Astigmatism of the Heart

astigmatism of the heart. A defect of the spirit in which desires and passions do not meet at a focal point, but rather the image of them remains always blurred.

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Bermuda Triangles of the Home

Two days ago, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I just barely missed stepping into a safety pin on the floor, needle open, aimed right at me (like a jungle booby trap) (like a hungry one-toothed shark). I saw it in time, picked it up, and thought, "Whew. That was a close one."

Yesterday, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I stepped on something hard and stopped down to look. It was a thick shard of glass, and if I'd come at it from a different angle, it would have cut me for sure. "Whew," I thought. "That was a close one."

The glass was in the same spot the safety pin had been.

You might think I should stop walking through my kitchen barefoot; but rather, I'm going to stop walking through my kitchen barefoot on that spot. It's a locus of danger and I need to be careful.

*     *     *

Last week I lost my keys. "Where were they when you lost them?" people always ask, even though those same people get upset if you ask them the exact same question when they lose their things. "If I knew the answer to that, then I'd know where they were!"

But this time, I knew where they were when I lost them, and they just weren't there. Weird. I couldn't go out without my keys, so I took a shower, made lunch, stayed at home, and later that afternoon, found the keys exactly where I thought they'd been, exactly where I'd been when I lost them.

*     *     *

There's a dent in my pillow where your head used to lay. I fluff the pillow so it's round and plump, a perfect egg shape. But I return later and the dent is there again.

Maybe I shouldn't have bought "memory foam."

*     *     *

I wonder now if time and space aren't exactly the way we imagine them to be. Sometimes causes seem to succeed effects. Sometimes time seems stuck in a loop, or I mean that I'm stuck in a loop and time seems to disappear altogether. Sometimes I wonder if I'll make the same mistakes over and over and over, and if that's what Purgatory is, and if so, then how is it different from anything else?

The rooms of my apartment have more than four corners, and in some of them, things disappear, reappear, behave unexpectedly, according to a set of rules I can't seem to and never will understand. But I see now, that's just the way the world is. It makes sense, just not in the ways we were led to believe.

Blog of the Future

There's a blog that sometimes links to my blog, so people who read that blog sometimes read this blog too. Whenever this other blog links to my blog, I'm flattered: I sometimes doubt that anyone reads my blog. I sometimes doubt that anyone reads anyone's blog, except their own. So it's reassuring to see that someone has in fact read something on my blog, and even gone so far as to recommend that others read it, too.

In fact, whenever this other blog links to my blog, I read this other blog. It's as if their affirmation of my blog confirms my opinion of their good taste, and then I want to see what else they're thinking. I read it diligently, I'll find things I think are interesting, and often I'll add a link somewhere on my blog back to this other blog, so that presumably, the people who are reading my blog (if there are any) are now also reading this other blog, because of my recommendation. I assume this other blog sees that I've linked to them, and this causes them to read my blog more closely, and maybe find something they like enough to recommend to their readers.

It all reminds me of the closed-off glass globe they have at the Natural History Museum which has been sealed for years and contains an entire self-contained ecosystem, but would probably smell really bad if you open it up.

But it seems to work.

The closed-off glass globe and the cross-linking between blogs, that is.

However... a distressing thing has started to happen, because now this other blog is no longer linking to stories I've written. Instead, it links to stories I haven't written yet. It quotes these unwritten stories, and it points its readers to my blog seeking these stories which don't yet exist. It must be very confusing and disappointing for these readers.

The stories which the other blog says I've written, even though I haven't—I don't know if these are stories I would have written sometime in the future; but they seem interesting to me; so I write them.

I worry that the story I wind up writing is not be as good as the story that I was supposed to have written but didn't write.

These recommendations come, and I write for them, trying to catch up with their expectations, always a step behind, hoping not to fall two or three steps back, hoping not to stumble, hoping not to fall, trying to anticipate their next want, trying to fill it, to keep them happy, all of them, the readers and the future readers I don't yet have but apparently someday will. What do you want, stranger? And what will you want after that?

But for the Grace of God

On the day that Glenn Beck and his horde of infantile angry white men converged by the Lincoln Memorial to "restore the honor" of America, I was carrying a woman with a broken hip into a friend's car. She'd been evicted from the hospital earlier in the week, after her Medicare coverage ran out: they gave her a walker, put her in a cab, paid the fare, and sent her back to the third story apartment she shares with her very-literally-deranged daughter. When she got out of the car, someone stole her walker, and she waited at the curb until some guys who lived in her apartment building carried her up the three flights of stairs and set her down on her olive green sofa, where she stayed till we heard from her a few days later because she was hungry. It had taken her this long to get the phone from her daughter, who shouted in the background of the phone call, "Don't talk to them about how I treat you!"

So we went over with some groceries, and in the end, decided to carry her out and return her to the hospital.

The feeling of a 72-year-old, 87-pound woman clinging to my neck and crying in pain is outside my normal range of experience and I won't forget it any time soon. While I carried her, I worried I'd drop her, of course; but I also worried that from her pain she'd vomit on my new shirt. The thoughts that pop into one's head are sometimes an unpleasant surprise.

"Thank you," she said.

"You don't have to thank me."

This isn't a story about me or any good deed of mine: I was, in this, just an orderly, and an accidental one who just happened to be nearby. My friends are saints: they stock her fridge, and they decided to cover the cost of re-admitting the woman to the hospital. (In the end, this wound up being a daily copay, only: the woman was thrown out, broken hip and all, because she couldn't pay $100 a day...)

After we got the woman into the car, my friend drove off to the hospital, and I—still with the old woman's smell on me—walked off through Hollywood. Very few people walk in Hollywood: sometimes it feels like I and homeless people are the only ones who walk in Hollywood. I walked by a man with no shirt and a white, chest-length beard. His hands looked like they'd been tarred. He curled one of them into a fist and he shook it weakly at the sky. His lips moved but he didn't make any sound.

This, at the corner of Selma and Ivar, the spot where tomorrow morning there will be a luxe farmer's market selling handmade soaps and organic produce, but where today a man with tarry hands lives out of a shopping cart and curses God, and a woman with a broken hip pisses in her sofa for days because she can't cover a $100 copay; and I just broke, right there, shaking, with the disparity of so much privilege—a Siddhartha moment: the suffering of people is so real sometimes it pervades right through all the creature comforts we erect to shield ourselves from it. "You don't have to thank me," I'd told her, not to be polite, but because the world owes her some kindness. This same day that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin marched on Washington to "restore traditional values" to America—the traditional values that led to slavery and segregation, the values that led to rail barons and child labor, the values that espouse neglect of the disenfranchised, abandonment of the helpless, enrichment of the coddled—values that in wiser times of history are, once adopted by the state, called fascism; and any society that willfully chooses not to take care of its own doesn't deserve to be called a society at all.

Godzilla Reading Haiku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You gonna eat that sausage?"

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

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

And he's used up all the toilet paper.

"Sorry!"

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

"Sad, right?"

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

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

"Ha," I laugh.

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

"OK, one more."

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

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

*     *     *

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

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

"I know you're not that guy."

"It's lonely being a monster."

"I guess it probably is."

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

If wishes were fishes

If wishes were fishes,
the sea would be tea,
and hope like a rope
of pearls around me.

Inner monologue of a Lakers fan

I'm so happy now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to rape you all.

We won.

The world is so good.

Lemons, pt. 2

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

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 Labyrinth

You're looking for work. You've just about given up. You see an ad and you answer it. You call the number and they ask, can you come down now? Yes you can come down now. You write their instructions. You walk to the corner and wait for the bus. When it shows up, you step onto it and sit toward the back. You watch out the window as it carries you overland through the neighborhood, through the next neighborhood, and into neighborhoods you've never seen. Storefronts and people roll by your window and they're all unfamiliar. Last stop, the driver says. There's no one on the bus. You get off.

The sky is dark like the gray before sunrise. You read the directions you wrote down and walk to a dim low office building. You ring the buzzer. They're waiting for you. Would you like something to drink?, they ask. No, you don't need anything to drink.

The three words that best describe you are reliable, creative, and detail-oriented. That's not really what we're looking for. Do you understand the nature of the position for which you've applied?

I'd like that glass of water now. Sure thing.

We would like to hire you, they say. You're not qualified but we would like to hire you. Most people come to us out of vanity, but you've come to us because you're hungry and have nowhere else to go, and we think that's a more honest motive.

Thank you.

Don't thank us.

Underneath the office is a labyrinth, and somewhere in the labyrinth is a monster. The monster is so terrible, no one has seen it and lived. Every year seven men and seven women are sent down into the labyrinth, to calm the beast so it might stay underground.

You stand at the door to the labyrinth and soon you will go inside to try and kill the monster. This is your job now.

A girl, the office manager, has offered to spool string to you, to help you find your way out, after. Are you ready? she asks. Are you scared?

Since you don't know what's inside, there is no way to be ready, and it would be foolish to be scared. I don't know, you tell her, as you step into the darkness after the monster...

The Rowboat

I had a rowboat but I lost it.

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

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

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

The Secret Museum

or, Small Wonders from the American Collection

While walking through the hodgepodge and (to my taste) pretty unremarkable fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum ("American Art": side-by-side exhibitions of furniture, commissioned portraits, Abstract-Expressionist painting, bejeweled flatware, and a few sculptures of bronze, marble and wood—though separate sculptures, and not all those materials within a single sculpture1), this happened:

A couple approached, then unlocked, then opened a small knobless door situated discretely between two (boring) paintings—"Mrs. Sylvester Gardiner, née Abigail Pickman, formerly Mrs. William Epps," (1772) by John Singleton Copley2 on the left, and "George Washington," (1776) by Charles Wilson Peale3, on the right. This door was so unassuming that if I'd noticed it before4, I'd have taken it for a service closet.

Inside—I only saw it for a few seconds—was a small black pedestal, maybe waist-high, with a glass case on top and a single spotlight shining down upon it; and inside the case, centered within the spotlight, a small, abstract bundle of sculpted glass: fragile rays shooting out from a center and then ending in a hundred tiny droplets, so it looked maybe like a representation of pollen, or a snowflake, or, judging by the cascade of light that radiated off it, maybe a will'o'the'wisp, or a model of something powerful and subatomic. It was the most delicate, beautiful thing I've seen in this museum.

The couple took a quick photo, then closed and locked the door. A security guard pushed at it, to confirm that it was locked5 6, and then, their attention gone, it faded unremarkably back into the wall: it all but disappeared.

Then I noticed these secret closets are all over the museum.

And because mystery is more wondrous to me than answers, I never asked what or how or why.

1. The Brooklyn Museum's American collection is a sloppy survey of American art history which resembles your grandparents' attic, if your grandparents were friends of art collectors, but not collectors themselves, except accidentally, e.g., as the recipients of gifts. The following examples are all currently on display in the four smallish rooms that make up the American collection, arranged in such a way as to cause maximum confusion and frisson among museum patrons:

a. Emblems of the Civil War, 1888, Alexander Pope.
b. Giraffe Head, 1850-1900, maker unknown.
c. Green Yellow and Orange, 1960, Georgia O'Keeffe.
d. Chest of drawers, circa 1690, maker unknown. etc.
e. Water jar, 1700-1750, Unknown Zuni artist.
f. New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 2, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.
g. etc.

2. One inscrutable puzzle of mimesis is how the bearer of such a storied epithet could be rendered so inert in portraiture; but such was the style of the day.

3. Not the Gilbert Stuart portrait that we remember so fondly from elementary school, nor quite the other Peale portrait which graced our middle school, but this graceful albeit thin-headed one.

4. I hadn't.

5. As did I, once the guard stepped away.

6. It was.

The Thick of the Woods

Two lovers in a meadow by a forest, and one says, "Let's go into the woods!", so they run off hand in hand. The forest grows thick—tangles of branches and leaves that block the sun, thickets of vines that snarl the paths—and before long, the two lovers become separated from one another, and can't find their way back.

"Where are you?" "Over here!" They reach their fingers through the vines toward the sound of that beloved voice. As long as they can hear each other, they never feel entirely lost; but they can't see one another, except in maybe-imagined flashes of colors glimpsed through the trees; and they can't find a path that will bring them back together.

"Where are you?" "Over here."

So they grow old in the forest, in love but unable to see or touch. Sometimes they call out more from habit than urgency; sometimes they mouth their answer without making a sound. Eventually, they stop speaking at all—so there's no longer any proof of the other's continued existence in the forest. But neither do they want any proof. They believe the other is over there, somewhere, in the thick of the woods; and undisturbed in the company of this hope, they live happily, quietly, ever after.

The Woman Who Planted Her Children

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

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

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