Not for all the clove cigarettes in the world would she countenance that step

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Loneliness was all the rage, a thing to be cultivated. Thousands, most of whom were fundamentally OK with what they were and how much they counted less than a year ago, went to pieces. They went places, did things, and those I knew simply wanted to curl up in a ball away from everyone. Then of course get together to talk about the need to not be together raging inside them and smoke until their tongues chafed whatever area of mouth they contacted.

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Extravagant things happened. Some gave way to crushing insecurity, others simply gave way. Posterboard and markers were nearly always on sale. The radiators clunked on falteringly for awhile, then stopped. Clouds of cold breath pushed up against the ceilings, percolating for days on end. Girls with long faces and wide hips fashioned slogans that spoke to their condition.

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Fights broke out. Beers were tossed aside or casually broken at the neck, jagged instruments that bespoke bargaining power and casual engagement with strangers’ well-being. Men in pressed jeans and immaculate coifs walked out of bars, blood streaming from long gashes under their faces. They weren't real bars - just symbols - and the blood was more like divorces and the creeping perception that eventually all the pictures would stop. Journalism majors who deigned to stand above the partisanship slipped on the sopping floors of their glass-ceilinged prose and came out, if at all, broken. There really was nowhere else to go, and being nervous and lonely and unsure why didn’t anyone placate much at all.

April: Still the cruelest month?

1.


A large man in overalls, shirtless nameless and scared shitless that his life's possibilities have hit the proverbial wall (or so I imagine), picks at a scab on his knuckle while waiting in one of those lines we all wait in when summoned to perform some duty in a bureaucratic office with government posters on the wall. I wish I knew what specific duty his is to perform. It smells like boredom and incomprehension in here, but it's not like at the post office, full of envelopes and procedural rigor. and the employees don't have uniforms. the magazines (Field & Stream, U.S. News and Report, Martha Stewart Living) are functionally distractive in only the most nominal sense. Tidbits of conversation at the head of each line carry that soft-edged politeness that comes hand in glove with situations where one stranger attempts to induce another to take an interest in his affairs.



2.


Someone somewhere is shooting at sheep with a paintball gun, for the sake of not having much else going on, at all. Were that it not the case.


3.


F.H. Bradley supposes that each individual agent is trapped in a kind of impermeable circle or bubble against which other agents' bubbles bump up. That does not make for a good night's sleep.

DePaul: becoming people that stand in front of things that you actually want to look at.

1) The New Yorker fiction this week tackles the problem of a self-as-sieve-for-consumer-purchases. It's almost disarmingly direct in pointing out that the equation "staying cool through having cool things and going to parties with cool people who know about Dadaism and ironic symbolism" ultimately veils you from the world and injects into your life same kind of alienation that befalls less couture lifestyles (blue collar TV watching with bowling on Tuesday?).

The story is not good, nor is it really bad in the sense of being poorly constructed or not offering up a polyglot array of characters (although they come off a bit precious, at that). It's an exercise in realism, to the degree that it portrays a flat, empty existence through the depiction of flat, empty characters, the narrator being the exception, sort of. The narrator discovers (or thinks he discovers) that his fashionable friends are all essentially salespeople whose particular idiosyncratic hipster affectations are actually akin to product placements in the sea of sweet coolness in which they circulate. The conflict of the story - if I recall correctly - revolves around the narrator's sense of disorientation that follows closely in the wake that his friends are all billboards. He gives away his stuff, intends to murder the guy whose machinations first revealed to him that the styles or values he had embraced were really more like window dressing, and - at the end - seems to shrink back from the intention to get past the kind of life to which he had devoted himself.

I'm not sure if I misread the ending here - I took it to suggest, essentially, that knowing you live in a self-constructed jail and accepting it is somehow better (or easier?) than exiting it. The assumption being, exiting one jail is entering another? I don't know. That the story appears in the Fashion issue lends it a little bit more traction, at least through the collision of its fictional world and the world portrayed through the ads of the other magazines.

Here is more food for thought on the general problem the story attempts to get its glossy paragraphs around.

Jeff Spicoli-Style Vans Slip On Shoe, Deposited in Sunless Clime

1) Current onslaught of cuisine/cooking related materials continues. No Reservations, by that Anthony Bourdain guy with the TV show and the constant cigarette dangling (completed) - does not make me want to become a heroin addict or a line cook. To one degree or another, did inspire militancy and desire for unilateral uptick of my life's intensity (for instance, four hours of sleep, aided and abetted - once again - by neighbor's nascent relationship). Plus makes for vivid version of imagination's constructed notion of New York City blunt, a kind of eccentric honesty and You-couldn't-pay-me-more-to-care-less-ness. Of course I have spent about 17 hours, total, in that metropolis so all notions get filtered through countless viewings of NYPD Blue and the early poems of the Confessional type guys and gals with drinking problems and hangups that stick out like goiters on sleepy southeast asian women on a pilgrimage to some holy goiter-shrinking shrine.

New York theme cont'd - a re-re-reading of Kissing in Manhattan, first discovered in 2003 and devoured in a sitting. Found in library today, to be the accompaniment to warmed up chicken and potato with 2% milk dinner. Also found at library today: 12 old New Yorkers, circa 1982-1985, and subsequently absconded with.

Other book:

Maximum City. About Bombay. Or Mumbai. Good epigrams. Author interview over at the Believer may be worth your time, if you have excess amounts of it.



2) dark muck on slowly evaporating snow drifts, plus every morning starts with ice, metls a bit, then freezes again by the time I'm out ambulatory and socializing. Makes for large yellowing bruises and waking up unsure of where exactly that came from.




UPDATE: having read Kissing in Manhattan in a sitting, once again, it seems like it's worthwhile to at least ask the question: do you, dear reader, have a book or a CD or a movie, even, to which your attentiveness to your own list of TO DO and your day-to-day goings on constantly crumbles in importance? What kind of thing is an obsession when it's completely temporary and sated in a sitting? Is it even one? Discuss.