Shoes, Shoes, Shoes

"Only rarely did he notice his own existence, when for example lack of breath—the revenge of a heavy body—forced him to halt with open mouth on a staircase, or when he had a toothache, or when at a late hour during his chess cogitations an outstretched hand shaking a matchbox failed to evoke in it the rattle of matches, and the cigarette that seemed to have been thrust unnoticed into his mouth by someone else suddenly grew and asserted itself, solid, soulless and static, and his whole life became concentrated in the single desire to smoke, although goodness knows how many cigarettes had already been unconsciously consumed. In general, life around him was so opaque and demanded so little effort of him that it sometimes seemed someone—a mysterious, invisible manager—continued to take him from tournament to tournament; but occasionally there were odd moments, such quietness all around, and when you looked out onto the corridor, shoes, shoes, shoes, standing at all the doors, and in your ears the roar of loneliness."

— from Nabokov's “The Defense”

"The House at Loon Lake"

“Objects have lives. They are with us through things.”

This was said by a woman on a “This American Life” piece. This was my second listen. It’s a spooky tale of an abandoned house found by two boys. There, they found letters from the 1930s and ‘40s, love letters, desperate letters. You should listen. Turn off your lights and light candles. Please. Do it for you. Radio will take you to a place beyond what you can see. When you are tired of looking, listen.

http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/01/199.html

Snake It Forward

"Snakes in a Newsroom."

I think this will kick the ass of Bravo's new show, "Tabloid Wars." I'm not kidding. Picture it: Editors running screaming from slithering creatures while trying to put out the daily edition. Fear! Deadlines! Snakes! It'll be adrenaline-filled and fast-paced, not to mention scary and sexy. Cause you know how sexy editors are.

Anyway, I'd like to see this in my own office. With literal snakes, not the rabid beings who wander this cube-urbia daily. In fact, I'd like to see the literal snakes duke it out with the ad-guy snakes. That'd be buckets o' disgustipating fun.

In preparation, I want to register the domain name: snakesinanewsroom.org.

And I want to mention here a new domain I think should definitely exist: ".sad"

You know, we could use it any time we feel like shit, which, as you all seem to tell me, is often enough to keep the servers busy. Then again, I quite liked Miss C's suggestion of ".ugh"--potentially even more useful than ".sad". She was discussing that she was hot and sad today, and I suggested www.girlsarehotandsad.sad. She liked this, and in her approval mentioned that www.girlsarehotandhappy.happy "just does not have the same ring to it. Fassbinder would not make a movie based on that website. But hot and sad, yes. 'The Hot Tears of Petra von Kant' might well have been a working title."

Truer words were never spoken by such a hot and sad lady.

This Is Not a Metaphor

I have a lethargic fly.

It’s been here about two days. It is heavy and black and I can only assume it’s the same one all this time (so save it, all you “flies live for, like, an hour” types). I feel awful watching it wind down, slowly, a twisting animal caught in a primal time-space curve—it flies ever slower, lands longer each time, and I wonder what I can do to make its last minutes on Earth somehow worthwhile. Not swat it, I suppose.

Suggestions, as always, are welcome

It’s So Cleansing

Am I the only woman in New York who enjoys a good “Fuck you” exchange every once in a while?

I find the frequency of necessary cleansing to be approximately once every couple months. That’s when I feel the sudden welling up of two words—they come abruptly and with force: “Fuck you!” I shout. And a tidy “Fuck you!” comes back to me.

I don’t mean to imply that I shout “Fuck you” with no reason. Usually the reason is asshole-driver related.

Tonight it was a grand gesture at a car that nearly ran me down. The words followed on the gracious heels of my pseudo-Italian arm gesture that was meant to convey, “Sir, you nearly ran me down with your car, so FUCK YOU.” But either way, the words decided to follow the movement; I really had no say in the matter. It erupted quietly though, more like, “Fuck yu.”

A hearty “Fuck you!” rang back from a man with a slight European accent so that it sounded more like “Fock you!”

What I find really ultimately satisfying about these explicit verbal exchanges is the swift force with which they occur, and the suddenness with which they end. The man drives away, something has been released into the night air. Something that carries itself off into the dark sky, dissipating as it goes.

Rockin' the Global Media

So here’s a phone call from a friend who needs help from the big guns: Can I please call One Man in Baghdad for a favor? The friend’s childhood friend’s parents are stuck in Beirut and frightened as hell. They’ve been standing in lines for eight hours at a time, in the broiling sun, 70-year-old stroke survivors, American citizens. Each time, they are sent home to their war-weary house.

Within three minutes, I’m on the IM line to OMIB, and he has immediately sicked his Beirut correspondents on it. Apparently, they are already on this evacuation morass like parakeets on power lines. Thank you OMIB. Power of the press, people, continue to believe in the power of the press.

I Will Live in a Fortress if I Must

When one arises at 1 a.m. in order to pee and perhaps grab a light snack from the kitchen, one does not expect to encounter a creature from the deep, an agent of Satan, a monster of the dark. Yes, my friends, we are talking about a Water Bug.

If you do not live here, think of a roach of gigantic proportions. If you do live here, you are quaking while you read this.

It just appeared. Brown and ugly, ugly as a fungus on a mold.

I stumbled around a bit while grabbing the nearest potentially lethal bottle of spray liquid I could find. It turned out to be soap scum stuff that pretty much eats the veneer off my shower. I sprayed, the devil ran not under the door to the hallway toward which it had appeared to be heading, but back toward my bedroom.

I believe I screeched once.

I have no desire to kill anything that big, much less a desire to clean up whatever ookiness I have made by killing such a creature. For now, I have barricaded myself in my room in an attempt to peacefully finish my book ("The Inner Circle," T.C. Boyle, about Kinsey) and quietly suppress chills that are plaguing my grossed-out spine.

Who decided to call these things water bugs? What the hell is that about?

Blech. Ick. Yuck.

Addendum: My train ride this evening included a man with unusually deformed legs, two deaf men, two transvestites and a man with a very bad hair piece. It was a confluence of sorts you don't see every day, but you are strangely happy you did. New York in all its heterogeneity, courtesy the Sunday evening A.

Rub It Off. Or Out. Or, Nice Try

Some people make a stain on your soul. It’s the kind of shape that will stay in you forever and have that annoying ink-blot-like quality that will cause you to occasionally stare at it and wonder what the hell it is. Either that or you’ll begin to ignore it until you actually don’t see it anymore—it is just a part of your blotchy inner life once and for all, and indistinguishable from the rest of the mess. But it does contribute to the entire blobbish creation one way or the other, which, possibly, is reassuring.

Narcissismos

Taught

Elongated

Stretch

I fell asleep wondering about the sexual sounds of words. I easily came up with a long list of words that imply sexuality, but also sound sexual. I excluded words that were specifically about sex and, instead, tried to focus on the sounds and the possible contexts in which you could say/hear them. The list was long, but I remember only those three.

I dreamed I was winning all my school swim team races. We were from my university, competing against other schools, and we knocked them all out, race by race. One length butterfly, two lengths breast. Water over the head, nostrils above the water. It was very satisfying. In the way that physical movement--and physical triumph--feels. When asked the name of our team for the record (the scorekeeper's record), we all scratched our wet heads and gave up the name of our school’s sports teams. And then added the word “Alterna-.” And then someone offered up “Heathens.”

I also did what I now know I do repeatedly and stunningly in my dreams throughout my life: I flew. It’s more of a floaty fly than an actual soaring. Apparently, it is my dream specialty to amaze people with my ability to move in the air about a room and hover when I so feel like it with so little effort. Then there are the dips and swirls I unroll through the air for my own happiness.

What the Park Said

Mini-dogs snarfled around gargantuan mastiffs and humans sniffed one another's asses.

Or something like that. I spent a few hours reading the paper and watching dogs wade in and out of a cordoned off portion of a lake in Prospect Park. I watched a religious Jewish father side-kick his wolf-eyed dog into the water when it didn't want to swim. I heard him yell at his 12 children with the same vehemence. And I saw 147 yamacha-clad kids push and pull said dog this way and that, in a way that recalled my own childhood desires to get Ellie or Max to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it. ("Look here!" "Get the stick!" "Get the STICK!")

I heard owners call, "Miffie!" "Muffie!" "Madeleine!" "Roscoe!" so many times I became deaf to the names of dogs. Except to "Shoshana." Who names their dog "Shoshana"? Apparently one incredibly nasal-voiced woman in Brooklyn does.

I saw men without shirts play rugby. I saw plastic bags tumble over a pond. I saw my arms turn slightly red with sun and the clouds wash over the sky.

I felt my eyes become heavy with calm, and the day spread outward like lava from my warm toes.

"To talk is silver, to shout is golden."

Yesterday, I caught a sliver of a documentary about a Finnish chorus of screaming men: The Finnish Screaming Male Choir.

Because I am in the process of fleeing my house within the next ten minutes, I leave you to read about it if you like, and think about the idea that shouting can be freeing. Can it? How do you let out what you need? How do you keep it a river and not a flood? Or can the surrounding land handle the inundation, so, hey, go for it, we’ve got a canoe?*

[*Now accepting packages containing flotation devices. Pls send c/o McBickle, underwater in Brooklyn. And do it quickly, the Gowanus is stanky.]