The Soft Bulletin

What's in a Fish?

2006-05-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

Charlie sat in the waiting room, glancing nervously back and forth between the months old Golf Digest in his lap and the generic paintings on the wall. The secretary handed him some paperwork to fill out. When he finished, he handed it back to her and she smiled politely as she motioned him into the office.

Dr. Warstein, a large man with a salt-and-pepper beard and sparkling, intense eyes, sat behind a large mahogany desk that was covered with neatly arranged photos in bronze frames. Charlie couldn’t see the pictures, as they faced the doctor, but he assumed them to be family photos. There was a large landscape painting with a red barn that dominated the frame behind the doctor. As Dr. Warstein looked up from his scribblings, his head was framed in the doors of the barn.

“Ah, Charlie, nice to meet you.” The doctor came around the desk and shook Charlie’s hand. The doctor had a strong grip that made Charlie feel at ease, comfortable and welcome. Two deep brown leather chairs faced each other over a long coffee table. Dr. Warstein motioned Charlie to the chair closest the door, then sat carefully down in the other. He smiled at Charlie thoughtfully as the secretary placed two cups of coffee on the table, with cork coasters under them to protect the wood.

Charlie sat slumped down into the back of the chair and peered at the doctor over his fist, which hid his mouth and nose. The doctor smiled back at him, pen and paper at the ready.
“Well,” said the doctor, “what brings you in? What can I do for you?”
Charlie thought for a second, then spoke through his fist.
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before, so a step-by-step wouldn’t hurt.” Charlie resumed his blank stare as Dr. Warstein uncrossed his legs, recrossed them, and leaned forward. He shifted his notepad to his left hand and spoke carefully.

“Well, Charlie, this is your time. So you talk about whatever you want. I’ll ask questions if you want me to, to keep you headed in the right direction. But mostly I’m here to listen and to facilitate you getting to the root of your anxieties.” The doctor paused and looked at Charlie to gauge his reaction, but none was forthcoming as Charlie continued to hide in his fist. Dr. Warstein continued.
“Where would you like to start? We could talk about your childhood, your parents. Work, maybe? Or anything, any thought that might have struck you recently. It’s up to you.”

Dr. Warstein sat back and positioned his pen, ready to take notes. He smiled and looked thoughtfully at Charlie, who finally removed his fist from his mouth and adjusted himself in his seat.
“OK, alright then; I’m here, um, I’m here because I’m depressed; it’s been bothering me for a little while now. But I don’t really want to talk about the depression itself yet. And I really don’t want to talk about my parents; later yes, but not now. I thought we could start less painfully. I’ve been having this recurring dream, something from my childhood.”
“That’s a great place to start. Tell me about the dream.”

“OK, the dream takes place down the street from my house; at the end of the street, past a long row of pines, there’s a tiny park with a picnic table and a couple of those dirty grills that are cemented into the ground and you’re always afraid to eat off of them. There’s a creek that goes by the park. Willow trees line either side of the creek and the branches dip down into the water. It’s a beautiful place, really.

”We used to walk the creek in the summer as a way to cool off. It was rarely very deep, so we’d wear ratty shoes and go exploring. You could start at the park in the neighborhood and walk until you reached another park downtown, behind the police station, but we hardly ever went that far. Usually, we’d look for a place where it was deep enough that we could swim, though we knew there was no such place.

“This is where the dream starts: Once, we were walking the creek and found some older kids hunting carp. I guess I could call it fishing, except they were using a bow and arrow. The creek was rarely more than two feet deep at the most, but somehow some really big fish lived in there. Some of the carp were like a foot and a half long. So these kids were stomping and splashing and moving the big rocks that the fish hid under, trying to scare them out so they could shoot them with an arrow. The arrows were easy to find when they missed because of the shallow water. They actually shot one or two, and these big fish were floating there in the water, their pale yellow scales tinged with the red blood oozing slowly from the small wounds where the arrows hit them. This is where I wake up, with the image of these dead fish in my head.”

Dr. Warstein’s smile grew wider. “Very interesting,” he said, “what do you think this means? What might these symbols, the creek and the fish, mean to you?” For the first time Charlie broke his blank stare and smiled shyly back at the doctor.

“I don’t know; that’s the problem. There’s another dream, another memory, that keeps recurring as well. It’s very similar. Once, I was fishing with some of my friends – I don’t remember which friends, and no one else factors into the dream – and we spotted a goldfish, a koi, in the water. We tried to catch it with our fishing rods, but it wouldn’t bite, no matter what we tried. So we ended up just chasing it around for a while, until I spotted this piece of wood sticking out of the water. It looked too smooth and polished to be a branch, so I pulled on it until it popped out of the muck. It was some sort of gardening tool, but one I’d never seen before – and haven’t again, for that matter. It was short, maybe two, three feet long with a metal tipped that forked slightly like a snake’s tongue; it was spear-like in appearance, so that’s what I used it for.

“So I’m jumping around and yelling and chasing this fish, just missing each time as the water altered the trajectory of our gardening spear ever so slightly. Finally, after getting so close a bunch of times, I hit it. Or, I thought I did. The spear didn’t go through the fish like I thought it would. But its movements slowed, and it stopped hiding and kind of fluttered around for a minute and I picked it up and it was slimy in my hands and I carried it over to the picnic table and laid it there on the table. It was dead now, with its gardening spear wound and no oxygen; really, the wrong kind of oxygen, being breathed through the wrong respiratory system. I had a pocketknife, a tiny little knife on a key chain that also held my little Phillies baseball player key chain. And I figured, why not, so I started to cut the fish with my knife. It felt weird when it broke through the scales, like cutting through the hard crust on a loaf of bread, only the insides of the bread were fleshy. I cut a square, like a window to the inside of the fish.”

Dr. Warstein interrupted Charlie dream-story. Charlie’s head snapped to attention, almost as if he had been dreaming the dream right then and the doctor’s voice had woken him.
“What were you trying to see through the window?” the doctor asked, watching Charlie’s face the whole time. Charlie’s eyes, which had seemed to not focus on anything during the recounting of the dream, now looked intently at the doctor.

“What was I looking for? Did I expect to find fish like my mom puts on the dinner table, filleted and gutted and cleaned, cooked nicely all the way through? Maybe I was hoping to find something more, some sort of evidence of a fishy soul that would rise up in front of me, and wings and a halo would appear seemingly from nowhere, but I would know that they came from heaven and the fish soul would float away playing a soft, sweet, fish melody on his gold fish harp.”

“What then?” asked the doctor. John’s eyes had lost focus again, and this time they did not refocus on the doctor.
”The fish had no soul. All it had were organs, and worms in its stomach or maybe the worms were intestines. The dark, bile color of the intestines contrasted sharply against the bright orange of the scales and made me feel sick and sad at the same time but I didn’t know why. I looked at my knife and there was blood on it and I wiped it off on the table, trading the blood for bits of the rotting lumber that flaked off and stuck to the blade. I wiped it once more on my shorts, folded it up and put it in my pocket. Then we gathered up our fishing rods, our shoes, and walked home.”

Charlie stopped there and looked at Dr. Warstein, hoping that the doctor held the answers to the infinite unasked questions that swam in Charlie’s head, fighting each other to be the next sound to exit his lips. None of them won, though, because each thought gave way to the next and Charlie gave up trying to think of something to say.

“I think this is a good place to stop,” said the doctor as he rose quickly and unceremoniously from his seat. “We’ve accomplished a lot in establishing a groundwork for future sessions, but we don’t want to do too much at once, now do we? I want you to think about what your dreams mean to you and when you come back next week we’ll discuss things more in-depth.”

Charlie got up from his chair and shook the doctor’s hand and nodded a friendly goodbye-I’ll-see-you-next-week nod, all the while his brain yelling at him no we’re not done here I don’t think I can make it another week it seems like just a dream but you went to school for this take a wild fucking guess what it means, then nodded to the receptionist who smiled politely as he walked through the waiting room past the generic paintings and months old issues of Golf Digest.
“Next week,” said the doctor with a wave, “we’ll get you sorted out.”

Insomnia related events: 'The Decline' declines (the story, not the blog)

2006-04-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

The story starts here.

I tried to go from there and ended up with this (explanations and apologies below)
---------------------

But wait; it will do no good to start at the end. Nothing can be examined fully when only the conclusion is looked at. There are contexts and motives and consequential decisions that led explicitly to this conclusion. Sane men do not kill themselves without good reason. The argument could be raised that only insane men kill themselves, but do they too not have good reasons for doing so?

Sean Barry graduated from college near the top of his class, with honors. He was by no means a stupid man, and in fact would have done better had he not had a slight problem with motivation. He found his academic pursuits to be boring and paid them just enough attention to get by.

It was with this attitude that he entered 'the real world,' as his business professor repeatedly labeled it, `reality. Where if you're not careful, you get eaten up in a second. One needs a plan to succeed, to stand out. Because if you don't stand out, then you've failed. You've become one of the minions, just a cog in the great machine that is capitalism.'

Sean never liked his business professor, nor his business classes in general. He took them as a concession to his father, who thought that Sean would never make any money with an English degree. Sean agreed with this basic assumption and so chose to double major, business and English.

But Sean didn't think about integers, tax brackets, or corporations. These things were necessary evils he needed to endure in order to succeed in life; because what is money if not a measure of success? A family friend once told Sean that 'money doesn't buy happiness; but it does by freedom.' Sean's father nodded in assent to his friend's wise adage; Sean stayed silent. There was no use agreeing or disagreeing with the two older men, whose experience in such matters far outweighed Sean's own, rendering his opinion next to useless.

And so Sean's second major in English became his silent - if half-hearted - defiance of his father. But it was small comfort, because eventually, Sean would follow his father into 'the real world,' most likely following him right into some bureaucratic desk job.

--------

Sean Barry is supposed to be the guy who kills himself. My plan is/was to create an inner story - framed by the immediate events leading to his death - about bureaucracy and the overwhelming oppression of hating one's job. I wanted it to be Kafka-esque, a la 'The Trial'. However, I feel what I have is decidedly not what I want and so it will probably be scrapped.

Don't ask me why I posted it if it's going to be scrapped. Because I did, that's why. And I haven't slept.

Insomnia rears its ugly head

2006-04-06T05:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here early in the morning, earlier than I wake up for basically anything. I couldn't sleep at all last night and oh god did I try to sleep. Three or four times I got up and tried to get my mind to stop running aimlessly. Didn't work.

The Girlfriend leaves later today for Indiana for her Grandmother's funeral. And yet I'm the one who can't sleep.

And so I'm arming myself for the day with plenty of caffeine. I have a long day: class, a discussion on Muslim-Americans, more class, club lacrosse practice tonight. I made myself a full pot of coffee, but I put one or two too many scoops in and it tastes like crap. So I switched to cola (Food Lion brand - I'm broke).

And so, with the extra hours I didn't spend laying in bed trying to force myself to sleep, I read some more of New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49:

At issue is no longer a matter of rational understanding of the truth, but another enabling/disabling condition - that which forces us to recognize the world as it is, in the middle of an elegantly posed problem and its hermeneutically satisfying conclusion, in the world of a text whose only significance lies in its existence as text.

I read the introduction to Slow Learner; in which Pynchon writes candidly about his growth as a writer, which makes me wonder which of the common mistakes he enumerates I make on a regular basis.

And the beginning of the first story, "The Small Rain" which is about soldiers dispatched to take care of hurricane victims in New Orleans. (hmmm...)

The Criticism of Lot 49

2006-04-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Somewhat belatedly, I am currently reading New Essays on: The Crying of Lot 49.

Criticism of The Crying of Lot 49 will continue to ask and answer versions of these questions, though perhaps the point is that the novel is put in the form of a question: it is, conceivably, a quest without end, an inquiry into and dramatization of our incessant desire for meaning, our will to generate signs and significance wherever we plant our feet. Framing this desire as a question is one of the hallmarks of postmodernist literature, to which Pynchon's work is a considerable contribution. But this formulation also leads to one of the primary questions about postmodernist fiction itself: are its speculative nature, its parodic playfulness and bookishness merely forms of diversion which lead us away from an engagement with "reality"?

When I finish with New Essays I will perhaps write an essay of my own, then move on to Slow Learner.

Hopefully this summer will lend time for me to read V. and Gravity's Rainbow.

And maybe one of these days I'll get around to writing that essay on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Maybe after I read Kafka on the Shore.

The Decline

2006-03-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

The sky was dark and grew darker as heavy clouds moved in. The clouds were angry and they pushed and shoved and crowded one another until there was no more room and there was nothing left to do but rain. The rain started quickly, leaving ill-prepared pedestrians nothing to do but draw their coats closer and hold their briefcases and newspapers over their heads for protection while they sought out the nearest overhang or doorway for shelter.

Two such men were walking home from work together and – the storm having interrupted their animated conversation – they ducked into a restaurant and took seats at the bar. They shook their coats to rid them of the wetness and ordered drinks – one stout, one scotch – before resuming their conversation.
“Clearly, something must be done,” said one of the men, sipping his scotch.
“Yes, clearly,” said the other. “But what? One must tread carefully in this situation. The slightest misstep…” He paused to sniff at his beer. “Well, you know what could happen.”

“You don’t have to tell me the possible repercussions. Regardless, action must be taken. If things continue as they stand, we will be finished. The downward spiral we are currently traveling will take us to God only knows what depths. This cannot be allowed to happen.” He sipped his scotch again and studied the lines in the wooden bar as his companion spoke.
“But perhaps it is too late. Perhaps this downward spiral is irreversible. Perhaps the only thing we can do is stop the bleeding. Perhaps entropy has already taken hold.” His face grew dark as he said this. An ominous look appeared in his eyes.

“What do you mean by that?” the first man asked, a confused look on his face.

“I mean entropy – the tendency of all things towards chaos. We can only fight against the decline for so long before we can do no more. Perhaps it is time to let things run their course.”

The confused look on the first man’s face turned to surprise.
“Are you suggesting we give up? Do nothing? I cannot give up. It is against my nature; against human nature. Entropy, bah. If your theory is true, there would be no such thing as progress. This is obviously not the case. Things don’t fall apart, they just change.”

“You are right; human nature is to fight entropy. But death is also human nature. Death is the essence of human nature. Death is not progress, it is an end. Nothing you do can stop it. The wood that made this bar, that you were studying so intently earlier, was once a living thing. It gestated from a seed and grew big and strong. Then it was cut down. What remains will eventually rot away. This building, too, will fall apart; the mortar will grow weak with time and the bricks will crumble slowly. It may not be obvious, but it will happen. And you and I will walk by one day and wonder how such a magnificent structure could have wasted away. This is your progress, your change. Progress is nothing but an attempt to combat entropy. Wooden structures were replaced by brick and mortar which was replaced by iron and steel, each one able to last a little longer in the fight against decay. But the decline is inevitable.”

With this, he finished his beer and motioned the bartender for another. He looked back at his friend, who was becoming slightly agitated, his nostrils flaring slightly. The first man took a moment to process what he had just heard. Then he too finished his drink and ordered another, then began to speak.

“True, there is decay and decline. But there is a cycle to things. Day decays into night, then night becomes day again. A tree dies and decays into soil which fertilizes new trees. Cities and civilizations fall apart and new ones are built on top of the remains. Governments collapse and new ones take their place. Everything has a cycle. Even death is part of the cycle of life.”

“And what follows death in the cycle of life?” the other man replied. “Need I remind you that the phoenix is but a mythical creature? We won’t incinerate and be reborn from the ashes. When we die, that is it. Like trees, our bodies decay and become fertilizer. But not fertilizer for new people, only fertilizer for plants, food for worms.”

The first man shook his head. “You’re depressing me,” he said. “Look, let me buy a round and we’ll go home and hopefully you’ll sleep off this absurdly depressing outlook. Agreed?”
The second man nodded his head softly, with a defeated look on his face. The two men had their drinks and parted ways outside.

The next day, the first man arrived at the office early, intending to finish up some paperwork. He went by his friend’s office to see if he was in yet. As he rounded the corner, he saw the feet, then the torso of his friend hovering above the ground. There was a note on the door that said simply: “I couldn’t fight entropy any longer. I go now to feed the worms.”

2006-03-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

Caddyshack II is terrible. Easily one of the worst sequels ever created, even considering the horrendous history of sequels in American cinema.

True, the movie has a theme of anti-semitism; it does nothing to cover the true crap that is this movie. Has Jackie Mason ever been in a good movie?

At the same time, has Chevy Chase ever taken part in a movie of this level of unmitigated crap? He's definitely tried, but Caddyshack II...wow.

Good Chevy Chase roles: all Vacation films, Fletch (which is a terrible film but is funny solely because of Chevy Chase), Nothing but Trouble (also terrible but funny), and his small role in Dirty Work (Dr. Farthing: $50,000. Mitch: Did you say $50,000? Dr. Farthing: No, I whispered $50,000)

Also members of the Caddyshack II cast who have done better and should kill themselves for Caddyshack II: Dyan Cannon, Dan Akroyd (for trying to reprise Bill Murray's groundskeeper role) and Randy Quaid. Really? What the fuck were you thinking all of you?

The cast was completed by Robert Stack, also of Unsolved Mysteries fame. What in all that is holy was he thinking?

[this post brought on by Caddyshack on AMC tonight, followed by Caddyshack II on Comedy Central at two in the morn'. But mostly by friends of mine offering the following conversation: "Caddyshack II is a misnomer." "Misnomer is a great word to use in this situation." Me: "Why is misnomer a good word to use here?" My friend: "Umm, I don't know. I don't really know what the word means. But it sounded good in this situation."]

[More than anything, though, this post was inspired by Yuengling beer.]

Pushing Through the Haze pt. II (or, Why I Drink Myself to Sleep)

2006-03-03T23:07:00.000-08:00

Lisa stopped by on her way home from work. Work, shit. I didn’t even call to say I wasn’t coming in. That could come back to bite me, considering I’ve used up almost all of my sick days on similar hangovers. To be fair, once I actually had the flu. Well, it was the flu combined with a mild hangover. Drinking away the flu, amazingly, doesn’t work. I thought the alcohol would kill the germs, but apparently not.

Lisa works in my office. From her face I could tell that they were none too pleased with me down there. She always gives me this look, like “what am I going to do with you?” She gave it to me as soon as I opened the front door. I just turned around and shuffled over to the couch. She followed me and sat down next to me, real close, but on the edge of the cushion, and put her hand on my knee. She started to talk, but I waved her quiet. She opened her mouth again and I tried the same wave, but it didn’t work.

“You can’t keep doing this crazy shit all the time. You get drunk and you freak out. Do you even remember what you did? Probably not; you never do.”

I tried to give her a helpless puppy dog face, but I’m pretty sure that, with my unwashed, unshaved face, I looked more like a panhandler begging for spare change. She began again.

“How’d you get home, anyway? I hope you didn’t walk.”
“Cab, I think,” I said simply.
“Last time we saw you, you were running down the street wearing a cowboy hat you stole from some girl at the bar, carrying a traffic cone. You slammed into a parked car at full speed.”

That explained the new accoutrements in my bedroom and the bruise. I shrugged and gave a smile, like “Eh, what can you do?” She usually laughed, or at least smiled at this sort of thing. Not this time, though. She just gave me her look again and kept talking.

“I don’t understand you. You seem fine most of the time, like at work. You’re great at work, when you’re there. But then we go out, we’re hanging out having a good time, and you just have maybe one drink too many and you’re gone. Lalaland. And you’re smoking a lot, recently. Do you realize how much you’ve been smoking? You never did anything like that when Molly was around.”

I stood up abruptly, suddenly angry and depressed again, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do once I was upright. I wavered for a second, decided I needed a beer, and went into the kitchen and got one. Lisa pulled it out of my hand.

“So that’s what this is? This is all about Molly? Christ. She was terrible for you. She treated you like shit. You know this.”

I found it hard to talk, so I went over to the stereo and put on some Nick Drake. Perfect for sadness, quiet and soothing. Lisa gave me the beer back. I opened it up and took a sip. Lisa spoke again, more softly this time.

“So what are we going to do about this? It’s been, what? Eight or nine months since she left?”
“Six,” I interrupted softly, speaking into my beer.
“OK, fine. Six months is still long enough to get over her. Or at least to get over the solving-depression-by-drinking-yourself-to-death period. Besides, they’re about to shoot you at the office. You show up only randomly, and when you do, you’re late.”

It’s hard for me to get mad at Lisa. She introduced me to Molly. I’ve known her longer than any of my current friends. Besides, she was right. I took another sip of beer in lieu of telling her this last bit of information. We sat in silence for awhile; she looked at me while I looked at my beer and tried to listen to Nick Drake. But my thoughts kept straying to Molly.

“You know what I miss most about Molly?” I began, still speaking to my beer; Lisa just rolled her eyes.
“Don’t do that. What I miss most is her being here. I miss sitting here on the couch and having her come up behind me and rubbing my shoulders. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and there’s nobody beside me in bed. I miss her being in my bed. She always slept naked. And her body was so warm.”

I stopped and looked at a spot on the carpet, probably a beer stain. I have quite a few of those.
Goddammit, why is Lisa here? Why is she doing this to me, why now? The only thing she’s doing is bringing up painful memories. Tony’s probably waiting for her. He’s sitting on the couch, watching TV, and he knows that at any moment Lisa will walk through the door and give him a kiss. And they’ll snuggle on the couch and he’ll rub her leg and she’ll kiss his neck. And then when the Daily Show is over they’ll go into the bedroom and make love and fall asleep, a tangle of torsos and arms and legs and they’ll sleep there, face to face, and dream happy dreams. And I’ll be stuck here with only my beer to keep me company. I was getting sick just thinking about it.

“So, uh, I’ve got to go take a shower,” I said. “I haven’t showered yet today. I’m sure I stink. So, you should probably go.”
“Are you sure? I could stay and we could talk about this. I want to help you.”
“No, you should probably just go. I need a shower.”
“Maybe you could shower and we could go grab some dinner.”
“That’s OK. I’m not really hungry. I’ll probably drink my dinner tonight.” I half-laughed when I said this, and looked at her. She wasn’t even smiling. Not in a joking mood, I guess; not that I was joking, and she knew it.
“OK, look, whatever. But you’re coming to work tomorrow, and that’s final. I’ll call you in the morning, and if you’re not there by 9:15 I’m coming here looking for you. You know I’ll do it.”

She stood up, then hesitated. She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. I didn’t look up. She sighed and walked slowly out the door, as if she were expecting me call her back into the room at any moment.
“And please don’t drink anymore tonight. Really, I think you’re an alcoholic,” she said, the sound fading as her figure disappeared around the corner.

“Looks like it’s you and me alone again, Bud,” I said to my beer.

I ate a bagel for sustenance, set the coffeemaker, and drained the 12-pack that sat in the fridge. I should call Jimmy tomorrow, see how he’s doing. Maybe he’d like to go out to the bar some night. If not, I can’t really blame him. I collapsed into bed without bothering to undress and cried myself to sleep, holding a pillow in my arms, wishing it were Molly. I never did bother to shower.

Pushing Through the Haze pt. I

2006-03-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

When I woke up in the morning, my mouth tasted like a sewer. Scattered about the room were items acquired at some point during the night: a cowboy hat, traffic cone, an empty pack of cigarettes. I regarded these things for a moment, but couldn’t place them in the fog of the night before. I stumbled to the bathroom and gargled with mouthwash. In the kitchen the coffee pot was full, the ‘on’ light glowing. Thankfully, I had programmed it before going out. I rinsed out a mug and, too hung over for civilities, dried it with my shirt. I put off taking a shower until my hangover went away.

What happened last night? I remembered a few things, the early preparations: shower, getting dressed. I remembered getting to Tony’s house. We had a couple of beers there while we waited for Matt. We listened to Fela Kuti and played golf on Playstation 2. We met Lisa at the bar; what time was that? 9:30, ten o’clock? I remember some rounds of shots, an Irish car bomb, maybe two, some Jager. I vaguely recalled some shots of tequila. How many, I don’t know.

I think maybe I danced with some girl. I don’t remember if she was pretty or not, but I didn’t wake up to find anyone in my bed, so I guess it doesn’t matter. I remember, wait; I think I was drinking by myself for a while. Why was I doing that? I was sitting at the bar by myself. Where were Tony and Matt and Lisa? Had Christie shown up? She must have. She must have been there and I was the fifth wheel. I must have been drunk and depressed and went to sit at the bar by myself. Why didn’t they stop me? They know how I get. They should’ve stopped me. It’s like they get together, the four of them, or even just one couple at a time, Tony and Lisa or Matt and Christie, and they just start ignoring me, like I’m invisible or something. That must be why I got so drunk.

It’s been a while since Molly left me. Six months, to be exact; six months since she packed up her stuff in a Uhaul trailer, hooked up to the bumper of her shitty little Honda, and drove off. I guess I saw it coming, but the foresight doesn’t stop the hurt.

Tony called sometime around two. I didn’t want to pick it up, but after about the fifth ring it started pissing me off, so I picked it up just to stop the ringing.

“Hello?”
“Hey, man. How’re you feeling? You, uh, you were kind of a mess last night.”
I just groaned in answer, kind of an “uunnh” sound.
“What?”
“I said, ‘uunnh.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I dunno. Whatever you want it to mean.”
“You OK?”
“Aside from the jackhammer in my head, the puke stains in my toilet and a large bruise on my arm from god knows what, I’m just peachy.”
“Jesus, man. Why do you do that to yourself? I mean, you got up and said you were going to the bathroom and never came back. When we went to look for you, you were sitting at the bar. You had a line of empty shot glasses in front of you. When we asked what you were doing, you yelled something unintelligible, then ran out the door. You almost knocked over the freaking bouncer.”

I didn’t want to talk anymore. So I hung up the phone as he started to say something else. That’s what they do. They treat you like shit and then call the next day and act like they care.

They were Molly’s friends to begin with. The only reason I still hang out with them, I didn’t have any other friends. When we started dating, she was my world. I ditched all my friends to hang out with her. They hated me for it. Take Jimmy, for instance. We were roommates all through college. I haven’t seen him for over two years. All because of Molly. I’d call him, but I don’t even think he’d pick up the phone.

The Lesson in Characterization

2006-03-03T22:56:00.000-08:00

In Bambara’s “The Lesson,” character is established right away. The three main characters, the narrator, Sugar, and Miss Moore are shown with their basic tendencies in about twenty-five words: “Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup.” Bambara is able to set up the entire story in that one line by establishing the older, wiser Miss Moore and the youthful overconfidence of Sylvia, the narrator.

That’s not to say, however, that Bambara does a perfect job of characterization. It is impossible to tell the sex of the narrator until halfway through the second page because she is neither described nor identified by name. This causes a bit of confusion when the reader gets to the line: “and besides we might meet some cute boys.”

Aside from this gender confusion, that opening line suffices to sum up the characters for the entire story. Essentially, Miss Moore wants to show the neighborhood children an expensive toy store so they can see how rich people (read: white people) spend their money. Miss Moore is college educated. She feels it is her duty to facilitate the education of the children. Sylvia on the other hand, while seemingly intelligent, does not want to deal with any of this, because it infringes on her fun time. In fact, she gets angry at Miss Moore precisely because the message hits home perfectly. She sees the way people spend money and it disgusts her ($1,000 for a toy sailboat?). Since Miss Moore is “old and stupid,” it angers Sylvia just as much that Miss Moore has taught her something.

All of this is alluded to in just that one little opening sentence. Another good line is: “Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block with no first name.” This gives another example of how proper Miss Moore is, while showing Sylvia’s disdain for the fact. But that opening line is the crucial one. And it is well written, too. In fact, it introduces setting too. With one word, block, we know it is the city. With the mention of nappy hair, we know it is a black neighborhood. One sentence, one story. Good work, Toni Cade Bambara.

The Storyteller

2006-03-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

I am the storyteller. I can make you think and feel whatever I want. A few well placed verbs and nouns and adjectives and you are mine. You see only what I want you to see. I play with you like a puppet master, I dangle you from strings. I pull on one and you see happiness; another, and you are sad.

A raised eyebrow, a sinister smile, a harsh word; you no longer like this character, and only because I told you not to like him. You don’t know him, only I do.
I write white, fluffy clouds onto a bright blue sky. I write a warm sun and it makes you happy. You’ve seen these clouds and this sky and this same sun many times before. You know its happiness. But you don’t see it unless I want you to. I could make you sad just as quickly by turning those white clouds to gray and covering sky and sun with these dark clouds. Now you see sadness.

I show you a dog playing with children. The children run and laugh. Or I show you a snarling dog, teeth bared. I show you a cat lounging in a window, bathed in sunlight. Moments later, that same cat could be hissing at you with its back arched. I know how these things make you feel and I manipulate you.

I use words to sculpt your feelings. You are putty in my hands. I mold your thoughts. And you, you believe everything I tell you. You have no choice.

A Childhood Memory

2006-02-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, northwest of the city about a half hour in Bucks County; you can see it in M. Night Shyamalan’s movies: Signs, The Village. The beautiful farmland is more north of where I lived, though. There used to be farmland near my house, but it was eaten up by developers building more gas stations and supermarkets and housing developments.

We moved to Chalfont when I was four. The neighborhood was big. It was three main roads that converged back on each other to form a semblance of blocks, the occasional cul-de-sac branching off the main roads. My house sat more or less in the middle of the neighborhood where two of the blocks became one. One road went up a hill, where it curved to the left and leveled off. It came back around, going back down ever so slightly, so that without realizing it you’d be back at the bottom of the hill, like Escher’s waterfall. The other street led down to a cul-de-sac.

If you walked down that street, straight down in a sort of continuation of the road, you came past a row of tall white pines down to a tiny park with a picnic table and a couple of those grills you see at parks that are anchored into the ground and are always dirty and look like if you ate off of them, you’d get sick. A creek weaved slowly and silently past. There were large trees and, on a sunny day, their shadows made patterns on the water.

We used to walk the creek in the summer as a way to cool off. It was hardly ever very deep, so we’d wear ratty shoes and go exploring. You could start at the park in the neighborhood and walk until you reached the park in downtown Chalfont, behind the police station, but we hardly ever went that far. Usually, we’d look for a place where it was deep enough that we could swim, though we knew there was no such place.

Once, we were walking the creek and found some older kids hunting carp. I guess I could call it fishing, except they were using a bow and arrow. The creek was rarely more than two feet deep at the most, but somehow some really big fish lived in there. Some of the carp were like a foot and a half long. So these kids were stomping and splashing and moving the big rocks that the fish hid under, trying to scare them out so they could shoot them with an arrow. The arrows were easy to find when they missed because of the shallow water.

I remember they actually shot one or two, and these big fish were floating there in the water, their pale yellow scales tinged with the red blood oozing slowly from the small wounds where the arrows hit them. The kids never said what they were planning to do with the fish. Can you eat carp? I don’t think I’d ever eat anything out of that creek. Not that it was a dirty creek; I just don’t trust anything I’ve urinated in more than a few times. Would I drink toilet water?

Another time, I speared a koi in the creek right by the park. I had found some sort of gardening tool in the creek; it was short, maybe two, three feet long with a metal tipped that forked slightly like a snake’s tongue. We were fishing, and we saw this fish, this beautiful orange thing like a giant goldfish swimming around and we tried to catch it but it wouldn’t bite. Then I saw this piece of wood peeking a bit out of the muck in the bottom of the creek and I pulled on it and this gardening snake’s tongue popped out. So we started trying to spear the fish, splashing around and chasing after it as it darted under rocks and ducked into the branches of the willow that skirted the creek.

There we were, jumping around and yelling and chasing this fish, just missing each time as the water altered the trajectory of our gardening spear ever so slightly. Finally, after getting so close a bunch of times, I hit it. Or, I thought I did. The spear didn’t go through the fish like I thought it would. But its movements slowed, and it stopped hiding and kind of fluttered around for a minute and I picked it up and it was slimy in my hands and I carried it over to the picnic table and laid it there on the table. It was dead now, with its gardening spear wound and no oxygen; really, the wrong kind of oxygen, being breathed through the wrong respiratory system. I had a pocket knife, a tiny little knife on a key chain that also held my little Phillies baseball player key chain. And I figured, why not, so I started to cut the fish with my knife. It felt weird when it broke through the scales, like cutting through the hard crust on a loaf of bread, only the insides of the bread were fleshy. I cut a square, like a window to the inside of the fish.

What were we looking for? Did we expect to find fish like my mom puts on the dinner table, filleted and gutted and cleaned, cooked nicely all the way through? Maybe we were hoping to find something more, some sort of evidence of a fishy soul that would rise up in front of us, and wings and a halo would appear seemingly from nowhere, but we would know that they came from heaven and the fish soul would float away playing a soft, sweet, fish melody on his gold fish harp.

The fish had no soul. All it had were organs, and worms in its stomach but really the worms were intestines. The dark, bile color of the intestines contrasted sharply against the bright orange of the scales and made me feel sick and sad at the same time but I didn’t know why. I looked at my knife and there was blood on it and I wiped it off on the table, trading the blood for bits of the rotting lumber that flaked off and stuck to the blade. I wiped it once more on my shorts, folded it up and put it in my pocket. Then we gathered up our fishing rods, our shoes, and walked home.

Best Screenplay vs. Best Picture

2006-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

Yglesias opened the debate, then Pandagon picked it up.

This is good.

Historically, the better films, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that get handed the best original screenplay Oscar, not the best picture.

Case in point: John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" won best picture in 1941.
The picture that got the best original screenplay Oscar was "Citizen Kane," which is now regarded, at least by the AFI, as America's greatest movie.

Other films on that list that won best original screenplay: "Annie Hall," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "The Apartment," "Pulp Fiction," "Fargo," "On the Waterfront," "Sunset Boulevard," and quite a few others.

It should be noted that quite a few others on that list won the best adapted screenplay ("The Best Years of our Lives," "Casablanca," etc).

As for best picture winners on the AFI list: "All Quiet on the Western Front," "It Happened One Night," "Gone with the Wind," "Casablanca," "The Best Years of Our Lives," and on from there.

With maybe one or two exceptions, the films that won best picture and appear on the AFI list won either best original screenplay or best adapted screenplay.

Setting Matters

2006-02-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

Setting plays an important part in storytelling in that the setting of a story is often as a subtle literary device. Instead of blatantly saying that the characters “live in squalor,” you describe their house with “air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers.” To describe setting is to use the writing mantra “show don’t tell.”

The Joyce story “Araby” is interesting because it provides a clear mental picture of the neighborhood, the kids playing in the street, the train, the bazaar. You can see the boy’s disappointment in Joyce’s description of the near empty bazaar, his despair echoed by the darkness. I find this interesting because this same clear description is missing from Joyce’s Ulysses. The biggest problem I’ve found in trying to read Ulysses is that I cannot for the life of me get a mental picture of what is taking place. It all seems disjointed; what I see in my head doesn’t make any sense. The point is that setting allows the reader to follow the story by giving that backdrop, so the reader can see the story in his mind.

“Araby” shows lower class Dublin; or at least makes me recall my vision of Ireland: rows of houses with thatched roofs on a dirty cobblestone street and tiny, dark pubs full of Guinness swilling men who sing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and “Oh, Danny Boy” before stumbling home to their overworked wives and hungry kids. Interestingly, I am half Irish, so this is actually a slightly romantic vision to me (except for the overworked wife and hungry kids part).

I’ve gone off on a tangent, but an important one. This tangent was evoked by the setting of “Araby” and Joyce’s descriptions. I could do the same thing with the bazaar, and talk about how it reminds me of the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ, especially the little amusement park at the north end.

Mr. Wind Up Bird

2006-01-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

I finished Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last night. But I'm not feeling all that well right now, and thinking and looking at the screen hurts my head. So I'll write about it later. I'll say this: I liked it a lot. I found it hard to put down.

I'm also working slowly through A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf.

I borrowed Wind-Up Bird from Luke, while the Derrida reader was thoughtfully given to me as a Christmas present by the same. Thanks, Luke.

Backwards

2005-12-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

We’d been living backwards for years, we just never realized it. All along we thought we were moving forward in the steady flow of time, living each new day as just that, a new day; when in reality, we had seen this day, every day before. Nothing was new and each passing day was a false hope of a new beginning of forward progress.

A person is supposed to age because he lives forward, time takes its toll as one grows older until eventually he dies. But we, living backwards, were aging not because of the progression of time, but because of the strain of having seen all of this before. How could we not have seen it? It was so obvious, right in front of our faces the entire time, but we were too preoccupied with pretending to live like the rest of the world, trying to fit in with those living in “real” time. We were blinded by our own sight, our own knowledge of what was and will be.

Entropy is the natural progression of all things towards decay. An object at its inception is at the height of its life span. From there, things only worsen, then fall apart, until nothing is left but a memory, a shadow of what formerly existed; eventually, there is not even that. We knew this, because we had seen it, seen it backward and forward.

We watched things created and things fall apart, knowing all along that one only led to the other, knowing that we were powerless to stop it. And this is what aged us; this was the strain of living backwards. What can you do when you know everything falls apart in the end? So you step back and watch as nature takes its course and life crumbles, just crumbles until nothing is left but the tattered remains of what once was.

The truth about the true nature of time came gradually to me. I keep telling myself that things would be different had I realized it earlier, but, no, they wouldn’t be. Things happen the way they happen over and over again, never changing, always the same. Things always fall apart in the end. I am telling you this story because that is how things are. I have always written this story and I always will write this story and eventually, it will disappear. It will disappear as surely as I am creating it right now. It will fade from consciousness, fade from memory and disappear forever.

But not completely forever, because it will live on in this moment forever and I will see it and others like me, those living backwards, will always see it because this is how it happened, this is how all things happen. All things happen in a moment and then are gone, except for in that moment. That moment lives on, unchanged. It is only in the next moment that things are different. It is the great folly of the human psyche to think that these two moments are continuous, that they follow one another on the same plane. In truth, each moment stretches endlessly on its own plane. Human perception cannot see this though, as it follows its own different plane perpendicular to the planes of time, the planes of each moment. But we see it, the backwards people; we see each moment for itself and we see that they go on unchanged, going on forever replaying over and over again for all of eternity.

Slapshot

2005-12-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

I played roller hockey today. For the first time in probably seven or eight years. It was the most fun I've had in... probably seven or eight years. I know what you're thinking: either I'm a virgin or I've hit a long dry spell, because there's no way roller hockey is better than sex. Well, it is. It was tonight. Imagine going without sex for seven years; how good would it feel to finally get laid again? That's what it felt like.

It took me a few minutes to get used to the skates again. But it was, as the saying goes, like riding a bike. You never really forget how to do it. Soon I was skating backwards, in figure-eights, whatever. It all came back. Like I should have been born with wheels attached to my feet.

My shot didn't come back quite so easily, having been used the last eight years for lacrosse. It's a similar motion, but not quite the same. It worked well enough, though. I could still carry the puck (ball, really) just like I could before, although I lost it a little when I looked up from it.

Oh! Joy. Pure, unadulterated joy. I missed you, hockey. You were such a huge part of my life, but I lost you. It wasn't all my fault. We moved from the suburbs of Philadelphia to rural Maryland. Hockey isn't as big there for some reason. Neighborhood games that happened daily in Chalfont were non-existent in Maryland.

School ended, ride the bus home. Drop your school bag, run upstairs and change. Grab the phone. "Are we playing? Good." Garage, get skates on, grab stick and gloves. Do we need the net? OK. Up the street, pick teams. Who's goalie? start playing. Faceoff. pass. Gliding towards the net, pass. pass. Shot. Score! Clear the puck out, no faceoffs after goals. Slows the game too much. Goals get traded, back and forth. Car! Move the nets, let it pass.

We play for as long as we can. Usually until it's dark. Because we can, because there is nothing more important. These games were everything. They were all we looked forward to all day. Homework came second to hockey. Do it after the game. There's only so much daylight, not nearly enough time to play. Fights happened. They're part of the game. No hard feelings the next day. This is how it was.

We tried to play when we got to Maryland, but one-on-one, two-on-two games just aren't the same. The energy, the passion wasn't there. No one else in the neighborhood wants to play. Don't they understand? Don't they know what these games are, what hockey is?

And so the years passed hockey-less. Sure, we watched on TV. But the Flyers don't come on DC TV all that often. We went to some games, when the Flyers played the Capitals. They were amazing. The building covered in more orange than blue. Eventually, these trips stopped too.

And I missed it, all of it. But it disappeared, the time filled by other activities. Until tonight. It felt so good to be on skates again. Better than I remember, actually. So from now on, every Thursday at 7 I'll be playing roller hockey.

I'm on a Plane, I Can't Complain

2005-11-21T01:17:00.000-08:00

I am on a plane, high above the eastern seaboard. We are flying, a massive, heavy piece of modern machinery held aloft on air particles and principles of physics. Bernoulli’s principle, Lift vs. drag, velocity, acceleration. Principles that, if debunked or disbelieved even for a fraction of a second could send us hurtling back to earth at frightening speeds. Gravity is physics: 9.8 meters per second squared. We are defying gravity. Somehow, we found a way to place large metal devices in the air, not supported by wires from above nor bolstered from below. Air particles, tiny too tiny to see, hold us in the air; we float on them. We float in the air. We are floating.

The man in the airport bar couldn’t understand why he couldn’t smoke in the airport or on the plane.
“some psychopath can sit here for hours drinking cranberry and vodkas and vodka and cranberries, and a cop, I’m a cop, can’t even have a cigarette. I don’t know what’s more frightening: a fundamentalist terrorist or a man who hasn’t had a cigarette in five hours.”

I smile and nod in assent. He has a cop’s moustache, with the ends going down to where a goatee should be. Maybe it’s a fireman’s moustache. Does it matter? Is it required that, on becoming a fireman or police officer, you grow a moustache? Some people think it’s a Fu Manchu, but a Fu Manchu is just a normal moustache with the ends grown out real long.
“The security I don’t mind, though,” he says to me, “the way I see it, the more security the better. They didn’t have to take my lighter, though. What could I do with a lighter? Everything is flame retardant these days anyway. Fire resistant carpet, fire resistant seats, fire resistant shoes, fire resistant underwear.”

I wonder if his moustache is fire resistant. If his plane crashes and burns, could his widowed wife and bereaved children identify his remains from his un-singed moustache?

The guy to my left is sitting with his girlfriend. They have been waiting since 3:00 for a flight pushed back to 7:30. When I ordered my Yuengling, he corrected me. “It’s Lager,” he said. Most of the now empty keg of “Lager” is in their stomachs, making its way to their bladders, the alcohol coursing through their veins.
“You’ll have fun in Orlando; great place.”
This sentence is slightly slurred, evidence of his three and a half hours sitting in an airport bar.

Gina is the bartender, she should have been an actress. She hams it up, chewing the scenery for her inebriated audience. She tells a joke overdramatically. It’s a dirty joke and supremely unfunny. Everyone laughs, either from too much booze or out of sheer manners. Dumb blonde jokes follow from the bar’s inhabitants. A young guy, the most recent arrival to our airport bar circus, tells a dirty joke about a cowboy and an Indian. It is too complicated and its nuances are lost in this bar. No one laughs.

“While my mother waters plants, my father loads his gun. He says death will give us back to god, just like the setting sun is returned to the lonesome ocean. And they crashed into the deep blue sea.”

I smile through all of this, pay for my beer and leave. I am on the plane, high above Charlotte or Savannah, or maybe the Atlantic Ocean; I can’t tell because the clouds are below the plane. Or the plane is above the clouds. We are balancing precariously on particles of oxygen and nitrogen and other assorted members of the periodic table.
I want to sleep in the clouds. Someone tore open a million pillows and scattered their contents across the sky, building mountains and valleys that shine in their whiteness. The sun sets behind them, the white clouds framed above by flaming oranges and yellows.

Clouds are evaporated water bound together with dust particles in the air. They grow heavy with the water and make rain. The yellows and oranges of the sunset are caused by greenhouse gases and other toxins in the atmosphere. Pretty sunsets are the product of the Industrial Revolution. Increased airport security is the product of Islamic fundamentalists flying jumbo jets into the World Trade Towers.

What does a seatbelt do in a crashing airplane? Can a thin nylon belt prevent injury in a crash sustained at thousands of feet per minute? Lights glow dimly along the edge of the overhead baggage compartments, soft light creating an ambience of tranquility. It is the same glow as on a coach bus that drives along the ground, much more obedient of the laws of physics. How would those lights act in a violent freefall? Would they give any indication of our impending doom? No. “Everything’s fine,” they would say. They would not flash or grow angry and red. Death is nothing to them. They are merely illuminable gases floating in glass tubing. We are bodies trapped in metal tubing, floating on gases in the atmosphere. Lights on the ground make patterns that signify nothing.

Rebirth

2005-11-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

All that crying about The Decline was apparently for naught (or was it?). The Decline is back in most of its glory, having lost all of our archives. But who needs archives? Out with the old, in with the new.

Eulogy

2005-11-10T16:13:00.000-08:00

The Decline is dead. Long live The Soft Bulletin. This is perhaps a good thing. The Decline was not my baby. I was the uncle who occasionally stepped in to help provide care. I was not the general, but merely a foot soldier.
While I enjoyed posting on The Decline, I am OK with its burial.
Aenesidemus in his final post on The Decline wrote this:

"Then this blog, suffused with this
experience, is not about declinism, unless it is about The Decline of Individual Reason. It is only a critique of individual reason insofar as it questions the possibility of a Common Sense. It questions the possibility of Common Sense when it notes the vassalage of Language to banality. It notes the vassalage of Language to banality when it observes the imperial logic of Culture. The imperial logic of Culture is such because it colonizes the individual by analogy and metaphor rendering any emancipation unthinkable. But most importantly, the extension of culture critique to individual reason is enacted here by way of a profound skepticism regarding our own judgments. If Reason is in decline, this means nothing other than my reasons cannot be trusted."

This was The Decline.

Now, The Soft Bulletin rises up not to take the place of The Decline, but to fill the void that the loss of The Decline created in my life. I cannot fill the shoes of The Decline. The Soft Bulletin, instead, will be a place for me to write things that had no place on The Decline. It is not pretentious, I am making no attempts at satire or humor. I am not making a political statement. I am merely putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and posting my thoughts, random and scatterbrained as they are, where someone might chance upon them.

The Soft Bulletin is nothing more than a documentation of me. What I write might have no relevance to anyone else. But I'm not writing for them, I'm writing for me. I am writing to write. If I don't post these things, they sit on my hard drive, tucked in a folder marked "miscellaneous." Perhaps now that my words become a part of the blogosphere, the world wide web, someone will find them. Will that person care? Maybe. Will they stop reading after a few sentences? It's a possibility. I am not concerned. Life goes on.
I am writing to write, I am writing because I need to. That is all, nothing more. The Soft Bulletin.

Writing, not I

2005-11-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

This was originally posted on The Decline, which is no more. I shall miss thee, Decline.

What is it about writing that scares me? The fear of failing? No, that is a different fear altogether, one not entirely present here. It seems to be a feeling of inadequacy, maybe I can’t write. I don’t have anything to say. I could write down my thoughts but they are fleeting, they move to fast; I would not have time to get them down, nor would they probably make any sense. Could I slow my thoughts to the speed of my writing and would it make any difference? “To reach a kind of writing where only writing writes.” Beautiful and enigmatic. How does one get there? Is it a subconscious disconnect from what I put down on paper? Or does it mean that I am not even worthy of writing? Is writing bigger than I am, or can I conquer it, make it my own?

I sometimes fight the words. When I lay down, the words come in torrents. I lay awake at night thinking these words. I lay in my bed thinking thoughts and stories. To put them to paper would be ridiculous. Too many words not saying anything. So I sleep and leave the words to their own devices. Did these words want to be written? Sometimes I wonder.

Besides, words need themes and connections and continuity. Words, language, need a purpose.Sometimes the words fight me. They fight me. They buck me when I try to put them in a logical order. I put the words in a sequence to tell a story, but they don't listen. The words follow their own laws which I did not prescribe. Who told the words to do these things? They never listen to me. Who are you, words? What are you, language? You behave for Tolstoy and DeLillo and Rushdie and Hemingway.

Yet, for me, you fight, you do your own thing. You form thoughts in my head at inopportune times when pen and paper are far away, as if you never wished to be written down. Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth at, what, 20? Have I already past the age where I can be anything at all? What can I do anyway except critique what others have done? What is left to write? Hope it don't rain all day...