June 19, 2007
"Oh, there is a McDonald's - do you want McDonald's or Subway?"
"McDonald's, but I'm surprised that there is one here."
"There are always McDonald's where there are white people."
01:12 PMDecember 07, 2004
Notes to my therapist
Mexico is different - Mexico is different.
He was getting all packed up and was trying to get ready for the flight. He was going alone somewhere real for the first time and wasn't able to either deal with the fact that he was afraid nor admit it to himself. On the surface he was simply worried about the details of travel - exchange rates, Spanish phrases, packing first aid supplies.
In reality, he was eighteen, clueless and about to travel to a country full of strangers who were stranger than anyone he had ever met. He didn't know anybody in Mexico, and even though he was ignorant on this as well, he wasn't really there to meet anybody other than himself.
02:43 PMDecember 02, 2004
The food was cold, but the company was relatively warm, and it was much better than sitting at the edge of his bed afraid he would fall off it all.
He watched the people as they came in - most eating a quick bite at the only place that was open before doing the big meal at dinner. He had ordered a lot of food after looking over the menu - lingering - while sipping some coffee after some warmer small talk. She was a veteran of this situation even if he wasn't and knew what not to talk about but at the same time address indirectly.
While he was waiting on the food was the best time, because he had to be there - they needed him to pay.
08:39 PMI am covered in sameness most days. I could live my life with my eyes closed if it weren't for all the traffic - I move, flutter, and object in the same ways everyday. Sometimes I try to mix things up, but even this is a repeat. If it weren't for my rubbing up against her sameness my life wouldn't have any meaning to it at all.
08:30 PMDecember 01, 2004
Most of the people in the world think that they are doing fine because one of the interesting consequences of this world is that you can get happiness from your strengths and your weaknesses – being shy can lead to a life of contentment – life doesn’t force you measure up all the time. This is how most people become successful.
04:21 PMThe most important thing that she ever told me was that there is nothing but learning, that the one constant in the world is that there is only change. When I asked her later she said that she didn’t believe it anymore.
04:21 PMA few things bothered him about college when he first arrived. First, the professors were freaky smart and knew a lot about things that didn’t have to do with anything about what they were teaching – shit like World War II and the history of America. His Spanish prof knew more about stuff than he did when it came to just about anything. Second, most of his classes were a joke – it was like he was paying to learn things in a much more professional environment but he had already learned them. Ass-wiping at Harvard. Third, there were women everywhere and they were not being yelled at my their fathers when they found out what they were not wearing. Fourth, there were at least a million people just like him wondering around looking at everything but the sidewalk, but the older ones still looked down more than up and they didn’t talk much.
04:20 PMThe impact started at her shoulder blade and knocked her easily to the ground. She was so shocked by it that at first she didn’t feel any pain, but just felt herself not wanting to get up, but to just crawl as fast as she could back to the house and find her mom’s legs to wrap around and hide behind like dissappearing into the shadows of a forest. The boys never knew where it had gone, but it stayed with her for a good long while, aged and strengthened by the fact that it was her memory only.
04:20 PMThe real mystery to me is how the magazines get into the bathroom in the first place. Somebody systematically rips the stickers off of the front covers (usually taking a subtitle or too along for the ride) and then throws them away somewhere (most likely outside of the office based on the results of my searches). They then put the magazines in the bathroom under the papers at least once a week. I suppose the really interesting thing is the response that they have gotten over the last few months. For a while it appeared as if someone was reading them a good deal (probably more than one person) and now it just looks like someone (else probably) is pushing them down and at one point I found one in the trash. When I came in yesterday I found that they had all been moved to the trash and someone had brought in their rival publications to give us another slant, probably not as extreme this time. I can’t wait to finish this bagel and coffee – I have to enjoy this before someone kills the whole thing (but how could they really?) and stocks the place full of fucking Marie Clare and Golf Digest.
04:20 PMI always liked the quiet part of my office once I got it all setup. There was a time after all the boxes had been shipped that I felt simply silly to have spent the amount of money that I had on the desk(s) and the shelves and the machines, but the quiet hum when I get home sounds like an impatient greeting and I don’t feel when I feel like I am still at the office up until I get to bed.
04:19 PMWhile waiting for takeoff I was thumbing through a magazine when I noticed an article that was listing the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ professions over the next five years. My eyes probably stopped as they have a few times before whenever they have long articles helping young people to find what they want to do with their lives. I used to buy those ‘best colleges’ reports and just look over the majors looking for something to catch my eye – I guess I was hoping that I would find something that was a nice fit and wouldn’t waste much more of my time:
‘University of Virginia’
‘Undecided’
Average Starting Salary: 65,000
Most of those magazines give you advice based on the fact that you are making your decision of what to do everyday of your life only on the amount of money that you can make over the next five years – like you get all the way to college and then just study the landscape to see where to go for the next forty years. It is, and was, such bullshit that I got so disgusted that I had to order a drink from the stewardess, but she couldn’t give it to me until after takeoff, and since I was in the back of ‘Economy’, the prospects weren’t so good.
It started out as a strange intellectual fascination and he thought that it continued along this vein much longer than after the point at which it became purely physical.
04:18 PMAfter everyone was gone he fell into a common routine starting with rising before dawn and going onto his front porch to watch the sun come up. Most days he would drink a full two cups of black coffee while he watched, but some mornings he would look down into a full cup and watch the reflection off of the top steam. After this he would walk around the neighborhood for a few hours, not stopping at the pharmacy or the newstand or bagel place – not waving at the regular joggers or people opening up shop either. The man who owned the diner waved four times in the hopes that he could grab another regular after seeing him, but did not try a fifth. He would write the rest of the morning in a long journal while sitting on a bench watching the traffic between periods. Every Friday he would go the market and stock up on coffee and wine and he would throw out the full journal on his way out and turn the corner towards his place without looking back.
04:18 PMA reunion is really a strange place to be when you never really knew anybody to begin with because now you have changed so much that they really don’t know you now either, and the traces from back then end up getting in the way of both of your little social movements and you just can’t get around it. Luckily for her, they were both drinking when he walked over and noticed the memory, and that little piece of complete newness between them was enough to get everything started.
04:18 PMShe had never really understood that part of him, but she kept at it almost everyday in the hopes that she would reach some level of understanding. She would glance over at him and find him making faces to himself like he was watching himself in the mirror right before a big meeting. Most of the time it was while they were just sitting around watching TV – she would feel him moving slightly against her and tilt her head up to see that it was his jaw and neck moving like he was responding to what was said. After awhile she decided that asking him about it would make him either explain it all to her or closet it up. The thought of him having to talk to himself in the bathroom was too much for her, and she decided to just leave it and let him go on with it. It tasted more like mystery that way.
04:16 PMWe were wandering – lost - for what seemed like ages – at least half of our lunchbreak. After making numerous jokes about different peoples areas and a little innocent finger pointing right after we passed people in the long, monchrome halls we simply starting being quiet and all walking in the same direction until somebody recognized the fax machine that was one department over from ours and we all returned to our desks and didn’t talk again until it was time to smoke.
04:16 PMAfter he told her to start looking for the patterns she starting notices things that she never had before. While he told her to look for ‘truth and happiness’, she was still just a little girl, and the wisdom was lost on her – all she retained was that he had told her to start looking for things that happened over and over and in the same sequence. In this way she started her obsession with digestion and numbers, and as she would walk down the street she would count the cracks and sub-cracks on the sidewalk, watching in frustration the way that they would split apart and ruin the order of the surface.
04:15 PMAs soon as the bell rang, he felt as if he was already out the door and home. The long walk home for him despite the heat were the most calm moments of his life, and he relished them by stopping to turn down new streets and later alleys and unfenced yards until he looped back around towards his house when he felt that his time was up, where the incredible solitude of not being understood would start up again.
04:15 PMHe would keep it up until he felt silly, and then he would stop for a few days and give it a rest before starting back up. The beginning and the end of each of these phases is when he most felt like a professional, like what he was doing was real in any sense.
04:15 PMThe old man finally drove himself mad, after years of the world attempting nobly to do so, by trying to write a book. ‘Mathematicians should never try to write books’ was the unspoken lesson at his funeral, where the events leading up to his death were painted as the last passionate struggles of a man on the forefront of mathematics and literature, when in reality he had convinced himself that one could write a book by starting out with a word and then simply adding to it every other possible word that would make sense after it. After spending a year trying to picture the first page in his mind, he started inventing a much stronger type of paper that could withstand the mammoth opening that he so vulgarly intended to place on it, and when his relatives were dividing up his inheritance, no one knew what to do with all the rolls and rolls of blank pages.
04:14 PMAll things in the world have been known before at one time or another, people are born and grow in knowledge that has been learned and forgotten again and again with each generation. People don’t read the lessons of the past, and libraries are a simple waste since they only record in a great book of fame those that wrote an old lesson down in a simple, pretty way – but these libraries will be dust again as well and that lesson will never ever be learned.
04:14 PMThe thing that she never ended up knowing about humans despite years of research and even the changing of some of her personal habits to theirs like a fan of a quirky artist, was that perfection for them seemed to lie right in the middle of things, but that they defined themselves at extremes. Most that she met would live on extremes and be proud of their vegetarianism or their love of cars, but most of their moral standards were based on the idea of ‘everything in moderation’. It was quite a paradox, and she had lost many a moon-night over it.
04:14 PMHer whole life she would tell me stories, although it took me years to really listen. You do, after all, shut out the world during the time that you think that you have it figured out – you don’t hear the wisdom being shouted out at you through your covered ears. The last story that she told me was not told in print or with her soft voice, but through her eyes. Sunken back from the truth, they were staring at everything and finding nothing would return to her hands and then start over. She was mumbling without meaning to my mother and even though I thought she was mumbling ‘help’, Mom said that she was asking for water. Her last lesson was that death is a great tidal wave – she could see it and knew that when it broke she would be alone.
04:13 PMAfter he told her his overall life philosophy she tried to follow it for as long as she could. His basic tenet was quite dramatic as six-year old’s statements tend to be (and it was also obvious to most that he had overheard it on the subway): Find truth in most things, and let the rest fall. Since she wasn’t at the level of discovering who was lying to her, she started instead paying attention to patterns in the hope that things that were true would happen over and over again and lies simply wouldn’t work for very long. She had found that lying to her parents didn’t work, but that they remembered when she was honest, so she lived the rest of her life like this and it worked out pretty good.
04:13 PMThe problem with trying to write a letter to God is that it is hard to find your audience. Normally when you write something you have a reader in mind whether or not you realize it. And the problem with writing to God is that you don’t really know your audience.
04:13 PMHe used to get up and run in the morning back when they lived by the water. He would run right between where the water was and where the sand go too thick. The ground there was perfect for running because it was flat and hard and little wet, so the sand didn’t kick up and get in his shoes and give him blisters. The rest of his life running could never really match that.
04:12 PMThe part that his parents never really got was that he knew more than they did. He had seen his homeroom teacher at a party that weekend that he spent with his older cousins, and she was drinking and smoking and bitching. He was never able to get back his motivation after that, and he hated that class. He thought of her at the end of his first week of work.
04:11 PMJanuary 07, 2004
"Home", she thought as she stood right in the middle like a rock breaking the stream in half for just a moment. She was tempted to put her arms out and feel them rushing by, but it got the better of her and she just stood there until she got in line, ignoring the strange glances and awkward side-stepping.
06:38 PMSeptember 25, 2003
The paperclips are like little cockroaches holding on for dear life, holding my life and my papers together.
02:43 PMSeptember 09, 2003
Looking back, what most impressed me about her during our first meeting was her natural defensive-driving skills. Our first date followed the typical high-school script: eat at Denny's (but this time without the friends who introduced you), only one of us can drive, so she did since she was a year (felt like a lifetime) older than I was. On the way there she was driving and I was small-talking when two grown men in a pickup truck came over into our lane while looking at a house over to their left. She swerved off the road into someone's yard while honking the horn. They heard her just in time to move back over so that she could come back onto the road before the yard ended and we hit a telephone pole and fire hydrant on the corner.
She hadn't been driving long, but she reacted the right way and saved her car and us without breaking a sweat. How she reacted afterward was a little different:
You stupid motherfucker! Fuck you you stupid piece of shit! That's right, you better not look over here you fucking dumbass or you'll swerve and almost kill somebody else!
She started shaking and cried a little after it sunk in. If I were to ask her about it now, she would probably get a little worked up - she is still mad really - but if it happened again we would probably be safe.
01:08 PMAugust 27, 2003
He got up every morning at 5 and quickly got ready in the dark. He normally didn't have to worry about what he was wearing and didn't brush his hair, cut down to 1/4 an inch it never did anything but stand up straight. His normal shower routine involved about 10 minutes where the water, as hot as he could possibly make it, would just hit his upper back right where he should be standing up straight.
He would gather his gear up in his bag every morning - mainly a check that he had everything or last minute inclusions of certain books depending on what he felt like doing that day - things stayed in the bag once he got home every night.
He prided himself on being the first person to arrive at wherever he was going. The coffeeshop or bookstore would find him showing up about 30 seconds after they opened but never earlier - before the bikers getting a cup on their way to work and before the police shift change. He wouldn't just come in and grab a cup to go, this was his destination.
After ordering a drink, the same thing every morning, he would go put his stuff down at the same table from the day before - reserving it just in case somebody came in - and walk aimlessly through the place looking out the window and just generally wasting time by reading the headlines from the paper that he never bought. Sometimes the girl behind the counter would make conversation with him, to which he would respond methodically. The same person never worked more than a few mornings a week what with the available pool of college workers, so he never really knew if they remembered him or not. They never got his drink started without him arriving, and he insisted on telling them what he wanted every morning; he never assumed that they remembered him.
When they called out his drink order he would turn and thank the girl on his way back to his table. He had found that the table with either a nice view out the window or the table where you can't see outside but everybody has to pass by you on their way upstairs are the best spots. It basically depended on what he had to get done as to which he went with on a particular morning.
He would then fall deep into the unchallenged world of thought - books, programs, writing - and this was one of the happiest times in his life.
03:20 PMJuly 11, 2003
Ring
The sound of the phone ringing woke him up as if from a dream, but more jarring, like someone slapping him awake, but he was standing up, looking out the window, waiting for the phone to ring and trying with every ounce of his strength to somehow shut off his ears so that when it rang it wouldn't cause him physical pain, which it would, and did every single time.
04:18 PMJune 19, 2003
Stand up
A professor comes into the first day of his college class. The large lecture hall is filled to capacity for the only time during the semester, and the rare quiet makes him smile to himself. He puts down his books and looks out over the audience for a few seconds before speaking. "Everybody please stand up right now" he says in an emotionless voice and looks down at the floor. After a few seconds a couple of the students begin to stand and then slowly the rest join them. After they have been standing for a few seconds he looks up and says: "Ok, you can all be seated." There are a few quiet chuckles and some of the students give each other confused grins while they slide back into their seats. He lets them get settled and then tells them to stand again. He then walks to the front of his lecture space and begins talking.
"When you came into this room today you may have thought of people in terms of groups - college students, rich kids, black students, whatever. Simply put, I think that we are, instead, a series of individuals with different views, histories - different everything. But at the same time we can be grouped into certain categories based on whatever grouping mechanism you like. For example, you could say that just now there were people who were very resistant to me making them stand up, and you could say that there were those that simply stood up without questioning it. There were those that got mad at what they saw as an abuse of power, and those that laughed and thought it would make a nice little story to tell when your friends asked you how your first day went. The point is, we can group people based on small things like this, but that doesn't mean that we are different. Now, let's talk a little bit about biology."
06:45 PMJune 04, 2003
By the time he had looked up a full five seconds had passed - he wouldn't have thought it was that long if you had asked him afterwards as it was only enough time for him to grab his drink, which had fallen on the floormat - but it was. When he hit it, he didn't really feel the impact of his chest and cheek against the steering wheel, or his wrist, which ended up against the radio at a strange angle, but he did hear the noise very clearly. It was much softer than he thought - no broken glass or last minute screams - frightened eye-contact between the two as they stared together at the inevitable - but it was a soft thud and then the screech of the tires. Then silence. An alley cat was searching in some trash when it happened and darted underneath the dumpster when it heard the noise. When he was out of the car and looking for help, its eyes followed him as he got back into his car and drove off, leaving the man.
07:35 PMMan standing in the middle of the street, lucky there is no traffic - he's freestyling, I think is what they call it. There was no freestyling when I was coming up, only music that was written then recorded later on. I think he is talking about himself, most of them do don't they, it is a very egotistical genre - like they can't talk about life or anything, or why they are in so much trouble most of the time. By the time he had crossed the street he was very happy with his conclusion and he didn't turn around to see if the man was still at it.
07:34 PMShaking inside, man am I nervous about this. Job interviews are always bad, but this has to be the worst. His suit is a little tighter than it used to be, with small little creases showing up around his middle even though he didn't know it since he always stood up really straight and sucked it in when he looked in the mirror out of habit. His eyes were very wide by the time they called him, and that is when the sweating started - at first just a warmth around the arms and face and then moving down him until he felt as if he needed to change pants. It was panel-style, with multiple people asking him questions with various degrees of nastiness. Afterwards, he won't even remember the first few questions that they asked, which is ironic considering that they were the only ones that counted in any way.
07:34 PMI wonder if I will ever get a bigger office, I mean my cubicle is nice and I have a pretty good view of the edge of a window which means I get that sunshine sometimes and I feel like I am outside working with my laptop, but wouldn't it be nice to have an office. The sheer respect of it - here, honey, is where I work - this is my office, where I make important phone calls and do other adult and somehow manly things that allow us to live - be attracted to me in a primal way; bow down before my altar of power. Cubicle sex is impossible, but in an office at least there is a chance of a little action, of a little privacy. It would also be cool to have an office on the bottom floor of a very large building that faced right onto the sidewalk so that you could look at the people as they walked past. Maybe that would be too distracting, all that movement out of the corner of your eye. If you moved your desk so that your back was to them then one day you would probably turn around and get scared shitless by someone flashing you, and there would probably be spitting since if I was homeless the last thing that I would want to see is some prick with a nice leather chair five feet away from me behind some glass moving papers around. Maybe it would have two way mirrors, or one-way, one-way, like in the movies where they drill the criminal until he confesses, but only no one would punch through the glass without your permission because if they did then you would have to smell and hear the street, and that isn't the point. Oh, we're here, and just in time, because I am fucking starving.
07:34 PMMarch 03, 2003
Checkpoint
"Hey, look: 3/3/03 3:33"
"It looks like we are halfway to pure evil."
"I think we are probably much closer than that."
03:33 AMFebruary 23, 2003
2 people riding off into the sunset
[2 people on horses ride off into the sunset after an amazing adventure]
"Wow, what an amazing adventure."
"Yes, I must say that was something special. I hope that our next one is that good."
"Any idea where that one might be?"
"Well, that's where we are riding right now. Another one is always around the corner if you are looking."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah, go ahead."
"Why in the hell are we riding at night? I mean, the sun is going to set in like 5 minutes and then we won't be able to see where we are going. Couldn't we have just stayed in town another day?"
"Oh, just ride along and shut up."
"And if we can find adventure anywhere then why can't we just stay in town and wait for it? Do we really have to seek it out?"
"Do you really want to go back there? Everybody knows us back there and they saw what we can do. There are no suprises, we would just be sitting around doing nothing back there? Is that what you want, a whole life of nothing?"
"Well, I'm just saying that we could stay in a warm bed and get some more whiskey."
"Get some more whiskey, warm bed? What is wrong with you? What happened to adventure? You want to live a life of sitting around doing the same stuff?"
"No, not really, but I'm just saying.."
"Just shut up. Here, let's set up camp here for the night, it's getting too dark to keep riding."
10:08 AMFebruary 16, 2003
2 stories about dogs
1
Driving down the highway in the rain at night I am at the front of a dense pack of cars. We are in a construction zone and I am looking at a sign off to the side of the road. My eye catches the sight of a dog running across the highway.
He is across the road before I can even step on the brakes.
He gets halfway across our lane and then stops.
We hit him, killing him instantly and sending our car off into the median.
We swerve to miss him and hit a truck to the right of us, sending him spinning and us off to the ramp on the right.
We don't hit the brakes and slam into the dog at full speed. The noise is horrible and we drag his body for about a hundred yards before the main piece falls off the front of the car. I spend nearly three hours getting all the hair out of the grill and our insurance goes up slightly after paying for new headlights on the right side.
Right before we hit him he reels back a little, just enough to change the angle of impact so that he comes over the hood and through the windshield at us.
2
Our neighbor is a police officer with a K-9 partner. He keeps the dog at home and it is very friendly with us; a large purebred German Shepherd that knows very little about sheep. He is a sweet dog and spends most of his off-duty time doing normal dog things such as sitting on the porch overlooking the parking lot while chewing on a plastic toy or playing with their other dog, a civilian black lab.
We told our neighbor that we were suprised at how normal the dog acts given that it is trained to bring down and nearly kill very strong, desperate people. He said that the dog is trained to act differently when wearing his police collar.
One day when bringing in some groceries the dog made a slight noise and I looked up to find him looking down at me, the chew toy discarded from his mouth. Something I said or did, or the way I was holding whatever it was that I was holding, had triggered something in him and he stared down at me for a moment in complete silence, its hair slightly up, its ears a little more at attention than normal, it eyes and breathing calm and patient. After a few seconds it made up its mind lacking further information and moved back to its little blanket and grabbed the toy in its mouth.
I wonder if I will ever have to put my collar on to deal with you, and if I do, if I can ever really take it off.
05:56 PMJanuary 30, 2003
Visions of bathrooms
I was walking home from work today and thinking about the future. I apparently should have been thinking about the present because I walked right into a rather large man, knocking him to the ground. Looking down at him on the sidewalk I realized that I probably should have seen him given that he was blue-skinned and wearing nothing but a vest and yellow pants.
"Congratulations, sir" he said and smiled at me, still not getting up.
I offered my hand to him: "Sorry about that, I didn't even see you". I was trying to ignore the blue skin as hard as I could.
"You have won my services for a few hours, don't feel sorry" he replied, still smiling and looking quite comfortable laying diagonally across the line between the sidwalk blocks.
"Ok, and what does that mean?" I reply sheepishly. I'm playing along now with this crazy person, all the while trying to keep the phrase 'Alien Male Hooker' below the surface.
"I am a genie, one of the last in fact".
"You mean like a 3 wishes sort of genie?". (This crazy person game is fun.)
"Well not really. You were thinking about your future and so I will give you 3 images from your future for you to look at for 3 seconds each. After this you can ask me 3 questions about each."
"Why all the 3s?" I ask, somehow suprised at how I am playing along. My only questions is why 3s? How about asking him where he got that vest/pants combo, the I-Never-Want-To-Have-Sex-R-Us?
"You said 3, I never did".
"Ok, so if I had said 40 then I would be able to see 40?"
"Yes, of course".
"Crap."
"Yep. So, are you ready to get started?"
"What sort of 'images' do you mean anyway? Like visions or pictures?"
"Well, I go and pick a random day in your life at a random time in the future. I then pick a random second in the day and take a snapshot of what your future self is looking at. I then show this to you. You then ask me three questions about what the hell you are looking at, and I answer them".
"Ok, sounds good." (I should run into strange mean more often. Ew, glad I didn't say that one outloud.)
"Ok, first one coming up."
He is suddenly standing, and looks over my shoulder - concentrating now, and then laughing like a little girl all of a sudden. Not good - my future is funny. He turns back to me.
"Ok, we have the first one."
Before I can say anything I look around and all I can see, no matter where I turn my head, is the wall of what looks like a very large bathroom. It is maybe five feet away. It is white, tiled, and clean. There is a magazine in the very corner of the image. The image fades and I focus on the blue teeth that are now visible from my companion.
"Can't do much about that, the times are picked completely randomly."
"Seriously, me taking a shit, this is just a waste of time. Half the time I am sleeping anyway - the other two could be just as bad."
"Ok, do you have any questions?"
"About what, my bathroom?"
"Yes. 2 more."
"What?"
"The bathroom. 1 more".
"Piece of crap... Ok, since the bathroom appears to be big, am I rich?"
"Well, I don't know your definition of rich, but it isn't your bathroom, so I can't really tell."
"What?, this is just a waste."
"Well, I didn't make you any promises, and it is not like you have anything to lose."
"Yeah, go ahead". (Maybe I am on TV - but how am I seeing these thing?)
I'm pissed off - I have important walking to do - and I am not prepared for the next image and only see it for a split second. It is of a person, sitting across from me in a restaurant. I can't tell if they are male of female, but they are smiling. My glance at the image makes it seem blurry to me, but the smile is front and center, and very clear.
"Who is that?"
"A friend".
"What age am I in this picture?"
"You are 35".
"Wow". For some reason this answer hits me like a ton of bricks. I had never really thought of what I would be doing that far from now. It is very strange to think of my future self. What am I like? Who am I? What do I look like? I am suddenly very afraid. There is so much that could happen to me.
"Am I ok then?"
He sort of gives me a weird look and then says: "Of course you are. I can only tell you what was in the picture, but you seem to be having a good time, and your friend is too. You know, that was a waste of a question, dumbass."
"Ok." (This is a lot to process. Shouldn't this be making me feel better? Did he just call me a dumbass? Am I on TV? Is his tongue really yellow?)
The next image is of a girl, a strikingly cute one, standing in front of me with one hand on her hip, the other one raised in an effort to get me to look at something off to the right. I don't - thank god-, and I am left staring at her profile and the way her hair is tucked behind her ears. She is maybe 17 - I am really bad at guessing ages - but she is very pretty.
The image disappears and I am left wondering. Who is this girl? I seem to be enthralled with her in some way - we are close enough to argue it appears. Then a very scary thought enters my head.
"Is my wife going to leave me?"
"No."
"Am I old at this time?"
"Yes."
(Crap, should have asked how old.)
"Well, then who is the girl?"
"Your daughter".
"My daughter?"
"3 questions only please."
Everything suddenly falls into place. I have a daughter. I am ok, and we are ok. Of course she was striking, she takes after her mother. I am breathe out slowly, I feel my hands tingle and I stretch my arms out in front of me and look past them to me legs.
I start to walk home. My companion goes back to hide in the bushes.
01:25 PMJanuary 16, 2003
Footprints
One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to him and the other to the Lord. When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life.
So in his dream he asked the Lord about it.
"Why are there only one set of footprints during my hardest times?"
"Those are your footprints; I was flying around during those times."
"Flying?.... Flying Jesus?"
"Yes. But the flying is a little redundant anyway; you wouldn't say Flying Superman would you? It is assumed that I can fly - I am Jesus Christ, I can do anything."
"Why were you flying above me during those times when I needed you the most?"
"Why do you assume that I wasn't helping you? Just because I was flying around doesn't mean I wasn't helping you. I can help you from anywhere. I multitask; I am Jesus Christ."
"Why weren't you flying around during the good times, but only the bad?"
"Well, to be honest you are sort of a dick when you are going through bad times and you tend to be a jerk to people for no reason. I like to not see your face so much when you are like that. I put some much work into you that when you are happy I like to be there then though."
"Did you just say di..."
"Dick? Yes. Oh, here we go."
"But you are Jesus, you can't cuss"
"The word dick is of the earth - just like asshole, fuck, shit, bitch, etc. They are simply words that you people have decided (without my intervention) are bad. Most, like dick, bad because they were used by a particular group of people that the majority didn't like. So if you said them then you were like the oppressed minority and so they were bad to say."
"But in the bible.."
"That is something completely different. When a group of people took over another group destroying their civilization they also took in small bits of their culture including some of their vocabulary. But some cultures were so against other groups that they thought that they could decide what you should and should not say, so they decided that words from them were evil and should not be said."
"Ok, that makes sense, but what about not cursing and not taking the Lord's name in vain..."
"Well, that pisses me off big time. "
"Which one?"
"Well I don't like it when people say goddamn or go to hell because those are orders and I don't like you guys bossing me around. I also don't like it when people say Jesus Fucking Christ because it sounds to me like Bob Fucking Robert (if your name was Bob) and I don't like the sound of that at all."
"So you are against faggots?"
"Well, now that is another term that I am not quite fond of. It is similar in some ways to nigger, which I don't like either. Here is why. All words mean nothing. Study a different language and you will learn this. You will also learn that all words mean everything; they have complex meanings that cannot be defined even by the people who understand them the best and use them everyday. Words like faggot and nigger are said during violent acts against fellow humans. They cause real pain to people even when they aren't followed up by violence."
"Well in that case don't words like asshole hurt to? I mean there are people who can be offended by words like this if they aren't used to them then they sound very harsh and can hurt."
"Very good. This is true. You see I don't really care what people say but what they mean by it and what other people think that they mean. If you says Jesus Christ when you stub your toe I don't really mind because you probably aren't really meaning it. When you say Jesus Christ when your car hydroplanes I listen."
"This has been very enlightening."
"Well, I am Jesus. That is sort of part of my job description."
"Can you create a rock too big for you to lift?"
"Salamanders"
"What?"
"Words don't mean anything. Didn't I just tell you that? It doesn't matter what I say. It matters what I do."
"Umm.. So if you wanted to create a rock that you couldn't lift then you could otherwise you couldn't or wouldn't create it, right?"
"I don't think that you are understanding this at all."
"Well then if you can't do anything with talk then tell me how I can see your actions."
"Well, first of all they have nothing to do with rocks. You guys are so tied up in the physical it is amazing. The rock thing is not my favorite form of mental masturbation that you guys do. My favorite is your idea of heaven. I once heard this sunday school class talk about whether or not a crack addict's heaven would be a room full of crack for all eternity. Amazing, like twenty minutes worth."
"Well?"
"Well what? I told you, it has nothing to do with crack rocks."
"Very funny"
"What? You didn't expect Jesus to be funny? Who do you think invented humor anyway? Do you think it evolved?"
"Well, I haven't really thought of that. I just thought that humor is just part of us. In-born. Fish don't have senses of humor. Or maybe we learn it. Some families are just funny because the parents have a sense of humor while other people just don't laugh much."
"Physical again all over. Genetics or environment. Both of those are so physical it makes me want to teach you how to fly just to show you. What are you thinking right now?"
"What do you mean. Don't you know?"
"I do, but the point is that you don't. When I said I was going to teach you to fly you got all excited about what it would feel like to see everything from above, to feel the wind. Then you thought about how it would be cool to be the only person who had ever flown. This made you proud and then you thought about how you are talking to Jesus and how people aren't going to believe this - pride. Just a complex form of physical pleasure. Physical, physical, physical."
"Wow."
"Why are you so amazed? No physical explanation. No computer wire between you and me. You are so hard-wired to think about things empirically that you can't even imagine the fact that right now you are back at home dreaming in your bed unless you imagine time passing. But it isn't. I just took you away and talked to you for ten minutes, but when you physically return no time will have passed. Sounds like bullshit doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"Well, there you go. "
"Are you saying that the talk is over?"
"Well pretty much, you only have one question left to ask me."
"No I don't... Oh! What is the meaning of life?"
"Salamanders."
"What?... You have-"
"Just kidding. Man you are quick to get angry aren't you? Listen very closely as this applies to you especially."
"Ok."
"Be nice to people."
"That's it!"
"That's a lot! I, Jesus Christ, just told you to be nice to people and you are yelling at Me, the Son of God approximately .8 seconds after I told you how to live the rest of your life."
"Oh. Sorry. Are you mad?"
"I don't get mad, I can't. That is the point. I can do anything I want - from simply destroying the world to tripping random joggers to turning up the volume on pain. But I don't."
"But what about floods and earthquakes?"
"Rocks."
"So what do you do exactly?"
"Well that is what you will spend the rest of your life doing."
"Oh. Not very comforting."
"Oh, I'm comforting, but you asked."
"Ok. Well, thanks. "
"See you later. Hehe."
"Why do you laugh?"
"Inside joke. Wouldn't it be silly to tell your jogging partner see you later as you ran beside him on the first lap? Hehe!"
January 15, 2003
The end
"You know this is it for me" he said in between spitting out a little of the large chunk of tobacco that he had stuck between his inner bottom lip and front teeth onto the concrete floor of the auditorium.
We were trying to listen to the speech, trying to give the guy a break. After all it is pretty hard to speak in front of three thousand people who are older than you mostly about the significance of an event that they have already done and that you are doing: you don't know what the fuck you are talking about and everyone knows it.
He had placed the tobacco there while we were lined up behind the bleachers. Well, while we were lining up - there had been some confusion as to where everyone was supposed to be since most people just remembered who was in front of them and a few people either hadn't been at the rehearsal or hadn't shown up for the real thing. So we had a bunch of groups of people who were in order but the groups were all out of order. After a couple of minutes of a few people taking charge and figuring this out he had simply yelled down the row "Everybody just fucking ask the person in front and behind you what their damn name is and keep moving up or back until it is fucking right" and then turned to me and grabbed my little honors tassle gently between his thumb and index finger and said "See, we don't need none of this bullshit to do this". Bubble sort, parallel processing, complex adaptive systems. Looking back on it he was drunk but I didn't know it at the time not knowing what drunk people act like when they have managed to cover up all the obvious things like speech and smell and walk. After all this takes practice and you don't come across very many of this level when you are that young.
"Yeah" I said, not knowing what to say this is always what I said.
"Yeah" he replied with a little grin and then quickly turned away from me and looked out into the audience.
03:05 PMJanuary 07, 2003
Stories beginning with 'who'
who she thinks to herself, the one and only question, the smallest question and the biggest echoing in her head as she stares out the window again. It was a very big deal for her to get the office with the window, the two windows; it is a big prestige thing but all it seems to have done is completely alienate her from everybody else as if she didn't have enough of that as is. She has tried all the configurations of her office, even drawing little charts that map out where her desk will go and where the electric outlets are and other design constraints - she has spent hours on this, weeks - all in an effort to avoid staring out the window so much. She likes to stay in her office during lunch and look down from there, it is the only time when she does it and doesn't feel guilty about doing it. It only takes about five minutes for her to eat her little sandwich because she eats it as fast as she can, not wanting the little terribly sad memory of her alone in the apartment making a week's worth of sandwiches to ruin an otherwise good lunchbreak. She used to get sad towards the end of the week, but now she makes three new ones every Wednesday and then four new ones every Friday so that they aren't so alone. Every once in awhile she wishes she had binoculars or a telescope, but maybe that would ruin the point - she is so high up here and she can't really make out people's faces anyway from here - of watching them move along in their little groups and making up stories about them. You would think that it would make her sad, but it is the opposite, she takes comfort in how very few of them walk in groups. Maybe she wants binoculars to look onto the other buildings and see other watchers eating their sandwiches by the window.
who's there? She is awake now and terrified. She could feel someone staring at her while she slept, she could see a figure next to her bed. The returning silence is almost too much for her to bear and she scrambles for the lamp and sees her laundry basket staring at her from the foot of the bed. She should have gotten a smaller apartment she thinks to herself as she cuts on the TV. The amazing thing is that the burgular was able to to move it into place without waking her.
who did you expect, fucking hulk hogan? And then I suddenly realized that this was who I wanted her to be.
09:28 PMStories beginning with 'how'
How can I do this?
More people are killed each year by goats than by airplane crashes.
He is repeating this over and over in his head as he streches out on the pleather seat at the terminal. He is so scared, so completely helpless that he has gotten sleepy, like his body has just given up all hope of survival and shut off, and he is trying to milk it. Maybe he can actually fall asleep and then when he is awaken rudely by the announcement he can just board the plane in a daze and not worry about his life being in other peoples hands - people who used to crap their own pants, who masturbate, who make mistakes. He thinks about plane designers sitting in cubicles drinking coffee and looking at internet porn and shudders.
The announcement comes. Now boarding. Jesus. This is it. He gets up and gets in line without even thinking; cows to the slaughterhouse. He feels stupid and irrational, everybody else is fine, reading their papers and wishing they were just home. I mean if they were afraid of the bus ride to the terminal then he would think they were crazy, wouldn't he?
More people die each year in car accidents than in airplane crashes.
But that doesn't include buses. And that goat stat can't be right because it is international, how many people come into contact with goats? All over the world probably millions. Planes, probably millions, but not the same set, so it really doesn't make a lot of sense. I am in the set of people who fly in planes, so I have a better chance of dying in a plane crash than being stabbed to death by a goat. Have I ever even seen a goat in person, in animal, in real life? That car stat could be the same thing, how do they do these studies, just compare numbers of deaths? Mother-fucking interns comparing numbers, what a life. My whole life, my contentment at this moment controlled by people drinking coffee wishing they were somewhere else.
Boarding time. Takes his seat away from the window, careful to not even look to see if he is near a wing because it shakes and then he can't stop sweating and grabbing the seat in front of him. He tries to relax and leans his head down. The seat to his right is empty and a business man is asleep already leaned up against the, thank god, closed window. Happy place. His fear is so strong now that he doesn't even look up or around, just stares blankly at the seat in front of him and awaits it. He hears a sound to the right of him and turns. Somebody wants to sit down but his elbow is in their seat. It is a nice looking older man with a goat on a rope leash.
How in the hell did I get here he thinks to himself, clutching the map and trying hard to see without his inside light. Damned old car, no heat and no light - the only two things that he needs right now. I always do stuff like this don't I? Where is the hotel, this town is so small it seems like only an idiot would get lost. Or is it could get lost. Well, obviously I could and would get lost. Aren't they sort of another tense of can and will: could and would. I can get lost and I will get lost. But in the future, the unknown, since I am a fool I could get lost, and I would get lost, knowing me.
"How do you explain this?" the attorney says as he whips out a manila folder full of pictures of the victim with the accused when they were younger. This flies in the face of his claim that he has never met her and just happened to be walking by her apartment near the time of the crime. This is one of those Matlock moments about six or seven minutes before the end of the hour when everything falls into place that are so very rare in actual trials and instead of furiously writing down the details so that he can do an proper write-up later, he is captivated by the thought that there may in fact be Doritos in the vending machine near the smoking lounge.
09:27 PMRoutine
On the day that she died Sally spent a full fifteen minutes tying her shoelaces. Recently she had developed this thing where she had to get them just right before she could go outside and so she retied the left one three times and the right one eight times before she felt that they were even in tightness and overall comfort. She then stood up, grabbed her bag, threw it over her shoulder, and walked out the door - this shoe business being the last item in her routine.
09:26 PMRelease
As he began pissing into the water fountain he took a moment to reflect about what had brought him to this point - pissing in the company water fountain at three in the morning. Pissing is often a reflective time, and this was not an exception. It can also be said that pissing anywhere at three in the morning on a Friday night is an ideal time for rumination.
Pissing in a public place, such as a company water fountain in the main hallway, is normally an act of desperation or revenge and you would expect him to be thinking about how miserable his life is, how lonely he is, how his job drains him of his essence, or how he has no purpose, but he was mainly thinking about how he got there. He remembers being frustrated and getting up to get a drink. He had no change. He then went to his car - completely on the other side of the now empty lot - to get some change and as he pushed the key against the lock the little piece of plastic around the top of his key, the part that holds it on the key chain, broke and fell on the ground. He then walked calmly to the fountain and began pissing. After he was done he sort of mentally giggled about how he felt much more refreshed at having produced liquid instead of consuming it. He then went back to his desk and continued working.
09:24 PMJanuary 06, 2003
Lessons learned
What I learned on my vacation
- There is a gas station between Mobile and Montgomery that is a good forty miles away from any competition. In this gas station they have a sign that says that they are looking for help:
Help wanted
must work nights
must work week-ends.
must have car.Absent from this list is a secret requirement that is absolutely essential to getting the job; you must be a Christian to even think about working there.
- Some people spend a large part of their lives worrying about things instead of beings.
- Very large casinos pay for the air travel, food, and lodging for people who gamble a lot. They do this because it makes economic sense.
- Families can destroy each other. By the simple act of holding on to pride or the belief that your children must act like you wish them to as adults, parents can rob themselves of the gift of sharing their adult lives with those of their children. Children can be robbed of the gift of wisdom from parents through the continued application of stubborn will. This is all made worse by the fact that families, by being so close, can hurt like no one else.
December 06, 2002
Coffee shop
On his way back from a refill of coffee he accidentally sits down at the wrong table. Since he has his book with him he doesn't really notice but after sitting there for about thirty seconds reading he gets an idea and looks up to find his laptop is on the wrong table and has been replaced by a young purple-haired girl who is hunched over a small journal writing furiously with a very large caligraphy pen, which only allows her room for about two words per page so she is constantly turning the page to write. She does this with one hand, the other holds the pen out still pointing in, waiting for the clean page to appear. He stares at her too long and she looks up.
"Hi."
"Isn't that your table?"
"What are you writing about?" he says while taking a slow sip of coffee even though it is much too hot, really only touching the cup to his lips.
"Nothing to do with you asshole" she says and gives him her best 'I am a pycho' stare until he gets up and leaves.
"Can I ask you a logistical question?" he says upon arriving at his destination, which suddenly seems almost comically close to her's whereas a minute ago they didn't even notice each other. "How much money do you spend a month on those little journals, you must go through like two a day the way you are writing about me".
"I use disappearing ink, and I am not -"
"Ok, that is all I wanted to know, nice talking to you."
She rolls her eyes and hurries to replace 'cute guy' with 'world-class prick' before the ink fades.
November 14, 2002
what
Whatever do you mean she says softly over her shoulder while at the same time realizing that it sounds very english-butler of her to say and not at all natural for her but in this case caught in an obvious lie she suddenly feels very formal like this is an event, a performance that she must get up for because she has known that it will happen one day and she supposes that she has been mock rehearsing it in her head, analyzing and traversing the various paths that the conversation can take and creating little scripts in her head, memorizing her lines without realizing it but now she has failed completely on her first line because she never thought about how the performance would start and so he will know now and all is lost.
What the hell are you talking about anyway he says to himself as he braces himself for the sudden but expected stop of the train. He is quite tired and his mind was wondering, random firings after a day of very structured and disciplined thinking or at least the perception of such brought about by intense concentration and very fast context switching to avoid daydreaming - hours upon hours of thinking about the same thing, the same domain, the same realm of thought, a vast list of problems and possibilities that he traversed one by one and analyzed systematically - his mind so preoccupied or at least the top of it, the visible part to him, the concious, controllable - but after that was over his mind was wandering without his control and this is when the thought came to him and expanded into a thousand possibilities unfolding all the advantages systematically like it was used to, he could travel then, he could go to Asia, well maybe to California at least, and how he could be anything he wanted for real this time, you know like his parents had said once and he wouldn't be caught his foot on the track of normality. By the time he got through the doors of the train he had his thoughts back under control, wrestled to the ground by the thought of her.
What in the world is that guy doing she thought out loud to herself and was suddenly embarrassed and glanced around only to see that no one was looking at her or even at him even though he lay there right outside the window picking at it systematically lost in the sheer concentration of it. Looking around she saw everybody else was looking straight ahead, but that was where he was - straight ahead - only they looked at various angles so that they weren't looking at him but at the tree behind him or at people walking by or the building across the street, between hurried bites of salad and chicken. They were acting like they didn't see him just like a moment ago when the motorcycles went by and filled this place with sheer sound and nobody looked up from their papers - reading one sentence between each bite but mainly just looking at the pictures - even as the place shook and the blood rushed to her face and she thought that they were going to crash right through the window - who would look up then - and she glanced around and saw that nobody was doing anything different and suddenly felt like an idiot and that she was the loud sound. She glanced back over at him and saw that he had stopped picking at it now but it was bleeding a little or was that blood it didn't look the same color as her's but instead was a little darker or maybe that was just because she was looking through the window and out past the sidewalk and maybe her view was just distorted some or maybe a lot and now he was just staring ahead at the sidewalk maybe he was counting cracks and studying their shapes maybe he saw them as parabolas and important metrics, jagged edges crawling up the sky of profitability, numbers from clever market segment analysis, maybe he used to be very successful with a big family too but something had happened to him, no, no, he had happened to someone, he had done something wrong and he had hurt somebody and this was just how it was that was better much better and now she turned her head back to her purse which she held with both hands in her lap, the strap wrapped around her wrist, and checked to make sure that her jacket was still on the back of her chair that it hadn't been taken because that is what happens around places like this and you must rely on the advice of experienced friends in new situations like this one. She saw that she hadn't even started her salad yet, she hoped that he got here soon so that she could stop feeling like this.
What the fuck is that he says and looks up over the row of two-story shops and sees through the clouds a large plane banking sharply turning to the airport not a commercial but a military one he had never really seen one like it it was a little scary looking not the sort of thing you would want to see in wartime not a good sight for our enemies he thought but that did not make him feel better while the sound still shook his body and he realized that he had stood on this street a thousand times and never looked up at all so if he were deaf then he never would have during his entire life so then he looked down just to make sure but maybe he shouldn't look new places if this was the kind of shit he was going to see and have to think about and so he kept walking, switching his bags to his left hand.
02:51 AMNovember 05, 2002
Starfucked
There is this woman who I have seen at the coffeshop every single time I have been in there over the last half-year that frightens me beyond belief. Here are the facts I have gathered about her private-investigator-style:
- She is a nurse at a nearby hospital.
- She is married.
- She visits the place everyday, including the weekend.
- She is there so frequently that she restocks the napkins and straws without asking the employees where the extras are in the storage room (which is behind the counter).
- She talks to the employees by name and asks after their children.
- She frequently compliments them on how they fix her drink (more in a moment about this travesty of self-control) the right way unlike the other shop that messes it up and tries to charge her extra.
- She is a coffee whore.
- She scares me.
Now, about her drink. She orders 2 very large frozen cappuccino drinks with extra caramel sauce and three shots of espresso. They are apparently both for her and she comes in at least once a day everyday because she knows the employees (dealers) work shifts ("Hi, Sandy, so you have started working Tuesday close, is that because you are taking that class in the morning this semester?"). Combined I would say these drinks are probably 80 ounces of caffeine milkshakes that have her kidneys the size of raisins (or marbilized watermelons) by the time she is done. To you non-users this is equivalent on the Berkeley Slow Self-Destruction Scale (TM) to six cups of coffee, two very large milkshakes, and three tablespoons of whip cream.
The people behind the counter fix her drink quickly (rule number one: do not keep the addict waiting) and avoid eye contact and participation in her smalltalk monologue. I think that they do this for fear of being caught fixing such a blatantly pornographic drink; "Perhaps this is a federal crime", they say to themselves as they rush through pouring nearly two blenders full of the brown goo into the bucket-like plastic cups, which strain under the weight of the extra sauce ("We were not designed for this level of density!" they scream). "I am so going to get fired for this shit", they say to themselves while using the napkin as a glove in a vain attempt to not get fingerprints on the cups.
The reason she scares me is not the fact that she is me taken to a logical extreme (I am currently a CHIT, Coffee-Whore in Training) but the fact that she has said repeatedly that this is the only strain she drinks and I know that they aren't open all the time. There have to be days when she doesn't quite make it in time, or they are closed unexpectedly and the coffee-whore goes on a massive violent rampage, running into grocery stores and snorting coffee grinds through a little red sifter all the while gasping for air screaming "Charge me extra for this, bitch!" through mouthfuls of coffee powder and foam.
02:05 AM