It’s easy to influence the past, dummy. Use your head.
My dreams tend not to be prophesies. They tend to be epilogues.
He was a small, pale creature—something between a boy and a man. And very rich, too. Almost mortally wounded by his own wealth.
“I’m worried that you will only love me because of my money,” he told me.
You wish it were that simple, I thought.
What l said was: “Money has nothing to do with it.”
Old masters
A coworker was late this morning because a person jumped onto the tracks at her subway station. The guy was struck by a train. He didn’t time it right, though, and was alive when my coworker (and, coincidentally, the paramedics) arrived. The paramedics screamed at the man not to move. It turned out that he had stabbed both of his parents to death earlier in the day.
There seems to be a lot of parent-killing in the news this month: grown children going off the rails and murdering their parents with knives, guns, or lengths of cable. In theory, patricide is the most motivated of all crimes. Regardless of the particular relationship between child and parent, there is no person for whom a child could potentially have more reasons to kill than his mother or father. Think about it. The number of grievances a child might accrue against a parent is literally boundless, both quantitatively and in an ontological sense.
This doesn’t make patricide sympathetic or reasonable; it just makes it interesting. Nothing is more boring—more stupid and dismal— than an unmotivated crime.
Groms in paradise
With one boyfriend I went to Todos Santos. The first night he drank too much and got hammered in a cabana. I tried to stroke his neck but he pushed me away, so I went downstairs to the beach and walked around, looking for a surfboard. There were chairs in which to sit and look at the fluorescent-lit sand and the black waves. The cushions were a plastic wipe-off material and I thought about all the things that had presumably been wiped off of them. Upstairs my boyfriend was prone and unresponsive, which was a dynamic that would repeat itself many times, though only twice more in the cabana.
The 21st century is pretty good so far
My skin is fragile; bruises easily.
“Maybe you have scurvy,” Alice says.
Maybe I do.
Interspecies peace treaty
My favorite rhetorical move is the one where incredible animal feats are translated into human terms in order to make them more intelligibly amazing. If you’ve ever watched a BBC or PBS nature special, you know what I’m talking about.
Here’s an example:
The tiger beetle can run at a speed of 5.6 mph, which, relative to its body length, is the equivalent of a human running at 480 miles per hour.
or
The mantis shrimp uses its front legs to punch through the shells of prey with a force 8,000 times that of gravity. If a human boxer had the same capabilities, his punch would have the same force as a gun.
Now, here is the task. Is there a specific name for this maneuver? And if not, who will come up with one?
Fiction
In summer not even your insides are discernible from your outsides. Blow a stream of air at your wrist and it’s no warmer or cooler than the atmosphere, just different.
At home in the summer I work in denim shorts, my feet resting on a rubber pig that Nick insists we keep beneath the kitchen table due to its ugliness.
When he gets home, Nick tells me about his job at a city agency. Often I contribute observations that sound stoned or demented, and he calmly explains how the government devotes entire swaths of itself to the inevitability of its own malfunction.
“Oversight is something-something-something,” he’ll say, voice disappearing into the closet as he unspools his tie. “But it winds up being part of a larger self-correction geared towards achieving as little reform as possible while still satisfying the demands that led to its creation in the first place.”
“Which are what?” I ask.
“Popular outcry,” he says. “Fear of crisis. I love you.”
Lightly salted peanut
On Sunday I had a dream that I was trying to climb a hill so steep I physically couldn’t do it. That was the whole dream: I couldn’t walk up a steep hill. (Nice allegory, brain.)
After waking I lay prone in bed for a moment, wanting an Ibuprofen for my legs, which hurt from trying to walk up the hill. They stopped aching when I identified the experience as a dream. Total time elapsed between waking and legs-not-hurting: thirty seconds.
Then I got dressed, packed my backpack, and went to JFK to catch a flight. By the time I landed in Los Angeles I was sleepy again.
At my hotel room I went through all the little rituals that mark the beginning of a work trip. First, survey the room to see where I will work. Then turn on all the lights, hang up dresses, write some perfunctory note on hotel stationery (“Print receipt”), line up shoes, scan TV Guide, arrange toothbrush parallel to sink, make a cup of coffee, discard coffee after a sip, write another note on the stationery (“Coffee”) and open all windows, if windows will open.
I did all of these things and then went outside. The hotel was full of families in wet bathing suits, pushing elevator buttons and dripping. I felt like a valence electron bouncing between atoms. (Neutrally incomplete.) It was seventy-something degrees, which feels like the exact temperature at which human beings are designed to walk around. You can be alone in LA and the weather is hospitality enough.
Hey, we’re in a recession
It’s hard to tell whether the troops are men or boys. One of them is nicknamed Ralphie, another is hypnotized by a Greek yogurt commercial with a slim, yogurt-covered woman in it, and a third can’t stop referring to his wife (not present) as “retarded”. I get a soda and sit down at the table, where they start asking about my job.
“You should write about sex,” one suggests. “Or Forrest Gump.”
“Why Forrest Gump?”
“Have you SEEN the movie?”
They are giddy with story ideas: Khloe Kardashian’s marriage, lingerie football, and a legendary regional sandwich called the Fat Dyke, which contains mozzarella sticks, a cheeseburger, chicken fingers, French fries, and your choice of sauce.
One of them proposes an experiment in which I try to be a lesbian for thirty days and then write about it. It’s hard to say no to a person whose face contains parts of an IED.
“Maybe,” I tell him.
“You need to broaden your horizons,” he says.
