excerpts
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Art
I pretend not to watch him.
He looks up at me.
I turn my head toward him and look down at him across my shoulder. He jerks his head toward me, then motions his camera toward me.
I stare at him through the mirror sunglasses, then shrug.
He takes my picture. We wait, for it to silently develop.
In the photo, I look like Lou Reed.
I wish I'd had a cigarette in my mouth.
He pastes my picture onto the board with the others.
I am next to a picture of a young girl holding a baby.
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Styles
Billie felt them falling onto Liz's bed in slow motion. She felt the blankets slowly giving way beneath them. She saw the darkness fading into white, then dissolving into white curtains billowing into her bedroom. Outside the open window, a bright and sunny day awaited her. The curtains continued to billow and flap. The sunlight intensified and burned out the image of the window in bright yellow-white light. And then everything went black.
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Out in the Township
My father bakes bread late in the evening.
I come home, from an evening with friends, a big day in the township, the hundredth anniversary, any excuse to celebrate life, an electricity in the air, a summer feeling of fun and warm weather cooled with the setting of the sun to a point where it is just not comfortable, so that wearing a light overshirt or sweater makes it feel just cozy.
The smell of the hot bread fills the house. He bakes six or eight loaves, two at a time, when he bakes, makes it an all day and night project, so that the odor floats out the open doors and windows, attracting neighbors to him in his loneliness, seeping into every crack and crevice of the place, lingering on into the next day.
"Are you in for the night?" he asks.
"No. I thought I'd go out to the township party."
"I thought that's where you were?"
"No. That's over. It moved somewhere else."
"Where?"
"I don't know. I have to find it."
"It's kind of late, don't you think?"
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re-identity
Katy tells me not to do this, attract women to me without being serious about them, and I tell her I don't do it intentionally, it's them not me, but I have to admit that sometimes I do, and anyway, I don't often listen to Katy in this regard, although I pretend I do, I pretend I don't know really how I do it, when sometimes I really do, because I think Katy's a little bit jealous. I think she wants to keep me for herself (or to attract them for herself.)
Katy isn't normal, but then, neither am I, which is odd, since we come from a very "normal" family. I criticize her as much as she criticizes me, for trying to do the same things with women as I do, but she maintains that there is a difference, because she is serious about them.
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life stories
The cellar window was too small for his father to fit through. It looked old and dirty. Kelly couldn't see through it, because it had frosted glass with wire in it. The glass was cracked in a lot of places.
A heavy screen covered the window on the outside. His father pulled off the screen and forced the window open, and Kelly climbed feet first backwards into blackness of the cellar. His father helped him by holding his arms and lowering him as he stepped down onto the top of an old toilet.
After he was inside, it didn't seem so dark, but it still scared him. Standing in the light from the window, Kelly could barely see the wooden stairs. Beneath them, in the still blackness, he imagined the missing concrete blocks in the wall where it opened into the crawl space under the kitchen. His father had set traps inside the crawl space and caught mice that his mother heard scratching around down there.
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Reservations
Rosy jumped up, spilling the blanket onto the floor. Staggering out of her den, she hurried through the kitchen and the living room and up the open staircase to the second floor. As she ascended, without stopping she reached down and gathered her long T-shirt into folds, pulled it over her head and flippantly tossed it over the railing into the dining room below. On the landing at the top of the stairs, she looked back over her shoulder, turned and looked erratically around. Grabbing the railing with both hands, she leaned over against it and scanned the first floor thoroughly.
Absolute stillness filled the house.
Quickly she turned away, looked up, stopped dead, gasped, and immediately let out a short quiet laugh. The look of recognition of her own reflection in the full wall mirror at the end of the landing stared back at her staring at herself.
Walking along the balcony, Rosy, an attractive, thin, shapely woman in her late thirties, squinted her eyes and curled her upper lip at her image. She paused, examining herself, approaching the mirror in starts, slowly strolling, twisting her torso right and left. As she neared the mirror she looked quickly down to the first floor, then down to her midriff, where she pinched a thin layer of skin.
She looked up, directly into her own eyes.
She said, "Rosy, why did you stop exercising?"
She glanced over her shoulder, wheeled, and bolted into the bedroom.
Across the room, Rosy bent over an open bottom dresser drawer. She pulled out a blouse and tossed it behind her toward the bed, but it fell far short of it onto the floor. She opened the top drawer and disarranged it, searching, came out with panties and bra and turned around quickly. Moving fast across the room, kicking the blouse up onto the bed without losing a step, she rushed into an adjoining bathroom and slammed the door.
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The Concrete
I open my eyes. The nurse is bending over me, straightening my sheets. I am covered, and I am so hot. I feel the coolness of the sheets beneath my hot hands. My palms lie flat on linen.
"Oh, you're awake again," she says. "Do you want anything?"
"Wa..." I try to say water, but my throat seizes up. The noise I make makes it begin to burn, a dry parched burning, the burning desert sand of the dry planet I am from.
"Wa...er," I manage to say, as I try to lift my head but let it crash in pain back down onto the pillow. The softness of the pillow tears into the back of my head like a lump of concrete.
"How about some ginger ale?" the nurse asks. She lifts a can up toward my face and inserts a straw between my lips. I suck, even though it fills my head, throat, and chest with an enormous hurt, and I am rewarded with the most soothing nectar I have ever tasted, but then quickly it starts to burn in my throat and I have to stop drinking. I close my eyes and feel hot tears run out of them down my burning face. She wipes my tears away with her bare cold fingers. My brain screams, "Touch my face. Touch my face. Lay your cool, cool hands over my face like you did before." But she doesn't do it. Only my brain screams it. I can't make my voice come out of me...
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Video Vertigo
Dennis watches Jennifer. That's his job, but he'd watch her anyway, even if it weren't his occupation. It's his pre-occupation. He watches her through the viewer, and in editing, if he has the time and can get into the lab, if he can slip in while they're not watching, because they (the managers and supervisors; not the technicians, they don't care) don't like the cameramen kibitzing in the lab, trying to interfere with the final product, thinking they all are Felinis and Bergmans. Dennis watches her at home too. You'd think he'd get enough of news at work, but he watches Jennifer on every broadcast, to see her and to see how they butcher his work.
- - -
The airship in the distance looked like a huge but ordinary helicopter. Dennis didn't understand what the big deal was. The Colonel walked close behind Jennifer up the steps. The specialist waited at the bottom. So, as Dennis headed up the steps, he slowed, to allow the Colonel and Jennifer to ascend ahead of him, so that he could get a better angle on the backs of Jennifer's thighs as hejockeyed for a line of sight past the Colonel. He made no pretense of trying to hide his shot, looking out only for Jennifer to turn, so that he could pull away before she saw him shooting. He didn't care what the Colonel thought. He knew intuitively that he'd understand.
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Shards of Light
I hear birds singing.
I am birds singing, and not
here, not listening.
Sensing is being
what is sensed; what is non-sensed
is non-existence.
I fade into it,
environment is, not I,
perceiving itself.
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thoughthistory
I don't like most movies. But there's always some small part of most movies, even the worst ones, that I do like. When I write, this is what I'm writing, these scenes from my life which are not the boring parts. This is what interests me, about my life. When I set about to document it in a more conventional way, when I write in order to "tell a story," I become bored, with the development of plot points, and especially with resolutions. Resolutions are artificial. Life is more like a soap opera than a Hollywood film. Except for death, there are no final resolutions in our ordinary lives. This is why I consider my work to be postmodern: I can't be bothered with modernism's developmental approach to life and art, even with the verité movement of "realism." Stories contained within a formal structure bore me. I like my reality piecemeal, like it really is.
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Two Witnesses
"...society is characterized by those characters who crawl out of the woodwork, or the cement work, the sewer-works, every time there's an incident to be taken advantage of..." His words trailed off into the night as the automatic doors closed behind him, and I almost rose to follow him, to hear the end of his speech, but I suspected that there was no end. He certainly had been the most interesting thing to happen there in the hour and a half I'd been sitting there. I go there often, when I'm bored, when I need to be stimulated, to find stories. It's a good place to spend time now that the only visual media remaining is corporate propaganda.
I looked away from the door and around at the other people. A middle-aged black man sat a seat away. He looked over at me as I looked toward him. His soupy brown eyes had no visible pupils and the color faded into the bloodshot whites instead of there being a clear-cut distinction, as in normal eyes. The things that most impress me about people's eyes are the pupils, the access to their centers, and the way the colors stand out against the whites. This man blurred my impression of him. I knew why.
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Ethnic Diversity
My ancestors are from Europe. Where, exactly, is hard to define. Primarily, on my mother's side, through my grandfather's lineage, we are from the Alsace-Lorraine region. This means that we could be French or German, most probably German, because we look German, and because that is the accepted opinion among our family members. But as we all know, appearance and opinion aren't everything, and there are some names on my mother's mother's side, which suggest that we could be partly French. And this is the most clear-cut branch of the family tree. (Earlier on my mother's father's side there is some scantly evidence that we were related to a group of Jews who emigrated to Russia when our branch of the family came to America. This may be true, or it may not be.)
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Connections
If we are not fixated at the paranoid-schizoid positions to become psychotics, then we develop to the depressive positions and become neurotics. "The depressive position is unconsciously retained and neurosis inevitably becomes a universal phenomenon." (Thomä & Kächele, 1987) We are all neurotics, more or less. I have always maintained this, but I'm surprised to find psychoanalytic theory affirming it. Apparently however, psychoanalytic theory maintains that we are not all psychotics. Okay. Maybe I've been wrong on this point. But there is a "psychotic-core" postulated, and I see how it is that this exists within us all, transcended in a way in which we do not transcend our neurotic personal heritage.
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Personals
I remember realizing without fully focusing, an idea,
which I feel come into a fuller fruition now as we near
the center of the room: we know each other, without
words. Words are unnecessary. This is why I did not
want to speak to girl next to me, or to one on my right.
Others speak, which others, myself included, know is
wrong--or not wrong, but insincere. They spout words
to alleviate their doubt, their insecurity, their fear.
I feel this too, but I have never been a speaker. I hide
these fears away, so that no one will know, or know
less readily, seeing them unwittingly revealed through
loquacious behavior, yet they are revealed through
taciturnity. We cannot be revealed, but we are seen.
[The world is a dangerous place, always, but especially
when ingesting controlled substances before entering
government buildings.] We are colors, we have always
been. I am blue, and the girl is blue too, and everyone,
blue, or magenta, or bright yellow. We coagulate in
the center of the room, into colors like stained glass,
each of us a different segment of the whole, some of
us, standing out, others blending in. The girl whose
hand I do not hold is tinted with a purple glow, as if
she were less blue than pink, but she is a certain blue.
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miscellanea
Despite sensibility, I find myself admiring McVeigh
for the dignified and courageous end he put to
his life, disarming the vengeance, disguised
or otherwise, of his detractors, the victims'
families and representatives, some of whom,
not realizing the folly of their misplaced remarks,
stated in so many words their disappointment
at his lack of remorse, his stoic determination
to stick to his strongly held beliefs and opinions,
his refusal to apologize for the "collateral damage."
G. Gordon Liddy's demeanor comes to mind.
He is not dissimilar, and I admire him too,
begrudgingly. I just can't help it. These are men
in the vein of the Caesars, Napoleon, Alexander,
Atilla, Hitler, Norman Swartzkopf, et al., united
by the common thread that they are all killers.
This is the society we breed in our struggle to exist.
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FAQ
Images are so limiting, so arbitrarily defining. I am so much more than what I look like. When people see me (or anyone), they form opinions. "First impressions are important." "Appearance is everything." These homilies are true, but they should not be. It is so difficult to correct first impressions. I allowed a picture of myself to be placed on the back of my last novel, and now I'm sorry I did. Maybe I chose the wrong picture, but I liked that one. I still do. But it classifies me in a way that may limit me. And it's not really a true rendition of my self. I am so much more (and less) than that photo depicts.
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