Wednesday, November 30, 2005

For One Blog-Entry Only

There is a 2-for-1 offering at my local psychic today, says the outdoor sign, which also carries the funniest misspelling on any sign I have ever seen. That part is printed on, and it took two years for anyone to attempt to fix it with a marker. I would reveal it here, but then you all in bloggerland would be able to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of my batcave, and the Lady McBickle does so treasure her imagined semi-anonymity.

The sign also offers "10% off, One Free Question."

I don’t want to deconstruct that phrase. I do want to ask, however, what would you be asking today, if you had One Free Question?

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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Utterly Childish Post for My Pleasure

There is a street in Brooklyn with one restaurant and a store on it.

The restaurant is called “Futura BM” (below it, a translation reads: “Bistro Moderne”) and across the street is “V.C. Pet Supplies”.

Both make me snicker.

To add to what is turning out to be a gleeful post (for me), Jon Stewart describes the men in the court at Saddam Hussein’s trial as “sitting in their man-cribs with the looks of men tired of seeing each other in the shower.”

Man-cribs.

Stewart goes on to describe the new, professorial look Saddam is sporting these days as kind of an, “I say, would you care to join me for an apéritif in my rape room?” sort of look.

Snicker.

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Sunday, November 27, 2005

The TV in My Head

In the grand tradition of blogging in front of the television, I will describe to you what is happening on “Breaking Bonaduce”:

Danny (former child star Danny Bonaduce, in case you’ve never seen this riveting madness of a reality show) is trying out the new electrical collar he bought for disciplining his dog. He ties the black strap around his own neck and starts the setting at “1”.

By 4, he’s feeling the juice. A little.

He cranks it, he cranks it, and he rests on 8, which produces a sharp jolt that convulses his head when he pressed the buzzer. His two little kids are laughing and jumping around.

Danny hands his oldest child, maybe 10 years old, the buzzer. She gets off a few shocks.

Then the little tow-headed one, maybe 4 at most, starts jumping up and down with excitement.

“You want to shock daddy? You want to shock daddy?” Danny asks his little kid. Then he hands over the controller.

Anyway.

I feel as if I spent the weekend post-shocker. A slightly-more-than-24-hour stomach flu seems to have run its course through my tired body, and the lingering headache tonight feels post-shocked in a worse way than what I would prefer—you know, "crappy," instead of that buzzy adrenaline rush you get after you are frightened or overly stimulated?

Once again, I am amazed how sickness can bring the world to a sudden stop. All the plans you had for those days are gone forever, unrealized, unexperienced. I felt no desire to eat, I could barely move from the bed. The one consolation for being flat out like that seems to be the odd ability to lapse into stretches of thought, even with feeling physically awful. Lying in bed immobile gives you that small gift: thoughts that may not last long but feel pulled out like taffy, sort of soft and lengthy, sweet.

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Friday, November 25, 2005

Geraldo Get Off My Ass

It seems that Geraldo Rivera has broadcast a follow-up to a story I wrote MONTHS ago. Like, months. (I can't stop laughing.)

I'd heard he was doing it from someone I used to work with, but it slipped my mind. (How does something like this slip your mind, you ask? Don't.) So I'm on the phone with Mrs. Buttles just now and she's trying to convince me to come over and clean her house while she naps (heathen slut) instead of cleaning my own, and then remembers to tell me that she caught the Geraldo piece.

"Everybody look out!" is what Mrs. Buttles says to me. "Geraldo's on the loose again!"

Needless to say, this devolves into girlish giggling punctuated with more sly inserts of me being about to clean her house while she naps. In a match-up between Geraldo Rivera and the grand dame, Mrs. B., there would be no contest. Of this I am sure. Place your bets now.

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Yes, We Have No...

Bananas?
More wine?
Who knows.
I know that holidays bring people out of the woodwork, another mysterious expression, in addition to my all-time favorite construction: "I have no ----- [whatever]."
"Have no."
Why do you "have no"?
Why isn't it you "don't have"?
Fucking mystery.
Back to the woodwork.
You come, and some of you don't. But holidays bring the love, I suppose. From some. And then not from others you secretly hope for, and not from others you secretly don't. So sniff, and, whew.

[Back of hand swipes swiftly over forehead: whew.]

Thanksgiving is officially over. We can all return to drunken, family-free blogging now. (For anyone in need of that. I know there are some blogs stretched to the north of me always ready for your no-family high-escapist self. See blogroll, and click at your own risk.)

Addendum: I add this, a comment I just wrote on a young woman's blog--someone in blogland kind enough to link to me:

I ran down the steps in a midtown subway stop this evening. An old woman, replete with black headscarf, as if right here from Eastern Europe, had her hand out for please, please just a little change. I rarely give money to people in the subways because, well, many reasons. Sometimes I do. I looked at this woman and knew she had no other means, no family, no ability to get herself public assistance. And it's Thanksgiving. It's freakin Thanksgiving.

But I knew I had no money in my wallet. Like zero, none. So I smiled at the old woman and zipped down the stairs. But I stopped at the bottom to look back at her, only to see her crying, sobbing, really. What else can make your heart hurt as much on a holiday when we are supposed to feel thankful?

This I do not know.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

‘Someday’ Is a Terrible Word

So it’s that week of the year when people make trips across the country that sound as arduous as the Apollo 13 mission. (Okay, not fires in the ship, but boredom in the car. Painful nonetheless, they tell me.)

I never made those car trips much, never flew to see any Aunt Edna in Des Moines or Uncle Moishe in Brooklyn or any such thing. As a kid, my house was maybe just like yours: Holidays were the worst days of the year, days when someone (maybe someone specific) could be expected to drink a little too much and go off the handle.

Years on, various gatherings with my often satisfying friend-family and other odd Chinese take-out meals scattered in between, somewhere close by, somewhere in the vicinity of me, a father on the East Coast comes to his daughters with this over the e-transom today:

“Have a great Thanksgiving. Maybe someday we'll celebrate together again.”

I have no kicker.


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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The Things You Don't Know

Last night I was out with some friends and I asked one of them to tell me a secret. You know, one of those late night, half-assed questions that you don't expect much out of.

"I like to wear pantyhose," he said to me. There was no hesitation.

"Hey, wow," I thought and maybe said out loud.

We circled back round to that a little bit later in the conversation, you know, just to flesh out the thought.

"So why do you like to wear pantyhose?" I asked the guy.

"I like the way it feels on my legs when I touch them," he said.

There you go.

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Sunday, November 20, 2005

We Try to Say Goodbye

The woman’s voice read out a story that may well have been a parable of the man’s entire life:

“When he was just a little boy, his younger sister went missing. I combed the house, calling for her from room to room. I eventually found her curled up in an upstairs closet. I called to my son and asked him, “Do you know why your sister is in the closet?”

“Yes, mommy,” the boy said. “I put her there. I wanted to make sure she was in a safe place.”

The woman’s voice went on to tell of her son’s work in China with AIDS patients, before that country’s government had even acknowledged the disease, and his work as a doctor, later, with 9/11 workers, his work in India, his work in poor clinics. The list of his humanitarian efforts stretched across third-world countries and the Northeast coast and finally through these two full rooms, which were lined with filled-up rows of wood-backed chairs, and eventually into the next room where another hundred people stood as silently as they could, straining to hear the voice as it found its way through two doorways, one at either end. Occasionally, the creak of somebody shifting their weight on the old wood floors obscured the voice. It was that hard to hear.

*

We had waited on a line that stretched out among the rust-colored New England trees, quiet faces framed in black woolen scarves waiting their turn to enter the old, stately house built by Calvert Vaux at the turn of the last century. On the line were doctors, so many doctors in between the rest of us, all in our 30s, it seemed. Across from the house was a tree that was majestic but squat, just turned gold and orange, like a grand baobab somehow planted in the soil of Connecticut.

I remember the silence. We scanned each other’s faces silently, in an intimate effort to be together somehow even if we didn’t know each other. He had known each of us, and that was like a string binding us along the stone path, waiting in that line, waiting to listen to stories about his life.

Then we entered the house.

A hiccupping cry echoed out from behind closed double doors. It was the wail of a 30-year-old woman who had lost her young husband, and it broke our hearts.

*

In the early cold of that autumn day, after the service had ended, we shuffled into the backyard of the grand house to the sounds of an obscure dub music CD that the man had played repeatedly to anyone who would listen. It was a laid-back sound, one I could remember this 6-foot-3 handsome man hopping around to in his swim trunks as a group of us jumped in and out of a pool the summer before. The cold bit our noses though, as we listened to it on this day.

“My favorite memory of him,” one graying young doctor was saying to two young women, “was when I found him lying in the middle of the street on night in college, howling at the moon. ‘Come lie down and howl with me!’ he begged us. Because that was just so him, having that much fun and wanting everyone to be part of it.”

Everyone agreed as our toes went numb in the biting air that this man enjoyed life more than most of the rest of us. That it was hard to imagine him gone now, if only because he had been so very alive. Repeated was the mantra in groups of three or four that he had lived longer than his very few years. That his years, somehow, had been fuller than most of ours. We were happy for that.

When he died it had been a shock, as you would imagine it must be when someone so young, so fit, so handsome and sweet is found collapsed on the floor of his kitchen in the early morning hours by his young wife and elderly father, who happened to be visiting the couple. When the man’s heart gave out, or an embolism burst, or who knows what went wrong in his still-human body happened, it brought to the ground someone about whom you cannot help but say, if only to yourself and not out loud, “He went too soon.”

He was only 34.

*

During the nine hours of this day, the man is so present in every room that I can see him clearly walking past or standing next to somebody. It is impossible to gather that many people who loved one person that much and not see him as a near-solid apparition.

When I try to grasp that he is gone, I see in my mind’s eye a puff of smoke, nearly like one you might see in a cartoon. Or I see a speck of dust—one mote—maybe just as a way to make solid his absence.

*

After the memorial service and the backyard gathering, those of us who knew the man well went back to the wife’s family’s bluish-gray house, which is tucked perfectly snugly into the trees of New England off a winding road that calls to mind a childhood that promises happiness ahead. The wife cannot return to her new house in Brooklyn, the one she and her husband had bought and moved into only a month ago. She is staying instead in her parents’ home for the indefinite future, again made a child instead of the woman and wife and future mother she was becoming.

Hours into drinking beer and wine and walking in circles around tables with heaps of potato and pasta salads going uneaten, I heard the wife break into sobs again, saying, “We were building such a lovely home together.”

Again, our hearts broke, if that was possible.

Friday, November 18, 2005

Various Unconnected Stuff with a Promise of Something Better to Come

“Be assertive when decisive action is needed.”

This is my real fortune tonight, post broccoli with bean curd. The last one I snagged off a coworker’s desk. (The cryptic one.) (Cryptic fortune. Uncryptic coworker.)

Had one stiff drink at a bar tonight in a state of mourning over the lost friend. During that time I told some kind of a story, something I saw, something involving a small girl, but I feel that maybe I have killed enough of my own brain cells by now to have forgotten what it was. But I distinctly remember thinking, loudly, “Blog about this later.”

Forgive me. I spend more time these days writing about what I cannot remember than about the colorful stories I remember then forget. In the background right now is the “Don’t speak. Don’t speak,” of “Bullets Over Broadway” fame. Mostly when I look up I am marveling over the strange sequined hats women in the 1920s wore that resembled bathing caps. Such a bad-hair-day-chic solution.

And now I wonder what the half-hole punch is at the bottom of the fortune cookie papers. Hm.

Done wondering.

Recently I read in a semi-bad novel an assertion I’ve been testing: That you need to pay more attention to what you see in somebody’s eyes in the first few seconds after an assertion. Or a thought. Or an action. Sometimes it is very telling. Another coworker, when I ran this past him, told me that he thought you could tell within the first five minutes of meeting someone if you would ever want to sleep with them. (An assertion he got from somewhere else; where I don’t remember.) Thoughts?

[Unrelated statements follow.] I may be embarking on my first actual book. Like really may be. Might be maybe. All signs point to “Yes.” And so on.

Realizing that, really, I should read Joan Didion’s book on grief. Grief is maybe the most mysterious emotion, I am realizing. It is a terribly complex feeling based on an absence. Which makes no sense somehow in my head or heart.

Now ends the evening babble.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

The Best Fortune Ever

"We all have extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be revealed."

And no, I'm not leaving out any words. Which, in my opinion, makes it all the more powerful...

More from Hades

I can tell you that today I saw a pomegranate, smashed open, seeds scattered like solid drops of blood across the floor of the 34th Street subway station. It was only about a third of the fruit. I wondered where the rest had gone. Who carries a pomegranate while walking through a subway station? Who actually tries to eat one while walking? Who actually eats pomegranates anyway?

I can tell you that when I woke up this morning, I did not expect to be grieving today. I can also say that grief feels new and wholly empty each time I experience it. Like nothing can fill that emptiness, and “time” is not a satisfying concept in response.

Life comes and goes, and people drop ancient symbols of life and death on a well-traveled walkway.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

.

A friend of ours has died today. Out of the blue, with no warning. On an anonymous site talking about an anonymous person to most of you, I send my love to his wife and to all my friends, even if they didn't know him. When this happens, who knows what to do, say, feel. I just know I want to feel connected. There it is.

Addendum ... 8:08 p.m.
Been reading sytheticzero, and was struck by Mitsu's thoughts after seeing "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind":

"We bloom into being in the matrix of life and we disappear, but we don't really disappear --- we're not three-dimensional objects, separated from the world, but we breathe into the world and breathe the world in, and thus, when we die, we're not gone, because our presence in the world was what it was entirely, at that moment, and that creates a cascade of effects that continue on. Just as we owe a debt of gratitude (or blame) for the billions of years before us, our existence contributes to what happens after us as well. In a way, that's partly what the movie was about --- the impossibility of erasure. It's something we would like to do but cannot.

"Not that I really believe in time, history, and sequence, in this sort of simpleminded way --- I also think in a sense we create our past when we look into the past --- yet we, right now, are at least in some sense the past of some other beings in the "future" --- though where we are the most real is right now."

[Thanks, M. Hope you don't mind my pasting here.]

Monday, November 14, 2005

Yes, It Is Just Like a Lunatic Asylum. All of It.

A colleague gave this to me tonight and said, “Henry Miller wrote this about when he was a copy editor. I printed it out for you.”

“I must say, right at the start, that I haven’t a thing to complain about. It’s like being in a lunatic asylum, with permission to masturbate for the rest of your life. The world is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities. There is nothing on which these slick guys upstairs do not put their fingers: no joy, no misery, passes unnoticed. They live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and they are the frogs who have nothing better to do but croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes. Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world.”

—Henry Miller, “Tropic of Cancer,” 1934


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Saturday, November 12, 2005

Egg and Cheese Sandwiches and Canadians Are a Wonderment

At approximately 1 a.m. last night, the Canadians and I went in search of diner food. It was remarkable. Neither Vex nor the adorable Fearsome had ever seen an actual diner. What do they do up there in Canada when they need breakfast at 1 a.m.? That’s what the young Latino waiter wanted to know when I revealed that this was their first diner meal, ever. Bug-eyed, shiny black-haired wonderment—on the part of the very Brooklynese waiter, who actually marveled, if that can be physical; and on the part of the kids, who ate their onion rings with great enthusiasm and straightforward happiness.

Really, sometimes I love the world.

Right now, Charlie LeDuff is on the Discovery-Times channel challenging his Southern Baptist cousin. The cousin is arguing: “How can you look outside and see the world and hear the crickets and not believe there is a God?” Charlie, when she says she believes every word of the bible, and that it should be taught in schools: “Isn’t that group think?” He came and spoke to one of my classes in grad school once, and he was dirty under the fingernails and sexy as can be. Smart, full of passion, charming. Someone you could love and hate all at once, I think.

Now he just asked his maybe 12-year-old overweight cousin what he wants to do when he grows up. Here’s the kid’s answer: “Sit around the house.” No. Shit.

Been thinking about eyes. Is it a choice to be made, how much you reveal in your eyes?

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Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Spanish Flying

I herewith make an announcement: Two bloggers met in the dark reaches of the Lower East Side last night, and the consequences were…bourbon-soaked and hilarious. (But really, did you expect something else?)

My friends, I tell you now the ever-mordant Vex is a flesh-human, with a perfectly Canadian accent, a ready smile and little trace of the misery that permeates his blog. What a fascinating thing, to meet someone you only know in words.

I loved what he said to me in a phone call before we met up:

McBickle: “How do you like my city?”
Vex: “Well, I’ve been here three days, and it’s my city now.”

Yes, exactly. New York is for all of us. And as a coworker just said to me when I asked her if “MonkeyTown” should be one word in her story, “Yeah, that’s Brooklyn for you.

In other news, a colleague recently mentioned something called “Spanish Fly.” A mythical aphrodisiac? Anyone know of this? I’ve been thinking a lot about smells lately—musk, perfumes—the way their smells change on your skin, the way they change you when you wear them, the way they call to mind people from the past, people you do and do not want to recall so distinctly when you smell their scent out of the blue.

Now back to my Vex-induced hangover.

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Sunday, November 06, 2005

The Most Useful Class I Took In H.S. Was Typing (or Latin)

Someone I work with was just talking about a “Meat-tastic” sandwich at some fast-food chain. Meat-tastic. Say it with me. I can imagine the smorgasbord of pig parts now…no, thanks. After 18 years, I’m still pleased with my choice of vegetarianism, even if it did cause me to cry when called “Veggie” in middle school by two teasing boys in Home Ec class. I think we were learning to sew that day. One of them also tried to drown me in the pool during gym once. Then again, I think I called him “Monkey Ears.” At least, I did in my head.

Things haven’t changed much as we’ve gotten older, I think. Not that anybody’s tried to drown me lately, it’s just I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. If they tried, though, I’d probably do the same thing I did back then: Close my eyes, hold my breath and enjoy the feeling of being underwater.

Then again, they always say the best swimmers are the ones who drown.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

I'm Aware. And How Do You Think I Feel?

I just spent a stupid amount of time attempting to get to the “prison bitch name generator” but it’s just one of those click-a-link to get-a-link-to-click crapfests. And I did it for you, kids. Only to entertain you.

What can I say. I am short of material, short of sleep, short of ideas. I am, however, long on, long on…long on…what am I long on? Still too young to be long in the tooth, but that’s “in” anyway. Long on random things to write that I just need to yank from the back of my overpacked head toward the tips of my superfast-moving fingertips…
Yanka.
(But you might not wanta what gets yankeda. So I stoppa me now. Thanka me later.)

I’m actually having a sneezing fit, which is making the transmission of thoughts even tougher than it was a minute ago. But, as you can plainly see, not the transmission of words. Words I can always do. Fill the space, never fear the blank page. Just type. Just keep going. I’m going to write the most pathetic ad copy ever and make a bamillion dollars: “Just keep going.” [(tm) vex's page, first rendition. here: ibid on the (tm).]

Please make out your checks to “McBickle.”

AND, curtain.

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