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Sunday, 30 June 2002
Stopped at an intersection on my way to the beach yesterday,
I inched forward by taking my foot off the brake while simultaneously
looking left, failing to notice that the mini-van in front of me
had not actually disappeared like I thought it had; a moment later
I heard the gentle clunk of kissing metal. Before I had a chance
to react, the man in the mini-van jumped out of the front seat,
hastily glanced at our bumpers, leaned over my open window and said,
"I'm-okay-you're-okay-let's-go!" and skipped back to his
vehicle.
Back in Raleigh today, riding my bike on a curvy path at Lake Crabtree,
I rounded a bend and noticed a squirrel sitting on two legs at the
edge of the path, busy with something between its front paws. Just
as I got close to the creature, it darted underneath my front tire,
scrambled for its life in a cloud of legs and fluff, and then scurried
off in the direction it came from. I was afraid that I'd run over
at least one of its limbs, but apparently it escaped unharmed. I
imagine it meant to say the same words the man in the mini-van had
said the day before.
Friday, 28 June 2002
I must say that I don't understand the American public in terms
of where it directs its outrage. Why are people so upset when the
court upholds the separation of church and state, but are frustratingly
quiet over issues such as Enron, the Kyoto Protocol, the erosion
of civil liberties, or, um, I don't know, the illegitimacy of our
president?
***
Tonight I'm going to watch North by Northwest projected on a big
screen on the side of the art museum while sitting on a blanket,
next to a cooler, underneath a pregnant gray cloud. Or at least
I think I am.
Thursday, 27 June 2002
She rarely leaves the house, but when she does, it's usually
just before a hurricane or a big thunderstorm. Tonight it was the
latter, and she sat squatting underneath the Cougar as the rain
fell around her on all sides. Meanwhile, I walked around the house
in flip-flops and rain-soaked hair, calling her name and producing
my whistle while I gripped a fickle flashlight, the shadows
around me perpetually shifting and disappearing.
Searching underneath the house always makes me nervous for both
and horror movie reasons. One of the rooms,
I've locked, to discourage the homeless from camping out there,
but the other room is still open. It's fairly spacious, with a dirt
floor and stairs that stop dead at the ceiling, an old washer and
dryer parked in the corner. As I exposed the dark corners with weak
light and walked past wet plants that slapped me in the face, three
of the wrong cats rubbed up against my ankles, asking the neighborhood
sucker to give them more expensive cat food. Finally, with no help
from her, I spotted her and chased her inside, and we both toweled
off using our respective methods.
Last night she threw up her dinner in the shape of a cross.
Tuesday, 25 June 2002
The girl who sits next to me behind a cloth collapsible wall
has a perfectly round stomach. I'm told there's a baby inside of
it, but that's difficult for me to imagine. She drives to work,
sits quietly in her cubicle marking up documents with her special
green pen, goes to lunch, and comes back again, all the while with
a little human leech tagging along. I forget sometimes, but then
she'll come whisper some details in my ear and run away laughing,
or she'll jokingly do jumping jacks in our boss's office, making
him cringe and plead with her not to let go of her package. Once
there was free ice cream on offer in the kitchen, and it occurred
to me that people with small humans in their bellies reportedly
like to eat that sort of thing, so I immediately reported the news
and she seemed excited.
The past few days she's been straightening up her office as if she's
preparing to leave the company forever, though I know otherwise.
There must be some sort of internal alarm that lets her know it's
time to prepare, something like the alarm that lets an animal know
when a storm is approaching. And then one day, rather suddenly,
she will be absent, her belly will vanish, and there will be another
human and another parent.
Monday, 24 June 2002
Sunday, 23 June 2002
Yesterday morning I caught the end of yard sale, a sidewalk
lined with boxes of old-new t-shirts from a local screen printing
company. Concert t-shirts mostly, lots of Sonic Youth and Beck and
Tenacious D. An old lady walked away with a few unusual items bunched
in her arms—an old guitar strap, a red tie, a novelty wig,
a knit hat, a suede jacket. A mailman spun his white truck around
and excitedly sifted through the remains of what was left. "I
like t-shirts! See? I'm wearing three right now," he reportedly
said. I came home with a handful of cheap t-shirts myself, most
of which I have yet to try on.
Later I drove to a belated wedding shower to see two old friends
whom I hadn't seen in years. It's only at these sort of events that
I really notice that my fingernails are inconsistent lengths or
that I have cat fur on my shirt. It was really nice being there,
though, and I experienced that phenomenon that comes with seeing
old friends, how all of us simultaneously seem different and exactly
the same.
The rest of the day was bloated with one social event after another:
I took pictures at a bizarre party where there were clowns dancing
to live bluegrass (prior to the band there was an unconventional
parade, but I missed that), met some acquaintances/friends for drinks,
stories, and bad jokes, and ended up at a tiki party on the southern
edge of Raleigh. All of it was fun, but there was too much of it.
I probably should've skipped the last event.
Today I caught up with how the rest of the world spent their weekend
(dying
in earthquakes, being
confined to their homes, fighting
fires), took a nap, watched a movie, and left the house as little
as possible.
Friday, 21 June 2002
There was a time I had the luxury of keeping all email that
was sent to me, including obese attachments and bad forwards, terse
replies and timely invitations. Whenever my account would creep
toward its capacity, I could simply delete the superfluous messages
and stave off the inevitable a little while longer.
I no longer have any superfluous messages. As far as I can tell,
every little minion that can be sacrificed already has been. I've
sent myself old emails that I wanted to keep after ridding them
of their attachments or their HTML. I've saved a modest amount to
disk, and I've sent messages to other, roomier accounts. But of
course every new day brings kilobytes to manage, and I feel like I'm trying to stuff
my feet into shoes that are too small.
Today I even looked through the folder that I had, until this point,
refused to open, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in deleting
any of the messages inside of it, no matter how hefty they were.
I discovered I am not yet that desperate; I couldn't bring myself
to delete any of it, or even resend it to myself in a smaller version,
because I don't want to change anything about it, even though much
of it I am not ready to re-read.
Thursday, 20 June 2002
At A/V Geeks
movie night tonight I saw a film
that I hadn't seen since I was 6? 7? about a shiny red balloon that
follows a little French boy around Paris until the balloon gets
popped by some little French bullies. When it dies, exhaling its
insides slowly until a little brown shoe hurries it along, all of
the other balloons in town escape from their owners, come find the
little boy, and together they carry him away over the city.
I'm not sure what the message of the film was supposed to be, and
I'm not sure why I was so pleased to have those grainy images come
to life again in my brain. Certainly good memories are worth keeping,
but why do I enjoy filling in the blanks of neutral childhood memories?
I could almost hear a bell of recognition every time my brain saw
a segment it knew.
Tonight all of the films had the theme: "Baffling educational
films that warped a whole generation of little kiddies' minds."
The other films were less coherent and not as well done, and none
of those I had seen. One had the moral that if you're not loved,
you might die. For the intro to the film, a morose little boy climbs
off the school bus alone and falls dead into the snow. In another,
a mime plays hide-and-seek with a string of children who hide in
badly chosen places—trunks of cars, old refrigerators, sewage
pipes—and they're never seen again. It seems we're lucky that
we've made it this far.
Wednesday, 19 June 2002
Tuesday, 18 June 2002
If I could be disappointed after I'm dead, it would really bother
me if I hadn't saved all of my email to disk, if I hadn't sleeved
all of my negatives, put all of my pictures in albums, and burned
all of the mixed tapes given to me over the years onto CDs. Doing
those things is not exactly how I want to spend my time, but since
I am the only one who needs these tasks done, I am the one to do
them. Nevermind that after I'm dead it won't matter that I saved
some ridiculous forward in an obsolete version of Word on some out-dated
piece of plastic called a "zip disk." Nevermind about
that.
Monday, 17 June 2002
We were both unhappy there before she arrived, in that three-street
town with no stoplight, no grocery store, no mayor even. Together,
we would reminisce about our old towns and old friends, people and
places we had transformed in our minds to be impossibly cool, always
superior to our surroundings, yet always so remote. That was the
secret to making it through.
But when she came, we latched on, and we complacently let our discontent
inflate. She was from Boston, went to an all-girls private school
up there, wore low-cut shirts and curved silver nails and hoop earrings.
Naturally very pretty and irresistibly experienced, and we hung
on her every word. Stephanie became better friends with her than
I did, perhaps because the father that she would visit lived across
the street from Stephanie and not from me, or perhaps because I
was shy. Sometimes I would only hear of her second-hand, which only
served to further dehumanize her. Occasionally I wouldn't know about
her visit until she was standing in front of me, making me feel
unprepared as I glanced down at the clothes I was wearing, which
would suddenly seem remarkably un-hip.
She gave us a lesson on how to properly say the letter O, to not
drag it out or flatten it or sharpen it, not to pronounce it like
a southerner. I didn't think I sounded like a southerner, but I
wanted to be certain, so Stephanie and I would practice tirelessly.
We'd talk like choppy robots, make staccato bursts of sound that
refused to slide but which were horribly obnoxious. We knew it,
but we didn't care. It was our way of saying what we thought of
our town and that we rejected any hue it began to color us with.
We never really learned to appreciate it, and both of us moved away
as soon as we graduated from high school; in fact, Stephanie left
town the same night, still wearing her gown.
Yesterday I rode my bike around that town, my dad in front of me
on his bike, and my mom trailing behind. We rode over the brick
pathways of the university, past the old tennis courts where I spent
my last summer there, down the sidewalk of the squat brick school
toward the deli where I'd feed Ms. Pac-Man quarters, past the building
where I had my first few sips of alcohol. Now, years later, I am
stuck somewhere between a pleasant nostalgia for my hometown and
the frustration I remember feeling from always wanting to be somewhere
else.
Saturday, 15 June 2002
I did everything at the wrong time today: ate breakfast at , went out for the evening at 6:30 p.m., and came home
at 11:30 p.m. and started working. Now it's almost 5:00 a.m., and
I'm just going to bed.
I put up some pictures
today. To make sense of the seemingly erratic theme, go here
and read the explanation.
Friday, 14 June 2002
I. Generally I don't eat until I'm stuffed, candy bars don't
appeal to me much anymore, and if I have a snack, usually it's a
piece of fruit. But yellow sheet cake, the kind covered in a blanket
of the thick white sugar and obligatory flowers? I want all four
corners, please, along with that abandoned icing around the rim,
and, yeah, go ahead and wipe the knife off on the edge of my plate.
Today, at a coworker's baby shower, I ate too much of it, got a
sugar high, got a sugar low, and had trouble drinking my water,
which was suddenly unusually bland.
II. All week I've been trying to cross things off of an impossibly
long list. Though I got a lot done, it stopped being fun somewhere
around Monday, because I noticed immediately that despite my progress,
the list wasn't getting any shorter. So last night I took the night
off and went to the movies to see Dogtown
and Z-Boys, a documentary about . It was a little self-congratulatory, but I enjoyed
it, I think because of the way it made me feel more than the way
it made me think.
III. I'm hoping to put up a new set of pictures sometime this weekend.
Perhaps the above is at last appropriate.
Thursday, 13 June 2002
Wednesday, 12 June 2002
I've just spent the majority of my evening restarting my computer
and backing up all of my files, thanks to the external CD writer
I have connected to my computer. If I had to guess, I would say
that I've burned about five CDs successfully and thrown away about
100 since I bought it a year ago. Tonight, it tricked me into thinking
that all of my website files had vanished from my computer. That
turned out not to be the case, but some of my software is still
under that impression.
By now the veins that once connected that diseased little creature
to my computer have been ripped out, and the machine itself is sitting
ten feet away where it can do no more harm. If I didn't know that
my brief period of satisfaction would be followed by regret, I would
turn the single unit into a thousand smaller ones, jagged purple
shards of plastic, a mess of regurgitated insides that I have never
seen.
Tuesday, 11 June 2002
Monday, 10 June 2002
The last semester of my senior year in college, I was required
to write a 20+ page investigative research paper that covered a
specific aspect of journalism. Of course I wanted to cover an issue
that would hold my attention for the entire semester, but I chose
rather haphazardly; since I'd been watching of Mafia movies, I decided to write about the media's
treatment of John
Gotti, whom I knew little about.
As part of my research I'd written Gotti a letter, asking for his
opinion of his image in the media. I'd found his penitentiary address
online, along with an unusual list of items that I was forbidden
to send him, including plant shavings, body hair, nude pictures,
and stamps. Right. So I followed those instructions, but I didn't
really expect anything back.
A month after I'd turned in my project, Gotti responded. Flowery
handwriting on two sheets of notebook paper, a polite grammatically
correct letter about his disgust for the media and its unfair portrayal
of him, wishes of luck for my career, praise for the fact I wasn't
pursuing a career in law.
I always meant to write him back to thank him for his response,
but I never did. Yes, I know all of the reasons I shouldn't be sad
to hear of his death, but I am a little sad anyway.
Sunday, 09 June 2002
Two girls accosted me, offering me $10 cash for my black ink
on their 6-page form. Always too sympathetic. For the next fifteen
minutes I sat on a bench and honestly (politely, incredulously)
responded to each ridiculous question that had been formulated to
predict marketing trends. "What will be the next big thing?"
"What's your favorite brand of clothing?" "Rank the
following (1 to 5) in terms of coolness." "What's your
favorite commercial?" "Are these stars 'getting hotter'
or 'cooling down'?" "Which [of these identical stores]
do you prefer: The Gap or Old Navy? Abercrombie & Fitch or American
Eagle?"
More than half of the questions I had no answer for at all, but
I responded anyway, since that was the requirement for the reward.
I felt uneasy about giving out my personal information; I'm not
sure why I chose not to lie about that. Always too forthcoming.
It made me think of this guy I dated in college who was so paranoid
about people knowing his name that he would make up names to give
hostesses at restaurants, often forgetting who he was when
"his" name was called.
When I handed in my survey, they even took a Polaroid picture, which
really creeped me out. As soon as I walked away, I regretted agreeing
to participate, and I felt kind of dirty, like I'd somehow sold
out. Those two fives stayed in my bag all of one hour before disappearing
into my gas tank.
***
Two minutes after cursing the predatory nature of cats, I was praising
my own cat for being a predator. I'd walked down to rabbit field
to distribute an old when I spotted an unknown fluffy white cat weaving through
the tires of a nearby car. I squatted and held out my hand and made
some silly noises that are supposed to attract cats, and it approached
until it was just out of my reach, turned suddenly, and took off
after a .
Moments later, standing in the door of my room, I watched my cat
Leeches fly off the bed and tackle one of those huge outdoor-bred
roaches. She saw the shoe come down but must have not made the connection,
because she's still sitting beside my desk, striking out at nothing,
in hopes that the interesting creature will again come out and play.
Saturday, 08 June 2002
It's Saturday afternoon and the sun's still shining, but the
shadows are getting longer. There are lots of things for me to do
between the outdoors hours and the going out hours, personal projects
mainly, but it's difficult to narrow it down to one or two; usually
I end up starting on one but getting side-tracked, and ultimately
I work on parts of ten different offspring. I really like this time
of day because it fully belongs to me, and I don't feel guilty about
not enjoying the weather or reclusive because I'm alone in my room.
It's somewhat cooler today, which is appreciated, since I've spent
most of the afternoon outside, photographing a Native American pow-wow.
I suppose it was about like I expected, except for maybe the fair
aspect of it—funnel cakes, collapsible stands filled with merchandise,
and a loud man with a microphone.
Most of the merchandise stands were lined with a curtain of feathered
dream catchers, and from behind the stands came puffs of the sweet-smelling
smoke of burning sage. There were baskets of rabbit skins and cases
of handmade jewelry, dark-haired plastic dolls wearing fringed outfits,
life-size canvas tee-pees, and live music produced by drummers and
wailers.
The costumes were elaborate: war paint, feathers, animal skins,
bells, dresses, chaps, braids. A few people draped animal skins
over their heads and necks, with little fox faces sitting just above
their own faces; those who had "earned" lots of feathers
had bulls eye-like tails made from them. Somehow, even though many
of the costumes were composed of similar parts, each outfit was
distinct, and I could tell there was more than one tribe being represented.
I circulated and shot pictures, unsure whether I should request
permission (risking getting a posed shot) or simply take pictures
without asking (risking being impolite). At some point today: one
of my lenses broke, my camera stopped working for a couple minutes,
and I accidentally took two shots of my own shoulder while changing
lenses (which made me the maddest of the three). I will probably
post a few of the non-shoulder shots in the coming week.
Friday, 07 June 2002
You know what commercial I hate? The one selling a oversized Ford vehicle. A husband stands at the back
of the SUV, while the wife from somewhere within the house, "Honey! The Smiths
say they’re coming with us! Make room for them!" and the
husband dutifully creates a seat for the Smiths in their behemoth
automobile. "Honey? The Smiths just called and said they can’t
make it!" He puts the seat back down. "Honey!," she
screeches, "It's the Stewarts! They want to come along!"
Seat back up, dumb exasperated expression on the husband. "The
Stewarts can't find a sitter!" Seat back down. And so on. The
privileged have it pretty rough, don't they? Whenever that commercial
comes on, I reach for the mute button, but it’s never soon
enough. I always at least catch the first "Honey!"
Thursday, 06 June 2002
There is a group of people who aren't originally from here.
They live here now, because we pay them to live here. We dress them
up in strange costumes with little bulls eyes on their chests and
watch as they fight with sticks and little cakes of rubber. We claim
to be part of them, and we claim that they are part of us. We watch
them closely, very emotionally attached to what they do. We talk
about them a lot, our words full of curses and praises and predictions.
Walked down to Moonlight Pizza tonight and got stuck behind a curtain
of rain, stayed and watched people watch the hockey finals in which
"we" are the underdogs. Listened to the synchronized chorus
of groans, gasps, sighs, and yells. Got sucked in for a moment myself,
but pulled away when the rain let up.
The amount of water in my atmosphere seems to be a constant. It
gets released from the dank air as if a giant sponge is being rung
out. And then, slowly, the water seeps back into the sponge again,
filling the air with an invisible density that makes it hard to
move or breathe.
Wednesday, 05 June 2002
Tuesday, 04 June 2002
Mom offered to go with me. My parents live between me and the
court house, and apparently today it was particularly easy for her
to take the morning off. It's not a pleasant thing to do alone,
she'd said. She was standing out in the yard when I got there, collecting
litter that had been thrown from a passing car.
Our first stop was a service station in a town called Coats where
they calibrate your speedometer for $34.95. I'd
assumed that my speedometer was accurate, but I wanted some
basis for the "guilty of faulty equipment" plea I'd been
advised to give. We only had to wait five minutes, the two of us
seated in a dingy room with a noisy A/C unit, some baseball trophies,
a Bible, and an old hymnal.
As it turns out, my speedometer was off by about . Unfortunately, it was off in the wrong direction.
I was driving slower than I'd thought I was. I mentioned my concern
to the man behind the glass, and he reassured me, "It was off.
That's all they care about."
Second stop, the court house in Dunn, a line snaking down and back
up a narrow hallway, sweaty people leaning against the concrete,
holding pink slips in their hands, staring ahead at nothing. A young
girl with cornrows in her hair bounced against the wall and watched
as the beads swept by her face. A guy had on a shirt that said,
"Real men don't need directions." A large woman gripped
a newspaper in one hand, fanning herself between paragraphs, gripped
a bottle of water in the other hand.
The courtroom itself was cold and full of brown wood and pews and
reminded me of a church. When I walked in, I wasn't quite sure what
the procedure was, but almost as an answer to my insecurity, I got
to watch about 40 people go through the ritual: whisper to the DA,
show her your ticket, walk up to the bench, answer "yes"
when asked, "Do you plead responsible?" and pay $90 in
court costs. It seemed to me that it would be much more efficient
if we would just line up in front of the cashier, but I didn't mention
that to the judge.
So, that's it, I think. The insurance god is pleased.
Stop number three, my mother had to pick up a few wedding gifts.
We printed out lists of somebody else's wants and shopped for them,
as the custom goes. I didn't see anything at all that I'd want for
myself, and I wondered how the lists were so long. A gravy boat
for $100? That's a joke, right?
Stop four, standing in the kitchen at my parents' house, both my
mom and I eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was then
I realized the morning I dreaded was over.
Monday, 03 June 2002
A Filipino Elvis impersonator performed Saturday night in downtown
Raleigh, decked out in a yellow beaded pantsuit, white leather shoes,
flashy jewelry, purple-tinted shades, and a headset. Between each
song he would retreat to the back of the stage, fumble with his
mp3 player, turn back around with a big smile on his face, and begin
to croon. Beads of sweat formed on his brow as he jerked back and
forth, tassels swaying this way and that, and he'd point his index
finger at the end of his outstretched arm as he hit a lasting high
note. He looked like he was enjoying himself.
The word is that his daughter is disabled, and he performs in order
to help pay the bills. In any case, he is not the only Elvis impersonator
in the family; on Saturday, he sang a duet with his similarly employed
cousin via speakerphone, via the Philippines. I took some pictures.
Sunday, 02 June 2002
On Thursday I spent my last evening alone with Jay before he
moves to Portland. We had talked about getting together for years,
but for years we just ran into each other and talked about getting
together. We would try to catch up, but Jay's a popular boy with
a short attention span, and often I would have to struggle to finish
a conversation we'd started. It used to be much different, but so
did everything. I know I'm going to miss him, but right now they're
still just words: Jay's.moving.to.Portland. Right now he's still
in town.
So on Thursday we went to the bar where we used to hang out, which
has recently been remodeled and reowned and looks nothing like it
used to, including the regulars. We sat in the empty back room on
plush chairs and talked about a hundred things, then we retreated
to his car where he excitedly introduced me to new music, and then
I turned him over to the bar where those regulars had relocated,
where his other friends were waiting, and where his attention span
would quickly recede.
***
I should've known that if a thief didn't want my old bike for
free, that it probably wouldn't sell at a yard sale; I'm still
stuck with it. Actually, I'd tried to get rid of lots of things,
and nothing of mine sold at all. Maybe I should set it out on the
corner, unguarded, and hope that it disappears.
***
Tonight I finally gave in and installed my window unit air conditioner.
But not before enduring muggy, windless air all day. It's only been running
for an hour, and it's already time to give the beast a break from
exhaling.
Saturday, 01 June 2002
Trash
can.
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