Swerve

I’m sitting here listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. I never thought I would be saying that. The other common denominator between the two poets I mentioned yesterday is the surplus of interesting acquaintances they respectively have. I also have interesting acquaintances. I wonder what they are doing these days.

The phone just rang and there was no one on the other end. This has been happening about twice a week. Other repetitions: I will be relating an anecdote or expressing an opinion, and midway through, I will realize that there is no graceful way to conclude and I will just sort of cut myself off and look at whoever’s listening as if I had just asked them a question. This habit is a troubling interpersonal tic, which causes difficulty for me and the listener in obvious ways, but there is still something sort of awesome about it. I don’t know if you see what I mean, though I’m sure you’ve told a story that’s fallen flat on its face and felt the awkward surge of empty conversational space brush up against you without any recourse or alternate route available. Normally my anecdotal incompetence occurs while seated around a lunch table with other teachers.

I believe Joni has sung herself silent. I will now replace her with Tom Waits circa Small Change. What a fantastic album cover: the bored looking unattractive dancer with pasties leaning up against the dressing room counter with a mirror behind it. Hairspray, unknown tonics and I guess nail polish lie on the counter. Who is that man in the black and white picture to her right? Waits sits with his right leg up on a chair, looking down and to his left, rubbing his head. A soft pack of Old Golds sits in the foreground, next to a mirror that looks like it has coke residue on it.


Three short second person vignettes, in the spirit of fiction’s being less strange than truth and also being unapologetic about the relative aura of normalcy that surrounds it (fiction).

You are seated in the middle section of a Greyhound bus, eavesdropping on people behind you. They are having a roundtable conversation about how calcified and dissatisfying their current marital situations are. These are your words, not theirs. The conversation has been going on for a few hours; not once have you looked back to connect voices with visages. The stories share a quiet desperation and an early 21st century lassitude about the constraints and responsibilities one ostensibly inherits upon saying “I do” and “till death due us part.” Some are cheaters, others are just unhappy about who they are in relation to who they used to be. Outside the window, mile upon interstate mile streams by, undistinguished and therefore existing only in the abstract American nowhere of bus travel. Save for the occasional river or small suburb that is foreshadowed with an abundance of pictographs indicating food petrol and overnight lodging, you are wherever the voices in the back suggest you should be. They call up flickers of thought, half-images, the mnemonic detritus of your twenty-odd years and the six or seven semi-serious relationships of which you’ve been part. You paw at the book in your hands, searching for the right page, a set of words configured in such a way as to gather up your attention and banish the intrusive flirtations and suggestive comments that occasionally tear through the general malaise in the back. Will they be fucking each other soon? Is that it? Isn’t the sharing of mutual devastation a kind of foreplay? Not having seen who they are, your mind summons up a series of character actors from commercials who are supposed to represent the average everyday maligned citizens you suppose these individuals to be. The book is of no help, and the sun is going down quickly enough to make the window’s image’s content that much more obscure. I cannot begin to describe how distressed this all makes you.

[cigarette break – did I mention that it is quite possible that pneumonia and I are co-habiting on this fine March night?]

You sit in the chair staring back at a large mirror’s image of yourself and the blonde forty-something stylist who has her hands on your shoulders. The hair cape is black. It drapes over the chair and your legs. She teases your hair and asks how you want it. You say short. In the next twenty minutes, you share a little about yourself, as much as seems necessary to keep her attention but not distract her from making you presentable to the world. Your hair cascades onto the cape and floor. You came here on a lark, a walk-in. Halfway through, you realize that it would have been possible to invent an identity for this stranger. She is doing a good job, though, and she tries to provide the right mix of questions and information about herself. The haircut costs $15. You walk out the door into the sun intent on taking a shower.


You receive a letter. It is not a Dear John letter. It is an after the fact breakup letter whose writer has to get something off of her chest. The letter closes with a passage from a letter Kafka wrote to Milena Jesenka – the letter writer knows you well enough to know you know Miss Jesenka perished in a Nazi death camp. This may all be melodramatic, but maybe it’s not. Who’s to say in this day and age what quoting Kafka really is? The excerpted passage at the end of the letter addressed to you goes like this:

Writing letters, however, means having to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s not longer any good, these are evidently being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

You read it twice, catching yourself up each reading on the quaintness of the word “aeroplane.” Then you light a cigarette with a match, light the letter with the same match, and pitch it into the sink. It is the engulfing in flame process that you have decided to just sit back and watch.