February 13, 2006
Sub: Ships and Sealing Wax
(group email, writing sample)
hello all.
for reasons i'll get into shortly, i've been away from my computer for over a week. that's a very long time indeed, in this day and age. the upshot is that i'm hopelessly behind on all my correspondence, which gives me the opportunity to send out a mass email. every time i get one, the sender invariably apologizes for sending out a mass email, but i'm not going to do that. i think it's silly. and besides, who has time to write an individual message to all of their friends? i mean, it's a nice thought or whatever, but if you're anything like me you've got thirteen drafts of unsent emails staring you down at any given time, and it's all a little overwhelming, and then you go play xbox instead, or maybe work on that stupid novel you've been writing.
so, yes. hello all.
one of my priorities this last week has been getting in touch with my mom. she's hard to get hold of, because she's a lot like me in that she doesn't answer the phone from roughly September through April, and usually erases her phone messages without listening to them. i wanted to let her know i'd moved to San Francisco this past week, and so i'd probably need to borrow next month's rent. theoretically, that would give me time to find a decent job, but in reality my unwillingness to start out on any kind of career track makes it so that i'll just be buying myself a few weeks before i have to go work in a hotel again. it's a bizarre industry, hospitality, and i won't go into the picayune details of it here, but suffice to say the conditions and pay are just shitty enough that most competent workers either quit or get promoted inside of six months, and so the poor rich bastards who run even the nice ones are always so desperate for help they'll hire anyone who speaks English and doesn't mind being humiliated and having things thrown at them--they're like that girl who gets a reputation for being slutty and having no standards, when in reality there's nothing wrong with her standards at all, she's just such a bitch nobody can stand actually dating her for any length of time. in this analogy, i ran into her at a party and had a brief conversation before wandereding off, but then i bumped into her again later as the party was winding down. i mean, i'm gonna try stretching the party out a bit in the hope i'll run into somebody i actually, you know, like, but as a matter of fact i know who i'm going home with; there's not much sense complaining about it, and she's just good looking enough that my friends won't bring her up just to humiliate me for the next frieking decade, the way they sometimes do. and you know who you are, you insensitive fucks. oh, but if anybody has a lead on a job, let me know. i have five years experience as an accounts receivable bookkeeper and another four years of customer service eperience--six-line PBX, hotel front desk, alumni services, you name it. i've also edited various small publications and managed a large co-op house. bachelor's degree in progress. as always.
but so then today my mom called me me more or less out of the blue. excellent! i thought, but before i could hit her up for money she said "There's been an incident." i wasn't too worried--we'd exchanged pleasantries, so that probably meant nobody i cared about had died. and my brother's in jail, so it's not like when i was in high school and people with shotguns would come over and demand the car. still, even if i wasn't bracing myself for anything earth-shattering, 'incidents' are never good things, either. "Your father cut two of his fingers off," she told me. "When?" i asked. it's not the most obvious question, but sometimes my family doesn't get around to telling me things in what i would consider a timely manner. normally that doesn't bother me--about two years ago we all agreed to an "Only if someone important is for real about to die" rule, to save on travel costs--but this last winter i quit my job rather abruptly and decided to go home for Christmas, and when i got home both my parents were in the hospital. i thought that warranted at least a heads up. "I didn't know you were coming until you called from the airport," my sister explained, and so i let it slide. but still.
"Today," my mom said, in response to my question. "With the table saw," she added, but i'd sort of figured that. "Which fingers?" i asked. "Half his pinky and all of his ring finger, on the right side," she told me. "Did they sew his fingers back on?" i asked. "No, we couldn't find them. We had the neighbors over to help look. They were all prepared, they brought over a cooler and bags of ice. Just, you know how some people seem prepared for anything? They're like that. But we only found half his pinky." "Why didn't you know where to look?" "I was dying my hair, so I didn't see it. And your dad was yelling about cutting his finger and telling me to come help him, but I was dying my hair so I didn't come right down. He should have said he'd cut his fingers off, then I would have come." i wasn't particularly alarmed by any of this; everyone knows your ring finger is pretty useless, and half a pinky is as good as a whole one--you just have to pretend you were born with small hands. besides, the last time my dad cut himself with a saw i'd been in high school, and my sister ran into my room and screamed "Dad cut his hand off!" and i spent the rest of the day wondering if that meant he'd lose his job and we'd have to go on welfare. or maybe i would have to get a job myself; i did a lot of theater and played baseball, and i really didn't want to give those up. but then even though there was a lot of blood, it turned out he'd only broken some bones in his hand. i did quit the baseball team a little while later; the coach was kind of an asshole. my dad still having his hand was kind of a bonus, as it happened.
"You should have seen the blood, Alan," my mom said, because she still calls me by my middle name, even though you're not allowed to. "You couldn't tell where it happened outside, but he got it all over everything inside." "And you only found half the pinky?" "Yeah, your sister found it. But she wouldn't touch it. It was all mangled." "No, I wouldn't want to touch dad's severed finger either." "It was too messed up to sew back on. And the rehab for that makes it almost not worth the trouble, if you think about it." "Yeah, leeches gross me out," i agreed. "What do they use leeches for?" she asked. "Circulation," i said; "Blood flows in, but it takes awhile before it can flow back out, so they have to use leeches for a few weeks. It's all very medievel. But you couldn't find the other finger?" "I'm pretty sure Mia got it, actually," my mom said, somewhat apologetically. Mia is my brother's dog. she's an expensive purebreed husky but nobody has time to walk her, so we're trying to give her away. if you're interested, let me know. but anyway. "You guys should really take better care of that dog," i scolded my mom. "Buy her a chew toy or something."
my mom and i talked shop for awhile. in other news, my sister is spending a lot of time with her ex but they're not getting back together. i'm happy about that, because five years is a long time to be with someone and then not be friends with them, but on the other hand she hasn't been single for seven years. and she's only twenty-three, so you do the math. also, my incarcerated brother is back together with his stripper fiance (now ex-ex-fiance, i suppose, but that's awkward syntax), although she remains married to another man. my neighbor in Sacramento had been mulling becoming a stripper when i left; apparenly there aren't enough autistic children in Sacto for him to make a living tutoring them. he asked me if i'd ever considered it. i said no, of course; my svelte figure has more to do with poverty than working out, and i always figured a dollar stuffed into my g-string would be a dollar taken away from the g-string of an actual incest survivor. "Well, have fun in San Francisco," he said. then he added, quickly: "Even if it is the Gay Capital of the World." i kind of wanted to tell him about the ratio of bachlorette to stag parties in the life of your average male stripper, but the boy had a Dream, dammit, and destroying any Dream would have felt to me like a disservice to Coretta Scott King's memory. and in the middle of Black History Month, no less. so i just smiled and nodded. "At least you won't be stuck in Asia-town," my neighbor concluded with a shrug, motioning toward the street. i wished him well and finished packing, wondering--as usual--where things had gone wrong.
so, yes. despite whatever the hell other plans i may have mentioned the last few years, i'm really living in San Francisco. it's nice here, and i know lots of people. despite whatever the hell else you may have heard, i like people a lot. even if i don't like being around them all that often. Spring seems to have come early here on the west coast, or so i've gathered. ever since i bought that fake sun to control my circadian rhythms spending time outdoors feels like a waste of money, so i try to avoid it. i didn't have my computer set up, as i said, so i mostly played xbox and thought of excuses not to find a job. you can imagine my shock when i finally plugged back in--i can only assume that my friends on the east coast have died of exposure or possibly chilblains. all of them. i'm sad, really, but only on the inside. after the tsunami and the earthquake and Katrina i just can't cry about natural disasters anymore. it's like i'm numb or even maybe a little dead inside. speaking of which, did any of you catch former "Dancing With the Show-Ponies" star Michael Brown testify in congress this week? there were bound to be questions, i suppose...i was a little surprised to see Brownie tossing a little j'accuse Dubya's way, like it would matter. America might condone Evil and reward Venal, but we will not listen to or even tolerate a Loser--never have, but especially not now, not in today's dangerous world, with danger and possible annihiliation perpetually and swarthily around the next corner; we don't have time to be looking back, no sir, especially not at Losers. history will now be written going forward from here out, and only Winners write history. we just want our Losers to exit stage left so we can get on with forgetting they were ever here. like the Seahawks, for instance. in many ways MIchael Brown might be the luckiest Loser in all our fine Republic; if anybody cared about him, they would have never let him near a congressional sub-committee. after all, there are no mistakes in George Bush's America; just happy little accidents. you could ask William Casey about that, if Dubya's daddy hadn't whacked him. we grew up thinking of George HW Bush as a wimp, and i think that had to fuck with Dubya's head a little. if my dad murdered people for a living and still got called a pussy in public, i'd probably go a little overboard the other way myself. hell, if i'm Dubya right now, i'm shipping Brownie to a rat cage in Guantanemo, heckuva job or not. why? because Al Gonzalez says i can, that's why. that's all the fucking reason i need in the world. Freedom and Liberty will prevail!
but enough of that. that is all beside the point. Spring is here; let's keep our eyes on the ball now, before February realizes...look, i don't care what the calendar says. Spring is here. i know this because my friends have been hitting me up for benzodiazepines instead of stimulants this week. the seasons changing, it makes everyone edgy. body's internal workings starting back up, you're bound to get some spillover. nervouse energy. need to take the edge off. very different from Winter; if you let them, people would sleep the whole way through. as it is, they need help getting out of bed. not that i push or even recommend amphetamines or anything of the sort; for various reasons beyond my ken i already seem to be a Person of Interest, insofar as i can't go to the airport without being pulled out of line at least twice. that, plus the fact that i have a brother in federal prison for drug trafficking means i need to stay clear of sleazy tweakers and the like. rather, i've had access to a fairly exotic drug that turns off the part of your brain that tells you to fall asleep. the military invented it and they say it treats narcolepsy, but i have my doubts. i'm pretty sure its primary purpose is to keep the drones' minds off the War and happy while they make the sweet sweet honey our economy fattens itself on. it's sort of like how the CIA invented crack to fund illegal arms sales to Myanmar or wherever it was we were promoting Democracy at the time. that's just the way it goes when your government needs scratch but refuses to raise taxes. i don't know what it says about my generation that instead of getting high and having some fun with it we all seem to be clamoring for drugs that make us more productive. my esteemed colleague Randall has been in Japan long enough that i thought he might kick some anthropology my way about the efficiency thing, but the man only writes me to rehash sporting events and taunt me because Japanese women enjoy sleeping with him; meanwhile, my game seems to have taken a sabbatical. whatever. it's Spring again. and just in time this year too--i gave away the last of the anti-narcoleptic pills to a couple of friends this morning, so don't ask. the stuff retails somewhere around $10 a pill, but for various karmic reasons i am obliged to give the stuff away for free when i have it, and it goes quick.
speaking of efficiency, i'm dragging this email out a bit because my computer crashed earlier tonight. it came right back up, but i had fourteen MS Word windows open at the time. i don't know if i've mentioned this to anyone at all, ever, but i'm finishing up a novel. hence the fourteen windows. it doesn't appear as though i've lost anything, thankfully, but just trying to make sense of the Recovery Pane twists my brain all pretzel-like. it's a stupid business, writing, and i recommend you avoid it altogether. if i had it all to do over again, i'd be a professional basketball player. you should see the groupies. that, and there are people who coach basketball. nobody seems to know anything about writing novels. actually, i knew a guy in college who published a novel, but i saw him at my Sham Wedding and asked him about it--he told me that in order to get published i needed to be in an MFA program and have a professor take an interest in my work. i think Magic was involved somehow, too; i was drunk and had trouble concentrating with all the noise. and i wasn't in graduate school, either. did that make the Magic part more or less important? "If you're not in grad school you'll have a hard time finding someone to publish your book," he said, somewhat dismissively. then i tried to make out with four or five girls who were not my wife, and they all turned me down, so by four in the morning i was dry-heaving in my bathroom, alone except for Randall, who'd passed out on my couch and managed to rouse himself just enough to taunt me for not being able to get any action at my own wedding. asshole. i secretly hoped for Godzilla to eat him in Japan, but they stationed Randall somewhere out in the boonies. and Godzilla never goes out there, not unless he's chasing King Kong, who was with Peter Jackson in New Zealand the whole time, which may or may not be anywhere near Japan. it's on the other side of the globe, anway, and the globes at my schools when i was a kid were always rusted in place so you only had to study the important side. point is, i don't know where New Zealand is.
aside from my fantasy about Godzilla eating Randall, let all that be a microcosm of my Sham Wedding and ensuing Sham Marriage, which is to say it's a pretty good story but sort of embarrassing in some of the particulars. the whole thing was a pretty straightforward scam to get me health insurance without actually getting a job--the idea being that i couldn't very well get a job if i didn't have medical coverage of some kind. like everything else i've ever learned, this turned out to be only partially true, but that's later. the plan also involved moving to Seattle. the plan itself was brilliant from a tactical standpoint, but ultimately undone by a bit of fine print in the insurance policy itself, to the effect that as a dependent i didn't have any coverage for mental health and i would have to pay for all my medications up front, then get reimbursed 80% five weeks later when all the paperwork cleared. my high school drama teacher Chris really summed the situation up best: "So it was all for naught!" she laughed, a little giddy with lite beer and because she'd had her eyes dilated at the optometrist's office that day; we were inside, but she still flinched a little when she blinked. and, well: yes. technically on some levels the Sham Marriage was for naught. but i think there are some valuable lessons in there for all of us, and if the purpose of my life is to serve as a warning to others then so be it. you learn more from doing theater than reading the plays themselves, but if reading stodgy Greek plays ever taught me one thing, and only one, it was this: don't fight or otherwise fuck with Fate. that's what Antigone said when Oedipus plucked out her eyeballs with a cockscomb, as the Eumenides crept up behind him, about to rip out his intestines to use as a garrotte on poor Tiresias, who of course foresees all this but can't do anything about it because he's, you know, blind. i think.
two stories about my year in Seattle. like most reasonable people, i have a rule about dating people i work with, which is to say i avoid it. but like all the other rules i make for myself, i don't hold myself to it; get me in the right mood and i can justify damn near anything, and usually talk a few otherwise reasonable people into going along with me, to boot. so in July i went on a date with a girl i worked with, although for justification purposes i preferred to think of us as sharing an employer, rather than being actual co-workers. anyway, the date went about as well as these things can go, but then i didn't hear from her for over a week. which is weird, since we saw each other at work, if only in passing. but so then i got an email about why it wouldn't be a good idea to follow up on things. fairly standard time-constraint-issue-type stuff, except for when she said 'and I know you say it doesn't matter, but you're MARRIED.' as if i'd forgotten, and having it shouted at me ELECTRONICALLY would make me remember. my wife spent the summer away from Seattle, but if anything that just made the girl more suspicious. "I don't understand what happened," i said to my friend Sierra a few months later. "You mean you're surprised that some people have respect for the institution of marriage?" she asked somewhat rhetorically, with maybe a pinch of derision. "Well," i grumbled. "I guess it hadn't occurrred to me before, no." so that was one thing that happened in Seattle. another time, i was taking the bus home from work and two African-American gentlemen were having a conversation. actually, it was more like one of them ranted in the other's general direction; it was more of a monologue performed for the benefit of the entire bus. "Seattle, this here's a racist town. Racist like a motherfucker," he announced, and began providing some examples. i tended to concur with the preponderence of his citations, although i probably would have used more fancy-pants words than he did. then the bus made a turn up toward my apartment in Capitol Hill, which is to Seattle as the Castro is to San Francisco. "We headin' up inna Capitol Hill now," the African-American gentleman explained to his companion. "Lot of faggots up in here. I know I ain't supposed to call 'em that, but that's what they is."
after that i moved to Sacramento. it was cold. i lived by myself and slept on the floor the first two months. my job didn't work out like i'd planned--well, planning is probably too strong a word for anything i do these days. but it didn't work out, regardless. i transferred, but it was only after i'd arrived, after i'd spent three weeks unemployed waiting for my paperwork to clear, on my first day actually working at the new hotel, only then did i find out i'd lost my health coverage and would have to wait 90 days for it to start again, unless i cared to pay $450/mo. for a shitty cobra while taking a $2.05/hr pay cut that i hadn't been told about, either. and i had to work the graveyard shift. again: fine print. but Sacramento wasn't all bad. if i ever do have kids, once they're four or five and their personalities start shining through a bit, if i realize they're not particularly bright and there really isn't anything interesting about them, then i'd probably think about going back to Sacramento and raising them there.
i'm realizing that there are quite a few people i've been promising to show some chapters of my book to for awhile now, and i haven't done so. the trouble is, i know that there are a few things i need to fix in the first chapter--i'm finding it difficult because Alicia--that's the narrator--has such a dark sense of humor that on the one hand it would be out of character for her to be melodramatic about the deaths of various characters who become important later, but i can't let her be flippant about it, either. i mean, Kurt Vonnegut can be flippant when he kills his characters--and he always finds a way to get it done, somehow, I mean his commitment to letting his characters die pointlessly is certainly something--but i always get the feeling that deep down he doesn't really like any of them. and if he doesn't care, why should i? "Because Vonnegut is awesome!" respond mostly teenagers who mostly don't read very much. and probably think On the Road is a good book. but i digress. some ontological questions come into play, with all these deaths; like how maybe sometimes you find things that no matter how you look at them they just aren't funny. like the holocaust, say. and i've heard holocaust jokes certainly. but are they funny? i want to say no, but then The Producers is funny, at least on stage. what does it mean? it means i'm stuck, is what it means.
that said, they'll all be dead soon enough, and the book will be finished. that will be nice. i can't imagine what it's like to publish a book, or what happens if it's successful or if it fails or what, so i don't think about that. it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. yes. three years and six drafts later, it's come to this: it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. i have a few other novels in various stages of preparation; a promising outline of an historical novel that i'd like to spend maybe a summer researching in Amhurst, an old short story that would make a nifty allegorical novella, also an update of Dr. Strangelove, with terrorism replacing communism. that one isn't more than a notion at the moment, but it's fun to play with in my head when i can't sleep. also i have 200 pages of a novel i started in 1999 about college kids in berkeley doing drugs and waiting for the apocalypse. not sure what to make of it now when i give it the once-over, but i would enjoy sitting down with it for real.
but consider yourself updated as to my doings. i wish i could write twenty or thirty messages, individually addressed and all, but seriously--wouldn't they all end up sounding the same, in the end? there are only so many things on my mind at any given time. at any rate, if you're getting this then i'd like to hear from you. love to, in fact. i'm missing some email addresses, but i'll get that sorted out later. it's a little like trying to account for all your socks. can you ever really be sure, i mean really? if you're in the bay we should kick it, or whatever the kids call it now when you meet up to sit around and not do much of anything for a couple hours. i'm always into that. on that level, now that The Day After Tomorrow has arrived, i'm really not going to miss the East Coast. what's the rush all about? PEOPLE! i mean, dudes. seriously: calm. down. my new address is
xxxxx
for reasons i'll get into shortly, i've been away from my computer for over a week. that's a very long time indeed, in this day and age. the upshot is that i'm hopelessly behind on all my correspondence, which gives me the opportunity to send out a mass email. every time i get one, the sender invariably apologizes for sending out a mass email, but i'm not going to do that. i think it's silly. and besides, who has time to write an individual message to all of their friends? i mean, it's a nice thought or whatever, but if you're anything like me you've got thirteen drafts of unsent emails staring you down at any given time, and it's all a little overwhelming, and then you go play xbox instead, or maybe work on that stupid novel you've been writing.
so, yes. hello all.
one of my priorities this last week has been getting in touch with my mom. she's hard to get hold of, because she's a lot like me in that she doesn't answer the phone from roughly September through April, and usually erases her phone messages without listening to them. i wanted to let her know i'd moved to San Francisco this past week, and so i'd probably need to borrow next month's rent. theoretically, that would give me time to find a decent job, but in reality my unwillingness to start out on any kind of career track makes it so that i'll just be buying myself a few weeks before i have to go work in a hotel again. it's a bizarre industry, hospitality, and i won't go into the picayune details of it here, but suffice to say the conditions and pay are just shitty enough that most competent workers either quit or get promoted inside of six months, and so the poor rich bastards who run even the nice ones are always so desperate for help they'll hire anyone who speaks English and doesn't mind being humiliated and having things thrown at them--they're like that girl who gets a reputation for being slutty and having no standards, when in reality there's nothing wrong with her standards at all, she's just such a bitch nobody can stand actually dating her for any length of time. in this analogy, i ran into her at a party and had a brief conversation before wandereding off, but then i bumped into her again later as the party was winding down. i mean, i'm gonna try stretching the party out a bit in the hope i'll run into somebody i actually, you know, like, but as a matter of fact i know who i'm going home with; there's not much sense complaining about it, and she's just good looking enough that my friends won't bring her up just to humiliate me for the next frieking decade, the way they sometimes do. and you know who you are, you insensitive fucks. oh, but if anybody has a lead on a job, let me know. i have five years experience as an accounts receivable bookkeeper and another four years of customer service eperience--six-line PBX, hotel front desk, alumni services, you name it. i've also edited various small publications and managed a large co-op house. bachelor's degree in progress. as always.
but so then today my mom called me me more or less out of the blue. excellent! i thought, but before i could hit her up for money she said "There's been an incident." i wasn't too worried--we'd exchanged pleasantries, so that probably meant nobody i cared about had died. and my brother's in jail, so it's not like when i was in high school and people with shotguns would come over and demand the car. still, even if i wasn't bracing myself for anything earth-shattering, 'incidents' are never good things, either. "Your father cut two of his fingers off," she told me. "When?" i asked. it's not the most obvious question, but sometimes my family doesn't get around to telling me things in what i would consider a timely manner. normally that doesn't bother me--about two years ago we all agreed to an "Only if someone important is for real about to die" rule, to save on travel costs--but this last winter i quit my job rather abruptly and decided to go home for Christmas, and when i got home both my parents were in the hospital. i thought that warranted at least a heads up. "I didn't know you were coming until you called from the airport," my sister explained, and so i let it slide. but still.
"Today," my mom said, in response to my question. "With the table saw," she added, but i'd sort of figured that. "Which fingers?" i asked. "Half his pinky and all of his ring finger, on the right side," she told me. "Did they sew his fingers back on?" i asked. "No, we couldn't find them. We had the neighbors over to help look. They were all prepared, they brought over a cooler and bags of ice. Just, you know how some people seem prepared for anything? They're like that. But we only found half his pinky." "Why didn't you know where to look?" "I was dying my hair, so I didn't see it. And your dad was yelling about cutting his finger and telling me to come help him, but I was dying my hair so I didn't come right down. He should have said he'd cut his fingers off, then I would have come." i wasn't particularly alarmed by any of this; everyone knows your ring finger is pretty useless, and half a pinky is as good as a whole one--you just have to pretend you were born with small hands. besides, the last time my dad cut himself with a saw i'd been in high school, and my sister ran into my room and screamed "Dad cut his hand off!" and i spent the rest of the day wondering if that meant he'd lose his job and we'd have to go on welfare. or maybe i would have to get a job myself; i did a lot of theater and played baseball, and i really didn't want to give those up. but then even though there was a lot of blood, it turned out he'd only broken some bones in his hand. i did quit the baseball team a little while later; the coach was kind of an asshole. my dad still having his hand was kind of a bonus, as it happened.
"You should have seen the blood, Alan," my mom said, because she still calls me by my middle name, even though you're not allowed to. "You couldn't tell where it happened outside, but he got it all over everything inside." "And you only found half the pinky?" "Yeah, your sister found it. But she wouldn't touch it. It was all mangled." "No, I wouldn't want to touch dad's severed finger either." "It was too messed up to sew back on. And the rehab for that makes it almost not worth the trouble, if you think about it." "Yeah, leeches gross me out," i agreed. "What do they use leeches for?" she asked. "Circulation," i said; "Blood flows in, but it takes awhile before it can flow back out, so they have to use leeches for a few weeks. It's all very medievel. But you couldn't find the other finger?" "I'm pretty sure Mia got it, actually," my mom said, somewhat apologetically. Mia is my brother's dog. she's an expensive purebreed husky but nobody has time to walk her, so we're trying to give her away. if you're interested, let me know. but anyway. "You guys should really take better care of that dog," i scolded my mom. "Buy her a chew toy or something."
my mom and i talked shop for awhile. in other news, my sister is spending a lot of time with her ex but they're not getting back together. i'm happy about that, because five years is a long time to be with someone and then not be friends with them, but on the other hand she hasn't been single for seven years. and she's only twenty-three, so you do the math. also, my incarcerated brother is back together with his stripper fiance (now ex-ex-fiance, i suppose, but that's awkward syntax), although she remains married to another man. my neighbor in Sacramento had been mulling becoming a stripper when i left; apparenly there aren't enough autistic children in Sacto for him to make a living tutoring them. he asked me if i'd ever considered it. i said no, of course; my svelte figure has more to do with poverty than working out, and i always figured a dollar stuffed into my g-string would be a dollar taken away from the g-string of an actual incest survivor. "Well, have fun in San Francisco," he said. then he added, quickly: "Even if it is the Gay Capital of the World." i kind of wanted to tell him about the ratio of bachlorette to stag parties in the life of your average male stripper, but the boy had a Dream, dammit, and destroying any Dream would have felt to me like a disservice to Coretta Scott King's memory. and in the middle of Black History Month, no less. so i just smiled and nodded. "At least you won't be stuck in Asia-town," my neighbor concluded with a shrug, motioning toward the street. i wished him well and finished packing, wondering--as usual--where things had gone wrong.
so, yes. despite whatever the hell other plans i may have mentioned the last few years, i'm really living in San Francisco. it's nice here, and i know lots of people. despite whatever the hell else you may have heard, i like people a lot. even if i don't like being around them all that often. Spring seems to have come early here on the west coast, or so i've gathered. ever since i bought that fake sun to control my circadian rhythms spending time outdoors feels like a waste of money, so i try to avoid it. i didn't have my computer set up, as i said, so i mostly played xbox and thought of excuses not to find a job. you can imagine my shock when i finally plugged back in--i can only assume that my friends on the east coast have died of exposure or possibly chilblains. all of them. i'm sad, really, but only on the inside. after the tsunami and the earthquake and Katrina i just can't cry about natural disasters anymore. it's like i'm numb or even maybe a little dead inside. speaking of which, did any of you catch former "Dancing With the Show-Ponies" star Michael Brown testify in congress this week? there were bound to be questions, i suppose...i was a little surprised to see Brownie tossing a little j'accuse Dubya's way, like it would matter. America might condone Evil and reward Venal, but we will not listen to or even tolerate a Loser--never have, but especially not now, not in today's dangerous world, with danger and possible annihiliation perpetually and swarthily around the next corner; we don't have time to be looking back, no sir, especially not at Losers. history will now be written going forward from here out, and only Winners write history. we just want our Losers to exit stage left so we can get on with forgetting they were ever here. like the Seahawks, for instance. in many ways MIchael Brown might be the luckiest Loser in all our fine Republic; if anybody cared about him, they would have never let him near a congressional sub-committee. after all, there are no mistakes in George Bush's America; just happy little accidents. you could ask William Casey about that, if Dubya's daddy hadn't whacked him. we grew up thinking of George HW Bush as a wimp, and i think that had to fuck with Dubya's head a little. if my dad murdered people for a living and still got called a pussy in public, i'd probably go a little overboard the other way myself. hell, if i'm Dubya right now, i'm shipping Brownie to a rat cage in Guantanemo, heckuva job or not. why? because Al Gonzalez says i can, that's why. that's all the fucking reason i need in the world. Freedom and Liberty will prevail!
but enough of that. that is all beside the point. Spring is here; let's keep our eyes on the ball now, before February realizes...look, i don't care what the calendar says. Spring is here. i know this because my friends have been hitting me up for benzodiazepines instead of stimulants this week. the seasons changing, it makes everyone edgy. body's internal workings starting back up, you're bound to get some spillover. nervouse energy. need to take the edge off. very different from Winter; if you let them, people would sleep the whole way through. as it is, they need help getting out of bed. not that i push or even recommend amphetamines or anything of the sort; for various reasons beyond my ken i already seem to be a Person of Interest, insofar as i can't go to the airport without being pulled out of line at least twice. that, plus the fact that i have a brother in federal prison for drug trafficking means i need to stay clear of sleazy tweakers and the like. rather, i've had access to a fairly exotic drug that turns off the part of your brain that tells you to fall asleep. the military invented it and they say it treats narcolepsy, but i have my doubts. i'm pretty sure its primary purpose is to keep the drones' minds off the War and happy while they make the sweet sweet honey our economy fattens itself on. it's sort of like how the CIA invented crack to fund illegal arms sales to Myanmar or wherever it was we were promoting Democracy at the time. that's just the way it goes when your government needs scratch but refuses to raise taxes. i don't know what it says about my generation that instead of getting high and having some fun with it we all seem to be clamoring for drugs that make us more productive. my esteemed colleague Randall has been in Japan long enough that i thought he might kick some anthropology my way about the efficiency thing, but the man only writes me to rehash sporting events and taunt me because Japanese women enjoy sleeping with him; meanwhile, my game seems to have taken a sabbatical. whatever. it's Spring again. and just in time this year too--i gave away the last of the anti-narcoleptic pills to a couple of friends this morning, so don't ask. the stuff retails somewhere around $10 a pill, but for various karmic reasons i am obliged to give the stuff away for free when i have it, and it goes quick.
speaking of efficiency, i'm dragging this email out a bit because my computer crashed earlier tonight. it came right back up, but i had fourteen MS Word windows open at the time. i don't know if i've mentioned this to anyone at all, ever, but i'm finishing up a novel. hence the fourteen windows. it doesn't appear as though i've lost anything, thankfully, but just trying to make sense of the Recovery Pane twists my brain all pretzel-like. it's a stupid business, writing, and i recommend you avoid it altogether. if i had it all to do over again, i'd be a professional basketball player. you should see the groupies. that, and there are people who coach basketball. nobody seems to know anything about writing novels. actually, i knew a guy in college who published a novel, but i saw him at my Sham Wedding and asked him about it--he told me that in order to get published i needed to be in an MFA program and have a professor take an interest in my work. i think Magic was involved somehow, too; i was drunk and had trouble concentrating with all the noise. and i wasn't in graduate school, either. did that make the Magic part more or less important? "If you're not in grad school you'll have a hard time finding someone to publish your book," he said, somewhat dismissively. then i tried to make out with four or five girls who were not my wife, and they all turned me down, so by four in the morning i was dry-heaving in my bathroom, alone except for Randall, who'd passed out on my couch and managed to rouse himself just enough to taunt me for not being able to get any action at my own wedding. asshole. i secretly hoped for Godzilla to eat him in Japan, but they stationed Randall somewhere out in the boonies. and Godzilla never goes out there, not unless he's chasing King Kong, who was with Peter Jackson in New Zealand the whole time, which may or may not be anywhere near Japan. it's on the other side of the globe, anway, and the globes at my schools when i was a kid were always rusted in place so you only had to study the important side. point is, i don't know where New Zealand is.
aside from my fantasy about Godzilla eating Randall, let all that be a microcosm of my Sham Wedding and ensuing Sham Marriage, which is to say it's a pretty good story but sort of embarrassing in some of the particulars. the whole thing was a pretty straightforward scam to get me health insurance without actually getting a job--the idea being that i couldn't very well get a job if i didn't have medical coverage of some kind. like everything else i've ever learned, this turned out to be only partially true, but that's later. the plan also involved moving to Seattle. the plan itself was brilliant from a tactical standpoint, but ultimately undone by a bit of fine print in the insurance policy itself, to the effect that as a dependent i didn't have any coverage for mental health and i would have to pay for all my medications up front, then get reimbursed 80% five weeks later when all the paperwork cleared. my high school drama teacher Chris really summed the situation up best: "So it was all for naught!" she laughed, a little giddy with lite beer and because she'd had her eyes dilated at the optometrist's office that day; we were inside, but she still flinched a little when she blinked. and, well: yes. technically on some levels the Sham Marriage was for naught. but i think there are some valuable lessons in there for all of us, and if the purpose of my life is to serve as a warning to others then so be it. you learn more from doing theater than reading the plays themselves, but if reading stodgy Greek plays ever taught me one thing, and only one, it was this: don't fight or otherwise fuck with Fate. that's what Antigone said when Oedipus plucked out her eyeballs with a cockscomb, as the Eumenides crept up behind him, about to rip out his intestines to use as a garrotte on poor Tiresias, who of course foresees all this but can't do anything about it because he's, you know, blind. i think.
two stories about my year in Seattle. like most reasonable people, i have a rule about dating people i work with, which is to say i avoid it. but like all the other rules i make for myself, i don't hold myself to it; get me in the right mood and i can justify damn near anything, and usually talk a few otherwise reasonable people into going along with me, to boot. so in July i went on a date with a girl i worked with, although for justification purposes i preferred to think of us as sharing an employer, rather than being actual co-workers. anyway, the date went about as well as these things can go, but then i didn't hear from her for over a week. which is weird, since we saw each other at work, if only in passing. but so then i got an email about why it wouldn't be a good idea to follow up on things. fairly standard time-constraint-issue-type stuff, except for when she said 'and I know you say it doesn't matter, but you're MARRIED.' as if i'd forgotten, and having it shouted at me ELECTRONICALLY would make me remember. my wife spent the summer away from Seattle, but if anything that just made the girl more suspicious. "I don't understand what happened," i said to my friend Sierra a few months later. "You mean you're surprised that some people have respect for the institution of marriage?" she asked somewhat rhetorically, with maybe a pinch of derision. "Well," i grumbled. "I guess it hadn't occurrred to me before, no." so that was one thing that happened in Seattle. another time, i was taking the bus home from work and two African-American gentlemen were having a conversation. actually, it was more like one of them ranted in the other's general direction; it was more of a monologue performed for the benefit of the entire bus. "Seattle, this here's a racist town. Racist like a motherfucker," he announced, and began providing some examples. i tended to concur with the preponderence of his citations, although i probably would have used more fancy-pants words than he did. then the bus made a turn up toward my apartment in Capitol Hill, which is to Seattle as the Castro is to San Francisco. "We headin' up inna Capitol Hill now," the African-American gentleman explained to his companion. "Lot of faggots up in here. I know I ain't supposed to call 'em that, but that's what they is."
after that i moved to Sacramento. it was cold. i lived by myself and slept on the floor the first two months. my job didn't work out like i'd planned--well, planning is probably too strong a word for anything i do these days. but it didn't work out, regardless. i transferred, but it was only after i'd arrived, after i'd spent three weeks unemployed waiting for my paperwork to clear, on my first day actually working at the new hotel, only then did i find out i'd lost my health coverage and would have to wait 90 days for it to start again, unless i cared to pay $450/mo. for a shitty cobra while taking a $2.05/hr pay cut that i hadn't been told about, either. and i had to work the graveyard shift. again: fine print. but Sacramento wasn't all bad. if i ever do have kids, once they're four or five and their personalities start shining through a bit, if i realize they're not particularly bright and there really isn't anything interesting about them, then i'd probably think about going back to Sacramento and raising them there.
i'm realizing that there are quite a few people i've been promising to show some chapters of my book to for awhile now, and i haven't done so. the trouble is, i know that there are a few things i need to fix in the first chapter--i'm finding it difficult because Alicia--that's the narrator--has such a dark sense of humor that on the one hand it would be out of character for her to be melodramatic about the deaths of various characters who become important later, but i can't let her be flippant about it, either. i mean, Kurt Vonnegut can be flippant when he kills his characters--and he always finds a way to get it done, somehow, I mean his commitment to letting his characters die pointlessly is certainly something--but i always get the feeling that deep down he doesn't really like any of them. and if he doesn't care, why should i? "Because Vonnegut is awesome!" respond mostly teenagers who mostly don't read very much. and probably think On the Road is a good book. but i digress. some ontological questions come into play, with all these deaths; like how maybe sometimes you find things that no matter how you look at them they just aren't funny. like the holocaust, say. and i've heard holocaust jokes certainly. but are they funny? i want to say no, but then The Producers is funny, at least on stage. what does it mean? it means i'm stuck, is what it means.
that said, they'll all be dead soon enough, and the book will be finished. that will be nice. i can't imagine what it's like to publish a book, or what happens if it's successful or if it fails or what, so i don't think about that. it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. yes. three years and six drafts later, it's come to this: it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. i have a few other novels in various stages of preparation; a promising outline of an historical novel that i'd like to spend maybe a summer researching in Amhurst, an old short story that would make a nifty allegorical novella, also an update of Dr. Strangelove, with terrorism replacing communism. that one isn't more than a notion at the moment, but it's fun to play with in my head when i can't sleep. also i have 200 pages of a novel i started in 1999 about college kids in berkeley doing drugs and waiting for the apocalypse. not sure what to make of it now when i give it the once-over, but i would enjoy sitting down with it for real.
but consider yourself updated as to my doings. i wish i could write twenty or thirty messages, individually addressed and all, but seriously--wouldn't they all end up sounding the same, in the end? there are only so many things on my mind at any given time. at any rate, if you're getting this then i'd like to hear from you. love to, in fact. i'm missing some email addresses, but i'll get that sorted out later. it's a little like trying to account for all your socks. can you ever really be sure, i mean really? if you're in the bay we should kick it, or whatever the kids call it now when you meet up to sit around and not do much of anything for a couple hours. i'm always into that. on that level, now that The Day After Tomorrow has arrived, i'm really not going to miss the East Coast. what's the rush all about? PEOPLE! i mean, dudes. seriously: calm. down. my new address is
xxxxx
it's in the Castro, two blocks from the Safeway on Market. phone number's same as it ever was. and, of course, this email address. two of my roommates are J. Lauro and Veljko S.; you may or may not know them. i think Alicia B. stays here when she's in town, but she's abroad. i mean, a pretty lady. who happens to be in a foreign country at the moment. i also have two roommates named David and Renee, but i don't think you know them. i'll tell any and all of them you say 'hello' if you want, though. mahalo.
gabriel
