The ReversalAfter many years of focused self-loathing I have reversed the flow of hatred and entered into a lengthy phase of purifying misanthropy. I fear and hate other humans: their innate violence, apelike grins, and peculiar smells. I hate them in cars, in lines, and when they write things on the Internet. I am annoyed by assemblyline quirks, like knitting in public, or the wearing of certain hats.
When I ride my bike I barely see the gnarled toes and snail tongues of strangers, or their open-maw faces. There is no risk of conversation, although sometimes people yell things. (Two days ago some girl in a pack of girls yelled: "Fat nigga!"; I gave the group the finger and kept pedaling, which I guess is an improvement over 500,000 years ago when we would have thrown feces.) I am a point on a line in a grid and I assume correctly that every car, every body in motion, is put here to kill me. I haul myself over low-grade hills and map trajectories. I still look smiling on infants but in my heart there is vileness. And Brooklyn, with its glut of desperate wombs, has no shortage of upmarket strollers, the squeaks and caws of their passengers cautiously analyzed by their wrinkled mothers for signs of autism (bad) or genius (good). I am soon to get married, but given the general despair of the era and the fact that the oceans are now 58% molten lead I do not think of the joys of tiny fingers grasping my thumb but instead relentlessly catalog the disasters that could befall us, assuming of course that my ability to father a child has not been obliterated by all these years spent sucking down crooked molecules. If we have a child and the rats do not eat it first I will teach her (or him) to fear Sting.
"Be good," I will say, "or Sting will come with his lute."
"Where does Sting live?" the kid will ask.
"He dances alone in fields of gold. When he sings you fall asleep and die. But if you listen to good music he can never come close. For he is so afraid."
"Does he eat you?"
"No, because he is vegetarian. In Greece he is called Borefeus."
"I hate Sting!"
If there's life in other systems I'll hate that too, when it comes to claim our planet in the name of the NR!RRRG-7. You know how the Lisp geeks say, all code is data and all data is code? (I'm an XSLT programmer so I say the same thing, but it takes much longer.) I'm wrestling with the fact that not only are all of you apes, but I am as well, just as poisonous and treacherous with my plastic bags and air-conditioning. That is, I am code; you are data, and you are code as well, and the babies and cats are all genes crunching through a much, much larger machine that never, sadly, reboots. I hope we don't taste good to our conquerors.
The Bike StoreSomewhere in Brooklyn or Manhattan. A bell rings when you enter. Regulars can burst in sweating and ask the bald, turtle-slow mechanic to fix their derailleur. But supplicant strangers like myself must wait to be seen. The bell means nothing when I enter. So I stood next to a white pillar.
The employees hate their factory-made product. True bikes are pan-national: a leather saddle from an ancient basement find, a Japanese shifting assembly, a solitary Italian brake. The honest bicycle emerges from a tinkerer's living room like the Grand Canyon emerged from erosion.
A man and a woman stood around a repair stand like it was a warming fire. I eavesdropped on them as I waited to come into focus.
"He built a bike from five tricycles," said the man. "Melted down in a solar-powered furnace. With foam pedals. In Yonkers."
"I'm talking," said the woman, "about one from a warehouse in Queens, a warehouse taken over violently by the Modern Agrarians and turned into a nine-level sustainable farm. This bicycle is made from aluminum pipes from the dumpster outside a nuclear laboratory. The handlebars are bamboo and the rims are nanocarbon buckysteel."
Suddenly they see my factory bicycle, bought in this store two months ago, and I materialize behind it. I hold up the broken chain, the product of yesterday's lazy repair work ("Please," I said, "I'd rather you fixed it." "No," said the man, "it won't break again.")
A half-hour ago I was nearly hit by a box truck while I pedaled air with the chain hanging behind me. They hear that and fix the problem and I pay $60 despite the warranty and receive a lecture on shifting for my pains. City of pedants. People come here because they know better. The myth is that they left because they were too big for their small towns but they actually came here because they were running out of people to impress.
The Interrogation RoomWhen a story of extraordinary hollowness--one of our Whore Laureates drunk and in jail--saturates the entire government-sold spectrum, sanctimonious purselips condemn the media for its banality, its P.H.-imbalance. Why show blondes, say the purselips, when there is so much delicious suffering unreported? But if these huffing posters got what they wanted, TV would be veterans with southern accents demonstrating prostheses. Tired scientists would point to dead lab animals, cameras would pan slowly across superfund sites, and fat people would tell no jokes but rather sob.
When I bathe myself in blue light I don't want to see guts; I prefer emergency room doctors in tailored scrubs flirting over spreading tumors. I want to see a miniseries that opens with a long zoom from New Jersey into Manhattan: a mile-long zeppelin moors itself to the World Trade Center. Stairs lower from the gondola and a woman of a certain age emerges in harem pants, smoking, takes off her goggles and hands them to an attendant. She is here to collect an orphan just in from Shenzen, one she picked from a lithograph that appeared on her elliptical scope (which is connected by radiowaves to a groaning terawatt transmitter the size of a battleship). Container ships filled with Chinese babies prowl the seas. She is the woman who patented the platonic solids. But her empire is at risk.
No one makes my kind of television. Not long ago, not long after midnight, people from TV invaded our street with equipment trucks and set up dressing-room trailers--portable cages for gaunt parrots. As the sun rose workers stood atop the trailers, like gondoliers, and called to each other over the sound of diesel generators. Mo and I went down to the street rubbing our eyes. I'm sorry, they said, but you can't be here. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted on Untitled Police Drama Pilot, banalities repeated with an authentic mafia neighborhood as backdrop. That's why the interrogation room is a staple of crime drama: it's a bargain. One room, some green paint, and cheap lighting. There is a single table and a few hard chairs. We gave you what you asked for, say the interrogators. We brought you hair from the mane of a unicorn, and even though it is winter we found for you a single perfect strawberry. Now you. Tell us where to find the shed; tell us what we will find if we dig beneath it. Tell us how much oxygen is left.
Not long ago, not long after noon, I shuffled along President St. on my way to the 4th Ave R stop. I passed a Subaru with the windows rolled down. Inside the car a prostitute fellated a man. She was moving like a Marine doing pushups. The fellatee looked over to me, his eyes blank, and I kept walking--no plot twist, no sudden pan--to the train. How, I wondered, as I got to the Union St. stop, can I be bored when there is a criminal act coming to completion in bright sunshine eighty feet behind me? How, someone asked me later, did I know it was a prostitute? Because, I said. No one works that hard for free.
Empty RoomsWalking uptown or through Brooklyn Heights I will see a window stuffed with papers and books, or catch a glimpse of an old woman in a fading housecoat stepping out to get her Times, and I will wonder which room in New York City has been empty the longest. Is there, for example, a bedroom in Brooklyn that was sealed up after a son didn't return from Vietnam, and that has remained locked ever since, mustard paint peeling and a faded poster of Grace Slick on the wall?
Or does it go farther back? Perhaps in 1912 a meek and dullish woman, second sister of five, became pregnant by her doctor. He was treating her for nerves after she was harrassed by Irish and the sight of her knee made him forget his various oaths to his wife, to his profession, and to the Temperance Union and the Hippocratic Club. Apologetic, he drew a check, and the girl was sent west. Her mother wept, but the other sisters were glad to see her onto the train. She was a drab beetle.
In rapid order her bedroom became Father's study. The closet disappeared behind a massive bookcase laden with Collected Works. There was always the intent to get back in there, when the younger sisters were big enough for the clothes. But the missing sister was so quickly and thoroughly written out of family history that it was more comfortable to forget that the closet existed.
While her father and mother saw the second sister to the train the youngest sister was left behind with the nurse. Now the youngest is ancient, a full century, and her hair and skin are like skim milk. She sleeps in her parents' old bedroom and is tended by a new nurse. The sight of the bookcase reminds her of her father's collars and the sound of his pen scratching against foolscap. Entirely forgotten are the homely crinolines, wide-brimmed hats, the girdle, fur muff, and the pair of fancy gray lace-up boots.
Just as forgotten is the exiled sister, sent off from Manhattan by train to be enslaved to a minister's family. For years she boiled cabbage and sewed shirts and scrubbed the floor of the Methodist church, and her child was scorned by the minister's wife. Finally a dairyman came home from the War, having lost in an ordnance mishap his left hand and all but the index and ring fingers on his right hand. He asked her to marry him. No one took a picture after the ceremony, even though the minister's son owned a Brownie.
Impoverished of digits, the dairyman could barely milk, so his farm was one of the first to mechanize. His wife learned to apply ointments to the steel-chapped, oozing udders, and to ignore the smell of cowshit. There were no more children.
Her love-child son had finally pieced it together by the time he turned 31 and asked her in his halting way about his origins. But she looked out the window until he said that he needed to go fix the birdfeeder. He never found out that his father was an expert in ulcers and known for the twinkle in his eye. A few months later the son moved south and opened the first laundromat in Nevada; for a hobby he collected Confederate currency, and later Nazi currency, and currency printed by Japan in anticipation of conquering Australia. Through this pursuit he made many friends from over a dozen states. Seventy years after leaving Manhattan his mother died during a Columbo rerun. Through all of it the closet door remained unopened and the clothes unworn.
I have been dreaming up these rooms for years. A few square feet that remain constant: a walled-in basement corner in a museum where there sits a filing cabinet filled with old maps; a Model A rusting in a carriage house; a copy of The Tales of Guy de Maupassant and a catalog of electric goods left on a mattress in an attic. In defiance of progress and real-estate values these fake places are perfectly dusty and still.
From 1997 through 2006 I lived in a small room adjoined by a tiny bathroom. It was filled to bursting, and I knew every inch of the place. Now I live with another person in three small rooms (and a medium-sized bathroom). Once again every inch is spoken for. I plan to throw away a few hundred books to allow a large set of shelves to be removed, the density reduced so there is more room for light.
It's possible that this three-room apartment was once home to three families. The middle room has a window built into one wall that may have been put there to comply with an old law that requires each residence to receive sunlight. One family, we think, lived in our kitchen; one lived in our bedroom; and a bachelor made his home in the middle. Maybe ten people lived here. I am embarrassed to think of them standing in the kitchen in dark clothes. I have twenty shirts in the closet, and there are at least a dozen glowing and blinking devices scattered throughout the place. We, their great-grandchildren, spend far more than their year's salary on one month's rent. But they are gone, and they left no empty corners or unopened closets. All things are possible in New York City, and so perhaps these hollow, untouched rooms that I dream up are somewhere real and forgotten. But given the cost of a square foot it's more likely that we are flowers in a vase; and when we leave our jobs, our apartments, our city and our bodies, other flowers will be dropped into our place.
K. Gorman points out “The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan” from May 16, 2007. “You may in fact,” he writes, “be a variation on a mass psychosis.”
G. Allen writes:
A sculptor friend went to install a work in a collector's home. He needed a ladder, and the collector said, “oh, just go next door and get it.”
The other apartment on the elevator landing turns out to be unlocked, and empty, and sprawling, and gorgeous, but decrepit—and equipped with a ladder, which he promptly borrows, uses, and then puts back.
Whoever owns the apartment has never been there; the co-op maintenance is just paid from some lawyer's office in London, it's been decades, far longer than their neighbors have lived there, that's for sure.
The CPUI read a lot of computer language hermeneutics on various websites. It's rare to see people talking about syntax but instead they discuss how the language will be interpreted and understood. This makes sense, because according to two men who love wizards, Abelman and Sussman, “programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” At the same time the CPU is an ideal reader, the ultimate consumer, the final arbiter and interpreter.
I always nodded when I heard that efficiency is overrated and programmer time is more important than processor time. It soothed my autodidact's ego. But then a year ago I sat down at my desk with a quarter-million 600DPI images and a content database containing two million triples that can be viewed five million different ways. And I was not prepared. At first a single HTML page took 30 seconds to build; then 10 seconds; then, once I learned to re-use my data and indexes, and once I knew where all the variables were—a fraction of a second, a 300-times speedup. I've been researching and I know there are whole sections of code I can cut and replace with simpler, faster routines. I still have a long way to go, and much to learn, before I can slow things down again.
The perfect website is exactly one page, the one the visitor wants. But nearly every page on the web is about changing your mind—“There's more over here!” The economic model for the content-driven web requires accumulating pageviews, and the way to make room for more pageviews is to speed things up: caching, gzipping, embracing the combinatoric explosion with relational databases and gigahertz multicores. But now I find my inner editor battling with my inner programmer, wondering whether, instead of letting people explore the data set on their own, which requires much from them, I should create a core, smaller set of useful pages, working out problems of audience and utility ahead of time, measuring the connections between topics, assembling content automatically, and forcing the processor to do more work. I want to make the computer my partner in editing. And once I have more understanding of the CPU I should perhaps reverse my goal: no page should take less than 30 seconds to cache. If that page finds 10,000 new readers over the next few years because it's more valuable (in my experience, with the way Google works, this does happen) then I will have achieved a far more relevant kind of processor efficiency: three extra milliseconds per-page upfront processing per new reader. This is very cheap.
To better understand what efficiency actually means I have been flipping through books to learn about how a processor interprets programs, to figure out how wall-socket electricity is turned into a website. It turns out that a computer is simply billions of postal gnomes riding buses, picking up or dropping off bits. In the margin of my programming books I see which band names I can spell out in hexadecimal—0xdefcab4c00dee equals 3,922,828,592,156,142.
Assembler is the Latin of programming. It helps you understand all the languages that came later; everyone feels guilty for not learning it; but there's a lot of rote learning involved and it's easier to skip (as I have, with both assembler and Latin). But reading about registers, after my decade of programming high-level languages, is like going back to Shakespeare or the Bible and realizing how many times I've heard Hamlet or Julius Caesar, or a proverb about pigs, repeated back to me in books and speeches—it's always been there; I just didn't know to see it.
The Cloths of Heaven are Old Shirts and Dark SlacksOften in novels the dreams of characters relate to the action of the main narrative. A man fights with his wife, goes to bed, and dreams his house burned down. A woman dreams of a tree growing out of burned earth after finding out that she is not an orphan. This is horseshit. Last night I talked to Mo about shoes then dreamed that I entered a portal in my kitchen. In the universe that I found on the other side the Beatles never existed, and Prince was a Johnny-Mathis-style crooner, so “Purple Rain” sounded like “Moon River.” Another dream I frequently have: I am at work. The phone rings. I wake from the dream and go to work.
When I was in college I knew an old lady who would curse at me through my fog of oversensitive biases.
“I don't take aspirin,” I said. “I don't believe in it.”
“Pills are fantastic!” she yelled. “I was on pills and wrote a novel and had a love affair.”
I once told her that I was dreaming almost every night of sitting in classrooms. She thought for a moment—she was driving—and said: “Carl Jung says that boring dreams indicate a boring person.”
This burned its way into my brain like a curse and stayed with me for years. It was as if a wizard had cast a spell: remain forever soft and dull, in black shirts and black shoes with short hair. Other people went rafting down the Ganges but I was here in Brooklyn reading about Unicode.
Thus I used to feel ashamed and useless when everyone told me to go everywhere and do everything. But you dig a ditch, and then another ditch, and then sit and look at the ditch for a while, figuring out how you could be a better digger, ignoring people who love the ditch too much and shrugging off people who wish the ditch was a hill, and then you start up the digging again. No airplanes or Bodhi trees; just me and a machine and the occasional cat. It may be boring, but I am living my dreams.
UpstateI was upstate at a birthday party. A nice group of people. At one point someone said, it's hot, let's go swimming in the quarry. So we piled into a caravan of six cars and drove about eight miles. The quarry turned out to be wrapped in a fence and labeled with “No Trespassing” signs. So that option was out. All six cars pulled over to the shoulder and someone found a map and began to look for lakes. No one was in charge—this was more the type of group to build consensus. So there was a lot of discussion. I didn't have much to offer because I'm bad with maps.
After a few minutes a police car drove up. Someone in a nearby house or in a passing car had decided that we were suspicious in our gypsy caravan and reported us. The policewoman did not get out of the car but did roll down her window. The person whose birthday it was ran up to the policewoman and said, how great that you are here! We want to go swimming!
After much prompting the policewoman said, there is a public pool about 15 or 20 miles away. Which made everyone depressed: a long drive to concrete and bright blue paint and chlorine and screaming kids. So even though the map was filled with blue we realized it was getting late and got back into cars and drove back to the city. It was hot, though, and it would have been fun to go swimming.
The GuestsI put on a black suit with a blue shirt and orange tie and got married to Mo, who wore a burgundy dress. September 15, 2007, a few minutes after 6:00PM. We did it standing in the middle of the Carroll St. Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. No one was arrested.
Our friends put up two lines of yellow CAUTION tape to block the traffic. Mo's cousin and my brother spoke briefly about what makes a good marriage. The police came but were understanding. We exchanged vows: I promise to meet you at the emergency room; I promise to let you make fun of me.
The judge, a relative, gave us more words to say. Then they've wrapped the words in gold around your ring finger. It's very sudden when it happens. A bagpiper marched us three blocks to the reception. I danced with my mother-in-law and aunt-in-law; fed tres leches cake to my bride; drank good red wine.
Late Fragment, by Raymond Carver
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
At each place setting stood a finger puppet, each one it's own, all made by my mother.
Love ExplosionI came up with 100 Ways to Say I Love You at The Morning News.
A JokeWhy do oranges make good lawyers?
Because they always win on appeal.
Walking through Chinatown with Mo we passed a restaurant called Mandarin Court. “Excuse me, your honor,” I said. “But my client is seedless.” Mo rolled her eyes. “He's also a navel hero,” I said. “Oh!” Anyway, after a full train ride of focused thinking, during which time I nearly gave up on oranges in favor of bells, I decided that citrus is funnier and settled on the above. Then I searched through the Internet for variations but it seems to be original, or else I stole it from a six-year old.
Reading:
Fishing PartyLast September, on a clear warm Saturday morning a week before my wedding, about ten of us celebrated my bachelor party by going fishing out in Sheepshead Bay. You pay $50 and get on the boat.
The seas were choppy and the boat was rocking as we headed away from shore, but even so a few of my friends climbed to the upper deck for the view. I followed them, but at the top of the steep stairs the boat listed to the left and I found myself suddenly at angles and without an easy grip. I tried to land on a plastic chair but went down too hard, and the chair exploded into three pieces, sending me backwards with my legs in the air. My friends thought this was wonderful. The boat's pissed-off captain ordered us back down to fishing.
“You are,” said Dave, whom I have known the longest in New York, and whose friendship is now comfortable and worn and tested, “a big and clumsy man.” I nodded. Dave, small and scrappy, is entertained by my giantism and likes to make me hold tiny things—miniature bottles of liquor or toy cars—so that I look even larger. “Big and little,” he explains, “classic.” He organized our day out.
I put a hook through the eyes of a minnow and took up a spot next to a man who was my neighbor for eight years, another great friend. He is from the former Confederacy, and whenever the boat stopped and the horn blew to let us know we could drop our lines, he would point to a bit of blank water a few feet away and say: “that right there's the honey-hole.” Soon the rest of us were pointing out honey-holes, and, after a dozen minutes, my honey-hole paid off and I pulled up an ugly sea robin. I fearfully tried to get my fingers into its thrashing mouth until my once-neighbor, shaking his head, reached over and yanked the hook for me, then threw the fish back into the bay and said something about my vagina.
We spent four hours in the sun, pulling up inedible bottom-feeders from the overfished waters then throwing them back. At last the horn blasted twice and a voice came over the ship's speakers to tell us that the morning run was ended. We put the fishing rods in their slots and tied down our hooks to keep them from flapping, and the engines fired up for a last push. I turned sternwards and looked upon the water in its infinitude, then faced the bow and saw the low towers of Kingsborough Community College slowly enlarging as we headed back to the dock. I contemplated a lifetime of incidental rituals, a gold ring, and water becoming land, and thought: huh.
“Listen,” said Dave, coming up beside me and leaning against the rail. “I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you didn't want anything truly awful.”
“I honestly don't,” I said.
He frowned and nodded. “Because I have shown remarkable restraint.”
But I think my blushing days are over. I've seen enough to know that a strip club, while sometimes fun, is at its essence overpriced alcohol and burdened, worried, naked single moms. And I thought back to another bachelor party three years ago, where the women turned out to be whores and a Russian man showed up with a gun. On that night, after seeing those things and some others, I had to go home and sit in the bath and look at my hands. From my own big day I wanted only for my mind to be as blank as the water, and to not hear certain words: hotel, rental, deposit, catering, family, necktie.
We disembarked, with maybe three fish between us, and some of the party split off, not wanting to see what came next; and half of us drove to the unconverted garage that Dave had recently bought from mobsters. There we would hang out, drink, reminisce, and whatever had been planned would happen. When I entered it was dark and there was a projection screen showing a slideshow of disturbing images, and into each my face had been digitally inserted—there I was staring out of the horrifically distended anus of the goatse.cx man, or grafted onto the body of a nude amputee. I was directed to sit in the large wooden chair below the screen.
“I asked Mo what you're not allowed to have,” said Dave, “and she said fried chicken and pudding. So we're going to eat that. And drink a lot of Scotch.” He put a bottle in my hand and looked at his watch. “Get drunk now,” he said. What a relief to be ordered to drink Scotch after months of list-making and phone calls and errands.
“I stink of fish,” I said.
“So smell like booze instead,” he said. “You have twenty minutes.” I dumped chicken and biscuits into my mouth, chased with huge gulps from the bottle, pausing to puff a cigar. The other men were mostly quiet, looking at each other, and then to me, and then to the door. Dave's cell phone rang. He took the call, and then he took away my cigar and said, “You need to wear a blindfold.”
Now all was blackness. Some pornographic music began to play, and there was loud cheering and clapping. I sat and smiled, a little wobbly. A minute passed and then I felt someone climb onto my lap, bare feet on my thighs. “Hello,” I said. “How you doing?” The person said nothing but put hands to my sides, rocking to the music, and my friends cheered. The music went on, as did the chorus of hooting all around, and something rubbed against my chest.
Finally the stripper took my hand and placed it on a rough-feeling, angular object that I gathered was supposed to resemble a breast, and now I knew for certain that, as I had come to suspect, I was getting a lap dance off a male dwarf—confirmed a few seconds later when the dancer took off my blindfold and was revealed, a Hispanic man in his twenties or early thirties, between three and four feet tall, in a gold lamé dress. “I'm Malachi,” he said. He smiled and we shook hands, and I blinked as flashbulbs went off.
He leapt from my lap and took off his wig to reveal shorn hair. He and I posed for pictures as everyone toasted us, and then he shook my hand again, grabbed his coat, and made to leave.
“Wait,” Dave said. “We paid for the hour.”
“But,” I said, “that's plenty, right?”
“Paul hasn't eaten pudding off your chest,” Dave said to the man in the dress, “has he?”
Malachi shrugged and laughed. It took a few minutes to set up, to get the angles right, but eventually he found a sturdy place on my lap where he could stand, and pulled my head into his false cleavage. He was very muscular; I remember his defined clavicle, and the powerful smell of his cheap perfume, joined with the mouth-texture of ultrapasteurized rice pudding and the tongue-burr of remnant tinfoil attached to the top of the plastic cup. I remember the softness of Malachi's dress as it brushed my cheek and the long pudding-coated wig hairs caught in my teeth, mixing with the chemical spices of greasy fried chicken. But you can only eat pudding that way for a few moments unless you use a spoon. So we played poker, and Malachi played my hands for me, and did very well.
Finally the hour was up, and he left, as did his two bulky handlers who called out the name of their website where you could rent little people for amusements. “Anything you want! Anything you want!” said one of them with an old-world-Brooklyn accent. “You want something crazy? St. Patrick's day, someone dances on the table, you need a dwarf at all.” As they left I saw that Malachi waddled a little in his dress, and noticed that he was wearing a kind of diaper.
After that a lull ensued, so we went out. “Originally,” Dave said as we walked to a bar, “the plan was to handcuff the guy to you while we were eating. And he would say nothing. Just come with you everywhere and look up at you and blink.”
“I'm glad that didn't happen.”
“You know what, though? You have no idea,” said Dave. “See, the key is when you get them on the phone to just keep saying, 'Well, okay, that's interesting, but what's possible if we go up in price?' Just keep repeating that. You learn things.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like how much it costs to have a dwarf in a strap-on hump a stripper on a wrestling mat. Which is four thousand dollars. And I think you are a wonderful friend, and I'm sorry, but you are not worth that to me.”
I thought this was fair and said so, drawing on my cigar. “You know,” I said, “that was incredibly exploitative. But for some reason the fact that it was a dude in a dress made it less bad. He's just getting paid.”
Dave shrugged, indifferent to this thoughtful and sensitive political analysis. “Do you feel properly bacheled?”
I said, “I will be very old and looking at my great-grandchildren play in the surf, and the sun off the ocean will bring unbidden to mind a vision of that blindfold lifting to show me a little man in a golden dress with his small hand on my chest. I am grateful for that.”
“Good,” he said. “That's what I was aiming for.”
From that moment the night splits into sloppy fragments: I was in a photo booth at some bar; I was sitting in a large leather chair scared to stand up; I was leaning over a toilet fountaining gobbets of chicken and pudding. A car was called; my former neighbor, he of the honey-hole, saw me home. I was through the front door to my building, and had to crawl up the stairs because I couldn't find the banister (it was there; I just wasn't looking). I closed the door behind me and turned on the light. It was still early—maybe eleven—and Mo was out with friends. The apartment was empty except for the cat.
Mo tells me that I called her from the bathtub. She had already heard the story and been warned of my state. “How,” she asked, “was your tiny dancer?”
“Baby,” I said, “I just love you so much. And I also am trying not to splash water on the floor.”
“Listen, don't fall asleep in the tub,” she said. “That is very important. And you need to throw up again. Do you want me to come home?”
“And you know I am so glad that I am going to marry you.”
“Yes, but you're going to vomit again first,” she said. “Promise me you will vomit.”
“Baby,” I said, “yes, of course, for you. In just a moment I am going to puke so much fried chicken and biscuits and Scotch and pudding and wig hair and cigars.”
She sighed. “Do you swear?”
“Right this minute. I'm getting out now. I truly, truly, truly, truly, truly, truly swear it.” I crawled out of the bathtub on my hands and knees. “I do,” I said, trying to keep the phone dry, carefully following instructions.
Reading (or Download):
CloudsMy most frequent when-I-am-walking game is Exposure:
What if I had nothing more than my clothes and needed to survive the night?
“All of the brownstone basements have gates,” I said to my wife as we walked down Union St. towards home, “so that no one can hide in the alcove under the stairs.” The gates were new—a few decades old—compared to the homes.
I remembered coming home to my old apartment, nights five years ago, before the landlord fixed the lock, to find a dirty, bent-over person in the tiny space between the inner and outer doors. Or I'd find their ghost, in the form of blood and candy wrappers, the next morning. My neighbors the same. Not every night, just sometimes. And eventually the space was sealed off, the light the visitors had knocked out repaired. And one more warm, dark, hidden space was taken off the market.
“Maybe I could sneak into a backyard,” I said. “And sleep there.”
“That's a good way to get arrested,” said my wife. “You wouldn't try to sleep in this neighborhood anyway. Your best bet, if you are a working person and sober, they will usually help you with the shelters.”
For some reason I hate the block of Union St. between 4th and 5th Avenue. The air there is lead-heavy with menace. It could not be a safer, more amiable block—restaurants and children, even a church. But it rubs me wrong. To hell with it. I would not be surprised if the asphalt parted and a great squamous beast rose through the median. I would not be surprised if someone threw a bottle at my head. Give me President St. instead.
On President St.—mostly sweatshops and warehouses on this block, before we turn right—I noticed there was a light on in the largest building, shining out in a tiny sliver from beneath the security gate of the truck dock.
“I wonder if people sleep in there,” I said.
“Maybe. I see them there after work, waiting,” said my wife.
There must be a secret economy around army cots throughout town. Security gates go down, a lamp turns on. Five, ten dollars is handed over and a pillow comes out of a plastic bag. I wonder if they're in there now, two or twenty of the small men with bowl haircuts, hiding until the next day of work. Hopefully they can find showers. With a bed and a shower you can make it work. Food you can find. Clothes, too. New York is generous; it throws away everything but rent money.
Other possible shelters: the office trailer where they're building the hotel, or behind the plywood-covered windows where the new restaurant is coming in, or in the basement of the bar.
Our neighborhood is interesting. We have seen men counting out large bills late at night, garbage trucks with secret compartments, FedEx parked long after delivery hours in front of an old storefront now filled with empty boxes. Parades of identical Mercedes that fell off the same boat, restaurants that are only open once a month. Men greet each other by yelling and swearing.
My wife and I are visitors, tourists, not welcome or unwelcome. Sometimes the natives say hello--they wished us well after our wedding; they gave us some sparklers on the 4th of July; we gave them a case of beer--but just as often they do not. It's like being in a photograph of the Civil War. The subject of the photo is perfectly still, surrounded by ethereal blur. Online, the Google Maps “street view” of this block shows the men downstairs sitting in front of their club. They sit there every warm day. These people are the map.
I've been looking at two worlds. Bathing myself in technology, more than usual. I had lunch with a friend and I asked him: “why do I care so much about server virtualization? It has no bearing upon my existence. Even if I acquire this knowledge I can do nothing with it.”
(It does not matter to the story what server virtualization is.)
“Because it's fascinating,” he said.
Yes, I thought, relieved. My job doesn't give me many opportunities to talk about these things. The future is so light and small, dreams shuffled like a deck of cards, some in your hands, some on the table, and you're waiting for the flop, or the Jobs keynote, or the announcement from IBM and Sun: everything of substance will evaporate under the heat-lamp of advancement, all will be accomplished within floated condensates of progress redolent of cognoscenti (lilac perfume and bullshit), watched over by St. Cloud/Clodoaldus [“out of the mist”]; grandson of King Clovis. Murderous uncle killed his two bros.; relinquished crown; and hair, took orders; patron to nail-makers.)
That is one world.
The other world belongs more to the nail-makers. The day after playing Exposure with my wife I had (did!) lunch with my friend, talking about servers and our good marriages, and that night I rode my bicycle (analog; powered by tubes) over the Manhattan Bridge back towards Brooklyn, books in my bag, wet tires flattened against the asphalt by my bulk (I expect to be—sometimes am—mocked by strangers as I ride, scolded for being here, in the way, pedaling soft circles). Maybe we move to Pittsburgh and raise children. Maybe I write more novels. I can see where I suck. Maybe I stay exactly where I am, grateful.
When I get home to an apartment held together by dowels and nails, I will greet my wife, take the books out of my bag, and sit down in the office chair at a 20-inch screen, which is actually 1,764,000 tiny particles perpetually condensing, like clouds. I will have won the game again, with my roof and my bed as both ribbon and reward. But not yet—I am still riding my bike. I hit a patch of ice and my front tire slips just an inch or two. I correct by reflex—but the jolt of fear that rose up in that half-second of falling is chased by bolts of adrenaline and as I cruise to a stop at the light and the train goes by above me, knocking snow onto my neck, everything is exclamation points. Full of myself. Wondering, where is the truck with a camera on top to take my picture, here at the intersection, so that I can be, myself, on the map?
Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3sI wrote 763 six-word song reviews for The Morning News. The songs are all from bands appearing at SXSW right now and each review links to MP3s so that you might judge the state of contemporary music for yourself. 48 hours of music! Much of it bad! But some good. And charts.
The Wind Chest“Are you going to church?” asked my mother over the phone.
“I don't believe in God,” I said.
“That's no excuse. There are wonderful ministers in New York City.”
That's about as ancient a desire as we get around here. The wish for the good preacher—not the youth pastor with his guitar or the nervous seminarian but the berobed man standing behind a dark pulpit, flanked by a massive unadorned crucifix and the organ pipes, fed by a wind chest, the lowest flue pipe big around as a fat boy and taller than a phone pole. The smallest the size of a baby's thumb.
Once, before there were movies, an affiliated Protestant, visiting the city for business, pleasure, or family, would make sure to visit the appropriate pantheon of stained glass (erected by corporate titans as reminders of the real deal; NYC is not the place for mother-churches as much as rich-uncle-churches). The sermon witnessed there would not be simple thunder and visions of torment; it would be a trip to Jerusalem with layovers in London and Paris. This way the tourist, seated on his pew, redeemed a tour of the Babylonian fleshpots. His local preacher, marrying, burying, would always after seem provincial.
I have not of my own will been to church for fifteen years except to witness a marriage or conversion or to hear a eulogy. But I imagine the ministers in Manhattan and upper Brooklyn are of a fine urban quality, widely read, buffed like driftglass by both internecine Protestant warfare and interfaith community events. I imagine salt-and-pepper men and women with draped sleeves hinting at wings, dispensing wisdom with that warm presbyter's smile. On weekdays, white collar fresh from the dry-cleaner, they visit the light-yellow high-rise apartments of widows who still have drawers filled with gloves. After that, above a lunch table as white as their collar, they truly enjoy the company of a benevolent parishioner: ordering from menus on cream paper, drinking ice water with their steak. I do not want to imply that these ministers would look down on a laminated menu. But when you are asking someone for $800,000 to turn the vestry into a welcome center you don't go to T.G.I. Friday's® for Chimichurri Sliders.
After hanging up the phone I did think about it but I did not go to church. That moment when the middle-aged deacon on usher duty sincerely welcomes you is just too painful to contemplate; I would feel a vile snake taking his or her slightly-wrinkled hand. Instead I went to jury duty and sat in the pool, trying hard not to bitch to myself about this very basic and simple requirement of democratic life and failing.
From jury duty I expect drab rooms and bossy factotums pushing us from place to place. I expect to climb slate stairs dimpled by millions of soles and to stand in hallways with burgundy linoleum floors and look out of dirty windows onto far-below asphalt courtyards. But today at the metal detectors they politely relieved me of my camera and gave me a receipt (the camera in my phone they ignored); I was then gently brushed aboard an elevator.
In the waiting room Diane Sawyer, like a flight attendant explaining what to do in case of sudden landing, appeared on two televisions to inform me of my civic duty. She was the stewardess of justice. There was free wireless networking, and a sign asked me to let it be known if a water fountain failed or if I experience any unpleasantness in the bathroom. Every time we were reminded, whether by television or loudspeaker, of our civic obligation, we received two apologies for the inconvenience, and I found myself very worried. When the surliness is stripped from our system, when the jurors are treated as valuable clients instead of stinking cattle—or more specifically treated like customers instead of citizens—I'm saying, if the state can't take me for granted and abuse and ignore me, but instead must cherish me and treat me as a favored son, then haven't we shit the collective bed? (Or maybe I'm overthinking this; I did, after all, happily Twitter my jury experience. And Mo promises that it still sucks to be a juror in Manhattan.)
I was sent to small, crowded room 8 and told my number was 7. A woman in the pool had the middle name of Raspberry. The oldest man in the room said he worked recycling computers. The shortest woman wore a wig. The prettiest girl read Failed States by Noam Chomsky. A few miles away, on Wall Street, flanked by Trinity Episcopalian, the market was crashing, or surging. In Albany the new governor of New York state, a blind man descended of Harlem royalty, stood next to his pretty wife and confessed to many affairs; it emerged that he had dispensed much of his legislative wisdom in one particular Days Inn, and it was revealed, touchingly, that he had, after full confession, counseling, and reconcilation, taken his wife, who had also strayed, to the very same hotel and there, we can presume, they fucked Christian forgiveness into each other. In Philadelphia Barack Obama would soon give a major speech on race.
After lunch I was told that I would have no part in resolving the complaint that Martin Gonzales brought against Abraham Shelman and sent back to the comforts of the larger jury pen. There I watched Barack Obama, flanked by two flags, deliver a speech about race; the sound was off but the subtitles were on, forcing us to read through the random misspellings and odd homonyms. He was explaining why he would not disown his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
So. I went to church whether I wanted to or not.
Eventually they let me go and told me I didn't have to come back for years, and gave me a piece of paper. In Columbus Park I took some pictures: of the three huge green shamrocks festooning the columns of the Borough Hall; of the monstrish Victorian fountain filled with bronze toddlers; of the bust of Robert F. Kennedy on its pedestal; and of Christopher Columbus standing atop his high column. Slightly north and uphill from them all, closer to the post office, is the monument to the legendary eloquence of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (restored with support from the Church of the Pilgrims and Broadway United Church of Christ in Manhattan and reintroduced in 1988); Beecher's adultery was the story of the 1870s, a nationwide torment of salacious self-examination compared to this last painful week of Spitzer's wenching.
I walked down the stairs to the Court Street R train behind a middle-aged man. When he was halfway down the stairs he noticed something and turned briskly about and raced back up the stairs. What had made him run was a woman with curly black hair, handing out pamphlets. I descended and without stopping took one from her hand. It was printed on cheap paper, and the title, superimposed over the image of a jigsaw puzzle, was “Is something MISSING in your life?”
“Are you saved?” she asked as I passed. Her voice was brittle and urgent. “Yeah,” I said (what I always say when asked), “sure I am.”
Eloquence Personified“That’s great. That’s everything it’s supposed to be. Interesting. That’s right up my alley. That’s cool.”
—Paul Ford
SignsIf anyone needs the office phone number.
Over There~200 words on restraints at ABriefMessage.com.
SasquatchThe first movie I remember seeing was called Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot. I'm sure I had been to the Warner Theater before that but I remember this movie because it was not for children, I was six, and there was some negotiation before I was allowed to go. My brother took me.
I remember the monster coming up over a hill, roaring, but far more intense than that was the massive yellow Sasquatch logo that appeared on the screen at the beginning of the film. Looking at a clip of the film (obviously awful) shows, in contrast to the eyeball-drilling of Star Wars or piss-shower of Taxi Driver, a thin, nervous country with just enough money for a pack of cigarettes and a tank of gas.
Why they were showing a 1975 movie about Bigfoot in 1981 at the Warner? I was at that point only a slip of paper in a pullover shirt and man did I like dogs. My brother might have worn a denim jacket lined with thick beige lambswool, and cars had ashtrays. The Warner was a velvet-and-gilt palace near the Woolworth's. The floor had an inch-thick layer of grime and every step you took, at least in my little sneakers, went THWICK. There were gilded women carved into the walls and a red curtain that pulled apart for the show. I would imagine it was built in the 1930s--(yes, it was)--a big dose of Celebrex to cure the Depression, and while the art-deco style was modern the curtain and gold belonged to the theater. Or more likely to vaudeville.
(A vaudeville story, according to my father: his father, as a boy, would get inside a tire to be rolled across the stage between acts; he got a nickel every time. You had to keep the show moving. Later he became a respected whistler. Never met him.)
I could keep going backwards here until I was at the Globe Theater watching men in bear costumes chasing after boys in wigs, or further back to a naked stage in a natural ampitheater with chanting men in masks. But you had to read Oedipus in high school too. And the Warner shut down soon after Return of the Jedi to become offices; no longer were movies within walking distance. A tragedy in the original sense--meaning a song for the the goats.
I never told you because I was kind of out of it for a while there butDad has a blog.
So does my wife, actually.
Steering WheelI've been walking home--my bike is in the shop forever and the weather is nice. I listen to episodes of the Jack Benny program on my phone, waiting for Mary Livingstone to laugh. I'm up through 1946.
The traffic where I live is so bad that sometimes I am stuck in my minivan for forty minutes before I get to work. So I use the steering wheel as a kind of prayer wheel. Each notch reminds me of a prayer. I go from notch to notch saying prayers for my husband, for each of my children, my parents, my friends, and the students in my class.
I read something like that 19 years ago in Guideposts. I was sitting in my grandparents' living room on their black sofa. I think of it whenever my computer gives me the pinwheel, or when I am on the phone at work helping an old lady onto the website, explaining that email doesn't need stamps. At the top right of the screen, I asked, do you see a little box? And to the left of the box is the word “Username?” You put a special name into that box. We have to make that special name.
“I'm old,” she said.
Down through Soho. People walk into traffic while text-messaging. I also have on headphones. It's warm, crowded, and progress is slow. I see a girl in canary leggings and short bangs, backlit by a storefront. She is laughing at a joke made by a boy in a vest. No wonder people want to live here. Right then Mary Livingstone laughs in 1946. A man with his tongue out is trying to shake hands with everyone. On Bowery I pass the New Museum, which has a sign reading “HELL YES!” in great rainbow letters. Faces lit from below or on the side by cell-phone screens and media players. I am moving slow but light is absolutely everywhere.
Been a whileI've been working on something over at the dayjob. (Although I'm writing this at 2:36 AM from the office, so not just dayjob.) I tell you because it's fun, and it's free to use.
I went out the other day with some XML folks, old hands. We talked about ISO 8879, which I once photocopied in its entirety, and old issues of Creative Computing, and about Ted Nelson. I said, now that I have gained experience in key web technologies Django and SOLR, I feel I have the experimental platform I need to implement a new version of Ftrain with a new kind of story, entitled “Lost Dogs, or, the Unhappy Town.” The person I told this to, you could tell he was not buying this. He said, “I am not buying this.” There was a definite sense of trains leaving stations, boats leaving docks, bicycles unracking, respectively blowing whistles or tooting horns or tinkling bells. A part of me turned into birds and fluttered away, a flock heading to sea. They were dragging a whale. I thought, well, shit, I guess I better think about that.
Panel/Unicode table for youSo I've been out of it for a little while longer than I'd hoped. And I'm back here, like the world's worst ex-boyfriend, to ask for a small favor. I want to ask you to go over to Jeffrey Zeldman's website to read about a panel on which I could, should all go well, appear in March at SXSW, along with some nice people. If you're interested in it go ahead and vote for it.
Since I knew I was going to ask you for something I figured I should make you something nice. Here is a simple Unicode browser for people who like looking at characters; you can click on the number below each character to visit its Wikipedia page. Surprisingly many symbols have their own pages.
There may already be something like it out there, but I couldn't find anything quite like it, and I keep spending time poking around Unicode on Wikipedia and various other sites and finding it hard to get a sense of the whole range of options available.
There's a lot of good stuff up around 9,000. I think my favorite character, however, is ␙, #9241, the SYMBOL FOR END OF MEDIUM.
It's hacky--doesn't work in IE7. Otherwise it seems to roll along. It's all on one page (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and under the GPL/MIT license, so if you have any big ideas go to town.
␙
Elsewhere: Just Like HeavenI wrote a Non-Expert for TheMorningNews.org, called "Just Like Heaven":
Question: Is there afterlife —Matt
Answer: If you ever need to make your own Grand Canyon, start with a river and lift up the earth. As the ground rises the river will carry some of it away. Wait seven million years, at which point tourists will come. Some will see eons of erosion at work; others will believe that, a mere 4,500 years back, God dragged His fingernail across the desert. Like the group of evangelical-Christian creationists that rafted through....
And it goes on from there...
I'm on a Panel at SxSWI'll be in Austin at the interactive slice of SxSW (Where screencasts come alive!) for a few days starting this Wednesday. Mostly I'll be wandering around with a churro in my hand, muttering, but I'll also be on a panel, moderated by Jeffrey Zeldman and featuring Erin Kissane, Lisa Holton, and Mandy Brown. It's called "New Publishing and Web Content" and it's about teaching a meerkat to drive cuddling releasing a super-plague new publishing and web content. I'm working the door.
Here's information from Jeffrey regarding the panel, and an interview with Jeffrey about, among other things, the panel. Panel! (As a side-effect of this actual in-the-flesh attendance I'm sorry to say I'm not doing six-word reviews this year. I have not the proper strength.)
I've never been to SxSW before. It surprises some people when I tell them that. It also surprises people when I cry or vomit, or get into bed with them well after all the other guests have gone home. But I've never had a job where they want to spend money to send me places to learn things. I think that's a very NYC thing; ideas and talent are supposed to come to us, preferably kneeling and begging, not the other way around. This approach is why the finance and publishing industries are enjoying such great years.
So I bought myself a ticket on a jet, and if you see me say hello. I look like this as of a few weeks ago. (Caveat: The device I use to keep my head molded into a cube shape may not be allowed by TSA rules.)
If there are any webhatchets or resentments or awkwardnesses left over from the old days, I apologize. Let's just bury those and be nice. I have nothing left in me for across-the-room awkward twinges but lots of room for niceness.
ParkaMy friend wore a green parka. She is, like I now am, self-employed, and called me this afternoon using Skype, which I can already see, a few weeks into my new career, is going to be a problem. Behind her a cat moved, rendered as a set of small animated blocks, like something made of Scrabble tiles. "That green parka," I said. "Let me ask you a question about it."
She waved her arm to point to herself, and to the parka. That caused a problem, a stutter in the system, and then we were both trying to speak at once:
"The parka?""—Kay—"
"—Ahead—""—Go—"
"—So—""—Yeah—"
"—That—""—Parka—"
We were silent for a while, waiting.
"Go ahead," she said. "Ask your question."
This is the era for brief, frequent pauses. Pinwheels, little watches. FOUC. Vi.Me.O. The future arrives in five-second bundles, but then for the next ten seconds you're back in the past.
The 80s was the last truly futuristic decade. Skinny ties. Power, Corruption & Lies. Tass Times in Tonetown. Something about constant nuclear threat and Neuromancer. After that we kind of caught up with the future. Before, well, the future in the 70s was much goofier. Filtered cigarettes. R2D2. Kitchen appliances. People kept coming up with new kinds of magnetic tape, and new ways to change vinyl records.
I wonder if when we look back at this month of iPad if we'll think what an amazing moment to have lived through, or if it will be like some guy with sideburns telling your dad about the reel-to-reel player in his carpeted van.
This man I know once took me out on his sailboat and, long story, but I had to bring the boat around alongside another boat using a rope. He said to me, as I did this: "Listen. You can't go too slow. There is no such thing as too slow. You can only go too fast." And I thought about that for a long time. It's a nice thing to think about, on the weekends, if you have a sailboat.
In my novel nervous teenagers go to startup school in abandoned skyscrapers. (I like to say "In my novel..." a lot, instead of writing. I also like to organize my text-conversion pipeline. My latest idea is to port the novel to org-mode.)
I want to live in a historically awesome moment. What if in the map of time this is one of the small towns? What if this is someplace we drive through to get somewhere interesting? If right now turns out to be nowhere? Then again have you messed with spatial search in Solr? Right now is turning out to be everywhere.
I met an Amish inventor once. Everything he worked on turned out buggy.
"My question is," I said, when the pauses settled, "is how many days in a row have you worn that parka?"
My freelancer friend thought for a moment.
"Actually," she said, "that's a very good question."
Internet connections mostly fail on users 50-64-years-old, March 12, 2009, IT Facts:
All demographic groups are about equally likely to have certain devices fail them, though seniors who own cell phones are significantly less likely than younger cell phone owners to have problems with their cell phones. Just 18% of cell phone owners 65 years old and older reported that their cell phones had failed in the past year, while 26% of 50-64 year olds, 33% of 30-49 year olds and 30% of 18-29 year olds reported cell phone problems. Seniors are not as exclusively reliant on their cell phones as younger owners, and so they may have less wear and tear on their phones than do younger users who are more likely to experience cell phone failure.
We got the landline back in the new apartment. I can't tell you how happy that made me. I call people on it all the time. It's like we're in the same room. Getting older.