Preview of Coming Attractions

“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents+lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal”

-Susan Sontag Reborn:Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963

From Darryl Pinckney’s The Book of Lists: Susan Sontag’s Early Journals. The New Yorker Magazine. Dec 22 &29 2008.

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A public online journal cannot be a journal. It offers another layer of protection to the writer. Safety from documenting his/her true thoughts.  It is another excuse to put on a show, albeit, one that is viewed one step removed, by bodies in different rooms and eyes in different time zones.

This separation blurs the lines dividing public and private, but does not erase them entirely.

The author feels a release because his/her deepest thoughts are on the page and someone far away, at some later date, will read them.

Having a public journal online is a direct fulfillment of the exhibitionism Sontag spoke of in her journal (which was in turn discovered, read by others, bound, scrubbed, and sold in Barnes and Noble). Perhaps having a public journal online is a simpler, more direct way to get that hit of perversity, the need to show ourselves to anyone who cares to take precious seconds out of their day to look. Instant reverse voyeurism. I love thinking about people watching me and my most personal of writings.

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But then, I return to my first paragraph. Can you explore the depths of your writing if you know someone else knows you’re exploring it? It’s like toning down the swaying of my body when I play the piano in front of someone versus when I play it alone.  Does self-conscious rule the day with my public diary?

Before, I didn’t think that was the case, I thought the writing was fairly unadulterated. But now, I’m sensing that might not be entirely true.

No more safety nets.

Stop if you think that you’ve heard this one before Nothing’s changed, I still love you oh I still love you Only slightly only slightly less than I used to, my love.

“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment”- Thoreau

Without a sound, the boy sets his coffee cup on the counter. He touches the near bottom edge to the brown speckled linoleum and inch by inch, rolls the ceramic rim to a balanced rest. No one else is in the house, but it doesn’t seem right to make any noise.

The squiggly cartoon on one side of the coffee mug is an illustration of cows- scientific name Bos taurus-situated in a sterotypical office with confused expressions on their faces. The office is messy. Staplers appear as aimlessly situated on the desks as the transients on Fairmount Park benches.  The vagabond staplers wear jackets of forgotten manilla folders. Pieces of paper dance about in the air around the eye level of the cows. Phones lay without anchor.Pens and pencils sit on the tables and floors like demagnetized compasses. There is one intelligent appearing bovine in the middle of the chaos. He is looking out at the coffee drinker with a faraway, cynical expression. The caption reads: “It was utter chaos”

The boy forces himself to break into a wild, maniac grin. He imagines he is Alex from A Clockword Orange, his right eye is painted and he stares out into the camera. Today, the camera is a giant paper menorah sent by his mother for last year’s Hanukkah. It is a clip art candelabra. It says: “my fire burns for you these 8 crazy nights.” The stock illustration shows 10 candles.

The camera, the clipart menorah, stares back at the boy. Son, you are so very special and talented. He can hear his mother’s voice in the camera/menorah card. He flashes back to sitting on the plane, flying to see his mother the summer after his junior year in college. He is moving home. His shiny forehead struggles to crane past the sheen, mats of hair between it and the airplane porthole. If he jacknifes his body, wedging the buckled seatbelt into his hairy lower abdomen-the captain has illuminated the seatbelt sign, if you are up and about the cabin, please return to your seats- he can see between the waxen heads to the flaring candles of his hometown below.

He always feels such pride when he can pick landmarks from a plane at night. Pride at seeing the park where he goes running, and the intersection where he made a left turn at his drivers test, and the cookie-cutter housing development with the house with the bedroom where he was first totally naked with a girl. He can see these from the plane and he can see them from the ground level in his mind’s eye. Each scene washes over him and as if dancing underwater, the moments blur, recede, reorient, and rematerialize. Like trying to focus on a single leaf in a forest, the boy has trouble capturing a solitary still mental photograph. The bright blues of the Southern California sky mix with the hard, gray, steaming asphalt of suburbia. The adobe colored mansions, pale and blinding, reflect the woody azalea bushes. The paranoid streetlamps rush overhead as he runs stop signs at 2:30am.   Scrambling up the, green, hot, iceplant covered hillside of his high school to the walk home. Making out late at night in his mauve Honda with the purple speckled interior. Smoking rooms, rooms on fire. Movies and shouting. There are too many of them and eventually, gradually, the images combine until he sees a layered still-wet moving watercolor painting of his life. The white edges are subsumed in the frenetic colors.

But he is not proud this time, this time he is running away.

The window reveals  a thick, opaque carpet of murk holding tiny stars of living.  It tumbles out in front of him as he is moving just below the speed of sound. The boy wonders and dreams if the carpet would be soft and forgiving if he fell out of the airplane. The blackness always looks like it would.

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When I was young, you were good at everything. You were always lucky and talented.  It was terrible. I couldn’t stand it. I desperately wanted you to fail. Board games, soccer games, conversations, anything. I wanted you to lose. It would give me such pleasure knowing you might lose.

His brother’s words echo in his ear. He silently closes the cupboard, careful to permit the magnetized latches to gratefully reunite with little violence. He feels slightly sick after spooning a breakfast of raisins and coffee into the bottom of his stomach. He resists the urge to flush this meal with anything more nourishing. The boy drags his bookbag, laden with clothing and books that he won’t wear or read in day to come, to his shoulder. He is mindful not to turn his back to camera/paper menorah as he leaves, after all he must perform for it once again tomorrow.

Update: She would never date someone like me.

I am right, lonely.

Surprise! Romantic Comedies cause problems in relationships.

“The big Mouseketeer has appeared….

…..Jimmie, a grown man who wears circular black ears. Rabbit watches him attentively; he respects him. He expects to learn something from him helpful in his own line of work, which is demonstrating a kitchen gadget in several five-and-dime stores around Brewer. He’s had the job for four weeks. “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,” Jimmie sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, ” proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to bee-better-Mouse-ke-teers.”

Jimmie sets aside his smile and guitar and says straight out through the glass, “Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn’t want a tree to be a waterfall or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent.” Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty. “God wants some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That’s the way to be happy.” He pinches his mouth together and winks.

That was good. Rabbit tries it, pinching the mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some enemy behind, Walt Disney or the MagiPeel Peeler Company, admitting it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, making it likable. We’re all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy. Vitaconomy, the modern housewife’s password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method.

Janice gets up and turns off the set when the six-o’clock news tries to come on. The little hard star left by the current slowly dies. “

From John Updike’s Rabbit, Run

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A 12/14/08 Postsecret

Listings

The first thing the boy notices is the sofa.

It is austere-without cushioning or frills-and appears to be somewhat truncated. Visions radiate through the boy’s brain of the therapist purchasing the sofa secondhand from a cadre of midget zen buddhists. The boy imagines the buddhists living in the Lancaster hills, making jam and growing organic food alongside the Omish. He imagines the organic preserves market can’t be doing too well these days (it is a luxury good after all, you can always just put smuckers on your seven grain toast) and he imagines the midget buddhists having to pawn everything they own to buy their tiny lotus flowers. The sofa is mauve.

There is a Native American design cheaply embossed on the covering; the boy wonders if it’s an authentic design and if so, could he recognize the tribe of ancestry? He makes a mental note to study up on Native American art when he gets back to his work computer. The reminder is immediately added to his cerebral list of things he probably won’t do or have time for. It falls somewhere in between memorizing the constellations and origins behind their naming and learning how to play the harp. None of these things he will ever do. But each time he thinks how he can’t play the harp and won’t learn about Native American art, he is seized with a general panic and a sense of inadequacy. Just the thought of this imaginary agenda, without glancing at any of its contents, fills him with regret for time wasted. It is a crippling feeling of bones a day more brittle and skin a day more wrinkled.

And yet, he can’t stop adding to his mental tabulation of things he won’t ever do or have time for. The mere act of accounting his future failures allows for the slightest shot of sweet, unadulterated guilt. The list is his plunger and needle, any addition to it is the purest of narcotics. It is available anywhere. On his bike, riding down side streets. Staggering back from the bar, heady and blind.

The guilt can briefly absorb him and he has an excuse to regret. To remember and shudder. He has never found something as indulgent and consuming. His twisted logic

And even better, when he is released from arms of guilt, the sensation sticks around, like a plastic spoon dipped in peanut butter, washed, and then reused to ladle his  tomato soup. He his aware of that dissonant flavor of peanuts and salt against the sweet, tangy broth. He can remember what the spoon was just used for, and savor it; even though it does not fit.

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But he tables these thoughts as the therapist asks the boy why he has chosen to come to his office on a blustery winter day. The boy can see the American flag whip and flutter helplessly out the window opposite his position. The pulleys make a hypnotic clang on the pole. The office is warm and sleepy and red. The therapist is sitting in a sticky pleather chair across from the doppleganger lounger in which he himself is sitting. The sofa sits vacant on the south end of the office, the imagines asking if he can just give it a test lay.

He delays verbalizing all these thoughts because he fears he won’t be able to verbalize them coherently at this moment- at this moment the boy needs the therapist’s approval more than his help.

For now the boy will talk about his father and his job and his goals. He can always wax beautifully on those topics. He can share just enough to uncover a sliver of insight. The boy has mastered an incredibly effective miming of the Titanic sinking ice flotillas of the North Atlantic. He can peek over the surface to give the appearance of hiding an immensely complicated berg underwater. Yet, this is where the similarities end. There is nothing complex or changing or impressive underneath, certainly not enough to drown a luxury liner. But the therapist isn’t smart enough to see this and he’s the only one who’s authorization matters.

And the therapist will gladly hand this over, he knows this is all the boy wants from him. In return he receives money for his lunch and his wife and his mistress. He hopes the boy isn’t smart enough to figure it out.

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And eventually the boy will figure it out, but first, he will continue to puzzle over why the therapist decided to purchase such an uncomfortably short, uncomfortably ugly, uncomfortable sofa.

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His eyes are desperate crimson saucers, streaked from looking at the computer for far too long. He knows he has it much better than most, but can’t bring himself to recognize that for too long. He only writes when he is troubled and slightly irritated. His inspirations come only when he has a grudge to bear.

His brown suede coat is still streaked with the large dollop droplets of rain from last night. He wonders if the coat is ruined and his mind jumps into panic mode when he thinks about attempting to buy a new coat.

A whole Saturday, in January or perhaps February, wasted.

Wait, he tells himself, let’s not be too hasty. Sure he can’t wear the coat to black-tie functions anymore-not that he ever could, mind you-but he can still wear it out and about. It’s vintage and hip and has cred. Perhaps if he wraps himself in a coat embodying these adjectives, onlookers will simply identify the descriptors and him as one and the same. Yes, hopefully that’s it.

At least he has his looks.

He wheels from the coat to the computer screen once again. He traces the edges of her face with the cursor. He highlights the picture. Then clicks aimlessly around it. He sits at his computer and pines and fantasizes after a picture of someone he knew yesterday and thinks about how there is nowhere else in the world he’d like to be, sitting at his desk clicking at her photo and daydreaming.

It’s the easiest thing for him to do, and feels the safest and the most comforting. It’s like gently easing down on the edge of the bed, putting his feet up, and falling back asleep after he’s already gotten up, taken a shower, shaved, tied his tie, and bundled up for the winter cold.

He makes a note to write this down later in his blog. It seems like a terribly important, slow moment. Full of gravitas, yes. He’s stopped time by momentarily losing track of it.

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The dark-skinned chin jut out and the thin lips press together with the purity and the swagger of upper middle class youthful luster. The pose is simple and entirely for the camera. He wonders what she is thinking at the time the photo is snapped. Is she thinking about how she’ll look when the picture appears online? Is she perhaps thinking about making a different face? It is a lovely face, but a little stilted. There is poise and tenderness and regret. Yes, she is thinking of making a different face to hide that gnawing regret.

A simple wide-eyed pose, ears pinned back, teeth bared, eye whites gleaming off the fluorescent lights. That’d do the trick. Everyone looks the same when they make that face.

And yet, she can’t make these calculations fast enough and is left with a slightly pensive pose. Vulnerable but barbed with bitterness in her inability to make an unreadable, bulletproof face for the camera.

Indeed, later she’ll scold herself for not only realizing the weaknesses but for allowing them to erupt so suddenly on the creases on her forehead and in the tilt of her eyebrows like rapidly blooming Morning Glories.

But no matter. She will take more pictures. She’ll take as many as she can before she becomes old. She’ll take as many as she can before the deeply rutted emotions hit clay and become a permanent fixture on her face and deep inside of her. Oceans of rainwater will not take them away. Each day sees them mindlessly plowed a little deeper. Eventually, she’ll be unable to dig herself out of the holes and the best efforts of time and nuture and positive attitudes and willingness to change will be useless and she’ll have to live with the track marks.

She donates a moment and questions if those trenches will remain arable in old age. The soil is gritty and uneven now, but still redeemable with a little work. When does it turn poisonous.?

She banishes the thought from her mind. She has her looks now.

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He swivels in his chair and looks out the dark windows. He thinks of his own neatly manicured facial furrows and wonders if they reveal too much in his own pictures. He then wonders if someone else is tracing his own face with their cursor.

The feeling that there is someone behind him, or just down the hall in the deserted office overwhelms him. He shuts off his music and peers around the corner, just to make sure. The tracked carpet, littered with leftover carcasses from the violence of the hole-puncher lays a neat trail from his office to the copy room. He will be asked tomorrow morning to pick it up.

Looking at his watch, he knows it’s time to go to the gym and perform the nightly group ritual of intimidation of other scantily clad members of his approximate age group. He feels particularly menacing at this moment. Women love that, while other guys hate it, which makes women love him even more. He traces her photo affectionately with this cursor once more but it is more out of habit rather than reluctance to go. He has already excused himself and is thinking about sizing up the rest of his competitors. His place at his table for one, with her picture, will be reserved for him when he returns to his laptop.

December 3rd-4th edition: Dreamings

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
the unequal moieties fractured
by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother’s richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
even to bear our cry of ‘Judas’,
as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother’s richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
even to bear our cry of ‘Judas’,
as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

From In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W.H. Auden

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I’m playing a game of soccer with no discernible end, beginnning, or score. The match appears to be full-field, 11 on 11. There are people in the stands watching, but it seems their chief interest is in fighting with each other.

Of the 22 players on the field, I am the only one who is not a zombie.

Intermittently, a zombie- either on my own team or the opposing side- will try to take a chunk out of my arm or neck. They try, but I somehow successfully fend off any undead related injuries or drainage of precious bodily fluids.

After repelling the attack, I continue to play soccer with the zombies. They all seem surprisingly nimble for laying underground for what I can only assume is a number of years. In fact, all of them are better players than I am. I’m hapless. Zombie eyes of disapproval hover throughout the game as I keep making the wrong pass, guarding the wrong man, and generally tripping over my own feet.

I’m terribly frightened. But the fear stems not from being eaten. There is an effortlessness in my struggles to remain unbitten and unchanged. I’m as serene and defenseless as a Hindu Cow. Only I’ve been suddenly uprooted from the Ganges and plunked down in a Nebraska processing plant. I’ve wittingly avoided the grinder so far, but I know eventually I’ll be swept up.

The soccer field is thick with fit, agile, athletic zombies. I’m resigned, not frightened, to eventually being bitten.

In fact, I’m terribly frightened of not playing well enough to the expectations of the reanimated corpses running around periodically attempting to eat my flesh.

I’m failing the zombies on my team. I’m an atrocious player, I’m worse than I ever remember being in high school. I’m terribly disappointed that I’m disappointing them.

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A conversation I had with a friend upon telling her my dream

“So the zombies weren’t playing by the rules?”

“Well, no, they technically were. They weren’t using their hands, or committing any illegal fouls” “They were actually much better players than me”

“They were trying to eat you at various moments” “How is that playing by the rules?”

“Point taken, but technically there isn’t a stipulation in the FIFA handbook discussing the permissibility of eating one’s own-or a member of the opposing-team. So they were, in fact, playing by all the rules of what we know as the game of soccer. I suppose if soccer’s world governing body had any sense, they’d have a meeting before the next World Cup devoted to this matter”

“Um….sorry I asked”

She would never date someone like me

It’s a typical family Thanksgiving weekend.

My mother and sister are laying on the bed watching the movie 27 dresses. They are swathed in 10 different blankets of varying sizes and stitchings because Mom always appreciates her lodgings to be cold. Not frigid, mind you, but just over the Mason-Dixon line that separates comfortable from chilling. She likes her thermostat set to Virginia rather than Alabama, as it were. And she always appreciates her blankets thick, but not too ample. It’s like her habit of returning coffee that is made too strong. She says she likes not fully being awake after the first cup thus giving her an excuse to go get more. I always silently think: “well why get terrible coffee if you don’t want to wake up! Just get tea!”

So as I was saying, it’s a typical Thanksgiving break.

Mother and sister curled up in one room watching a movie about weddings and true love. The movie is an unabashed Jane Austen pretender but replaces the cherished bits of hard realism and feminist independence Austen throws in each of her novels with scenes about as emotionally nutritious as cotton candy. I get up and see what Ben is doing.

Ben is alone on the couch in the living room, watching a direct-to-video Invasion of the Bodysnatchers influenced neoWestern based on a series of currently popular multiplayer computer games.

Apparently family time, in our household, means existing in the same general residential space as one another but interacting as little as possible. Whenever I inspect my family pictures, I always remember my mother’s herculean efforts to bring us to the same room for longer than 5 minutes. And the pictures are all posed because we were never just naturally residing in the same place.

But make no mistake, I am just as guilty. I’ve been working in the guest room on law school applications for the last hour and currently have open web browsers that A. discuss the merits of using federal funds to build high-speed trains B. consider the functionality of various low weight two-person alpine tents and C. weigh the pros and cons of the starting lineup for my Sunday fantasy football team.

So, I get frustrated. I am determined to spend some family time while on a vacation with my family. Even if it is spent settled around the numbing glow of the television, I figure it’s better than nothing.

I shrug off the sensation that maybe silent time gathered around the most banal of movies is worse than nothing, and sit on the foot of the bed, watching the movie with Mother and Sister.

I come in at a particularly awful portion of the film where the main character is hurriedly plowing through a monologue about how her one true love (wherever he may be) crystallizes happiness and dreams and how every woman will one day be a proud celebrity at her own wedding. If she is wistful and anxious and suffers enough, God is sure to deliver on that promise. Her man will come and complete her life. I sit and watch and feel slightly ill. The word “huckster” comes to mind. The words “insidious” “shameless” and “predatory” quickly follow.

I look over to both ladies and see they are both reveling in the afterglow of their silliness injection, so I refrain from making any particularly abrasive comments until the camera swings around to another flat, contrived character and the scene is over.

“Ahem” I exclaim

“I know the complexities of love and desire and fulfillment are much too intricate for a picture of this undertaking, but the general lack of nuance in this film is ridiculous!” “How can you like this stuff?”

I’m in for it now. I’ve killed their buzz.

Yet, this comment fails to instigate the outrage I expected in mom and sis. They calmly reply that they know the story is a farce and the characters are all schemed and scripted but they still believe every word of it anyway. They both give a smile of satisfaction.

I am beside myself. I immediately regret deserting the safety of the Internet and it’s agreeable viewpoints.

The viewmasters inside their brains are furiously clicking away through reels labeled: “wedding” and “vigorous knights in gleaming armor.”

I want to rouse them and. I can’t let this nonsense continue. I see my heartbroken sister in 10 years realizing that love doesn’t actually solve all your problems.

I can’t fathom how my 55 year old mother who hasn’t dated in twelve years and was divorced by the man she believed to be her true love when their children were 8, 5, and 3 could even think of furthering this vicious cycle of absurd, fairytale hope. And yet, she still expects: (to paraphrase a friend who was paraphrasing literature) “Mr Darcy to come knocking at the door.”

I wish I could understand it or explain it. But I can’t. And I am speechless. I can’t question the sanity of her approach. She is alone with her cats and she’s waiting for the gentleman with roses to come greet her.

And to rub it in she remarks to me: “You’ll feel the same way too one day, you just haven’t met the right girl.”

And then it hits me, for all my righteousness, I believe she is telling the truth. It is a streak of irrationality slicing through my brain like a forgotten railroad overgrown with grass from misuse. Upon hearing her comment, the train switches tracks with ease.

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I quietly think I should be shouting “Eureka” (ir if I was British: “By Jove!”) to announce my discovery, but I can’t let them notice my acknowledgment of her analysis. I outwardly deny the accusation, but my thoughts immediately turn to Her.

She is exactly what flashes through my mind when my mothers utters the words: right girl. The viewmaster in my head starts clicking through memory slides. I am furious for letting this happen.

I skulk away to go watch the movie with Ben.

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But I can’t get my mother’s comments out of my head. She is correct, though only partially. She believes the ache and the wanting and the helplessness is yet to occur. I know I already have it. Bad. And that’s why I should trust what my mother says. Just this once anyway.

While the tremors of machine gun noises and zombie moans erupt out of the surround sound speakers perched close to my left ear, I can’t help but think of my terrible realization.

I am unable to avoid this irrational shadow and now it consumes me. And I am aware my mother has always maintained I will be seized in this cosmic euphoria. It will drill into me and settle in my skull. A song will come on the radio and my mind is unable to settle on anything else, like a fly on a sticky trap.

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It’s like I’ve been living in a foreign country. I speak the language, I’m getting along ok. I trip up every now and then, but I’m passably fluent enough to function. It’s a rational life, normal and untextured. Dichromatic. Without gradation or unnecessary description because I lack the verbal faculties for either.

Being with Her is like suddenly stumbling across a traveler who speaks English. The thoughts I was unable to verbalize come pouring out. There is a comfort–a naturalness–because the language is ours. I would be fine the rest of my life speaking the alien language. I would have nothing to complain about. But I would never have that ability to shade and color and create. She gives me that power to distinguish and parse and tease. I remember a language I had long forgotten because of her. She is innate.

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I’ll be speaking with someone else and I’ll wonder what she is doing, or thinking about. Or who she is with.

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My sister later remarks that she would “never date someone as cynical as me.” And instead of returning verbal fire, I smile. Someday I’ll tell her.

Perhaps it’s not a typical Thanksgiving break.