Featured On: May 18, 2013

Poseidon's Net

(This story appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.)

Featured On: April 3, 2013

Goldilocks and the Three Boys

(This story appears in the spring 2013 issue of Grey Sparrow Journal.)

Featured On: March 24, 2013

The Atheist of Dekalb Street

(This story appears in wigleaf in March 2013.)

Featured On: March 8, 2013

The House of Doors

Though the boy was scared and knew better than to enter the old house, his sister was curious and brazen and never did admit her fear (which made her a sometimes difficult playmate). "It looks like no one's been through this door in years!," and she charged off into the darkness. The boy followed reluctantly behind, hoping there wouldn't be too many cobwebs.

Instead of an empty house, they found an old man seated at a wooden table that he'd already set with three tall steaming mugs. "Well there you are," he smiled, not at all surprised to see them. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"

The boy blinked while his eyes adjusted. "Nobody drinks hot chocolate in the summertime." But his sister was already climbing into the high wooden chair toward the mug.

"Some people like hot chocolate in the summertime," the old man said. "In fact, if it's summertime here, that means it's wintertime somewhere else. I suppose everything is in fashion, somewhere."

The girl, who was often told at school that she was very unfashionable, got curious about these other places where unfashionable things were in fashion. She sniffed at her hot chocolate. "What's on top?" she asked. "Whipped cream?"

The old man chuckled. "It does look like whipped cream, doesn't it? On each cup of hot chocolate, I put a dollop of cumulus cloud, fresh from the sky. And this is very special chocolate, given to me by the ancient Aztecs. I travel a lot, and I like to bring back souvenirs."

The boy joined them at the table. "I've never seen an ancient Aztec."

"Of course not," said the girl, pushing up her glasses. "They're ancient. They all died a very long time ago."

The old man nodded. "But that doesn't mean you can't meet them."

"My name is Clarissa," the girl announced, suddenly aware of her manners. "And this is my brother Finley. He's shy."

"I'm not shy," said Finley. "I'm just cautious! Sorry we barged in your door. We thought this house was empty."

"Not at all. I was expecting you. My front door is always open to you. But if you're going to be a guest in my house, then I'm going to have to ask you to be more careful about charging through the other doors."

The children noticed then that the old man's little house was full of doors, but not the kind of doors that one finds in normal houses. The doors in the old man's house were all in the wrong places: some were in the middle of the wall; some were on the ceiling. There was a door set into the stairs and a door set into the sofa. There was even a big knob set into the kitchen table, and the girl realized suddenly that the table was a door. Some of the doors were square and some were round and some were wood and some were metal; some had elaborate handles and knockers and peepholes, and one had a big metal wheel that sealed it shut, and some were just normal unassuming doors. But the doors filled up the house, and they were all closed.

And a metal loop tied to the old man's waist held hundreds of keys that clattered and jangled whenever he moved.

The old man looked at his enormous watch, and stood up. "Please drink your hot chocolate. We have quite a day ahead of us, and I don't know when we'll have time for another snack."

Featured On: December 14, 2012

Suicide for Dummies

Feeling all alone? Unbearable pressures at home and at work? Do you feel unloved? In deep pain, with no end in sight? Thinking of killing yourself? 

Go for it.

If you want to commit suicide, that is your prerogative. Maybe you could hang in there a little longer, try some counseling, switch to a new medication. Maybe not. If you really want to end your own life, then no one is going to be able to stop you.

But on your way out, please don't shoot anyone.

This week has seen five school shootings—murder-suicides—in Illinois, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and California, with a total death toll over two dozen. Don't these kids have any manners? Offing one's self is rude enough: someone—probably someone who loves you—is going to have to clean up the mess. But the urge to empty a rifle clip into a crowd full of strangers before you go... that's a whole other sort of unfathomable.

How is it possible that we're left wishing for the "good old days," when people simply slit their wrists in the tub? How is it possible to be nostalgic for the shootings at Columbine, when these things were still shocking, when we could act as though this was uncommon?

If you are contemplating suicide, here are a few simple tips:

1. With a little planning and research, you can self-medicate. You won't even need a gun—which is good, because there's no lawful justification for anyone to have a gun in the first place.
2. If you do decide to use a gun to kill yourself, there is absolutely no reason to load it with more than one bullet. If the first shot doesn't kill you, then you'll probably be bleeding, brain-damaged, in terrible pain, and/or tremendously relieved—and in none of those scenarios will you be in any shape to pull the trigger a second time. If you must have a gun, then one bullet only.
3. Though you are not thinking rationally—you're upset, and that's understandable—still, even you aren't such a fool to believe that you're getting "revenge" on people who wronged or misunderstood you. You know that revenge is when you SuperGlue someone's locker shut, or when you embarrass them by outsmarting them. You also know that you won't look very smart laid out on the coroner's stainless steel table, while people talk about how your stupid school shooting was unoriginal, uninspired, and simply proved everything they already knew and disliked about you.
4. If, after all that, you still do want to kill yourself, it's got nothing to do with anybody else. Leave them out of it. Leave your automatic rifle and your copy of Catcher in the Rye at home, and jump off a bridge. Bridges really work.

Or call a hotline and get help. 1-800-784-2433. (Yes, that really is 1-800-SUICIDE.)

Featured On: December 9, 2012

Chicken Soup

or, Chickens, Part Three

Chicken soup is a food we only eat when we're sick, which means it's a food we can never quite taste when we eat it.

So it's possible we don't really know what it tastes like.

While making chicken soup today, I realize I've never had what I'd think of as good chicken soup, or tasty chicken soup—so my criteria, as I'm adding ingredients and trying to decide whether or not it's complete, is simply how much or how little my soup, made of all fresh ingredients, tastes like it's the soup from a can.

Featured On: November 25, 2012

Headlines from a Surrealist Newspaper

Little girl, burrowing to China, arrives.

Woman raises house full of spiders.

Astronauts in space so long, Earth forgets about them.

Volcano appears overnight in small town.

Sad woman's face disfigured into permanent smile; everyone assumes she's happy.

Housewife buries herself alive for peace and quiet.

Lifeguard saves child from nightmare about drowning.

Man, looking for lost love, finds it in his attic.

Featured On: November 9, 2012

Schadenfüße

 Schadenfüße. Noun. The sadness of discovering a hole in your favorite socks.

Featured On: September 12, 2012

Land of the Lost

The Unexistential Desert Island

In Lost, a set of characters, each having learned to thrive in their own way in modern society as best they can1, is suddenly thrust into a radically new world, when their plane crashes on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean.

If the show were a bit darker and a bit less fantastic2, this alone should have been enough drama to carry a TV series, without need of smoke monsters, hatches, time travel, or a nuclear explosion. How well would a spinal surgeon, a Lotto winner, a C-list rock star, and a Korean heiress thrive in the jungle, with nothing except the contents of some salvaged luggage3? Things would get ugly—and dramatic—pretty fast. If I were a betting man, all my money would be on Vincent the dog. (Photo, far right.)

This cutthroat Gilligan's Island would ask, first of all, this existential question: Who are you, when you're stripped of your context—when the skills you've honed over a lifetime are suddenly useless, when you can no longer take your identity from your job—and is that enough to survive? How much of what you do, and how you act, and what you believe, is circumstantial? In absence of society's structures, what are you?

By most measures, the passengers of Oceanic flight #815 are an exceptionally lucky bunch: they have among them a Boy Scoutish medical doctor, a cured paraplegic with a penchant for hunting boar, and an elite Iraqi soldier. Most times I fly, the plane is filled with people who can't even carry their own luggage without rolling it.

But moreover, the survivors of the crash are lucky because, through all their trials, their core values have remained intact. On Lost, no desert-island devolution of society ever happened: the doctor is still a doctor; the con man is still a con man, and the Lotto winner is still a lucky layabout. Thousands of miles from civilization and with no system of commerce, these people more or less elected to keep their day jobs—because without them, they (or we?) won't know who they are. And this would evoke existential questions that no television network is inclined to ask...4

1. Despite a societal bias to think otherwise, con artists and fugitives are also thriving within their particular circumstances: better to be the con artist than the conned; better to be running from the law than behind bars. "Thriving" is by definition circumstantial.

2. So, a bit more boring and a bit more like other TV.

3. Which, to be honest, would consist of nothing more useful than 3oz. bottles of hair product and cables for recharging now-bootless iPods.

4. We say we work to pay the bills, but it cuts both ways: we accrue bills because we work. Leisure is the dialectic flip-side of work, its antithesis: it's what we do when we're not working. So even our leisure time is actually defined by our work.

Featured On: September 2, 2012

The Lomo American Dream

A Walk on Hollywood Boulevard

Like so many before, you've come to Hollywood in search of the American Dream. It's the only place to look, really. Hard-working families in Cleveland, hopeful artists in Tulsa, military brats in El Paso, school teachers in Sarasota all have some chance of happiness where they stand; but if you really want to shine, you have to chase the sun. Chase Apollo's chariot as far west as you can go, and if you're one of the lucky few, you might actually catch it.

The city is ugly. Hollywood is the first, best proof that "All that glitters is not gold." (Sometimes it's just the reflection off a tarnished fender on the car ahead of you in the traffic jam.) The sun does that: turned up to full strength, as it is here (it goes to eleven!), it reveals things differently, for better and for worse. The same way that direct sun hastens the aging of paper or paint, it hastens the aging of everything. Arriving in Hollywood during the bright of day is like arriving at at bar after last call, as the bartender throws on the lights and reveals everything in a way it was never meant to be seen. Some things are better off in the dim.

Hollywood is one of those things. Seen from afar, on television, on Oscar night, it's the very definition of glamour. But to walk, as tourists walk, along Hollywood Boulevard from Vine to La Brea, is a disorienting experience, because there is no glamour—only storefront after storefront of cheap souvenirs, t-shirts, plastic Oscars, keychains, fast food, tawdry nylon lingerie. (Hollywood as it's depicted on Oscar Night is as temporary and contrived as the overpriced hairdos and costumes that the starlets wear; as temporary and contrived as the movies that they've arrived to celebrate. And why wouldn't it be? The event is a celebration of illusion. Once the camera crews and cinematographers leave, everything returns to its natural lomography.)

Still, people come, partly because the image-makers who control our access to the American Dream are so good at what they do, and partly because there is simply nowhere else to go. When you arrive in Hollywood, you're drawn like a moth to the spotlights that they point at the sky (as if each and every night is a gala event), and you arrive at the source, Hollywood and Vine—to find nothing: an unused subway stop, a small dive bar, and a restaurant known for its chicken and waffles. But like Dorothy landed in Oz, you recover from your disorientation to make out the trail of stars set into the sidewalk: they are  fantastical breadcrumbs of hope, commemorating so many who have chased their dream and achieved it—so you follow them, and hardly notice that, for all of the names on all of these stars on this sidewalk, you've barely heard of any of them. Time has erased them as surely as it erases everyone.

As you work your way west, the metaphors become unbearably obvious: the Hollywood Wax Museum defies you to tells the difference between its wax visages and the real stars: it suggests, though probably by accident, not that the wax sculptures are lifelike, but rather that the celebrities never were. "Look at these waxy corpses, and see the resemblance to the beauty you've grown up to revere!" There is a sheen coming off the fake skin. All that glitters is not gold.

Across the street, the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum offers a similar message: you pay an exorbitant admission fee to gain access to an underwhelming collection of exhibits—mostly plastic placards and animatronics that have long since failed; and in the end, you're forced to conclude, "No, I don't believe it"—but not for the reasons Ripley had intended.

Finally, at Hollywood and Highland, you arrive at the site of the Academy Awards, and a mock red carpet, set into the sidewalk, beckons you. You follow it into an enormous structure that looks equal parts Egyptian and Nazi: there are statues and flags and ascendant columns everywhere. Here, under these lights and in the cool California breeze, you feel you've finally arrived: you inhale deeply to get your first real taste of the American Dream; then your eyes adjust to the spotlights, and you make out the signs: Sephora. American Apparel. Lucky Brand Jeans. You followed the Yellow Brick Road, and it led you to a shopping mall.

Featured On: August 22, 2012

Poseidon's Net

(This story appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.)

Featured On: August 1, 2012

Failed Travel Book Titles

Let's Go Troposphere.
The Rough Guide to the Côte d'azur.
Frommer's Mogadishu.
Lonely Planet Costco.
Alabama for Dummies.
Rick Steve's Your Mom Through the Back Door.
Time Out Bikini Atoll.
The Jersey Turnpike on $5 a Day.

Featured On: July 1, 2012

Stella of the Angels

MP3 audio track

(This story appears in the November 2012 issue of Bartleby Snopes, where it was "Story of the Month.")

Featured On: June 12, 2012

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.

Featured On: April 6, 2012

The Labyrinth

There was a monster.

There was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull, and the king had him imprisoned inside a deep maze, called the Labyrinth.

The monster was called The Minotaur.

But his name was Asterion.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a Minotaur, and the king had him imprisoned inside a Labyrinth, where he wandered, hungry, savage, and alone.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, and none of them ever returned.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, where they almost certainly died.

Every year, the king decided, rather than kill the monster, to feed it seven innocent men and seven innocent women.

The monster's name was Asterion—which was also the name of the king's father.

So, this story is more complicated than it might at first appear....

Featured On: March 25, 2012

On the Head of a Pin

Luc Besson's Angel-A

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work, and their selves, to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego, from Pixar Studio's Ratatouille1

In Luc Besson's 2005 film, Angel-A, an out-of-luck Parisian named André is ready to jump off a bridge into the Seine, when a beautiful woman (Angela) beats him to it. She takes the plunge, he rescues her from drowning, and the two team up to get their lives back in order.

Their path leads through gangsters, pimps, horse races and strip clubs (this is a Luc Besson film, after all), before winding up (less characteristically) at Notre Dame Cathedral, and nearly at the gates of Heaven itself. En route, the two of them share a few touching moments: Angela is (of course) sent down from Heaven to teach André that he is lovable, and when she has him look in the mirror to tell himself so, he can't do it: "It's difficult," he stammers, but persists, tears in his eyes, till he manages to spit it out: "Je t'aime," he tells his reflection quietly.

If a film is entertaining, and manages to inspire or interest us toward a few moment's reflection, then perhaps any further discussion of it is beside the point—as esoteric as a medieval philosopher questioning how many angels could fit on the point of a needle.

But Angel-A is just as filled with touchy moments as touching ones: at one point, Angela whores herself to every man in a club, in order to help settle one of André many debts. (Angel-A is Wings of Desire meets Risky Business.) Later, we hear an alternate version of this story, in which Angela did not actually have sex with the 99 men, but simply lured them to a bathroom, robbed them, and bludgeoned them unconscious. Whew, that's much better!

The movie is one-half a fairy tale: a sweet man, who was never shown love, learns to treat people with kindness and honesty, and thus turns his life around. But it's a half-articulated moral, because in the world of Angel-A, only select actions have consequences; everything else can be solved by the six-foot tall, blonde-haired deus ex machina in the short black dress.

By the end of the movie, Angela has helped André realize his true nature; and his thanks to her is to lure her away from her own true nature: as she spreads her wings to fly back to Heaven, he clings on to her and brings her crashing back down to Earth, to "save" her and return her to the only place she could ever be happy: at the side of a man.2

1. I might have thought differently of Angel-A if I hadn't seen it back to back with Ratatouille, and noticed that apart from the pimping and whoring on the one hand, and the cooking and eating on the other, the two stories are almost exactly the same.

2. Luc Besson's brand of well-regarded schlock—including The Professional and La Femme Nikita—has come with its own mostly-well-regarded brand of "feminism": in his films, the girls kick ass. But they also take all their orders from men, and in the end, it is always the men who succeed or fail to make them happy.

Featured On: March 12, 2012

Latent Loves

"Drunk and disorderly conduct."
"The American West."
"Ice hockey."
"The night sky in the country."
"Lying in hot sand by the ocean."
"Driving at 100mph."
"Having a child's ignorance of the passage of time."
"Deep spiritual belief."
"Lounging in bed on Saturday morning."
"Dogs."
"Cycling country roads."
"Tawdry sex."
"The practice, not the idea, of vegetarianism."
"Disappearing into a good book."
"The smell of sage after a desert rain."
"Stage fright."
"Massachusetts rooftops."
"Foreign languages."
"Homemade sourdough."
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"Morning fog."
"Driving nowhere in particular."
"Discovering new music."
"Breaking hearts."
"Mulholland Drive."
"Forests of pine."
"The hum in the ears the morning after loud music."
"The smell of propane in the ice rink."
"Writing meaningful passages longer than 140 characters."
"Deer."
"Optimism."
"Knowing the bartender."
"Learning new words."
"Naïveté."
"The view from the top of a horse."
"Writing as if someone might read it."
"Being lost."

Featured On: February 20, 2012

Voodoo

You walk into your daughter's room. You wouldn't do this normally. You try very hard to respect her privacy, even when this sometimes causes you to wonder if you're being a bad or neglectful parent. The fact that you wonder means that you probably are not a bad or neglectful parent. But everyone has better days and worse days.

Her alarm clock is going off and she's nowhere to be found, so you walk into her room, and that's when you see them: two little dolls. Voodoo dolls of you and your wife.

"Maybe it's an art project," Janine says, when you tell her about it that night. "She's always been a kind of strange girl."

The next day, while your daughter's at school, you sneak back into her room to have another look. But her desk is empty. You open the drawers and rummage through, careful not to make a sound, even though no one's home. But you don't see them. You check her dresser, filled with underwear that looks too lacy to belong to your little girl. You feel guilty going through her things. "Dad," she'd say, "what are you doing?" And you're not sure what you'd answer.

As you reach for the comforter, to look under the bed, your phone terrifies you nearly to death by ringing.

"Hey. What's up?"

Janine has a migraine, came on suddenly. She's on her way home.

"I'll have a cold compress ready for you. That helps a little, right?"

Janine's firm depends on her and she likes that, which means she works long days and then brings work home with her, too. Your own consulting business has been slow lately, and you find it's more satisfying to weed the garden and to cook elaborate meals than to power on your computer and try to drum up new clients.

You're chopping vegetables when Janine comes through the front door, and before you can ask how she is, she throws up on the foyer rug.

"Go to bed, I'll clean it up."

Your daughter comes home an hour later. "Eww, what are you cooking?"

"It's chicken stew. You like chicken stew."

"I'm vegetarian."

You had no idea your daughter was vegetarian. "Tell you what: I'll take the chicken out."

"Gross!"

You don't know how to ask if she's playing with voodoo dolls. You're not even sure "playing" is the operative verb. The dolls were made of sticks bound together with wire, and dressed in old Barbie clothes. What makes a voodoo doll a voodoo doll? What authenticity? You touch your head, feeling for pinpricks. You don't feel especially well, but you don't know if that's black magic or just the normal kind.

"Honey, can I talk to you about — ?"

But she's already gone upstairs and closed her door.

It's unfair, isn't it, to pour so much hope into one's child? To ask them to be the flimsy vessel of so much expectation? We want all the things for our children that we never had – which means we're asking them to succeed where we ourselves have failed. Why can't we just simply love?

You knock on her door. "Can I come in?"

She's on her bed, doing what looks like homework. "You know your mom's sick, right? Some kind of headache."

Your daughter pauses at this information, but gives no indication whether she herself has driven a hatpin into her mother's avatar brain.

"What are you working on?" you ask, when you notice the paper you assumed to be algebra is actually filled with unreadable symbols.

"It's cool," she answers. "It's like a secret code."

"Can you tell me what it says?"

"No, silly. Then it wouldn't be secret."

You look at her, this little creature. You recognized her, you think, when she was three, when she was seven. She seemed like someone who could be a daughter of yours.

But lately you're not sure.

"You hungry? You want grilled cheese?"

She shakes her head and goes back to coding.

While you're washing dishes, you get a nosebleed. You watch the blood fall into the dishwater: the drops are slow to disperse. They hang between the suds and the enamel, floating wispy globes. Slowly they spread into thin red clouds, little sanguine genies offering you a chance to make a wish—but do it quick, before they disappear forever. You watch your blood floating in the sink, fading. There are so many things you could wish for. So many things.

Featured On: February 12, 2012

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.

Featured On: December 11, 2011

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.

Featured On: December 4, 2011

When Ulysses Returned to Ithaca

MP3 audio track

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.

Featured On: November 3, 2011

The Fibonacci Forest

When she was one year old, to celebrate, her mother, the botanist, planted her a tree; and when she turned two, they planted another; and when she turned three, her father, the mathematician, switched them into another tradition—a Fibonacci sequence of trees: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on, so by age thirteen, they planted her 233 trees, and by twenty, when her father was already gone, she and her mother planted 6,765 trees.

She dreamt of living to a hundred, in a forest so thick no one could even climb through it, because by then trees would beget more trees; and this act, which had started as an act of will by her family—an effort to share her birthday with nature, but also to control nature, as a patron does—would be subsumed by nature itself: the forest growing more forest so it'd be impossible to tell which parts of nature were hers and which belonged to nature itself. In one sense, the woods were hers entirely, existed because of her; and in another sense, she knew they would continue long after she herself was gone and forgotten, and this made her happy and it made her sad.

"This is my tree. This is my first tree." All the subsequent trees were planted in a widening circle around that first one, so the youngest trees were at the outside, and the forest grew taller and older toward the center. When she turned twenty, and her oldest tree turned nineteen, she built her house in the canopy of that tree, and the house grew higher and farther from the ground each year; and when she turned twenty-five and was already surrounded by thousands of trees, she fell in love and married; and when she turned thirty she had her first child, and she and her husband started a new circle of trees at the edge of her forest, so her daughter's forest grew to mingle with her own like the way the daughter herself grew—adjacent and sometimes intermingled, but distinct, too, and pushing out in her own directions. A few years later, they started a new forest for her son, at the opposite corner, and finally four children in all, each one with a forest growing higher and wider, canopies intertwined, and houses on the highest points of all of them: they grew farther apart, and higher, too, till they forgot the look of the ground and each other, and remembered only the trees.

Featured On: October 12, 2011

(Not) Common

or, Sunday in the Park

or, Raison d'être (pt. 2)

Kids squealing at the sprinkler. A seven-year old's pirouette. Couple holding hands from their adjacent bicycles. Old man's red socks. That singer. Tree branch like a sun dial. Happy line at the ice cream cart. Toddler on a break-away. Make-a-wish fuzzball drifting through the air. Far-away church bells. Reflections in the puddle. Ripples in the reflections in the puddle. Gray-haired man holding his boy so tight it's like he thinks it might keep him that size forever. Flip-flops and red toenails, balancing, teetering, on the curb. Puppy tripping over his too-big paws. Blonde-haired man sitting on the corner of a park bench, scribbling a notebook full of words he'll never share with anyone, writing them down like his life depends on it, because (some days more than others) it does...

Featured On: September 24, 2011

i MeAnT $1000

Featured On: September 5, 2011

The Real Dangers of Communism

The Real Dangers of Communism

Some warning signs that your government may have given over to Communism, or its less-understood cousin Socialism. If you detect any of the following, take up arms:

1. Roads
   If your roads were paid for with tax money and built by the government—they are socialist. In a perfect, free market world, each stretch of road would be a privately-owned toll road, and you'd move around it like it's a Monopoly board, paying each property owner as you go.


2. 911
   If your town allows you to place free 911 calls, then call 911 immediately to report Commies in your midst. If a private corporation isn't making money off of your emergency, then there truly is an emergency: the Reds have taken over.
   


3. Medicare
   "Are you now or have you ever been on Medicare?" This government program poses as necessary relief for the elderly, but any red-blooded American knows that if you get sick or injured, it's only logical that your employer should pay the bill—not the government. Medicare reveals the elderly to be what they truly are: Communist sychophants who are useless to the free market society.


4. Mortgages
   If you can't buy a house in cash, you shouldn't have a house. If you have a mortgage, it's because the government has intervened: they've incentivized it by offering tax breaks to you and to the banks. There is nothing free market about that. Keep big government out of your house! Pay for it in cash, and waive the tax break.


5. Marriage
   If you are married, you're a Leftie pinko. Again, the government has intervened against the free market by offering tax incentives to marry: they've got their big government hands on your wife! Also: people who marry are choosing a life where they share with one another, instead of selfishly hoarding. That's the definition of communism.


6. Public schools
   The only people who should be able to read and write are those who can pay for private education. Everyone else is a serf, and should stay that way. Educating the electorate is a luxury that should not be paid for by tax-payers. Instead, we should have a democracy run by illiterates, Tea Partiers, and Joe the Plumber.

It's not too late to save America. Act now!

Featured On: August 8, 2011

The Dinner Party

MP3 audio track

Anxiety was the first guest to arrive, as usual. He mumbled a hello and shuffled in the door, without a date, holding out the gift of a bottle of chilled Merlot. "Am I early?"

Anticipation showed up next, a little overdressed. He'd run into Familiarity in the driveway and they seemed to hit it off.

Ambition, Hilarity, and Unexpected came, and carried the conversation, so no one minded much the arrival of Droll. Everyone mingled and snacked and drank, chatting and joking, arguing and assenting, and then sat down for dinner.

Sadness and Futility were late showing up, but eventually took their places at the table. It wouldn't have felt right without them.

Featured On: July 24, 2011

The Man of Tomorrow

Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?," he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had evidence that Lex Luther was developing an advanced computer virus to take over the world. "How are you going to save us," the President asked him, "if you don't even know how to open up Outlook?"

"If I can't open up Outlook, I'll be the only one safe from the virus!" But he didn't like to think of himself as ignorant, so he hired a cousin of Jimmy Olsen's to install a complement of hardware and software into the Fortress of Solitude.

"How do I turn it on?," he asked the IT guy.

"The Internet? You don't turn on the Internet. It's always on, like the Sun."

Lois came over to show him how it all worked. "You should Google yourself! Look: one million, four-hundred sixty thousand results! Hey, click on the 'News' link: see if my stories are at the top."

"It says I already have a page on MySpace. What's MySpace?"

"Don't worry about MySpace," Lois answered.

When she came back a week later, he was still sitting at the computer. "Hey Lois! I'm the mayor of the Fortress of Solitude! @ThatSuperman has 400,000 followers!"

"You have a Twitter account?"

"I've got to protect my online brand, Lois."

The Internet afforded Superman with a whole new set of data that he could use to monitor crime, and to keep peace and order across the planet.

"Wait—Lex Luther is your Facebook Friend?"

"Well, we know a lot of the same people. And sometimes he harvests my crops in Farmville. Anyway, he doesn't really have time for world dominion anymore."

The Internet was far more effective at eliminating violent crime than Superman had ever been, because the criminals now mostly stayed at home—uploading photos of old capers, editing Wikipedia entries on classic bank heists, and playing each other at Mafia Wars till they fell asleep at their keyboards, icing each other all night long, from the safety of their dreams.

Featured On: July 9, 2011

Stranger Than Fiction

MP3 audio track

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.

Featured On: June 29, 2011

Shiva the Destroyer

(This piece appears in issue 29 of In Between Altered States.)

Featured On: May 29, 2011

The Introspective Superhero

or, Fortress of Solitude, pt. 2

The Introspective Superhero would happily rescue people, if only he knew with certainty that's what they wanted. But it's hard to know what's best.

Take Anna, for instance. Her tabby cat Bartholomew is currently stuck up a tree, beyond Anna's reach. Bartholomew is getting more and more frightened at his situation, and he keeps pushing himself farther up the tree, as if sensing that the ground is an enemy from which he must retreat. Anna, too, is beginning to panic, though she's normally quite level-headed: she thought the cat would have good enough sense to come down by now, and since he hasn't, she's becoming unsure of how to resolve the situation.

Nothing would be easier for the Introspective Superhero than to swoop in, fetch the cat off its branch, and return it safely to Anna's worried arms. But how much better would it be, he wonders, if Anna were to arrive at her own solution—remembering, say, the old stepladder in her apartment building's shared garage; setting up the ladder; confronting her own modest fear of heights; and, from a rung halfway up, luring the cat Bartholomew back down to safety? How much more confident and empowered would she feel? How much more fond of her cat, and herself, at the opportunity, years from now, to look back nostalgically at her afternoon's heroics, and how her actions had brought her and her cat closer together? The intervention of the Introspective Superhero would not help her. It would diminish her.

Even in matters of life and death, the path of the Introspective Superhero isn't always clear. He remembers painfully a time when, during a bank robbery at United First Federal, one of the thieves pointed a gun at the chest of a police officer and fired. The Introspective Superhero used his lightning speed to interject himself between the officer and the speeding bullet. But the policeman was furious. "I was wearing my vest!" he yelled, pointing at his Kevlar. The gunshot wound would likely have been trivial, but would have afforded the middle-aged beat cop a medal, promotion, and a path to an easy retirement. The District Attorney, too, was put out by the hero's actions. Till he'd arrived on the scene, it had been a clear open-and-close case of armed robbery; but against the Introspective Superhero, all weapons were useless, and the bank robber's lawyer convincingly argued the judge down to a misdemeanor.

Superpowers, it seems, don't make the world less complicated. Rather, because they afford the hero with near-infinite options, they make the world incredibly more difficult to manage. Each choice presents so many possible outcomes that it's impossible to guess which one is best. That's why most nights, though the hero could be saving innocent lives, instead he elects to stay at home and do very little. The best way to make the world better, he reasons, is to avoid it altogether.

Featured On: May 15, 2011

Flotsam

Yesterday without much planning I got on a train headed north and wound up at the point where Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey meet: there's a river and depending on which way you cross it, you wind up in one state, two states, three.

Now I'm somewhere else.

There's a farmhouse. There's a white farmhouse with peeling paint and a patio that wraps around. There's a farmhouse with two dozen twin beds, a French bathtub, two toilets that shouldn't be flushed ("If it's yellow, let it mellow"...), a garden full of dill and wildflowers, and bats living inside the walls. This farmhouse is half full of people I know (or knew, once upon a time) and half full of strangers, who help alleviate the feeling of distance between me and my old friends.

In the next room, a woman is cutting cabbage. In the next room, some people are laughing. In the next room, a baby is crying. In the next room, a woman is also writing, like me, writing something about this house, about the people in it, about who she is and who she isn't and wondering where she belongs.

"Dear diary," maybe she writes. Or, "I'm having an amazing weekend," maybe she writes. Or maybe she writes, "There is no loneliness like being with the ones you love, and still feeling lost..."

These journals are the father confessors we never had (but fall short of granting absolution).

My bag is packed. I don't know when, but soon, somehow, I'll find my way back south—maybe with my new friends or maybe with my old ones, or maybe alone. The miles that ticked off on the train yesterday (the unfurling of railroad ties, like a ruler measuring my life: how far I've come—or not...)—those miles today must untick. The tide that carried me out here, to this town I can't even name, will turn, and carry me back, too. Will carry me somewhere. And there, I will wonder all these same things.

The difference between flotsam and jetsam: only one ever finds its way ashore.

Featured On: May 1, 2011

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.

Featured On: April 24, 2011

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.)

Featured On: April 18, 2011

You Are What You Eat

I'm in my parents' home. We're cooking a holiday dinner made up of some version of the foods I ate growing up, which no longer have anything to do with the foods I eat today. "You are what you eat," they say, and I wonder if that means I have nothing in common with the boy I once was, who grew up here eating pasta and roast chicken and canned vegetables. "You are what you eat," and now I eat self-righteous, prissy foods, and I don't know how to talk to the people from my home town, except about the weird things I eat.

For instance, right now I'm drinking a gluten-free beer. There's some school of nutritious thinking that says people, and in particular people of European descent, aren't all that well equipped to digest the proteins in wheat. For 100,000 years, we didn't eat wheat, and then for 3,000 years we did, and now we put wheat in everything. But our bodies are still essentially the bodies of the foraging cavemen from 100,000 years ago, so eating all of this wheat causes ... problems. To get around these problems, I've stopped eating wheat—a primary ingredient in beer. So, if I want to "grab a beer," it now has to be a gluten-free one.

"What are you drinking?"

"Ah, it's a.... It's called a 'Redbridge'...." (I'd just as soon not admit I'm drinking a special-needs beverage, so I refer to it by name—but answering like that feels disingenuous, like telling someone you went to school in "Boston" to avoid saying "Harvard.")

"Never heard of it. Any good?"

"It's alright...."

This is why my conversations never seem to go anywhere.

"Never heard of it."

"Yeah, well.... It's alright."

"You're not from around here."

That was quick. Every conversation I ever have arrives at this point sooner or later, but this was faster than usual.

The confusing thing is, I actually am from around here.

"No, I'm not from around here."

It's nice, around here. It's very pleasant—trees and rivers and rolling hills and deer. I like visiting. But it's never quite been for me.

"So, where you from?"

He's hit on the crux of it now. Nowhere's ever quite been for me.

I tell him the name of some city where I used to live, and we talk about it for a while. Yes, it's nice there. Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of that sports team. No, I missed that game.

"Take care," he says as I leave.

"I'll see you," I answer in reply. But I won't see him. Even in the incidental conversation, I get it wrong.

Featured On: April 8, 2011

You Say Tomato, I Say Euthanasia

In my dream, I walked into the drug store seeking Chloraseptic^®, the noxious-tasting throat spray that temporarily numbs your mouth, making it possible to swallow when strep throat or other illness makes swallowing otherwise too painful.

The problem was, in my dream, I couldn't remember that it was called Chloraseptic, so instead, I kept asking the pharmacist for "Euthanasia."

"Excuse me—where do you keep the Euthanasia?"

One after the other, each drug store turned me away: "We don't sell that here!"

Lucky for me, New York City has a Duane Reade on every corner. Finally, a chemist of dubious ethics heard my request, invited me in hushed tones into his office, and sold me a bottle of Euthanasia^®.

(Coincidentally, it came in a clear plastic spray bottle full of cherry-red liquid, with instructions to "spray liberally 2-3 times in to the back of the throat.")

I thanked him, took it home, struggled with the plastic child-proof (and always somewhat adult-proof) safety seal, and sprayed into my mouth—five or six times, because who ever follows the instructions on their medication?

The pain did leave my throat, as I'd hoped, but it was only as the edges blurred at the outside of my vision that I realized my mistake: "Oh! I meant to ask for Chloraseptic!"

And then I fell into a deep dreamless sleep (which was, really, all I'd wanted...)

Featured On: April 4, 2011

The Raptors

MP3 audio track

(Obtuse pictures of malaise from the myths of nature)

Featured On: March 27, 2011

Invitation to an Earthquake

MP3 audio track

Tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Sebastian,
shot to death with arrow in Rome,
but who refused to believe it,
and carried his corpse for days without
letting it go.

Now, as you walk along the footsteps of Junipero Serra
from Mission San Diego de Alcala
north to Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay --

Watch the Word:
where it spread,
grew malignant,
was passed from those who use it for cutting,
to those who use it for collecting,

encircled, fortified,
presidio built upon the tectonics of history.

Watch the Sleeping Beauties grow their wall of thorns
and wake them.

Listen to the ghosts and the Angels and saints lament
what promises of death we have lost to the name of knowledge
and bury them.

Dear earthquake, dear shipwreck,
dear my blood,
tomorrow lay siege and punctuate history.

I look forward to your coming.

Featured On: March 20, 2011

The Ids of March

MP3 audio track

"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."

Featured On: March 7, 2011

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...

Featured On: February 21, 2011

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.

Featured On: February 7, 2011

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.

Featured On: January 31, 2011

Fucking Hillary Clinton

(This piece originally appeared in the literary journal Cargo.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I think she likes it too.

Oh the games people play.

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

And I do. Every day, I do.

Featured On: December 7, 2010

Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

I am, and have been, a strong supporter of your main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton—and I'd like to begin this letter by saying what she, these last few days, seems to have been unable to say:

Congratulations.

Congratulations for your brilliant, inspiring campaign, and for galvanizing the hope of so many who have become disillusioned with the American electoral process. During your campaign, you have proven yourself to be a leader who can rally people's hope, and I think this is as important now as ever in our nation's history.

I am feeling what many in the Clinton camp also seem to be feeling: that the tide is turning, irrevocably, from her and toward you. And, without compromising my belief that Ms. Clinton would make an excellent forty-fourth president, I am also beginning to get excited at the prospect of a President Barack Obama.

I am writing this letter today, though, to ask that you remember what, exactly, you have been pursuing these past months, and what you have been promising. You have stirred a lot of hope. The electorate is pouring its hope into you, and I ask that you accept this as its vessel—without hubris and with great humility. For it is a truly humbling responsibility.

Please never lose sight that the goal is not to run a brilliant campaign, nor garner votes, nor chase approval ratings, nor say kind words, but to repair a broken nation—a task which is sure to come with cost, and which could likely cost you the popularity you enjoy today. That is the office you seek, and if you fail to deliver on this promise, then you will surely have done much greater harm than good to the very people whose hope you stirred.

So much of America believes in you. I wish you all of the strength and wisdom you will need for the hard times ahead.

Sincerely,
Christopher DeWan

Featured On: November 28, 2010

The Waitress

There's what you are, on the one hand; and on the other, there's what you think you can be.

No, let me put that another way: there is what you are, essentially, in your heart—the sum of all your capabilities; and on the other hand, there's the smaller set of what you've realized to date. There is You the Greater and You the Lesser. You whole, and you fractured.

Some people believe that you, the "real" you, is the lesser one—the tally of what you've achieved. "What do you do?," we ask each other at parties. "I'm a salesman," we answer, deftly swapping a verb of action with a verb of being.

Other people believe that you, the "real" you, is that farther-away idea: "I'm a waitress and an actress, but I also want to direct."

You snigger when she tells you this. "She's a dreamer," you think. "She's a cliché." (And these things, too, might be a part of who she "really" is.) But clichés are lazy shortcuts, a rubber-stamp version of the truth: the outline is correct and familiar, but the details are missing. The details are the essence. The details are the differentiators. In the mind of this waitress, what she wants to do is more significant than what she is doing. To know her is to know that she wants to direct. To know her is to know that she is a bundle of potentialities, and to know which potentialities.

[When robots can bring us coffee at restaurants, then we'll all be free to act and direct.]

[When we fall in love, is it not with a person's wants and with their potentialities?]

It is our dream that distinguishes us—the dream, and the degree to which we are willing to chase it: the degree to which we believe we are not the man sitting in the desk chair at the office, day after day after day. No. Rather, we are the brilliant burst of light, looming just on the other side of the horizon. We eagerly, lovingly chase ourselves, to find ourselves.

"There's What You Are On the One Hand," limited edition print by Jessica Doyle

Featured On: November 2, 2010

Aspirin for Gangrene

MP3 audio track

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

This place will do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured On: October 24, 2010

Angeles

The First Night of the Rest of My Life

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

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

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

"You answered the phone." (Baiting.)

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

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

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

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

Over the Counter Pick-Me-Up Cocktail

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

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

The Dresden Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graciously. As in, not from Los Angeles.

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

"Adam Ant," he shot back.

I ordered a Tanqueray gimlet and held my breath.

Cathy squirmed.

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

"Alan Alda."

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

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

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

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

Caution Curves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams

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

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

Visiting Hours

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have a message from God."

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

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

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

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

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

Then Davíd was gone. Visiting hours were over.

Demerol

Generic name: Meperidine hydrochloride

Type of drug: Narcotic analgesic

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

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

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

Flowers

"My stomach is killing me."

"How's your head?"

"Still can't feel it."

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

I read the cards:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What irises?"

"From David."

"From who?"

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

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

Release Date

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

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

"Sweet, or dry?" Paul asked.

"Dry."

"Shaken or stirred?"

"Shaken."

"Olive or onion?"

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

Message from Pepper

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

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

Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skipper

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

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

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

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

"You eat arugula?"

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

"I find it bitter, as greens go."

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

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

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

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Click

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

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

And just as suddenly, it's gone.

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

Pepper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You brought me some leaves? Thanks."

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

"I've seen them before."

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

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

Jellybeans

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

"About time. What is he, seventy?"

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

"Ouch."

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

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

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

Theme and Variation

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

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

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

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

The Screenplay That Can Save the World

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

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

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

Ben went to the Smog Cutter.

The Smog Cutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sure. Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly I felt sick.

Purging

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

"What's the matter?," asks Davíd.

"I don't know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man with the Flower in His Chest

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

RECOMMENDATION: Pass.

Black Iris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[end of part one]

Featured On: October 17, 2010

Why I Blog

The metaphors are all too hyperbolic, but the one that gets his attention: "It's like I was born without skin." It strikes me as trite, but it gets through to him, which was the intended effect. So I elaborate: "Sometimes I try to hold the elevator door for someone and they don't make it; the door closes. And it upsets me for the rest of the day." Really. "I consider going back for them."

Another: "The woman at the bus stop. I think of giving her my umbrella. There's a torrent of rain. She needs the umbrella at least as much as I do."

Another: "Sometimes I see a couple at a restaurant, silently reading different sections of the same paper. And I cry. I actually cry, right there at brunch."

"How does that make you feel?," he asks, like a robot.

It makes me feel like an abandoned alien waiting for the mothership.
It makes me feel like a candidate for shock therapy.
It makes me feel like I was born without skin.

"It's upsetting," I tell him.

There are people I know who say they love me and at some level I don't doubt it; but they won't ask me how I feel, because the answer—How I Feel—it's a Hudson River, a mile wide and five hundred feet deep and meandering and unstoppable; it's canyon-carving; it's tidal; and they don't want to know. They want to read about it now and then, the highlights; but they don't want to know.

That's why I blog.

Featured On: October 12, 2010

An American Dream

(This piece was the featured story in Necessary Fiction the week of October 24, 2012.)

Featured On: October 4, 2010

Liminal's Revenge

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

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

I am neither here nor there.

I don't know what I want to do.

I'm not very comfortable not knowing.

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

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

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

P.S. It's the Metaphor, Stupid

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

The round river metaphor might not be working for me.

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

More on Mr. Lakoff later...

Featured On: September 23, 2010

Houseplants

I bought houseplants.

I've never been especially good at decorating (though I prefer to say "I'm minimalist"), so I take comfort in the easy style and color choices that come from buying plants—the green leaves, the terra cotta pots. Plants require a kind of mindless nurturing and I appreciate that.

I bought a small tree that it turns out is called a "money tree," and it supposedly brings financial good fortune, but so far, I'm not sure. It sits in my bedroom window, where it seems slightly conflicted, leaning toward the sunlight, leaning away from the cold, though they come from the same direction. It thrives quietly: it doesn't grow much in height but gets more robust in volume—as if it's getting richer.

Encouraged by this success, I bought a palm tree, which stands in the opposite corner of the room. It fills out that entire part of the room, and in return, it asks for little: it seems happy with its small share of light and its too occasional watering, and I worry about it only because it seems to collect such thick layers of dust that I actually dust off its leaves every now and then, so it won't suffocate.

Struck by the easy passivity of my two trees, I invested in a new set of plants—practical edible herbs: basil, sage, thyme, oregano. They are smaller than the trees, and more rambunctious. They are children. They always want something: they want to be told stories, they want me to play games. Sometimes they tell me I've given them too much water, sometimes not enough. They are inconsistent.

I went traveling for a few days, and, as if to punish me for leaving, some of the plants died. A plant dying is not like an animal dying, because when an animal dies, it is markedly different than it was when it was alive: a fish floats; a rabbit gets cold and stiff; a dog's tail stops wagging, and it stops greeting you at the door when you come home.

A plant is more private in death: it might appear to be dead but still contain life hidden somewhere under the soil, so that through water and penitence, it might be revived. Or alternately, you might continue to pour water into its barren pot for weeks before finally conceding that the plant has left you forever.

Lately I've noticed that some of my plants have taken on new character—a white sort of fuzz on the underside of some leaves—and when I touch them, the fuzz comes to life, scampering and then taking to the air: a small swarm of tiny white flies is eating more of the basil than I am. I spray at them with soapy water, as I'm instructed to do, because the aphids (as they're called) can't stand the taste of soap; and it drives them airborne.

Now they're flying around my room, homeless and confused, so the air is filled with skittish white flecks of half-brained dust—and I realize that, having desired to decorate my life with other life, and having brought it into my home, I've gotten more than I bargained for...

Featured On: September 11, 2010

11

In all the tumult of the last two months, I haven't had a whole lot of social contact with people and I haven't really missed it much, either: each time I change cities, I take another step deeper into introversion, I become a little less interested in mingling with strangers, and, so far at least, I'm okay with that.

But I wonder if it's not having some unexpected side effects, for example—a growing interest in my horoscope. Today, September 11, an auspicious day, offers me up this wisdom:

Keep being fickle and you could end up in quite a pickle... You try to please everyone and end up pleasing no one (including yourself) by avoiding a decision that's been dogging your heels for ages. Give up trying to make everybody happy. What would make you happy? Now follow through on that decision.

I'm not really one to let a snippet of (rhyming) astrology dictate my life, but, all other things being equal, ... why not? There have been a couple decisions I've been sitting on, and today is as good a day as any to take action.

And just like that, I'm a puppet of Fate.

* * *

Two months ago, I started seeing 11:11 on the clock. I'm not really much of a clock-watcher, I'm not terribly superstitious, I know almost nothing about numerology. All I know for sure is that each night for the last two months, no matter where I've been, with only three exceptions, I happen to be looking at a clock and it happens to read "11:11." At first it was just an odd coincidence, but before long, it started to seem more ominous—like it must mean something, but the meaning was inscrutable.

It's silly, paranoid, to be afraid of a clock, but last night, while I was on the phone, my eye fell on the clockface at exactly that magic moment, and I stopped what I was saying in mid-sentence. I had no idea what I'd been saying. I was shaking. Tonight I'll probably put the clock in a box or a bag, or maybe I'll put myself in one, till I'm sure it's midnight at least.

And just like that, I'm a puppet of Fate.

I mention all this to a New Agey friend and it turns out she does know numerology, enough to mention, offhandedly, "Your name, Christopher, in numerology, is eleven." I go on to learn:

With the number 11 the issue is always one of subtlety, intuition, sensitivity, awareness, and the presence of knowledge that is not being applied. You need to trust your intuition. Your gut feelings tend to be more reliable than your "rational" understanding. You are making the wrong decisions based on what you think you know, while deep down your intuitive understanding is telling you to go a different direction... In short, you have to take a close look at your life and read between the lines. Your inner self is attempting to communicate with you and you are not listening. Open up and acknowledge what you know.

I also discover there are whole Internet communities, whole bulletin boards, whole books, dedicated to people who see the clock at 11:11. "This has been widely reported for the last 5-10 years, and is now commonly referred to as the 11:11 Experience."

I started seeing 11:11 on clocks, receipts, bank clocks, EVERYWHERE about 7 years ago. Here is what I've learned since then. 11:11 is a wake-up call for lightworkers. Lightworkers are people who signed up for a "green beret" type of mission when they were on the spirit plane ( before being incarnated on Earth). What the mission is, in short, is to hold as much Light as possible, as strongly as possible, on this planet.

The "explanations" get elaborate and arcane, treading paths through the Book of Revelations ("After the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered into them, and they stood on their feet"), the Freemasons, and even, somewhat a propos, the World Trade Center attack.

But what does it mean? Is my clock speaking to me from the spirit realm? Have I somehow lost my way? I have no idea. Except that I suppose, like everyone else, I'm a puppet of Fate: "Keep being fickle and you could end up in quite a pickle." "9/11 = 9+1+1 = 11." "Hold as much Light as possible, as strongly as possible, on this planet."

Featured On: August 15, 2010

Postcards from the West

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Featured On: July 19, 2010

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?

Featured On: July 10, 2010

Emergency Preparedness

MP3 audio track

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?

Featured On: July 5, 2010

Paris

Packing

I nearly missed the plane.

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

Phantom Ringing

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

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

"Only disconnect."

Backpacking

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

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

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

Quel Chemin?

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

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

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

Sans Fromage

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

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

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

The World is Spinning

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

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

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

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

Meetings at Fountains

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

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

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

L'Orange

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

Regret

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

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

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

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

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

The Dull Mad Fact

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Paris.

Featured On: June 27, 2010

The Movie of My Life

You ever play this game? Imagine your life is a movie, and you are the casting director. Who plays you?

It's a grossly narcissistic, self-indulgent game, which is of course what makes it fun to play. It's also nice because, in the movie versions of our lives, we're generally funnier and better looking than we are in real life.

Well, my life is so interesting that it won't be reduced to a single film. Though New Line approached me about a trilogy à la Lord of the Rings, I declined, opting instead for three distinct genre pix, which will give me a chance to offer up a different aspect of my personality to three of Hollywood's finest:

Teen Angst Drama
As you'll guess from the heading, this film will focus on my troubled teen years, and will star Kieran Culkin (Igby Goes Down) in the title role: "[Culkin] shows poise, a fatalistic self-deprecating personality, and great comic delivery of the sophisticated lines.... When life beats down hard upon him, sometimes literally, he shows an inner resilience that allows him to somehow continue. At the same time, his acceptance of the strange hand life has dealt him has a real note of sadness to it, the perfect ying-yang of the comic mask." Does that sound like anyone else you know? My thoughts exactly! Culkin's performance came to an abrupt end in The Secret Lives of Altar Boys, and he had a habit of getting the shit kicked out of him in Igby; I hope in my life story he'll fare a little better...

Sweeping Love Epic
This broad, beautifully-shot epic will be at least three hours long, will feature a tragic love story, and will make you cry. The obvious casting choice here is Ralph Fiennes, who has proven himself in this role time and time again (The English Patient, The End of the Affair, Oscar and Lucinda). Articulate and iconoclastic, he's also eccentric and tends to come unhinged. Notice too that he's wearing my signature blue shirt. I'll probably shoot this film in an exotic locale like Africa or South America (though I've never been to either), and he will fall in ill-fated love with Asia Argento, Helena Bonham Carter, or Juliette Binoche. The film will win an Oscar for Best Cinematography and will doubtless be a contender for Best Picture.

Buddy Movie
This one is problematic since I don't actually have a buddy. But I really do want to offer up my life story to Owen Wilson, for what could be his first-ever dramatic role—and I don't know if he can do anything except buddy movies. I admire him most in his first movie, Bottle Rocket, and I'd like to find a use for the jumpsuit he wore in that movie. I'd also like to use that Zoolander loft. But who should my buddy be? Hmm. Maybe it's best to work backwards, and start with Owen's own buddies: Luke Wilson could be my loyal, mild-mannered friend Pete, and Ben Stiller could play my Pakistani brother-in-law. Bill Murray will be double-cast as my expatriot-mentor-poet-friend Stewart, and also my Dad (how Freudian!). I'll bring in Drew Barrymore to play my sister, and there will be a great car chase through the streets of Los Angeles in my old Volkswagen Cabriolet. I'm not really clear yet on the story, but even now, I'm sure you can see its potential. Right?

Runners-up:
Campbell Scott; Mathew Modine; all of the Culkin brothers in a series.

Featured On: June 21, 2010

Time Lapse, pt. 2

Negative Space

She pulls on her clothes, refreshes her lipstick, kisses me goodbye, and closes the door, and I notice it right away—the presence of this new feeling. It has been lingering all afternoon, this feeling, like an unwanted guest, but I chose not to acknowledge it, and that in itself is a new kind of duplicity, I suppose—this lie of omission: pretending to share an intimate afternoon, she and I, while also including this other, this third, this feeling, this feeling who sits there, watching us.

Maybe she feels it, too, the presence in the room with us.

Maybe she does.

But her version of the history is different than mine. Her version is steadier and more continuous than mine. In my version, we have had a very jarring year, she and I; and the result of it is that when I am with her, I reserve a part of myself. I bifurcate. Part of me is with her, and part of me is with myself. We stroll the streets, we wander in and out of shops, we lounge at restaurants, we loll in the park, we loll in bed, same as before—except now, part of me is not there. Part of me instead stands in reserve, out of body, stands guard, to protect me from the intrusion of another jarring year.

Maybe she feels it, too.

Maybe this is what happens between people.

Maybe this is an evolution of love.

The result of it is that a distance has opened between what I am feeling and what I am saying. The result is this new negative space, the vacuum of evacuated promise, and it occupies the room like an unwanted guest, intruding on the intimate afternoons.

Featured On: June 16, 2010

Identity Theft

Here are a few biographical lines about Chris DeWan:

After some important years spent in Pennsylvania, Chris graduated from a well-reputed school on the East Coast and then found his way to California. He spent some time dabbling in the arts and in theatre, before committing to a career as a computer programmer and web developer, working for Apple Computer. An avid cyclist who has competed on occasion, he has also been known to color his hair, and sport various body piercings.

All of these things are true of me, but I'm writing them about the other Chris DeWan, Bizarro Chris DeWan, my doppelganger, whom I have never met. We came dangerously close once, probably as close as ten feet, at a party in Cupertino. I sipped a beer with my left hand, and he, like a mirror, with his right. He knew I was there. There was only a table of shrimp cocktail between us.

What happens when matter and anti-matter collide?

It's unnerving to have a double, worse than the worst Citibank "identity theft" ad—unnerving not because people unwittingly fall for the ruse, but because there is no ruse. Somewhere, out there in the world, there is another Chris DeWan—not simply a namesake (which would be inevitable), but another one of me. Presented with an almost infinite number of life's forking paths, his and mine crossed as soon as our names were etched on our birth certificates, and have continued to do so, often—even yesterday, when a friend of mine visited his blog instead of mine: "Weird how long it took me to realize it wasn't you; he works at Apple and seems sort of crazy in a funny way."

Philip Roth had Operation Shylock; I have Operation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Of course it's all much ado about nothing. He and I will continue to live in peaceful co-existence, parallel but separate lives. We will act freely, make independent choices, and they will probably be the same. This will continue to muck up search engines until gradually, our identities according to Google have become one. I wish us both the best.

P.S. Kudos to Chris DeWan
According to Google, Chris DeWan is the Belvidere High School Athlete of the Week for golf, plays in a band, and is one of Los Angeles' hottest young indie actors. He has published photography of Glacier National Park, organizes Civil War re-enactments, and writes capsule reviews for Butterfly Books. He is a straight A student who has high expectations of himself and those around him. He is twelve years old, is in the seventh grade, and plays basketball. Congratulations, Chris!

Featured On: June 9, 2010

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...

Featured On: June 2, 2010

These Are My Hands

There's a fire in my kitchen. This is a thing that happens sometimes. There are several pots on several burners and something somewhere has overflowed, and instead of simply making a mess, it has made a fire.

I might put out the fire with a towel, but I can't find one, and instead I try to dampen the flames with my bare hands, by pressing them against the hot metal burners. This is an ill-advised solution to the problem. In my own defense, I never decided to put out the fire with my hands. It just sort of happened.

Kind of like that unplanned phone call I just made. Sometimes it's like someone else grabs the steering wheel and drives into oncoming traffic. "I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

My hands have a mind of their own. My hands have Tourette's. My hands are always having an out-of-body experience, doing things I neither plan nor condone. One of these days, I'm sure, my hands will up and slap you. They'll sit down at a keyboard and plunk out a Tom Clancey novel. They'll goose someone on the subway. They'll drive the car off the road.

"I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

What scares me most is that I don't know whether or not that's true. It kind of was me. I don't know which is more me—the hands when I control them, or the hands when they control me. Which is more me—the one putting out the fires, or the one starting them?

Featured On: May 27, 2010

On the Veranda

Part of her thought if she'd been able to just let go, the sheaves of renderings would have built themselves, harvest come home. Another delusion, no doubt. She knew she'd been grandiose, and didn't have much to show for it. She had committed that most American of sins: failed to move laterally.

- from Bruce Wagner's Memorial

It's going to be another one of those days, by which I mean frustrating. I'm staring at the computer screen, hitting "Refresh" every thirty seconds or so—as if inspiration of any sort ever comes via the Internet.

Sure. If I hit "Refresh" just this one more time, all my problems will be solved. My Inbox will suddenly overflow with love, affection, opportunity, wealth, challenges, self-confidence, and the answers to all my still-unarticulated questions. That's going to happen. (I mean, how big would that attachment have to be, exactly?)

I hit "Refresh." And when I'm not "Refreshing," I'm typing, using similar (if slightly better-founded) logic: that if only I keep typing—spewing words as fast as they pop into my head—then eventually, like the monkey at the keyboard, eventually, I'll have to stumble on to some wisdom.

And eventually, maybe I will.

But I'm not sure it's going to happen today.

* * *

My Zen archery teacher (yes, I had a Zen archery teacher) would talk about the importance, in Japanese architecture, of the veranda. Because of his pronunciation, vee-lan-da, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant. Actually, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant, because teaching Zen archery (kyudo) to a Westerner is a somewhat futile exercise. We harbor B-movie samurai fantasies about shooting things—but kyudo has almost nothing to do with shooting, or even bows, arrows, or targets. Rather, the study of kyudo is a kind of brain-washing through storytelling—and the bow is nothing but a set of stories, which, if used properly, might break some entrenched habits, and replace them with new ones.

In kyudo, you don't pull the bow string. You open the bow.

In kyudo, you don't shoot the arrow. While opening the bow, the arrow will release.

In kyudo, there is no target. (The word we used for "target" means "that fuzzy faraway thing.") An arrow might hit the ceiling and still have been the result of an excellent shot, depending on how it was released. In self-help parlance: you are the target.

All you have to do is let go.

* * *

A veranda is a space in between—neither inside not outside, neither here nor there. When you have left a place and have not yet arrived at the new place, you are on the veranda.

In my culture, in Western culture, we are encouraged to move quickly from one place to another, always to be on our way ... somewhere. We are encouraged to aim for a target, and to hit it, and if we do this, we have made a "good shot."

But in kyudo, the ceilings of the verandas are littered with arrows that strayed very far from that fuzzy faraway place called the "target". In kyudo, one is encouraged to take off one's shoes, kneel down on the veranda, and contemplate the path of these arrows, each of which might have been a "good shot."

Sometimes it's a good shot, even if it fails to move laterally. Sometimes you have to stay on the veranda, and be patient, so that you can know where to go next. Sometimes you have to let go.

Featured On: May 17, 2010

Upon smashing a silverfish lurking on my wall

Upon smashing a silverfish lurking on my wall,
Smashing it with an old unread magazine
(because too many come),
it quickly separated into two parts—

The smudge on my wall like
an unexpected freckle,
and the bits and legs and stuff
now glommed onto the pages.

Though separated from their body and their life,
Still they marched urgently onward, somewhere,
desperately fleeing the catastrophe that had already arrived;
and I regretted killing it, because we're all the same.

Featured On: May 12, 2010

On the Farm

I had a really vivid dream that we were on the farm. Everything was cold and crisp and quiet and kind and beautiful. We were walking through the woods, and came to a field with a herd of deer, and we stood there, really quietly, till eventually, they ignored us and wandered around us and surrounded us. There were so many of them that we were scared, if they panicked, they might actually trample us, but it was worth it, just to be surrounded by all those deer. It was that same sort of feeling as walking out onto a frozen pond, and hearing the ice beneath you creak: you're pretty sure you're safe, but you're not totally sure. We stood there quietly, without speaking, just shivering, as the deer brushed by, grazing on the grass.

(Sometimes I wish I remembered my dreams a little less well, or that my real life was as interesting to me as my dream life...)

Featured On: May 5, 2010

The God of Small (White) Things

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (like all of Wes Anderson's films, to greater or lesser degrees) is like a dollhouse made of marzipan: it's delicate, sweet, and of questionable substance that's neither fulfilling nor structurally sound. You simultaneously want to protect it, admire its preciousness, and crush it to hear the satisfying thunk of its fragility.

That's to say, then, it's everything we've come to expect of Anderson's films, and everything we love about them, and everything that drives us nuts, too. (No pun intended.)

Critics have been piling on Darjeeling Limited, eager to knock Anderson's hipster specs sideways:

Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet. (Jonah Weiner for Slate, "Unbearable Whiteness.")

Weiner falls short of calling Anderson racist outright, but I won't shy from the word: parts of Darjeeling made me cringe and try to hide my own white face under my hoodie.

But I have no intention of joining the critical pile-on, either. For obvious (and probably defensive) reasons, I take issue with the implication that privileged, bookish woebegones with white skin don't have stories worth watching. And I absolutely reject his conflation of Anderson's perspectives with the films of Noah Baumbach and Sofia Coppola, which I think, for all their own whiteness, are churning full of blood and guts. Anderson's movie about Americans soul-searching in an "exotic" land becomes an essay on cleverness, true; but Coppola's version of the same story, Lost in Translation, is exquisite and heartful.

Weiner also misses the fact that there's something elusively magical about the worlds of Wes Anderson: for all their preciousness (and "unbearable whiteness"), they induce another feeling that offsets the queasiness: wonder. Anderson's gift is his ability to make us marvel (and laugh) at things that would otherwise be mundane. He reminds us there's life to be found, everywhere, and it's rich and complex—even when it's made of white confection.

Featured On: May 1, 2010

(Not) Common

or, Sunday in the Park

or, Raison d'être (pt. 2)

Kids squealing at the sprinkler. A seven-year old's pirouette. Couple holding hands from their adjacent bicycles. Old man's red socks. That singer. Tree branch like a sun dial. Happy line at the ice cream cart. Toddler on a break-away. Make-a-wish fuzzball drifting through the air. Far-away church bells. Reflections in the puddle. Ripples in the reflections in the puddle. Gray-haired man holding his boy so tight it's like he thinks it might keep him that size forever. Flip-flops and red toenails, balancing, teetering, on the curb. Puppy tripping over his too-big paws. Blonde-haired man sitting on the corner of a park bench, scribbling a notebook full of words he'll never share with anyone, writing them down like his life depends on it, because (some days more than others) it does...

Featured On: April 25, 2010

Snakes

MP3 audio track

(This piece appears in the October 4, 2012 issue of MicroHorror.)

Featured On: April 20, 2010

This Is Your Life

MP3 audio track

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.

Featured On: April 3, 2010

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2

I can't remember.

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

I really can't remember what I was watching.

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

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

* * *

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

And then I realized, you were gone.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Maybe it never mattered.

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

* * *

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

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

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

"It was good seeing her."

Featured On: March 27, 2010

Reaching the Pegbox

The thing is: you are not the primary agent of your life.

You think you are. After all, it's you who decides when to set the alarm, whether to add cream and sugar to your coffee, whether to take the scenic route to work.

But now and then, something happens. You stumble. The world that seemed so clear suddenly wavers in front of your eyes: a veil lifts, and you get a glimpse that things are in fact quite different than you like to assume. Your petty acts of will exert very little influence on the course of your life.

Maybe you had a near-car-accident and tasted your own mortality. Maybe your wife left you. Or maybe your sudden belief crisis was cued by something more subtle or invisible: maybe it was a song on the radio. Maybe you looked up at a flock of migratory birds, wondered where they were going, and suddenly lost faith in everything.

One thing is for sure: you are not the primary agent of your life. Other, stronger forces are at work. Some of them have names—gravity, economics, love. Some you can never and will never know. What you do know is that suddenly, everything that seemed so good is now spiraling out of control. You don't know what's what, what's important, what to believe. "If nothing holds fast," you ask yourself, "then what has value?"

You have discovered, quite organically, metaphysics.

You get the sense that your life is a tightly-strung violin, and your every act is intended to bring it into tune. But you can't reach the pegbox, and all you have at your disposal are the tiny screws on the tailpiece that allow you to make fine adjustments. Not very much control at all.

* * *

Ten years ago, I spent a week walking through the desert, thinking that I was dead—not that I was going to die (though that too was a distinct possibility), but that I already had. I became more and more convinced that I'd passed from this world, and wasn't even sure exactly when I'd crossed from one state into the other.

Death Valley is weird like that.

My brief walkabout into psychosis wasn't totally unplanned: after all, who goes into the desert except for some sort of spiritual revelation? Being dead explained many things, not least of all why, after so much effort spent, I still felt I had so little influence on the world around me:

Spirit can't touch body.

Eventually, I came back to the conclusion that I was alive—which meant there were whole other, still misunderstood reasons for my inability to affect change.

* * *

The Buddhists say that much of what we think of as reality is, in fact, illusion, and our confusing the one for the other causes us great suffering. They say that one can find happiness, but only when one stops wanting it, or wanting anything. The cessation of craving is the cessation of self: you must admit that you are not the primary agent of your life.

The cessation of craving, the cessation of self, is a kind of death.

To help remind themselves of this, they chant mantras, over and over, in Sanskrit.

Some say that God speaks Sanskrit, and that a chant spoken in Sanskrit offers truth in itself, without translation: one is already speaking the sound of truth, directly. But truth can't, won't, come in words (words being tied to particulars, to things, so the diametric opposite of omni-anything); truth, when it speaks, must speak in larger rhythms, in dialectics, in waves; and if one wishes somehow to speak truth, then one can't do it through understanding, but only un-understanding; through tearing down what we think we know; and through the mindful repetition of ... anything—a chant, perhaps, or the gravelly sound of footfalls in the desert, or the long drone of a single note from a violin. Focus on a single note, only, in relation to nothing but itself, and that note will never be out of tune. And you will disappear completely.

Featured On: March 12, 2010

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.

Featured On: March 3, 2010

Fortress of Solitude

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of Apocrypha and Abstractions.)

Featured On: February 25, 2010

A Funny Thing Happened

(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...

Featured On: February 20, 2010

Romantic Idealism, pt. 1

Do I miss you, or just memories of you?

Philosophy teaches us that nothing is real: all sight and sound and smell and everything we experience is apprehended through the mind, and therefore, they are ideas. All our sensations must become ideas in order for us to feel them.

If that's the case, then what I miss right now is the idea of the sweet smell of your breath, and not the smell itself...

Featured On: February 15, 2010

Sounds of Silence

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park

Cinema is inherently voyeuristic: we, the viewers, are always on the outside, peering at something to which we should not be privy, while on the inside, the characters who occupy the world we watch seem unaware of our presence.

In the case of most Hollywood blockbusters, it is easy to forget that we are voyeurs, because our window offers us a view of the impossible—places we could never possibly be: inside a jet fighter, or amidst a zombie army, or bumbling through a romance with a witty supermodel, or in a galaxy far far away.

Gus Van Sant's recent spate of vérité-style films offer instead a glimpse into places we might have been, if only we were so unlucky: lost in the desert without food or water (Gerry), hiding under a table in the library of Columbine High School (Elephant), or living out the final week in the under-furnished mansion of a reluctant rock'n'roll hero, before his suicide (Last Days).1

Add to this list one more place we don't want to revisit any time soon: the mind of a teenager—in particular, the dreamy, lyrical, emotionally-detached mind of a skateboarding teenager named Alex, growing up in a broken home in Portland, struggling with belonging, and involved in an unfortunate and grisly incident one night at Paranoid Park. The film recounts the events before and after that incident, but it jumbles the order, skews the point of view, slows things down, speeds things up, repeats a scene several times but reveals something new each time. "I'm writing this a little out of order," says Alex of his own pencil-scribbled narration. "Sorry. I didn't do so well in creative writing."

Van Sant, an American auteur who is best known for his (excellent but entirely conventional) Good Will Hunting, has since been diligently reminding us that the medium of film is one of sound and image and time, more than one of plot or character or dialogue. The most memorable moments of his recent films are the ones in which nothing is said and not very much seems to happen: the crunch of feet on the desert gravel; an ad hoc song plucked out on an acoustic guitar, performed for no one; the silent grainy home-movie footage of one skater after another, jumping off a ramp and reaching—Icarus-like—for the sky. These scenes may seem wistful, or indulgent, or narcissistic2; but then, the most memorable moments of our own lives are probably the same.

1. Van Sant calls these three his "Death Trilogy," and indeed, they are beautiful, elegiac, fictional snuff films.

2. Marshall McLuhan suggests that Narcissus would never have become so enamored of his own reflection if he had understood it for what it was ("Narcissus as Narcosis"). Instead, perhaps he was enraptured at the discovery of one so similar to himself, and could not avert his eyes. The same might be said for Van Sant's long, longing gazes upon his subjects.