Narratives of random interactions with New York City while on bicycle or foot.
Odd EventsPeculiar things, witnessed.
TelescopeSeeing with prose, and letting the cat out of the box.
Not GOSPLACSFeedback on .
As Brooklyn Slowly DrunkenedThe blackout of 2003.
Looking for Something StableWhat we talk about when we talk about fetishes.
Taking the Edge OffThings we love that do not love us back.
Black Box TheaterBeing in the audience can put you on stage.
The Alley WatchersThe women who live on Rebecca Dravos' side-street are mothers, and judges of men and women.
June-August, 1994A long summer in upstate New York.
JerryJust a college anecdote.
Talking With MomFunerals, free meals, and nagging.
PlanespottingRefractions on flying.
ReviewLooking at it two years out.
Accordion TimeTime folds and unfolds in the rhythm of heartbearts, which leads to a theory.
Concession StandPaul: I used to go to this movie theater operated by a dyslexic.
Scott: And he would put the times up all backwards?
Paul: Yes, that. But whenever you went to the concession stand, all they had were videotapes of policemen having sex, and I bought one once, and the policemen were totally smeared with grease.
Scott: (very disappointed) Yes?
Paul: All they sold was buttered cop porn.
Medium of ExchangeLayers of language and millions of dollars, all confounded, all tied together.
Medium of Exchange (Revised)“I tried once to imagine the path that a dollar takes when it leaves my wallet, when I buy a can of soup.”
ProgressFrom there to here, then to now.
JokeWhere does Björk live?
Njörk.
What does she eat for dinner?
Pjörk chops.
IntercourseFinding a penny, my friend held it up to the light, and said, “Make a wish.”
“I wish that I could keep that penny forever, and it would always be shiny.”
She threw it out the window, and she looked at me. She raised her eyebrows, and she said: “Did it come true?”
All The Brands Names I Can See While Typing Without Turning My Head or Moving My EyesIiyama Monitor. Gateway Laptop. Verizon Cell Phone. Marlboro Cigarettes. Corona Beer. Pop Secret Microwave popcorn. Barnes & Noble Wall Map. MasterCard Brochure. SunKist Orange. Memorex Recordable CD. Arista Misoc CD. Q-Tip Ear swab. Cambridge Soundworks Speaker. Sharp Air conditioner. Panasonic Batteries. ING Direct mail. GNC Vitamins. 3M Post-it notes.
Chinatown and BackThe parade! The perspective! The joy!
Chemical PlantsMemories of the chemicals of childhood.
JillA conversation after some events.
The Chinese CatsRecalling a friend, finding her identity in her early 20s.
Losesome, LonesomeQ: Maybe we could have a threesome?
A: Maybe you could have a onesome.
The Bad TurtlesAn inventory of New Years.
SickbedA thing that comes from dreams, but would be better forgotten.
PredictionsAn old man came up to me; it was 1AM & I was waiting for a bus. “Hey,” he said.
“I'm reading my book,” I said, nose buried to see the letters in the yellow light.
“If I could have 35 cents for the bus...” Which I fished out from my wallet and presented. He carried a large clear plastic bag inside another clear plastic bag, and whatever the bags' contents were had dripped a slimy white fluid that flowed like a wave.
“I got all this chicken,” he said. “They were throwing it away,” and then the smell hit me: musty fried chicken, left out for hours on a warm, wet Thursday night. “I'm going to give it away.”
“That's a good haul,” I said.
“Oh, I'm lucky,” he said. And I was reminded of another old, indigent person, a woman at a shelter where I'd volunteered during a less busy, and less selfish era of my life. Parched orange skin, no teeth (heroin), and very little hair, 4 feet tall. She'd introduced herself with a strong handshake. “I'm Lucky,” she said.
It looks that way, I thought. I was pleased to meet her. The women at the shelter were fined a quarter every time they swore. They had no homes, they were at odds with their families, and many of them had been prostitutes and drug addicts, and they could not swear. Most of them were able to turn it off for the social workers, but one morning when the morning bus had taken them off, and I was left to sort out the beds I took a look at the swearing book, and there was Lucky's name with an inventory of her sins: countless F's and MF's (50 cents), S's (25 cents), D's (15 cents), and a few miscellaneous dimesworth's of profanity.
They were also not supposed to smoke, but after the social worker left the cloud would roll out from their door, the day's cadged cigarettes brought into play. It was none of my business.
One night as I lay half-asleep on my green cot and my rough, gray D.H.S. blanket, all of the women in the shelter began to scream, and the bathroom door began to swing open and shut. “Volunteer!” one of them yelled, but I pretended not to hear, and then I heard a repeated flushing of toilets.”
“It's some kind of fish! Some kind of fish!” someone screamed.
“I got it!” said someone else, and then another voice made a keening, sickly noise. Then there was a long quiet, and someone began to laugh.
I never stopped volunteering, but a new coordinator came on board, and forgot to call me, and after a few months I'd forgotten all about it. It wasn't much work—I simply slept at the shelter on weeknights, because you needed one non-participant to be on hand, as the homeless are not permitted to run their own shelter.
The man with the bag of fried chicken said something to the bus driver, and was let on without paying. The three of us, driver, the man, and I, sailed down Court St. without a stop, until we reached 9th St. There we disembarked, and I held the door for the man, the greasy bag sloshing out with him.
“All right then,” he said, going left. “You take care,” I said, going right.
Empire StateA tentative step in a singular direction.
Age of XWhat time is it?
The Soldiers at Smith & 9th StThe sign at my subway stop said “by using this station you consent to appear in a film.” On the platform, I found actors in camouflage, holding fake guns, in stone-faced formation. This was 1997. The shot was for the film The Siege. The scene was part of a montage that shows what New York would be like under martial law, following a wave of attacks on the city by Muslim terrorists.
In 2001 I worked for a few months in Israel. When I would leave my office I'd see soldiers everywhere. My company asked me to move to Tel Aviv, to stay on for a year, and I loved the job, so I almost said yes right away. But in Jerusalem I saw bullet scars on buildings, and I began to wonder: all these soldiers, all these guns.
That company closed before I could decide to stay, and I came home on September 18, 2001. There were guns everywhere. A friend and I sat in Battery Park and watched soldiers drive camouflaged trucks, the camouflage green and brown instead of the desert colors I'd seen in Israel—but the rifles had the same purpose.
On a night when they were welding apart the last standing piece of the towers, a friend and I walked around the entire fenced-in area. It took a full hour, and we passed dozens of soldiers. The welding was our compass point, the sparks at the center of the circle.
Today, most of the soldiers are gone, but some still appear, at Penn Station, or at the entrance to the PATH train in the West Village. I don't know what they'll do if they ever see a terrorist. When nerve gas is released bullets won't help. And I don't like this feeling of being under occupation, the sense of being watched, and suspected. I know the reasons for it, and I can understand them. But I don't trust them, and I don't trust the people in power to take this inch, and then not take the later mile.
I met a woman who'd been on the 35th floor of the north tower. A fireman had put her onto a boat. “I feel so guilty about Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said. “We are doing these terrible things, and then I'm ashamed that I am not grateful.”
I saw a friend from Israel, and she said: “Israelis are happy with their lives. They did a survey. I'm happy too. I protest the government, but you can only have so much depression, and shame, and guilt.”
The other night I went to a wedding reception. The couple had held a guerrilla ceremony, going at 10 AM to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, ascending in the elevator with a group of 30 friends, and had taken their vows in the midst of a fog, with Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey as witnesses.
The reception was on an old, rusty boat, permanently docked to pier 63 on the west side of Manhattan. The groom wore a green tuxedo, and the bride wore a green dress, and she was the most beautiful thing below 50th St. The boat rocked slowly back and forth in the Hudson as people drank and danced, the stomping of their heels resounding through the hull.
The bride and groom were both fine dancers, obviously exhausted by their day, but finding reserves of adrenaline and enthusiasm as the night went forward. Spontaneously, their friends joined hands around them. I was pulled in, and in a short while about 25 people had made a circle, legs kicking in synchrony. A man filmed this circle of bodies from the inside, face after face. Then he turned the camera onto the newly married couple in the middle, to capture them twisting, shimmying, kissing, their arms finding each other's waists. These were the sparks at the center of our circle. The song ended, and the circle split into its arcs. Then the bride and groom cut the cake, which was in the shape of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in New York City.
Knowing Your EraIt would be nice to know.
LaundromatConsidering the spin cycle.
Interlude: VictimGetting some tail.
CeilingHole in the roof of the Smith & 9th St. Subway Station
I went for an interview at a branding firm in midtown. It's one of several branding and new media firms in its building. The other floors are taken up by a non-profit addiction treatment center, and a wig maker's. I strode in with purpose in my legs in order to keep the security guard from stopping me, and entered the elevator with a tall, thin, tired-looking man in a leather jacked who was shivering—shaking, really. He made it to the third floor, then began to pound the wall of the elevator with his fist and say “shit” repeatedly. There was nowhere else to look, so I looked at him. He had a black cloth bag, half-zippered with a piece of white plastic hanging out of the opening. He put his hands to his head and moaned, gritting his teeth. The elevator continued to creep skyward.
The poor bastard. Whatever was eating him—something oily with tentacles—was turning the world into ghosts, making everything sepulchral. You could see it on him. He was Orpheus surrounded by shades, desperate to turn back and see her one last time. I'm not one for hard drugs, but you have to have sympathy.
He got off at the 9th floor, and I went in for my interview. A friend suggested me and arranged the interview. The job is for a “production artist,” someone to run software, put together long documents and follow the guidelines established by the firm's designers, to do the legwork of the documentation age.
The interview was polite. I was rested and enthusiastic, trim in a tie and jacket. My resume, neatly laserprinted at Paul's, showed a smattering of work history, and my portfolio, created to complete the requirements of my night classes in Publishing Technologies, demonstrated sufficient technical skill. The interviewer, a woman named Calla with graying hair, manager of HR and operations, was polite and non-committal, but nodded often during the meeting and promised to call me this week.
After I left there was little to do but go back to work. I am helping a friend build sets for an off-Broadway opera. No one is sure of the specifics of the production, but the checks don't bounce. Somehow I have been brought in without offending the union, and so I swing my hammer and run the heavy cordless drill, putting together two-by-fours and painting large sheets of jigsawed plywood, cut into circles and parallelograms.
“How did that go?” he asked.
“Good, I guess,” I said. “We'll see.” I told him about the junkie in the elevator, and we laughed at it, and I proceeded to drilling holes into long warped boards that we would force to become risers.
The work had a rhythm, and as I fell into it, suddenly I remembered being in an old brown car in upstate New York, the lights of a police car in my rear-view mirror. I hadn't been speeding, so I knew what was coming. My pathetic Dodge beater had no chance of escape from the curved black-and-white Ford Taurus behind me. So I pulled over.
License and registration, etc. Waiting for him to ask permission to open the trunk, to search the back. In a paper bag below some eggs and potato chips were three small brown paper packages tied with string, and inside them plastic bags, and inside the bags was a long night in prison and an orange shirt with a number on it, with many more to follow, night after night, stretching into years. I'd been dangling myself over the cliff of this moment for almost a year. Even so, I willed my hands into steadiness and handed over the paperwork.
He looked at the license, and at my face in profile. In the next year I would learn to loathe his face, and he would come to represent everything that was falling apart, and it was finally his face that launched me to New York, to the wave of drunken couch life that rose and fell like waves across three years of my life.
The need to say something, to yank the future back away from the handcuffs that hung from his belt, overwhelmed me. I asked, “Was I speeding?” Knowing I hadn't been.
The officer said nothing for a long moment, and then: “I'm sorry to have bothered you, sir.” Another pause, agony. “Someone reported an old brown Dodge stolen, but this all seems fine.”
I laughed and suddenly fell into a character, someone new emerging, the old self submerged. “God, no. I wish someone would steal this car.”
“They're easy to hotwire,” he said. “Probably kids.”
“That so?” In my life I don't know that I'd ever said “that so” before, but the person I had just become was an expert at banter; he could talk about the weather, the hazards of modern driving, and quote from shows on television he'd never seen. “Never occurred to me anyone would want to steal this thing.” His gun hang loosely in its holster, easily reachable; another holster held a sheaf of blank parking tickets.
“People steal everything,” he said. “You wouldn't believe.”
I have $14,000 in illegal drugs in the car, I thought, as the submerged self surfaced, gasping for air. But I pushed him back down and said, “I guess you'd know all about that.”
“Guess so at that,” the policeman said. I could see him now: thin legs and a strong chest, the classic cop body, all driving and weight-lifting. Young: somewhere between 25 and 29, with a moustache pleasantly cultivated. “Well, okay then.” He handed me my papers.
“That's all right?”
“Everything's fine,” he said. “Sorry for the interruption.” He wished me a pleasant day.
I drove off, and before a minute was over he had passed me, moving silently past my rattling car.
That was the beginning of this life. The details, the causes and effects are for another day, when I have time and my arms are not sore from holding a drill and pushing warped wood into a form. Later, that same policeman would appear at my door and invite himself in, with a deal to make, and I began to see that all of my imagined toughness, my proud compromises, were an amateur act. I would learn that I could only stomach a little of the evil in the world, when I'd thought that I would have no problem swallowing bellyfuls, as the stage of my early 20s began to fall apart.
That was me in the elevator. Not the man beating his fist at the wall, but the man who went to night school and learned to use software named with corporate conjunctions: Photoshop, InDesign, GoLive. The man with the shakes got off on the 9th floor, and I went on to the 12th. I introduced myself to the receptionist and read a copy of AdWeek on the lobby couch. I stood up, squared my shoulders, and shook Calla's hand. I left the interview and went back to work. It took more than ten years to learn to do that; it takes most people much less time, but for me it was ten years. I have not filled in every space. But every night—tonight, when I finish writing this—I call Catherine, and twice a week we meet, usually at her apartment, sometimes at mine. Sometimes we have sex, usually taking turns until the other person is released. Just as often we're tired, and we put our hands on each other, we drink from the water bottle on the bedstand, she puts in her earplugs, and both sets of eyes close. We're gone for a few hours, swimming in the ether. Then the clock radio turns on, tuned to the news on public radio, a thoughtful, neutral voice telling us what remains.
Smith St. Between Nelson and HuntingtonNo one lives on this block. It is empty of all but passing life. On the left, the elevated F and G lines move through at intervals, straddling above a playground with thick latticework made up of steel beams coated in concrete. For years, the concrete was shedding, and you would find thick chunks of it, split in pieces from the 20-foot drop. The playgrounds located under the elevated line were often closed. Now they have wrapped almost the entire length of the structure in black plastic mesh, and studded it with silver rivets—“bedazzled it,” someone said. Where before it was simply dingy, it is now monstrous and elephantine, and so hideous that I am awed by its lurking presence.
The 75 bus runs here, in the shadow of its larger, older brother.
Facing north, the elevated line descends, closer to earth with every inch, heading underground on its way to Manhattan. There is a large empty lot to the right. After 7 years, no one has yet claimed it for construction of any kind, which makes me wonder if it's poisoned and unusable. Filled with weeds and a span of concrete, some marked with half-hearted graffiti, the lot is clearly prime spot for the pursuit of drug addiction, binge drinking, and sexual intercourse, but despite a few tears in the fence, I never see anyone there, although I have not made much effort in this direction.
Smith St. Between 9th and NelsonHere you will find a few brownstones, and across the street, some sort of red-painted brick structure which belongs to the concrete factory, and some trash lids chained to a wall so that they will never escape. All night the cans strain at their chains, for a freedom that will never be theirs.
ClassHow the other 0.1% lives.
Three GatesReading the story of Empress Theodora.
Passing SoftlyThe F train in motion.
The King of the PigeonsA note from the future Emperor of New York City.
ListsA small selection of hundreds of lists from Wikipedia.
SleeplessSee also: The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel at The Morning News.
The creature perches upon the bed, orange stripes and yellow eyes. It is filled with mewls, and pours them out in the middle of the night, with a sound like knocking over a glass of goblins. In the bathroom, these sounds reverberate into language. Eye, eye, eye, it says, from deep in its throat. Child, child, child. Why, why, why, why, why? And then the sound of claws on the wall. My dreams are troubled.
As I type, then comes the smooth passage of its warm body across my ankles, like a piece of silk. It mourns until I lift it to my lap, and then it places its paw on the computer's mouse, in a weak information-age parody of hunting instinct. Sometimes I wake it in the middle of the day, and it is limp as I lift it from the closet, and disappointed. But I want it to wake, so that it does not talk to me all night.
The creature communicates by blinking. I turn to it from across the room and meet its eyes, and blink slowly. It blinks back. We have a long moment of interspecies semaphore. It is a wary means of communication, both of us out of the other's reach. But we understand each other, right then. See, we're thrown together in this life, so we might as well be friends. But the exact boundaries of those friendships—those are still under negotiation. I've never had one of its kind before, and it's never had one of mine. We are both soft and warm, but neither one believes in rushing things.
It needs a name. The cat's name is TK.
The LandlordMarta's landlord was always checking on something. He wore expensive white shirts, pressed slacks, and sneakers. The shirts he should wear, she thought, are thick and rough, not this combed cotton. She was afraid that he would make physical demands. For a long time she thought about moving, taking her suitcases and kitten and leaving for some other part of the city. She lived on the second floor of a three-floor building.
Every few months Mr. Nweski would insist on being let in to spray the corners with insecticide. He would have to check the sink. Once he listened to the walls with a stethescope. He stared at her chest as if he was making emotional contact, as if her nipples were eyes.
During the second year she became tired the feelings he brought with him. She thought of killing Mr. Nrewski, of pouring acid into his face, strangling him with piano wire, beating him with an aluminum baseball bat, splitting open the skull beneath his coiffed hair. She knocked bookcases onto him, and kicked him in the testicles, and pushed his face onto the electric coils of the stove, and when he stood back up again the burns were like the tattoos of a tribal chieftan, a bizarre spiral of red, raised skin. And then she covered him with spiders.
One Saturday morning he appeared with a stud finder. They are remodeling the apartment next door, he said—and when he entered, he found a man making an omelette, and Marta in a T-shirt and loose-fitting shorts.
“He found a stud,” she said to the omelette-making man, after Mr. Nrewski left.
The kitten grew into a sullen black cat with white paws. The omelette-making man went away. Marta gained 12 pounds, and turned 27. Now she told her friends about Mr. Nweski, and all of them laughed. She half-anticipated his visits, the pathetic droop of his eyelids.
On the second of a month, Mr. Nweski knocked on the door and asked for her rent check. She shook her head down at him, and told him to check the box. He went through the pile of envelopes in his hand and was very sorry. He asked after the apartment.
“Yes. It's a nice place, and all of my guests appreciate it as well.”
“If—”
“But now I have to get ready for my boyfriend to come over,” she said.
He stood there, half in the door, so that he had to jump into the hallway when she began to close it. She peeked through the peekhole and saw him biting his lower lip. She wondered if he would wait in front of the building to see who rang the buzzer. This made her feel guilty, but she hoped also that he would spend an hour spying, and realize that she had lied to him to get him to leave.
He knocked again two months later, and she was about to ask him to wait until she changed, but she was in good spirits and answered in a bathrobe, her smooth legs poking out of the bottom, unbound breasts hanging firm and free. He held up a new red fire extinguisher.
“Hello,” she said, singing the word.
“Marta—”
“Mr. Nweski.”
“Marta—”
“Mr. Nrewski, wait here,” she said, and she left the door a crack open. She went to a dresser and pulled out a pair of underwear, light pink, synthetic, clean.
She returned and took the fire extinguisher.
“For safety,” he said, looking down, now, at her bare toes. They were coated in orange lacquer, now cracked.
“I have something for you,” she said, handing him the underwear. “But I am on the phone.”
He looked at the cloth in his hands, and she closed the door. A minute later he knocked, and then knocked again. But she did not answer.
On the second of the next two months, she was out. Once with friends, and the next working late.
On the third month she heard the knock, and went to the peekhole, and there he was, the size of his nose doubled by the fisheye. He had seen, she knew, the sudden eclipse of her presence through that tiny portal, and for a moment she looked at him, and he looked at where he thought she was, behind the door. It made her jump. But she did not open the door. He knocked again, faintly, almost scratching, and she watched him bend down, his purpose unknown. Then she turned from the door, letting light shine once more through the portal, and heard his footfalls receding, and the creak of the banister as he pressed it, then his light step, in his sneakers, down the stairs.
When he was gone she opened the door, and there was a large brown envelope, sealed, with no name on it. She opened it and found the underwear, still smelling of fabric softener, and no note. Outside his car started, the wheels biting into the loose gravel that silted at the curb.
How I Learned to SwimIt was a storm that pushed me back in. I took swimming classes at the Community Center in 1980, in the summer, when I was six. The instructor was massive to me, muscled, tall, dark-skinned. He blew a stern whistle.
There would be a test to pass at the end of the lessons. He came into the pool and showed us how to rotate our arms, how to cup our hands. He put his hands on our midsections and told us to kick. Some of us wore inflatable orange cuffs. To pass the test, you must swim the length of the pool three times, from the shallows to the bright blue deeps.
The water, warmed by Pennsylvania midsummer sun, claimed me, placing pressure on every nerve. I would sink, eyes opened and burning, shafts of light on my body. I lingered there, as long as I could, forgetting to breathe, testing the pressure. I never heard the warning whistle that told us a thunderstorm was arriving.
When the whistle blew, you climbed out. To swim in with a thunderstorm approaching was a folly like crossing without looking, or putting a hand on the stove. I hadn't noticed any thunder, or whistling, nor my name. The splashing blocked out every other sound. Finally I heard my name, and looked out at an empty pool.
I came out quickly, pulling myself over the side, ashamed to find that I had broken a rule. The thunder passed, and the instructor ordered everyone else into the water. My punishment was to watch the rest of the swimming from shore, on the edge of my pool chair.
I sat still for the remaining half-hour, forgotten in plain view, the light coming up off the white concrete, coming out of the water, and read the pool rules again and again, sounding them out. The most important rule was: no running. I watched the others swim, like a dog at the window as its owner drives away.
The class ended, and the other boys and girls filed off home. My mother was late. So it was just I and the teacher. I bowed my head.
“I'm sorry I didn't get out of the pool,” I said. “I didn't hear you.”
“It's okay,” he said. “But you have to get out of the pool if it's going to thunder.”
We sat together for a long moment. “Are you ready for your test?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
It was something for him to do. “Okay,” he said. “Let's see you do it. If you do it, you'll be the first.”
I was in, the slide of water thrilling my skin, and pushed off hard from the pool wall, arms windmilling, turning my head to breathe, blood coursing through my muscles, washing out the shame of punishment. One length, then two, then three, and another to prove I could. From the deep end, I popped my head up and held onto the side, and looked at the instructor, took him in from his sandaled feet to the muscles coming out from his T-shirt, to his tightly trimmed kinky hair.
“Not bad,” he said. “You passed.”
Propelled by pride, I rose out of the water, and towelled off, and my mother arrived. I left with her. I told her everything: my failure, the long punishment, and I was afraid of her disappointment, but she needed to know the whole story. And then I described the lengths I swam, the fact that I was first, my redemption. Now, with my arms in motion and my legs kicking, nothing was too deep, or too wide.
The LawIn honor of ancient Internet tradition, pictures of my cat.
CommuteMorning events.
The SpyProtecting myself, and others, from my own geek nature.
Memory of the New EconomyBack when we were cool, and flush, and full of ourselves.
Dawn over 9th St.First the deep blue.
ShoppingA commercial expedition.
VoiceLearning to speak.
Northeast CorridorHospitals take the life right out of you. The huge sliding doors, the phalanx of clerks and guards, the waxed linoleum. And that smell. All on a rainy Memorial Day.
I rode the commuter trains down to Philadelphia, and got off at the wrong station, figuring that Temple University Hospital and Temple University were the same thing. I walked through Temple's empty campus, massive concrete buildings and brick sidewalks, not finding the hospital. On reaching Broad, I took a left; I found out later that I should have taken a right. I gave up when I reached Center City, and hailed a cab.
There in the hospital was my grandmother, 87, her shoulders bare under hospital sheets, her hair pure white. She didn't know who I was, but she smiled, and wriggled her feet in their little brown socks. So small I could cup her in my hand.
My mother, my brother, and his wife were there. They laughed at my wet brown shirt, soaked through, and listened to me tell the story of walking miles the wrong way in the rain. My grandmother came in and out of sleep, and we introduced ourselves to her many times, showed her a newspaper, prompted her to read a few words, to speak, telling her she was in the hospital, that she was with her family.
After a few hours, we each kissed her forehead and squeezed her hand, and went for dinner at the Country Squire, a massive diner in Newtown Square. We ordered comforting food: turkey, chicken, spanakopita, food that feels good to the mouth.
My mother had snapper soup, and we each tasted it. My brother remembered how my grandfather had once caught a snapper out of the Brandywine. He decided to show my brother the right way to kill a snapping turtle. First, he applied some sort of gentle, time-honored method of teasing out the snapper's head. But the turtle would have none of it, and stayed inside its shell, away from the fishing knife. That game continued for a few minutes, until, frustrated, my grandfather decided on another approach. He reached into the shell with pliers, grasped the snapper's skull, and yanked, ripping the head right off the body. “You could hear the little turtle bones cracking as the neck stretched,” said my brother, beheading an imaginary snapper with his hands, and we laughed hard, together around the table.
That night, I stayed with old friends, glad to have people so close, glad for their conversation, and for their ridiculous, bug-eyed Boston Terrier. It leapt, licked, and snorted around us, filling the room with goofy life. The next morning I went from Paoli to 30th St, 30th St. to Trenton, Trenton to Penn Station, then took the F home. Each train platform felt a bit more desolate, and each connection delivered another dose of melancholy.
I am one of those men who keeps his feelings for himself, for evenings alone. I can't feel things as they happen. And I prefer this; for all the times I was admonished not to dress my cat in an apron and to feel good about crying, as a boy in the late 70s and early 80s, I feel stronger when I store things inside, when I drift through the situation and shelve my reactions, taking them down when the moment is over, and I can make sense of what I've seen.
Admonitions to live in the moment, to carpe diem, make me suspicious. Each moment is full of fractures and strains, confused intentions, desires and uncertainties. Time is moving water; it is unseizable. How do I speak to this woman in the hospital bed when she isn't sure who I am? Do I stroke her hand and talk about the lunches she packed for me when I was 10? Do I try to ask informed questions of the nurses, like my sister-in-law (herself a nurse), or weep a little, like my mother? Do I lean by the window, firm and reassuring, like my brother?
What I do is stand there, confused and afraid of doing the wrong thing. I listen to my grandmother whisper her replies to my mother's questions. I wonder what it's like for her, looking up at us from her pillow, an oxygen tube in her nose. I try to see myself as she sees me, so that I know how to act: does my body, looming over her bed, comfort or perplex her? Should I move closer or farther? I meet her eyes, and look away, embarrassed, then look back.
Assembled around the hospital bed with its stainless-steel rails and electronic controls, we each try to communicate the same thing to this fragile, baffled person: that she is loved and not forgotten. We do this even as she has had so many memories and abilities cut off by the sudden force of the stroke. I hope, as everyone in the room hopes, that the tender essence of our message will get through, that it will find its way past the injuries and settle within her mind. We are saying: it is no problem if you forget us, because we will not forget you. Okay?
Back in Brooklyn at two in the morning, with a bottle of water to my right and a cat at my ankles, I take the last two unseized days, days wandered through, and tease them apart, unbraid the knot in my stomach and examine its fibers. I sit in my chair and live in the moment deferred.
Before we left, they moved my grandmother to another ward, another room. The new room had a window looking out on a Greek Orthodox church, its gold dome gleaming as the rain, for a moment, receded.
Being moved shook her badly. In her first room, the room where she began to recover, she'd started to piece together a world. In that first room, to fill the absence left by the stroke, she made new, tenuous connections between light and language, between people and words. But now, presented with a new set of white hospital walls, all of these connections were thrown askew, and she was forced to start again. It pained her, and it pained us to see her so lost, immune to explanations.
I think through this moment, and its sibling moments, rebraiding sensations into a tentative understanding.
Going back and forth to Philadelphia, I was motivated by familial duty, operating out of a desire to do the right thing. But I stayed up late tonight hoping to get past duty, to probe the place in the mind that inspires duty. I remembered that the root of duty is love—here, it is the love I feel for my family. I stayed up because, more than I needed to sleep, I needed to connect that love to the gentle woman in the neurology ward, the retired middle-school teacher with lost and milky eyes, whom I've known, from earliest memory, as Gram.
If I was a different person, I would not have to look for that connection; it would have been waiting there on Broad St., on the 4th floor of Temple University Hospital. But I must think in order to feel. Duty saw me through the last few days, until it was replaced by love and compassion. That is how I learn, how I know what I feel. And how I feel is, you know. Just very sad.
GallivespiansSome thoughts on geekery.
A Good Thing to DoPosters in Manhattan.
Gone Protestin'In a few moments, I'm heading to the protest, the big one. After that I may wander up to Central Park to see what happens there. Or not; I may come home and go to sleep. My friend Alex has had dozens of giant balloons made, with Bush's head on them—maybe we'll pop them at the end of the march. We're going to meet at 7th and Houston, and walk up to join the throng. Friends are up from D.C., people in from all over. My girlfriend is at home with a broken foot, wishing she could go.
Last night my pal Jack and I put up 50 posters with the faces of 50 dead soldiers around Wall St., wheatpasting them to the bottoms of light posts and onto steampipes. Wall St. was empty on a Sunday night, but I've worked down there enough, for banks, to know where people walk. No one arrested us or had words. If the police had stopped me, I would have said: we think that the soldiers, and all the people who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being forgotten in everything that's happening. That it's become about one man, the president, rather than the many men and women who are forfeiting their lives. I mean, I probably would have mumbled something like that.
And then the police would have said something in response, and it would have gone from there. I think they would have understood. Others putting up these posters were stopped by the police, and when they explained what they were doing, and why, the police nodded and let them continue.
I'm 30 now, and when I write Ftrain, I often think of myself at 18 years of age. What could I teach that young man? What I would say, before I hop on the Ftrain proper to go to the protests, is: peace and fairness have become these sort of eye-roll-inducing words. They're said with a sneer. But as I was raised a patriotic Christian, those words still have some meaning to me.
This morning people were yelling at the coffeeshop about the mess in the city, the protesters, on and on. And I didn't say anything. Just let myself swim in it. Because there's no reason to say a word; my statement will be made later today, and I won't have to make it alone.
And today is going to be amazing. For a few hours, all sorts of people will be together, all different colors of skin and clothes, thousands of different ideas, all unified in that they hate the way things have gone, that they loathe this sourness that has soaked into our democratic ideals. Some will be in cut-off cargo pants hitting drums, and some uptight others, like me, might wear Oxford shirts with celluloid collars. They'll be exercising their right to assembly and free speech. They'll be nonviolent, at least all but the tiniest fraction. And while nothing will immediately change as a result of their coming together, maybe something will happen later in reaction to all of us. And I think myself, at 18, would be saying, good going, don't lecture me, I'm already there. Let's get on the train.
I'm Paul Ford, and I approved this essay.
Yet AnotherAs we walked north along 7th Ave, balloons in hand, a man wearing a smock popped out of a restaurant. “I wish I could come!” he said. “I have to work.” We told him that it was okay.
In small groups that added up to some debatable number—a half-million is showing up in the Times—folks stood in the sun, sweating into their shirts and costumes. We joked about rapid-response police blimps. We yelled at Madison Square Garden. Most of the chants were pretty dumb, as always, but I remember loving to chant when I was 19. I imagined my Republican friends laughing at me as I stood damp and tired, surrounded by people beating on plastic buckets with their palms. Fine; they can laugh—none of them are voting this November, anyway. I drank a gallon of water, and took an air-conditioned train home. Now I'm waiting for the convention to start. I'll watch every speech, if I can. It's sickness, but I love it.
Miscellaneous Blues and OrangesThoughts on learning a camera.
Crashing a Republican PartyWandering into the Republican Governor's Association event.
Views of TKA closer look at the creature.
All The Memories I'll NeedHere comes the flood.
The VetWatching parts of the game last night I was put in mind of attending Phillies games with my grandfather at Veterans Stadium. I was nine or ten. There are four things I remember: the mass excitement that everyone experiences in huge crowds; dirty men selling "8"-shaped pretzels out of old shopping carts; and the angry, enraged, often hideous fans that sat in the nosebleeds with us.
Fourth was the sense of the city, dirty and weird, accents and homeless veterans. My hometown was just that—town—with problems, projects, and statues, but no grand boulevards. I can remember summer nights walking along the railroad tracks back from the video store, sneaking glances at lonely people curled up in the bushes, their white T-shirts smudged and their eyes half-closed. That was interesting and scary, but Philadelphia was for real.
In the late 1980s there was a prevalent nostalgia for the 1950s that made its way into collage culture. That was my first exposure to irony proper; I watched Leave it to Beaver and bought zines with collages of men with pipes and smiling housewives. An escape from the metalhead norms of the neighborhood. At the same time cyberpunk was on the rise, science fiction as pure chaos, styrofoam in the bay and VCRs washing up on the beach, brains filled with silicon, empty buildings. I saw the point of these novels as I sat for hours spinning pixels in DeluxePaint, cutting and pasting. It was nearly impossible back then to get an image into the computer: scanners were exotic, audio recording nonexistent. You had to use the images provided or create your own. The only way for the computer to communicate with the larger world was through the printer, or a modem dialed into a BBS (never for me), or disks copied from friends. I remember spending tens of hours working with one image of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd that I'd found on some disk somewhere, switching heads, adding third eyes, and so on. Just for the process, to see if I could.
I sometimes feel a tremendous nostalgia for that era of technology, even though in other regards it was not the finest hour for my family or myself. I notice a similar nostalgia in other now-older computer geeks. Perhaps the nostalgia emerges because the earlier machines—the ones at home, in bedrooms or dens—were so utterly disconnected from the larger reality, pre-Internet, pre-compact-disc, pre-hard-drive. I remember that I identified powerfully with the Amiga 1000 we bought when I was twelve; I came to know its bizarre moods and to listen to its grunting disks for clues to its health—the anthropomorphic/pathetic fallacy at work.
Other than to see a very few friends I don't like to go back to the town where I grew up. So why did I spend so much time this weekend attempting to tune the Amiga emulator on my new computer, and even more time trying in vain to run a copy of the OpenStep 4.2 operating system, the direct lineal predecessor of Mac OS X—an operating system I never even used but long wished to try? Searching in vain for ISO images and virtual disks, finally giving up, shaking my head at the futility of the effort?
The old machines were small towns, populated by individuals; occasional viruses aside it was a safe and pleasurable environment. But now technology is uncontainable, metaverses with urban grime and corruption. One must take strong prophylactic measures to avoid griefers, spammers, phishers, flamers, &c. And sometimes I just want to go back to a smaller town, run old programs, see the way things were done before. Partly for the comfort of the memories but also to see the limits. A trip back to the small town lets me see the utterly stimulating madness of of the city, to sense the thrill of the sprawl again. After the SuperBowl was over we listened for the men downstairs at the social club. Their megaphone came out and they screamed and honked horns, and one man yelled out “twenty gee,” his win, a payment on team loyalty.
Flood 2A second flood in two weeks brought five and a half feet of water and inches of thick river mud into my mother's basement. So I came down to Maryland on Sunday. I've squeegeed and pressure-washed for two days. The mud was remarkable, filled with oils, swirling, stinking. It covered the first five steps up out of the basement. Photos of myself at 15, of my brother, my grandparents, emerged on the floor, torn and purple from their soaking. I threw them away.
I threw away my high school yearbook, hundreds of books that had belonged to me at some point, or to my mother. Also, I need a tetanus shot, under the advisement of the state of Maryland.
Tetanus and mud, and sore shoulders, uninsured, fat, behind on many deadlines, money dwindling, now up at night on dialup to finish the work I couldn't do because I was sweeping shit, and happy. Old men from down the street and the smell of gasoline, pulling out the washer and dryers, piling things into pickups. Some days you pass out of the daily shadows and into sharp relief, and an invisible camera catches you. Today it would have caught mud flying, mud on my face, sweat pouring, hour after hour of motion. Not a real photo; a photo filed away into the ether, a photo you sense but don't see, an image immune to time and further floods. Sometimes I imagine these pictures when I'm out walking: the Plymouths cruising down broadway, men in tricorner hats and long rifles running through Brooklyn, men running away from a fire. Pictures taken with clouds for film and the curve of the sky as a lens.
The pigsI forgot to tell you--when I was down in Maryland helping my mother after the flood, a woman came by the house and told the story of her three caged pigs. These pigs were nearly carried away during the flood. Lifted up in their cages by the raging torrent, they swam as hard as they could, their snouts barely out of the water, and they survived. Hero pigs! Brave swimming pigs! Pigs rising above obstacles! Unsinkable pigs with seven highly effective habits, getting things done! Give them ribbons, and rub their snouts. “We're butchering them next week,” said the woman.
Installing updatesHello there. Ftrain is on a hiatus. People have written to tell me that I am on hiatus because I am upset that George W. Bush is the president, or because I hate the Internet, or because I am sick and dying. They are wrong. Ftrain is on hiatus for many reasons, all of them good. First, it is on hiatus because I am writing a book. This is a book that you will be able to purchase later this year in bookstores, from online booksellers, and anywhere else books are sold. It is a book about young people doing goofy things.
I will tell you about it when it is printed and in stores. My deadline is February 8, but it will not be out until some time after that. When the time comes for it to enter the stores, Ftrain will become one huge advertisement for the book.
I am also starting a full-time job in February, rather than sitting around the house in my socks. & I'm getting well underway with coding a real, grown-up version of the framework under this site, which I must do in order for the new job. Thus, I'll give away more code for building weird semantic webbish sites soon, under an open-source license, if anyone wants it. For real this time. I swear. I really want to. I won't screw it up. It will be a combination of Apache2 mod_rewrite rules, PHP5, XSLT, MySQL, and the Sesame RDF engine, and you'll need to understand all five technologies to use it. It won't have a content management interface aside from weird XML files, and it won't work at all when you start it up. You'll love that.
If you're curious, you can hear me on NPR from time to time, or read the Weekly Review from Harper's Magazine, which I write every now and then, or check out XML.com, where I'm slowly working on a series on the Semantic Web in government (which will resume in March).
Thank you for reading. You're great readers, and you've made it possible for me to become an okay writer and get a book deal, and a good job as an editor. Many of you have even given me money. I owe you all a drink. I'll start thrashing away here in February, then get back on the web content wagon for March.
My Cat Abraham LincolnI rename my cat every month; this month his name is Abraham Lincoln. He talks to me for hours at a time, and when I do not give him the love he deserves he enters the bathroom, finds a spot in the bathtub that resonates perfectly, and screams until I give in and call for him. Then he trots over and waits to have his ears scratched. In this manner he is fully actualized. He has a dread disease, FIV, which slowly kills him. The other day he turned to me as I worked and said “mrgnao”; then he vomited fully and without reserve into the pair of pants I'd left on the floor.
I picked him up and soothed him, and said his name (for the month), and when he began to purr I put him down and cleaned off the sullied pants, sighing. I am fully responsible for his entire digestive process. His food comes in white plastic Science Diet bags, runs through his intestines, and goes out in other white plastic bags, smelling of pine. He is a noisy purrer and a drooler. In the mornings, when I am not worth a damn, he jumps onto my chest, digs his claws into my flesh, purrs, and sometimes drools directly into my mouth. Also, he is not the best groomer (I'm not either), and sometimes, bloody snot accumulates around his eyes. Every few months I need to bathe him. He fights weakly as the water rushes over him, then sits still, silent and hunched, as I shampoo his back and face. When it's over he hides in the closet and grumbles for hours.
He is a quitter. I took him to the vet in Park Slope because he was sneezing. For the entire mile-long walk he screamed from inside his box, and I was ashamed of him. When we got to the vet I expected him to go berzerk, but he was silent and sat on the metal table, only protesting, weakly, when a cold thermometer was inserted into his anus. That was his limit. After the vet visit, twice a day for two weeks I cradled him like a baby and smeared ointment into his eyes, and he took it without much protest. “I've already lost,” he seemed to say. “Why bother?” My girlfriend calls him “Defective.”
He is not totally without a sense of adventure. He'll scale an Everest of boxes to hide inside one of them. He'll stand whining at the edge of the shower with his eyes huge. And he killed a two-inch-long cockroach that flew into the apartment and landed on my neck; he killed it without fear while I sat on the bed trying not to get depressed over the cockroach. If a mouse was stupid enough to show its gray whiskered face in this apartment it would be swiftly destroyed in his jaws. Or stupefied by his breath.
One says of ones cat: my cat is the best; he is not like all the other cats; he has a personality. I do not say these things about Abraham Lincoln. And yet he fills out my life. He is orange, and confused, and becomes furious whenever I answer the phone. He yells and hops around, amazed that I could even consider talking on the phone given how badly he suffers when I do so. He covers everything with hair, even aluminum cans. He has poked his head into a small brown paper bag, gotten it stuck, and run across the room like a brain-damaged unicorn, smashing into chair legs and trash cans. I just watched, in paradise, until finally he sat on his haunches with his head still encased in the bag, waiting for fate to deliver him, or kill him—he'd made his peace. I am grateful that I can pull the bag off of his head. It's simple enough but it means the world to him.
The Thumb-sized Heart of TK the CatA pleasant fellow expires.
BenefitsSome thoughts on health insurance.
Metropolitan DairyOn my way to work last week.
OccupationFilling in the spare forty-five minutes.
Scampering HousewardsAnother stroll down Smith St.
We are going to“We are going to listen to some music,” said Scott. “Get up your Russians.” I have this Russian website I visit where the songs cost ten cents each. This is one of the things I like to do the most, hang out and shop for music online and listen to it.
“You know what I want to hear?” Scott asked. He was suddenly guarded.
“There's amnesty tonight,” I said. “You're cool.”
“Band called Ace,” he said. “'How Long' is the name of the song. Driving song.”
“Let me just get that for you,” I said. “I've decided on total amnesty. I don't care what anyone listens to any more. I tried to tell Lucy about how much I like Chicago,” I said. “And she just looked at me. Like how could she love this man who just said he likes the band Chicago?”
Suddenly I wanted to tell him my morning dream about a man living here, in my apartment, fifty years ago. This man is alone and he has a few pots and pans, a cheap old bed, a chair, and a collection of jazz albums that he spins over and over. He has a job in the city, where he is a ghost, and when he comes home he sits in his chair and smokes cigarettes, drinks, and listens to his albums for two hours. He doesn't read. I can't see him any more fully than that. I know a few things about this man: he does not own a bicycle; he owns several gray ties; he believes in ghosts, in a small way.
Walking around I sometimes become aware of men in straw boaters and women in crinoline with parasols walking down the same street as the girl with a pierced navel. A man in knee breeches yells out to man in a fedora carrying a trumpet case. The beatnik snaps his fingers as Manahattoes and Canarsies walk by. A woman in a housecoat. Trollies rise up out of the street, tracks gleaming from use. Cobblers and leadsetters, tailors, candlemakers, butchers. All are, I notice, heading for the park. I slide in besides a man from the Depression wearing a stained tie. “When we get there,” he says, “I am going to have a popsicle.” He pats his chest pocket. “Pal,” he says, “do you have a light?”
Crossed, Tangled, BraidedThirty-one and focusing.
It was a genuinely pleasant interaction.The woman was printing the hotel bill and she asked me how my stay was. I said, “well, I had a problem. We went right to sleep last night but in the light of morning some disturbing things were seen. My girlfriend's box spring was completely torn open. You could see inside. And the sheets were the wrong size so they fell off, revealing weird brown spots on the mattress. The upholstery on the lounge chair was ripped out, and the desk chair had a huge liquid stain as if someone had urinated all over it and left it to dry. The walls were greasy, and also there was a large smear of human feces across the top of the toilet which my girlfriend discovered. 'My God,' she said then. 'My God.' I see your huge brown eyes growing wide behind your counter. It is an uncomfortable moment for both of us.
“I was here because my flight was canceled. I thought I might have the continental breakfast but I don't want to put anything here into my mouth. I have a full day at the airport. Cinnabon and screaming children.” My eyes said, do not make me ask for a refund. Which she gave me, and we got onto the shuttle bus and left Elk Grove, Illinois.
Gary Benchley, Rock StarFtrain.com, I've been unfaithful to you. I went and had an affair with print publishing, and the result is a novel published by Plume Books (a division of Penguin), and available all around the nation. I hope you will forgive me.
This is how it happened. I'd long been a web-only writer (a pejorative term which I wore with pride) with a little radio thrown in here and there. I love the Internet and the unique textual experiments it allows me to perform, and for a long time I had been interested in seeing what it would be like to write a serial novel online. I had a suspicion that people might like a funny story on the installment plan.
So I began a novel on The Morning News, and the fellows there also let me publish it under a pseudonym, because that makes everything more fun. I've done it before on this site with Scott Rahin and Rebecca Dravos, and a few other fictional folk. And doing this on The Morning News led to a novel deal.
Gary Benchley, Rock Star is a comic novel about a callow, indie-rocking youth who must find a way to live--and rock out--in the hipster neighborhoods of the East Village and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If you like Ftrain.com you'll probably like this novel. I worked hard on it and I hope you'll purchase a copy, take it home, and read it, and either pass it on to your friends or else tell them to pick up a copy. Feel free to let me know what you think.
I'm giving a reading in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Thursday, October 6. I hope you'll come out and say hello.
More Ftrain.com starting Wednesday.
More about Gary Benchley, Rock Star
The official website for the book.
Buy the book from Amazon.com.
An explanation of the hoax on The Morning News.
The original serialization of the novel on The Morning News.
Lost SongsLoss as gain.
LaundromatSome things just suck.
SpeakingTrying to get things rolling again.
PrecinctPrecinct, Danish, Squirrel
Green Apples Will ExplodeDreams, machines, plans.
Sortable ListsPacking up leads me to think about interfaces and garbage.
Five Minutes to DepartureSo long, 9th St.
LungAs I began to walk down the stairs at the Brooklyn Union St. subway platform I felt the rush of air that comes when an express train hurries past on the inner platform. Standing at the top of the steps my shirt was pressed against my chest and my hair was lifted straight up; I imagined a billion tiny comets, rushing past me on the way to 4th Avenue.
There are famous winds. The north-bound mistral in France in the winter, the hot, sandy simoom in the deserts of North Africa. We hear more about wind now that we are warring in the desert, about the sand chewing into the machinery. I once stood under palm trees in Israel as the khamsin tossed sand through the air. The sunlight refracted through the sand amplified the colors in the flowers and the palm leaves. The world looked like a picture in an old cookbook from the age of Jell-O(TM) molds and glistening hams. That was six years ago—19 cents on the dollar of my life.
But I am already doubting the story. Was the wind really the khamsin? Was the light truly amplified? I look for confirmation online and yes, there is the khamsin (the Hebrew word for it is sharav). But no one on the World Wide Web mentions the quality of the light and I worry that I have got the wrong wind. So: I know I had a job outside of Tel Aviv in 2001, and there was a wind. The wind had a name, and I felt sand in my mouth. I do not have a name for the tiny squall of litter that is lifted by the air pushed forth by the rushing N train. Traindraft? That sounds like a software application. Subgust? Pushwind? Maybe.
As I descend I am sad to hear the express train passing. Sometimes I grab the R train and go one stop and check to see if there is a D train waiting for me. But now it is gone ahead; the local won't catch up. I want a D train because after a few minutes along its journey it leaps out of the depths of Brooklyn onto the Manhattan bridge, over the East River, with miles of water, buildings, and boats visible out the window. The commuters are like moles given wings. But it's gone.
The Union St. station breeze carries copious amounts of perfume, sweat, and hair product; it contains the coffee-breath of the multitudes. It also brings carcinogens; the very air, as I have read over and over, is latticed with invisible poisons, parts per million that will find their way through my lungs and land on my organs like bees; they will pollinate my cells and one day, a shadow on the X-ray.
But we also—they told me this in physics class—breathe in the same air as Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci. The physicist Enrico Fermi made his students figure out how many molecules of gas from Julius Caesar's final exhalation we each take in with each breath. The answer, according to the math, is one: each time you suck air you take in a solitary molecule from Caesar's last gasp. Also Brutus's, and billions of other more anonymous souls give their share.
And eventually, me. Breeze gone, I pay the toll and stand against a wall to wait for the local train. What choice do I have but to breathe it all in? There's obviously room in my lungs for both history and carcinogens.
Men standing around broken machinesI realized not long ago that my age of deep feelings has passed. For much of my life I was able to bring myself to an emotional boil by reading or writing. I used this as a kind of fuel and assured myself that in my agonies I was more intense than the person sitting next to me on the subway. But I have come to sympathize with those men who stood around saying little, who gathered around the open hoods of brown cars or around malfunctioning typewriters. That is how I remember them, circa 1980, when I was a slip of paper in a pullover shirt.
Somewhere during the sensitive age that ensued I learned that it is okay to cry and, being a boolean kid, I concluded that those who do not cry are not okay. I cultivated sensitivity like an orchid. As I nursed my anguish I thought I was working things out brilliantly, but in many cases I was not resolving anything but rather pointing at my burdens and expecting to be admired for the act of pointing. I wrote a great deal: tens of thousands of words.
When I was fifteen (it was ten years before he would actually go) my grandfather was very ill. I wanted him to say he loved me before he died. It was not something he could say easily; the words were a burden. But I felt that I needed it. I passed the request on to my grandmother several times over months, and finally, one day as I was walking out of the hospital, he said the words. (Or was it years later, over the phone, during another health scare? Anyway, I know that at some point I asked for the words and that he said them.)
I did no harm to the man by making him say “I love you, buddy.” Still, I feel lousy writing those words in his quotation marks. He had his reasons to shy away from vulnerability with a male descendant. But I'd learned somewhere that men don't express love and that you must encourage them to say it, force it out of them if needed. I thought I was doing my grandfather a favor.
We tormented him; we drank his soda and replaced it with food coloring and water and then we snickered in the hallway when we heard him yelling about his root beer going flat. He told us off-color jokes. So when he told me he loved me, it did not mean anything. I didn't feel relief or closure. I was simply creating a memory, hoping to archive him, but whatever emotions I filed away on hearing those words are now missing. I remember instead that he pressed a few dollars in my hand when I was 16. He took me out a mile from shore on a boat and let me steer.
My brother once told me it shouldn't be a lot of work to love someone, but I didn't believe him. When I began to date Mo, who is now my fiancé, I sent her a long email explaining who I was and what I stood for. She didn't reply but we went out a few nights later and talked about power tools and related subjects. The conversation went on for an hour. “I like this,” she said, “much more than those long emails.” So that was the last long email I ever sent. I eat better now and my skin has improved. I think more often about those men standing around a car, or my grandfather and his fellow geologists, entering caves and picking out crystals with pickaxes. It's not a desire to return to some old bad past. Mo is going to keep her name, and I am going to have that name tattooed on my arm, emblazoned on a red heart with an arrow through it.
I think about the men because there are two futures: the near and wild future—the future of Web 2.0, the war on terror, and midterm elections—thrashing and blind like a baby mouse in the grass. And there is the other, much older future, which is basically an enormous, ever-widening archaeological dig. They're digging up old Roman bones, pilgrim gristle, and mysterious chunks of iron that may have been astrolabes. Shovels in hand, people fall over dead onto the piles of ancient coffeehouse newspapers and loose pioneer trash that they have themselves exhumed. Time passes; it could be a few days or a millennium. Someone digs them up and holds their skull in hand and wonders: what was the dig like then? There is nothing wrong with the newer future. Those who make it work for them will be powerful and rich. But that older future seems to have more room in it for those quiet, dry-eyed men. And I know I want, someday, to join their group as it stands frowning around a steaming car engine, each trying to figure out what went wrong.
SpinningThe first thing I see biking to work are the casket trucks loading up, each with the same soothing and ambiguous sunset painted onto it. That's right around the corner on Union Street. At any point in time (check your watch) Brooklyn probably has as many just-dead people as went to my college.
I watched a cat die in Chinatown. I was just about to get onto the bridge. It twisted, just-hit, in the middle of the street with at least 100 people close. No one moved. Should I cross the street, dismount, and stomp it to death with my sneakers? The importance of stomping suffering things to death was imparted to me as a child, but I've never had to do it. The cat stopped twisting before I could move. So I pedaled onto the bridge, and when I got home I tried to pet green-eyed Desdemona, who sneered at me, and tore a long gash in my hand.
One day two women were coming out of Cattyshack on 4th Avenue, standing next to me as I waited for the light to change. One said to me, with a confronting tone, “I've got my nipples pierced!” I guess in an Oxford shirt and soft-chinned on a nice new bike I look like a real typical asshole.
Later I think: so does my boyfriend. But I'm already home, key in the door, when that comes to me. Then, last week, a spraypainted black car pulled up next to me at Jay St. “Do you love sluts?” yelled a woman in the passenger seat. “Because sluts fucking rule!”
I love skinnin' em! I think later. When I get home I tell this to Mo she shakes her head; thus I have twice failed to be funny. I used to be in the black car, yelling at strangers, I think, and I try to pet the cat, but she tears off a piece of my finger and runs away as fast as she can.
The Weird Thing“I just sat around,” I said. “It's my least favorite holiday. Did a
bunch of work, actually. Mo was bartending and I didn't feel like going out. How'd you do?”
“I left a party,” said my friend, “at 12:03. I'd had enough. And then I went home and I swear to god the walls were vibrating. People were out of their minds. I couldn't hear my own TV. And you can't ask them to keep it down on New Year's.”
“You can't,” I said.
“So I got all my blankets and a pillow and I went down to my car. Put the seats down. Stretched out. It started raining.”
“Like camping.”
“Totally pleasant. I woke up completely rested at like 11. No hangover. With the rain falling around me. I mean, if I'd stayed home, I'd have been miserable. But I slept in my car. I did the weird thing and I was happy.”
Rowing the PoolA friend of mine, a brilliant woman whom I knew for six years, was a natural at confrontation. Discussions could feel like they were being held in a room filled with eggshells and spun glass. We'd be speaking along, cruising at high speed through high and low subjects, and then I would say something. Along came the pursed lips; the eyes narrowed behind her expensive glasses. Or on the phone—I'd be chattering away until I noticed a clear silence. It would last for almost a full minute, and finally she would say: “hmm,” and now she and I stood on either side of a turbulent river and the bridge was out. Start rowing.
One summer a few years ago we were hanging out with many mutual friends at a house in Connecticut. She was very ill—this was the halfway point between the botched surgery that ruined her life and her death. She was sitting by the pool, and I was swimming. We were talking in a half-assed way. I forgot about the eggshells for a moment and said something that offended her, and she told me to go fuck myself. She'd been driving me crazy all weekend, so I said “okay!” and dove to the bottom of the pool, where I thought: I am done. And when I surfaced the friendship was over.
“I don't talk about it as a rule,” she'd told me over the phone once. “But since you asked, yes. I am in terrible, constant pain. I am in pain when I wake up and pain keeps me from sleeping. Literally every moment of my life there is pain, except when I am on Vicodin, and if I stop taking that, my hands shake.”
I heard her drink from a bottle of soda, the omnipresent liter bottle of Diet Coke. “All that pain,” she said, “has made me a difficult person.”
She was tactile, likely to take your hands in hers as you were talking. This is a rare quality and implies a certain bravery. “Will you fix my back?” she'd ask. Of course. She'd lie down on her bed and I would put equal pressure on both the top left shoulder and the right of the spine. She was big and could take all the pressure I could give. Underneath the fabric of her shirt, I knew, was a huge scar where her spine had been exposed after the hospital screwed up, but I never saw it. I just fixed her back. Then she'd cook me dinner.
“You never knew the old me,” she'd say. “I was a force of nature. I think that the old me is coming back.”
After the poolside fight we didn't speak for a day, and then, right before she left, she asked me to fix her back. I went into a bedroom and she stretched out. I applied cold-handed pressure, feeling bored and annoyed. She thanked me, then showed me some old photos. “Here I am,” she said, “ten years ago. I was a dish.”
Once, she said: “I always feel that I fuck up the photos. My hipster friends are standing around thin and smiling and I'm just this huge bitch with a cane.” I loved her, but right then, looking at the old pictures, I saw only the bitch with a cane.
Months passed. We sent short emails. Neither one of us was willing to be so disappointed again. Then, last March, something in my upper right thigh tore in two, and I was in a different world. There was no way to keep my chin up, no way to walk it off. Whether I moved or stayed still, it felt like railroad spikes were being driven into my body. I drank much of a bottle of whiskey with a dozen aspirin, but it didn't even damp the pain. The next day I half-crawled to the doctor's office, and spent the next six weeks in a prescription-painkiller haze.
As I popped Vicodin I began to think of her. When I could sit down again I wrote an email:
Lying on the floor with my hot water bottle helped put a lot of our weirdness in perspective. You went through this, but times 100. You were difficult to interact with back then because you were truly out of your mind in physicals agony.
I sent her that email and then I worried. Trying to say that I understood what she'd been through—she could read it as condescending and we'd be on separate shores again. A week passed, two. I called her, and she asked about my leg. It was better, I said. She told me she had read my email ten times, taking it in. I told her that I understood that she hadn't wronged me with the slights and criticism; that I had figured out how, through sheer bluster, she was able to portray herself as someone who could deliver the news straight. That was the last rowing I ever had to do. The friendship was repaired when my leg was torn up.
A lot of people were frustrated with her because she couldn't make reality match the person she wanted to be. She made promises she couldn't always keep. And she knew how difficult she was being, and she knew it would take her a long time to fix the broken aspects of her life, but she could not stop now; it was so much work just to get out the door. She was deep underwater, and she had to swim upwards, but she was determined to kick until she surfaced.
The End of Lazy ChristmasNot writing enough means that everything feels uncooked—like my stomach is filled with cake batter. I've been off the wagon for two years and now is the right time to get back on, if I can. Mo & I were having a conversation during Lazy Christmas, like this:
P: This is probably our last lazy Christmas.
M: You think?
P: Next year we'll probably go to your Mom's.
M: True.
P: And then after that we might have a kid.
M: Please stop eating the gingerbread candies.
P: And that will be the end of the lazy Christmases.
What I'm saying is, we're nine months to a wedding (PROJECT RINGWORM), and then there's the potential post-wedding baby (PROJECT LITTLE SOCKS).In the house is not a gently ticking biological clock but rather a fertility gong that occasionally rings out, and when it goes off we both sit across from each other, quietly blinking. Plus I am soon to launch the culmination of over a year's work (PROJECT HARPOON), which, like all large websites, will not be finished--rather, it is in a launchable state, like the Space Shuttle, and upon launch it will require tremendous ground support. Unless it explodes. Therefore it is essential that I get rolling again.
Person or Stuff?Sometimes we play a game called “person or stuff.” It's a dark night; we're walking down 4th Avenue below Union Street, or through some other bleak-looking part of Brooklyn. We spy an ambiguous silhouette a block away. “Okay,” one of us asks in a hushed voice, “in that doorway—person or stuff?” We whisper our guesses and keep walking. I almost always lose. Sometimes I'm sure it's a person, but when we pass it turns out to be a broken stroller and old boxes. Sometimes I'm sure it's trash, but when I get close it's a sleeping man curled among his belongings, and his untied sneakers stick out from his collection of old clothes and bottles. We pass in silence, and even when I've guessed right I feel ashamed.
Night VisitMy friend Scott Rahin came over and offered to do the dishes if I spoke to him for a while.
“Okay,” I said. “But you have to be quiet. Mo's working construction and she has to be there by eight.”
He clearly had something to talk about but instead of talking, and instead of doing the dishes, he drank two beers and told me that, in close consultation with his friend Jane, he had developed two new descriptive terms for the vagina.
“The first one is 'cocksocket',” he said.
“That's okay,” I said. “What's the second one?”
“'Eelmouth',” he said.
“That I like.”
“I knew you would, because you're a fishfucker. You got the new Mountain Goats?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I like listening to that guy whine,” he said.
I ran the wire and played the album with volume low. While it played Scott made fun of me—what a whore I was in my little apartment with my health care and whole-wheat bread. And when he was done he rode off on his old bicycle.
$5 Chocolate BarScott Rahin told me, “the other day I was watching this video and I just started crying.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Sigur Rós,” he said. “And before you humiliate me—”
“Was it the one where the kids fly?”
“Yeah.”
“That's the Sophie's Choice of music videos. What you're seeing in that video is your grandparents going to heaven when they're kids. They escape all of the shit you heard about, like being beaten by the nuns or not being able to afford college, or having to tow a Dodge out of the mud with a mule. There was never that moment when you got the call, when you had to get someone to cover your college radio show, and you end up at some hospice where they leave you in the room alone with him, or her, for a few minutes and you have no idea what to say. Except you see that morphine drip and hear the gurgle in their throat and realize that pain is more complicated than carrying a black leather journal and a variety of colored pens. Twelve years later you're following links and there's some video from Iceland with elves singing and bells and children with perfect skin wearing the latest fashions of 1918, and your dead grandparents start running up that hill together. No polio or cardiac arrest and no car crashes or racism or halitosis. No wonder you're crying.”
“That is more or less what happened, but I don't really need to cry,” said Scott. “Weeping is like a five-dollar chocolate bar. Someone else could enjoy it but I feel guilty opening the wrapper. I have a girlfriend and Halo.”
“I used to have this deep well,” I said, “of manufactured pain. I counted on it. It was a reason to write. Moving in with Mo pretty much shot that out the door. Now if I see myself reflected among a similarly tinted throng of strangers in the skirt glass of a skyscraper, I no longer shield my eyes from the reflection, nor do I expect to be crushed midstride by a large falling object like a frozen turkey or bond trader. I fully expect to live all the way to the end of the block. I guess I feel like you do about crying. Except if you flip that over I have no outlet for radiant joy. I dwell in a valley of irony and second-guessing and I am suspicious of feelings. Every now and then I want to say who cares about the heat death of the universe? Truth and beauty! Truth and beauty!, except there isn't a national fuck-yeah feeling.”
“You have your bike. It has a bell.”
“True. There's nothing ironic about traffic. Do you remember that movie American Beauty?”
“Rose petals,” said Scott.
“And so at the end dead Kevin Spacey starts talking about how every moment ever is pure rapture. And how we all couldn't understand how great it is. You could hear screenwriters masturbating. Now every time I see a plastic bag on the street I think, is that the most beautiful thing in the world? And it is not. No plastic bag has ever been the most beautiful thing in the world. Do you know how much of an asshole you'd need to be to even think that in the first place?”
“So what is? Most beautiful?”
“I've been told repeatedly,” I said, “that it's a distended vagina with a bloody baby head emerging. I have my doubts.”
“I always think of this little brass gorilla statue that was behind the bar at the place I worked in Utica. Its arms were up like this, garaaaaaaa! Rarh! It was just a piece of bar crap, but something about it made me feel okay. I went up to look at it and it was really detailed. Eyelids.”
“It reminded you of some cool gorilla you knew.”
“Maybe I had some book. Or maybe my grandfather and I watched some National Geographic special at his house and they were going on about gorilla families, so after he died and I got that job, and God knows, that was a shitful time in my life, but I see that little gorilla and what the hell, here I am, at least there's a gorilla.”
“I think the gorilla for you, it's like the Virgin Mary is for people. Someone is looking at that and they get a comforting feeling.”
“Give me a brass gorilla and I feel all right.”
“A gorilla and a shitload of fireworks,” I said. “That's a good night.”
“Oh, I have fireworks,” said Scott.
“How many?” I asked.
“It's a funny story,” he said. An hour later we had stopped by his house and even though I had websites to build I'm standing near the Gowanus Canal. After a moment of fumbling in the quiet there's the shink of the lighter flint dialed by Scott's thumb, and a few seconds later a rocket leaves his hand—a wobbly line of chemical light, a brief whistling sentence with a bang at the end, straight up much higher than the tall trees, had there been any. He's got two dozen more in his bag.
We stand for a moment. He says, “maybe we stop there,” and I say, “yes, you're right.” We walk away from the canal. Normally I'd bum a cigarette but both of us quit, and the urge to say something stupid or fucked rises up like habit, but I fight it. I'm hungry for one genuine moment without insult, wit, or smoke. I say, “I got married here two weeks ago” and he says, “I was there.” We start walking back towards my place.
He asks me, “Who was that for? The bottle rocket.”
“It could be for our grandfathers,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Then we'd have had to light them all.”
“There's a statue of the goddess Minerva in Green-Wood cemetery,” I say. “It's about a century old. It's at the highest point in Brooklyn. Upon her helmet sits the sphinx; in her right hand is a laurel, which she is about to rest upon a stone altar. The altar is trebly dedicated, via inscription, to the memory of the Battle of Long Island, to America, and to the spirit of that wisest of all statements, the Declaration of Independence—a document that, according to the inscription, in its Minervan wisdom equates liberty with equality.”
“I know her,” says Scott.
“She probably saw that bottle rocket.”
“She's sitting there,” he says, “alone in the dark with dew on her bronze. She's in despair surveying the blue flickering lights of millions of windows. Brooklyn has squandered the treasures she brought with her when she burst out of her father's brain. She's thinking, they took the fire from Prometheus and made 'smores. And then—just a flicker out of the Gowanus and two man-shapes behind it. Something bright. A flash of cheer. Not that we know anything special.”
“We don't, no.”
“We're just saying hello,” he said. “Sometimes that's all you need to have your faith renewed, just someone nice noticing that you bothered to get dressed.”
“Can you send a signal like that retroactively?” I ask.
“To a statue?” says Scott. “Yes, you can.”
“So that's our five-dollar chocolate bar,” I said. “I wonder who else in the city is thinking of her right now? Someone must think of her every day. People have been recollecting the statue of Minerva every day since she was erected. There's this continuous stream of recollectors that we just jumped into. What do you think after that? You think that she knows our names?”
“We sent her a bottle rocket,” said Scott. “So hells yes. She knows our names.”
Things Have Rules(1) Talking to strangers; (2) being a guest; (3) dressing appropriately.
MicroclimatesCut weather in half and there is more weather.
The Moral Superiority of the Streetcar(1) Long-form journalism fixes everything. (2) The moral superiority of the streetcar. (3) I like big bus and I cannot lie.
Bantha TracksPeople complain, still, about the new Star Wars movies being
terrible, not up to the standards of the first few, but have you ever
considered the gift the director gave to our culture when he failed so
profoundly? An entire generation of men who secretly believed in space
princesses, ready to waste countless hours on fantasy, suddenly forced
to face facts. Lord knows Star Wars is still everywhere, but if the
movies had been good it could have been even worse.
Years ago and for no good reason I had special, free tickets to the
New York premiere of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, tickets
with holograms on them. Regis Philbin was in the audience. After, we
had no idea what we'd seen. “It's for the kids,” said my friend,
terrified. We felt childish, selfish, ashamed.
For the people who do love those movies, well, it's a net gain that
they are kept out of public intercourse for a few hours. Not
just Star Wars—think of Transformers II—the
amount of children who went unbeaten, the number of vehicles that did
not crash into billboards, and in foreign markets, widows left
unimmolated, as so much of the world sat slack with eyes half-open and
the screen sprayed violent noise all over them. Really. Everyone is
happy, and Michael Bay deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. It is the best
of all possible worlds.
That Shaggy FeelingSoon, orphans.
Nanolaw with DaughterWhy privacy mattered.
Reading TonightReading!
Woods+People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately.
“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”An essay for TheMorningNews.org.
“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”Forgot to tell you about this.
Welcome to the CompanyRecapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") puts forth that incubating humans act out evolution as they grow from zygote to baby. This was a popular idea a century ago, but it's turned out the science isn't that simple. Yet the principle holds that the dividing fetal cells are engaged in a kind of performance of all of evolution—from simple to complex, from general form to specific form. The developing human loses its tail early, gains a cerebrum later.
Thus newborns are time boiled down, and every ounce gained is another 20 or 30 million years of life; they compress the three billion years since abiogenesis into a nine- or ten-month performance that runs from conception to birth. By the time they arrive they have gone for rides on comets, teased dinosaurs with sticks, come down from the trees, and run across the savannah.
The day before we were scheduled for our Caesarean I told the Internet that I was packing for a very long trip and wasn't sure what to bring. People—friends and strangers—wrote with suggestions: Spare pants. A suitcase filled with books. Your wife. Extra underwear and camping detergent; a hoodie and a flask. The head and <3. Can organic mixed nuts, first aid kit, cash hidden in wallet belt, an extra pair ultra comfortable shoes. Carseats. Toothbrush. Multiple chargers. Take less. Pillows and a blanket for you, easy snacks, every kind of memory-recording device. Bring a sandwich. Music. And patience. Half the clothes and twice the money, and lots and lots of gin.
So a few days ago we packed everything and went to the hospital. And a few hours after we arrived the clock—our clock—reset from 3.5 billion to zero.
Hello little girl. And two minutes later: Hello little boy.
The SwingsMy friend Michael wants to know what I think of his novel. The first chapter—the first of twelve planned, according to the index cards pinned to clotheslines that cover the ceiling of his apartment, is one hundred fifty-seven singlespaced ten-point Times New Roman pages that describe relations between a man referred to as Captain and a woman known as Isabella, the wife of a Austrian blunderbuss dealer. When we first meet her she is disguised as the Austrian's teenaged son, but after seeing her husband/father keelhauled, and threatened with keelhauling herself, she unbinds her bosom and explains that she was, until she posed as a woman of good family in order to marry, a whore wise to pirates, and now she wishes only to survive the voyage and be returned to Europe. At this Captain drags her off to quarters, exiles his catamite Esquimaux cabinboy to the galley, and proceeds to 92 pages of vileness until on page 156 a passing French galleon launches a cannonade into the poop. The narrator is a stowaway African gray parrot native to London.
“I read it at work,” said Enola, also a victim of the novel. She was speaking to me over the kitchen table at Scott Rahin's apartment. She shook her head and laughed with glinting fillings. (As with intense thunderstorms and passing sharks you are glad to have experienced that laugh but even more glad when it's over.)
Enola manages accounts at a public relations firm that represents corporate law firms. When I met her eight years ago she had just left her boyfriend and, believing herself to have successfully navigated past the sirens of her own fertility, was transitioning from a life of waitressing, amateur ceramics, and activism into button-blouse dayjob singlehood, flirting with sturdy, masculine coworkers who rented jetskis on the weekends. But now her white-collar reinvention is a leg chain made of rent money and health care, she hates the people with whom she works, and her body has changed her mind so she is desperately rowing back to the sirens' rocks before the last egg drops. She dates with fury but the stink is on her now. In the last three years she has sketched over 2,000 portraits of girls on swings as part of an undefined project. I have nothing but sympathy and she's sick of it. She calls me “Mr. Fuck.”
Which is fair. She tells me I'm a horrible ugly person, okay, and that my kind has ruined everything, fine. She mocks my shirts. I'm used to all of this. Then she says: “remember when you got drunk on my couch and tried to touch my neck?” And I sigh. Six years ago she asked me in for a drink after we'd been to a movie and I moved in for a kiss, and she laughed at me. Now that I'm married she likes to bring it up unless my wife is near.
(“As for Enola,” Scott recently said to me, “she just can't find anyone desperate enough to spelunk himself into her gaping brood pouch. And the only reason she wants to get knocked up is in order to grow a man dumb enough to love her.”)
It shouldn't bother me but it does. Not the rejection. That was hardly painful in retrospect. It's that when she goes down this conversational route I wonder if she feels that my basic contentedness somehow cheats her out of her due. That because she rejected me unkindly, years ago, she had established that her own existence was run along superior principles. Three months after the neck-touching she broke the silence to call and tell me that she was dating a famous and rich artist. Ah, I said, great. “It's so surprising to be this happy,” she said.
The famous artist worked exclusively in leaves, and so of course he left her. She didn't call to tell me that at the time, though. And now seven years later I realized that thinking along those lines was giving my role too much due. We were just passing the time with half-assed, comfortable cruelty. Normally fine but I thought of those 2,000 sketches of swinging girls—some smiling, some forlorn, some with trees behind them—and hugged Scott and kissed Enola on her cheek and put on my coat. “Don't let me scare you away,” she said; she had, but not in the way she would hope to. As I closed the door I said, “I just have something better to do,” which got of her a half-laugh mixed with the sound of the latch.
Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red ValleyWhen I first joined the People of the Red Valley all those years ago I was glad to share water. I had been in Fathers of the Blue Sky and Sons of the Lion but I did not feel welcome in either family and I could tell that the People of the Red Valley were serious about creating a tribe that would provide me with a high quality of food, shelter, and opportunities for mating. And for a long time I was happy in the Red Valley. I ate of the food and would partake of the shelter, and married well more than once.
Yes, for a long time it was good. During the hunt for the Great Fox, five chiefs and twenty warriors—including myself—traveled for six days towards the night sun. There we found the sleeping Great Fox and encircled him in silence and woke him all at once with our roar, and pierced his side with our spears, and where the blood touched the ground there will grow a mountain. I felt that we had truly built an effective community that could accomplish anything, a community where my contributions were valued.
I remember a time when we respected each other. Recall when Rain-on-Winter-Grass wrestled a ghost bear by the Five Trees River and had to be pulled away by all of us before the Woman in the River could turn him to tears and take him as a husband. That night I wiped his tears with my war shirt, until the Woman in the River gave him back to us.
But then things began to change.
First, when I proposed that we go to war against the Fathers of the Blue Sky I expected there to be a discussion, but I didn't expect the Five Chiefs to insist that I retract my proposal. Yes, I understand that the laws of the People of the Red Valley say that we will raise arms against no other people, but who gets to decide those laws? If no one questions the Five Chiefs are we any better than slaves?
Then, few seasons later I saw that some of the chiefs had taken too many wives. Some of the mother-chiefs even took more than two husbands! And yet when I wanted a third wife and a larger cave, the Five Chiefs took pains to point out that I was not born a Red Valley Person and made so bold as to say that I had not earned the “large” cave in which I lived—not only that but I had not shared a deer in three moons. Now, that would have been fine and fair if I had known the policy on deer-sharing, but nowhere was it clear how many deer I would have needed to share in order to move to a larger cave.
Finally (and this was the last straw) in the fall, when there was the smell of snow, we allowed six men and a girl-child of the Waterfall People to enter our home, all seven hungry and weak, and I was asked if I could shelter two of the men in my already very-crowded cave, as if it was suddenly my job to teach strangers the ways of the Red Valley People, and asked to share my smoked deer meat—even though it was never made clear to me exactly how much smoked deer I should be giving to the People. That's when I began to wonder exactly why I had come to the Red Valley.
And now the famine has come and the crone who tends the heart-hearth has been eaten by lions in the night. And don't get me started on the council's attempts to find the next crone, which was proof of the fact that our chiefs don't care about anything but themselves. Yes, there was a time when I was very proud to say that I was a Red Valley Person. But that time is over. There was a time when I would have shared my smoked deer meat with all of you, but that time is gone. I hope one day the People can regain their communion with the Sun, but I doubt it.
Goodbye, People of the Red Valley. I guess I'm once again a Father of the Blue Sky.
Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out“Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out” is the title of something I wrote for New York Magazine's website.
10 TimeframesForgot to put this here...
I recently gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, a full-day event held on Saturday, May 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I teach a course in Content Strategy there, and working with the immensely talented students has forced me, as a content-oriented individual, to think hard about a specific task that interaction designers frequently take on—namely that they themselves must make things that allow other people to make things. They define the experiences that permit other people to do their work, or play, or tweet, or post things. They make the forms that the rest of us fill out. And so I walked around New York City and thought: What could I ask of these students, how could I advocate on behalf of the creators who are their users? This is, I hope, a partial answer to that question.
Read the keynote...
Rotary DialImage: Telephone Desk Stand, U.S. patent #180,081 (palindromic!). Image research: Anil Dash.
Necessary Introduction
So-called “people” on the Internet are writing about how no one blogs any more. I am one of these no-ones, by which they mean those of us who used to write things on the Internet and post them to our own servers, but have now instead gone over to centralized services like Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, where we spend our time—the diaspora of the alienated transformed by convenience into an aggregation of the aggrieved, or something like that. And they think it's a shame, and it is a shame. So I took the Blogging Challenge and tweeted:
If folks want to go LEAGUE OF INDIE BLOGGERS I'm down. I am here and my wife says it's okay if I really have to. To the webrings!— Paul Ford (@ftrain) August 20, 2012
First piece tomorrow about meetings or maybe dial telephones, 500+ words.— Paul Ford (@ftrain) August 20, 2012
That's some context for you, because this is not some descent-from-Olympus nonsense like I usually pull. This is straight-up blogging, amateur prose written quickly and with neither guiding stricture nor sober editing. I am going to tell it like it is, right from the heart, and I am going to tell it about telephone dials, because a man has to live by a code, and my code is unary loop disconnect dialing.
Dials
Let's get to it. There aren't as many dials in this world as there used to be, but once there were tens of millions. The rotary dial (or “calling dial” if you look at the patents in the 1920s) represented a big change in how a person approached the Bell System network. Prior to dials you picked up the phone and the suddenly broken circuit animated some light in an unseen switching station; soon would come an operator, a real woman (they tried men but they talked back and wanted too much advancement) and the operator would say: “Number please?” Or something along those lines. Get me Baltimore! you might say. Or: “Murray Hill 5-9975.”
“Right away, Ma'am.” Or Sir. Then the operator, who had to signal to ask permission to wipe her brow, would move some plugs around to make the connection. Now you were emperor over leagues of copper string.
Decades pass and here, finally, comes the calling dial: pick up, a live circuit is offered up; start dialing. Ringring.
When you dialed somewhere on the other end of that wire was a relay—a large heavy ozone-smelling device that heard the clicks. Or rather it didn't hear as much as register modulating electric pulses. These are beautiful, abstract, incredibly dumb devices that clack. Anything that they could do a matchbox-sized computer can do today.
“Detail of back side of a Western Electric 6-wire 100-point crossbar switch (model 324-N) showing ‘banjo’ wiring.”—Wikipedia; photo by user Yeatesh copyright CC BY-SA 3.0.
Western Electric was the manufacturing arm of the telephone monopoly. They made everything: Phones, switches, equipment for the linemen. Sometimes you have to marvel at the audacious monopolistic excitement of it all. The Bell System employed a million people in thousands of different positions and traded on the stock exchange under the letter “T,” the ultimate in financial domain-name shortening. Sure, Wal-Mart employs 2.2 million people (two hundred thousand to stock the shelves and two million to keep them from unionizing). But Glen Campbell won't show up and sing “The Michigan Greeter” about Wal-Mart, will he?
The rotary dial was a building block of civilization, the key that unlocked the phone system for millions of people. It was an integral part of your parents' lives. Imagine your father stuffing his dirty fingers into the waiting greasy dialpits, over and over and over again, over and over and over and over again, ringing your mother's bell until finally she shudders and reaches—for the phone and says: “Hello? This is [YOUR MOTHER'S NAME].” “Hey,” says your father, “this is [YOUR FATHER'S NAME].” “Well, how do you like that?” asks your mother even though she likes it very much. He asks her out to dinner. “Let me check my busy calendar,” she says. She goes so far as to coyly ruffle pages of the nearby phone book. “As it turns out,” she says, “I've had a cancellation.” Not much later your father drives by and picks her up and off they go. And usually they would have just had dinner, but this night—this night initiated by dialing on a rotary phone—they have a couple of nice chops and too much red wine, and, maybe it was the pretty moon, they find themselves engaging in penetrative sexual intercourse, your mother and father. Both of them. You can hear the smushing-together of bodies, soft and moist like warm gingerbread, their skin traversed with thick bristles of interlocking hair, hair like the hair of wild boar. Never forget the both of them, eyes half-lidded, hairy-gingerbread bodies glistening on a bed with maroon sheets. The smell of stacks of damp pennies. Your mother and father. Pennies.
And now here you are! And you're amazing. All thanks to that beautiful rotary dial. Let's open one up and take a look inside:
Mechanism-wise you can intuit quite a bit about the whole system by watching that video. Note for example the way the rotary action causes a coil-uncoil with the middle whirrer, which uninvolves the pen gear, in turn causing the quirt to devilate, which itself leads to the essential pulsing grombus before the return hose coil inductor is repronged. Couldn't be simpler, and yet something so elegant brought millions of people (like your parents) together—just as, years later, the iPhone would bring people together to hate Android. After all, it wasn't the phone itself but the network that mattered. That's a trite statement in this age of Big Social, but the phone people invented the idea of the network as we understand it, the idea of connecting people together whenever they wanted. “Social” is just a riff on the metaphors and understanding around “phone.”
The phones connected folks, but the phone book described a town. In even a mid-sized town the phone book was heavy, printed on cheap paper. The paper was so cheap that ink would bleed and spread during printing, so much so that they used special fonts–Bell Centennial starting around the 1970s, and before that Bell Gothic)—that had various little divots, called ink traps, within the letters so that less ink was transmitted during printing, and thus the ink-bleed could be put to service—and the effect was sort of peculiar to the phonebook, the way the numbers and letters were slightly blurry, with the grain of the paper essential to the form of the type.
The phone book at its essence was a practical tool for translating names into numbers; it was a symptom of the Bell System, not a cause. But I have odd, fond memories of poring over it to learn a great variety of things irrelevant of whether I'd ever make a call or not; there was of course just looking through the names to see who was who; there was discovering the addresses of friends or enemies—and there was a map of the town itself, in the front section, and, oddly, there was often a perpetual calendar. You could engage in an enormous variety of fantasies and plots just by flipping through the flimsy paper, or learn about your crushes, and about the people your crushes were dating while you stayed home and read the phone book.
Those were the white pages, the fattest part, everyone named and listed. Then came a slender striation, the blue pages, the list of government and community services. You could find out in the blue pages what all of the offices were at a college or a hospital, all the different divisions of the mayor's office or the high school. Like a lot of people I like to know how things sort themselves out, and who is in charge of what. This information was urgent to me, and otherwise unavailable without asking an adult, which I hated to do. They were always so suspicious. Why do I want to know how the hospital works? Because I am momentarily interested in hospitals. I hate this town and I hate you. Leave me alone.
If ever there were something to make an information architect's heart sing it was the index of goods and services of the yellow pages, the great swath of color—smaller than the white pages in breadth but way more varied. A list of places that could clean out gutters? A collation of all the pizzerias within a five mile radius, with sketches of fat Italian chefs? Check, twice. And coupons, so many coupons. You could plan a life there, or a good couple of weeks. Once a year they'd do that, the people, just send you a big list of all the people and addresses and businesses and offices in your town, and trust you to do the right thing by it.
Progress was a phone book released every year, a cycle of civic rebirth. It grew thicker as more people moved to town, and people commented on that. “I can remember when it was half that size,” a parent would remark, nostalgic for their own lost and smaller world. Is there anything like that today, any single document with creators so naïve as to believe that they could deliver all that humans had to offer in black Bell Centennial on white, blue, and yellow paper, indexed, tagged, and sorted? And will there ever again be humans so naïve as to believe, as I did, that when they held a single book they held the whole white, blue, and yellow world?
Image: Trundle Toy, U.S. patent #196,737, 1963.
Edits
A tweet from Rick Prelinger pointed out that the typeface Bell Gothic preceded Bell Centennial. I edited the piece to clarify.
@ftrain that was Bell Gothic, designed 1938. Bell Centennial was a 1978 redesign.— Rick Prelinger (@footage) August 21, 2012
A a tweet from Alan Gutierrez explained that exchange codes were not pronounced in any special way. I removed a sentence accordingly.
.@ftrain MU was not capitalized prior to dials and never pronounced. Two letter acronyms for exchanges were added for the sake of dialing.— Alan Gutierrez (@bigeasy) August 21, 2012
A tweet from Alan Gutierrez explained that exchange codes were not pronounced in any special way. I removed a sentence accordingly.
In the Facebook Group, Dan Brickley pointed out that where I'd written “decentralized” I meant “centralized.”
A tweet from Dan Phiffer pointed out that I had doubled an “A” in the above correction.
@ftrain I spotted a typo in your Rotary Dial post’s updates section—“A a tweet…” appears twice. Shipping enough fixes introduces new bugs.— Dan Phiffer (@dphiffer) August 22, 2012
I appreciate people who help.
Recent Offsite Work: Code and ProseAs a hobby I write.
SaturdayI went fishing in Florida once, said Rebecca, and the ocean is absolutely teeming with violence. I pulled a two-foot kingfish out of the water. It fought and fought—well, for a minute I fought it—and then bam it comes up easy as an old boot, half-eaten. Between the time it snagged my hook and the minute later when I landed it a barracuda had bit it in half. The captain just laughs and throws it off the deck, and I watched it sink. And I am pissed. I did all that work. I took it personally that this other fish had come after my fish. What had become my fish. I am there in a boat ninety minutes from shore with some fiberglass between me and all this. I mean we're on land and we don't take it seriously how insane it is out there. You're at the beach throwing a ball around laughing in the sand and out beneath the waves there is this slaughterhouse, this horror movie. Shark week forever. It's amazing the ocean doesn't just run blood all the time.
Sleeping PieceIt's late and I can't sleep for nerves, but I should. So I look at the cat to relax. She is stretched on Mo's orange padded jacket and her green eyes are half-closed, eyelids flickering. Her white front right paw is curled softly into her chest.
Like the tide coming in, her green eyes start to close. She stretches out the right front white paw and rests her mottled brownish face with its green eyes and white muzzle onto it.
We like to look at the cat. “My god,” Mo will say, “she's cute.”
“She is. And you want to know the best part about our cat?” I say.
“What's that?”
“She will never, ever die.”
NightMy recent dreams have terrified me. “Push!” I shout and the baby crawls out on its own acephalous, absolutely no head, and in its neck a single eye that opens and blinks. Cut to my new life with Mo on the border between Israel and the Occupied Territories. Hundreds of us live in a large house and then the bombers come. Missiles whistling down one after another, bodies in the air—and when it appears to be over a full passenger jet crashes straight into the surviving crowd. Then I'm back in Brooklyn and my doctor puts her hand straight through the hole in my stomach.
I try not to borrow trouble, because I have faith that in time trouble will show up and knock gently on the door. Mostly by luck I live a life of extraordinary privilege, which to me means that I have health insurance, opportunities, very little debt, and neither I nor my fiancée are threatened by an invading army. But the sleep brain wants to give me fits. I have to finish these projects.
Etc.Yes, Scott, said Rebecca. We were at her place. Rebecca is a research librarian and I am a series of tubes, so what we talk about together is data—sorting it, viewing it, eating it. We talked about starting a company, an organizing organization with an aluminum office. Our agency would promise to apply the latest library science and Semantic Web principles to each client's need for structure. Bring us all of your receipts, manuals, press clippings, laptops, and un-replied-to emails, we'd say. We'll make sense of it all! And then we'd dump the whole pile in the trash, and each client would be charged $1,000 and handed a golf pencil and a lined notebook as a parting gift, problem solved. “Think less,” we'd advise. “Do less.” Once the word got out there would be thousands of people begging us to take them on. After a year or two we would just leave the company, stop answering the phone, and forget about the office rent.
“You're both nerds,” Scott had said. “And yet neither of you are rich.”
Rebecca said, Yes, Scott. Her cat Rockstar sniffed my hand.
“Let's watch it again,” said Scott. So we gathered around the computer and watched the Donnie Davies video for the sixth time.
“I just can't get enough,” said Scott.
“Me neither,” I said.
“It's okay to be funny again,” said Scott. “This video grants us permission.”
“It does,” I said.
“So,“ asked Scott, “why aren't you funny?”
Snow dayWalking home from the train we were so happy to see the snow, because there has been so little of it. “God,” said Mo. “It truly is amazing. Brooklyn is just this fantastic place for one—asshole.”
“That was trash-can snow,” I said. “It came off a garbage lid.” It was running down the side of her face. She pulled it off her cheek and shot it directly into my mouth.
“How,” she asked, “does that taste?”
“Truce?” I asked.
“Truce?” asked Mo, disbelieving.
“Truce,” I said.
“Truce,” she agreed.
Almost home, we stopped to look at the Gowanus Canal. “We met here,” Mo said, pushing snow off the railing into the dark water fifteen feet below. “Truce,” I said and pushed a good handful down her back. She turned and landed a pile of slush right above my nose.
We went upstairs and looked out the window. It was falling at 45 degrees, the wind whipping the flakes into straight lines. Sometimes a spare flake would leave the pack and dawdle past the window or land on the outer sill. “Maybe they'll cancel school,” I said. As a kid I would get up at six, turn on the radio, and listen for the list, in my pajamas, sitting directly above the radiator vent. It was the only time anyone cared about local AM stations, and the announcers would stretch out their 15 minutes of winter fame into a full hour, breaking the closings into multiple segments with ads in the middle. West Chester area school district was last alphabetically.
With a style that incorporated many pauses, the announcer (something alliterative and old-sounding: Don Dickles? Mike Mulrooney? Bernard Barton? Father Larry O'Larry?) would arrive at the “V”s then break into ads for car dealerships and beauty salons. The ads were more interesting to read than the closings, so he lingered over them. My hands were shaking; I was nine. Then, purposefully cruel, he played a song, old enough that the cylinder was in the public domain (so the station could avoid paying artists' fees)—some long-dead tenor sang, “Pennsylvania Tuuuuurnpike, how I love you!” The kids from Bishop Flanagan were already out pushing each other into drifts. I had a desperate need for information; I could not believe that it was possible for any organization, particularly WCAU AM 1520, to blithely shrug off its civic duty. Then, an hour after he began reading (first up: African Bethel Methodist Pre-School, closed), ten minutes before I would have been expected to stumble to the bus stop, he came to the end of the alphabet: “West Chester area school district, closed for the day.” I thanked Jesus and the other two. God knows in 24 hours I'd be back at Hillsdale Elementary having my phonics-hole stuffed. But respite for today.
I've still got toys and games—XBox, Tetris, DVD player, and cell phone (thanks, foreign child labor, for letting me stay a little boy forever), but the snow day is lost. To take time off is to impede the progress of my projects and thus myself. When not at work I should be writing; when not writing, at the gym; when not at the gym, doing the dishes, or figuring out ways to make more money. I know this is a strategy for ultimate failure and stress-related disease, but the best I can do right now is keep spinning and then burn out on the weekends. I promise myself on Friday night that I will write 20 pages, but instead I read about space orcs while eating 25-cent packages of misspelled food—Chipchaps, Salt Smackerz, Funcorn, Yeesty-Klair, Mintee Sourz, Chocoprong Cheezers, Kake Snax, and Yumchkins.
“I can still taste Brooklyn,” I said. Mo laughed, remembering the look of disgust as I tried to dig the snow out of my mouth with my fingers, and I thought: that laugh will only mean sadness when I am dead, which, given the mood I am in and the unkempt quality of my hair, will be very soon. Those sudden melodramatic thoughts come at the end of happy sentences, like deformed punctuation marks. We're teasing the cat with a string, laughing along, and I think, all of this will be gray ashes, or cancer lurks unbidden and inevitable. (My father used to say, “laughing ends up in crying,” but he didn't mean this. He meant, take that lit firecracker out of your ear, funny guy.) I have come to understand the meaning, the underlying message of these melancholy Morrisseyish moments of self-pity and desperation: it's naptime. I woke up out of the void this morning, and now I'm on my way to work. It's not a snow day, just white salt-shadows on the pavement and the asphalt.