Greenwich Village

When I got sick of my folks we got in Dan's car and drove all over the place. Dan had this real bad acne. Sometimes he put vaseline on it so the zits would ripen up, and then he'd squeeze them. He was a real good guy.

We drove all the way up to Ohio once. We had a girl with us and she wanted to see the water that went out to the sky. I'm sick of the fuckin' quarry. She had a cigarette that she kept bringing to her mouth between her thumb and her forefinger. She wore a striped shirt, and I could see her nipples rippling in the irregular cotton like the jiggling navels of water balloons. She was beautiful. She made me want to eat glass and rip baby ducks apart. We were taking some pills that Dan had stolen from his mother. When we passed the square, he laughed maniacally and wouldn't turn, even when the girl yanked on his collar and yipped loud with her mouth pressed up to his hair. We drove through the night and when we reached the lakes she was asleep, curled up like a dog on the carpet behind the passenger side with her head propped on the bucket seat. Her hair was splayed out like a fan. I remember that dyed-blond color. It had a brass to it that shone like copper in the dawn. It was nice.

We hitchhiked to New York. We got into Greenwich Village and this head trucked up to us. C'mere. He gave us a joint and walked us through street after street. I had on my army jacket and my filthy denim johns. I'd patched them up. An archway rose before us, stark and tan, birdshit coming off it like icicles. We stepped through the stones into the jangling purse of a war rally. I had a little leather gris-gris bag around my neck with some money in it, and a gold watch I'd found on the ground. The head snapped it from my neck and leapt into the spitting banks of crowd with a stag grace at just the same moment that a tear gas bomb tinked the wall and hissed it breath against the stone just by my ear. The crowd drew from me like I've seen paint draw from salt. I remember the still faces of the hippies. They looked like a river right after a car gets in it.

Zeitoun

I have to admit, I'm totally jealous of Dave Eggers.

Which is why I bought Zeitoun.

I hoped I would hate it. Because seriously—what is Dave Eggers’ problem? Normal people start one world-changing nonprofit organization, publish one groundbreaking literary magazine, write one New York Times bestseller, and are, thenceforth, satisfied.

Not Dave Eggers, as he proves with Zeitoun. The mind behind A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 826 National, McSweeney’s, and a whole grip of other awesome literary miscellany, had written a novel that combined Hurricane Katrina, the Muslim American experience, really hip cover art, and the twee appeal of boating.

He was really beginning to annoy me.

So I bought Zeitoun, and I read it, hoping to be vindicated.

The first few chapters satisfied my desire for disappointment to the utmost. They were dry and wordy, distant and slow. “Ha!” I thought. “It’s bad!” I put it back on my bookshelf. A couple of weeks later, I started reading it again—to put myself to sleep.

But much to my chagrin, the book had a slow burn. Before I knew it, I was staying up until odd hours of the night, lured deeper and deeper into the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun—Syrian immigrant, New Orleans building contractor, and devout Muslim—who stays behind after Hurricane Katrina to paddle around his flooded, semi-post-apocalyptic city in a second-hand aluminum canoe. The journalistic chill in Dave Eggers' narrative adapts itself well to his stalwart, level-headed protagonist, who takes the reader into dangerous situations in a way that allows us to sight-see without getting too worried.

In fact, the book is a lot about sight-seeing: through the calm eyes of Zeitoun, we are allowed to be voyeurs into the tragedy of Katrina without feeling, well, tragic. His wife, Kathy, a Midwest Baptist who converted to Islam against her family's wishes, creates a comfortable window into scenes of the everyday discrimination faced by Muslim Americans. As Zeitoun stands on the steps of his house and momentarily admires the beauty of his living room filling up with water, we are allowed a truly, sinfully postmodern moment of thoughtless appreciation, like that guy in American Beauty who takes videos of dancing plastic bags. Even when Zeitoun gets threatened by a band of armed looters, all that we feel is a twinge of ethnographic interest for the young men in the baggy pants. It's like the rest of the postmodern world: you're high on Xanax, and the experience of life is never so tough that you feel you need to look away. 
 
Dave Eggers, you've foiled me again. I'm not entirely convinced of your greatness. I'm not about to join a fan club. But I'd recommend your book to a friend. 
 
And not to help with falling asleep.

Spaces

It was not, I tell you, until quite suddenly last night when I woke up that I noticed the spaces. The spaces is what I have called them. But how could I describe them? They are not really there. When my mind tries to find their beginnings it seizes a row of disjointed images as it always has about anything consequential. I cannot alight on one.

I suppose it began one day when I was reading a report Su Pin had sent me. My mind was wandering a little, as it always does, but I had my coffee and all was fine. John Wayne on the cup spoke with his sad sympathetic face about all a man has to do. I was a man, and I was certainly all right. Only when I looked at the small black letters of Su Pin's report I found that my eyes slipped from them as a greased spoon from a metal rack. I simply could not take meaning from them. No, that was not quite it—that makes it sound as though I could not read. My faculties were not diminished. As I said, I was quite normal. But the white of the spaces held me, snapping my eyes to them with the same significance as a pale naked body, irresistible. I sat this way for an hour or more with no one noticing that I was acting so oddly, my coffee cooling. 

Another instance that I remember was an obsession with girl's hair. The first was a rather frail brunette. Her hair was in a whorl above her head, pinned down in a graceful and unintentional sort of round. The movement of this hair was so entrancing to me that I quietly took a small picture of her with my phone from across the cafe where I sat, and when I went back to work I told C.J. I was going on a coffee break and spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom sitting innocently on the toilet and looking at it. This entrancement continued with another girl I spied on a dating service who had a picture in which she sprawled on a bed. Her face was obscured and her hair lay in a majestic fall holding the light like a glass vase in a painting. At this fall of light I stared for many hours. I knew that if anyone were to find her picture on my computer they would think that I had used this picture as pornography, which was embarassing to me. I wondered if I was developing a fetish, if I would soon request that whores lie obscured on a bed and let me look at their hair, blonde, brown, black and red, so much more interesting to me than their body. Such a thing, although unnatural, was still as natural as a man wanting to look at a woman. But the fixation with the hair passed, and I was left, again, with the untethered pauses disconnected from an image.

I am an engineer. I have always been an engineer, by trade and by inclination. I built tree houses when I was a boy in the woods behind my house and spent many hours creating with my mouth the kinds of noises that an airborne war would make were I to be in the middle of it, a defender in a lone and fallowed outpost, and many hours laying in the tops of the scaffolding that I had wedged into the arms of the trees and staring up at their branches waving on the grey sky. I think the spaces have been with me always.

But it was not until this morning, early this morning which most people would call the middle of the night, that they appeared to be inside of me. And now I don't know what I can any longer do. And now I don't know how I can speak, or be, or look out of these eyes.

Why Forever 21 Is More Human Than Upright Walking--My Thesis of Life, Backed By Science

The preview for Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams has had me thinking a lot about Lascaux.

Humans have been anatomically modern--i.e., normal-looking--for 200,000 years. That is a reeeeaalllly long time.

5,000 years ago, the oldest known pyramids were just a twinkle in some pharaoh's eye. People didn't even know how to domesticate plants until 10,000 years ago. 200,000 years is enough time for life as we know it to come and go twenty times over.

For some reason, humans existed for nearly their whole evolutionary lifespan as anatomically modern without being what we call behaviorally modern. Until around 40,000 years ago, there was no drawing, there was no painting. There was no jewelry. There were no tiny antelopes carved into the handles of hunting tools. There was no material representation of imaginary things. As far as we can tell, there was no form of abstract thought whatsoever.

The latest theory about why humans started doing stuff like having funerals, making elaborate necklaces, and getting tattoos has a lot to do with what happened when a group of H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, and encountered the H. neanderthalensis populations who had already been there for a hella long time. Science had no clue until recently what these two populations did when they met--did they fight each other, did they eat each other, what?

Now, it's genetically evident that they made babies together (if you're not African, you're part Neanderthal--sorry, white supremacists!), and archaeologically evident that they engaged in a whole lot of trade together, too. Neanderthal remains start showing up BEDECKED with H. sapiens-style gewgaws. Both populations' material technology--their stuff--starts to get way more complex, at a way more rapid pace. There's even evidence that this is when spoken language starts to really blow up. In other words, when these two populations encounter each other, they quickly become far more human.

It's here that we start to see places like Lascaux. Cave paintings. Symbolic expressions of human thoughts. A dog can't look at a bunch of lines on a flat surface and see a cow. A human can. A chimpanzee won't bury its mother facing east. A human will. Because of the continuously belittled human abilities of socialization and material attachment, humans became more human than they had been for 160,000 years.

Humans will glorify anatomical details which are not particularly exclusive to us, such as the thumb. But we will marginalize our human obsession with adornment and symbolic materials, even though the presence of these obsessions is actually how we define modern humans as different from humans who were merely anatomically modern.

My conclusion: Forever 21 is more human than upright walking.

Secondary conclusion: I'm going shopping.

The Mollusk

It was not until three years into her marriage that Rachel began to think of her husband as The Mollusk, to say fuck you quietly when she hung up the phone. He was a twat, a jerk, an imperturbable jackass. More than anything, she told herself, she hated the situation. She didn't hate him. This was her fault. His barely redeemable human flesh, his inadequacies, his paleness and stark exhaustion. There was something she was doing. She didn't seem to have an appetite for anything anymore. She was like a keeper of needs. Earlier, in her twenties, maybe, she had been pliable, more relenting. Now she was a portrait-eater, a harpy. She had become some cold Attila. He was not the sealed grave. She was the hunk of bone.

And yet, she wondered, what was it that called her to him, that made her take comfort in him? He was like a magic box that held her former life. When she looked at him, she became infuriated at the lostnesses that had all gotten into him somehow, and then been locked away. She wanted to break him, but she knew that this was illogical. She improved her diet and hoped that it would go away. Fuck you, she said into the air above the dining table, after she had thrown the phone not so hard as she had wanted. Fuck you, fuck you, you closed-lip hunk of junk.

Do You Know the Church Hymn?

There was a little brown pony once, but I didn't know what to name it. That was one of the things that Mother had bought us before she died. The pony was not really a pony, of course, but a full-sized gelding boy horse, but we got him when he was a colt and tussled up by birth so that the nap of his hair was funny--too much on the sides, furred on the top. He was so frail.

Her handkerchief would flutter out the window on a breeze and at the end of it, her hand, looking like to flutter as well. And she would cry: Howard! You are a loved, loved boy! And my legs were like to young trees rooting in the dirt.

I remember when she died there was a little, little teacup balanced on her chest, yellow, with beads of bright gold paint, so little that you wondered if you'd better move it, in case she breathed and then it toppled. But it didn't. She looked at me with her black head there on that pillow and that teacup balanced on her chest atop the crinny gown which was so thin. She closed her eyes and she knotted her hands below the teacup, and she said My son, do you know the church hymn? And she began to hum it, me watching that cup that brittly resting on her sternum like a conch. And I thought to fill it with tea, for it was so still.

How Dark the Sky

Maude slapped the dough with the flat of her palm, picked up a bit more flour, dusted the air, grasped the fleshy greyness and dropped it onto the counter. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked out the kitchen window. Why I have to do everything myself, I do not know, she said under her breath as if the house had not been empty of men since morning. It was four o'clock now. Four o'clock and she was only kneading the bread. Four o'clock, and no tidy motor buzzing cutting the lawn with her husband sitting atop of it like any God-fearing country man. How was she going to cook the dinner? Maude dusted off her hands, shaking her head and pulling at her eyebrows. She gave the dough a tidy slap and walked across the kitchen, drawing off her apron to hang on the wood peg by the door. She grasped the chipped banister and walked up her hallway stairs slapping her palms against each other. Maude was not some nagging cow, and if her husband brought her home a bundle of field mint, as he always did when he had been shirking, well, he could just set it on the porch and have it with his dinner. She raised the wooden sash.

Henryyyyy, she shouted. Her voice pealed over the shushing yellow wheat fields. Henryyyyy. Wiiiiilt! With her head out in the sky she could feel the gathering evening on the sides of her neck and the backs of her hands. The air felt wet, and the flat gold land seemed to cut the distance into two shifting bolts of cloth, bright yellow and shining, murkish grey. A bullfrog chirruped down at the creek, under the stand of crack willows and osiers, and then another bullfrog, and then all of the bullfrogs chimed roundly together. Maude kept her head out of the window, feeling the plangent weight and moisture like palms on her cheeks. Heyy-en! The bullfrogs clangored. She picked her palms up off the sill and looked at them. They were caked with chips of white paint. 

 

Maude pulled her head in the window and looked at her bedroom. She had made the bed, and she had dusted and straightened all of the picture frames that day before she went to go get the new auracana's eggs from the coop. The doily made for her by her mother was resting on the back of the yellow chair that she sat in when she had some time to read. Her husband's fancy boots were propped up on the hope chest, where she had set them. He would be wearing his gaiters today, and his overalls. His flannel would be red. Or was it the blue one? She couldn't recall. I can't recall, she said, although I dressed the man, and she faced again to the window.

Maude leaned with her arms preceding her over the sill, slapping off the flecks of paint. They stuck to her skin stubbornly. With her head and shoulders pressing toward the sky, Maude felt like she was leaning into the bottom of a lake. The air hung like a mud veil over the fields, and though she strained her eyes for a grain of color that would mean a tractor or a hired boy from town, she could see nothing. She brought her head back into the room, then turned her body away from the window without shifting her gaze. She pulled her hands in from the thick air and put them in her pockets. Then she turned her head and strode back into the hall.

She reached up with both hands to the china bead on the end of the string to the attic stair, and pulled it. The stair unfolded like an accordion, and she used one hand to pick up the hem of her skirt and the other to steady herself on the upper steps as she climbed. The steps groaned with her weight, the bottom board striking the wood of the hallway floor with a clud. Maude hunched through the four-foot door that her father had put into the attic wall in case of floods and stepped onto the rooftop.

Her house looked small from here, the guttered borders of the roof not seeming to stretch more than ten feet in any direction. The wheat fields spread all around, magnificently yellow, and the sky lowered beyond, surrounding and dim. Which wall was her bedroom window? She craned her neck over the gutters and could not place herself among the distant spaces of her home. The ringing of the bullfrogs gained in pitch and the rushing of the crack willows joined that of the crops under a wind that lifted Maude's skirt and made her bend to press it to her knees. The shingles of the roof radiated heat that warmed her legs. In the distance, she saw the sheets of yellow and grey blur as the sky fell to water and the water fell to the field. It is about to rain and I am on the damn rooftop looking for you, Henry, she said. 

 

She turned back to the roof door and a red speck in the distance caught her eye, moving towards the house under the blackness of the falling sky. The bead of color gained in size and she stepped unsteadily over the shingles, straining to see it more clearly. It had a white head, and hands, and then it was her son, bounding over the wheat field where he was never supposed to go, wearing her husband's red flannel and his own green rubber galoshes. Ma! he shouted as he ran. Ma! Ma! Ma! The ringing of the bullfrogs drowned his voice. 

Wilt! Maude shouted. You stop running!, but he kept bounding through the high sheaves, a path of broken stalks flattening behind him like a road. She saw his face now, strained, white, shining with sweat. His eyes jittered wildly, like the eyes of a colt that she had once seen whose mother had been shot for a lame leg right in front of him, the farmer an ignorant man who had only dealt before with stupid cows. She put her hand to her heart and clutched the fabric there.  

Wilt! she cried again, and he heard her this time and stopped dead at the border of the field and the green lawn and looked up at her, his white chest heaving and slick under her husband's shirt, his face stricken and blank, and the rain reaching the boundaries of the house hushed the bullfrogs and the noise of the trees as she fell to her knees at the edge of the roof.