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Also, my face, in case you were wondering, is half-shaven. It's true. I was shaving just now and remembered that I hadn't sent this email yet, although I wrote most of it early this morning (the stuff up to the paragraph about snow). When I remembered this, I felt bad because maybe you won't get the email today and so you will think that I'm not thinking of you when I am. Anyway, when I made the decision to stop shaving, I immediately envisioned a scene in which I'm standing across the street from our building (which in the process of burning to the ground), and there are lots of people there with me, watching it burn, and every now...
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Recently I've been having these experiences. I walk out of the apartment and stand at the top of the stairs waiting for K as she locks the door, and while standing there I realize I can't remember walking out of the apartment. I remember being about to leave, but I can't remember leaving. Nonetheless I must have left because here I am at the top of the stairs. * From a recent email exchange: Her: Also, please start doing something about your forgetfulness. I am beginning to find it unattractive. There are many things you can do. It's like going to the gym, except in this case you make sure your brain muscle stays fit. I...
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I've never liked the word cunt. It's nasty and crude. Not that pussy is any better. Cunt seems demeaning, while pussy seems—what?—silly. I can never decide which of the two to use in my diary. I try cunt for a time, then switch to pussy, then return to cunt again, sometimes in a single sentence. Neither word seems right for very long. In desperation I have occasionally tried using vagina. However, vagina is so medical-sounding that I invariably cross it out. My diary is littered with sentences in which I've drawn a line through the word vagina and written cunt or pussy in the space above it. A few times I've considered using the word sex, but sex...
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My gym's just a block and half away, at the corner of Union and 7th, in a basement. They tried to make it nice—and I suppose they succeeded—but it's still in a basement. There are no windows. This bothered me at first, but now I don't think about it so much. My gym is my gym. I go nearly every morning. Most days my trip to the gym is the only time I leave the apartment, and the people I see there are the only people I see all day, aside from K and the occasional delivery person. I rarely talk to anyone at the gym, but I notice everyone. I notice them and think about them...
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Middle of the night K is making whimpering sounds. I'm lying on my side and she's behind me, spooning me. I don't know how long she's been doing this, but what finally wakes me is the way she's shaking. I turn to hold her. "You had a bad dream," I say. "It's okay." "No, it's not okay." "It was a dream, sweetheart, and now it's over." "It was real." She's sobbing now. I ask her to tell me the dream. She says her father came to visit and we were sitting in the living room, talking and having a nice time, when suddenly he said he had to go. "You mean back home," she...
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My sister Andrea and I visited the circle yesterday. The circle is where we grew up; it's a cul-de-sac. We were driving to Target to return her vacuum cleaner when Andrea suggested a quick side trip. We parked in front of Bruce Goldberg's house. Bruce doesn't live there anymore, none of the Goldbergs do, but I still think it as Bruce Goldberg's house. One time when we were kids, Bruce's sister Rhonda, who was fat, sat on Andrea, who was tiny, and Rhonda refused to budge. I can't remember why Rhonda did this, but someone told me about it while it was happening and I came running. Andrea and Rhonda were on the lawn in front of Bruce...
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I know a woman who can only come from words—or rather, from stories. These stories are always about people coming. She reads them and comes. Naturally she touches herself as she reads, but the stories are primary: they make her want to touch herself.
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The opening is there but he cannot go through, so instead he goes part way through, which only makes him want to go farther, which he cannot do, and so, like a person in a line that is not moving and will not move, he takes a tiny step forward, moving that tiny step closer to the person in front of him, who in turn moves a tiny step closer to the person in front of her, that person being him, for there are only two people in line. It's like a game of musical chairs. They walk in slow circles around a single chair, waiting for the music only they can hear, for it is in their heads,...
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Everything we experience is recorded and stored in our brains. I believe I read this many years ago in a science magazine. You might be sitting in a chair, looking out the window, and all the while your brain is silently registering and recording what it feels like to sit in that chair, the feeling of the chair on your butt and the backs of your legs, the pressure of it, as well as everything you see and hear while sitting, things you don't necessarily even notice, consciously. Actually I saw this on TV. There was a man on an operating table with a sawed-open head. The sawed-opened part had been flipped over and was resting on top of his...
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An awkward scene in the co-op. The cashier is someone I had a date with two years ago, just before meeting K. We had soup at a Japanese restaurant and she complained about being chilly—she hadn't worn socks—so I lent her the thick wool sock I use to store my digital camera. Every five minutes or so she would switch the sock from one foot to the other. It was a scene out of a romantic comedy, and I liked her plenty besides—she was smart, beautiful, and unpretentious—but then we got to talking about the co-op, of which we were both members, and I made the mistake of making up the plot of a film, set in the co-op,...
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I had lunch with a friend at my favorite Japanese restaurant, Yamato, on Seventh Avenue. I ordered what I always order: the teriyaki salmon lunch box. It comes with miso soup, salad with carrot dressing, two deep-fried dumplings, rice, a California roll, and a little medley of pan-fried vegetables. Everything is first-rate. I particularly like the carrot dressing, although the dumpling sauce is yummy too, as is the teriyaki sauce. Even the rice is a cut above, fluffier and less sticky than elsewhere. Also (and this is the point, really), I had nothing to say. I've had nothing to say for some time. Related: I recently began a piece that begins: All writing is positive. Even...
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I played a guitar today for the first time in many years. K's nephew, a musician, is visiting from Chicago, and he left two guitars in the hall. This morning, after he'd left for the day, I decided to try one. It was a better guitar than I've ever played, one worth several thousand dollars—not that I could tell the difference. To my surprise, I found I've forgotten all the songs I ever wrote. Parts of some came back, a smattering of verses and choruses, but I couldn't play a single song from start to finish. I'm also down to just four chords: Am, Em, G, and C. I've never counted, but I believe I written at least...
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A few nights back I saw a play written by a friend. I'd seen the play years ago, in a different production, and had read it before that and had loved it. It's a beautiful play. Poetry, of a kind. This time it was lousy, mostly, because the lead actor was lousy. There are only two actors in the play, and only the lead speaks, so if the lead is lousy, the play is lousy. Although maybe the lead wasn't that lousy, really; maybe he was so-so or mediocre or some word or phrase meaning less than good but not that terrible. I don't know. I just know I felt for him because he was trying so hard to...
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I'm going to a show tomorrow. I mention this in part because I don't go to many shows these days. In fact I can't think of the last show I went to. Okay, I just remembered: it was Letter Purloined. As much as I enjoyed Letter Purloined, the seats were uncomfortable, or I was uncomfortable sitting, and this more than anything is what I remember about it: being uncomfortable. Actually, no, this isn't true: I remember how the actress who played the queen/psychiatrist would say uh-huh, and the way the king would recite his poetry, his hand cupped over the crown of his head, and many other things as well—enough to choke a horse, if a horse...
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David said that Oblivio sounds like a comic book hero whose superpower is making people forget. I laughed, imagining a gang of bad guys thwarted by absentmindedness—they hold weapons in their hands but cannot remember how to use them. Or should it be the other way around—Oblivio as a villain whose weapon is forgetfulness? I like this better, for evil, like love, proceeds from memory. In the absence of memory, there is no evil. Tsunamis aren't evil, nor are piranha. You need a person for evil, someone capable of connecting the present to the past and future.
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