“Yes?”

• None Found

• Short Bites
• Short bites
• Short Bites

Often when I walk down the street I find myself falling into line behind another person heading in the same direction and letting them do the work of setting the pace and dividing a path through the on-coming crowd. It allows me to relax, look around at the scenery and let my mind wander. One day I noticed that the person I was using as a pace car was behaving a bit oddly: he was checking his appearance obsessively in every available reflective surface that he passed. It’s something we all do, of course, often without noticing or being noticed — so universal is the impulse to reassure ourselves of our comeliness. With this little fellow, though, I noticed something. I was struck by the fact that he was not particularly unattractive — which would have made his checking behavior make some sense (someone who grew up unconventional looking would probably be self-conscious of their appearance) — nor was he particularly attractive, so his behavior couldn’t be dismissed as run of the mill narcissism. He looked average. Passable. Attractive enough. And that is what got my attention and led to a rather interesting insight.

“All the checking in the world is not going to make him look any better,” I thought, and suddenly saw the bizarre futility of the kind of obsessive self-regard that the little man was engaged in and that the rest of us do as a matter of course. What he had forgotten (or never learned) was the corollary of the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (i.e., not the beheld): when it comes to assessing one’s attractiveness to others it doesn’t matter — at all — what one thinks of oneself. Read that last line again. How many times have we looked on in comic horror at someone who left the house clearly not intending to imitate a clown but who succeeded nonetheless? Now ‘fess up — how many times have you been the clown?

This may sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but consider its implication: not only does it not matter what you think of your own appearance in assessing your attractiveness to others, the only opinions that matter are those of others (the self-esteem mavens wouldn’t like that — but it’s true). When it’s important to you to know if you are attractive, beautiful, pleasant to others — don’t look at yourself, look at them. Read their reaction to you. If they like what they see, you’re attractive; if they don’t, you’re not. And you can’t predict what any individual will find appealing. In a large city like New York, where you meet hundreds or thousands of people in a day on the street it is obvious just how random these judgments can be. What you’re really looking for is a general consensus: a trend among the faces facing you. And, keeping the statistical theme going, you only need to take a sample. On any given day it should be obvious early in the day how successful you’ll be. Once you know, you can stop checking. Completely. This leads to lots less work. If only my average looking little friend had known.

Since the incident with the average looking guy I have practically stopped regarding myself in public. I get ready for the day by doing basic preparation (shower, shave, make sure the hair is heading in one direction, don reasonable clothing) and then wait for the world to tell me how successful I was… today. Some days I can tell I’m not very attractive because I get no reaction or odd reactions to something I’m wearing. I feel no pang at this because I know now how random attraction is and there’s a good chance I’ll be attractive again, tomorrow.

• A rat’s agent of grace
• My Elizabeth Taylor Story
• Human Nature

For me, the initiation happened around age 9 on the school playground (of course) and my mentor was a wiry kid named Chris W. (I don’t know why I’m protecting his identity — it’s almost certainly a matter of public record in the justice system, by now). Chris was not very bright but he was precocious in one particular way — by 3rd grade he was already a well-known perv, constantly getting into trouble for bothering girls and making lewd suggestive comments that sometimes were disturbing but often were just baffling. One day, after lunch, he cornered me by the see-saw and told me he had a joke. The interchange:

Chris: No matter what I say, answer “rubber balls and liquor”.

Me: Okay.

Chris: What did you have for breakfast yesterday?

Me: Rubber balls and liquor.

Chris: What did you have for lunch?

Me: Rubber balls and liquor.

Chris: What did you have for dinner?

Me: Rubber balls and liquor.

Chris: (his face now twisted into a rictus of perverted glee) What do you do to your girlfriend at night?!

Me: Rubber balls and liquor?

He exploded in laughter and I nodded knowingly and snickered but, of course, the joke makes no more sense now than it did then. I was feigning sly appreciation of naughtiness to cover my guileless confusion — I distinctly remember feeling a surge of anxiety at the possibility that girls possessed some version of “balls” and that this fact had somehow eluded me. Then I decided that it was just a stupid joke that didn’t make any sense and had probably been created by pervy Chris who knew no more about girlish anatomy than I did.

Occasionally his bawdy bon mots landed somewhat more successfully. Once he walked up to me and demanded to know what I would say if his balls were on my chin. “I don’t know, what?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said, “because my dick would be in your mouth!” Well, as I discovered many years later, he was right about that — it really is very difficult to talk with a dick in your mouth, but since there’s usually little to say at such a moment the comedic irony is nil.

• A rat’s agent of grace
• Mark Allen and Lypsinka’s Lovechild
• The Semiotics of Smoke

• None Found

		Click to enlarge

The Highline Park has opened a second section that threads a path of green through the old industrial section of Chelsea. Very impressive — all that’s missing are laser cannons to pick off the yuppie runners who crowd the narrow paths…

• Wounded Warriors in Central Park Run
• Apple moves into the neighborhood
• Glamour and gore at the turn of the century

Have you ever been surprised by the reappearance in a dream of a long-forgotten image from your past? Something that seemed to have little or no significance at the time? When it happens to me I am astonished at the seemingly random collections that make up our memories, the odd things that are retained, somewhere imprinted in the folds of flesh. Offstage scenery awaiting the call to action.

One night, in my sophomore year of college, I was walking home from a Chelsea studio where I took a printmaking class. Passing 18th Street, I noticed a cluster of people and lights about midpoint between 5th and 6th avenues. Back then the area was still fairly industrial so it was unexpected to see activity at that time of night. I had to investigate and strolled toward the lights. As I approached I saw that it was a new restaurant — an incongruously glamorous looking place with a velvet rope and everything! And as I scanned the people standing outside to see if I recognized any of them a long black limousine pulled up in front and out stepped… Elizabeth Taylor. I was standing about 20 feet away and she was unmistakable. She turned back toward the car for a moment, perhaps to gather her coat, and as she did she glanced across the street. I was the only person standing there and suddenly those amazing eyes looked right at me. Another moment later and she had swept through the restaurant doors and was out of sight. After being stunned, I ran all the way home to my dorm to tell my friends and we all ran back to see if we could spot her leave the restaurant but after a long wait decided that we had missed her departure.

For all these years, I’ve liked to think that my image persisted somewhere in Elizabeth Taylor’s memory, an anonymous little actor perhaps retrieved once or twice to populate a dream. It was fun to think that after so many years of her being in my head I was now in hers. The news of her death was especially poignant — you see, she took a little bit of me with her.

• Losing my religion
• A Ghost Story
• A rat’s agent of grace

Passed Karen Finley at Broadway and Waverly Place. She was wearing a leopard coat. Last time I saw her was back in the 80′s, when she performed ["I'm an Ass Man"] (strong stuff).	Turned off Broadway onto Washington Place and passed a gay couple. One guy said to the other, “I’m living in my head.”	Turned onto Mercer and noticed EMT and police helping a homeless guy into an ambulance. I had seen the man the previous day crawling across Waverly on his hands and knees and wondered if he would survive.
5:30 pm	5:31 pm	5:32 pm

Three minutes during a walk home from dinner in the East Village on February 28.

• Autumn in New York
• Marilyn 666
• Here Come the Memorials

I wrote once before in a [post] about the meanings of smoke that I was then in the midst of an attempt to quit — using nicotine patches. That attempt failed. Within days of ceasing use of the patches I was back on the butts. I suppose the patches work for some but, for me, they simply shifted the source of nicotine from smoke to the patch and — even at the lowest available dose — once the patch was discontinued my body still needed a source of the 7mg or so of nicotine it expected daily. It occurred to me that the goal should not be nicotine replacement but nicotine reduction through slow titration — dose reduction — to a point where quitting would be relatively easy. Commercial products, produced at only a few dose levels would not do it.

I was smoking about a half pack of Camel Ultra-lights (approx. 0.4 mg nicotine per cigarette according to [this] FTC source) at the time I began the reduction project = 4 mg. of nicotine per day. Irony – my “normal” daily dose was already about half of what the lowest level of patch provided. No wonder I didn’t quit using the patch — it was actually making me more dependent on nicotine. My goal was to slowly reduce the number of cigarettes I smoked each day until I was down to just 3 or 4 per day — assuming that at a daily dose of only 1 to 2 mg. of nicotine, my dependency would be mostly psychological rather than physiological and easier to quit. I gave myself no time limit and did not rush the process, coaching myself that since it took me a long time to become a half-pack a day smoker it should take awhile to comfortably get back to being a 3 or 4 cigarette a day smoker.

It took a few months to get down to my target of 3 to 4 cigarettes a day (one for each of the major triggers: morning coffee and after meals). And, just as I was debating about how to actually go about quitting, Providence intervened: I got food poisoning from eating a bad hot dog last July 4th. I was sick as a dog for days and, of course, could not smoke at all. After the fourth day it dawned on me that I was completely free of nicotine dependence — since it only takes 4 days to completely get through nicotine withdrawal. Had there been any side effects of the final withdrawal (e.g., stomach cramps, constipation, headaches, etc.) they were completely masked by the far more severe symptoms of food poisoning. I realized I need never smoke another cigarette — I was free.

People have asked me if I found it difficult to quit smoking — and are surprised when I say “no”. The method I hit on — slow reduction of dose dependence and then just wait to get sick (hopefully nothing as dire as food poisoning) so you can get through withdrawal with any symptoms masked by the illness — was really pretty easy. Interestingly, I have also never experienced any cravings since I quit. There were a few behavioral triggers that made me think of smoking sometimes (the strongest: dealing with work stress, which I had adapted to by relying on smoke breaks that got me away from the office for a few blessed minutes…) but they were eventually extinguished.

The takeaway: nicotine is an addiction, but a fairly manageable one using standard dose titration methods and reliance on “masking symptoms” of any transient illness that can help you through the final 4-day withdrawal.

• The Semiotics of Smoke
• February 12, 2044
• Born Too Late…

I know I should probably want to hate this image and everything it represents, but I can’t because it’s so damned perfect. Frankly, I admire the commitment that BB shows — in the midst of a near-Depression, with the raging rabble verily at the gates of the compound! — to a lifestyle and an ideal that seems quaintly antique in a culture that paves over its history and sells out its future for a quick buck.

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

• Yahoo needs a strong husband
• Every Day is Like Sunday
• Network, 30 Years Later