A Very Short Story

The Flaw

She wasn't sure if she liked him, but still worried about what he thought. She'd learned to be self-conscious about being the kind of person who talks to empty spaces instead of faces.
"I hope he doesn't think I'm not interested," she thought to herself.
He tried to make a real effort to seem a good listener, but still he was distracted.
"I hope I'm not visibly sweating," he thought, "because this pretty girl doesn't seem to want to look at me."

A Very Short Story

She was tall and lean with a wide sweep of hair falling obediently across the left side of her face. In the mirror she observed it as her right side. She dressed quickly but thoughtfully. When all else was done she slipped on her green flip flops matching her large green straw handbag. Her long unpainted toes hung just barely over the front of the too-small shoes. She didn't want anyone to notice her imperfectly long feet.

A Very Short Story

He shot himself through the head a week ago. He was 25 and had his heart broken a few months before.
She didn't take it well, but she knew it wasn't her fault.
The mother was a different story. "He belonged to me," she strained weakly through the embrace of her consoling husband.
Everybody belongs to someone.

A Very Short Story

The Hurt
Defeated, but with intent, he inhaled deeply and plunged himself under the above-ground pool's water line. He tried to stay motionless but submerged while he stared at the girl's slowly swinging legs. In this way, she couldn't make eye contact with him, and also his vision was blurred just enough to restrict his ability get an effective mental picture for that evening's fruitless masturbation attempts. The expanding pain in his lungs rose up into his brain as she floated naively three feet above.

A Very Short Story

Effect
A man sat in a park and watched a bird. It stopped near him briefly, then flew away. An hour later a similar bird did the same thing, and flew away. Just then the man's girlfriend greeted and sat down next to him. The man nervously slipped his rigid, clammy hands into his pockets and was surprised to feel the small metallic ring. He had forgotten.

my favorite living author

pretty sure i've talked about david foster wallace here before. he hung himself last friday. he was 46, so he beat hemingway by a decade and a half. this certainly wasn't my first reaction but it was a reaction: he certainly didn't seem like the kind of guy for which "attempted" suicide would apply. rather much more detail-oriented than to fail at really anything he tried. also not my first reaction but less whimsical and therefore more instructive of my overall reaction: there is an absolutely spectacular passage in infinite jest where he describes in first-person an attempted suicide by drug overdose. i've never attempted it myself but the hazy disconnect between human-brain, human-human, and human-world was so well-done it was literally chilling for me to read it. i don't know how you respond to books or written words but finishing reading that passage was maybe the only time in my life where i had to stop and put the book away. it was too much and i just had to stop for the day. too much. it's something the very same character says and something of a melancholic motto for me. it's also a central theme of the book, which might be all the explanation that's required in conveying my love for it. i'm not going to take this time to do any sort of intelligent review of infinite jest, not least because any thoughts on it necessarily can't be separated from the so-recent demise of its author, but i can say with measured emotion that it's one of the handful of best books i've ever read and maybe the best book since the spread of modernism. actually if you've read much of his own opinions of literature you'd agree that it can be silly to compare works with regard to literary era or even to label such eras, so maybe i ought to simply stick with my first statement and leave it at that.

that a man has died is not of much consequence to me. people come and go all the time, and, while it's perhaps pretentious for a 27-year-old to act flippant on the subject, i currently possess neither the disposition nor the experience to philosophize any deeper. what's personally interesting is the depression and obviously therefore the disconnection present in this man that could cause such an outcome. to write as he did requires an incomprehensibly huge amount of emotional depth. to truthfully express both exultant and utterly despairing feelings through mere words requires a man to possess a dangerously massive range of emotions, and therefore all the subsequent vulnerabilities that come with them. i guess i'm saying that suicide from such a person as this should not ever be a surprising result. tragic of course, but not surprising.

there are people--artisans of various types--that transcend simple human existence through their ability to create fully-formed existances for others. these people don't really exist simply as people, as private entities; they belong to the world that they've rendered almost obsolete. i would personally consider bob dylan another such person. he's not who he was born as, he's something else now. wallace i consider similarly. and that's why it's tragic to lose him. more interestingly, though, that's why it's difficult to understand his discontinued existence. here is someone that beat the system, someone who became for the world around him something more than simply alive. so how could he be dead? his output is and will always be alive, it's the creation that has died. or dried up. i don't know. maybe i'm getting carried away but it makes sense to me to think this way.

something else that's somewhat personal about all this is that when you really understand a book or a writer it is impossible not to feel a real connection, as if you know the person. writing and sharing words is an incredibly intimate activity, both for the giver and the receiver. as with every literary consideration, wallace certainly understood this. it makes you wonder if the stress involved in exposing parts of himself was just too much to bear. or, further, if the acknowledgement of his own genius and his own transcendence was too much for his mortal cognition. i know this all seems pretty heady and that real people don't think this way but if there is one person who would have it was him.

it's too bad what happened but in a way it was inevitable. too much. he was too much.

1. Participated in the spectacle that is the Tribeca Film Festival. Actually, I just went and saw a new movie that's on the festival list because I got free tickets from a co-worker. There was no pomp, no celebrities, nothing whatsoever that would make me a cooler human being. Since you're wondering, the movie I saw was a documentary called Secrecy, which is naturally about government policies regarding classified information. It was a decent film, of good quality as you'd expect with a festival selection, but nothing exceedinly interesting in my opinion. In fact, they only touched on what I thought was the truly interesting angle: the fact that we're living in the "information age" and therefore everyone has more info than ever before and so the whole practice and gathering of classified intelligence would seem to be somewhat arcane and the huge struggle to hide what's nearly impossible to hide even more arcane. Instead they chose to pursue the GWBush is horrible/the government is a dirty secretive body/we have a right to know crap. It's all fine to uncover some illicit govermental moves to hide some facts, but I've seen all that before. It's called Frontline and it's on every week for free on PBS. I gave it a 3 out of 5 on the audience scorecard.
2. I had my first pop in maybe 2-3 years while watching the movie. It wasn't as monumental an occasion as it could have been as 1) it was only a diet, and 2) it was a fountain drink so not as aggressively carbonated. It was actually somewhat pleasant.
3. Along the lines of my New Yorker thought from last time, I stopped and thought about it just now when writing the word "pop." I've gotten infected with "soda" so much that "pop" doesn't come naturally anymore, and even when it does it somehow sounds odd in my head.
4. Dave thinks I'm not a good writer anymore. This is probably true. At least I'm not as spontaneous or perhaps as madly interesting as I was. It's because I'm happy. Or content. These are wonderful things to be, but for my own artistic purposes, not really conducive to exultant creation. Because I'm almost always happy, I don't have those lonely or horribly agitated or otherwise expansive emotional range that I used to. So my prose doesn't have as much range either. Or at least that's how I can explain it.
5. I'm always happy because of Sara. So Sara, shame on you for your one negative influence on my life. I'm not sure just yet how serious that sentence is. Not very, but maybe a tiny bit. I'll think about it.

Another Very Short Story

Blows
We went to MoMA to see the Serras. I called him a sensationalist hack; she cried; I apologized. We went to the Film Forum to see a Truffaut film. She called him a derivative hack; I bit my tongue--hard. We don't talk about art anymore. She left me, simply. I cried, breathlessly.

A Very Short Story

Life to b4
John had just been castled: scorned and sent away by his friends. His queen had long since flown the coop; fate had sent her along with a dashing and daring young knight. John was afraid and disconsolate. He decided to lie down and take a nap. When he awoke his queen--indeed his whole kingdom--had returned to how it had always been. He was confused. And extremely disappointed.

A Poem

I wrote this almost a year ago. I've been told I'm not terribly prolific.

Cinderella on the 6

Ten beers walking slowly stopping starting along the dark cracked birdshit sidewalk.
Trip stumble swoop and glide over potholes en route to the 86th st train stop.
Fumble in the pocket pull the card please swipe again at this turnstile. Ok.
Three young Bettys looking wide-eyed confused planning finding consensus.
Infused with the walk-heat forehead moisture undo the second button and breathe.
Turnstile rotate woman fascinate moving ten twenty thirty forty feet down the line.
Stand sobriety limbs carefully asunder still a herky jerk in her thick-belted direction.
Leaning tight-jeans white shirt against white tile wall, staring at me only peripherally.
Stiff neck forced posture time the perv just right yes peripheral no more. Ok.
Drift on, drunk return, the Bettys getting closer bored spread out hangdog what did you really expect at 2am on a Monday?
Men on the tracks flashlights waving calm still air dead sound dead but the feet slide.
Too far turn around muse hiding by a pole knee betrays. Stare stare wait she looks.
Once more with confidence skiing between the poles forty thirty twenty ten stop.
Lights and noise quiet and the air disappears and the prey is alarmed.
Danger stop freeze wait for it five feet train slow door open three feet one foot—
Cross paths no eyes no board train sit she’s a mouse on the next car. Fool. Ok.
Visual through the window foggy sight eyes again good a game the mouse is playing.
Stare stare mouse stands looks fast turn pause wow butt perfect silver buckle.
Mouse skitters sits farther away the horror foggier still brown hair but barely now.
Stare stare one station two three stare stiff neck stiff thunder flows like a river.
Purse and hands aflutter mirror brush plastic sticks and discs spread eyes concentrate.
Minutes of attention satisfaction new face stand turn full figure salute to the window.
Not for me ignorance and consternation two stops consults watch and phone what did you really expect at 2am on a Monday?
Beauty queen smoking struck lightning and lived like lips of fire red with rings.
Next to last stop appointment time one last look tease full figure ample chump.
Mouse-marmot stand grasp pole damn you don’t look at me I’m poor and horny. Ok.
Exit moves heels with ease confusion failure rube don’t look at me.
Wheels move mouse slips up up up and out away into his clutch slipperless.

Tues Sep 12 8:19pm