the actual articulation of whatever

A public library is a little voyeuristic, a little romantic and intrinsically cinematic.

A personal library is different. Cleaning out an old house and discovering the book cases full of knick-knacks, old bottles and torn up books is something like reading an old note, a sincere will passing on who the owner was rather than what they owned. The note is vague to begin with and entire stretches of ink have been worn out by the air but important clues are still there. Each word underlined in a particularly worn hardcover and each little postcard used as a bookmark (“I’ll wait for you, my love” written above a tropical beach scene, skillfully painted in water colors by the author) is an hour or three spent wondering what it all meant.

And then the phone rings and you rush down two flights of creaky stairs, wondering the entire time how one person lived alone for so many years in this cavernous house. You miss the call but the answering machine records an old friend wanting to catch up, inviting the library’s owner to a small get-together. You pick up the phone and start dialing slowly, getting ready to inform the caller that Rose has died and does she know who the artist was who loved Rose, the one who was waiting for her on a beach in Florida? Why did Rose stay in New York City, alone for decades, in a cold decayed house that might have stood on the opposite end of existence?

Alexey-Titarenko via beautiful/decay

A friend of mine has a gut feeling that “the end times are near.” He has mentioned this to me before and, he says, now “the signs” are piling up. Without proselytizing, I tried to probe his beliefs (which I initially mistook for pessimism from a nostalgia-fetishist). My questioning him was an act of aimless exploration more than the opening of a debate. I’m not in the business of internet conversion, I’ll leave the crusaders in the YouTube comment area and Reddit to noble pursuits such as that.

As he cited evidence from scripture, it occurred to me that his conceit – and it is massively egotistical – was familiar and comfortable. His mixed belly ache about the imminent apocalypse (half fear-induced vomit, half heaven-anticipating butterflies) was here yesterday and will be here next week. He doesn’t know it but whenever anyone preaches that there will be no tomorrow, I smile, never having felt more sure that tomorrow will come and that it will not be too different from today.

Talking to people – religious or not – who think strongly that the world is going to end soon is a bizarre, totally fucking strange experience. It’s sometimes interesting but usually frustrating and not at all unlike talking to a snotty teenager. In the case that the world ends and a rapture goes right on and on, God will have a lot of snot fucking kids to deal with.

Alexey-Titarenko via beautiful/decay

True, language is an organic, untameable product of human culture, and all the style guides in the world can’t stop the lolcats from hazzing their cheezburgers if thousands of people want them to. But by the same token, subliterate Web chatterers are unlikely to overthrow standard English anytime soon. Curiously, people who cite the “organic” nature of language in decrying standardization never consider that standardization might itself be an organic process—that the relative stability of spelling and grammar conventions in the twentieth century as opposed to the eighteenth, the eighteenth as opposed to the sixteenth, etc., might have evolved communally and naturally and not through a conspiracy of grammar scolds.

abbeville

In light of the impending Democratic apocalypse of November 2010, I think it is high time that we discuss and put out in the open exactly how you ought to feel about the (D)im prospects of this midterm cycle.

Lesson 1: Learning is experience and 2008 is worth remembering. If you recall, it was the year in which the almost three-decade old conservative movement crashed into a wall made of money and sand. America, which had been moving steadily right since the election of a dashing old man to the White House in 1980, took a jarring leap leftward with the election of a young, sleek covert agent from lands abroad, bred deliberately with the bizarrely inefficient destruction of our nation in mind.

With Obama’s ascendancy, the coup de grâce, came the final fall of the Republican congress and then eventual arrival of a Democratic super-majority. The nation was poised for change – and not just the bumper-sticker sort but the tangible sort, like a hatched Bolshevik plot or something equally consequential.

Yes, we were told that 2008 was a watershed moment in our nation’s history and we reacted in kind. If you think back, you might still be able to hear various news anchors weaving their unimaginative story lines about the GOP being “put out to pasture”, the possible end of the Republican Party and the thousand-year rule of the Democrats. In short, the men and women of America’s televised services (our best and brightest) had an erection as openly exposed as the microphones which stood so tantalizingly close to their mouths. It was an easily exploitable storyline, perfect for simplification, hyperbole, yelling, flashy graphics and weird breaking news music to make the viewer uncomfortable but glued to the set.

A power shift in American politics, an episodic event, became blown up into a pre-rapture party which warranted utterly confusing sixteen person panels on CNN, smug circle jerks on MSNBC and a completely predictable case of masturbation-induced-amnesia on Fox News. In the end, it meant ratings.

Fast foward to 2010:

The GOP, marked for death by pundits just a year ago, is about as angry as a screaming zombie and almost as articulate. The Democrats, assigned near-permanent hegemony over the country around 12 months ago, are docile fools walking around with shaved heads so that the zombies might have a better look at the menu.

So, here’s my advice for the upcoming season: As November 2010 approaches, keep your eyes open for televised orgies in which a group of made up men and women get paid to conceive of and share the most bizarre and half-baked ideas ever to cross a lusty American mind. If you get lucky and come across this sort of stuff, listen up. Act on your wildest urges right then and there. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself fucked and they’ll find themselves paid.

A few weeks ago, I bought stocks. I did this with a relatively insignificant amount of money – I wasn’t going to make or lose too much no matter what happened – for the sake of self-education. I am somewhat ignorant when it comes to finance and I figured putting some money down would help me focus and learn at least a little bit.

I’m down a solid 15% and not once has it seemed like I was going to be up at all. While I am not panicking – see my investing strategy of barely investing – I guess the one thing I have learned is that I have a lot to learn.

Oh, actually, I’ve learned two things. The second: If I’m a slow starter, no one else seems to be too far ahead of me.

I ought to edit the title: “Here is where I remember that, in fact, I don’t know what the fuck I am doing. But at least I can admit it, idiots.”

Note: The top picture is a bear market not taking no for an answer after an exhausting flirting session. The middle picture? Whatever, man.

Seasons are like sicknesses. Either that or I’ve got a bad head cold.

Standing in a 100-person strong line outside of the Coney Island DMV this morning, waiting for the doors to open, I wished it was summer again. Not a wild thought for anyone, especially considering that I was able to see the ocean and Cyclone from my spot in between a heavily perspiring fat man in gray sweat pants and a talkative 60-something woman who is “never gonna do this again.” She looked to me for confirmation after she swore off the DMV for life but, even if I could see her breathe, I was stuck thinking about the summer.

It took all of thirty minutes standing in the below freezing shade for my body to start to forget what exactly summer feels like. The idea that there was a time when I was uncomfortably hot was becoming increasingly abstract to me, a foreign thought that maybe I got from a TV show or a book but definitely not from my own experience. As the line moved – not because the door had opened but because we had all ostensibly decided that crowding each other would speed things along – my body started to move slower, my mind remembered a little less. Still, the woman behind me kept talking, tsking and fidgeting her body. This slowing phenomenon is not universal.

A serious, weighty sickness – a good flu, for instance – brings the same amnesia. The fever, the heavy eyes, the heat, the shards of glass that seem to go down your throat with every bit of saliva swallowed: each sickness, recurring or not, comes on in ways I always seem to forget. In the fetal position on my bathroom floor, wondering what will be exiting my body next, my health becomes a concept not unlike summer during a bad winter. A smooth swallow sounds like a fantasy and an uninterrupted sleep is a myth. This is especially true for the very young and very old. For the very young, each moment carries the weight of a year. For the very old, each moment carries the potential of an eternity, especially one spent infirmed.

The sicknesses and the seasons are realized always in ways you forget and, more, in ways that make you incapable of remembering anything but.

On my list of priorities, taking up a much more independent pot habit is much nearer to the top of the list than the bottom. I’d like to be the sovereign of my own stunned senses (or, I’d like to be able to get a little fucked up and watch a movie without worrying about who else is down).

All plans for revenge (or at least meanness) fall weakly by the wayside and that is strange because I know perfectly well how to be mean.

Whenever I try to explain myself, it feels like I’m lying or defending a child.

I don’t know what my biggest fear is. I don’t know how to quantify that and no one is offering me the courtesy of keeping score for me.

Something I think about often is a particular sort of insanity in which I intermittently dip so far out of reality that I can’t properly recognize who is a human being and who isn’t. I sit down at a table and I don’t realize that my entire family is there with me. I sit in a house and can’t recognize my friends standing around me. I go to the bathroom and I don’t realize that someone is already sitting on the toilet.

This is the sort of mental illness that is scary, lonely and humiliating both for me and the person who is about to get peed on. Tough shit.