffic, no one on the sidewalk, no construction sound, no plane passing overheard, no hum of electricity, nothing.

There was no one. Sometime overnight, everyone had disappeared. Everyone except me.

I assumed, then, I didn't have to go to work; so I finally finished a book I'd been reading for too long. I made myself a sandwich, and then, not really knowing what to do, I went back to bed, around 3pm. I really needed to catch up on sleep.

Monday, 11:30pm

I woke suddenly, well-rested but draped in so much darkness: dark as far as the eye could see. Haha. People are still missing, or seem to be. Maybe it's an elaborate hide-and-seek.

It's so quiet that it hurts my ears. That is, in the quiet, I hear a high-pitched whine. I've been told that this is the onset of hearing loss: the pitches I hear are the pitches that I no longer can hear, if that makes any sense. I wonder, then, is deafness actually loud, a cacophony of all pitches?

I'm wide awake; it's midnight; I'm the last man on earth. It's flattering, really. And frustrating—so many things left unfinished: the report I was writing on at work, which Alex told me was quite good. (Alex is my immediate supervisor.) (Or maybe I should say was.)

Also, I had Mets tickets for next week. They were playing the Orioles.

It's harder than I expect to pass the time, in the dark; but it gives me unexpected joy—it gives the familiarity of my apartment refreshing newness. I also stub my toe, badly, on the corner of the sofa.

I walk through my neighborhood. Everything seems to be in its right place: cars are parked, trash cans lined neatly against the walls. The black outline of a nearby skyscraper blots out a patch of stars. In the dark, there are more stars than I've ever seen in the city, but I don't remember the names of any of the constellations.

Tuesday, 5:45am

I start jogging. I don't usually jog. It's funny how we behave differently when there's no one around to see: there's no one who knows I don't jog, so I can be a jogger if I want to. Central Park is covered in a light mist, and I twitch with a vague foreboding: "Don't go into the park alone!" But when you're truly alone, no one is a danger.

Tuesday, 11:21am

I keep glancing at my cellphone to see if there are any new messages, but of course there aren't, because I'm the last man on Earth. Anyway, it's not like very many people called me before.

Tuesday, 12:48pm

I'm standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, underneath the twine of steel cabling. The wide sidewalk on the bridge is empty. The lanes of traffic on either side are empty. The water below me is calm, but everything is so quiet that I can hear it roaring by.

Tuesday, 4:55pm

I get a guilty pleasure out of reading Cosmopolitan magazine. It's embarrassing: I'm a guy and it's not for guys, but I read it whenever I go to the doctor or the dentist. I like knowing what women are supposed to be thinking about me.

Every issue of Cosmopolitan is almost exactly the same as the last issue: it has articles on sex positions and how to drive him wild in bed. Cosmopolitan has more sex in it than Playboy. I'm surprised they manage to come out with new issues each month, since eventually they must run out of sex positions. But I guess people forget, so they don't mind reading the same things twice.

It occurs to me that the Cosmopolitan I read today in the park outside City Hall is the last Cosmopolitan that will ever be printed. I wonder, does that mean the hair style they describe will be in fashion forever?

Wednesday, 8:15am

I decide to go door to door in my apartment building to see if anyone is still around. I've lived in this building for three years and I've never knocked on anyone's door till today.

I like the people who live here. (Lived.) (Liked.) (Insofar as one can like people to whom we don't speak.) People in this building are quiet, and clean, and polite. (Were.) Sometimes they'd hold the door for me when my hands were full with groceries, and sometimes I'd do the same for them—so we were neighborly, I guess is the word.

I bring a box of Girl Scout Cookies, so that if someone does open their door, I can ask them if they want one.

You'd be amazed by the variety of doors in my apartment building. You'd think they'd be all the same, bought in bulk, at a discount rate, but in fact nearly every one is a little different. I imagine they've been replaced, one by one, over a long period of time. Some doors seem incredibly heavy. One, on the third floor, is light like the closet door in a child's bedroom. Knocking on that door is like knocking on paper.

No one is answering any of the doors. It was a forgone conclusion, but I got caught up listening to the sounds that my knocks made without ever really thinking about why I was knocking, till the paper-thin door knocked me out of my reverie.

I climb out on my fire escape and eat some Girl Scout cookies. I pour some milk to go with the cookies, but my milk had started to sour, and I throw it out after a mouthful. That was the last milk I will ever have. I might never wash that taste out of my mouth.

Thursday

Though there is no one else left in the world and therefore the status of my obligations is vague to say the least, still, I am a man of my word: I spent my morning paying bills for my cellphone and cable. I won't do it again next month, though, if this continues, since neither of these services has been working for several days.

I also decide to finish the report I started at work, the one which Alex liked so much. I bike to the office. Without traffic, without stoplights, without car doors, without pedestrians in crosswalks, biking is the purest joy: it's really like flying.

I'm quite productive, working alone. The phone doesn't ring once. When I've finished assembling my PowerPoint deck, I do a practice run of my presentation in the conference room. It goes well, I think.

On the way home, I head west and watch the sunset over the Hudson. I wonder why I didn't do this more often, before. Then I bike home, the strobe light on the back of my bike seat flickering to protect me from non-existent traffic.

Friday, Early Morning

My watch stopped and I'm quickly losing my sense of time, but I wake naturally just after dawn. Today is the day of my work presentation. I own three suits and I have trouble deciding which one to wear, but finally I pick the newest one, the one with pinstripes. I never expected I would be the sort of person to own three suits, the sort of person to have enough suits that it's hard to decide which one to wear to work. I'm not sure when I became that sort of person, but the transformation wasn't awful, like I might have imagined. If anything, the third suit was liberating. The first two suits were obligatory, but this third suit seemed somewhat for fun.

I'm proud of my PowerPoint deck: it's got a kind of structural elegance, and it deserves to be shown.

But as I'm tying my tie, I notice there's a blemish on my face, a black spot on my cheekbone, like a beauty mark. I've never seen it before. It is sudden and alarming. I can feel my heart quicken, and I wonder, should I call a dermatologist or an oncologist?, before I realize that phones are dead and there are no doctors. I am alone with my blemish.

Looking closer in the mirror, I see that the blemish is nothing: it's not a pimple or a lesion. It's a tiny spot of pure nothing, a little black hole on my cheek. I poke at it with tweezers and the tip disappears. It is unsettling, and I decide not to go to the office today.

Friday, Late Morning

I've returned to the paper-thin door on the third floor and I'm smashing it down with my tennis racquet. "Hello?," I call out, after destroying the door. "Anyone home?"

The apartment is nicely furnished, and very clean, and comfortable, and has a very fresh smell. There is a vase of cut flowers on the kitchen table, and I refresh the water in the vase, though the flowers are nearly all dead.

"Hello?," I call out again.

The view out the window is good. I wonder what she pays in rent?

Then I notice—and I can't believe I didn't hear it earlier: there is water running. The shower is running in the bathroom.

"Is anyone there?," I ask again. "It's me, from upstairs."

I turn the knob of the bathroom door, and push the door open with my tennis racquet. Steam pours out and fogs my glasses; I can't see a thing. "Hello?"

I pull back the shower curtain. There is no one, just hot water pouring down into the drain.

The showerhead is very nice—one of the overhead ones that pours the water out like rain.

On my way out, I borrow a stack of DVDs from a bookshelf, and bring them back to my apartment.

Sunday night

There is a scene in the movie Amélie where the main character (a French girl named Amélie) has the television on in her apartment with the sound turned down. She looks over at it and notices a news clip: a horse has escaped its corral so it can run, side by side, with a team of bicyclists. Amélie watches in wonder and decides to record it on her VCR. Later in the movie, she gives the videotape to another character, who also watches the scene with silent wonder. I doubt either one of them could explain why it was wonderful, but it was, and they knew it, and it made them happy.

I felt the same way about the movie Amélie. I couldn't explain why, but when I saw it, it made me feel happy to be alive.

Monday morning

I decide perhaps I'll learn French. I practice saying, Sans toi, les émotions d'aujourd'hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois: "Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's." I don't really know what it means, even in English.

Evening

Something strange happening with time. I don't mean in the sense that "Time flies when you're having fun," or in the sense that, in absence of outside obligations, we lose track of days, like children in the summertime. Whatever is happening, it is alarming in a way that it never was when I was a child in the summer.

I blink my eyes and a week goes by. Anyway, I think it's a week. It might be longer or shorter. There's no way to know.

It happens in the midst of a day, too: sometimes I'll sit at my kitchen table in the morning, flipping through a magazine I've already read, and then, twenty minutes, the sun will begin to set.

But then twilight lasts for days.

So something's not right, but there's no way to measure, and no one with whom to compare.

When I look in the mirror, I think I look much older than I remember. But then as soon as I concede this is the case, I seem much younger.

I'm losing track of things.

And I'm not sure when I stopped eating.

Thursday or maybe Sunday

Of course I wasn't watching the DVD of Amélie. Electricity had been out for days, weeks, who knows how long? Instead, I stood the DVD box on top of my television, and I watched the box. I stared at Amélie for hours, days, who knows how long? And she stared back.

"Hello," I said.

"Bonjour," she replied. And proceeded to tell me, in detail, in French, everything that had happened in her movie, to the best of her memory. I don't know French, so she would stop periodically to recap in English.

"Thank you," I said.

"De rien," she replied. "It's nothing."

It was, without a doubt, the best movie I've ever heard.

Some Time Later

I find that the people I used to know are beginning to blur in my mind. I remember a funny story, something I did once with a guy named Adam. I laughed out loud when I remembered this story. Fun times. Then I realized, "Oh. That wasn't Adam." And I couldn't remember who it was.

Since no one has any further use for street signs, I've begun to paint them over with the names of the people I knew. I walk around during the day with a can of green paint in one hand and a can of white paint in the other, and I gradually re-map the city: Jonathan Street. Caroline Boulevard. Adam Lane. Before I forget.

I rename Broadway after my mother, whatever her name was.

Middle of the Night, I Think

I had a nightmare that everything that's happened recently was in fact only a dream. In the nightmare, I woke up, and the world was still full of people, same as it ever was. My alarm clock chimed and beckoned me to another workday, and I was filled with great emptiness.

Then I woke from the dream, and the night was still, and the city was empty, and everything was as it had been.

I went to the bathroom for a glass of water, and noticed the black hole on my cheek had grown, now big enough to fit a finger.

Later

"What do you want?," Amélie asks. "What do you want to do? Ce qui vous veulent faire?"

"I want to write a manifesto."

"Bah!" She wrinkles her nose. "Your life is a manifesto."

My life is a manifesto. "Ma vie est un manifeste!"

Daytime and Tomorrow

I have more paint now. I roam the city, and one by one, I'm painting over all of its billboards.

Left to our own devices, maybe we all become artists.

I am painting enormous murals, scenes I remember from my life. As I paint, I remember everything, everything I ever did, everyone I ever knew. I remember long forgotten years and feelings of communion; holding hands at the junior high dance; the encouragements of my second grade teacher; the mobile of ceramic swans hanging over my crib. I remember sweeping forests sprawling far as the eye could see, rolling oceans, endless plains. I remember mustard gas and sinking ships, bullets and bayonets and the sticky warmth of my own blood; I remember rounding Cape Horn, scaling Everest, building the Pyramids brick by brick, walking light-footed on the Moon. I remember the center of the galaxy, the center of the universe, the sound of vacuum. I remember the Big Bang, like a gasp of breath, like a baby's laugh, like the anticipation of an orgasm, like the spasm of fear that comes alongside true love, the true fear of loss; and I remember, before that, the bottomless silence—like the silence I hear now.

It is all right.

Choke

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

Cloudscape

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.

Command Line Existential Crisis

$ whatis whoami

Computer Head

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I've had my head in a computer for days now, and it's had an unsettling effect that I call, simply, "computer head." Computer head comes after too many hours or days of writing code, of passing variables into functions, of running if-then-else conditionals and for-next-while loops.

Non-computer people may not understand how beautiful a computer is, how perfect its mind. Things work, or they don't. Conditions are met, or they aren't. A function is performed, and it returns a value, true or false. The job of the programmer is to mediate between this immaculate computer logic and the sloppy unordered world. A programmer takes a world of chaotic choices and judgments, and systematizes it.

The world, of course, puts forth such little effort to comply. At 6pm, the programmer may have fit everything into a tidy system, but by 11, nodding off to sleep, that same programmer will suddenly realize whole scenarios for which that system won't work. There, in the dark, staring at the ceiling, where people might count sheep, the programmer sees brackets, parentheses and semicolons flying by; and there will be no rest till every loose end falls neatly into some predefined place. It's why programmers are notorious for working late hours, for staying at their desks and living off M&Ms (M&Ms, by the way, won't muck up a keyboard...): while the world goes unreined, there is no peace in the would-be-tidy mind of the programmer.

I'm in this frame of mind when a friend calls. I can't pick up the phone: I've already made the transition into fastidious computer-think, and I can't afford to undo it with a human interface. "Human interface." I actually think this. I see my caller ID and immediately reduce this to a variable, $Caller = "Peter". Before I can stop myself, I've built a function in my head to decide whether or not to pick up:

function PickUpPhone ($Caller, $q) {
	# where q is the "friendship quotient"
	if (!($AnswerPhone) {
		$Caller["pissedOff"]++;
	}
	while ($Caller["pissedOff"] >= q) {
		friendship = FALSE;
	}
	return friendship;
}

I don't take the call, and I think there really is a decent chance that $Caller["pissedOff"]++. Instead, I break for lunch, and at the deli, I start codifying their array of menu items:

              <item><sandwich><tuna>; 
              <item><soup><splitpea type="vegetarian">;

Stop it.

But I can't stop it. I get back to the office and it's worse than before: "Hello, $Accountant;" "If MeetingLength > 1 hour, then Morale = (Morale -1);"

By the time I get home, I can't feel my body. I'm not sure I have one anymore, and I'm not sure I need one. I think of taking a bath, or going for a walk, but instead, I go straight to a computer, to tweak some code. After all, "$TrainRide > 15 minutes," which gave me plenty of time to discover new ways that my system could be improved, and the world could be made more perfect. It's almost there...

Embrace the Kafka

Some mysteries will never be solved.

They say people are creatures of habit, and I am no exception. I have a favorite mailbox, at the northwest corner of 34th Street and 7th Avenue. It's conveniently located at the top of the stairs as I get off the subway, and it gets emptied several times a day. Sometimes I drop mail there and discover that it's been delivered to its destination that same day. My mailbox is big and it's blue and I find its big blueness reassuring, as if the rivets that anchor it to the ground also anchor me: every time I drop a letter in this mailbox, I feel connected to the vast, powerful permanence that is the United States of America. (Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating clearly hasn't watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, the premise of which is that a lone mail carrier is able to bring order back to his anarchic, post-apocalyptic country.) Say what you will about the United States Post Office: grumble about your mail carrier, long lines, or the economic inefficiencies of state-sponsored monopoly. I find it to be the most reliable and least nefarious manifestation of federal government that there is, and it makes me proud to be an American.

Maybe this preamble will begin to explain the shock—no, let's call it distress—I felt when I came out of the subway the other day and found my mailbox was missing. I looked to the spot where it had been, immovable, the day before, and there was no trace of it, just a little dent in the snow. I had a letter that needed mailing and I didn't know what to do; I walked back and forth, envelope in hand, in stupefied disbelief, while people passed by as if nothing catastrophic had happened.

How could a mailbox be missing? There must be some mistake.

Calm down. Take a breath. There's another mailbox at 36th and 8th. At least I hope there is. I hope to Christ there is.

I grabbed a mail carrier who was passed by. "Excuse me," I said, trying to slow my breathing. "What happened to the mailbox?" He looked back quizzically, and I had to consider the possibility that he wasn't yet aware of the crisis at hand. "The mailbox," I explained. "It's missing."

Oh, I'm sorry. Was I screeching?

What is it about the Post Office that taps so deeply into my bureaucratic paranoia? My grandfather worked at a post office, a big urban sorting center, and I still shiver remembering his tales of the vast underground network of sorters and filers, of conveyer belts and mail sacks, an entire underground city, layer upon layer of unfathomable bureaucracy. When a system grows large enough, it takes on uncomfortable resemblance to an organism: it grows desires, appetites, even sicknesses. My grandfather joked that people had gotten lost forever inside his sorting building, but I never thought it was very funny.

Why did I care about a missing mailbox? Even the reasonable explanations weren't reassuring: as when anything unusual happens in New York City, I blamed it on terrorists. "Al Qaeda took my mailbox!" "Full of anthrax and in CDC custody!" "Dirty bomb!!!"

But this fear was followed almost immediately by another, deeper one. If the Postal Service persists in the face of rain or sleet or snow or dark of night, then what worse catastrophe could have befallen my unmovable mailbox? The mailbox is representative of a law and order that I have been able to take for granted as fundamental, impervious to attack and immune to entropy—until now.

Sure, the lid was a little creaky and it didn't always close. It's completely possible that my mailbox was in for a repair, or had been retired after years of dependable service. But even this didn't offer me much solace. I thought of the de-commissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, only a few blocks away—a giant steel symbol of aging, rusting empire—and wondered, is my mailbox another, smaller one?

It's all so strange, as if I awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, and found myself transformed...

Emergency Preparedness

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I hear the chirp from a policeman's walkie talkie outside my window, and see a small group of them (gaggle? pack?) standing next to my apartment. And a fire truck. I can't tell what's going on and I wonder if I should be prepared to evacuate—which right now I'm not, because I'm sitting here in a towel and nothing else. I've been sitting here in this towel since I got out of the shower a half-hour ago; and I was in the shower at least a half-hour (so warm!)—which makes me realize that when the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.

It all reminds me of the time I was evacuated from my apartment, after the building sort of exploded.

I woke that morning to an enormous thud that shook the walls of the Lido Apartments, where I lived at the time. The Lido was a relic from old Hollywood, a once-glamorous hotel turned into a five-story brick slum with aspirations to gentrify. Typical rising and falling of Hollywood dreams. ¹

On this morning something shook the building hard. This by itself wasn't too unusual, it being earthquake country; but this was a different kind of shake—not the slow, growling rumble of an earthquake; more like someone had driven a truck straight into the building. A big truck.

I poked my head out my window to see what was going on, and saw everyone else in my neighborhood doing the same—a hundred sleepy faces dangling outside a hundred windows. I thought of Whac-a-Mole. Then I remember thinking something bad was happening, something possibly disastrous or epic. ² I remember thinking I should throw some clothes on and leave the building.

Instead, seeing nothing, I decided to go back to bed.

[When the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.]

The firemen banging on the door shouted, We needed to get out "NOW NOW NOW." But I couldn't get out, because there were four of them standing in the doorway, and they were the biggest, widest, thickest people I've ever seen. So instead I grabbed some essentials—my laptop, some chewing gum—and waited for them to disperse.

Out on the street, the longest line of fire trucks ever assembled stretched from horizon to horizon (or at least up Wilcox to Cahuenga, and down to Hollywood Boulevard). Helicopters swarmed the sky, and police held curious passersby behind yellow "Do Not Cross" tape. I strolled through it casually, weirdly unbothered, almost dissociated. I declined a TV interview and instead made a beeline for Mann's Chinese Theatre. I watched Blade II (which really was bad, a disaster of epic proportions), and wondered, every now and then, if I'd have an apartment when the movie was over, and if I should have brought, I don't know, a change of underwear or at least a jacket.

I learned the full story when I got out of the theatre: a few people had seen my building on the morning news ³ and called to see if I was OK, and I pieced together the details from their string of voicemail messages. An underground had fire spread to a natural gas line, causing a muffled explosion that blew off the manhole covers all around my block: this was the initial thud. But it turned out that my building also sat on top of a major intersection of gas mains, and if the fire had spread, it'd have blown that entire part of the neighborhood sky high. Boulevard of broken dreams.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Maybe take short showers and don't sit around in your wet towel too long. Or maybe just that some people never learn.

1. The Lido was best known as the location for the lobby shots of the Eagles "Hotel California." My own favorite thing about the Lido, apart from its location and dirt-cheap rent, was the view it afforded to the luxury condos across the parking lot. Forty-eight windows shaped like wide-screen TVs faced toward my apartment, like forty-eight channels of television, and without fail, two or three of them featured women taking their clothes off and dancing. No one ever believes me about the dancing, but it's true. This was, after all, Los Angeles.

2. I can't remember for sure whether this was just before, or just after, September 11. I'm going to say it was just after, because that makes a better story. And maybe accurate.

3. Who in L.A. watches the morning news? Or any news?

Errand

errand. Noun. An expedition involving the acquisition of some good, usually perceived as essential, when in fact completely unnecessary. Because errands involve a component of travel, they are often confused for a leisure activity. From the root, errant, aimless.

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Eskimo Words for "Brunch"

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

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

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

qanuk

Brunch before noon

kaneq

Early afternoon brunch

kanevvluk

Brunch after 2:30pm

sanajait

Brunch cooked at home

namiippunga

Brunch eaten out

muruaneq

Brunch with a lover

nutaryuk

Brunch with a new lover

qetrar

Brunch with your friends

nevluk

Brunch with your family

tuktu

A savory brunch

mutuk

A sweet brunch

mamaqtuq

A brunch mixing sweet and savory

qujannamiik

Brunch with powdered sugar

pirta

Brunch in the air

aniu

Brunch crusting on the ground

qanisqineq

A mimosa brunch

quisuktunga

A Bloody Mary brunch

qanikcaq

Brunch involving three or more alcoholic beverages

qengaruk

All-you-can-eat brunch

utvak

Mother's Day brunch

ajjiliurumajagit

Weekday brunch (seldom used)

navcaq

Wedding brunch

natquik

Breakup brunch

navcite

Unexpected breakup brunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Experiments in Magnetic Poetry (pt. 1)

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.

Furniture

Think about your furniture.

Your first coffee table was made from a pair of milk crates you found laying on the curbside one trash night. You brought them home, dusted them off, and propped them in front of a mangy easy chair, and they were good for holding coffee, unread mail, tired feet, the TV remote control.

Later, you made a bookshelf out of those same milk crates.

You had a bureau of drawers made out of plastic, made by a company better known for its trash cans and dust pans. At some point you upgraded to Ikeaware, semi-disposable pinewood furniture. This was adequate and more, too: it offered, if not permanence, at least substance.

Gradually, pine gave way to ash and birch, the furniture took on more mass, became weightier, harder to move, harder to throw away. After the passage of no small amount of time, you saved up a little money and, eventually, spent some of it on a "piece"—when furniture is nice enough it's called a "piece." You like this piece; you feel an affinity for it that is almost fetishistic. You know in your heart there is nothing categorically different between the piece, the hand-carved antique oak coffee table, and those milk crates: they're equally good at holding coffee, mail, tired feet. But the point is, over time, you managed to acquire some things that speak to you, things that make your life just a little bit better, things that appropriately express who you think you are.

Then you move to another city and leave all of your furniture behind.

Then you realize that furniture is a metaphor for everything else in your life—restaurants you like, parks, grocery stores, radio stations, friends, lovers. Unexpectedly, you find yourself combing the streets on a trash night, looking for milk crates and thinking about time, and thinking about time...

Godzilla Reading Haiku

MP3 audio track

"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, a real hug, tight, so he knows I mean it.

Intro to Philosophy

or, How Looking for Belief Can Lead to Believing Nothing

My life has been a series of apostasies, and I blame this on Norman Kretzmann.

Against the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I entered college as a philosophy major. My last year of high school had been a strange and spacious one: since I'd completed most of my requirements the year before, I took it upon myself to spend my senior year doing whatever I wanted, despite the diligent efforts of hall monitors and truancy officers. I was delinquent, but in the best possible way: if I skipped class, it was usually to work on a film I was shooting through most of that year, a sort of thesis project that (in my mind) gave me carte blanche to wander the halls, as long as I carried a camera. If I wasn't working on the film, then I was reading a book I'd stolen from an English teacher the year before, by Will Durant, called The Story of Philosophy.

People have romantic notions about philosophy, and the purpose of this book was to shatter all of those notions. People imagine the study of philosophy to be a lot of cloudy, heady and generalized musing about the meaning of life. But Durant's book was dry, dense, and merciless. He didn't care what you thought about the meaning of life. He cared only to explain the rigors of Spinoza and Schopenhauer—this, to high school students who would laugh at the word "monad" because it rhymes with "gonad."

Somehow, I found purchase there, in that book: I was unprepared for the mathematical precision that the discipline of philosophy required, but I did love the questions, and I would skim the dense passages over and over until I could understand them in their cloudy, heady, generalized forms: I loved philosophy in spite of itself.

I wound up at a college with a world-class philosophy department, and quickly discovered it was one of the easiest majors, requiring only thirty-two credits—just one class per semester. Since I'd just spent a year cultivating a love of free time and a disdain for requirements, it seemed a perfect match, and I declared my major immediately.

My first class: Philosophy of Religion, with Norman Kretzmann.

Kretzmann was famous in esoteric circles, but his celebrity (like that of most of my professors) was lost on me. Instead, I was excited by the subject matter. Young philosophers want to know, "How should we live?"—and it seemed to me that any discussion of religion would have to address this cloudy, heady, general question.

Instead, what happened, more of less, was this:

Kretzmann wrote two or three sentences on the blackboard, and amended the wording of them until the class could agree that they were true. Once he'd established these initial statements, he'd add to them, line by line, allowing us to argue at any point until we all agreed with what was written—so that the truth of each statement was airtight. Methodically, for an hour and a half, Kretzmann constructed a logical proof, and at the very end of class, exactly on cue, he'd arrive at the proof's conclusion.

On Tuesdays, he proved that God existed.

On Thursdays, he proved that God did not exist.

And it went back and forth like that for the entire semester.

I can't remember if the class ended on a Tuesday or a Thursday, or if, in the end, Kretzmann ever tipped his hand to reveal what he himself believed to be true. Belief, in the end, had nothing to do with it. Those sixteen weeks shattered all belief, and that must have been his intention: those proofs proved that you could prove anything. We were theists and atheists on alternate days, and after that, nihilists forever.

Lemons

“When God gives you lemons, throw them as hard as you can at His head.

Metamorphosis

Or, Destroying the Dream of my Own Translation

"Kafka's sentences often deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of sentences in German that require that the participle be positioned at the end of the sentence; in the above sentence, the equivalent of 'changed' is the final word, 'verwandelt'. Such constructions are not replicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text." - from Wikipedia

First, start with a phrase:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Use a computer to translate it into Japanese, and then back again:

One morning, one Gregor Samsa suffered from a dream, woke up in bed converted to their destructive himself.

Do it again:

One morning, one suffering from a dream Gregor Samsa, destruction of the bed, woke up in the translation itself.

And again:

Gregor Samsa dream, from the destruction of the bed one morning, suffering a single one, I woke up in the translation itself.

You've come here, to language, to literature, looking for meaning. It's why anyone comes to anything: to make sense and order of otherwise meaningless circumstance.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa one dream of one suffering from the destruction of one, I woke up in the translation itself.

Trying to pin things down with words, you've discovered that meaning moves. It evolves. It flies. it flits. It flutters.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa in my own translation from the burden of 1111111 I woke up one single dream was destroyed.

Instead of meaning, you've stumbled upon the destruction of meaning; and in that, you begin to find the true meaning of meaning: that it's made by looking for it.

I, 1111111, morning, 1111111, destroying the dream of my own translation from the bed, woke the burden of Gregor Samsa.

Destroying the dream of my own translation.

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.

Rapunzel's Tangles

Another one of her husband's business functions tonight and it was her job to play the wife. She loathed these things but faked it admirably well for short durations. Mark—her husband's name was Mark—thought she might enjoy this one: "Samson will be there."

Everyone expected she and Samson got along, for obvious reasons.

Introverts, she reminded herself, expend energy in social situations. Whereas extroverts draw energy, ingest it. So it's not that there's anything wrong with me, per se, was her conclusion to herself. Nor does their ingesting of my vital energy automatically mean that extroverts deserve to be treated like sycophantic vampires, was her next thought. She took a deep breath.

"Don't worry so much," Mark counseled her.

"I'm not worried. I just need to get ready." She kissed him on the cheek and disappeared upstairs, settling in front of a vanity mirror.

"Who's the fairest of them all?," Rapunzel said aloud, running her hands through her famous hair.

The hair unfurled around her, spilled out of the bedroom, trailed down the stairs and flowed through the rooms of the house like she was a fountain. It was so lustrous that light hitting it reflected back onto the ceiling and made constellations.

She didn't need much time to tend to her hair. Most days, she didn't even brush it. "Silky locks slip." Every morning, she'd sit up in bed and coil it in armfuls, like a sailor's rope; and through the day, she'd maneuver about her home by reeling the hair in and letting it out again with gentle swings of her arm. She left the bulk of it in the center of the house, in an atrium which had not been built expressly for that purpose but which suited it perfectly, a convenience she discovered days after first moving in.

Rapunzel had gotten so adroit at managing her hair that she barely noticed herself doing it. Stirring pots, sipping from her drink, talking on the phone, all the while winding and unwinding the lengths of her golden hair—passing the wooden spoon, the glass, the telephone, back and forth between her hands while unfurling her hair and coiling it back up; the delicate footwork, stepping over and around the masses of it that flowed from room to room: Mark watched her sometimes, the unconscious beauty of this dance, the native grace of her. She was the most beautiful woman in the land; and it was impossible to separate the image of her from that cascading wonder of her hair.

"It's a pain in the ass," she'd say, just before cutting it off. Mark would come home to discover her wearing an angular bob, cut above the shoulders, sharp and sudden across her face, she gleeful with the lightness of it. But sad, too, with loss—sad from the lightness.

No matter, because within days, the hair replaced itself: it grew out of her with unstoppable force, overrunning everything. "Where does it come from?" She'd sigh, but without anger, at the inevitableness of it—like someone who has come to the end of a too-short vacation—and begin again wrapping it into manageable shapes.

"If that hair is your worst burden in life," he'd say, "at least it's a beautiful burden."

"At least it doesn't tangle."

The truth was, she wasn't sure she liked her husband. She loved him—that was easy enough. It's not hard to love someone so known and so close for so long: she loved him, but maybe because what we mean by "love" is sometimes a nice, portable word to describe the shorthand, the easy easiness that we're lucky to experience with a few strangers over a lifetime. Love: a lack of the typical discomfort. Love: that which trickles in through the otherwise impermeable solipsism.

She imagined fairly precisely how the evening would play out among his colleagues and their wives: bravado and laughter and some of both not false. Inevitably, Mark would tell the story of how the two of them had met—the one story everyone knew already. "I was a petty thief!" he'd brag. "I broke into her home to steal from her!" He always ended the story the same way: "But as soon as I laid eyes on her, she robbed me instead: she stole my heart." He said this with a mix of syrupy storyteller's sweetness and also sincerity, such that she couldn't tell how much of it he truly believed. Maybe even he couldn't tell. That's the danger of recycling your best stories rote: habituation numbs everything.

She had an aversion to fruits and vegetables and it embarrassed Mark at these dinners. "She's allergic," he'd explain.

"I'm not allergic. I just don't like vegetables."

But to him this was uncomfortably close to admitting a true character flaw, so he'd confide to anyone: "When she was a baby, her family traded her for a bunch of rapini."

"Not rapini," she'd have to correct. "Rampion."

"Sorry. I knew it was rampion, I just said it wrong."

"Rapini is a broccoli..."

Since her twins Hercules and Tabitha had been born, she'd tried to reconsider her relationship to the produce aisle. It was difficult. Lately, Rapunzel found the simple act of grocery shopping to be stressful to the point of apoplectic paralysis: it offered a multiple choice set with nearly infinite questions and no correct answers. Salted or unsalted peanut butter? Fresh or frozen blueberries? Farmed or wild salmon? Low-fat cream cheese or fat-free cream cheese? NutraSweet or refined sugar? White bread or brown bread? Carbs or fat? She just didn't want to poison her family with whatever happened to be carcinogenic this week.

It occurred to her that so much of life is arranged like a multiple choice test with no correct answers.

She lingered, always, over the lettuce in the produce section, and wondered if the grocer stocked such a wide variety of it just for her, just to mock her. "Is lettuce even a vegetable? It's a leaf. Doesn't it need to have some substance before it's considered a vegetable?"

Too often, she came home with nothing but frozen pizza, red velvet cupcakes, and a case of wine. The pizza tasted like cardboard, but comforting cardboard, at least. Once, a girl in her daughter's preschool unpacked a Ziploc bag of fresh cherries, and Tabitha asked, "What are those?" Mortifying. Since then, Rapunzel made a point of buying whatever fresh fruit was in season, setting it prominently in a bowl in the kitchen, and then forgetting it there till it rotted and was replaced the following week. "The Bowl Where Fruit Goes to Die," Mark called it.

She pinned up her hair with relative ease. "Product makes perfect!" she'd joke, but in fact, she rarely used any, and the apparent effortless grace with which she managed her coiffure was a result of plain old practice. A few pleats and layers were all she needed to create striking dramatic effects. In general, she avoided ostentation, but for their wedding, she'd sculpted her hair into the shape of a castle, which, set upon her head, floated like it had been built upon a cloud. When her son Hercules first learned to crawl, she began fashioning her hair into elaborate mazes, and they'd make a game of his finding his way out, till one time a structural incident resulted in the collapse of one section of the labyrinth, and Hercules was suddenly buried under an avalanche of it. It scared him as only a child can be scared—no pain, but a deep feeling of betrayal at a world he'd trusted too completely—and that was the end of that particular game.

Lately, she'd taken to draping large sections of her hair up the sides of the walls, to get it out of the way, mostly, though it reminded her nostalgically of the ivy that grew around the tower where she'd spent her childhood. But once birds came and began nesting in it, Mark asked her to take it down.

Her real guilty pleasure, and where she spent her time, was her eyebrows. They grew suddenly, relentlessly, with the fierceness of a desert cactus hungry for its short spiny burst of life. She'd pull up to the mirror to tweeze her eyebrows into neat groomed shapes, plucking at them deliberately one at a time; and by the time she finished, they'd already have begun growing back. So she learned to tend them the way one tends a garden—that is, tending the garden that exists now, and also the garden that will grow in later. Studying the pattern of where they wanted to grow, she anticipated it; and rather than feud with it—it was a force of nature—she plucked in a way that she hoped would be complementary. The precision that this required was such that she could spend literal hours in front of her mirror—not, in the end, out of vanity, exactly, but more because of the calmness it afforded her. Staring so closely at her own reflection, she found she disappeared. Her worries receded into the simple task: tweeze and pluck. Tweeze and pluck. So close to the glass, her face ceased to be hers, and instead became its own landscape—her own face, a faceless alien landscape of pores and follicles; and staring longer, this dissolved further into just shapes, colors, no labels, no words.

She looked at the flush of her cheeks in the mirror and tried to imagine what her brain knew to be true, that it meant blood circulating under the skin in an almost infinite fractal of veins and capillaries: she imagined it like a magical river of lava, flowing underground through miles of unexplored tunnels. She imagined little boats coursing along this river, delivering their payload of globular vitality. What a great word: "hemoglobin." Little packets loaded with oxygen. Oxygen, which she needed to live; and which also is a poison that ages and eventually kills us. We oxidize. Blood races through the bloodstream, gives us life and speeds us toward death. Aging is just rusting to death.

She tried controlling the flow by holding her breath, by breathing faster, watched for subtle changes in her complexion's mood, as if her complexion were a friend and they were playing a child's game of hide and seek. "Come, oxygen. Come out come out wherever you are. Come, death."

She breathed deeply. When she let herself be very still, her breath always touched up against some anxious part of her and jolted her out of the stillness, brought her back to the day and its worries: she'd been shopping all day for shoes with her friend Goldilocks—its own special Hell. "Those look nice," Rapunzel had said encouragingly.

Goldilocks wrinkled her button nose. "Too big."

"How about those? They're cute."

"Too small."

It never ended.

Goldilocks had a new lover and wouldn't stop talking about him, but she was fickle with men and everything else, and Rapunzel doubted the poor fellow would last the week. She smiled politely, thinking of all the couples she knew, and wondering if any of them were happy. One by one, she held them in her mind like an imaginary police lineup and tried to imagine which ones were cheating on their spouse. As a game, it helped her to pass the time, but she conceded that without any real information, it was just wistful conjecture, impossible to know, like trying to guess someone's birthday, or how they trim their pubic hair. (Goldilocks waxed regularly. Rapunzel, perhaps in deference to the obvious jokes about her own hair growth, was fastidious about keeping modestly trimmed.)

"Psychiatrist says nannies turn young boys into future adulterers," Goldilocks read aloud from the cover of a fashion magazine.

"The single leading cause of adultery," Rapunzel answered, "is marriage."

Her therapist had asked her once if she'd ever considered cheating. "Well, that depends on your definition of 'cheating'—." She'd found there was little point to being cloying with her therapist, but she kept at it anyway.

"What's your definition of cheating?" he asked.

"Would I ever consider cheating? Is that what you asked? Ever is such a horribly long time...."

"What's your definition of cheating?"

He wouldn't let up. Fine. "There are certain... How do I say it? Our marriage—I mean: any marriage—it's based on certain expectations and assumptions.... some of which aren't spoken. Aloud. So I mean there's a lot of room in marriage—any marriage—for misunderstanding...."

That hung in the air for an extra few moments. The air was thick in her therapist's office.

"Don't you agree?" she asked.

"What do you think are the misunderstandings in your marriage?"

For Christ's sake. "Where to begin? No. I'm joking. I was, you know, speaking generally. There aren't any particular disappointments in my marriage."

"Disappointments?"

"Yeah. No. Wait, what?"

"I asked you about misunderstandings in your marriage, and you said disappointments."

"Did I?"

"Yes."

"Interesting!"

They stared at each other, the perennial overpriced blinking contest.

"Would you like to talk about your disappointments?"

"I don't see the point really. Everyone has disappointments."

"What are some of yours?"

"Me? No. I was speaking generally."

On it went, hour after hour, week after week. Why did she even go?

[When you spend your childhood locked in a tower, when that tower is all you know, you don't consider yourself trapped, particularly. This is the boundary of your world. So when someone breaks into your tower and seduces you with rescue, well, "Rescue from what?" you ask. He says there's a bigger, more enticing world out there, full of possibilities; and you say, "What are possibilities?"

It's not his fault: he goes to some trouble, this liberator-thief: he has mainly good intentions. He even incurs some injuries bringing you into this new world. But being trapped is all you know. It's the only place you feel like yourself. You get a fresh start in a new, expansive garden, and the first thing you'll do, every single time, is build a wall. To make yourself feel more at home.]

Since she'd stopped being able to sleep, she'd been taking long walks in the night. Mark hated it. "Who walks? You look like an indigent person." But too he was worried about her safety, and as a concession to him, she strapped reflective strips to her ankles to flash back the lights from oncoming cars. From the distance, she imagined they looked like two very small, very low-flying, very spastic UFOs.

He also bought her a ridiculous can of Mace, which she did not bring with her and which she thought wasn't even legal in their state.

The anxiousness wasn't even background noise. It was the air itself.

The walks got longer.

In the beginning, just looping through her own neighborhood at 4am felt exciting and forbidden. In the low light, even common things looked refreshed: she'd notice pocks in a tree, or a crack in a neighbor's house that she'd never seen before. Imperfections are everywhere, she began to think, but mostly invisible during the bustle of the day. Also, imperfections are where things become unique: the pocks and cracks are the main things that distinguish us from one another. So she'd quest for them, the flaws and subtle breakages, and once she saw them then her perception of that object would be altered; and she'd carry this new knowledge back with her into waking hours, like a secret. "Secrets make us stronger," Goldilocks had said to her once, while gossiping about her lovers. Rapunzel thought: secrets make our autonomy stronger.

Soon, like everything else, her furtive late night wanders fell into the familiar, and lost their excitement; and she found herself investing more time and more risk in her excursions. She'd go farther. She climbed the fence at the edge of their neighborhood and strolled the nearby golf club. By day it was overrun with men in pink shirts. By night, coyotes. Both were dangerous, she laughed, but lately she preferred coyotes.

What terrifies children? Big-clawed monsters so strange and unique that grown-ups don't even have names for them. Drowning. Supernovas. Being left behind.

What terrifies adults? Foreclosure. Being passed over for promotion. A declined credit card. Getting sick from food past its freshness date. The loss of comfort. The chance that we're missing out.

At what age do we become so banal?

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." To let down your hair is to run wild. Did she ever do that, really?

What excites children? Sugar. Swimming pools. Bunk beds. Eating. New things. Familiar things.

What excites adults? She didn't claim to know. Tomorrow, maybe. Always the sense that tomorrow would be better. She'd do this tomorrow, she'd do it all tomorrow, because tomorrow there'd be sunshine and energy and money and time. When was this tomorrow? Why not anything today? Because today was always filled up:

"Hercules, do you want pasta or edamame? Pasta? Are you sure? You had pasta for lunch."

She loved them so much she could choke on it. She didn't even perceive them as separate from herself. Is this love? If I were to die today, I wouldn't die at all, as long as they continued.

She wondered how long her hair would grow, after she died.

"Tabitha, what are you eating, honey? No, mommy doesn't want a cherry. But you're sweet to offer. Here, spit out the pit, baby-girl."

She entertained the notion that perhaps Medea had killed the children less from rage or despair and more as a way to escape the exhaustion of so much feeling.

Rapunzel realized her children sprang from the same place as her hair: they both arrived, it seemed to her, from the future, from the great void; and they grew like her hair, too—unstoppably, as if the future had already fully imagined them in a realized state, and was sending incremental updates to the present. Oaks hidden inside acorns. This came as some relief to her: if her life was unpredictable and vaguely dissatisfying, then at least it was also preordained, and not her fault.

She could go on pretending it was real, this life, despite whatever evidence to the contrary. She'd keep at the eyebrows—not till they were finished (they never were or would be), but adequately reckoned with. If the eyebrows were an unanswerable question, then she'd keep at them till the question had been asked, at least. She could disappear, the way she'd disappeared tonight, into the mirror, into the rituals of her hair. She could disappear into whatever task was at hand. She'd put on elegant clothes, pin up her hair, wear all her finest charms. Her efforts would become focused, diligent, even aggressive—maintaining and expanding the illusion of her perfect happy life. This was her purpose. No matter that she didn't believe in it: it wasn't for her. "Happily ever after" was never for her. It was for the others, in their moments of feeling small or tired, a hope there's more and it's nearby, reachable, something that can be had and held and kept forever, as if there were such a thing as forever, as if there were such a thing as happy. The stories we tell our children are terrible, but not for the reasons we assume: a fairy tale is a series of small truths used to tell big lies—not the other way around—and people swallow them like sugar. And she was complicit, she knew. It was her highest purpose: to go to her husband and children day after day, and lie to them about love, and joy, and happily ever after—so they could go on living.

"I'm ready," she called.

Shiva the Destroyer

We were on the train and we were going toward important places, and that is what allowed us to disappear into ourselves, and pass by station stop after station stop, staring into books and newspapers and windows and each other, as if we were nowhere, as if we were people without souls.

The man shuffled onto the train announced by his own stink, a sticky vinegar that attached itself to the inside of the nose. He shuffled his feet and he shuffled his cardboard cup, mostly empty but with a few coins, like a broken toy tambourine.

He spoke too quietly to draw us from our reverie. It was the stink, rather, that drew us, and pushed most of us to inch away from him without looking, nor hearing his mumbled words: "I am Shiva," he said, "Neelkantha of the blue throat, eye of fire, skin of tiger, greatest among gods, destroyer of worlds." He chanted this quietly and made his way among us, while we withdrew from him without looking up.

Not listening to him or even hearing him, we never imagined that his words were true, that he was indeed the great deity incarnate, nor that our failure to love him or care for him was a final act of disastrous consequence: that we had failed so exhaustively, failed in our very humanity, and, undeserving of it, would live to see it stripped from us, while we, unaware, listened to our headphones, read our magazines, and recoiled from the stink of the misfortune we'd helped to create.

Stella of the Angels

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I lost focus so I went to a fortune teller. I picked the first one within walking distance who took credit cards. She asked me to hold out my hands, and as soon as she touched me, I got a hard-on. Within ten minutes we were fucking on the sofa.

"You've got a really strong love line," she said.

I moved in that night. That was three years ago.

*    *    *

(Did she see it coming? I always wondered, and I never knew.)

*    *    *

Her name was Stella Luna, like the children's book. That's what it said on the sign in her parlor. Her real name was Stella DeAngelis, but she changed it. "I thought Luna sounded more mystical," she explained.

"More mystical than, 'From angels'?"

I asked if she came from a long line of psychics, and she laughed. "My daddy was a plumber." But she also had an uncle who made a good living betting on horses, and legend has it that her grandmother predicted the assassination of JFK, in vivid detail, including the phrase "grassy knoll." She claimed she saw the face of the third gunman, and could have picked him out of a police line-up. "But who knows?"

*    *    *

"You're going to struggle a while," Stella told me, as we laid naked on her sofa, she finally reading my palm. "Because you're a seeker."

"What do I seek?"

She ran her finger along my palm but didn't answer.

"What do I seek?"

"That which you don't have," she said finally, and got up to pull on her clothes.

"That's obvious. That's everyone. That's tautological."

"I don't know what that word means."

*    *    *

She knew the future but she didn't know that certain truths follow from their atomic propositions.

*    *    *

"You're going to go home and pack a bag of things and move in with me," she said.

"Is that a prediction? Or just something you want?"

She smiled and kissed me. "It's your destiny."

*    *    *

I went home, packed a bag, and moved in with her, which was a shitty thing to do, because I'd lived with a woman at the time, a woman who told me often that she loved me.

"I'm moving out."

"What? Why?"

"It's my destiny."

I paid an extra month's rent and let her keep my share of the deposit, and since she was justified in saying all of those bad things about me, I never tried to stop her. I still think about her sometimes.

*    *    *

Stella and I took a trip to Vermont, after I'd been living with her for a few months. We rented a car and took turns driving up the coast through the rain. Halfway through Connecticut, she said, "Pull over. I want to fuck you."

I stopped the car, and she unbuckled my pants and climbed on top of me, somehow squeezing her lithe body into the space between me and the steering wheel.

"That was great," I said, and she laughed and wiped the fog of our breath off the windows.

Up ahead, a tractor trailer had jack-knifed and killed twenty-two people—the largest single auto accident in Connecticut history.

"Did you know?," I asked her.

"I just wanted to fuck," she answered.

*    *    *

"Do you believe in predestiny? Are our futures written?"

"Of course." She looked at me like I'd questioned the roundness of the Earth, or gravity. She didn't understand why this idea put me into a three-day sulk and got me wondering about suicide. "Do you ever think of killing yourself?," I asked her.

"That's stupid."

*    *    *

"What do they say?"

She looked at me impatiently.

"Nothing about sinking ships, right? Nothing about death at sea? I couldn't bear knowing I was going to drown."

"When I read your palm," she explained, "I am reading your palm."

"That's tautological."

"But when I read the cards, I am reading the cards. And the cards are reading you. Do you understand?"

"No. I mean of course, yes, but, no, not at all. Why does a random shuffle of cards offer meaning about my life?"

"Right? Why does a random shuffle of events, or a random shuffle of jobs, or a random shuffle of girlfriends, offer meaning about your life? Exactly."

"So what do the cards say?"

She looked at them quietly for a while. She didn't like telling my fortune. Or maybe she just didn't like my fortune.

"You're going to struggle a while," she finally said.

"That's vague."

"The cards are kind of hard to read tonight. I'll look at them again tomorrow."

"I want my money back," I told her.

"Then you should have paid me." She kissed me sweetly on the cheek. "Let's go to bed."

*    *    *

She held a bag in her hand and she told me she was leaving. She gave me an extra month's rent, and said I should keep her share of the deposit.

"What? Why?," I asked. But she didn't answer.

"I've loved you," she said. "I'll always love you."

"Did you see this coming?," I asked.

"Did you see this coming?," I asked. "Because I didn't see this coming."

But I was shouting at the door. She was already gone.

*    *    *

We were lying on the sofa, and she was kissing my hand. "What am I seeking?," I asked her. We were both so relaxed, the way lovers are. "I don't know," she answered. "What are you seeking?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I don't know."

Stranger Than Fiction

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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.

Sugar and Stones

I am an ant, but I forget sometimes, and I think that I'm a spider. A spinner. A schemer. An eater of ants.

Each day I walk with the others. I yoke myself with a stone or with a gob of sugar, and march lock-step along the line. I follow those in front of me, till somewhere, someone takes my gob of sugar or my stone, and sends me on my way. And for that, I am happy, or I think I am.

But at night, I dream I am a spider. I spin elaborate plans, perfectly symmetrical and beautifully engineered. I perch at the center of my web, ready to seize the moment when the mindless drones, the worker ants, myself, march like a slow red tide into my web. I am patient and a planner. I shall thrive.

Another day of sugar and stones, then exhaustion, sleep, and more dreams. Now I'm a pitiless bird, watching from a mile high the march of the thin red ants, the methodical spinning of the spider; I am circling passionless and free, and carried higher and higher by the gusts of wind and the tilt of my wing.

Another day, burrowing tunnel to tunnel, onward and upward, outward and downward, outward and upward. Up is down and down is up. Slow march under hard sunshine, endless expanse, and so much weight carried, so much weight. My brethren fall, and I crawl over them, as others some day will crawl over me. "Where are we going?" and "Why?": we have no use for questions.

Tonight I dream I'm a blue-eyed boy, squealing and laughing in the field; a boy with messy hair and sometimes bloody in the knees; a boy who, for ignorant sport, hurtles rocks at the birds, sets afire to the spider web to watch the wisp and hear the crackle; who wipes clean the anthill with a curious swipe of the foot, and erases, on a whim, whole fields of serfs, whole armies of soldiers; demolishes roads and kingdoms, ends empire, and ends empire's dreams, dreams I never understood or shared or even glimpsed, though I toiled to build them; dreams now gone in the swipe of a shoe; and from this dream, I do not wake; and it is how I'd have wanted it.

That Guy

When I wake up, I can't tell what's going on. It's dark and there's sharp thudding. After a few seconds, the morning snaps into better focus and I understand: it's that guy. That insomniac road crew guy who runs the jack-hammer. He's at it again.

As I sit up in bed, I feel vaguely like Roy Scheider, who, having vanquished the giant predatory shark in Jaws and then again in Jaws 2, sees his family flee from Hawaii to Florida, only to have the shark follow them, in Jaws 3-D, looking for revenge.

* * *

We first met in upstate New York: I lived in a sleepy college town, in one of those broken-down, overpopulated old clapboard houses that make up these towns—the kind where the walls are all crooked and the doors never quite line up, and rooms seem to have been haphazardly appended to the original structure till you can't tell what the original structure was, rooms just slapped on here and there so that the building resembles a hamster's Habitrail—even before one considers the rat's-nest decor of piled laundry and food containers that are the closest thing the house has to insulation. You know—one of those houses?

We lived a little ways off the road, but they were doing some work on a water line or sewer line or something, and that's how I met that guy.

That guy, that orange-vested guy with bulging triceps and a penchant for early rising, was an up-and-comer: he had everything it took to be a very successful jack-hammerer. And he knew it. Every morning he'd be up and coming right outside our window, hammering away into our driveway, into what felt like the foundation of the house, into what felt like my molars and my cranium, at 7am. 7am! No regard was given to the fact that we we'd been up all night working studying drinking and playing guitar. 7am, on the button, every morning. This guy was a German train. This guy was the Cal Ripkin of jack-hammerers.

The resulting lack of sleep led to more than half of the house coming down with mono.¹

There was no evidence to support the obvious theory—that guy enjoyed waking us each morning from our privileged (and often hung-over) sleep.

* * *

I didn't see that guy again for a few years: we drifted apart and went our separate ways, and I kind of forgot about him. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in L.A., but I couldn't be sure, because the steep angle of the sun threw the shadow of the hard hat across his face, and all I saw for sure were his white teeth shining out from his gleaming sadistic 7am smile.

* * *

It's only natural, I guess, that we each wound up in Boston: it's an obvious destination for private contractors and for over-educated liberal arts grads. The entire city of Boston is always under construction, constantly.² Road crews are easier to find than T stops, and at least as prevalent as Dunkin Donuts.³

[Construction is the status quo in Boston, along with its evil twin, destruction. Put aside the exceptional example of the Big Dig and consider instead the thousands of smaller-scale fiascos: i.e., the entire time I was in Boston (so, two years) saw work on the Congress Street Bridge, a major passage across the Boston Channel into South Boston. Work started before I arrived and it goes on to this day. Construction in Boston is so common that you might never twice take the same route from one place to another: like the Hogwarts staircase, the road itself will bend and twist and reshape itself over time.]

That guy found me a week after I renewed my lease in Boston's South End. I had plenty of misgivings about signing on to another year of that apartment (in particular) and another year of Boston (in general), but I made some peace with these misgivings, and decided it was for the best that I stay. I inked the new lease and settled in for another year.

The wrecking ball showed up the following week, there to tear down the adjacent building and replace it a new set of luxury condos. Yes—wrecking ball. Since we'd first met in that sleepy college town, that guy had diversified: he was now adept in many new tools of noise and destruction, including (but not limited to) the pile driver, the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and even explosives.

The amount of time it takes, apparently, to level an old building, clear the rubble, and then build, from the ground up, a new set of luxury condos is exactly one year—exactly the duration of the lease I'd just signed. They were just installing the windows when I drove my U-haul out of town.

I hope that guy forgives me for not saying goodbye.

* * *

From the window of my Brooklyn apartment, I can make him out, in his too-familiar hard hat and orange vest. He's surrounded by an army of rubber construction cones and he's blissfully jack-hammering away. Sitting there on the curb, off to one side, there's a coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Even from this distance, through the light rain and through the cement dust that rises up around him, through the shadow that the sun casts off of his hard hat, I can see his bright teeth smiling, as he hammers his way back into my day.

1. Or maybe it was all the kissing.

2. Given the number of liberal arts grads, it's probably under constant deconstruction as well.

3. It's completely possible the prevalence of Dunkin Donuts in Boston is a direct result of the prevalence of road crews, because you will never see one without the other.

The Bogeyman

The bogeyman came over last night, and
he wasn't as scary as I'd remembered.
We made dinner. He said the wine went straight
to his head. At the end of the night,
We started kissing, and I fucked him
On the same bed where he used to lurk,
slovering and snarling, clawing at my ankles.
Now he's snoring while we spoon,
his sleeping face lit in moonlight, and
I know I haven't conquered fear, just
moved it somewhere else, still undiscovered.

The Cleaning Lady

His apartment was too large and his schedule too busy for him to have time to dust, or clean toilets, or scrub floors, so he got a referral from a co-worker, and hired a cleaning lady. "Look at all these nice things you have!" she exclaimed upon her arrival, and promptly threw them in the trash. "There. Everything is cleaner now," she said, and indeed it was.

The Ids of March

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"I had a vision of myself right now, as a kind of wandering bachelor Mendican poet, wandering all the way down the beaches of Malaysia, eating magic mushrooms all the way as I went until I reached Bali and evaporated in a state of ecstasy in the sunset."

- from Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia

* * *

I'm crazy. Or at least I was crazy. Or at least there are some pieces of paper somewhere in the world that would indicate that I'm crazy. Or was crazy. Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

I went to an eye doctor when I was in fourth grade; I had no idea I was near-sighted until he flipped some lenses in front of my eyes and the world suddenly snapped into focus. I never thought to ask why the world was fuzzy; that was just the way the world was. Crazy is like that, too: a doctor presents a theory, or a prescription, or a suggestion about how to look at the world, and, like the eye doctor, asks, "Better or worse?"

Better or worse.

Better or worse.

Fuck if I know. The thing is, whether the world is blurry or not, we keep stumbling through it. What choice is there?

What choice is there?

* * *

I'm home now. Except I don't mean the home where I live; I mean the home where I grew up, the home where I was a kid. My parents' home. Except I don't mean that home, either, because my parents moved a few years ago. They packed up all the furniture and books and trinkets and all the landmarks and icons of "home," and unpacked them in this other place, so that this new place seems familiar even though it's completely different. The house is full of memories that I never actually had.

They pulled off a funny trick when they moved, managing to fit a full house worth of stuff into a smaller house. I try to pull off a similar trick when I visit: I try to fit all the experience I've acquired since I moved out; I try to sneak those ten-plus years into this place; but it never fits, just like the high school letter jacket doesn't fit. So one sense I get, coming home, is that nothing fits.

* * *

I find a stash of old books and CDs in the basement. This was me, then. This is what my world sounded like. These are the words that went in and out of my head.

Better or worse?

I try to explain to the stylist why it's so hard for me to get my hair cut. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. She seems to understand: "The hair," she says, "is where the superego meets the id. And it's right there in the mirror, every single morning."

Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

Some days I want to evaporate.

"He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass."

The Margarine Manifesto

Part One: Counting My Blessings

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Two: Setting the Scene

I considered making toast for breakfast. Instead I ate half a chocolate bar and had four cups of coffee. I'm still in pajamas.

Part Three: Panic / First Response

In order:

• Sleep in
• Take a long shower
• Go for a walk
• Indulge long email threads with old friends
• Take the subway somewhere you've never been
• Read job listings in other career fields
• Flip through the dictionary, learn new words like feasance and outre
• Write a manifesto

Part Four: The Woods

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promissory notes to keep
And I have promissory notes to keep.

Part Five: Panic / Second Response

In no particular order:

• Take a class
• Get a dog
• Leave the city
• Leave the country
• Move to the country
• Enroll in grad school
• Get a houseboat
• Get an Airstream
• Get a horse
• Hike the back country
• Join the army
• Join the Peace Corp
• Join anything
• Start a magazine
• Start a novel
• Start a memoir
• Start a religion
• Finish something
• etc.

Part Six: Things That Sometimes Hold Me Back

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Seven: Capitalism

Capitalism is the system by which we (the capitalists) take whatever amount of initial wealth we are dealt (the capital), and then, by hook or crook, make our best effort to multiply this wealth through the opportunities afforded to us.

If one's wealth is zero, then no amount of opportunity will lead to more wealth: zero times anything is zero.

If one's opportunity is low, then no amount of initial wealth will lead to more wealth. Pursuing a poor opportunity (i.e., a multiplier < 1) may in fact lead to less wealth—even if it is the best opportunity available at the time.

The model is complicated by the fact that greater wealth leads to greater opportunity, and lesser wealth to lesser opportunity.

Part Eight: On Margarine

I considered making toast for breakfast. The making of toast presents a choice. One may:

1. apply butter to one's toast
2. apply margarine
3. leave one's toast as is

Butter is a bad choice, because it contains saturated animal fat, which leads to heart disease; and because it contains lactose, which is hard to digest.

Margarine is a bad choice, because it contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in cholesterol and is associated with cancer; and anyway, it tastes a little funny.

Dry toast is a bad choice, because it is not very satisfying, and one only eats breakfast once a day, so it should be satisfying.

Sometimes all of the choices are bad. Hence, I had half a chocolate bar.

Part Nine: Global Free Trade

The premise of global free trade is that, unfettered by local restrictions, we are free to choose from a wider set of capitalistic opportunities: if Country Y offer more opportunities to multiply one's wealth than Country X, logically one should pursue those opportunities with Country Y. One is "free" to "trade" loyalties and obligations, when presented with a better chance at greater wealth.

Thus, if one has the opportunity to flee a country, and leave the jurisdiction of one's massive debt, thereby breaking the promise to repay, for the sake of a fresh start, then this is simply holding with the premise of global free trade:

An outre solution: not submissive feasance; not irresponsible malfeasance; but legitimized non-feasance.

Part Ten: The Woods

In the deepest parts of the woods, there are no forking paths, because there are no paths. The eye looks at the spaces between the trees and, connecting them, imagines a path where there is none. We walk these imaginary paths, marching forward into the woods, unafraid, till something causes our faith to waiver; and then we wonder: Am I lost? Is this a path I'm on now? Or am I merely in the unconnected spaces between trees? Am I on a walk, or have I gone for a hike in the back country? This thing that I started, this thing that I am doing—is it something I can finish? Can I finish anything? When a path seems to fork, are any of the choices good ones? Or is there no path at all?

The Raptors: Five Days and Nights in Silence

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(Obtuse pictures of malaise from the myths of nature)

This Is Your Life

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You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.

Time Lapse

"And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."
- Anne Enright, The Gathering

The trip put me in the mood of a birthday, or a New Year: something about transiting from one place to another offered me just enough pause, and distance, to reflect on what has been: there is the version of the story of our lives that we tell ourselves we're living, and then there is the version we're actually living; and sometimes it's not clear or obvious when those two diverge. Suddenly a year has passed and we're altogether someone different than we thought we were. There are lines on our face we never knew were there, and that small hole in our heart, the one that's been leaking the slow trickle of joy, at some point during the year that hole got larger, and the leak turned into a flow, and now has maybe caused structural damage, which, owing to the slow passage of time, we have till now failed to notice. This pause, this one flicker of quiet amidst the inexorable crawl-forward of time, this snapshot of the status quo, motion-blurry but clear enough, certainly, to discern this: the status quo not working. Then the pause is over: time has stretched its legs and now marches onward, and our momentary glimpse at clarity is insufficient to change the momentum of anything.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, all my worries will go away and my blood pressure will drop twenty points. The stock market will soar and the price of oil will plummet. The weather will be sunny and cool and breezy, like for flying a kite.

The pothole outside my house will fill in, and the garbage smell will lift away. Mail will never be lost again. Sinks will flow with chocolate and champagne. Credit card debt will be forgiven. We will all lose ten pounds. Our teeth will floss themselves.

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, the world will fill with flowers. The milk carton children will return. Heartbreaks of the past will turn to wistful happy memories; we will shed our fear of all things, and we'll dance and make love in the streets, except the streets will be better, too, and won't give brush burns.

When results are in, and he has made his acceptance speech, we will gasp in genuine awe at the rightness of things; we will get choked up to have rediscovered our lost faith; and we will believe, like our forefathers believed, in the power of democracy, and in the good that lies buried (sometimes too deep) inside the human heart, tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama.

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."

Vegan

ve-gan. Noun. A vegetarian who doesn't like you.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Want-Induced Psychosis (pt. 1)

By the time we end a relationship, usually the person we loved is already gone.

Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that person no longer exists, or never existed: that person with whom we'd built a home, raised our children, celebrated so much happiness and hope—in our imagined future—that person never existed. We've been in love with a phantom, an objet d'art of our own creation, inspired by a real-life counterpart who, it turns out, doesn't want those things at all.

We wake up to find that our bed, our house, our future, is empty, and that it has been for some time. It's the simulacra that's been keeping us warm. A beautiful ghost.

Love, then, is a kind of psychosis. ¹

The sun comes up on a day as cold and empty as it ever was, but brighter and colder, for want of a new illusion to keep us warm.

1. The gravitational pull of our desire, strong enough to warp space-time.

When Ulysses Returned to Ithaca

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When Ulysses returned to Ithaca, it wasn't what he'd remembered. The streets were dirtier and narrower, the people furtive, unhealthy and short. Climbing the hill back to his palace, the road was worse, too—pocked, uneven, steeper, it seemed; and the palace itself had fallen into ruin: the ceiling was collapsed in spots, and the front door was rotting off its hinges.

"Penelope?," he called out. "Penny, are you there? It's me, Ulysses. I'm home." His voice echoed off the crumbling walls, and scattered a herd of stray cats that went into hiding under a pumpkin plant that had grown to take over what used to be their living room.

He sat down on what was left of his old throne: it was covered in moss and decayed leaves. "This is where we lived," he mused. "This is where we loved," though he'd been gone ten years without a word to her, without so much as a postcard. She'd left and left no forwarding address.

"What now?," he wondered. The master strategist of the Achaeans had failed to contemplate this—a life without Penelope.

"What now?," he asked again, and he sat back to look at the stars through the holes in the ceiling, arranging them into shapes and then giving the shapes (for the first time) names. He named them for his friends. When he'd filled the sky with "Orion" and "Perseus," with "Andromeda" and "Cassiopeia," he still hadn't found a set of stars to call "Penelope." He loved her dearly—he was sure he did—but he couldn't quite recall her shape; and he didn't want to get it wrong.

Work

n. nautical. to sail against the wind.

A co-worker asked me to lunch, and when I said "No thanks," she replied, "Why? Because there will be people there?"

Which made me like her even more than I already did.

But I still didn't eat lunch with her...

* * *

n. physics. force acting upon an object to cause displacement.

Someone at work just told me I'm "more blunt and less charming" than my usual
self today. When I told her to "Fuck off," three people turned around like there was about to be a fight.

Can't anyone take a joke?

* * *

n. fine arts. a creation, such as a song or a painting.

"Chris, what are you doodling?"

"Oh, it's nothing. It's ... a little duck."

"You mind paying attention to our meeting?"

Well, since you asked...

* * *

n. religion. a moral or righteous act or deed.

"The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery."

Note to Self: when you start quoting Marx in the office, it's probably time to call it a day...