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Wednesday, 30 October 2002
This morning I stood outside the brick building where my live. There were four of us congregating there,
though I didn't know the others. It wasn't immediately clear that
they were waiting for the same person I was waiting for, but for
some reason it gave me hope that they wanted entrance into the same
building, as if that gave me a better chance. One of them looked
like Ioki from 21 Jump Street, and I never noticed the details of
the remaining two. I was just aware of two upright bodies behind
me, facing the same metal door that I was, hands in pockets, breathing
cold smoke.
I kept dialing her number, letting it ring four times, hanging up,
letting it ring another four times. It wasn't that I suspected she
was there, really; it was that I needed to pay my rent and get to
work and I didn't know what else to do, except punch the little
buttons and hold the phone to my head. Ioki started yelling her
name. Mrs. Knoll! Mrs. Knoll!, always in twos, his voice
being swallowed by brick.
I don't know how long we waited there. Eventually one of the walked around the corner, peeling a key off of a
keyring as he walked. The others vocally jumped him. Let us in!
You can let us in! We climbed the stairs in a tight pack,
and the man opened the door to the landlord's apartment. There she
was. Well, one of them. Standing there expectant, as if she'd invited
this very group over herself, as if she'd answered the phone and
pressed the buzzer. But she hadn't.
***
Tomorrow Siouxsie
Sioux
will be taking the L train, sitting at my desk, cupping a mouse
and positioning her dark-rimmed eyes too close to my monitor, visiting
my new doctor, and walking in a Halloween parade on a street near
my office. Later, she will quietly slip down my drain in a river
of soap and water, only to be exhumed again on Friday.
Tuesday, 29 October 2002
Monday, 28 October 2002
Looking back over what I said is like watching a horror movie.
In it, I'm the main character, and I can see myself walking steadily
toward the haunted house, pushing open the creaky door, and walking
into the trap. I plead with myself not to do it, to have foresight,
to change courses, but the girl I'm yelling at is deaf and stupidly
determined.
Tonight I don't feel like living alone. Right now I want a roommate,
someone with whom I can talk and maybe cook, but not make plans
with or set aside a chunk of hours for. I want it to be easy and
thoughtless with my imaginary roommate, because I want to be thoughtless.
It feels so much later than it is, just because we have collectively
decided that winter should be dark. Moving the clock back is only
good for one day.
Sunday, 27 October 2002
It didn't take long for the buildings to shrink, to flatten
and space themselves apart and sink into the earth, for bright orange
trees to stand in their place, for the middle of civilization to
be transformed into the middle of nowhere. I hiked a trail at the
top of a mountain and saw nothing but contoured hills of flamboyantly
dying leaves and white post-rain haze. When canoeing down the Delaware
river, Tripti and I drifted away from the others and floated downstream
almost silently, nothing on either side of us but hills and crooked
trees, surroundings that looked something like the autumnized set
of Deliverance.
The Inn itself reminded me of , but with a swarm of environmentalists
moving through it, and a few local pear-shaped golfers moving around
it. As part of the swarm, I went to workshops, listened to speakers,
danced, talked, talked too much, played games, and temporarily learned
how to line dance from two sixty-year-old cowgirls. The bus ride
home today was groggy and quiet.
Wednesday, 23 October 2002
"...the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors
who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application
of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the
proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued
to work and breed, their other activities were without importance.
"Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains
of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared
to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born,
they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they
married at twenty, they were middle-age at thirty, they died, for
the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and
children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer,
and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.
"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of
the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors
and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged
capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate
them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the
proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required
of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever
it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter
rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes
did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general
ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The
larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
***
On Thursday I'm leaving for the Poconos, for an office retreat.
I'll be back on Sunday.
Tuesday, 22 October 2002
On Saturday we drove around the disjointed streets of Queens,
dead-ending in a chorus of "left!"s and "right!"s,
asking directions from disinterested people, passing turns, turning
maps sideways and upside-down. But it only took us an hour to find
the school by car, which was brief.
It was an elementary school of long hallways, held together with
construction paper and tape that formed the shapes of ghosts, cats,
and autumn leaves and showcased the names of school children. On
the doors and walls and floors were silhouettes scrawled in black
marker; it was our job to color in those spaces with paint. Martin
and I took the door to the cafeteria, a squat pink-gutted room filled
with tiny chairs and crumbs, evidence of surges of bustling life
that made the room seem strikingly vacant.
There was fruit on our door, and vegetables on its twin, where a
woman named Lisa was steadily working and humming to
the R&B being broadcast over the intercom. I started with the
bananas and moved on to the star fruit, cleaned up the purple paint
fugitives running from the grapes, highlighted the pear. Outside,
there was a group working on a mural of the United States, a terribly
inaccurate but attractive piece that covered a large slab of courtyard
concrete. Later it would decorate the bottoms of little kids' shoes
in bright colors, which would in turn spread parts of North Dakota
into Colorado, and parts of Colorado into Arizona.
At three our jobs
expired. We threw our bleeding brushes into a bucket of paint thinner,
collected a certificate, and left the school permanently. Sort of.
***
Thank you to everyone who wrote to tell me the trick behind the
wizard's little card game. For the record, I do not believe in magic.
But it was nice getting email.
Monday, 21 October 2002
This
is kind of creepy, in more than one way.
Saturday, 19 October 2002
Thursday, 17 October 2002
Some of them are amazing. Tonight on my way home from work,
I stopped to listen to one standing near a subway entrance at Union
Square. He was playing a banjo, picking out a flood of crisp notes
with quick, easy fingers. He was singing, high and low, a folk song
that sounded somehow old and rural. He had a nice voice.
He had a drum tied to his back. His right leg was connected to the
mallet by a wire, and another wire connected his left leg to a set
of cymbals. He would move his heels in a reverse tapping of the
foot, lifting his right heel to bang the drum, lifting his left
to clap the cymbals, while simultaneously singing and articulating
his banjo, performing the work of three or four people. It took
me a moment to fully grasp the extent of his performance. When I
stopped to listen, there were a few people standing there, scattered,
ahead of me. By the time I walked away, he'd attracted a substantial
crowd.
This morning I saw one of my favorites. He plays the acoustic guitar
and blows on a series of narrow uneven pipes that are positioned
on a metal rack in front of him. Sometimes he strokes the pipes
with his breath, producing a sound something like a hand being strung
down a piano, from the last key to the first.
He wears his long black hair in a ponytail and alters his facial
expressions between happy and surprised. He seems to lose himself
in his own music and forget that he's in public, which is something
I really enjoy watching, perhaps because I doubt I could ever do
the same. It drags me into the music as well, to see someone producing
and being, rather than someone who just skirts over the surface
and observes.
Tuesday, 15 October 2002
On Sunday I noticed I was starting to get sick, so rather than
going out with a friend from Raleigh who was in town, I remained
at home, so that I could swallow pellets of vitamin C, drink tea,
take a warm bath, and watch a movie.
I patiently waited for the water spewing out of the bathtub faucet
to get hot, timidly testing it with my hand so I wouldn't get burned.
It never even got warm.
Desperately and wastefully, I began boiling pots of water on my
gas stove, carrying them carefully toward the bath, dodging my cat,
pouring their steaming contents into the suddenly large basin. One,
two, three, four, and again. I must've combined twelve pots of boiling
water with a few inches of cold I'd put in, but the cold just swallowed
the hot like a light snack, destroying all evidence of my labor.
I gave up and waited until the next day, when the hot water miraculously
returned.
***
Monday was a holiday, which I spent underneath pounds of covers,
reading, running errands. I took my to the local laundromat, where I sat sniffling and
reading 1984 and retracting my legs every few seconds to
avoid tripping the screaming children running around a block of
washing machines.
A few minutes before I was about to leave, a pudgy young girl came
up to me and asked whether I could change her dollar into quarters.
I could and did, and she disappeared. A moment later, she returned
and told me that the machine had eaten her quarter. "That's
too bad," I said, as I folded the last of my hot clothes. On
my way out the door, she caught me again and boldly asked me whether
I could give her the money the machine had taken from her.
(I refused.)
***
I'd already chopped the garlic, green onions, and carrots for soup
when I noticed that I don't own a can opener. I grabbed my keys
and my bag and ran across the street to the Town, a long and narrow shop that dangles orange, curly
fly-paper in ribbons above the fruit. No can opener. A block away
at another store, I bought the last available tool that called itself
a "can opener," though I'd never seen anything like it.
How hard can it be to operate?
Once at home, I tried every conceivable angle at least twice, called
my mom in vain, and considered puncturing the bloody can with a
sharp knife. Instead, I knocked on the door to the nearest apartment,
with my can and opener in hand. "Hi, sorry to bother you, but
do you know how to open this can using this thing?" He laughed
heartily for a rather small guy, and just let me use his conventional
opener. "Have you ever seen one of these before?" I asked.
He explained that he had, but that they were only to be used in
times of crisis.
I still don't know how to use it. Incidentally, tonight I unintentionally
bent and broke my cheap wine opener (and broke the cork in half
as well). Although I will admit to not being especially mechanically
inclined, I swear it isn't me.
Monday, 14 October 2002
We didn't camp this weekend. It was cold, the rain fell steadily,
and the 20 mile-per-hour winds promised to collapse our feeble nylon
homes. Instead we ate dinner at a New Jersey diner and went bowling
with a few of my relatives on my dad's side of the family. At the
diner, while standing at a bathroom sink, I encountered a woman
who'd never experienced a faucet that turns on automatically. "I
stood right next to it and it came right on!" she exclaimed.
"Pretty soon you won't have to do anything!" She half-directed
her comment at me, but only because I was the one standing there.
I just nodded and smiled, unsure of how to respond.
On Saturday it was my Mom's half of the family: my grandparents'
anniversary combined with an overdue family reunion.
The walls and shelves and tabletops at my grandparents' house are
covered with pictures, pictures that are never retired or replaced,
only added to. Most of them are the same pictures that were there
when I was a little girl—dated pictures of my cousins, aunts,
and uncles—hanging in pearl chain-like frames, adjacent to
faded paint-by-number artwork my mom and her brother produced when
they were young.
I saw more of those pictures than I did that side of the family,
and much of my memory of them is frozen in 70s-style haircuts and
big-print shirts, expressions that never change or tire. That must
be how they know me, as well—age 12 with blond hair and a bad
perm, sitting unnaturally in front of a blue watercolor canvas.
All of us visited our grandparents, and inevitably saw those pictures,
even if we didn't see much of each other.
So there was a little bit of pressure getting ready for the event
on Saturday, knowing that whatever picture was taken of you was
going to be the picture people see of you for the next ten
years; likely in a few years it'll receive the tip of a finger along
with the question, "who's that?"
But it was rather relaxed; I'm not sure why I anticipated otherwise.
I shouldn't be so reluctant to leave my element.
Sunday, 13 October 2002
Thursday, 10 October 2002
My parents are sleeping in the next room, after having driven
up from North Carolina this morning. Tonight we walked around my
neighborhood in a and ate dinner at a Vietnamese/Peruvian place
underneath the direction of a waitress with a forced giggle. As
we walked back to my place full of rice-rice paper-rice noodles,
my father looked up and down the streets with a watchful eye, rewarding
each avenue a tacit safety-rating. They both like the place, they
say. I hope their car's okay in the morning.
Tomorrow night (and the next) we'll be sleeping in tents in New
Jersey, next to tents housing remote relatives (some of whom I haven't
seen in about a decade), underneath fat, dark clouds spouting out
less pitiful rain. There will be trees, I'm told.
Wednesday, 09 October 2002
The walls are white, and of course they are: they are white
on white on white, layer after layer, that no matter how deep you
drill into the wall, the drill bit returns with a dusty coat of
flakes all the way up to its neck. The place you really notice is
around the borders of the doors, where you can tell that the lines
were once sharp but are now so smoothed over with paint that they
blend softly into the wall, creeping down in a gentle slope. And
the cabinets and the doors, all of them wearing so many coats that
they have trouble stuffing themselves in the places they're meant
to go. Underneath there somewhere, I'm sure there are spots and
stains and holes and bruises, hiding in their secret layers from
each new tenant.
But the windows, they can't be painted. Today I cleaned them for
the first time, while in the midst of hanging the curtains "properly,"
an exercise that took hours and caused me to get plaster in my eye
and burn my finger and crawl around on the floor smacking a blind
hand under furniture in order to retrieve finishing nails.
The first three attempts at each window turned my cloth completely
black, as if my predecessor had been a diesel vehicle of some sort,
and the back window had a patch of jagged blue crayon in its center.
Prior to cleaning the windows, I had been able to see through them
just fine, which was a surprise once I discovered the blanket of
dark that covered them. Perhaps it's like LA, where you don't really
notice the smog when you're underneath it.
I think it's finished now.
Tuesday, 08 October 2002
It feels as if my head is plugged in and there's a current running
through it, quietly humming like my computer. Lisa and Wolfe had
been talking about taking me to see Mindless Self-Indulgence for
weeks, telling me stories, like how, at the last show, the band
exited the building through the front doors and finished its set
on top of a van.
The lead singer, whom the crowd kept calling "Jimmy,"
had a double hot pink mohawk, wore a white suit with a black tie
and a long white skirt, and sometimes sang holding what looked like
a stuffed wolf. (He actually looked a little bit like Ryan,
apart from the hair and the height.) His voice oscillated between
falsetto and a more natural singing voice, and his facial expressions
and gestures looked fluid enough to have been choreographed, but
I knew otherwise. The band clearly was insane and unpredictable.
The mosh pits weren't just cluttered around the stage, but scattered
around the floor and watched over by those in the balcony that circled
the room. It was impossible to completely avoid getting knocked
around; mostly I stood with feet parted, as I would on the subway
during take-off and landing, with no bar to hold onto. By the time
the show was over, I'd involuntarily moved fifteen feet from where
I'd started.
Lots of people who looked eighteen, lots of spiky hair and spiky
belts, spiky jewelry. I got a little worried when a guy with five
two-inch spikes protruding from his face jumped around near me,
due to the nature of the most pits. Lisa noted that it adds a new
dimension to a show, when there's a chance you might get injured
during the course of it.
Immediately after leaving the venue, I stopped at a grocery store
to buy some water, in an abrupt transition to normalcy: rows of
neatly stacked food underneath bright lights, people in warm sensible
sweaters standing in line, quiet.
Monday, 07 October 2002
Sunday, 06 October 2002
I'm bad at guessing quantities, so I have no idea how many people
were in Central
Park today, and since I almost never watch TV, I don't know
if anyone else knows either. Thousands, certainly; thousands of
other frustrated people who make me wonder about the validity of
the polls that claim the majority of us want war. I haven't met
any. I have trouble understanding the pro-war argument.
***
As of last night, I am again carless, which means I no longer have
to (one) remember where I parked, (two) remember whether that side
of the road is scheduled to be cleaned the next day, (three) remember
to move the car before I'm lying in bed, (four) drive around the
neighborhood making figure eights, (five) wonder why there's a parking
space (thinking that if it's free, something must be wrong with
it), (six) debate whether I should tell the 300-pound man that I
wish he wouldn't sit on the hood of my car, (seven) clean off the
egg yolk and shell smeared on top of Ingo's car, or (eight) worry
about getting parking tickets, which I was told are now $105 in
Manhattan. I am going to miss it a little.
Thursday, 03 October 2002
My new apartment is a railroad style apartment, which means
it's long and relatively thin and that the rooms line up like boxcars.
I moved in on Sunday afternoon, and it wasn't until today that I
was able to walk in a straight line from the engine to the caboose
without stepping over anything.
After a short period of uncertainty prior to my move, I've decided
that I like the place quite a bit, that I don't think I could've
found an apartment that suits me better, assuming I don't get sick
of Spanish music anytime soon.
The last several days bleed together: Martin drove my car and my
cat from Raleigh to Brooklyn; I scraped mysterious flecks of yellow
from the knobs on my stove; Martin and I and lots of other people
spent my lunch break watching a free White Stripes concert at Union
Square; I bought a level and became a little obsessed with it, testing
the angles of everything I attached to the wall; old Cuban men playing
checkers watched my car as I unloaded it, assuring me that they
wouldn't let anything happen to my stuff; my cat discovered the
fire escape.
Three a.m.: Lisa, have you seen Jane? After a quick check
in the usual corners, I took the fire escape, carefully gripping
the thin red bars and quietly moving up past dark windows. Martin
walked around the alley that surrounds the building like a moat,
carrying a flashlight and whistling for her. He insisted that she
must be inside, that there was nowhere for her to go.
Almost an hour later, we were standing on the roof, pointing the
flashlight down, forming a weak V of light that barely reached the
construction site behind my building, when we saw a plump gray figure
walking along a high concrete wall. We ran down the stairs in a
long spiral, trying to find a balance between quiet and quick. I
helped hoist Martin onto the wall, one black Converse shoe standing
on my thigh, the other in my cupped hands. Just as he was able to
pull himself up and stand, Jane looked at him, jumped back over
to the fire escape, darted up to the second floor, and hopped in
my window.
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