A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the—

(or, What Doesn't Kill You Makes Your Limp Stronger)

Technically, my birthday had already been over for a few hours when I stepped into the busy street without looking and got hit by the cargo van. Still, during the brief time between when it smacked into me and when I smacked into the ground—that is, during the brief time that I was airborne—I remember thinking that there is a certain poetry to getting run over on your birthday. "Thirty-five," I mused, "That's a sufficient number of years..." (I also remember thinking things that were less poetic, like, "I hope this doesn't break my iPod.")

None of this is historically unprecedented: when my father was a boy, he became famous in his home town by stepping out in front of a dump truck. He also flew through the air, and wound up spending a significant part of his childhood in and out of casts and leg braces. He made it into all the local papers (and in a way, that is how my parents first met...).

No such celebrity for me. Though the sound of the van hitting my body seemed significant at the time (like the sound of crushing a six-foot soda can, like the sound of metal burping), and though I found myself a bit farther down the block than where I'd stepped off the curb, I somehow managed to get away without a scratch. (Well, one scratch.) I expected the driver to be furious—he had every right to be, since I'd walked out in front of him. So when I hit the ground, my first impulse was to apologize. "Sorry to get all up in your grill"...

How many near-death experiences does it take to add up to a whole-death experience? Because, for a youngish middle-class white guy, I wonder if I've had maybe more than my fair share... (Then again, there's something not quite right about the term "near death"—it's a linguistic fallacy along the lines of "near-pregnant": you are or you aren't, and proximity doesn't have much to do with it...)

The fact is, when I was half this age, I was sure I wouldn't live to be this age. And when the end comes, it probably comes with all the advance warning of a speeding cargo van crashing into the left side of your body. Thirty-five is a sufficient number of years. But I'll take more. And today, I'm glad to have them...

Alt-Country

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

"Got new ones."

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Autoschadenfreude

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

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Computer Head

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

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

er-rand. 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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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)

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...

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2

for PG

I can't remember.

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

I really can't remember what I was watching.

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

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

* * *

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

And then I realized, you were gone.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Maybe it never mattered.

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

* * *

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

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

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

"It was good seeing her."

Having Cake Versus Eating It

When does anyone ever, ever have cake without eating it too? I thought that's what having cake was...

Insomnia

The sky is a lush curtain of purple and the house I'm in is washed out of any other color—that one hue only, and the rest is silver gelatin. And hints of pink in the clouds, from a sun that has long ago set but still stubbornly throws light from below the horizon. The night is long but I'm more awake than I've been in months, years, maybe ever; and the air is so clear it carries every last smell to my nose and I breathe it in. First among them is the sweet sweat of my lover. Her cheeks are flushed and she's breathing short breaths. I have a hand firmly on her waist and the other has a grip on the back of her head, and from there, her two centers of gravity, head and womb, I hold her sway, and seize into her with a hungry kiss. She collapses almost imperceptibly into my body, moans slightly. Then the blood starts. It is spilling from the corners of her mouth down the line of her jaw. I am sucking her blood up through her lungs, gulping breathfuls of it, but spilling more of it than I'm swallowing, and a small river of it runs runs between her breasts and begins staining the belly of her white dress from the inside. She can't breathe.

Finally, I ease her down into the grass. She put up no fight, even at the end, because she loved me. I am a vampire, but she loved me.

* * *

The freighter at sea groans like a creature breathing, its metal subtly twisted by relentless underwater waves, so the hold is full of sound even though I'm alone. I climb a ladder to the top deck and try to make out details—landmass, iceberg—but the dark is too thick: I see shapes where there aren't any. All I can see are different grades of darkness.

I look a minute more: I'm desperate for some confirmation of what I'd just learned, with absolute certainty but no proof, down in the hold. A single tangible fact to make my next acts easier. But there isn't one, and sadly I turn away from the railing and start climbing the short ladder to the ship's bridge.

It's warm when I step in, lit by an amber lantern, and all of the people there—my family—are huddled around the lantern like it is a campfire. When I throw open the hatch, they look up with expectant eyes, relieved to see me. It is my job, I know, to get them out of this, to save them, and they know I will. And I, too, know I will. But I know something they don't. I know with absolute certainty that the ship is about to sink, and this room full of people I love will soon fill with water, and every last one of them will drown painfully in a dark arctic ocean. I don't know how I know this but I do, and that's why I have the machete behind my back, and why I used it already on all of those people down in the hold. I must kill them to spare them. Because I have failed them.

* * *

Am I dreaming? There's something not right. I don't remember leaving the door unlocked, and I can't explain the smell of cigarette smoke in my studio. Nothing looks amiss, but ... something isn't right.

Maybe I'm dreaming.

Or maybe he was here.

My heart surges thinking about it. Maybe he was here. I haven't turned the light on yet and I'm suddenly glad I didn't. I move slowly toward the window and peek through the half-open curtain. Is he out there? One of those parked cars across the street? Or any of the darkened windows in the apartment across the way?

Has he seen me come home? Because if he has, I'm a dead man.

An axe, I think, is what he used last time. Against the last person he hunted. A hatchet.

How I wish it were a movie, or a dream—I'd have a box hidden in my closet with a handgun. Bullets in the nightstand table. I'd have some way to fight back. But it's just me, inside my dingy apartment—a pile of books, a few pots and pans, dirty laundry. Nothing that actually matters, now that it comes down to it. The tinny set of kitchen knives that seemed like such a bargain now seems worth every penny I paid for them and not a cent more. Barely cut a tomato; useless on meat.

I'm going to die here. And I can't even remember why.

Has he seen me, yet, through the window? Is he walking, even now, quietly up the stairs? I don't know. But if I run for it, he'll see me for sure.

I sit on the floor. With inevitability, I find, comes calm. Maybe I hear him, down on the stairs, the hatchet man. He's coming. Now, or later. There's nothing I can do to stop him.

Maybe I'm only dreaming, and I'll wake up, tired, sweating, frightened, but alive. Or maybe I am awake, and this is exactly why I've been having so many nightmares...

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.

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.

Stranger Than Fiction

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

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

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Thanks.

* * *

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

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

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 Good Samaritan of Smith Street

It was all just a big misunderstanding. It was a whole set of misunderstandings, in rapid succession.

I boarded a Brooklyn-bound F train in SoHo. It was a beautiful weekend afternoon, and the subway car was full of (more than usual) happy couples and their children. So many children. So many children, in fact, that my first impulse was to change to another car.

But the bell dinged, the door closed, and that settled it: I was staying with the kids. The kids and, at the far end of the train, a banjo player.

Goodie.

A little girl waved, and then spit up.

I waved back.

Her mother beamed at me, I suppose to thank me for helping to teach her daughter that the world is full of friendly people and not misanthropes. That old tale.

Squeals erupted from my left: a small gaggle of toddlers were falling and drooling on each other, dancing to the music of the banjo player, who was making his way toward my end of the train. The banjo player was plucking away, and the kids were having a literal hoot. They were having a literal hootenanny. So I did what any childless adult would do in this situation: I turned on my iPod. This situation is exactly why God invented the iPod: to keep your children and your banjo out of my world.

One square dancing toddler got tangled up in my headphone cable, yanking it from my ear; and as I reached down to untangle it, the train slammed on its brakes. The child flew through the air, toward one of the subway poles (and certain death, or at least pain and a lot of crying)—and through no fault of my own, I caught this child. I guess I saved its life. Its mother thanked me, and a few of the other mothers did, too.

I was just trying to untangle my headphones.

The child (who now owed its life to me) sat down beside me, but I wasn't having any of that—this tot looked a little soggy in the diaper. I stood up and—wouldn't you know it?—an old woman with a walker boarded the train, and thanked me for giving up my seat.

"No problem," I told her, since it had been an accident. A few of the mothers beamed at my generosity, at my act of kindness, and this time, some of the fathers beamed, too.

I was getting a bit of a reputation on this train.

That's when a man handed me five dollars.

"Huh?"

He pointed to the banjo player, then exited the train. I understood that this man had wanted to give $5 to the banjo player, but couldn't get through the wall of children without missing his stop—so he entrusted his $5 to me, the most reputable citizen on the F line. He wanted me to complete the transaction.

Of course I thought of keeping the $5. But the banjo player's shoes were in tatters, and he had actual duct tape on his instrument, and if I'd kept the $5, I'd have felt so guilty that I'd have spent $40 on whiskey, to salve my guilt—so, in the end, it was a losing investment. It was simpler just to give the $5 to the banjo player, and I did.

And he dropped it. It fell on the floor of the subway car, and the toddlers clambered for it, drawing everyone's attention to me, the donor, the Good Samaritan of Smith Street: everyone saw "my" $5 donation to this banjo player whose music I was trying to drown out with my iPod.

I could hardly bear all of the good will that I was engendering, so I got off the train one stop early. As I did, I ran into a man who asked, "Spare change?"

"As a matter of fact..." throwing him a couple of quarters and imagining the car full of beaming parents admiring me as the train pulled away.

The Ids of March

"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 iPhone is Not Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Just like Steve Wozniak.

This Is Your Life

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.

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.

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...