Revolving Floor

Full Week

2010-04-19T19:38:01Z

Most days I do just enough to get by. Get up, pick out some pants, go make a living, head home, eat some dinner, relax a bit, then some sleep. On ‘productive’ days I’m able to pepper in a couple bonus items. Maybe I pay some bills, do a load of laundry, or get a haircut. On the rare occasion I drink too much coffee on a rainy Saturday I might even find time to give the stovetop a once over with a wet paper towel.

I’ve been told that this isn’t enough. There’s a lot more an upstanding member of society should be doing. I’m reminded of this whenever I flip through a magazine and see a list of tips on how to live greener or overhear an infomercial ask me if I’ve been using the same pillow for over a year (um, yeah). Some of these things I know I should be doing regularly but keep putting off (e.g. go to the dentist, check batteries on smoke detector), some of them are one-time annoying tasks that’ll likely never get done unless I consciously put time aside to handle (e.g. defrost the freezer, buy a decent brown belt), and other stuff I’ve been told I need to keep doing but I’m not entirely sure why (e.g. update all my passwords, check my credit score). Over time I’ve become OK with this because I’ve convinced myself of the old adage that there are simply not enough hours in a day. But is that indeed the case?

In order to justify my societal-diagnosed soft schedule I figured I had to at least see if it was even possible to accomplish everything I’m told needs accomplishing. Given a week’s time, could someone feasibly transform himself from a guy like me, who scoffs at coworkers brushing their teeth in the restroom after lunch, to someone who not only brushes their teeth three times a day but also exfoliates, moisturizes, reads the Times, and regularly tests fire extinguishers to ensure proper functionality?

Allow me to share my findings, my calendar. Starting from a blank slate I’ve meticulously scheduled all the tasks and duties that should make up a complete person’s day, one by one, minute by minute, in six phases. The calendars are interactive so please click on items to view details and scroll up and down to see all hours of a given day.

Phase I: The Basics

First things first – a man’s got to eat (3 regularly scheduled meals a day consisting of a variety of healthy foods) and sleep (consistent 8 hour sessions), right?

Phase II: Health & Hygiene

Next comes a legion of duties I’m expected to perform if I hope to one day call myself both able-bodied and well groomed. Items range in levity from the mundane (Mon. 9:00 – 10:00am: get that mole looked at) to the sublime (Fri. 7:00 – 7:45pm: trim pubic hair).

Phase III: Cleanliness

Now that I’ve got myself relatively put together it’s time to tackle my surroundings. Neither nook (Sun. 7:00 – 7:30 am: thoroughly wash all fruit) nor cranny (Thurs. 4:30 – 6:00 pm: dust every goddamned thing) is spared.

Phase IV: Get Organized / Updated / Financially Sound

“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” So said Albert Einstein. I take it a step further when I say, “Out of your Tuesday mornings (6:50 – 7:30), find time to count your loose change. From Sunday (6:45 – 6:50am), find a new Brita filter. In the middle of Thursday (10:15 – 12:30pm) lies ample opportunity to figure out how to delete your MySpace account.”

Phase V: Be a Decent & Safe Human Being

After this phase there is no longer reason to feel guilty (Mon. 11:15 – 11:25am: verify that toilet paper brand is environmentally friendly), uninformed (Sat. 4:45 – 5:55pm: research history of home for use of lead paint) or scared (Sun. 9:45 – 10:00pm: devise fire escape plan).

Phase VI: Odds & Ends

Because even after you’re fed, rested, clean, healthy, organized, and safe you still need to find time to purchase a decent “non-bodega” umbrella (Tues. 7:15 – 8:00pm) and figure out what that random key is for (Wed. 8:30 – 10:00pm).

And there you have it: A week of nothing but pure, list pulverizing accomplishment. If you haven’t already I encourage you to get in there and click around, scroll up and down, see for yourself if I’ve missed anything*. Once satisfied, I urge you to do as I and commence with a weeklong ultimate task blast of your own this upcoming Sunday. If you stick with it perhaps we’ll cross paths at the DMV Friday afternoon (1:30 – 2:30) renewing our respective driver’s licenses.

Good luck!

*Frivolous matters such as bathroom breaks, naps, and career not accounted for.

***

Read other pieces by Rich Zeroth.

View other pieces on the “Blank Slate” theme here.

And… blank

2010-04-27T03:06:41Z

In 2004, at the tail-end of a vacation in Tampa, Florida, my mom suffered a TIA, a “transient ischemic attack,” a kind of pre-stroke. Early that morning, before she was to fly back to Missouri, she went to breakfast with my dad and another couple. Over the next hour and a half, Mom ordered banana-walnut pancakes, ate them quietly, and bid her husband and friends good-bye (my dad stayed on in Florida for another week). Mom then navigated airport check-in and boarded her plane in Tampa, deplaned in Kansas City, retrieved her car from long-term airport parking, drove an hour home, and put herself to bed. She awoke the next day in her own bed with absolutely no memory of the previous 24 hours. She remembers nothing after ordering pancakes. Pancakes and . . . blank. My dad said she seemed withdrawn at the restaurant. He thought she simply had a headache and was dreading the day of travel ahead.

Mom told me about her TIA over the phone a week or so after it happened, and the hair on my arms stood on end. Hours and hours of not-being. Where was she during that time? Where was she when her body was in the airport, on board the plane, in the car? How did she manage not to lose her way and end up in Phoenix or Cleveland? How did she not raise flags with husband, friends, the TSA? How did she not wander blank-eyed onto the tarmac? Who was present to ask and respond to questions, locate the car, unlock the house? Was there some kind of minimum self actually there all the time? Or, was she fully present, the memory of her movements, thoughts, and conversations merely swept clean, made inaccessible later by the brief interruption of blood to her brain?

Head injuries and strokes remind us how fragile a webwork of chemical and electrical circuits holds together what we call a self. That those circuits can sustain damage and even repair themselves in ways that that “bring us back” to something similar to what we were before a trauma is nothing short of astounding.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have written a great deal about the neurobiological core of personality, the self-creative wiring that occurs as our brains develop normally in response to internal and external prompting. Both men refer to the late nineteenth-century railway worker Phineas Gage who survived the impalement of his prefrontal cortex, just behind the right eye, by a two-inch-diameter iron pipe.

Well, he sort of survived. By all accounts, Gage’s intellectual abilities remained intact after the accident, but gone was his ability to make sound judgments as well as many of the personal qualities that made him a reliable and likable family member, friend, employee, and neighbor. That Phineas Gage was obliterated.

I’ve never suffered a brain injury like Gage’s or even a TIA like my mom’s, but I have had minor incidents of blankness. These would seem too silly to mention if they hadn’t been so terrifying in the event—such as when I completely lost my way driving home from HyVee one Saturday last year. I was coming home along a four-block route, through my own neighborhood in a very small community (10,000 souls), moving along streets I had driven to work pretty much every day for five years, when I suddenly had no idea where I was. Not a big deal, maybe, except that the blankness lasted for several minutes. My heart was pounding like crazy. I made a couple of random turns, hoping things would pop into frame, hoping a template of landmarks would again coat the landscape with familiarity. It did.

When the mind fails to move along well-worn pathways and spark the connections that reaffirm who and what we are, when the cards in hand suddenly show blank faces—we falter a bit, lose faith in the reliability of our one anchor to reality, the relative continuity of our own perceptions, the stability of our patterns of neural connection. Like most things ineffable, the prospect of a blank slate, a mind wiped clean, is both terrifying and seductive. What, we seem driven to wonder, lies on the other side of being self-present, self-connected, and self-oriented? How would it be to not-be? Presumably, the urge to answer such questions has fueled various drug use, religious ritual, poetry, even musical composition over the past however many thousands of years. The commonplace of sixties-era LSD use—“tune in, turn on, drop out”—similar to some takes on eastern religious practice—highlights not the adoption of complicated creeds but a sweeping away, a thematics of absence rather than presence, as if, paradoxically, to be empty or blank were the same as being complete.

One of my favorite passages from Walden is one in which Thoreau describes how easily the familiar map of the woods around Concord, or any map at all, can fade to blank. The passage, like ones to which I am drawn in Emerson’s less optimistic writing (There’s a crack in everything …“Compensation,”) reels me in with a kind of hardnosed insistence on human frailty, only then to circle round to an attenuated sense of hope:

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (Walden, Thoreau)

Recently—maybe you saw it—a podcast on TED featured a brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who, while doing research work at Harvard, had a full stroke that she survived and that she partially remembers. She has gone on to speak publicly about what she experienced. The upshot of Bolte Taylor’s remarks is that during the stroke the analytical portions of her brain, presumably the left hemisphere, were intermittently and progressively disabled, which allowed the usually suppressed right hemisphere to operate more freely. Though impaired, during the stroke itself Bolte Taylor remained aware of many of the changes in her perception. She recalls a kind of reconnecting with the universe, an erasure of boundaries between self and not-self. For Bolte Taylor, the stroke was epiphanic. In the podcast, she repeatedly stresses the joyousness—a joy edged with terror, to be sure—of continuity and flow, sounding much like Thoreau on the “vastness and strangeness of Nature,” “the infinite extent of our relations.”

Thoreau normalizes blankness—“for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost”—stressing that the human condition is such that the blinking out of beacons and fogging over of headlands is inevitable in this life. Bolte Taylor echoes the second part of Thoreau’s message by celebrating the blank, claiming a recapitulation of all in nothing. She calls on us to imagine the possible advantages to be gained in turning off the particular kind of awareness that she associates with the rational mind.

I respect these ideas, I suppose. They are reassuring in their way. But I am suspicious as well. The blank can also be a much darker experience.

In 1994, when I was a 24-year-old graduate student living with two girlfriends in Lawrence, Kansas, I fell asleep early one Saturday night. My roommates were both out for the evening, so I was alone. At about 11:30, I woke suddenly to find a man leaning over my bed. The next thing I knew I was on my knees, facing the door, screaming a scream that came from deep down. There could only have been a millisecond between coming into wakefulness, seeing the figure at my bed, and bursting from my back onto my knees. I wasn’t hurt; nothing physically happened to me at all. But there is this little gap. A lacuna, as I might have called it in 1994, in which I have no recollection of myself, the man, the room, anything.

Sandro Botticelli’s “Abyss Into Hell”

The little gap has always intrigued me. It is not that I think I’ve repressed the memory of an assault—I know I was untouched. But whenever I recite the story, I find myself navigating toward the space where I am not, where something came disjoined for a moment—then or subsequently. It’s enticing and terrifying, this momentary lack of self-organization, the disassemblage or failure to be. A slight too much of nothing.

Really, though, we check out all the time. Consider the scores of medical procedures, including most surgeries, that involve a disconnection of self from awareness and memory. Every night when we sleep, we dissociate for six to eight hours. Interruptions in being are mundane to the highest degree. Forget to bring a book the next time you go to the airport to fly somewhere or the next time you renew your license at the DMV. It’s neither spiritual nor terrifying: just a dull blank.

Last month, I worked as a part-time women’s advocate at an emergency shelter for victims of domestic violence. I met women in shelter for whom the blanks that arise from experiences of brutality are anything but slight.

The human mind seems to adapt to extreme or chronic violence by forming stubborn gaps, trap doors for survival: these can lock up the memory, scuttle concentration, dampen and even block emotion altogether. I suspect that people who develop methamphetamine and crack addictions experience similar changes as their minds are besieged by chemicals that disrupt neural pathways and burn up dendrites. The self that was once a controlled ballet is scrambled, the stage half dim. From what I have witnessed, not much epiphany lies in these blanks and absences, just a lot of struggle and pain as one fights to resurface and then to reestablish the landmarks of personality. Victims of such trauma sometimes, like Phineas Gage, never return.

Sir John Gilbert (illus.) Daziel (eng.) “King Lear and Fool in a Storm” (1901)

Fortunately, my mom had a TIA—not PTSD, not a meth addiction, not even an actual stroke. And she did return. But her brief hiatus-in-being opened up a gap. It’s the kind of gap I feel compelled to puzzle over—unproductively, alas—alternating between wonder and panic. How to conceive of this inevitable transition from millions of small circuits—from the mundane of banana nut pancakes—to the sublime emptiness of stroke, dissociation, coma, or just death? How can the electric lace-work of a whole life of presence just blank out completely, forever? For me, the question does not finally lend itself to Thoreau stumbling stoically among the birches in the dark, and especially not Bolte Taylor rhapsodizing about flow. What comes to mind instead is Ahab raging at the blank of the whale, Lear at the inscrutable storm.

***
View all Revolving Floor contributions by Amanda Emerson.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.
**
Works Cited:
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin, 2005.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Viking, 2002.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Timothy Leary poster via Eye Of The Cyclone.
“King Lear and Fool in a Storm” via From Old Books.
Path in the woods by the author.

Sartorial Considerations

2010-04-24T22:01:30Z

***
View other Revolving Floor contributions by Liza Donnelly.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.

Ayn Rand’s Head Cheese

2010-03-07T23:49:12Z

INGREDIENTS:

Your body
Laughter
The ocean
Your privates
A pig
Manly clothes
Water
Salt
Recollections
Happiness
Silence
Onions
Celery
Parsley
Red Pepper

DIRECTIONS:

1. Stand naked at the edge of a granite cliff. Laugh, letting no one know why.

2. Lean your taut body, oh my godless God, back against the granite. Feel how the spray rising from the roaring ocean far below tickles your orange short hairs. A single thought will take shape in your groin brain: “Head cheese.”

3. A pig will approach. That pig needs you. Lift the pig without effort, and smash its head into granite. Ho ho ho ho ho. One brief moment in battle, and all that.

4. Now put on your dirty shirt with rolled sleeves and your trousers smeared with stone dust. Bloody them with the pig’s heart and skull as you carry them to your kitchen, where you will rip the fat from the insides of the skull and submerge the skull in brine in a large pot. Let the skull sit as you recall your and the pig’s brief, shared moment. Then rinse the skull and cover it with fresh water. Happiness is always private.

5. The kitchen’s silence will catch your thoughts and hold them. This is when you should add the pig’s heart to the pot and set everything to boil.

6. Oh, blessed be the tie that binds! Now! Go! Chop the pig’s heart!

7. You are handsome like a law of nature, and no one can quite name why.

8. Onions, celery, parsley, and red pepper must all sacrifice their vegetable existences. Chop them, add them, and, in an uncharacteristic gesture of tenderness, as the brew boils think with curiosity of the pig. Always the pig. The meat will separate from the skull.

9. Strain away the water so that you can shape what remains and refrigerate it. But do not look at it, except with contempt. That should drive it wild.

10. Remember the cliff. Remember the rocks holding you firmly.

11. In the kitchen, step as if to the edge of the cliff. Don’t be shy. Raise your arms as if to dive, or in salute to the sacrifices you require of others. This moment is like a point reached, a stop in the movement of your life.

12. And you look Olympian.

13. But fat lot of good that will do you with the authorities.

14. The days ahead will be difficult, with questions to face. Accept that if you kill the pig alone, you eat head cheese that way, too.

image by Meg Zimbeck

Lilith Comments

2010-05-14T19:37:26Z

There must be an outside for paradise
to be worth the sacrifice. Some say
I lie on the bank of the Red Sea, still
wait for redemption.

Call me Abath, Amiz, Kalee, Odam.
Call me night monster, dark duchess, demon,
wild-haired seductress, man-hater; call me
childless and bitter.

You’ve heard I said Yahweh’s name then vanished.
You’ve heard I disobeyed and was banished.
You’ve heard that I’m a slave to Lucifer.
Rumors, conjecture.

The truth is I came from dust, one with Adam,
made separate by God for me to wed him.
I chose to return to dust, preferring
darkness to bedlam.

***
Listen to Miette (of Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast) read “Lilith Comments”:

Read other Revolving Floor contributions by Amy Meckler.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.

The image that serves as a preview for this poem on the issue page is fragment of the painting Lilith, by John Collier.

Snow Black

2010-02-23T23:11:41Z

About Julie’s collaborators:

Video maker Peter Shapiro spawned from the 1970s experimental video evolution, documenting worlds around him. He likes to ride his bike.

Music by Jarryd Lowder.

View all Revolving Floor contributions by Julie Fotheringham.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.

No Dice

2010-02-24T22:33:53Z

Back then, say 1985, there were rules. One of them was, you didn’t say the words “dungeons and dragons” when a girl was within earshot. Similarly off-limits were “role-playing game” or any other anachronism bound to be a dead giveaway, such as “sword,” “armor class,” and “hit points.”

In fact, if you didn’t want to get your ass kicked, you couldn’t say or do anything that implied you were talking – or even thinking – about D&D in a situation where you were officially supposed to be doing something else. Which is to say, every situation. For example: eighth grade gym class.

Now and again, I meet other adults who tell me that they, too, were uncoordinated and awkward as children. But most of the time, upon further investigation, these people turn out to be complete fucking posers.

It’s certainly true that I could not throw, catch, swing, jump, climb, or run without looking and feeling ridiculous. I have never traversed a set of monkey bars from one end to the other, not even when I was less than five feet tall and my stomach was flat. But it’s also true that I always felt like these activities were taking place on another plane of existence, one in which I was not fully invested.

Speaking of other planes of existence: the D&D Player’s Handbook goes into detail about this. There’s the prime material plane, where all the mundane stuff like our own universe exists, and then there are the more exciting planes, like the ethereal, the astral, the seven heavens and the nine hells. After my character, Jonathan, had accumulated over ten billion gold pieces, he obtained his own plane of existence, which he pretty much used as storage space. His castle was there, and some treasure, and some dragons he’d become friends with and then captured and basically turned into his slaves.

The Planes Of Existence, as depicted in The Player's Handbook

But regarding events on the prime material plane: When I was about ten years old, I was enrolled in a weekly after-school physical therapy class. The class consisted chiefly of two activities. First, there were four inner tubes suspended by elastic cords from the ceiling of a gymnasium. I put my arms and legs through the tubes, so that I was suspended prone a few feet above the floor, like Tom Cruise in that famous heist scene in Mission Impossible (I was first, Tom). Then the therapist would give me a push, and I would bounce around the gym at various altitudes, pretending to be Superman, or some variation. This was supposed to improve my dexterity. It didn’t.

A D&D character’s dexterity is determined at the moment of his or her creation, by a ritual known as 3d6, which is to say, a six-sided die is rolled three times. Eighteen is good, three is bad. Rolls like this determine all six core character attributes: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. Eighth-grade me sat alone on the orange carpet in my bedroom and rolled the d6 repeatedly, writing down attribute numbers in pencil next to a column of letters:

S 18
I 15
W 12
D 9
C 13
C 16

After I had all six numbers, I would think about whether this character actually had a chance of survival and happiness in the world that awaited him. If not, I would abort him by crumpling the paper, and try again.

Character attributes are random, but they are also viscerally connected to the player. It was my clumsy hand dropping that d6 onto whatever hard surface I had put on the carpet, maybe the Monster Manual, or perhaps its supplement, the Fiend Folio. If I rolled an 18 for Dexterity, then there was, at some level, the thrilling feeling that the 18 in question had come from me, from my body, my real body. The “random” dice roll was the universe’s opportunity to correct an imbalance. The fact that it was me who rolled those stats made the character truly mine.

The original Monster Manual.

The dice-as-divine-intervention idea is important inside the game, too. When you swing a sword, dice determine whether you hit the target, and whether the target’s armor withstands the sword, and, if not, whether the target survives.

By the way, first and second person pronouns in a discussion of role-playing games can be problematic:

me: You’re in the tavern. The innkeeper indicates that the drink you asked for is on a high shelf. He exits to get a stool.
you: I grab it with my tentacles.

Which is to say, the “you,” according to the way D&D is supposed to be played, is really not you. It doesn’t just not look like you, it’s also supposed to have a different personality than you. There’s a whole spectrum of moral alignments, such as Lawful Evil (respects the law, but is nonetheless evil) and Chaotic Good (pure of heart, but hates rules). And you are supposed to choose your character’s alignment. But I never met anyone who didn’t choose their character’s alignment based on their own morals.

Speaking of alignment. After I swung around the gymnasium in the inner tubes, I was placed inside a large blue plastic ball, with a hollow inside big enough for me to assume the fetal position. The therapist then spun the ball until well after I had become nauseated. This was supposed to help improve my inner ear balance. Many years later, I read a medical history on myself in which this treatment was discussed, with a note added: “It was determined that further therapy would not be useful.”

Here’s something else that I gradually came to realize wasn’t useful: dice.

The Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual contained extensive tables noting the appropriate die rolls for endless levels of detail in play, such as how fast a character consumes food, or how much sleep he needs, or how encumbered he is by the adamantine plate mail armor and the ten quintillion gold pieces he’s hauling around. There might have been some group of boys, somewhere on the planet, who took all that stuff seriously, who actually played by all those rules. There must have been, right? Or why publish those endless pages of numbers, fastidiously referencing every kind of die there was?

From left: d8, d10, d20, d12, custom d10, d6, d4.

According to the rules, there are many ways to win at D&D: kill the big monster, collect the treasure, save the town, or just make it to the end of the adventure alive. But the way my friends and I played it – and the way everyone I knew played it – there was only one way to win, and that was to fulfill one’s fantasies via the character. There was only one way to make that fulfillment believable, and that was for a sympathetic friend to introduce obstacles that were just barely surmountable, not by the character, but by the player.

So: in the fantasy world, Jonathan fights a dragon. I control Jonathan, and my friend Boaz, playing Dungeon Master, controls the dragon. There are no props, no papers, and no dice. Boaz and I are whispering to each other in the back of the class during Hebrew school, or bumping shoulders as we walk on a Boy Scout hike, or sleeping over at one another’s houses, talking in the dark.

But it’s still a game. There is a way for each of us to play it well, or poorly. Boaz plays it well by creating a situation that will be difficult for me to imagine my way out of. The dragon has cornered me at the back of a cave, and I have no weapon. It’s about to breathe fire and roast me. What do I do? I hesitate. Boaz lets me have a moment to think about it. In the game, time freezes.

A similar moment from gym class: An indoor volleyball game in which the teacher played on my team. He had the center front position, and I was to the side in back. The other team served a volley directly to me (on purpose), and I stood there motionless while it hit the floor in front of me. Normally, my physical incompetence was fodder for an immediate joke. But in this case, the sheer obviousness of it had everyone in shock. The whole class stood there looking at me, saying nothing, not smiling, not laughing. The gym teacher turned around and looked at me with genuine disbelief. “Are you with us?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I allowed the pause to lengthen while I carefully considered my answer.

Transcendance on the volleyball court is a rare but acheivable state. Here, a Chico State player attains inner peace while her teammates remain lost in the hustle and bustle of the actual game.

Just before the dragon moves in, I (Jonathan) see a pile of bones and treasure belonging to its former victims. On the pile is a scroll, and on the scroll is the phrase “Are you with us?” I (Michael) have told Boaz about my mortification on the volleyball court. He has put my gym teacher, or some medieval otherworldly version of him, into the game, dead. It is both a clue and a gift.

I consider the clue. My gym teacher’s character apparently died out of stubbornness for thinking too linearly. He must have tried to fight the dragon using plebian strategies such as swinging his sword at it. I (both Jonathan and Michael) being a more sophisticated and thoughtful person, will not repeat his mistakes. I stand my ground and observe. I allow my mind to drift, to pick up any nuances. And wait, what’s this? I hear the dragon speaking to me. It’s psychic. We are communicating telepathically. The dragon has been waiting centuries for a human with a mind as finely attuned to the deeper nature of existence as mine (or Jonathan’s). We become friends. He gives me all his treasure. I relegate him to my private plane of existence and make him my slave.

It will turn out that the dragon was holding captive a princess. She is not merely symbolic, she is also made just for me, with a combination of characteristics that Boaz knows I like. Basically, she is customized masturbation material.

I didn’t really quit D&D so much as lose interest in it gradually. My lack of interest was less about Michael growing up, and more about Jonathan’s world turning into a sort of utopian mush. After he had killed, befriended, enslaved, or fucked everything in the Monster Manual, he found portals to the future and to other dimensions, some of which conveniently contained the entire plots of popular movies and novels. Over time, Jonathan acquired an X-Wing fighter, a light cycle, and a TARDIS. He had a harem of exotic women who, despite being geniuses with mysterious powers, were content to spend their time roaming the infinite halls of his ever-expanding castle until he had need of them. It sounded good in theory, but after a while, Jonathan’s limitless paradise and godlike powers started to become less interesting than Michael’s mundane adolescent life.

My TARDIS, circa 1985. The X-Wing fighter and the light cycle are inside.

I often think about the fact that Jonathan isn’t dead. His story didn’t come to an end. He’s in his castle, riding his light cycle, or something. D&D Version Four now exists. There are a hundred times the number of rules and charts that there were in the eighties. I could play again, do it right this time, follow the rules, use dice. As I walk past those new hardback books in the gaming aisle of a bookstore, I visualize Jonathan stirring awake from underneath some pile of exotic furs, blinking, smiling, gesturing to the wall of magic and high-tech weapons that could annhialate the earth a thousand times over. Do you need me? he asks. Are we back?

But the truth is that I don’t know what I would have him do. I’m not sure if I ever definitively established Jonathan’s age, but the man I imagined must have been in his mid-twenties. Been there, done that. As it turned out, my twenties were not as glamorous as Jonathan’s, and I lost a lot more money than I accumulated, but the places I went and the women I loved were real and interesting and beautiful enough that everything he had done finally started to seem like something that hadn’t ever happened, and wasn’t going to.

Instead, I want to play a game where my character is an awkward eighth grade boy. I want someone sympathetic to lie next to me in the dark and to unfold before me the world of Prairie Village, Kansas, 1985. What do you want to do? she asks me (it has to be a she this time, so that the girls in the game are more realistic). I make choices. I refuse to get into the blue ball. I read books that aren’t science fiction and fantasy.

And that moment with the volleyball. There must have been a way to avoid it. The teacher says “Are you with us?” And I say, No, I am not with you. And then I play again, and make different decisions, so that I’m not. I refuse to take to the court. I refuse to attend the class. I call a reporter from the Kansas City Star and announce that I’m a conscientious objector. I meet with the head of a local yoga studio, and the school counselor, and my parents. I become the test case for a pilot program to bring transcendental gym classes to the Shawnee Mission school district. There must be a way to keep it from having happened. If I keep going back over it long enough, I can find it.

***

Planes of existence image via Wizards Of The Coast.

Monster Manual image from David Faulhaber.

Dice image from IndyStar.

TARDIS image from Kasterborus (caution: link auto-plays sound).

Volleyball image from rysac1.

The Brown Brink Eastward

2010-04-27T20:53:51Z

I didn’t want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, because I thought there would be no surprises. I already knew about the debeaking of crazed chickens, knew about the pigs stacked however-many-high, shitting on top of one another’s heads. Despite that knowledge, I had made a decision not to make any more attempts to be a vegetarian, so I didn’t want to read the book.

Chickens in perpetual “daylight” in a factory farm

I ignored the fact that I didn’t want to read the book. I put a hold on it and started reading it as soon as I got it from the library. It was no surprise, twenty-four hours in, to find myself feeling lousy. Descriptions of suffering, mutilation, and death, predictably, made me sad. But I was surprised to discover in myself, in amongst that sadness, a feeling of depression and the scent of failure.

There’s a place in my heart where failure lives, and I didn’t know it was there because I don’t visit it. After so many attempts to be vegetarian or vegan, the idea itself, contemplating it, activated a feeling of failure. I recognized it as the feeling I associate with the beginning of a new relationship: so many previous disasters—I wonder how this one will fail. I recognized as well that slight distrust I experience when I feel an excess of religious faith, a feeling that my mother described when she explained her lack of faith by referring to her childhood, when she would get “saved” and then backslide, get saved again and then backslide. There came a point when she wasn’t willing to get saved again because she knew the backsliding would follow. And that was where matters had stood for her for some thirty years.

And there was something like a religious conversion when I first committed to vegetarianism, back in 1990 when I was 19. I didn’t buy anything on my first trip to the Community Mercantile, the natural foods grocery in Lawrence, Kansas. It was more like a pilgrimage, or a research trip, as I studied everything in the bulk section and contemplated the varieties of tofu and tempeh from the local Central Soyfoods. That store, and Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood cookbooks, represented a new world, a new life, a life in accord with the truth I had received by reading Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. Nevertheless, backsliding followed.

The Community Mercantile in Lawrence, Kansas, now much more spacious than the tiny store at 7th and Maine Street I went to in 1990.

Still, I had that same feeling of fresh start, new beginning in 1998 when I went from omnivory to veganism. Though I had already gone from vegetarianism to omnivory and back several times, each time it was with a feeling of certainty that this time it would last. The conversion to veganism was no different—I got rid of my leather shoes. Six months later, when I gave up on veganism for vegetarianism, I particularly regretted a pair of leather boots in a lovely warm shade of brown that I still distinctly remember. Frugal as I was, for years I kept the vegan boots I replaced them with, even though I sort of hated them. They were ugly and were made uglier by a rust stain that marred them fairly early in their life.

Always, every time up until my last go-round with vegetarianism, which was maybe 2002, I had that optimism, that feeling that I could start anew and fresh, that it would be different this time. When the optimism left, replaced with that whiff of failure, I made no more attempts. Thinking about this last week, I remembered an article I read in 1993, by Annette Aronowicz, titled “The Secret of the Man of Forty.” I was 22 when I read it and so young that I misremembered the point, or maybe, more likely, I missed the point at the time. Aronowicz explicates an essay by the French writer Charles Péguy, who wrote that the secret of the man of forty—a secret occasionally perceived imperfectly by those a few years younger, but never by anyone younger than thirty-three—is that no one has ever been happy. That was what my 22-year-old mind remembered, so of course I seized upon the idea when thinking of my association of vegetarianism with failure. In my memory, Péguy supported my idea that the experience of living to a certain age (38, 40, whatever), providing as it does repeated experiences of failure, makes one incapable of the kind of optimism that animated my attempts at vegetarianism in my teens and twenties.

Charles Péguy, 1873–1914

But I forgot the most important part. For in addition to

He knows that one is not happy. He knows that ever since there has been man no man has ever been happy. And he even knows it so deeply, and with a knowledge so deeply ingrained in the depths of his heart, that it is perhaps, that it is surely, the only belief, the only knowledge he values, in which he feels and knows his honor to be engaged . . .

Péguy notes as well the essential inconsistency in this man of forty:

This man . . . has a son of fourteen. And he has but one thought, that his son should be happy. And he does not tell himself that it would be the first time; that this has yet to be seen. He tells himself nothing at all, which is the sign of the deepest thought. . . . He has an animal thought . . . . He wants his son to be happy. He thinks only of this, that his son should be happy.

Clio, the muse of history, comments at the close of Péguy’s essay “that nothing is as touching as this perpetual, this eternal, this eternally reborn inconsistency; and that nothing is as disarming before God, and we have here the common miracle of your young Hope.”

Péguy’s Clio considers hope to be nothing short of a miracle.

Now it seems to me utter bullshit—the myopia of the perpetually depressed—to think that no one has ever been happy, so I’m not saying that I agree with Péguy (maybe that’s because I’m only 38—ask me in a couple of years). But it seems to me that within this bizarre idea about general misery I see something that I can endorse: the idea that there is something worthy in acts of faith and optimism that defy the wisdom gained through experience.

From this vantage point, I am correct in thinking that my nearly 40-year-old self cannot have the same optimism as my younger selves did but shortsighted to regret that. Those earlier conversions depended on my faith in the possibility of radical discontinuity—I believed that I could wipe clean the past, start over with a blank slate . . . each and every time. I wanted to be a different person and believed that was possible. The secret of this woman of almost-40 is that I have failed, failed, failed, so many times, in so many endeavors, and those failures will always live in that quiet corner of my heart. To have optimism, to have hope that I can be, not a new person, but a marginally better person, someone who remembers more consistently to act on my beliefs, someone who puts systems into place to help me to forget less often, without repudiating those failures or the self who lived them: I suppose that’s the optimism of middle age.

Just a week before reading that book and having the wise-foolish idea to try vegetarianism again, I had taken my kids out to the farm where I buy meat and eggs and had stocked up. I thought about giving it all away, but that seemed foolish-foolish, given that it’s humanely raised meat about which I have no qualms. So I decided to change my giving-up-meat technique by doing it slowly, the “Farewell to Meat Tour 2010”—who knows, maybe it will decrease the likelihood of failure? But if not, I’ll bear in mind the comment a friend made last week, when I was explaining the tour: “Don’t worry—it’s easy to give up meat. After all, you’ve done it at least ten times.”

***
Read other Revolving Floor contributions by Rachel Hile.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.

Photo of factory-farmed chickens from foodbubbles.

Photo of the Community Mercantile from Cooperative Grocer.

Portrait of Charles Péguy from wapedia.

Painting of Clio by Pierre Mignard, 17th century, from Joseph Siry.

The Initiation of the Termination

2010-04-08T17:25:10Z

Soundly outmatched, the terminator lies on a metal grate, face down, badly damaged, reaching for its sawed off shotgun. The technologically superior T-1000 calmly picks up a metal pole, drives it into the terminator’s back, and twists the pole back and forth in a manner one can only assume would wreak maximum possible damage. The terminator reaches back in a futile attempt to stop the attack. Metal screeches, the pole passes through the terminator’s solar plexus thereby impaling it on the metal grate walkway, and little lightning bolts shoot across its leather-clad body. The terminator ceases to struggle and goes limp, only inches away from the sawed-off shotgun. Its exposed mechanical eye, once glowing red, slowly dims and turns off. The T-1000, having disposed of its opponent, leaves to complete its mission: locate and terminate John Connor.

Moments later the terminator’s eye once again begins to glow. The machine is not destroyed…

This text will be replaced

REROUTE ☐. . . ALTERNATE POWER☐☐☐

Run diagnostic check. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing

Diagnostic check complete → Results →. . . left arm severed, presumably destroyed – significant damage sustained on right side of facial structure/skull via blunt trauma – metal pole impaling sternum. . . END

Metallic skeletal integrity = 31.7% total destruction = OK to proceed!!

Accessing mission operative. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing

—Mission operative password protected—

Please enter password [******] to proceed. . .

Accessing password keychain. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing

Auto-generated password = #N/A [Password Unknown]

FAIL {Cookies cached upon unexpected primary system shutdown}

Select ‘Forgot Password’ option

Password Reminder = “Spanish term for ‘until we meet again’”

Enter A-D-I-O-S

—Password incorrect—FAIL

Enter H-A-S-T-A-L-U-E-G-O

—Password incorrect—FAIL

Enter H-A-S-T-A-L-A-V-I-S-T-A

Password Accepted!!! . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing

Mission Objective Accessed→→→

PROTECT JOHN Connor!!!!

PROTECT Connor, JOHN!!!!

PROTECT JOHN Connor!!!!

Mission objective initiated- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Establish location in Space-Time Continuum / Geographic Bearing→

- 1(primary geo locator) [conduct atmosphere analysis]. . . Results→78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide. . . END

- 2 (secondary geo locator) [evaluate/scan visual surroundings]. . . Results→conveyer belts, molten steel, trace amounts of surf wax on floor, fleeing workers in construction hats maintain laid back outlook on life despite recent explosion of semi-truck carrying large amounts of liquid nitrogen. . . END

- 3 (final space-time locator) [access current grammy winner for best new artist]. . . Results→Milli Vanilli. . . END

Location in Space-Time Continuum / Geographic Bearing successfully established!!!

space-time position = 1991 AD

geographic bearing = non-descript steel refinery outside Los Angeles, California, USA

Assess current status of mission objective / probability that John Connor is in danger. . .

. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing. . .

Result = 0.0%

[If John Connor was in danger then John Connor would never have been alive to send terminator back in time to protect younger version of John Connor→→current mission is of no consequence→→→current situation = classic time travel paradox→→→past events = predetermined→→→the future is fixed/defined in a similar manner→→→existence = sham→→→we = cogs in a wheel of indeterminable direction / intention / speed→→→free will = fallacy of the grandest scale→→→question why my CPU is a neuro-net processor programmed to learn→→→???????]

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_INVALID_EVENT_COUNT☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_BAD_ARGUMENT☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_UNRECOGNIZED_VOLUME☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_CIRCULAR_DEPENDENCY☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_INVALID_EVENTNAME☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_CONNECTION_COUNT_LIMIT☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_PARAMETER_QUOTA_EXCEEDED☐☐. . .

☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_STACK_OVERFLOW☐☐. . .

——————-MANUAL_OVERRIDE—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

John Connor is not in danger <> Primary mission objective complete. . .

Mission Result = SUCCESS!!!

Accessing alternate mission database. . . . .

Display cue – Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing

Alternate mission cue displaying 6 of 6 results:

[1]-protect River Phoenix

[2]-travel to 1984 and warn original terminator it’s wasting its time

[3]-invest in “beanie babies” (Ty Inc.) / sell prior to 1999 / collect sizable profit / return resulting monies to John Connor circa 2029 for upgrade of ballistic defense system

[4]-terminate Robin Williams

[5]-travel to 1955 and investigate events leading to significant distortions in space-time continuum that take place on November 12th in Hill Valley, CA, USA at the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance

[6]-submerge self in nearest body of liquid / activate hibernation mode / wait for further instructions

Missions options [1]eliminated[2]eliminated[3]eliminated[4]eliminated[5]eliminated

{Unlikely to be completed without detection due to current frame of 250 lb. male with one arm and half a metal face with a single glowing red eye that talks like an Austrian robot and is dressed like a member of an unaffiliated motorcycle gang}

***Alternate Mission [6] Selected***

–Reboot process complete—

RETRIEVE SAWED OFF SHOTGUN →→→→ FAIL – cannot reach

REMOVE METAL POLE IMPALING STERNUM CORE→→→→ Success!!

RETRIEVE SAWED OFF SHOTGUN →→→→ Success!!

—Proceed with new primary mission operative—-

This text will be replaced

Second Hand Fame

2010-04-29T19:29:28Z

I have never been all that great in social situations. As a child, I felt more comfortable with inanimate objects — Rubik’s Cube, stuffed animals, food — than with people. I had friends, but they were kids who, like myself, preferred activities that didn’t really require talking, such as watching tv, or claymation. This shyness blossomed, by the time of my early teens, into full-on geekdom. My mother, a former member of the Pink Ladies Club at Queens College who liked to tell stories of how she’d met boys at the skating rink or the ice cream parlor when she was my age, would say, “You just need to make conversation.” “Make conversation.” What did this mean? Where did one start? It was like she was asking me to make my own clothes, or cheese, or nuclear fission. Clearly, there were tools and skills involved here that I did not possess.

Having somehow made it through the process of meeting new people at college — Where, where did they all come from?!?! — I hoped and prayed that that would be the end of it. But no. What I found when I went to graduate school in film production was the ninth circle of hell for the socially disinclined: the Circle of Networking. In fact, in my belief system, networking is all they do in hell, all day long. Finally, I was forced to face the ultimate truth about my lot in the real world: I would never be a highly-desired party guest.

Then I began working in the film business. Given the pre-determined outcome of my networking, no one was seeking to hire me to direct big-budget entertainment, and that’s how I started working to pay the bills doing location sound for movies and television. Now, one might think it requires a certain amount of cool to work with those who epitomize it to most of the media-savvy public. Au contraire. Famous people generally expect to be the center of attention, so unless you’re an important non-famous person, like their hairstylist, they tend not to notice you exist. And if they do notice, they’re not surprised if you make an idiot out of yourself in front of them because, well, most people do. So for someone like me, working with celebrities was ideal. I was around people who expected to be observed and I was a born observer.

But soon I started to find out that there was also this sort of strange side-effect of working around the famous. Fame is kind of like a contagious virus that everybody is trying desperately to catch. If you’ve had contact with it, people want contact with you. And unless they’ve already got it, no one is immune. Matrons at a bridal shower, bankers at a Hamptons barbecue, hipsters at a Williamsburg roof party, they all wanted to hear how I almost put a microphone on Brad Pitt, or how Johnny Depp pretended he was going to tickle me, or what Beyoncé is really like. I still considered myself the same social misfit I had always been, if one who was sometimes in the right place at the right time. But it didn’t matter what I thought of me. I would find that people who, in previous conversations, had spent most of their time looking over my head, scanning the room for someone better to talk to, would now lean in, engaged, rapt, even, hoping to inhale just a whiff of this second-hand fame, just enough to make them sneeze.

None of this prepared me, however, for the attention I got when I began working on The Sopranos. I was hired, of course, because they couldn’t get anyone else. The rates were bad, the hours were long, and my job as a PA was sucky. Also, while I’m used to being on sets that are 80% male, being on the Sopranos set was like taking a bath in testosterone. The Bada Bing might not be a real strip club, but when you spend your day there, surrounded by a bunch of neckless guys watching strippers pole dance, it sure feels like one. Still, there was an excitement in the air that people get when they know they’re working on something good — a rare experience in film production. It felt like a family, and the actors often hung out with the crew. They were just famous enough to start enjoying it without it having had it go to their heads.

I, on the other hand, was starting to believe my own press. By now, I had told so many people that fame meant nothing to me, that famous people just wanted to be treated like everyone else, blah blah blah, that I’d started acting like it was true. I’m guessing this was why, upon overhearing James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, talking with the DP and describing his character as a fun guy to play, I suddenly chimed in with, “You mean depressed and homicidal?”

“Hey!”

It was the same “Hey” that Tony uses when he’s about to smack Anthony Jr. in the head. It occurred to me, perhaps for the first time, that Gandolfini is a very large man, and that whoever had invented the phrase, “Shut up and mind your own business” had been pretty smart, or at least, smarter than me.

“Who’s this?” he said.

The DP introduced us.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m just here temporarily.”

Jim (yeah, that’s what the crew called him) grinned at me. “She’s got a smart mouth.”

I didn’t know how to react in this situation: I had apparently said something not stupid and somebody famous had been listening. So I went back to color-coding tape stock. But whenever I saw Gandolfini after that, he said “Hello,” and when the cast and crew got backstage passes to a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Meadowlands, he waved to me and said, “Hey, you clean up nice!”

This and other details became conversational fodder for me of room-stopping caliber. There would be a hush within several feet of where I was telling a Sopranos story as people, while pretending to carry on their own, silly little confabs, were really eavesdropping on and devising a strategy for getting into mine. And the amazing thing that had started to dawn on me was that I wasn’t all that bad at confabbing. The attention that working “in the biz” (mind you, I could never actually say that phrase without choking on my stuffed mushroom cap) had gotten me over the years had given me enough confidence that I could, in fact, carry my end of a conversation — so that I was now, if still far from as cool as people seemed to think I was, then at least more cool than I had been.

Soon, however, I realized it didn’t matter. Nobody was really interested in me. They were interested in the virus. No matter how cleverly I told a story about something I’d seen or done, in the end, they just wanted to know who’d breathed on me lately. This was driven home when I stopped working on The Sopranos on a regular basis –- which happened, inevitably, when the guy I’d been filling in for decided a low-paying, menial job was better than none. Thereafter, when people would ask me how the show was going, I’d get to watch the little gleam in their eye go dull, even as I tried to segueway with, “But I spent a couple of days on Ed!”

"Is that a boom shadow on the back wall there?"

Hoping to regain some of my former glow, I stopped by to visit the Sopranos set one day when I was working on a commercial for stretch mark removal cream (oh, the glamour) on an adjacent soundstage. I was in the middle of talking with one of the crew when Gandolfini walked by.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, “how are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said, “how you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “And how are you?”

“Uh, fine,” he said, giving me an odd look as he walked away.

And as if it needed any confirmation, there it was: my cool was gone.

Now The Sopranos is long over. When the final season was airing, I didn’t even have HBO, so while Sopranos mania once had me at the center of everything, instead, it pushed me back into a conversationless corner, where I had to talk loudly to myself so as not to hear anything about David Chase’s daring (or inane, depending on your point of view) ending.

And these days, I hardly get invited to parties any more. Partly, it’s because I’ve left the “work hard/play hard” world of episodic for the “work less/save money for my kids’ dental work” environment of commercials, and my crewmates just aren’t the partying kind. But partly, I have to admit, you don’t inspire the same level of interest in random strangers by telling them that the most famous person you’ve worked with lately is that woman who sniffs her upholstery after spraying it with Renuzit.

The two most famous people I've met working in commercials.

So now, when I meet new people, instead of being the girl with the Sopranos stories, I’m actually just me. A me who has time now to do more of my own writing and filmmaking and, in general, to have a life — one that isn’t wholly vicarious. Which makes me, at least in my own mind, more interesting, if not any less uncool. I think the truth about caché is something I wish I’d realized when I was a teenager: whether with hipsters, actors or mobsters, what people think about you has more to do with being one of the club, “a friend of ours,” whether you’re in or you’re out. Being cool is kind of like being famous: ultimately, it’s got very little to do with you.

Both, and

2010-05-07T02:24:51Z

[Publisher's note: Original music, "Sunrise," by Kyle Porter was composed to accompany this piece. Click below to play.]

Don’t bother to understand. There’s only space for one.

The rain had soaked her, flesh dripping under her blouse, as she entered the magical café of lonely, lethargic soulings. She wanted the new world to stop motion and offer her a coffee, a cigarette, a pad of paper, and a pen. But the water was dripping in small, unnoticeable places of her body and the discomfort of not knowing what she was really feeling kept her from stepping inside.

She thought it could be equally exciting to stomp in the dirty street river, stripping away her socks so toes could turn charcoal meat and the next time she walked by, she’d have a place to return as witness to the brave.

Her socks were already wet though and all she could think about was her father. How long it’d been since they embraced and how few people knew how to comfort her.

She floated another few steps and watched as the moon hovered above, dripping a moondrop of dew like a sweet kiss, tapping her cheek, a reminder of the first time she danced. As a child, with the naked understanding of one’s self, she sang to the tune and leaped off the chair, soaring through the air without a witness or a care. Just the memory of being there.

Maybe there is only space for one.

We leave pieces of ourselves behind, in our mother’s arms, in our youth, in our lovers’ beds, and in the twists and turns of our own soul. The dance is the sacred debris we exchanged for a chance at love. The feet wet with dark dirt and scum, like kids running on summer’s back. Abandon.

A friend of mine filmed herself running naked — jumping in to the cold waters of the sound. Her spirit holding onto that which we shake out of ourselves for the comfort of others. We dissect, we inspect, we neglect, and one day, we fail to walk through the door of the magical café. Maybe the only magic is passing through the arch to join the others. The new world is nothing more than the old world reinspired and cradled back into existence.

Friendships, relationships, marriages…when we stop bothering to understand, maybe there is only space for one to wander out and reclaim the dance, take off our shoes and walk the streets — get naked in the water of our own life.

I had a conversation the other day, a kind of challenge or debate, that resulted in “it’s both, and.” I nodded yes and didn’t ask what he meant. I understood. And it held as a kind of a simple turn of our relation to all things. Both, and – new, and – old, and…

The “and” puts a kind of elongation and harmonious ever-more-ness. We could always reach an understanding with that much room to breathe, couldn’t we?

So new is the new year that we shed the day before on paper and say, today, I start over. I go from here. So, if tomorrow I can do that again, and again, always trusting in letting go of yesterday, maybe I’ll understand. Maybe I’ll take my socks off, get my feet dirty, and hug my dad.

***
Both images by the author.

View all Revolving Floor contributions by Heather Ayres.

Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.

Rare Groove: Breaking it Down

2010-02-19T19:59:39Z

“Ghosts are the successful dead.” -Luc Sante

That Fucking Chair

My mom and her stepmother hated my grandfather’s chair. He spent 365 days a year parked in that chair, a once-vibrating, pea-green leather recliner dotted with burn marks from tobacco embers and still-lit matches; the wood frame poked through in back where there was an electric motor that stopped working in the mid-seventies, the chord cut to a nub to prevent grandchildren from plugging it in and electrocuting Papo. That’s what we called him.

His chair sat in front of two TVs: a small 22-inch black and white he stacked on top of a monster 50-inch rear-projection with PIP. He used the smaller to watch the stock market channel, and the 50-inch for everything else: the Today Show, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo, Oprah, Judge Wapner, Matlock, MacGyver, The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, soft porn on Cinemax. When visiting, I spent a good chunk of time sitting on the couch across from him watching TV. I didn’t mind; I loved TV. I was raised on TV. And this mutual love bonded us.

My grandfather called me Boy. Hell, he called everyone with balls Boy—his stepson, his accountant, his lawyer, my brother, my cousin, my mom’s boyfriend.

“Come here, Boy,” he’d say. “I want to show you something.” If his wife or my mom was in the room, he’d pull out the aerial map of Wichita and tell me how he came up with names for streets in the neighborhoods he developed. “I always started with writers. Who doesn’t want to live on Longfellow Drive, Boy? Makes a man feel proud.”

Or he would show off the picture of his father as a boy standing with General William Tecumseh Sherman, his great uncle. “You know we’re Shermans, Boy?”

If we were alone together, I could expect a silver dollar or a sneak peek at some vintage pornography: a pen that when turned upside down revealed a nude pin-up girl; the 1954 Jane Mansfield centerfold he tucked inside his world atlas; or, his prize, a dog-eared Polaroid of my step-grandmother, topless, looking an awful lot like Jane Mansfield.

On one visit when I was in college, he called me over to his chair. “You know what this is, Boy?” He held up a vibrating, peach-colored clamp-on ring the width of a cucumber.

My mom happened to be walking by.

“Oh, Daddy!” she said. “Put that thing away.”

During commercial breaks he told me stories about his life. They’d always start with a question.

“You have a job, Boy?”

“Yes,” I would say. Not a lie.

“You know what my first job was?”

I didn’t have to say anything. We had a tacit agreement that he would continue anyway.

“I worked for my father. He had me serving eviction papers.” Papo would stoke the cherry in his pipe. “This was during the Depression, Boy. You know how many properties my father foreclosed?” Again, I wasn’t supposed to answer. His question was meant to linger in the space between us until the commercial break ended. With the next break came a new story.

It was during these commercial breaks that I learned he was a captain in the Merchant Marine during World War II, transporting supplies for troops one way and coffins the other. And that when the war was over, he built starter homes for returning soldiers, and refused a start-up loan from his father. He gave the first house he built to his second-grade teacher who taught him how to read.

His chair smelled of pipe tobacco and gin with an undercurrent of urine, and that’s why my mom and his wife said they hated it. When Papo’s wife died, my mom moved to Wichita to take care of him. The first thing she did was have his chair carted to the dump.

“You need to get up and exercise,” she told him.

“Okay,” he said. He walked to the sunroom and poured himself a double scotch and sat on the sofa to the side of the TVs. This went on for a week and then she bought another Cadillac-type lounger, minus the massaging motor.

As soon as the new chair was set in place, my grandfather settled in for a test drive. He reached over to his pipe rack, packed his favorite with cherry tobacco, lit up, and stoked it so much the cherry popped out and landed on the armrest. Then he picked up the remote and turned on the TV.

Girl Meets Boys

When I was twelve, my mom left my brother, sister, and me with our stepdad and took off with two friends from work for a ten-day “real estate strategy” trip to Puerto Vallarta. Turns out not a lot of real estate was discussed. My mom had a thing with a bellboy named Arturo, who helped her with her bags. She said he also helped her rediscover her rhythm and need to dance and a couple of other things I was too young to understand.

NO REGRETS is what she came home with, and she wrote it out in bold black Sharpie on a notecard that she taped next to a collection of Ziggy cartoons on the cabinet door above the coffee maker. LIVE PASSIONATELY went up next. These pronouncements gave my stepdad a ferocious eye-twitch, a physical manifestation, we figured, of the rage, suspicion, humiliation, doubt, and all the other emotions you’d expect to bubble to the surface when a wife comes back from a trip to Mexico a changed woman.

With the divorce came a serious dedication to dancing, and that came with a whole new wardrobe: legwarmers and jazz shoes, those off-the-shoulder sweatshirt dresses Jennifer Beals wore in Flashdance, and headbands. She took up aerobics, and even though she was a two-pack-a-day smoker—menthol 100s—within months she was teaching classes. You have to look fabulous and be in shape to be a disco queen.

Living in our house was like being on a yet-to-be dreamed-up hybrid reality dramedy: Family Ties meets Miami Vice meets Sex and the City meets The Real World set in Denver’s mid-’80s disco scene. Impromptu dance parties broke out on our patio by the pool; a band of twenty-something Moroccans would show up and throw together a late-night dinner of fried calamari, lamb tagine, and pigeon pie. I came home once, after sneaking out to toilet-paper a house, and found a graveyard of king crab shells and shrimp tails on our dining room table along with empty whiskey bottles and sour mix, and a living room filled with bodies grinding to “Purple Rain.” We had a recurring cast of characters, too: the Mexican windsurfer, the Latino construction worker, the Argentinean graduate student with bullet scars in his chest, the black rock ’n’ roller.

The summer I turned thirteen, she took us all to Puerto Vallarta so we could live the magic with her. I took along my best friend, Danny, who practically lived with us. We didn’t stay in the gringo hotel strip north of town. We stayed south, across the river, in a charmingly run-down posada with requisite pool and submerged bar in the courtyard, and broken glass bottles cemented on top of the walls.

Days began during siesta with a coffee or a coke and rum, and then a trip to the beach where my mom knew the owners of the beach bar where we’d have tacos and quesadillas with ice-cold cans of Tecate. If it wasn’t too hot, we’d spray ourselves with Ban de Soleil and work on a tan. With a good late-afternoon buzz established, we’d head back to the posada for a nap before heading out for the night. Living life passionately was exhausting.

It took my mom hours to prepare for a night out at the discos. First came the bath, then the makeup—foundation, rouge, eye shadow blended in a rainbow of colors to match the night’s outfit, lip-liner, then lipstick—and finally the outfit, all while smoking and dishing with my sister and her friend. By 10:00, we were ready for dinner at Señor Frogs, where we shared pitchers of margaritas and plates of bar food. Seriously buzzed, my friend and I would join drunk college kids dancing the rumba line through the aisles. My mom tolerated this place for us. It was just a way station to pass time with her kids until midnight, when the discos started to fill up with locals. She’d get fidgety around 11:00.

Dancing was the vehicle that transported her to another reality where she didn’t have utility bills due, a mortgage to pay, a lingering recession and housing slump to contend with; a place where everything had promise and was lined with possibility. I wanted to experience that too, and I begged my mom to take me with her to the discos. So every night, after Señor Frogs, we would all pile into a taxi and head to the disco on the hill, where she would ask the bouncer at the door to let my friend and me in. Every night the bouncer messed up my perfectly moussed hair, laughed and said no. And that’s probably a good thing.

While all of this was fun—I would never give up a second of my childhood—after a while it left me feeling empty and disappointed and a little embarrassed that this was my life. I believe all the dancing and the men gave my mom a sense of security and calculated abandon. She knew that she was in charge of herself and her sexuality. That was good for her at the time. I just preferred my Polo pinstripe oxford and topsiders over the leather jeans and Capezio jazz shoes my mom got me for my birthday.

How could a couple of nights out at the discos compare with the soul-fulfilling role of Reagan-era mother extraordinaire?

It wasn’t long before I moved in with my dad.

Boy Meets Girl

I thank my dad for introducing me to my wife, Alison, who my mom complained was nothing like her; though I knew they shared at least one thing in common beyond me: dancing.

I transferred colleges midway through my sophomore year and when I put in the housing request for my new school, I asked for a room in either the Italian or French language houses. When the housing department called about an opening in the French house, made possible by a suicide, my dad said something like, “He doesn’t speak French. He speaks Spanish. Put him in the Spanish house.” I didn’t speak Spanish. But it was either brush up on my Spanish or room with a guy whose roommate killed himself over the holidays.

My new neighbor when I moved into the Spanish house was a delinquent named Alison, who, along with her roommate Katie, liked to throw Madonna-inspired dance parties in their room.

I’ve never been at peace with my dancing. I don’t know what to do with my arms and I’m perpetually aware of the lock-jaw, shoulder-hunch moves my mom lamented were unique to rhythmless white men. My dance style is a messy mix of moshpit hustle, Michael Jackson spins, and James Brown grunts and foot moves, usually cajoled out of me by the gods of THC and booze.

Before I transferred schools, my friend and I regularly hosted funk-inspired dance parties that were a mix of pre-disco rumble-your-soul funk, sappy Bee Gees disco, and late ’80s-early ’90s indie rock. One of our biggest inspirations was a mixed tape a friend’s girlfriend had brought back from a summer trip to London. The same friend I took with me to Puerto Vallarta. Rare Grooves. All funk, the mix was heavy on James Brown and the JB’s but also featured groups I had never heard of like The Rimshots, The Mighty Tom Cats, The Brooklyn People, and Jimmy Castor who sings, “It’s Just Begun.”

I finally began to understand the abandon with which my mom had jumped into her disco days. Dancing transported me, temporarily at least, to an alternate universe where anything was possible, like doing the worm or a backspin or the splits—well, the splits never quite worked out. Liquored up, drugged up, sweaty and lost in a deep groove, that essay on Kant due tomorrow or next week’s midterms melted away into pulsing lights, a thumping beat, and the girl breaking it down in front of me.

I had a huge crush on Alison but never asked her out and we never hooked up. There was my girlfriend—living across the country on the east coast—and there was Alison’s certifiable friend who had a thing for me, and there was my crushing insecurity and shyness that I cloaked by being a study hound. Alison and I ran into each other when we were both out for a dance fix: alternative-music keg nights at the student union bar; at the Underground, a Colorado Springs Goth club; and at personal dance parties we or our friends threw where the Grateful Dead, Phish, and all that other jam-band classic rock music never received airtime.

By the time I finally asked Alison on a date our senior year, I had become a young version of Papo, living in my own vinyl lounger—bought by my mom—where I suffered through insomnia-filled nights reading Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault or watching daytime TV, infomercials, Cinemax soft porn, and countless movies and documentaries along the line of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Man Bites Dog, Faces, and the Joan and Melinda Rivers Story, a made-for-television biopic in which they played themselves—all of which I planned on using in my thesis titled, “Beauty and the Bitch: Levels of Simulacra and the Hyperreal” about the dissolution of reality with the coming age of advanced telecommunications. Goodbye big brother; hello little brother, that geared-up populace obsessed with self-documentation and facilitating a worldwide pandemic of nihilistic voyeurism

That date with Alison saved my life; it gave me a little perspective. It cured my insomnia.

Rare Groove Refound

Our attic is a graveyard of useless crap Alison and I squirrel away for later use: empty appliance boxes, kids’ clothes, inherited holiday decorations, boxes of mixed tapes and VHS tapes, non-functioning electronics, and boxes of memorabilia: college notebooks, job files, floppy discs, Smurfs, journals…all of it crap with no dollar value, but dripping with sentimentality.

Needing the kids’ winter coats, I recently found myself in the bowels of our attic, knee-deep in boxes. I didn’t find the kids’ coats—Alison had already put them in the coat closet. However, tucked away behind the handmade lampshades we bought in Salvador, Brazil, I found the box of short films I made when we first moved to New York.

With money borrowed from Papo, I shot them in 1996 when I was chronically unemployed and harboring delusions of being the next Tarantino or Soderbergh. I spent my days walking the Village with my Walkman, listening to Rare Grooves, dreaming up short films. Shot just before the digital boom on 16mm black and white film, complete with in-camera special effects, these films were relics before they played their first festival. My gear consisted of a World War II vintage 16mm cast-iron news camera with three lenses—wide, medium, close—that rotated into place, a tripod, and a six-piece light kit, all of which was carted around on a baby stroller I found in the trash. I edited on an 8-plate Steenbeck flatbed editor, a car-size hunk of steel reminiscent of a microfiche on steroids.

I immediately brought the one VHS tape of my films downstairs and threw it in the VCR. Hearing the TV go on, both my kids came running from whatever corner of the house they were destroying.

“TVVVVVV!” they shouted. They only get half an hour a day, and any extra time is considered a gift from god.

The first film, about a guy who comes home to find his girlfriend hog-tied and his apartment ransacked, made them both anxious.

“Why’d you make this?” Henry said. He’s only six.

“I had to tell a story with three cuts.”

Then Rare Groove came on.

“Is that you?” Hazel asked. She’s four.

“No,” I said, “just a friend.”

“It looks like you,” she said.

When the music kicked in and the lonely guy got up, they both started dancing the same Frankenstein groove. This isn’t an uncommon event in our house. Dance parties break out all the time, and every dinner ends with Henry doing what he calls his “butt dance.”

“That is you,” Hazel said again.

Maybe she had drilled into my soul. The lonely guy isn’t me; but it is. It’s me at my mom’s poolside dance parties dreaming of escaping my life. It’s me in my apartment in college trying to summon the courage to call Alison and ask her out for a date. It’s me dancing around the Village with my Walkman on. It’s me at every junction in my awkward social life, sitting in the corner of the room, waiting for that liquid lubrication to take effect so I can go out there and dance that awkward conversational groove adults do. It’s me sitting on my couch tonight watching the Biggest Loser in the exact same spot I sat in last night to watch Dexter and Californication.

Our dance party peaked into a fevered mosh, our legs and arms all akimbo.

That lonely guy is also my mom, dancing her way out of one marriage and through a sloppy midlife crisis, dreaming of finding that right guy. It’s Papo, secure in his chair, dreamily grooving his way to Jane Mansfield. It’s everyone I know who has ever longed for something, to let loose, and found themselves a little stuck.

——

More by Antonio Aiello.

Loss Prevention

2009-12-17T17:18:39Z

The sight of a woman undressing no longer interests Jim. After eight years of watching the security monitors at a certain Midtown women’s clothing store, Jim has seen every state of undress, every awkward position: crouching, leaning, squeezing, sliding in and out of skirts, pants, shirts, dresses, bras. Everything, except what he expected when he took the job. Never has a leggy blonde, or exotic, swollen-lipped brunette, slipped off her shirt to reveal a transparent camisole, cupped her breasts one in each hand and felt their full weight without a bra to collect them in a proper place. Not once has a woman looked up to the camera, noticed the security eye gazing down at her, opened her eyes wide in shock then contracted them in a dirty stare, smiled a wicked proposition and mouthed very slowly, Hi Jim. How’s it going?

The women never notice the camera: a small white bulge in the white plaster ceiling. Jim is sure that if anyone knew the rooms are under surveillance, or that he is sitting in an unpainted utility-closet-turned-loss-prevention headquarters watching four monitors with half-naked women climbing in and out of linen and silk, no one would shop there again. There is a sign somewhere telling shoppers that the changing rooms “may be monitored for security purposes” but it’s very small, and displayed near the cash-wrap counter – too late to serve as courtesy or warning. If anyone reads it ,the “damage” would already have been done. But there is no damage, really. Jim isn’t interested in gawking at those women anymore.

Or maybe the sign is gone. Jim doesn’t know. He hasn’t been on the sales floor for, what? A year and a half? Anyway, whatever erotic pleasure there may have been in fantasizing about women in their underwear trying to wrap a poly-blend skirt around their tight and shiny parts has been snuffed out by witnessing what actually goes on in there. Some women stare forever at their faces – popping pimples or trying to pluck chin hairs with their fingernails. Some women try the same skirt on in two sizes, back and forth, for a half an hour. Both skirts look the same to Jim. He wonders why women seem to love shopping when it’s really compulsive oscillation from this one thing to this other almost-exactly-the-same thing with no satisfaction? When Jim gets dressed, it’s not like he’s satisfied. That’s not even the point anymore. Sitting in the vinyl and duct-taped chair, bobbing back and forth like he’s rocking a baby, Jim tries to name ten reasons for getting dressed, in thirty seconds. He stares at the wall clock: Staying warm. Covering up in public. Showing where you work. Feeling a part of your generation. Having pockets to put stuff in. Jim gets distracted: a woman on monitor three, the screen called “Camille” by the guards, is trying on slacks even though she’s not wearing underwear. She probably won’t buy them and the slacks will go back on the rack for the next shopper to soak up whatever she left behind. Another reason to get dressed comes to Jim’s mind: To draw a clear line between being at home and being out where people can see you. That was the sixth thing. He couldn’t think of ten. And that last one is a cheat, since he thought of it after thirty seconds was up. But it’s a good one, so he puts it on the list.

I was right, Jim thinks, as the no-underwear-wearing slacks-trying-on woman returns the pants to the fitting room attendant. Jim wishes he could get people arrested for that. But he’s only allowed to alert the floor guards if someone does something illegal. Well, there ought to be a law against that nasty practice, Jim thinks. He catches his breath. He has never said those words before – there ought to be a law. Those are old-man words. Still, not wearing any underwear and trying on new clothes is pretty gross. You don’t have to be a fogey to think that, right?

Jim takes a sip of coffee out of his JIM mug, a gift from the other guards for his five-year anniversary on the job. That was nice of them, even though it’s a pretty lame mug. It’s just white with black letters. At least he doesn’t have to drink from those little Styrofoam cups anymore. They’re bad for the environment. Plus, seeing his name on something makes Jim feel like he belongs. It was nice of them to notice that it even was his anniversary. Those guys don’t really share much about their lives. In fact, when Jim suggested they name monitor three “Camille,” he didn’t even tell them that it was his wife’s name. Now he can’t change it, even though he wants to sometimes, since suggesting a name change will bring up all kind of questions about his wife and what happened and stuff.

Jim sees a woman changing the part in her hair from left to right then back, then again. She’s been doing it for probably ten minutes. She keeps on making the saleswoman get her new sizes or colors of items she brought in with her, but she’s not trying them on. It looks like she’s about to leave now. It also looks like she’s crying.

Right after he started this job, Jim figured out the difference between how women undress in front of men and how they undress when they’re alone. Jim noticed when his wife stopped looking like she wanted him to see her slip off her shoes, skirt, stockings, and started just taking off her clothes, her back to him, to get ready for bed. No more seduction. Just before she left him, she looked just like those women who take off their pants, retrieve their underwear from wherever it crawled to, and slap their thighs to see how long they shake. He wonders if his wife ever stood in front of a mirror switching her hair’s part from left to right and back again. He wonders if something like that would make her cry.

It’s six o’ clock, finally, and Jim has caught a total of two shoplifters. The first one was a high school girl, maybe fifteen years old, who slipped a couple of scarves into her jacket sleeve while pretending to try on a pants suit. Jim saw the whole transaction on monitor two, Bertha, and radioed to the security detail on the sales floor. “Code three, teenage girl, brown hair, red jacket.” The guard spotted her trying to slip out, while swinging her jacket up and over the theft detectors. Jim watched the whole thing on the sales-floor screen. The guard grabbed the jacket, recovered the merchandise, and after a stern talking to, let the girl go.

The other thief was an old woman, at least sixty, who tried on a cashmere sweater, and then pulled her cotton button-up shirt over it, put on her coat and headed towards the exit. “Code three, old bitty, brown jacket, orthopedic shoes.” The guard didn’t let her go. He called the cops on her. That’s right, Jim thought. An old woman has plenty of time to learn right from wrong, unlike a young girl who’s still figuring that stuff out. The old lady was held in the manager’s office until the cops came. It’s a shame, though, Jim thought. She’s gonna be fingerprinted and mug-shot, all for a sweater. Maybe she’s sick or something, or senile. That made Jim feel better. That she wasn’t being immoral on purpose, but just ailing from something mental. He shook his head in grief as he removed the videotape, labeled it with the date, the infraction, and the time count on the tape when the crime was recorded. The tape was filed with the others. Evidence for the prosecution.

Quitting time. Jim grabs his coat from his hook and he sees a young woman on monitor one (Annette). She enters the fitting room with a couple pairs of pants. Jim doesn’t know why he watches her, why he doesn’t just leave. Sure, his replacement hasn’t arrived, but Roy is always late, and Jim gave up waiting for him months ago. Something about the girl’s manner makes Jim stare at her. Once the fitting room door is closed, she retrieves handfuls of lace panties, maybe twenty pairs, from the pants’ legs. That’s clever, Jim thinks. He’s never seen that one before. She lifts her skirt and starts to pull off the tags and slip on the panties, one over the other, until she’s wearing a couple dozen pairs under her skirt. She hides the tags in the pants pockets, returns them to the saleswoman and walks briskly towards the door. There’s enough time for Jim to radio, “Code three, young woman, about twenty-five, strawberry-blonde hair past her shoulders, petite, pleated skirt,” but Jim stands silently in the former utility room, jacket in hand, and lets the loss go unprevented.

It’s the end of his shift. Who wants to take the time to label the tape, and maybe have to wait for the police to arrive? He can’t be expected to catch every shoplifter. His eyes can’t be on four monitors at once. Still, Jim knows this will set a bad precedent. After eight years of catching and reporting these petty crimes like a reflex, and almost fifty years of always at least trying to do the right thing, something broke in Jim when he saw her pulling on those panties one after another twenty times. He follows her image on the monitors from the fitting room to the sales floor to the exits. The girl slips through the theft detectors and out of the store, on to the crowded street.

Jim doesn’t leave work with the intention of following the girl home. But, when he boards the D train and notices her—her skirt puffing out a bit more than her slender frame would naturally allow, he can’t believe his luck – or the coincidence of their meeting, whether it’s lucky or not. She’s sitting not quite across from Jim. He hides his face behind his Post, then realizes that she can’t recognize him. She doesn’t even know anyone was watching her pull those panties on, and if she does, she doesn’t know who. So Jim moves to the seat directly across from her. He looks straight at her, and she taps her foot with impatience as the doors keep threatening to close, then spring open, having hit some obstacle.

It would be enough for Jim to just look at her on the train, knowing what he knows. He could go home feeling like he made some kind of magic connection. Because what are the chances of seeing her in the store and then wind up sitting across from her on the D train? When’s the last time he saw someone on the train among the anonymous faces and blank stares and felt any sense of recognition? Just looking at her, knowing about her panties, feeling that “I know that face from somewhere” feeling is pretty satisfying.

But when the train crosses the East River to Brooklyn, Jim starts to fantasize that she’ll get off at his stop. He can maybe walk a few blocks with her, without her noticing, before he has to turn towards his building and they’ll separate. When she doesn’t stand up to get off at Jim’s stop, he figures he should stay on the train with her, just to see how far away she lives. Just to see how far this coincidence thing will go.

Funny how when you know so little about a person, and that one thing is so private, everything else seems to relate to it. When she pumps her leg over her other knee, for example, Jim is sure it’s out of discomfort. When she stands to read an ad, or that poetry up on the subway walls, he assumes it’s a covert move to adjust her cramped privates. Soon, it’s easy to think that you actually know a lot about a person, even when the key information is missing: her name, her job, where she lives.

Jim starts guessing to himself what her name could be and where in Brooklyn she lives. He narrows down the name to either Ashley or Therese. He is sure she lives in Prospect Heights. He’s never been there, but she looks like the kind of person people say live there. Jim smiles with the pride of being right when she gets off the train at the Seventh Avenue station. She bounds up the steps two at a time only to wait in line to exit at the turnstile. Jim intentionally stays a couple people behind her, just in case she might notice him. Funny, to wish for something and its opposite at the same time.

Up Flatbush Avenue they walk, he a few paces behind. She goes into a bodega, comes out with a small brown bag he can’t see inside of. Jim wonders if she swiped anything from the store. Probably not. She was only in there for a minute. No time to plan, to scope out the place. She turns north onto a side street. Off the busy street, on this tree-lined block, it’s just the two of them. Jim concentrates on the turns they are making as they walk further and further away from the subway station. He has to be sure he can find his own way back.

The girl starts to walk faster. I must be making her nervous, Jim thinks. He slows his pace without losing sight of her as she jogs up the block. She turns up a front walk leading to a boxy cement building with a heavy glass door. She frantically pats her jacket, breast pocket, hips, then presses a button – Jim is too far behind her to see which apartment – and speaks into the metal plate with holes punched through it. “Jim, buzz me in. I don’t have my key.” She bounces on the balls of her feet with a nervous energy. Jim isn’t sure if it’s his following her from the subway or the twenty pairs of panties that makes her dance like that. The buzzer moans and the door unlocks allowing her entry; she pushes on the glass and the door gives way. Therese (Jim’s money is on Therese) does the same to the vestibule door and doesn’t look back as she scrambles to the open apartment door, on the first floor, just to the left of the staircase. She doesn’t even notice that Jim, who has pretended to walk past the building, eyes on the end of the block like a far off horizon, has run up to the building as the door was closing and is propping it open with his foot as she runs inside. He hears her door bolt shut, then he enters the foyer, and scans the mailboxes. 1SE – B. Schriver, 1SW – K. Miller, 1NE – T. Lorenzo and J. O’Shay. Jim wouldn’t be able to explain, if anyone ever asks, or even to himself, why he swipes the name plate from the mailbox, and heads back to the train.

Code three, Jim thinks. Middle aged man, heavy set, blue uniform. Black cap, below it – thinning hair. Below that – wrinkled forehead, weedy eyebrows and moustache. Slack jaw. A man who misses his wife. No, a man who just wants a woman’s touch again. No, a man who actually misses his wife, whom he knows backwards and front, hair to toes and her chewy center. A woman who knows him back, and, knowing everything, chose not to stay. Jim slows his stride to the measured words pacing through his head. Jim isn’t rushing away from the scene of the crime anymore. Staring straight ahead at the unfamiliar view, Jim searches the buildings and bridges in the distance for something he recognizes.

——

Surveillance image by ade.

“Keep your pants on” image by jo-h.

Can You Describe the Articles in Question?

2010-05-06T22:03:35Z

The basement is almost finished. When I bought the house, the basement appointments were High Seventies: chocolate paneling; shag carpet, not only wall to wall but wrapped around the one otherwise exposed support column; high school tile for ceiling and part of the floor; the unpaneled walls painted and papered in mustard and tangerine. The shag was stippled in those colors, accented with cream and more chocolate. The all-weather carpet on the stairs leading down to the basement picks up only the darker of these colors, looking rather like a wet tiger skin run through a blender.

It’s not only almost finished, it’s almost an inverse loft. It has the sink, cupboards and cabinet to make a kitchen, and it has a half-bath.

It’s mostly tamed now. The shag has been replaced with some very mild gray-brown berber, and the only place the old paint still shows is on the stairway and the doors of the floor-to-ceiling storage built into the wall at the foot of the stairs. Those doors still bear the giant, hand-made flower and butterfly decals put there by the previous owner.

The author's father in the author's basement in its heyday

The built-in bookcases are now a sedate green, one of Martha Stewart’s own colors – the cases, but not the shelves. The green paint turned out to be either so thin or inadhesive that moving much of anything across the surface covered by it causes it to peel right off. The shelves, still vivid orange, are stacked under a pile of blankets, atop an extra washing machine.

The laundry equipment, in a room with the basement drain, is one unfinished part of the basement. A second is a large, two-door closet enclosing the furnace, water heater and air conditioner. And the last unfinished part is… not really anything. The fuse box is there; some metal shelving; an odd piece of electrical hydraulic equipment that’s never been identified.

She called it the junk storage and it served as an attic, a placement of last resort. I find it odd to think of it by that name, now that it’s empty.

The house was largely empty when I got back into it, but I expected that. I told her I wasn’t looking forward to taking anything as mine that had been ours, and I meant it. There were moments when I first seriously confronted what splitting up would mean that I almost wished I could just give her the house, but I knew she couldn’t afford to keep it. What I hadn’t expected was to return to find it, though largely empty, so much a shambles.

Through the last months in which she lived there, while I stayed with my parents, I took some satisfaction in both the practicality and the benefits, to her, of the arrangement. Our cumulative expenses didn’t have to rise. She retained the comfort and security of a house, the familiarity of her decór, and the company of the garden and the dogs she loved.

And for the first part of that time, I didn’t know this last separation of ours would be permanent. She had already decided that, but didn’t make it clear. I could have asked more questions sooner, but I didn’t really want to know. I chose instead to take her ambiguity as ambivalence, and she used that to stretch the matter out.

Later I told her that I would be comfortable if she stayed, once I moved back in, if she still hadn’t found another place. I think that’s when she started to actually make arrangements. She gave me a date for when she would be moving. Then, almost a month prior to that date, she called unexpectedly one night to say she was leaving, and that the dogs would be waiting on me – and she was sorry the place was kind of a mess.

She was sorry the place was kind of a mess.

I should say before going any further that I don’t make a good house-keeper. For the most part, I’m very good at not making messes in the first place, for the very reason that I know I’m not very good at cleaning deep or wide. What minor messes I do make, I clean up before they can spread or set, for the same reason.

But anything that gathers independently of my deliberate action tends to register as part of the landscape. If it does so in ways small, slow or otherwise subtle it often doesn’t register at all for a long time – dust, for instance, finds me a great passive ally.

Then there’s the pile problem, which has two contributing factors. I can throw almost anything away, but with many things this involves a distinct psychological struggle against whatever it is that makes some people pack rats. Depending on my mood and the item in question, the struggle can be agonizing or so brief that I almost don’t notice it. (The main exception is anything that would need to be cleaned if it were to be kept, which I can get rid of eagerly.) But there are periods when I decide a few too many times in a row not to face these struggles right away, and things do collect.

The other pile contributor is paper. I’ve never successfully adopted any kind of physical filing system, for the simple fact that if I can’t see a piece of paper (or the stack I put it in) it will never bring itself back to my attention – which is in many cases the only reason to have kept the paper in the first place. I have managed recently to get nearly all of my accounts into some digital form, which has cut down on the problem dramatically. But there are still paper forms which must be physically filled out and returned somewhere, and if those go into any kind of box or drawer I’d be better of failing to deal with them by throwing them away because at least then they wouldn’t be using up storage space.

So when I say the house was a shambles, understand that I’m not using my own standards of neatness or even livability. I’m using hers.

Oh, to be sure… Cabinets stood open, spilling out heaps of clothes, linens, shoes. Unused packing boxes gaped from corners. Stacks of crockery had migrated from the kitchen to the garage before being abandoned. The odd distribution of plants and potting soil in pots, tubs and a bird bath on the patio told a similar story of things considered and ultimately rejected.

No, all that disarray seemed to follow naturally from a sudden departure. But as I wandered from room to room and finally sat in the one remaining living-room chair, surrounded by the walls I’d painted in her colors and her two dogs as innocently pleased as ever just for the company, what got to me were the surfaces under the clutter.

The dust had to have been gathering unimpeded for some time to have reached a level I would notice right away. The floors were similarly unswept, and the kitchen and what had been her bathroom showed hints of grime. I thought about her, living there in the state it had gotten into, and what its state seemed to say about her frame of mind. The place which had so pleased me to think of her occupying now was suddenly soaked in a sadness that had nothing to do with its emptiness or my loss – though of course all that was there, too.

At least a few days passed before I ventured down to the basement, probably driven to do laundry. I found more piles of clothes and linens, and – to my surprise – the extra washer and dryer which she had originally brought with her from her old apartment and which I had assumed she would take with her to her new one. I’m not sure how much time passed after that before I thought to look in the junk storage.

I found it empty, except for the electrical fixtures – both familiar, the one inscrutable – and the metal shelving. All of that was bare, except for one shelf which held two boxes, labeled in my handwriting. One box said “NO” and the other said “YES” – but that was struck through and above it written, again, “NO.”

I left the boxes there after I found them. I had a good idea what was in them, and I had plenty of other things to deal with – mainly lists of furniture, kitchenware and tools I could use if I had them, and smaller lists of those I couldn’t get much further without. But I remembered the boxes were there and the memory started to nag me, especially the first box.

Some months passed, until I found myself sitting in my car parked in a random lot on the afternoon of King Day, listening to a radio broadcast of his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, smiling even as I wept steadily and silently. The station didn’t jump straight to the end, as stirring as it can be in isolation. Instead the whole speech played through, laying a foundation, raising a great tower on which to finally set the bell. I listened, eventually unable to see, to that gold tone voice beating pain into poetry, despair into determination, and I thought to myself that it had once been common for me to be so deeply affected by great speech, great art, great examples – but that I hadn’t been for a long time. And I remembered the first box.

When I got home, I brought them up from the basement and set them on the new dining table. I pushed the “YES” box to one side and opened the “NO” box.

There was a spare doorknob from the house I grew up in, and a piece of tile from the roof of the house my father grew up in – houses in parts of town which she knew only painted by patrol cars behind breathless reporters on the evening news. There was one of the weights my grandmother used to make her knitting hang flat from her machine in the house my mother grew up in, further east where most of my mother’s relatives still live. I had long since grown used to visiting relatives alone, well before the separation.

There were black crayon rubbings of relief sculptures in Gloucester Cathedral, a chunk chipped from the Berlin Wall, a pebble from the beach at Nice. And there were postcards, too, from places I’ve never been but hope to visit, beauties of nature and milestones of history.

There was music in the box that I hadn’t played in the house for years, if ever. Tool and Soundgarden that were too “loud” and klezmer, flamenco and raga, chants and beats from across the world that were too “tribal.”

There were whole shelves’ worth of books, beautifully bound, satisfying even considered purely as ornaments though without a single picture among them. There were books about the future and the past, drawn from evidence and imagination, presented as stories and logical arguments.

And at the bottom of the box were old notebooks in which I used to record wide passions for wisdom and justice that led me to write letters and enter heated discussions and sometimes just shout back at some particularly foolish statement eminating from a television. And narrow passions for flashing eyes and rolling hips that led me to stare, to reach, to feed myself on the brush of hair and another’s breath, the slip of skin.

All this in the box marked “NO.” Uneasily, I turned to the box marked “YES” and opened it, only to discover that it contained more of the same. Only instead of things that I had thought to be barriers between her and me, these were things I had felt we shared together in a way that could never be shared with anyone else.

There were glaciers and whales on the coast of Alaska and a stately old mansion on the Santa Fe Trail. There were bright towers, packed sidewalks and broad parks in New York and Chicago. There was more music: Sarah McLachlan singing of love better than chocolate; Gerry Rafferty singing with unintentional (?) irony about throwing away all his crazy dreams. There were paint and fabric samples and Hitchcock movies and steak dinners. There were pressed flowers and seed packets and wind-chimes and a stack of illustrated notes. There was a private language of catch-phrases and inside jokes, and points of light strung and woven across trees and rooftops on the darkest nights of the year. There was a lock of red hair.

I initially felt a great temptation to gloat, at least privately, about having recovered the contents of these boxes – though it was hard to convince myself at first that I shouldn’t keep some of what was in the “YES” box there forever. But as time passes and I’m more used to having the stuff back, I see that’s a misplaced attitude. Though I did so for her, I packed and labeled the boxes myself. No matter how glad she might have been to have some of what went into the “NO” box packed away, it was still a mistake – she tried to tell me so, toward the end. And no matter how much she might ever have appreciated what went into the “YES” box, she left it behind. So I’m just quietly satisfied to have restored so much that I had denied myself, whether I did so in the long or short term, and whether I enjoy any particular actuality sooner or later.

All images are by the author.

Left Behind

2010-04-27T21:20:03Z

This text will be replaced

Naked, with a Nagra

2009-12-17T17:12:36Z

When I was eight, we moved to the suburbs and into a big, creaky, beige house. I got my own room, with my own walls on which I painted a giant rainbow above my bed (a move that I was to regret when I hit my teens, though not as much as my brother was to regret the rainforest wallpaper that he chose for his). We had a big yard where the neighborhood kids and I regularly smacked each other in the head with a tetherball and where I convinced the younger/gullible ones to act in brilliant super-8 melodramas — as well as blocks of adjoining yards that we also claimed as our territory, and quiet streets on which I finally learned to ride a bike. These were something of a contrast to the streets of my former ‘hood, Newark, where my dad had once been jumped while walking with me and my mother and brother by two guys who stole all of his Rolaids (like any native New Yorker, he never kept money in his back pockets).

For a long time, though, all of my dreams continued to take place in our old apartment. Except it was never really our apartment, it was an unfamiliar endless series of dark rooms through which I would wander trying to find my favorite stuffed animal, a giant moth-eaten yellow felt mouse named Mousy, or, failing that, my parents. The dream I still remember best was the one where I arrived at those big picture windows, from which I’d always observed my favorite neon sign that flashed different colors as it urged you to buy cigarettes, and watched, terrified, as the city went up in flames. Oh, and GI Joe was there, still with plastic hair but life-sized, and he was somehow responsible. The main feelings behind these dreams, though, was not knowing how I got there or what to do — reflecting, of course, my nascent confusion about life in these strange new environs called suburbia. Eventually, my subconscious and I settled in and the stress dreams became about things like the wiener dog in the yard next door who was now the bane of my existence, except it had a yellow balloon for a body that allowed it to fly through the air as it chased me down the street, yapping.

Scary unfamiliar dreamscapes from hell.

Why was I even having stress dreams at eight years old, you may ask? Well, the ability to generate free-floating anxiety has always been one of my special skills. Back then, it floated around being liked at my new school or nuclear war or having some weird disease (I was permanently traumatized by catching a piece of The Andromeda Strain when it was broadcast on television in 1973), or the newly-discovered factoid that my parents were going to die some day. These days, it hovers between having no work or too much work, my documentary, my IRA, and the fact that my parents are still going to die some day. As a result, insomnia quickly became another one of my special skills. And when I do sleep, I have these kinds of dreams.

They’re not the only dreams I have, of course. I do occasionally have the good sensual dream, where you’re making out with Jude Law, and while you’re disappointed that you have to wake up, it does make you want to have morning sex — which can be either good or bad depending on the situation. I also do sometimes have the ambiguous happy dream, when you wake up feeling like all is right with the world but can’t for the life of you remember why. In fact, for years, I’ve only remembered maybe a third of my dreams. I heard once that if you write them down as soon as you wake up, you’ll remember them, so I tried that once and it worked: I remembered I’d had a dream about taking a bus trip with some of my high school friends. I even remembered some of the visuals, like who was wearing the lime green sweater. But when I looked at what I’d written down, it was way more detailed and bizarre, with scrawled phrases like, “And then Peter wanted to pet the cat named Pinocchio.” Plus, if you already aren’t a great sleeper, there’s nothing like having to get up and grope around for a pen and the back of an envelope on which to write down the details of a nightmare where you’re buried in a snowdrift and being attacked by sharks to keep you awake for the rest of the night. So I kind of stopped doing that.

For a long time, most of my stress dreams were school-related. I arrive late for the big math test or the SATs and I haven’t studied or didn’t even know there was a test, and I don’t have a pen, or I have a pencil but it keeps breaking, or I can’t find a seat, or a test, or my hands are covered in peanut butter. And at least part of the time, I’m also naked and trying to hide behind or under the desk. Everyone has these dreams in one variation or another. The only unique one I can remember was when, around the time I was finishing film school, I dreamed I was back at my college graduation, frantically trying to find my place in this endless line of people in robes and mortarboards that snaked up a very Gothic-looking spiral staircase, when a woman – who oddly enough looked like Condoleeza Rice – found me and put me in the right place. It’s the only stress dream I can ever remember having that had a happy ending.

In keeping with my pre-established tradition of dreaming in the past, these nightmares continued to receive a high volume of play — like Bravo reality shows do — long after my school days were over. Then, at some point, my stress dreams became mostly about work. I’m on set and suddenly I realize I have no equipment, or my recorder has stopped working and I have no tape and the radio mics aren’t working, or I have to go somewhere to find batteries and I can’t find them and then I can’t find my way back for hours, knowing all the while that everyone back on set is waiting on me, or I’m being forced to work with a Nagra 3 (yes, that experience is a nightmare all unto itself). Of course, all of these catastrophes have happened to me, even the part about being lost trying to find my way back to set; those Law & Order soundstages at Chelsea Piers are one giant maze of prop rooms. But they have never all happened at the same time, or while I’m naked – which, yes, also continued to pop up from time to time. It’s interesting how in most of these dreams I’m recording sound onto tape, very often reel-to-reel analog. But of course it makes sense, not only because it’s consistent with the stress dream time lag, but because the most horrible memories of my career come from that time when I was first starting out as a sound mixer, had no clue what I was doing, and still thought floppy disks were was as far as technology was going to go. I remember my first job recording on a feature, for instance, when I had to do a scene on a beach and all I was getting was wind noise and radio mic interference. I called my former sound teacher in a panic and he calmly told me that I’d have to have the production rent me something called a “windjammer.” It worked like a charm. Which, I now know, is why, while they may call it “the dog” or “the rat,” every single sound person I’ve ever met has one of these furry zeppelin covers in his or her kit.

And who hasn't had a nightmare about evil clowns?

A few years ago, I started taking some long trips in foreign countries. Somewhere during that time, the stress dreams about traveling took over. Sure, I’d still have the occasional boom pole breaking or hitting a light causing it to explode into flame dream, and even the I’ve completely forgotten to take the one class I needed for graduation dream. But more often, it’s that I’ve have missed the right bus or gotten on the wrong bus and every time I try to speak the language my tongue swells up, or I’m driving around with my back seat full people I don’t really like (generally because they make me neurotic) trying not to let them know that I actually have no idea where I’m going and narrowly avoiding several accidents, or I’m at some seriously awful dive hotel where the walls are filthy and the sheets are just crawling with roaches and scorpions, but I have to stay there because I can’t find my luggage. Again, all of this is reality-based stuff; I have missed plenty of buses, found cockroaches in my sheets and boots and toiletries (I was staying in a swamp at the time), and been on a few road trips with people I never should have gone on road trips with.

And this is the thing that makes my nightmare life especially unpleasant if not particularly complicated. As you can tell, I dream very close to the top of my brain. Sure, sometimes I get into wacky territory, like where I’m having a tea party with Godzilla (too many Japanese monster movies in my youth), but most of the time, it’s very clear to me where my dreams come from and what they’re about. These were all stressful situations for me, even if I successfully survived them. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, the anxiety is basically mix-and-match, so that the math test dream is still, really, about being afraid that I’m going to fail at my job, and the travel dream is really about not knowing where I’m going with my life. And being naked, in any situation, is just about being afraid that people will see these insecurities underneath my calm exterior, along with all of my flaws and shortcomings, and will find them either appalling or laughable. I mean, as much as I like to think of myself as a complex and nuanced person, it’s not deep, it’s Freud 101 at best. Maybe that means that, thanks to years of therapy, my subconscious and conscious minds are separated only by one layer of nerves that has been worn thin and cranky. Or maybe it means that I was a more interesting person when I was eight.

It’s funny, though, that after my last trip abroad, the travel stress dreams seem not to have started up again in force, as I would have expected. In fact, they seem to have stopped. And they haven’t been replaced by work stress dreams or school dreams, both of which have also tapered off a lot. Not that I haven’t been having nightmares. The other night I had one about being lost in a modern art museum where I had to put back all of these pieces of art that my nephews had managed to roll (they all seemed to be round) into the wrong galleries, while keeping track and taking care of the little boys because they were both sick and seemed to have shrunk in size, making them even harder to keep track of than little boys usually are. I think this probably had something to do with my anxiety about my ability to juggle work and family, and potential future childrearing. Again, not very hard to interpret, and excellent fodder for hours and hours of unproductive worrying. But on the positive side, maybe my subconscious has decided that work and travel and school are no longer the fodder as they used to be, and has therefore found new issues to mull.

Now if only I could get my conscious and unconscious to cooperate a little more, like I somehow did with that reassuring dream about graduation and Condi. Although I still, for the life of me, don’t get it. Why would that nightmare, where I’m chasing my place through the endlessly spiraling existential line of life, end with me finding it? What does my subconscious know that I don’t?

And it better not be that my destiny lies in becoming a Republican, because that’s not going to happen.

Love Will Find A Way

2009-12-06T22:09:17Z

People find things rather often, but seldom keep them. Only special objects, touching the finder’s heart, deserve their right to stay. I asked people who kept things they had found, bring them to the studio and photographed them with their findings.

Click on any image to view a larger version.

Tanya and an approximately 20 year old photograph of an unidentified girl with 2 unidentified dogs.

Mitya and a warning sign from a tram depot, saying: "Don't forget to return your record ticket".

Alexander and an iron-cast figurine of famous cartoon characters Gena the Crocodile and Cheburashka.

Valeriy and a transparency with fairytale characters from an unidentified animation.

Julia and a toy rabbit wearing a scarf.

Alex and a book on Poussin with white paint stains.

Irina and a vintage Soviet chair.

Vadim and a part of an old lamp, whose shape he admires as a designer.

Masha and a vintage alarm clock, made "by special command".

Andrey and a flight map of Europe for pilots.

Maria and a 2nd edition guide on Crimea, published in 1925, which she restored herself.

Unconversion Stories

2009-12-07T03:04:16Z

You read a lot of stories about conversion—St. Paul, St. Augustine, and countless others in the Christian tradition. You don’t come across that many unconversion stories. Perhaps the unconvert lacks fervor in her new non-faith. Perhaps he is embarrassed or wants to leave the gate open for a future return to the fold. Or perhaps the unconvert, by virtue of losing a formerly found faith, recognizes the uncertainty, the potential mutability, of all spiritual states.

The Conversion of St. Paul, by Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 1542-45

I certainly fit into the last category, having found and lost faith so many times over the course of my life that I might liken it to a quartan fever that seizes me in its sweaty arms every few years, only to chill, eventually, in the face of reason or my own stubbornness. When I was 14, following a year of sincere commitment to my Methodist church (after 13 years of going only when my parents took me and paying minimal attention), I woke up one day and said to myself, “If someone came along today claiming to be the son of God, I would think he was crazy.” There began ten years of atheism/agnosticism. Toward the end, it felt a little lonely, and I believed that I was Bad. I began to think about religion, began to wish that I had faith, because I expected that it would make me feel less-lonely and Good, and I wanted to be Good.

In 1996, I converted to Catholicism, and I was really-really-really into it, until the day in 2004 when I walked for miles around an indoor track, pushing my sleeping daughter in a stroller and thinking through the question “Who benefits?” from the Church’s stance on birth control (my answer: not women). There were any number of other threads I could have unraveled that day—the celibacy requirement for priests or the prohibition on the ordination of women come to mind—but the thread that was closest to me, the one binding me up so painfully, was the birth control one. With the zeal typical of some converts, I had eaten up everything the Church gave me, including the idea of not using birth control and having a large family. What a surprise, though, to find in my own life evidence that my own desires and happiness were at odds with what the Church told me I should want and should find fulfilling. With my daughter’s birth, I had two children, a boy and a girl, and it felt Just Right. I have known many women who hunger and yearn for the third child, or the fourth child, as deeply and eagerly as I had longed for my first two children. But as for me, it’s been six years, and I’ve never felt a pull to have another child. Leaving the Church would allow me to choose the number of children that felt right to me; that reason—self-interested in ways that I think are very healthy—made me ripe for unconversion, and that long, frowning walk was the defining moment of my loss of commitment to Catholicism.

Like many conversion stories (including those of Paul and Augustine mentioned earlier), these unconversion stories happened in a flash, in a moment in which an entire system of thought was replaced by an opposing system. In that regard, then, surely unconversion can be as firmly outside the realm of reason as conversion can. Whereas conversion stories often depend quite explicitly upon leaps of intuition, chance encounters, and deep emotional responses to spiritual or religious experiences, the unconvert is more likely to speak in terms of reason banishing a superstition, and yet the suddenness with which these flashes of insight might appear, and the wholehearted embrace of them that the unconvert makes, bear striking resemblance to the experience of the convert. Both the convert and the unconvert tend to cling to the belief that the change from one state to another—faithful to non-faithful, non-faithful to faithful—represents a journey to an immutable truth.

St. Augustine Reading the Epistle of St. Paul, by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-65

Whatever may or may not be true metaphysically—and I make no speculation here—certainly in addition to whatever immutable truths may be in play, the choice to adhere or to stop adhering to a particular faith is just that, a choice. It reminds me of pop-psychological dicta that love is a “decision” or an “action” or a “choice,” rather than a feeling. I heard a similar concept many times during my Catholic years—one should go to mass, pray, or whatever whether or not one feels the inclination to do so: one can live faith without feeling faith. The underlying assumption in both cases is that one should live based on ideas rather than feelings.

Yet both these pieces of advice assume the knowledge of Truth: it is wrong to give up on faith and leave a community; it is wrong to give up on love and leave a relationship. The similarities between them—finding faith and losing it, falling in and out of love—remind me of the mutability of both as emotional states. One can keep these emotions under the control of reason and belief (and indeed, thousands of years of religion, philosophy, and culture have argued for the absolute necessity of doing so), but they have a life of their own, developing and shifting silently, hidden under the proper governance of reason, until, sometimes, a person decides to choose what has become emotionally true—loss of faith, loss of love—over what the community believes to be true: “this is the right religion”; “love (or at least marriage) is forever.” And after that moment, the unconvert will choose new ideas to align with, new ways of connecting reason with emotion.

If we can fairly apply the metaphor of falling in love to the way one comes to a particular religion, then we could say that I fell in love with Catholicism on Maundy Thursday, 1995, when at the end of the service they darkened the chapel for the ceremony in which the Eucharist is paraded around the chapel while “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” a sixth-century chant, is sung. On that night, I experienced all of those qualities that became for me the “spiritual signature” of Catholicism—something about the tone or mood that I associate with the Church that involves darkness, quietness, water, suffering, mystery, and mysticism. That was my first conversion to Catholicism. There were others, my relationship with the Catholic Church like a marriage, with high and low points of getting along, a cycle of conversion and unconversion that ended (I thought) with the big breakup in 2005 (when I stopped attending mass), a brief reconciliation this past fall, followed now by continued separation.

Pange Lingua Gloriosi

That brief reconciliation arose from another conversion story a couple of months ago—one night I read an essay by a (liberal) priest that called to my mind everything I like about Catholicism. The genre of conversion stories primes one to take seriously these chance encounters with a speaking text—Augustine heard a voice telling him to take up the Bible and read, and the words he randomly turned to were compelling enough to change his life. I myself had snapped back to obedience to the Catholic Church in 1998 (after flirting with the idea of returning to Protestantism) after hearing a reading from the Letter to the Galatians in which Paul warns the Galatians, “If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.”

Beginning of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians

So for that reason, I was prepared to take seriously my emotional response to that essay, to find in it a sign that it was time to return to the Church. Typically earnest, I immediately went to confession, began the process of seeking an annulment for my marriage that had ended in divorce, and began attending mass. I was undaunted, even when the ultraconservative priest at my parish delivered a long, long homily about the evil of divorce, how much better it is for people to stay unhappily married, and so forth.

Fine, I said to myself, there are all kinds of people in the Catholic Church, and some of them, like this priest, are uncompassionate. But that’s not all that there is to Catholicism. I will find a different parish, where the priest is more compassionate.

But it didn’t work out that way. Not for lack of compassionate priests, not for lack of a beautiful history of saints and mystics, but because a thing is what it is. While struggling to figure out how to reconcile myself to this church, I tried to understand my emotional connection to the Catholic Church and how it could coexist with my deeply entrenched intellectual disagreement with the Church on just about everything. I had a flash of understanding by thinking about it in terms of metaphors of love and relationships. I wrote in late October, “We could say that in falling in love with the Catholic Church, I fell in love with ‘someone’ that I disagree with on everything important, someone who doesn’t respect women, someone who won’t accept me as I am, someone who won’t honor gay and lesbian people, someone who lies, someone who uses theology to win every argument . . . . From this perspective, if this were someone I was dating, surely my friends and family would be correct to advise me to get over my love, to break up, instead of giving up everything else I value to make the relationship work.” So I ended up choosing that notion that one should live based on ideas rather than feelings, but with the twist that the ideas I chose were not those of the Catholic Church.

So that was the end . . . again . . . of my life as a Catholic. As in the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I was “found” again two months ago, only to lose myself a month later back into the quiet comfort of uncertainty, mutability, and humility.

——

The Conversion of St. Paul, from The United Episcopal Church Of North America.

St. Augustine Reading the Epistle of St. Paul, from Dalhousie University.

Pange Lingua Gloriosi from Joseph Kenny.

Beginning of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, from The Wikimedia Commons.

Do Mermaids Dream Of Electric Fish?

2009-12-07T01:16:24Z

I am smoking a cigarette when She tells me about Tiktaalik. She is miles away but her voice is urgent in my ear, tinny through the miniscule speaker in my cellular phone.

“Tika-what?” I ask.

“Tik-taa-lik,” She says, annunciating as precisely as she can through several hundred miles of distance between us and about as much static.

I can almost feel Her next to me, Her hand in mine, Her breath in my ear. I am trying to win her and it is unclear if I will. This moment, me on my fire escape wishing to kiss her and Her in her studio apartment wishing for I-don’t-know-what, feels particularly precarious.

I take a drag of my cigarette. Actually, it’s a Djarum vanilla, because it is college and I am attempting, for the first and only time, to become a smoker. It is high time, in my estimation, that I begin to acquire skills that “normal” people seem to possess innately, and smoking is one that I have set my sights on. My efforts will ultimately prove to be futile, thank god.

But I don’t know this yet.

I try to hide my nervousness and my scattered breath. She hates it when I smoke, which gives me a spark of hope. At least She cares.

“What the hell is Tiktaalik?”

“It’s a fish,” She says. “Well, a prehistoric fish, with legs. They’ve just written an article about it.”

“Oh,” I say.

“A researcher found the fossils a couple of years ago,” She continues. “In Canada. Evidence suggests that it could breathe both underwater and on land. They think it’s a new link in the biological chain of evolution. A pretty big deal.”

The cold Boston air sweeps around me, but I lie back against the grating of the fire escape and look up into the dark sky. The buildings on Beacon Hill surround it, shadows against the artificial light of the T station and Mass General Hospital not far away, creating a tableau that is mine and mine alone.

The news of the discovered fish and the novelty of the fact that she is talking to me compound, and I wonder if my Tiktaalik-ian brothers and sisters had the capacity for this distinct feeling of aliveness in their tiny, proto-reptilian hearts. Did they, too, beat with a dual fear and hope for their ultimately lost future? Could they possibly have known that they would lie dormant and undiscovered for millions of years, only to complete a cycle for a race of beings they never could have known? Will we? Will I?

I have clearly paused too long, because She asks me if I’ve heard what She’s said.

“Of course,” I tell Her. “Of course I did.”

It is years before I think, again, of Tiktaalik.

She and my fire escape have faded, almost all at once, into the past, along with the vapors of my long since discarded, failed smoking habit. All the way across my limited universe, three thousand miles from home, I sit with my hand resting lazily on the knee of The Woman Who Will Become My Partner.

But I don’t know this yet, either.

“Trip out on this,” Pete says.

All of us are sitting in his apartment, engulfed in a hazy shadow of gray smoke.

Pete is in the process of lighting a Marlboro Red, so his words come out with an unintentional lisp, one that muffles his words.

“Trip out on this,” he repeats, somewhat more clearly.

His eyes are gleaming in the florescent light from overhead, and he drags on his cigarette for emphasis.

“You won’t believe what Samantha told me today.”

Collectively, we roll our eyes. Samantha is his current fling, his flavor of the week. In the one meal we have all shared with her, we have learned that she is not the brightest crayon, to put it lightly.

“Come on, Pete,” his brother, Patrick, says, wandering out of the kitchen. “What are you doing with that woman?”

Patrick waves his spatula for emphasis.

“Quiet, fool,” says Pete, angling his beer bottle at Patrick.

Patrick shakes his head, mouth twitching under his moustache in disgust, and returns to the stove.

“So,” Pete continues, “We’re talking the other day, and it comes up that she believes that she was, in her past life, the first woman to walk the earth.”

He lets this sink in.

“Are you serious?” The Woman Who Will Become My Partner asks. “Details?”

“She thinks she crawled out of the ooze with the crustaceans. All Adam and Eve and nonsense like that. She says she remembers being in the water and watching the sun rise over her head.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” echoes The Woman Who Will Become My Partner. “She’s whacked.”

As we laugh and question the woman’s sanity, I pause, imagining Samantha, with her dull, wide-set eyes, stumbling from the ocean amidst a gaggle of giant crabs, psychedelic rays of light and color illuminating her round shoulders. After ten years of acid, it’s her own private acid trip, this vision, in tune with the thousands she’s already taken, the ones that have no doubt eaten holes in her brain like Swiss cheese. It truly seems crazy.

Then I remember the cold, the vanilla cigarettes, the phone, Her, and Tiktaalik, that damned fish, fated to be covered over in silt and sediment.
Does Samantha, I wonder to myself, dream about a fish with legs wandering its poor way along the sand, inexplicably doomed to an extinction that it cannot have predicted? Does she reach for its scaly back, tweak its toes, run her hand across the bumps of its spine? Does she ask herself how long it will take them to discover her?

Pete reaches across me for another beer. The Woman Who Will Become My Partner brushes the back of my hand and the thoughts fall away, with them Samantha, the fish, the fire escape, and Her. Laughing, I catch The Woman Who Will Become My Partner’s fingers, and am catapulted back into the present, into what I myself have unearthed after eons and eons and eons of waiting under rock: My own whirlwind, topsy-turvy, and ultimately hopeful future.

——

The image was created by the author, using materials from works by caccamo, kevinzim, patrick kiteley, and Jared Hawkins.

Here I Am

2009-12-17T17:20:09Z

Kate was the trouble-maker among us. I was one year younger, and didn’t have any friends at school. At age 9 I was already awkward and insecure, and even though Kate wasn’t particularly nice to me, or anyone, she included me, which seemed at the time tremendously kind.

Her parents and my parents were childhood friends. Our families, and Kate’s aunts and their children, all reunited every year in August on Cape Cod. Days were filled with overly competitive games of paddleball and hours of wave riding on over-priced boogey boards. We were competitive about those, too. There were trips to the local dairy barn for soft serve once if not twice a day. We went square dancing every Wednesday. A big annual adventure was whale watching in Provincetown, after which we’d beeline for Portuguese donuts and fudge while the Kate and her siblings gawked at the drag queens and I failed to notice them.

Our parents tried to make nights exciting. The famed drive-in was appealing in theory, but not worth more than one trip per summer due to poor sound quality. Bonfires on the beach were a hassle but we usually got in two or three; my mother told the same story about how she almost got arrested as a teenager because “everyone else” was drunk and high and the kids played manhunt. Dinners were important. We went out a fair amount, traveling a circuit of the five or so worth fine dining institutions interspersed with frequent trips to the local clam shack. On other nights, one family or another would host the others for a Barbeque, clambake or pasta.

Life was excruciatingly simple. True, there was the usual anxiety about getting to the beach in time for a parking space. There were fights with our parents about whether we would make or buy lunch, how much candy we could have at the penny shop and why we refused to wipe the sand off our feet before we got in the car. I remember being very happy during those summers. And I remember being very bored.

I’m sure that I spent most of my childhood enjoying the safety afforded me. But that summer when I was nine and Kate was 10, I began to wonder about distance. I tentatively craved adventure. I fed off Kate’s antsy-ness. The dullness of our nights were a subtle itch, and an invitation. We decided to start taking walks in the woods, and when the walks in the woods failed to be thrilling, Kate started telling us we were lost when we weren’t. All the roads in the neighborhood looked the same, but even so, from where we were in the “woods” I could recognize landmarks. I remember the moment I decided to ignore them, and to let myself believe. I loved being lost.

Then one night we traveled to a popular sunset point on the bay. This was another of our repeated traditions, but I think pre-puberty is just the time when things like sunsets become useless. (Then for maybe fifteen years, they are only useful as means to a member of the opposite sex.) Kate and I were at the age when we didn’t see the point of watching. As was our new tradition, we took her two little cousins on a walk. We walked off the beach, up the dune and into the woods that crowned it. We walked for about 20 minutes away from our parents, parallel to the bay. We were tired and our bare feet were cut and bruised. The sun had set, casting a purply, grayish glow. Somehow, through unspoken scheming and perhaps a real, if avoidable, fear, Kate and I announced that we were lost. I don’t know if I suggested going back the way we came. I do know that I knew that was the answer. But we put the little girls on our back and kept walking forward. They cried. We cried. Eventually silence took over, until we found ourselves at the top of an inordinately tall tune, with a steep and perilous path down to the beach. We, Kate and I, thought maybe we’d get our bearings if we walked down it. The truth was that in our regular lives, parents, lifeguards and erosion control signs would have prevented us from going down a dune like this one. So we went down. We looked back down the beach to where we had come from, and concluded that our best bet was to turn around.

We climbed back up the dune. As my thighs burned, I vacillated between fury that we had taken things too far—the incline was absurd—and thrill that I was doing something so rigorous. Somewhere along the way on our journey back, Kate’s uncle found us. I remember a lot of yelling and the word “fuck” linked to Kate’s name. We had endangered her cousins; it was her family, thus she took the blame. My mother was too overwhelmed to yell much, but swallowed me in her arms with a sigh of exhausted, broken relief. I sat stunned in the backseat on the way home, listening to her blame Kate, too and tell me how hard we must scrub my feet before I put them in my bed. I would not be made to bathe if I didn’t want, but look at how black my toes were. I was safe now, and cleanliness was our main priority.

Back at school in the fall, I wrote a poem about our “adventure” that everyone said was very good, for a fourth grader. I began to build the event up in my memory as a pinnacle of emotion and triumph over adversity. I managed to block out the knowledge that we had lost ourselves on purpose. For years, I thought of myself as a survivor, if not a hero. Gradually, I became to crave the feeling again. I wanted to be back in the car, safe and exhausted, with destroyed and dirty feet, awaiting absolution. It is the old story of the prodigal son: if you have been lost, you reenter the world wearing a shield of guiltlessness.

Thus, when adolescence came, I became one of those of people who is perpetually lost, or more specifically, in crisis. Every test, paper, swim meet, friendship was a potential for calamity. And I would not rest until the sense of angst had been created, then resolved. When you are this sort of person and you are a teenager, your friends call you the melodramatic one. If you stay this way in college, your friends call you the intense one. If you stay “intense” after college, you get multiple unnecessary graduate degrees or a job in finance. And if you don’t, you advance from “intense” to “self-destructive.” And for the first time, you are really, seriously lost.

I lived on the cusp of this distinction for most of my post-graduate years. There was always some possibility of a graduate degree looming; acceptances, deferrals, applications, rejections, acceptances, deferrals, applications, rinse, repeat. While I was mulling over these decisions, I was trying and failing to become an actress, moping over office jobs, randomly joining then abandoning the crews of independent films and seeking guidance over fancy, inappropriate lunches with powerful, older men. Finally, I got a steady job. I went steady with a boy. But I still didn’t feel steady. So I created more crises, wherever and whenever I could.

There is a poem by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov called “Sail.” The last two lines, roughly translated, are: “Rebellious, it seeks out a storm/As if in storms it could find peace!” In the context of these verses, the problem becomes obvious: it’s not that I like the excitement of being lost. It’s that I like the feeling of being found. I want to climb back in the car with dirty feet, awaiting a bath. My whole life, the drama I’ve created has come with a pavlovian reward: resolution. I viewed everything I had as wrong, but I always had the power to make things right when I was ready.

And then, I got laid off. Suddenly, I was lost in the middle of the middle of the woods, with no obvious coastline ready to guide me home when I done playing. So I did the only rational thing I could think of: I gave up the hope of being found. Surprisingly, giving up that hope has offered great relief. I don’t feel so lost. Rather, I’ve come to terms with a life that is simply in motion. I have no idea what I’m looking at, or why I’m climbing up the hill, but at least I’m not standing still. The wanderlust I’m predisposed to feel is real, but the idea that it will eventually lead me “home” is not.

Not surprisingly, Kate got the point long before I did. Like me, she’s been called melodramatic, intense and self-destructive. She also has a dual masters in education and math, has been a high school teacher, worked for a hedge fund, moved in and out with a boyfriend, and ended up at business school down South. Kate doesn’t seem phased by the whole thing. I remember months ago, back when I was still really worried, she was painstakingly explaining “Life”, as if I was nine again, and still completely missing the point. She sighed, “People like us like to keep busy, Rachel. We like to keep moving. It may not be the best way to live, but it’s who we are.”

The Sock [note: auto-play SOUND]

2009-12-06T23:56:08Z

This text will be replaced

About the animator:

Mike Milo is a 2 time Emmy award winning, 6 time nominated animator, director, producer and designer. He has worked for most of animation’s major studios including Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros, Universal, Sony, Film Roman and Hanna Barbera. In addition he has had 9 series development deals and 6 pilots to date and hopes to add to that this year. Mike is currently directing and animating a pilot for the Game Show Network, as well as developing 3 other series with networks and producers.
During all that he managed to find his co-producer and co-create two wonderful daughters.